Showing papers in "The American Historical Review in 2006"

AHR Conversation: On Transnational History

Abstract: This year, the AHR inaugurates what we hope to be an annual “Conversation” on topics of wide interest to historians. Inspired by our sister journal, the Journal of American History, which two years ago introduced its “Interchange” feature, our goal is to bring several historians together in a conversational encounter online, where ideas can be exchanged across different geographical, chronological, and subject specialties in a manner that will contribute to our overall understanding of an important theme. For our first foray we chose the topic “Transnational History.”

Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review

Abstract: SPECTERS ARE ONCE AGAIN HAUNTING EUROPE AND AMERICA—as are magicians, mermaids, mesmerists, and a melange of marvels once thought to have been exorcised by the rational and secular processes of modernity. In recent years, historians from disparate fields have independently challenged the long-standing sociological view that modernity is characterized by “disenchantment.” This view, in its broadest terms, maintains that wonders and marvels have been demystified by science, spirituality has been supplanted by secularism, spontaneity has been replaced by bureaucratization, and the imagination has been subordinated to instrumental reason. In the past decade, however, a new historiographic position, if not consensus, has emerged that presents Western modernity as “enchanted.” The ongoing redefinition of such an established view is of consequence for a variety of reasons, not the least of which has to do with the master narratives underlying the stories that historians choose to tell. As Dipesh Chakrabarty usefully reminds us, “The moment we think of the world as disenchanted . . . we set limits to the ways the past can be narrated.”1 The emergent view that modernity is as enchanted as it is disenchanted may conjure alternative vistas to the historical imagination, and at the very least offers the possibility of pulling new rabbits out of old hats. Narrating a historiography of “modernity and enchantment” has limitations of its own, however. Those historians who challenge the equation of modernity with disenchantment often present their views within the context of topical debates in their respective fields. It will therefore be useful to tease out some of the common concerns and findings that have appeared in otherwise distinct areas of study, such as the histories of science, religion, and mass culture. The works examined here are necessarily eclectic, drawn primarily from European and American histories of these subfields, but they are nevertheless representative of how the topic is currently being handled across historical specialties. A second challenge has to do with defining such inherently vague and complex terms as “modernity” and “enchantment.” Taken separately, each term has manifold meanings. When the two terms are paired under a particular interpretation of the relationship between “modernity and enchantment,” however, each assumes greater

The Mediterranean and "the New Thalassology"

Abstract: SEA AND OCEAN HISTORY IS MORE NOVEL than it sounds. It admirably exemplifies a new historiography of large areas. In one sense, the inquiry revisits a traditional historical geography. At the same time, both its scope and its methods are so distinctive as to make it an exciting—and quite unpredictable—area of reflection and research. A decade or so ago, such histories were hardly encouraged. In postmodern historiography, subjects of every kind, but especially identities and power relationships, became inflections of discourse. And because it made its own world, discourse could not be anchored to a particular place, even if, for practical reasons, its historians had to use texts from a particular region and period. Preset frontiers were taboo. 1 The context, whether for an exercise in microhistory, in new historicism, or in postcolonialism, was, ideally, global. Area studies, in many ways the creation of cultural anthropology and long suspect in that discipline, now flourish again. 2 But they are invigorated by what has been learned from the linguistic turn: there is no turning back. Even area studies, in their revived form, are therefore in some sense global, too. They may, for instance, be directly or indirectly influenced by debates on the nature and impact of economic and cultural globalization. The new interest in regional history derives, fundamentally, from the task of finding a different approach to world history—not through formulating generalizations about everything, but through the analysis of the whole by way of its components, and, consequently, of how those components fit together. 3 The regions of the new regional history tend to have one obvious characteristic: they are big—inevitably, since they are implicitly or explicitly elements in a larger and potentially all-embracing historical project. For the same reason, their historians share a sophisticated consciousness of the problems of delimitation. 4

