Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 2020"

From Bondage to Precariousness? New Perspectives on Labor and Social History

Abstract: This article pursues two goals. First, it reviews recent literature calling for a revised and extended history of work. Based on that review, it then explores the possibility of a new, empirically based analytical and methodological framework for the study of labor relations and the reinterpretation of contemporary issues, including precariousness, “modern slavery,” social inequality, and dependence. We contend that viewing labor relations as standardly diverse, coexisting, entangled, and overlapping across history provides an alternative organizing principle for the research field and is central to the understanding of larger social processes. To this end, we propose a contextualized, interrelational and transepochal approach to labor relations and labor experiences and discuss the potential of three research strategies: the analysis of the historical semantics of labor relations, the detailed study of coercion, and the historical investigation of the relation between precariousness and flexibility.

The Emmet's Inch: 'Small' history in a digital age

Abstract: Digitization has usually been considered a facilitator of what has been called “big” history. While digital history projects increasingly make good and sensitive use of individual and granular records and use them to bring human complexity into a larger analysis, the digitization of published material and archives have mostly been discussed by historians in aggregate: they are valued chiefly for their ability to give us “big data” about phenomena in the past. Yet for those interested in questions and methodologies of microhistory, biographical history, history from below, and other kinds of what we might call ‘small” history, the digitization of archives and individual records is an equally transformative development. This article will examine the way that digitization has changed how historians discover, concatenate and communicate small stories in their narratives and arguments. I will consider the practice and the ethics of telling and digitizing individual histories and suggest some different ways of dealing with the new boundaries—and boundlessness—that the “mass digitized turn” throws up, particularly for historians working in the period after 1800. Finally, amidst an increased emphasis on digitization and big data in the field of history, I want to assert the continuing power of all kinds of small histories to explain the past and to connect it to our present, and ourselves.

Access to the Trade: Monopoly and Mobility in European Craft Guilds in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract: One of the standard objections against guilds in the premodern world has been their exclusiveness. Guilds have been portrayed as providing unfair advantages to the children of established masters and locals, over immigrants and other outsiders. Privileged access to certain professions and industries is seen as a source of inequality and a disincentive for technological progress. In this paper, we examine this assumption by studying the composition of guild masters and apprentices from a large sample of European towns and cities from 1600 to 1800, focusing on the share who were children of masters or locals. These data offer an indirect measurement of the strength of guild barriers and, by implication, of their monopolies. We find very wide variation between guilds in practice, but most guild masters and apprentices were immigrants or unrelated locals: openness was much more common than closure, especially in larger centers. Our understanding of guild “monopolies” and exclusivity is in need of serious revision.

The Poetics of Narrativity: Understanding Trauma, Temporality and Spatiality 40 years after the Birmingham Pub Bombings

Abstract: This article explores the social history of the Birmingham Pub Bombings (UK). In addition to individual losses and injuries, the bombings triggered widespread anti-Irish prejudice and violence, wrongful convictions and community tensions. The resultant disharmony within the city of Birmingham lasted for generations, while the voices of communities not directly involved in the events of November 21, 1974, have mostly remained silent. This article offers new lessons in the historical construction of trauma and how we make sense of traumatic events. Using original oral history interviews and witness seminars, it explores the layers of trauma that have been transmitted socially, politically, spatially, and intergenerationally. It begins by first focusing on the temporal and spatial dimensions of this local history, which reveal how the reconfiguring of temporalities can be used to locate an inner voice for British postwar, urban, social history. Then, it contextualizes individual and collective experiences of the Birmingham Pub Bombings in order to reveal the ways in which traumatic experiences are placed within a narrative form that orders and facilitates the integration of past trauma within the present. As such, we argue that the poetics of narrativity—or the narrative framing of how and when trauma memories are told, heard, and negotiated—has the potential to pull together a richer, more inclusive, commu-

On the Run: Runaway Slaves and Their Social Networks in Eighteenth-Century Cochin

