In This Issue

     This issue contains three articles, an AHR Forum Essay, and a review essay. The articles assess the recent autobiographical impulse among professional historians, changing notions of physical comfort among eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans, and the place of gender in an African colonial labor conflict. The Forum Essay uses the emergence of borderlands to raise questions about the character of intercultural relations in colonial North America and their implications for colonial regimes in other times and places. It is the second of a new series we call Forum Essays. Instead of commissioning comments on an essay, as is our usual practice with Forums, we are opening up the commentary process to readers by soliciting their reactions. We will send all of the comments we receive to the author and will print the three or four that seem the most trenchant and compelling along with an author's response in the forthcoming October issue. Details can be found in the Forum introduction. The article section concludes with a comprehensive review essay that examines the emerging multinational literature on the "Rape of Nanjing." In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

     Jeremy D. Popkin notes that, although historians have traditionally been critical of autobiographies as sources, the past two decades have seen a flood of historians' memoirs, especially in France and the United States. He contends that this development forces us to take a new look at this way of narrating the past. Popkin argues that the new interest in autobiography among historians has been produced by larger changes in our understanding of history: a greater openness to its subjective elements and a greater appreciation of the importance of individual experiences. Through an analysis of what historians' autobiographies say about two common experiences of twentieth-century life—the impact of war and of ideological commitment—he tries to define what these texts add to our understanding of both history and the possibilities of autobiography. Popkin's thoughtful analysis raises questions about the practices of historians that cut across the entire discipline.

     John E. Crowley analyzes eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans' material culture and political economy to ask the question, how natural is the desire for physical comfort? He argues that their standards of comfort are a historical problem precisely because they seem so similar to those in America and Britain subsequent to the eighteenth century. Crowley found that physical comfort—self-conscious satisfaction with the relationship between one's body and its immediate physical environment—was an innovative aspect of Anglo-American culture. The term "comfort" was increasingly applied to improved standards of living and provided meaning to the eighteenth-century consumer revolution. But Crowley questions a prevailing assumption in the historiography of that revolution: comfort was a natural motive for new consumption patterns. He shows that items people might have wanted for their comfort were initially desirable chiefly for their contributions to gentility and health. Political economy made comfort a legitimizing motive for popular consumption patterns. The imperatives of physical comfort then focused scientific and technological expertise on more amenable designs of the domestic environment. Crowley concludes that by the 1790s the ideal of physical comfort had sufficient ideological force for humanitarians to incorporate it in their appeals for social justice toward the poor, the incarcerated, and the enslaved. In this way, he maintains, the culture of sensibility had naturalized the phenomenon of discomfort and made it susceptible to rational improvement. Crowley's essay convincingly demonstrates the analytical significance of examining the relationship between material culture and intellectual history at particular moments in the past.

     Lisa A. Lindsay portrays a large-scale general strike in colonial Nigeria as a moment in which gendered assumptions about work and citizenship, held by British colonizers and their African subjects, were expressly articulated. She points out that, during the 1945 strike, male workers demanded wage increases and even family allowances on the basis of their status as breadwinners, yet they survived the work stoppage largely because of the economic independence of their wives and the importance of market women to local economies. In the post-strike debate over family allowances, trade unionists used gendered language and claims about respectability to talk about racial equality within the colonial order and to constitute the colonial worker and citizen as a male household head. But colonial officials argued that African families were too different from those of Europeans to justify commensurate entitlements for wage earners. Thus Lindsay contends that both British administrators and Nigerian trade unionists confronted tensions between universalist discourse about gender, labor, and citizenship and the particularities of African domestic life. In the end, she concludes, in spite of the active participation of Nigerian women in politics and the economy, the male breadwinner ideal came to stand for respectability and rights in the colony as in the metropole. Lindsay's essay brings together insights from studies of gender and wage labor in Europe and those of the colonial state in Africa. Her compelling analysis highlights colonialism's effects on African domestic relations as well as the importance of gender in the political strategies of the colonized.

AHR Forum Essay

     Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron continue a new AHR format with a provocative essay about the meaning of borders and borderlands in the past. Taking up Herbert Bolton's six-decade-old call for a comparative and common history of the Americas, they synthesize recent literature to connect the colonial and national histories of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. They offer a framework that seeks to explain the diverse patterns of intercultural relations that characterized various North American frontiers. Challenging historians who ascribe the differences in frontiers solely to the original purposes of European colonizers, Adelman and Aron argue that the appearance of borderlands—a term reserved for contested zones between colonial domains—decisively shaped the character of intercultural relations. Critically, they assert, in borderlands born of colonial rivalries, frontiers tended to produce more inclusive intercultural relations. Analyzing developments on both sides of the North Atlantic, Adelman and Aron detail how imperial competition between Britain, France, and Spain enabled Indian peoples in the Great Lakes, the lower Missouri Valley, and the greater Rio Grande region to deflect colonial powers from their initial projects (and projections). Within these borderlands, Indian "peoples in between" fashioned economic, diplomatic, and personal relations that rested, if not entirely on indigenous ground, at least on more common ground. The Age of Revolution, however, ushered in the emergence of nation-states that turned eighteenth-century borderlands into nineteenth-century bordered lands. And as national borders supplanted colonial borderlands, inclusive intercultural relations yielded to more exclusive occupations. Adelman and Aron make a significant contribution to discussions about the nature of colonial encounters and rivalries in North America as well as other places. Rather than commission commentators for this Forum, we invite interested readers to send us their responses to Adelman and Aron's argument. We will print the three or four most instructive in the October 1999 issue along with a response from the two authors. Details can be found in the introduction to the Forum.

Review Essay

     Daqing Yang begins his essay by explaining that, to many observers, the Rape of Nanjing represents an emotionally charged and highly politicized subject and a symbol of East Asia's "unmastered past." However, he argues that over the past decade a convergence has emerged among professional historians on several important issues related to the event. In an analysis of influential studies recently published in Japan, China, and the United States, Yang demonstrates the existence of major areas of interpretative convergence as a result of intellectual debate, fresh evidence, and a renewed emphasis on scholarship. For example, he maintains that the fact that Japanese troops committed a variety of atrocities on a massive scale some sixty years ago is beyond doubt, even though works denying the massacre are still being published. Indeed, he notes that Japanese historians, in particular, increasingly portray the atrocities as the outcomes of the brutalization of war in China and deep-rooted tendencies in the pre-war Japanese military. Yang also reports that Chinese historians have come to acknowledge that grave tactical errors and utter confusion on the part of the Chinese defense contributed to the staggering loss of Chinese life in Nanjing. And he insists that, even if the analytical convergence about the event remains limited—for instance, considerable differences remain over estimates of the number of Chinese deaths—the historiographical implications of the narrowing debate are quite significant. Without underestimating the epistemological and political pitfalls involved in giving controversial events a past, Yang concludes that the recent assessments of the Rape of Nanjing demonstrate that historians can and should strive for a strategy of intersubjective judgment to overcome the contradiction between truth and subjectivity inherent in all historical inquiry.

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