Showing papers in "The American Historical Review in 2014"

History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value

Abstract: IN THE AGE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE, HISTORY and biology seem to converge. Ethicist Clive Hamilton maintains that “humans have become a ‘natural’ planetary force.”1 Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that anthropogenic climate change “spells the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.”2 As the divide between the humanities and the sciences melts in the heat of global warming, historians and biologists might reasonably be expected to envision the endangered human figure in similar terms. Accordingly, when asked who is threatened, these disciplines might now answer in chorus, producing a naturalized history, a cultured nature, and an embodied mind. Such a human figure would be recognizable in all corners of the university. Indeed, attempts at unification have been made by both historians and biologists. For instance, Ian Morris and E. O. Wilson have tried to reconcile disciplinary differences and create consilience on the ground, ultimately, of science. As Morris recently put it, “history is a subset of biology is a subset of chemistry is a subset of physics.”3 But I would argue that dynamic engagement between historians and biologists reveals multiple, often incommen-

“Crimes against Humanity”: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide

Abstract: IN EARLY 1919, BRITISH SOLICITOR GENERAL Sir Ernest Pollock faced the monumental question of how to prosecute those responsible for “crimes against humanity” committed against minority Christians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. “I think that a British Empire war tribunal should do it,” he argued to fellow Allied jurists.1 Although the notion of international justice was not new, initiating war crimes tribunals for perpetrators of wartime civilian massacres as a prosecutable offense had no precedent. Attempts to bring Turkish war criminals to justice for what would come to be known as the Armenian Genocide had their roots in imperial politics and humanitarian intervention. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain considered it an imperial responsibility to enforce what we now understand as a universal standard of human rights. The response to the massacres of Ottoman Christian minorities in the late nineteenth century and the 1915 genocide in Armenia can be situated in the infrastructure and ideological commitments of the British Empire. Contemporary reactions to, and the subsequent politicization of, the Armenian question were part of an imperial framework that eventually undermined attempts to document, prosecute, and memorialize the genocide. The script that still shapes contemporary understanding of the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century relied on Britain’s positioning of itself as a global empire and an arbiter of international justice. At the same time, Britain looked to manage imperial concerns as a Christian power that ruled diverse Islamic peoples. This positioning became increasingly problematic after World War I, during the attempt to prosecute Ottoman Turkey for “crimes against humanity” in a period of rising nationalism and

The Self and Its History

Abstract: HISTORIANS HAVE LONG BEEN ALLERGIC to psychological forms of explanation, so it seems unlikely that many will be eager to jump on the bandwagon of neuroscience or neurohistory. Despite many reasons for caution, an ongoing dialogue with neuroscience offers the prospect of new approaches to such perennially vexed issues as agency, experience, action, and identity. Neuroscience does not provide a handy model that historians can simply apply to their research. It functions more like psychoanalysis once did (and still does for some); as a field, it poses important questions and opens up new approaches to the mind, the self, and human behavior. Neuroscience is a fast-growing field that has gained much attention of late, especially at universities, but also among the general public. Membership in the Society for Neuroscience increased by 46 percent just between 2001 and 2010, to more than 41,000 members.1 Research on the brain has increased exponentially since the development of new brain imaging techniques, especially the introduction of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the 1990s. Use of fMRI makes it possible to detect functional activation of different locations in the brain through measurements of blood volume changes or changes in the concentration of oxygen. In 1992, fMRI provided the experimental basis for just four publications. By 2007, the rate had reached eight per day.2 Add to that the explosion of research at the cellular level of neurons, glial cells, and synapses in humans, mice, roundworms, sea slugs, and other animals, and the output is staggering. As might be expected, new books aiming to synthesize these studies are appearing at an accelerating rate, too. I cannot pretend to do justice here even to the synthetic works on the subject. The rapid expansion of research in neuroscience means that it is not a stable, fixed object. As historians have begun to test the waters of this field, it has rapidly become apparent that neuroscience can serve various ends; criticisms of humanists trying to engage neuroscience often include charges that they have read the wrong studies, misinterpreted the results of experiments, or worse yet, turned to neuroscience looking for a universalizing, anti-representational and anti-intentional ontology to bolster their claims.3 But those debates notwithstanding, the question of the self is a

When Ottomans Become Turks: Commemorating the Conquest of Constantinople and Its Contribution to World History

Abstract: IN RECENT YEARS, ON MAY 29, A VISITOR to Istanbul interested in escaping the crowds of foreign tourists at the city’s many famous monuments and museums easily might have passed the day participating in a series of commemorations occurring throughout the city. Devoted to the anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, these events include public prayers at the mausoleum of Sultan Mehmed II, the laying of wreaths at three different statues of the sultan, and an impressive ceremony outside the city walls featuring speeches, music, dance, and colorfully dressed Ottoman soldiers who stage a dramatic reenactment of the moment when the imposing city walls were finally breached following a fifty-three-day siege. The day’s celebrations are capped by an impressive musical laser and fireworks show projected over the Golden Horn, during which large crowds listen to an adulatory speech by the mayor of Istanbul and watch scenes from a film depicting the conquest of Constantinople.1 In fact, these are the most visible among a broad range of cultural and sporting events organized on and around May 29, not only in Istanbul’s many municipalities but in public venues throughout the country.2 They are commemorative activities reinforced by a multitude of other, more permanent cultural references that reflect Turkish “memories” of the event. Bookstores, for instance, sell countless tomes devoted to the conquest, including both fictional works and translations into Turkish of the various European eyewitness accounts. A number of films and magazines are available as well.3 At the same time, there are three universities in the city today with