Abstract: Despite growing attention to the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, the debate on the nature or characteristics of slavery in these regions has been left largely unsettled. Whereas some scholars emphasize the existence of harsh forms of hereditary slavery similar to those found in the Americas, others argue that the nature of slavery in Asia was urban, status-based, and milder than in the Atlantic world. This article explores case studies of slaves escaping in and around the Dutch East India Company (VOC) city of Cochin. Studying court records that bring to light the strategies and social networks of enslaved runaways provides new insights into the characteristics of slavery and the conditions of slaves in and around VOC-Cochin. The findings indicate that the social and everyday conditions under which slaves lived were highly diverse and shaped by the direct relations between slave and master, influenced by elements of trust, skill, and control. Relations of slavery nevertheless remained engrained by the recurrence of physical punishments and verbal threats, despite sometimes relatively open situations. This reminds us that easy dichotomies of “benign,” “Asian,” “household,” or “urban” versus “European,” “Atlantic,” or “plantation” slavery obscure as much as they reveal.

Commodification and Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Indonesian Archipelago

Abstract: Slavery did not simply die slowly in the nineteenth century; in some parts of the world, it expanded. Engaging with the literature on slavery in the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century, this article explains how a rising demand for forest and sea products, pepper and rice, together with a proliferation of firearms, kindled slave raiding and trading in the Indonesian archipelago. Enslavement happened both through capture and debt traps. This article offers an estimate of the number of annually enslaved in the Indonesian archipelago during the mid-nineteenth century and relates this to a conjectured total slave population of this particular region. The commercialization of slavery must have fundamentally changed the character of customary institutions of bondage. The article cites contemporary sources about the conditions of the captives and concludes with an explanation of how commercial slavery in this part of the world could continue into early years of the twentieth century.

Bad Mothers and Dirty Lousers: Representing Abortionists in Postindependence Ireland

Abstract: This article investigates how the criminal courts and popular press depicted abortionists across key decades of political, economic, and cultural transformations in postindependence Ireland (1922–1950). It demonstrates how and why the legal system and the media highlighted those abortion-related crimes in which bad mothers, ambitious parvenus, and ethnic “others” subverted society, religion, motherhood, and, in Ireland’s case, national values. At stake in depictions of abortionists was not only morality and criminality but also Irishness itself. Courts and newspapers presented abortion defendants as “others” in terms of gender, sexuality, class, race, and religion. Doing so branded abortionists as dangerous outsiders in, and even traitors to, a fragile Irish nation still working to define itself.

Kedudukan Legal Opinion sebagai Sumber Hukum

Abstract: Law is a means to achieve the order and welfare of the community. One of the sources of law is doctrine. The doctrine is essentially the opinion of a legal expert on a real legal issue. When discussing legal opinions, the term legal opinion is also known. Doctrine and Legal Opinion are mostly the same, namely the legal opinion of a legal expert on a real legal problem. If we agree that Doctrine and Legal Opinion are the same way in much of the literature that is mentioned as a source of law is the only doctrine, whereas where is legal opinion placed in the formation of a law? This paper will explain the position of Legal opinion as a source of law.

Population, Territory, and State-istics: “Habitual Residence” in the Belgian Census, 1846–1947

Abstract: In the eighteenth century, statistics was designed and understood as state-istics, as a scientific representation of the state, its territory, and its population. Statistics helped modern nation-states to “embrace” the social lives of the people contained in them; it served these nation-states to monitor the condition, to promote the welfare, and to protect the rights of their people. The history of statistics can therefore be analyzed to shed light on the politics of membership in modern states. In this article, I present a case study that focuses on the various specifications of the notion of habitual residence in the Belgian population censuses, from the middle of the nineteenth century—the first Belgian censuses organized by the homo statisticus Adolphe Quetelet—up until the middle of the twentieth century, when the welfare state more actively took “responsibility for its population.” My analyses show how the classification schemes of the Belgian population censuses elucidate underlying politics of membership and belonging. The use and development of the notion of habitual residence displays the ways in which the state (re-)articulated its expectations regarding society membership. It is not only indicative of new ways of managing the population but also of the establishment of specific norms and evaluative standards about the individuals who are living within the boundaries of the nation-state.