The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature

Abstract: IN 1917, IN A LECTURE IN MUNICH on “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber first articulated his notion of “the disenchantment of the world,” later also incorporated into his seminal Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism He presented disenchantment as a hallmark feature of modern Western society, which had come into full vigor with the Protestant Reformation Initially Weber described this development, in relation to science, as entailing primarily the conviction that “there are no mysterious incalculable forces” and that “one need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore spirits” Later, and rather more evocatively in relation to religion, he described it as a historical force that had progressively “repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin”1 Weber’s assertions were hardly uncontroversial, and they have been challenged repeatedly in the century since they were first made2 Nevertheless, the basic notion of disenchantment remains very influential on many academic disciplines’ understanding of the modern world Magic and cultural perceptions of the magical occupy a critical place particularly in sociological and anthropological conceptions of modernity, and issues of “magical thought” and “superstition” in opposition to “scientific rationalism” frame discussions not only of the modern West but of instances in which Western modernity confronts the traditional beliefs and practices of other world cultures3

The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia

Abstract: [T]hese gentlemen have formed a plan of geographical morality, by which the duties of men . . . are not to be governed by their relation to the great Governor of the Universe, or by their relation to mankind, but by climates, degrees of longitude, parallels, not of life, but of latitudes: as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial, all the virtues die . . . ; as if there were a kind of baptism, like that practised by seamen, by which they unbaptize themselves of all that they learned in Europe, and after which a new order and system of things commenced.

Conjuring the modern in Africa: durability and rupture in histories of public healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa.

Abstract: THE VALUABLE EMPHASIS ON MODERNITY in colonial and postcolonial African studies has profoundly divided precolonial African history from what comes after. But the depth and complexity of African aspirations for moral community and the forms of collective action they inspire, often in the face of severe material constraints, exceed the explanatory power of narratives of modernity oriented toward the history of capital, colony, and commerce. Long-term regional histories of durable bundles of meaning and practice grounded in Africa address these matters in part by working across tight spaces of ethnicity and beyond shallow chronologies. In particular, a history of public healing reveals compelling notions of public health and forms of power that cut across the colonial period but were transformed by colonialism. Public healing has wrestled with shifting boundaries between a porous social body’s moral communities and the starker outline of an embodied, autonomous individual. Modes of power and authority central to politics and to healing practices, public or private, have moved uneasily but productively against each other over the last millennium, as agricultural systems changed, as centralized states formed, and as commodified economies grew. Over the last century, they have moved against the forms of power and authority embodied in a colonial state or in biomedicine. In the context of public healing between the African Great Lakes, the historical complexity of relations between these entangled aspects of life reveals a heterotemporal modern Africa beyond the hybrid or the alternative forms of modernity so prevalent in the literature. Since the 1990s, work in African colonial history has emphasized African appropriations of European forms of knowledge and practice in a single field of culture inflected by political economy. These ethnographically dense explorations of what has been called “the colonial situation” push beyond a paradigm of “encounter” into a contingent history of colonial and postcolonial modernity. One scholar, Nancy Rose Hunt, finds valuable sources for her analytical categories in a precolonial Cen-

Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics

Abstract: RESUMEN Este articulo ofrece una nueva interpretacion de como y por que los europeos desarrollaron el gusto por el chocolate. Mientras estudios previos sugieren que los europeos transformaron el chocolate en terminos materiales e ideologicos para que encajara en su propio conjunto de gustos y prejuicios, aqui se demuestra que los europeos aprendieron a que les gustara el chocolate en los terminos de los indigenas como resultado de su estatus como minoria cultural en la Mesoamerica colonial. Este articulo tambien utiliza el caso historico de la transculturacion migratoria del chocolate para revisar los modelos explicativos del gusto usados en la literatura historica y antropologica. Rechaza los esencialismos biologicos y cultural-funcionalistas y muestra, en cambio, que el gusto es una variable historica independiente asociada a las circunstancias sociales. PALABRAS CLAVE: Chocolate, cacao, gusto, consumo, historia del mundo Atlantico, imperialismo. POR M ARCY N ORTON ** Chocolate para el imperio:

Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of "Superstitious" Rumors in the People's Republic of China, 1961-1965

Abstract: SINCE THE DEATH OF MAO ZEDONG in 1976, there has been an astonishing revival in the People’s Republic of China of what the government calls “feudal superstition”; this in spite of the fact that under Mao the regime waged a fierce onslaught against the “four olds”—old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits—especially during the Cultural Revolution. The 1980s and 1990s saw a rush to rebuild temples and ancestral halls, the resurgence of spirit mediumship and exorcism, renewed interest in divination and geomancy, the reemergence of heterodox religious cults, notably Falungong, and the appearance of “jade emperors descended from heaven.” 1 The rapidity and extent of this upsurge in once-proscribed beliefs and practices raised questions about the power of the Maoist state, suggesting that despite its intensive propaganda campaigns and bouts of repression, its capacity to remold popular thinking and behavior was much less than scholars had once supposed. This, in turn, raised questions about the nature of the beliefs and practices that revived during the era of economic reform. Were these manifestations of a tradition that had been preserved unscathed in the face of turbulent socioeconomic and political transformations? Or were these substantially new configurations of beliefs and practices adapted to the changed power relations of the reform era? 2 One form of “feudal superstition”—what the authorities call “superstitious rumors”—maintained a vigThis article was written during spring semester 2004 while I was a fellow at the International Center for

Smoking and "Early Modern" Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries)

Abstract: IN APRIL 1699, an unusual disturbance broke out in the streets of Cairo. As part of the annual pilgrimage caravan, which escorted Muslim pilgrims through the Sinai Desert to the holy cities of Arabia, a solemn procession was conveying a new silk covering destined for the Ka ba, or Sacred Shrine, in Mecca. Among the most notable participants were a group of North Africans, who created an uproar as they moved through the streets. Fired by religious zeal, they insisted on applying their own brand of Islamic morality to the crowd of onlookers. In choosing targets for chastisement, they were very specific, beating all the people whom they found smoking tobacco. As the tumult grew, they made their decisive mistake. Seizing a member of a local paramilitary group, they smashed his pipe, and during the ensuing quarrel, went so far as to hit him over the head. The crowd had apparently seen enough. Even as soldiers rushed to the scene, the “people of the marketplace” took matters into their own hands and began attacking the North Africans. The violence ended only with the arrival of a Janissary officer, who hauled the North Africans off to prison.1 Looking back on this incident from a very different time and place, with our own concerns and passions about tobacco, it is hard not to be struck by the deep emotions that smoking, even then, was capable of eliciting. Walking around Middle Eastern towns today, one could never imagine that such struggles ever took place. Nearly everyone has now accepted smoking as a public freedom. Few people would dream of condemning it as a moral scourge, or of banishing it from the streets and markets. If smokers today hear medical warnings about the dangers of tobacco, they remain oblivious to the acrimony that it once unleashed. This tolerant consensus did not emerge all at once. After its first arrival in the Ottoman Middle East at the end of the sixteenth century, tobacco would ignite intense debates about its legality and morality. The altercation in the streets of Cairo highlights these divisions in opinion. Invoking religion and morality, the rowdy North Africans were determined to put an end to smoking, and felt justified in using extreme measures. On the other side, the “people of the marketplace” completely denied this presumptive right to intervene in the affairs of others or to act independently on behalf of religion. To make their point, both camps were willing to come to blows. Why had tobacco become the subject of such bitter controversy? As contempo-

Democracy came too early: a tentative explanation for the problem of American homicide.

