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Beckert, Sven - American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950 (Article)

October 3, 2017

AHR coverSven Beckert - The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 4, 1 October 2017, Pages 1137–1170, Link to Full Text

Abstract
During the last third of the nineteenth century, a debate emerged in a number of European countries on the “American danger.” Responding to the rapid rise of the United States as the world’s most important economy, some European observers feared their nations’ declining competitiveness in the face of the territorial extent of the United States, and its ability to integrate a dynamic industrial sector with ample raw material supplies, agriculture commodities, markets, and labor into one national economy. This “second great divergence” provoked a range of responses, as statesmen, capitalists, and intellectuals advocated for territorial rearrangements of various European economies, a discussion that lasted with greater or lesser intensity from the 1870s to the 1950s. Their sometimes competing and sometimes mutually reinforcing efforts focused on African colonialism, European integration, and violent territorial expansion within Europe itself. Using the debate as a lens to understand the connections between a wide range of policy responses, this article argues that efforts to territorialize capitalist economies delineate a particular moment in the long history of capitalism; and it demonstrates the unsettling effects of the rise of the United States on European powers.

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Hinton, Elizabeth K. - From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime

September 1, 2017

War on Poverty book jacketElizabeth Hinton. 2017. Published by Harvard University Press. Publisher's Link

Summary:
In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.

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Ghosh, Arunabh - Before 1962: The Case for 1950s China-India History (Article)

July 20, 2017

journal coverArunabh Ghosh (2017). Before 1962: The Case for 1950s China-India History. The Journal of Asian Studies, 76(3), 697-727. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911817000456

Abstract

China-India history of the 1950s remains mired in concerns related to border demarcations and a teleological focus on the causes, course, and consequences of the war of 1962. The result is an overt emphasis on diplomatic and international history of a rather narrow form. In critiquing this narrowness, this article offers an alternate chronology accompanied by two substantive case studies. Taken together, they demonstrate that an approach that takes seriously cultural, scientific, and economic life leads to different sources and different historical arguments than an approach focused on political (and especially high political) life. Such a shift in emphasis, away from conflict and onto moments of contact, comparison, cooperation, and competition, can contribute fresh perspectives not just on the histories of China and India, but also on the histories of the Global South.... Read more about Ghosh, Arunabh - Before 1962: The Case for 1950s China-India History (Article)

Blair, Ann - The 2016 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: Humanism and Printing in the Work of Conrad Gessner (Article)

May 1, 2017

CoverAnn M. Blair - Renaissance Quarterly, 70:1 (2017), pp. 1-43. Link to Full Text

Abstract


I discuss how printing affected the practice of scholarship by examining the working methods of Conrad Gessner (1516–65), a prolific humanist, bibliographer, and natural historian. Gessner supplemented his revenue as city physician in Zurich through his publishing activities. He hailed printing, along with libraries to preserve the books, as crucial to the successful transmission of learning to the distant future. Gessner also used printing as a kind of social media: to reach readers rapidly all over Europe, in order to solicit contributions to his research projects underway, to advertise forthcoming books, and to develop his own thinking through multiple iterations.

 

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Lewis, Mary Dewhurst - Legacies of French Slave-Ownership, or the Long Decolonization of Saint-Domingue (article)

April 27, 2017

jacketMary Dewhurst Lewis. History Workshop Journal, Volume 83, Issue 1, 1 April 2017, Pages 151–175, Published: April 27, 2017. Link to Article

Abstract
After insurgent slaves in Saint-Domingue proclaimed the colony’s independence from France in 1804, France refused to recognize the new state of Haiti. When it finally did so in 1825, it was with gunboats outside Haitian harbors, and in exchange for favourable terms of trade and an indemnity of 150 million French francs to be paid to the former planters for the loss of their landed property. Although King Charles X and his advisors intended the indemnity to bring liquidity into the hands of a class deemed essential to restoration politics, in the event it did not achieve this goal. While the indemnity paid to British former slave-owners after the abolition of 1833 served in part as venture-capital for British industrial expansion, the Haitian indemnity and other payments to former planters cultivated a different legacy of slave-ownership: a preoccupation with lost grandeur with a politics of resentment. This legacy was fed in no small part by the protracted nature of the payments, which encouraged planters’ descendants to continue the financial claims of their forebears, investing them with emotional significance. The article explores the more than a century-long process of ‘decolonizing’ Saint-Domingue and its significance for the culture of French imperialism.

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Armitage, David - Civil Wars: A History in Ideas

February 17, 2017

book jacketDavid Armitage, Knopf, 2017. Publisher's Link

ABOUT CIVIL WARS

We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is, and what it isn’t, have a long and contested history, from its fraught origins in republican Rome to debates in early modern Europe to our present day. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war “civil” often depend on whether one is a ruler or a rebel, victor or vanquished, sufferer or outsider. Calling a conflict a civil war can shape its outcome by determining whether outside powers choose to get involved or stand aside: from the American Revolution to the war in Iraq, pivotal decisions have depended on such shifts of perspective. 

The age of civil war in the West may be over, but elsewhere in the last two decades it has exploded–from the Balkans to Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Sri Lanka, and most recently Syria. And the language of civil war has burgeoned as democratic politics has become more violently fought. This book’s unique perspective on the roots and dynamics of civil war, and on its shaping force in our conflict-ridden world, will be essential to the ongoing effort to grapple with this seemingly interminable problem.

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McCormick, Michael - Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond (Book Chapter 13)

December 21, 2016

book jacketMcCormick, M. (2016) Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond, in On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (eds J. Bodel and W. Scheidel), John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA. doi: 10.1002/9781119162544.ch13 Link to Book

 

Summary

Captured by slave hunters in Britain as the Roman Empire collapsed, Saint Patrick was sold into slavery across the sea. The autobiographical declaration casts his personal story as one of conversion, and spiritual and physical liberation. It is possible that the genetic traces of the forced migration of early medieval Europeans to the economic and political centers of the Islamic world live on in the genomes of modern inhabitants of North Africa and Mesopotamia, just as those of their African ancestors live on in African Americans. Sugar plantations helped finance the kingdom of Jerusalem's ecclesiastical institutions and the French-speaking feudal Lords of Tyre; the Crusaders profited from exporting the new sweetener to Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When the Muslims reconquered the mainland Crusader states and their sugar plantations, export production for Europe simply shifted offshore to the Crusader kingdom of Cyprus.

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