Slaves and Slave Trade in the Timor Area: Between Indigenous Structures and External Impact

Abstract: This study rethinks the patterns of slave-holding and slave trade that can be discerned in small-scale societies in the Timor region of the Indonesian archipelago, especially Timor, the Solor and Alor Islands, Rote, and Savu. It studies how European powers—the Dutch and the Portuguese—influenced the trade in enslaved human beings and how this was balanced by slaving conducted by Asian forces. The study is based in large part on archival sources from the VOC period, together with published Portuguese sources. Data on these issues provides some basis for comparisons with other, better documented cases of slavery and slaving in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. This contributes to an understanding of how local systems of slavery interacted with the transregional systems represented by external groups.

Pemberlakuan Pajak terhadap Barang Hasil Transaksi Jasa Titip Online

Abstract: As time goes by, technologies are developing more and more. One of a result of it that we know is internet. Internet is a network that enable to connect every human being in all over the world. Internet gave us many positive impacts, to fulfil our daily needs is one of them. Thanks to internet we can do our business activities more effective. One of the business activites that we can do is vending, selling things by internet known as online shopping. Many people can sell anything through online shopping such as goods and services. They called “Jasa Titip Online”, is one type of a business that let consumer told us what they want to and then we look and buy goods that consumers want. “Jasa Titip Online” devided into two kinds, first is domestic purchases and the second is overseas purchases. Problems arise from the overseas purchases, person who conduct “Jasa Titip Online” must collect things from other country then bring it to Indonesia. That will create new competitors for large companies involved in the export-import business. Goods that sold by export-import companies supposed to be taxed when entering Indonesian territory. However same things didn’t happen to a person who commit “Jasa Titip Online”, it should be taxed to create fair business competition. The tax provisions currently in force are stated in Peraturan Menteri Keuangan No. 203 Tahun 2017 that define imported goods brought by a person for personal purposes that worth under US$ 500 will be free on board. That provisions are less effective due to more people conduct “Jasa Titip Online” that somehow brought things more than US$ 500 but still free on board.

Wives for the Wounded: Marriage Mediation for Japanese Disabled Veterans during World War II

Abstract: Japan’s armed invasion of China in July 1937 catalyzed the creation of new welfare services for the rapidly escalating number of Japanese disabled veterans. Among those reforms was the emergence of public and private marriage mediation services that aimed to introduce potential brides to disabled veterans and create independent households for men with severe war injuries. Acting through the Greater Japan Disabled Veterans Association and Patriotic Women’s Association, the Japanese state established formal procedures for arranging such marriages. Concurrently, private matchmakers created marriage mediation services expressly for disabled veterans. Public and private marriage mediation efforts sought the multifaceted rehabilitation of disabled veterans and contributed to total war mobilization on the Japanese home front. In the process, wartime marriage mediation for disabled veterans reinforced contemporary social customs and gender norms by positioning women within married households to support their husbands. However, women possessed an extraordinary degree of personal agency because their consent was needed to produce marriages intended to benefit wounded servicemen and the war effort. This essay examines the origins of marriage mediation services for Japanese disabled veterans as well as popular wartime depictions of such endeavors and their female participants.

Gender, Violence, and Justice in Colonial Assam: The Webb Case, c. 1884

Abstract: In 1884, Charles Webb, a European employee of a steam transportation company in Assam, sexually assaulted and killed Sukurmani, a woman who had left Bengal with her family to work on a tea plantation. The district magistrate dismissed most of the charges against Webb, assessing only a modest fine for wrongful confinement, and, though the case was appealed and brought to the attention of the viceroy, ultimately this verdict was upheld. The Webb case, as it became known in the Indian press, galvanized public opinion in India, as discussion of the case overlapped with discussion of the controversial Ilbert Bill of the previous year. This article traces the Webb case as it made its way through the courts and newspapers, arguing that a close study of this case reveals the ways that hierarchies of race, class, caste, and gender were constructed and were manifest in daily life. This article further argues that the treatment of the Webb case by the courts and later by the vernacular press indicates that sexual violence was a central element in nineteenth-century contests over colonial rule in India.