Abstract: ERIC MONKKONEN WAS A LONG-TIME FRIEND. On scholarly issues we often agreed but sometimes disagreed, and I regret that he will not have the opportunity to react to the argument presented here. His article forms a good starting point for me to present my ideas about the United States’ experience with violence—a subject of great interest to me.1 There is no need to take issue with the empirical data that Monkkonen discusses, which few if any historians would contest.2 When it comes to interpretation, context, and explanation, he and I converge on some points but diverge on others. I share with him a firm belief that history provides an indispensable key for understanding manifestations of violence in any present-day society. Indeed, if there has ever been a problem with which historians are able to help out sociologists and criminologists, it is probably this one. Secondly—and here some scholars voice dissenting opinions—I agree that quantitative research into murder trends constitutes a necessary base for further analysis. Of all past crimes, homicide is the only one that allows for reliable estimates of its actual incidence, and any discussion of context, culture, and state institutions loses much of its meaning when the bare rates for the area or period under study are unknown. I am convinced, with Monkkonen, that murder is more than just an index to itself. He is cautious in calling the supposition that societies with a high incidence of homicide also witness a high level of assaults no more than a reasonable guess. This

Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon

Abstract: THE MOON, FOR EARLY MODERN ENGLISHMEN, was comfortingly familiar yet achingly distant. Countrymen looked to the moon, “the queen of heaven,” to understand “alterations and changes of humors, times, seasons,” and perturbations of “man’s body, the air, and all other things under her orb.” The moon and its phases helped regulate mundane activities, from the planting of crops to the letting of blood, as well as governed the washing of the tides.1 Lunar light facilitated nighttime journeys. Lunar features stirred the imagination. From ancient times to the age of the telescope, sky-watchers speculated about the “face in the moon” or the “man in the moon,” and occasionally wondered whether lunar eyes were looking down on them. The Roman Greek Plutarch (ca. 45–125) had written “of the face appearing in the roundel of the moon,” and his work was available in English by 1603. Plutarch’s moon was most likely inhabited either by creatures “light, active and nimble of body” or by “daemons” or departed souls.2 The poet Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) wondered, “what if within the moon’s fair shining sphere, what if in every other star unseen, of other worlds he happily should hear?” Rhetorically, for Spenser, the moon was a bridge from the newfound lands of America to the undiscovered world of “faerie land.”3 The new global geography and the new astronomical science of late Renaissance Europe brought fresh attention to the lunar sphere. Churchmen, philosophers, and creative writers became fascinated with the properties of the populated moon. Their earnest inquiries were sometimes tinged with merriment and scorn, and jokes about “the man in the moon” became standard early modern fare.4

Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts, and Colonial Agency in Central Tanganyika, ca. 1876–1928

Abstract: IN AUGUST 1923, DAVID NDAHANI, an Anglican pastor-in-training, came before the Kongwa church court in central Tanganyika to accuse his wife, Nenelwa, of adultery. They had been married in a Christian ceremony some years earlier, but Ndahani had never fully paid the bridewealth he owed to Nenelwa’s relatives. Nenelwa, disgusted with her husband, had in early 1923 left her conjugal home to live with her parents. Before the church court that August day, David Ndahani said nothing about the unpaid bridewealth. He complained that Ezekiel, a church teacher, had cuckolded him. His accusation led the church court to dismiss Ezekiel from his duties; the errant wife, Nenelwa, was ordered to submit to Ndahani. But on Christmas Day 1923, David Ndahani himself confessed to an adulterous relationship with the communicant Elizabeti. Elizabeti had spent several nights outside Ndahani’s door, loudly accusing him of sinning with her. Kongwa missionaries brokered a détente between Ndahani, Elizabeti, and her husband, Ishmael, committed their agreement to writing, and posted the notice on the church door. They hoped thereby to chasten the adulterous communicants. By 1929, however, Ndahani was in prison for thievery, and the missionaries were lamenting that “adultery was the norm rather than the exception.”1 In Tanganyika, churchmen gained control of converts’ conduct by keeping records. Their bureaucracy was meant to formalize spousal relationships, making sexual behavior subject to outside authority. But lovers also represented themselves. Self-interested litigants such as David Ndahani sifted through their spouses’ marital and social relationships, looking for evidence that could capture the church courts’ attention. They actively recast conjugal arguments over bridewealth, residence, and other issues, using the language of the courts to make their marital debates look like simplified morality plays. In Vicente Rafael’s nomenclature, litigants such as Ndahani and Elizabeti “contracted” administrative power, adopting some of its nomen-

Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth‐Century France

Abstract: IN THE WINTER OF 1751, AFTER ACCEPTING A POSITION of some responsibility in the world of finance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau fell gravely ill. Bedridden, delirious with fever, and facing the prospect of his own death, the philosopher resolved to change the course of his life. He renounced “all projects of fortune and advancement,” including his new job, and vowed to spend what little time he had left in a state of “independence and poverty.” After his convalescence, Rousseau remained true to his pledge and embarked on what he called his “personal reform.” His first act was to change his wardrobe: “I began my reform with my finery,” he wrote. “I gave up my gold trimmings and white stockings, I took a short wig, I laid aside my sword, I sold my watch.” Later recounting the same episode, he stated: “I left le monde and its pomp. I renounced all finery: no more sword, no more watch, no more white stockings, gold trimmings, hairdo.” Instead, he wore “a simple wig and clothes of good rough wool.”1 As a philosophical statement, Rousseau’s personal reform was loaded with meaning. The act of dressing down signified that the author of the recently published Discours sur les sciences et les arts was putting his philosophy into practice; he was turning his back on the luxury and artifice of Parisian high society and embracing a virtuous and authentic mode of living. I invoke Rousseau’s reform, however, not only to raise its philosophical implications but also to make a specific sartorial observation. Although Rousseau renounced fashionable clothing and accessories, he did not jettison the wig. Instead, he abandoned his old wig to adopt a simpler and shorter model, the round wig, a gesture that raises a number of questions. Why, if Rousseau was intent on rejecting the artifice of le monde, did he not simply discard the wig altogether and wear his natural hair? Why opt instead for a different style? Were certain styles not implicated in the corrupt high society that Rousseau was determined to repudiate? These may seem frivolous affairs of fashion, but, as I will argue, the multiple meanings attributed to wigs illuminate an important Enlightenment transition—economic, social, and cultural in scope—from courtly to modern forms of consumption.

Race War and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena, 1810–1832

Abstract: DURING THE AGE OF REVOLUTION, nations in the Americas faced the quandary of how to reconcile slavery and racial discrimination with the enlightened and liberal ideology of citizenship. Would slavery be abolished? Would all free men, regardless of race, enjoy the equal rights of citizenship, and if not, how would that exclusion be justified within an ideology that proclaimed the equality and brotherhood of humankind? From 1810 to 1812, patriot movements across Spanish America answered the last question by declaring legal racial equality for all free citizens and constructing a nationalist ideology of racial harmony—what contemporary scholars call the

"Each nation only cares for its own": Empire, Nation, and Child Welfare Activism in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1918

Abstract: IN THE FALL OF 1917, Franziszka Pollabrek, a Czech-speaking factory worker, was at her wits’ end. In a scathing letter to the Austrian Ministry of Education in Vienna, she demanded that the state do something about her incorrigible teenage sons. Pollabrek expressed her frustration with the state’s inaction in the face of what she perceived to be a disturbing wartime social crisis: “My boys will become nothing but thieves, liars, and murderers if you, dear Sirs, don’t intervene soon,” she warned. “The fathers are in the military, the male teachers are mobilized, and I work in the factory. You want to do nothing, so where should I begin? Since you have taken away their father, why don’t you take the children as well, let the boys be locked up or shot, so that I don’t have to see them anymore.”1 Pollabrek was not alone. Across Europe, citizens depicted the upheaval of World War I through stories of broken families, absent fathers, negligent mothers, and delinquent children, and they demanded action from the state.2 In the Bohemian lands (the Austrian crownlands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), German and Czech nationalist child welfare activists took the initiative in responding to these demands. As a nationally segregated child welfare system developed and expanded in this region between 1900 and 1945, nationalist social welfare activists created and transformed imagined boundaries between public and private, as well as relationships between state and nation in the context of a multinational empire.3