In This Issue

Articles

     Ann Taylor Allen notes that the intellectual history of Western Europe and North America at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century is often characterized by such terms as "cultural pessimism" and "alienation." She maintains that these characterizations are based on views of a minority of the population, primarily male academic, artistic, literary, and political elites. Women, Allen asserts, were also important in the intellectual life of an era in which an upsurge in feminist organizing encouraged a flowering of feminist scholarship. She develops that point by recovering the debate about the origins of the family, monogamous marriage, and the subordinate status of women. Beginning in 1860 and focusing on the years from 1890 to 1914, Allen demonstrates that feminist scholars responded to the changing intellectual paradigms of the era not, as did many of their male contemporaries, with anxiety, pessimism, or a flight to the irrational, but rather with a new optimism and confidence. In doing so, she revives the debates these women had with contemporaries such as Max Weber, Friedrich Engels, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud. Allen's essay integrates cultural and intellectual history to make a major contribution to the history of social science.

     Amir Weiner analyzes purification policies in Soviet socialism. He situates Soviet social engineering within the European ethos of modernity, and then assesses the eschatological-millenarian view of history that set the Soviets apart from other polities. Weiner argues that the totalization of the Marxist social model, especially in the wake of World War II, seriously challenged the primacy of a social approach to purification and helped establish a quasi-biological approach that was put into practice, although it never won philosophical or ideological endorsement. And the policy inevitably provoked comparisons with Nazi biological-racial engineering programs. Using examples of the campaigns against the Ukrainian nationalist movement and the Jewish minority, Weiner contends that the Soviet policies were ethnically based. But, he maintains, the Nazi and Soviet enterprises must be distinguished because, even when put into practice, the Soviet excision policy was eliminationalist and not based on a racial-biological code. Instead, he asserts, it relied on memory and its hierarchies of commemoration. Weiner's essay thus adds significantly to our understanding of modern state policies toward ethnic and racial minorities.

AHR Forum

     Celia Applegate begins the Forum "Bringing Regionalism Back to History" by critiquing the dispersed discussions about the role of regions in European history, particularly their relationship to discussions of nationalism and modernization. She argues that even though regional history has been freed from the deep obscurity in which it lay during the heyday of modernization theory, there remains no synthetic view of what European history might look like when written from the perspective of Europe's regional rather than its national diversity. Applegate goes on to analyze three prominent forms of research on European regionalism: considering regions, not nations as the locus of economic and political change; examining the ways that identity formation and cultural change have centered in regional, rather than national, contexts; and emphasizing regions as spatial and geographic entities and thus as places subject to the forces of cultural and political change. She points out not only the ways that modernization theory limited our understanding of Europe's regions but also the more recent problems of looking at regions in purely constructivist terms.

     Kären Wigen extends the Forum by surveying recent trends in the study of regions in East Asia. Focusing on China and Japan, she identifies three overlapping genres of work: discursive analyses of diverse regional imaginaries, attempts to reformulate core-periphery relations as dynamic and contested, and explorations of regional identities (including the "portable localisms" of diasporic populations) as a form of cultural and political capital. She concludes with a call to integrate these increasingly fluid conceptions of the region into a broad geo-historical vision where regional dynamics can be understood as both larger units in national or transnational terms and smaller ones such as the neighborhood and household.

     Two commentators continue the Forum discussion of regionalism. Michael O'Brien, a historian of the United States South, suggests that many of the analytical perspectives advanced by Applegate and Wigen have long been familiar in the writing of southern history. He also asserts that the value of interrogating the history of the regionalist idea, which (being dependent on the establishment of the nation-state) does not much predate the twentieth century, is very much associated with rational planning, and offers a political language of cooperative stability that accepts the legitimacy of the nation. Yet, he maintains, modern history around the world does not validate such a language of stability as a description of what has occurred or many wish to have occur. Thus O'Brien cautions that the essays too closely echo the discourse that is natural to stable (if federal) polities such as the United States to describe places in the world remarkable for their instability. Vicente L. Rafael, a cultural historian of Southeast Asia, brings his experiences in area studies and cultural studies to his analysis of regionalism as a subject of historical inquiry. He argues for the need to destabilize and thereby localize regionalism and to recognize the contingency of modernity when viewed through the prism of regionalism. He also chronicles the intellectual journeys of particular individuals such as Southeast Asian studies scholars George Kahin and Benedict Anderson and offers some compelling speculations on why such scholars are drawn to study particular places. Rafael thus adds issues of cultural theory and individual agency to the discussion of regionalism and history.

Forum Essay: Responses

     Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron's essay in the June 1999 issue, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History," was the first part in our Forum on "Borders and Borderlands." They took up Herbert Bolton's six-decade-old call for a comparative and common history of the Americas to offer a framework that seeks to explain the diverse patterns of intercultural relations that characterized various North American frontiers. The Forum concludes in this issue with a second part that contains three comments on Adelman and Aron's essay. Evan Haefeli urges scholars of North American frontiers to consider their work in a broader context that would enable them to develop an analytical framework useful to the study of frontier encounters around the globe and throughout history. Christopher Ebert Schmidt-Nowara raises questions about the intellectual foundations of the transnational history of North America by invoking the work of Latin American and Spanish historians and intellectuals who have also analyzed the cultural and political connections among empires, national states, and subaltern groups. John R. Wunder and Pekka Hämäläinen critique the essay for misrepresenting the historiography on the topic, avoiding issues of political economy and the environment, and, most important, failing to recognize indigenous agency. Adelman and Aron complete this two-part Forum Essay by engaging these critiques.

Review Essays

     The three review essays use an assessment of David S. Landes's recent book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, to explore the nature and meaning of Western hegemony during the last few centuries. They each do so from a different analytical perspective. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian, offers a succinct overview of the questions raised by European global dominance, particularly its technological creativity, over the last two centuries. He appreciatively yet critically assesses Landes's contention that European ascendancy sprang from distinctive attitudes and culture and his failure to address critical issues of economic and institutional analysis. Donna J. Guy, a historian of Latin America, considers Landes's book a brilliant but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to write a global and comparative history of capitalism based on geographic determinism, religion, and the morality of cultures. She contends that he used his extensive bibliography to reinforce his own prejudices about the superiority of Protestant culture in Europe and thus explain why some cultures have achieved economic success while others have failed. Guy suggests that Latin America, particularly Argentina, illustrates the weaknesses of his argument. Charles Tilly, a historical sociologist, assesses The Wealth and Poverty of Nations as a work of multi-level historical analysis. He probes the limitation of a cultural explanation of European dominance in terms of either national or world history. Taken together, the three review essays demonstrate why European hegemony remains such a critical but elusive issue.

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