“Sex Prejudice” and Professional Identity: Women Doctors and Their Patients in Britain’s Interwar VD Service

Abstract: The 1920s witnessed a radical approach to sexual health in Britain, and women doctors quickly capitalized on the opportunities offered by the new VD Service. Because venereology was considered to be low status, it was among the few interwar specialisms that offered footholds to women. In view of the long-standing aversion to female engagement with subjects like VD, the large numbers of women doctors entering the VD Service seems puzzling. But as this article reveals, their clinical work was facilitated by rapid shifts in social and medical attitudes towards the treatment of VD as well as the role of women in public life. By exploring how these women navigated the shifting terrain of interwar public health, it deconstructs the notion that venereology was principally a male sphere of clinical practice and research. Moreover, it presents an important counterpoint to the narrative of women’s bodies subordinated to male medical authority. Although the individual lives of these women remain frustratingly elusive, a prosopographical study of their careers allows us to chart their professional networks and clinical activities. We can see how they appropriated prevailing moral codes and styled themselves as guardians of the nation’s health. At its heart, this article demonstrates how women established identities within a profession that remained inherently masculine. Moreover, it opens up new perspectives on the provision of care and the gendered politics of sexual health in a period of profound economic and social change.

Before Bandung: Afro-Asian Cross-referencing and Comparative Racialization

Abstract: This essay analyzes the rhetorical and political connections between African American and South Asian critiques of race and empire in the century leading up to the Bandung conference in 1955. Specifically, we trace the way “caste” emerges as a key rhetorical term in the mid-to-late nineteenth century for linking the oppressions of race, slavery, and its aftermath in the United States to those of caste and empire in India. Building on work by Nico Slate and Antoinette Burton, we identify a strategic citational practice we call Afro-Asian cross-referencing, which the writers under consideration use to advance anti-racism in sometimes very local contexts. Focusing on the dynamic periodical culture of the period, our study analyzes anti-caste sentiment as an expression of cross-racial solidarity uniting anti-colonial movements in India with racial uplift movements in the United States. Because the concept of “Afro-Asian solidarity” first took hold at the Bandung conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement that it helped to originate, the phenomenon itself remains most visible in relation to this later period and the Cold War context. By shifting focus to an earlier moment in the history of Afro-Asian solidarity, we illuminate the work that the idea of caste did in defining strategic transnational connections—as well as missed opportunities for connection—later in the century.

The End of Sodomy: Law, Prosecution Patterns, and the Evanescent Will to Knowledge in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, 1770–1830

Abstract: This article analyses discourses concerning male same-sex sexuality produced in the context of law and policing in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands between 1770 and 1830. Intervening in the debate over the making of “the homosexual” and the change from homosexual “acts” to “identities,” I argue that shifts in sexual discourses were not linear. In the late eighteenth century, the courts and the police displayed a strong “will to knowledge” in same-sex sexual matters, collecting, requesting, and recording discourses on inclination and, in some regions, even innateness. This will to knowledge all but disappeared in the early nineteenth century, when in the aftermath of the official decriminalization of sodomy, same-sex sexual acts became mostly devoid of further meaning in legal and police records. The emergence of sexual discourses was therefore uneven.

“Forced Selling,” Domesticity, and the Diffusion of Washing Machines in Interwar America

Abstract: This article explores the reasons behind the relatively slow diffusion of washing machines in inter-war America and the rise and decline of a distinctive marketing strategy employed to accelerate diffusion: door-to-door sales. Washers represented a particularly difficult selling challenge, as many white-collar households (and, in the South, most white families) had already out-sourced some, or all, of their washing, to a laundress or a commercial laundry. Consumer resistance to machine washing was particularly strong in the South, reflecting both the greater availability and lower cost of black domestic servants, together with attitudes, inherited from the slavery era, that clothes washing was beneath the dignity of white women. During the 1920s washers were mainly sold door-to-door, by salesmen who focused primarily on the large number of blue-collar families who relied on manual home washing. The Depression witnessed a change in the washer market, with a greater emphasis on over-the-counter selling and price competition. Yet diffusion remained relatively slow, as the sector failed to provide a machine that would give housewives what they wanted – a means of doing their laundry within the privacy of the family unit, without significant inputs of either effort or time.