Oriental by Design: Ottoman Jews, Imperial Style, and the Performance of HeritageOriental by Design

Abstract: WHEN, IN THE EARLY 1890S, OTTOMAN JEWS began to appear in Chicago in anticipation of the 1893 World’s Fair, many American observers were perplexed at first. In one author’s words, the “looks and garb” of these foreign visitors to the Windy City led him “to believe them Mohammedan.”1 Others decided that they were Turks, such as the editors of The Chicago Times Portfolio of the Midway Types, who labeled Robert Levy—an Ottoman Jewish merchant who managed the empire’s exhibit at the fair and who was photographed wearing the attire of an Ottoman Muslim religious scholar—a “typical Turk,” or “Rosa”—a Jewish woman from Ottoman Salonica—a “Turkish dancer.” (See Figures 1–2.) Fairgoers’ disorientation was not helped by the fact that these Eastern Jews used the newly constructed mosque built on the Midway—where Muslim employees of the Ottoman exhibit regularly prayed—as the site of their Yom Kippur services.2 Once they discovered that the people dressed as Muslims or Turks were Jews, however, certain visitors expressed their disappointment. One chronicler of the fair explained that visitors in the know had begun to grumble that the “Turkish village” erected on the Midway Plaisance did not really “represent Turkey,” and that it was “purely a speculative enterprise of some Oriental Jews.”3 Equally vexing for those who sought an unadulterated glimpse of Eastern life in Chicago, many of the performers in the Midway’s Turkish Village were caught changing into Western-style suits and dresses between their Oriental acts. During the same period, Sultan Abdulhamid II and various Ottoman officials

Evidence and the Instability of Biology

Abstract: THERE IS AN IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN history and the past, and it powers both the evident force of the thought-provoking essays in this roundtable, and the skepticism and general discomfort of those who would prefer not to intertwine biology with historical work. Historians do not, cannot, have direct access to the past; neither can biologists, or anyone else for that matter. What we all have are collections of traces—manuscripts, rocks, phonemes, fossils, genetic sequences, built structures— that we interpret today to create a narrative about what happened before. In this, biologists and historians have a good deal in common: both groups (not to mention the historians and biologists who learn from each other or collaborate) want to answer current questions about the past, using what the past has left us to work with. Without recognizing this shared aspiration, we are unable to speak coherently about the very real distinctions that shape each domain of inquiry. Those contrasts inflect the very core of historical practice, and we need to be careful about when and how we choose to blur them. The essays, both individually and as a whole, summon many reactions; I will confine myself to two general clusters. First, we must account for the straightforward complaint by the authors about historians’ tremendous resistance to incorporating findings and methods from biology in their research. I certainly do not dispute the observation—the resistance is there—and it behooves us, as historians, to try to figure out where it comes from. Most contributors did not offer an account of its origins, but those who did located it principally in the sociobiology debates of the mid-1970s. Diagnosing the problem that way, I believe, risks flattening both the malady and the prognosis. My second, and more central, point concerns how we might best engage with scientific material, as a matter of historical practice. This concerns the use of sources, and all historians’ debates at some level hinge on that issue.

Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast

Abstract: IN THE SUMMER AND FALL of 1919, the African-owned Gold Coast press was awash with news stories and impassioned commentary about the postwar race riots that had recently devastated Liverpool, Cardiff, and other major port cities in Britain. Angered by the sexual politics underlying the riots, Gold Coast commentators were quick to point out that the ports’ white rioters were not the only ones aggrieved by interracial sexual relations. Atu, a regular columnist for the Gold Coast Leader, responded to news that black men were targeted for repatriation after being attacked on the ports’ streets for “consorting with white women” by reminding his readers “that in their own country white men freely consort with coloured women, forming illicit alliances, and in many cases leaving on the coast abandoned offspring to the precarious protection of needy native families.” He continued, “It does not require much skill to diagnose the canting hypocrisy underlying” the riots, but the question now was whether “any sensible man [could] suppose that these men will return to their homes to view with complacency the spectacle of white men associated with coloured women.”1 In a few short lines, Atu vivified the “tensions of empire” created by the movement of African men between metropole and colony, and their different systems of raced and gendered sexual access.2

Evolutionary Psychology and the Historian

Abstract: New possibilities have been opened up for historians by a new wave of engagement with biology, or more particularly with human biology, for the study of human history, environmental history, health history, and the co-evolutionary history of humans and other species. This paper critically explores the uses and limits of evolutionary psychology for the study of history by focusing on the particularly intensely discussed phenomenon of incest avoidance.