Peran Aparatur Pemerintah Desa dalam Meningkatkan Partisipasi Politik Penyelenggaraan Pemilu Tahun 2019 Desa Mlagen, Magelang

Abstract: Election (Election) is one of the means of democracy in the implementation of popular sovereignty within the Unitary Republic of Indonesia which is based on the Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution. Through elections conducted the people can elect leaders who are expected to be able to bring change towards a better life. Elections are also a means for the people to choose their trusted representatives to carry out various government affairs. Elections must be based on people's awareness to vote, not because of coercion or pressure. The higher the level of people's participation in the election, it means that the higher the level of their political awareness. Villagers who on average are still well educated understand politics only limited to a party of the people which is carried out every five years, and not a few political participation by the community is still influenced by movements from the ruling parties including the village head. The role of the village head is very important to be needed with the situation of rural educated people who are still quite low and most are farmers, this is what was described in Mlagen Village, Bandongan District. The role of the village head is very necessary in order to increase public political participation in the presidential election in 2019. The research method used is a qualitative research method with descriptive analysis techniques. Data collection is done through observation, interviews and documentation. Research data sources are key informants, informants, research sites and documents.

Rubble and Rebirth: Postwar Rejuvenation and the Erasure of History

Abstract: This article weaves together different postwar moments in the first half of the twentieth century to investigate how rejuvenationist narratives of a “fresh start” helped societies across the divides of geography and ideology to recuperate from the ravages of war. Apart from initiating boys and girls into ideologically specific and gendered regimes of citizenship, the older generation crafted reverse rites of passage to absolve themselves of responsibility for violent conflicts that had resulted in unspeakable death and suffering. Youth organizations became key sites for making young bodies useful to the dual task of regenerating war-torn nations and exonerating those whose actions had contributed to war in the first place. The need for acquitting the old was particularly pressing in light of disputes about who was to blame for the loss of young lives—disputes that often carried the tonality of ageism rather than party politics. If recapturing the innocence of youth became tantamount to deflecting questions of guilt and accountability, then bonding with youth allowed powerful men (less so women) who bore the scars of struggle to engage in deliberate acts of erasure. The disremembering of age and history endowed the ruling classes with seemingly innocuous possibilities, especially the possibility to acquire a clean slate on which to forge new collective identities within the redemptive framework of youth. Just as history is distorted by memory, rejuvenation opened up new futures while giving license to forgetting troubling pasts.

Amputated Men, Colonial Bureaucracy, and Masculinity in Post–World War I Colonial Nigeria

Abstract: Since the 1980s, several aspects of masculinity in relation to the First World War, including the image of the citizen-soldier, have been well studied. Other aspects, however, such as the experience of combat and its impact on peacetime masculinities lag well behind. Though wartime and postwar experiences in Africa provide a repertoire for gender and masculinity research, the continent has been neglected in this realm of studies. British colonial Nigeria contributed tens of thousands of combat men to the war with thousands becoming disabled and facing challenges to their masculine identities, yet there is no serious research on this topic for Nigeria. This paper contributes to this long-neglected aspect of African history. Known in colonial archival documents only as “amputated men,” war-disabled Nigerian men struggled to navigate colonial bureaucracy in order to obtain artificial limbs and redeem what they considered their lost manhood. Employing data collected from the Nigerian and British archives, the article’s objectives are twofold: it analyzes the diminishment of the masculine identities of war-disabled men in Nigeria following the First World War, and it explains how such diminishment was accentuated by an inefficiently structured British colonial bureaucracy, paired with British colonial racism. The article contributes to scholarship on WWI, disability studies, gender studies, and colonial studies, through examination of the protracted legacies of the global conflict on the African continent.

Keabsahan Putusan Pengadilan yang Belum Inkracht sebagai Novum dalam Pengajuan Peninjauan Kembali

Abstract: A judicial institution is called good, not only if the process is honest, clean, and impartial. But in addition there are more criteria that must be met, namely principles that are open, corrective, and recordive. In this criterion, one side that deserves the attention of judicial management is the existence of a good legal remedial system as part of the principle of fairness and trial independence which are universally recognized principles. The broadest opportunity to submit corrections and recordings of decisions that have permanent legal force (inkracht) deemed unfair by justice seekers can be done through a Judicial Review. However, the Judicial Review is very limitative, one of them with the requirement for novum. But the regulation of conditions can be said to be a condition as a novum not strictly regulated. Seeing this raises a problem about, "What is the validity of a court decision that has not been inkracht as a novum in submitting a review?". The method used in this study is a normative or juridical legal research method.