In This Issue

     This issue contains a special Forum and Review Essay on Millenniums. The Forum presents analyses of millenarian moments in China, Brazil, the United States, and the Soviet Union and a comment by a medievalist. The review essay surveys recent studies of millennialism. In addition, there is an article that presents a cultural interpretation of the Louis-Philippe monarchy in nineteenth-century France, and a review essay that assesses a multi-volume history of consumption. Finally, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Article

     Jo Burr Margadant offers a cultural interpretation of the failure of Louis-Philippe's July Monarchy in mid-nineteenth-century France. She argues that his regime faced two insurmountable problems: the absence of any cultural underpinning for dynasticism, and the widely held suspicion, propagated in the press, that self-interest and greed motivated the king just like others in public life. Margadant explores the gendered dimension of this crisis of legitimacy by examining representations of the royal family in political caricatures and in their public performances. She contends that these sources reveal an important transformation in the imagery of the monarchy. Early in the regime, both the royal family and its critics relied on feminine imagery to represent the monarchy. The queen figured prominently in royal representations, while caricatures feminized the king's appearance or portrayed him, in relations to France, the constitution or the press, as a monster brutalizing women. By 1835, when the stakes of political combat had intensified, the symbolic repertoire of caricature became masculinized and, gradually, so did the royal family's appearances in public, which became increasingly restricted to the king and his sons in military uniform. In contrast to domestic images of monarchy in Britain, she observes, Louis-Philippe was trapped in an imagery of masculine battle that left no space for a monarchy that transcended politics. This changed imagery set the stage for his violent overthrow by Parisians. Margadant thus makes a significant contribution to our understanding of political history by drawing on often ignored sources to demonstrate the significance of studying the relationship between political institutions and political culture and public representations of gender.

Review Essay

     Craig Clunas critically assesses three volumes published under the broad rubric of "Culture and Consumption in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." He explains that these and other related works have come to be seen as propagating notions such as "the birth of a consumer society" and a "consumer revolution." However, Clunas argues, contentions like these are more or less explicitly imbricated with assumptions regarding "the rise of the West." And his analysis reveals that there is no real level of internal agreement about the validity of these concepts among the participating authors, despite the way the works have come to be referenced. He also discusses the methodological evolution of the idea of "consumption" over the course of the three volumes. And he critiques the overt concentration on Anglo-American evidence in the construction of this idea. Clunas concludes his thoughtful review by drawing attention to some examples of what he considers good historical practice to argue for attention to consumerisms and modernities as multiple and not unitary phenomena.

AHR Forum

     David Ownby begins the Forum on "Millenniums" with a synthesis of recent work on the history of China's millenarian traditions. He contends that China's early medieval period (200–600 ce) was the formative era during which its major apocalyptic themes and motifs were first elaborated. And, he notes, many of these have continued to circulate up to the present. Drawing on recent research on the history of Daoism, Ownby gives pride of place to this indigenous Chinese religious tradition. He traces millenarian elements in both elite and popular Daoist texts from the end of the Han (206–220 ce) through the early Tang (618–906 ce). And he demonstrates that Daoist and other Chinese groups served to transform Indian and Serindian Buddhism, which entered China toward the end of the Han dynasty, into a potentially apocalyptic faith. Most important, he argues that these millenarian movements should be understood as populist or fundamentalist reactions from within Chinese culture rather than as the results of the importation of foreign beliefs or as expressions of self-conscious dissidence. In developing this argument, Ownby hopes to assist those attempting to compare millenarian experiences across time and space.

     Alida C. Metcalf takes the Forum to sixteenth-century Brazil. She investigates the sect known as Santidade de Jaguaripe, in which Indian and African slaves created a vibrant millenarian movement in the 1580s. Metcalf argues that the Santidade de Jaguaripe is one of the few documented examples of a slave millenarian movement in the Americas. Using the Christian vocabulary and the evangelization rituals learned from the Jesuits, slaves constructed their own community and predicted divine intervention to punish the evils of the emerging slave system. Slaveholders, threatened by the number of runaway slaves from sugar plantations, and Jesuits, fearful of the corruption of Christianity, joined the governor to destroy the sect. Subsequent episodes of slave resistance and idolatry, however, suggest that the kind of multi-ethnic community symbolized by the Santidade de Jaguaripe did not disappear from the landscape of colonial Brazil. Metcalf's compelling reconstruction of this movement not only documents an example of slave millenarianism, it also provides a suggestive way of understanding the responses of Indians and Africans to the emerging colonial order.

     Susan Juster brings eighteenth-century North America and Britain into the Forum. She notes that, when viewed from the perspective of Europe, millennialism in the United States during the revolutionary era looks remarkably benign and apolitical. While, in England, charismatic figures like Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott were gathering thousands of supporters to await the end of the world and the second coming of Christ, and generating considerable concern among the British political establishment, millennial fever in North America was confined to a handful of obscure local sects of no lasting influence. But if few inspired prophets appeared to give voice to apocalyptic fears, millennial expectations nonetheless ran deep in American political culture. These hopes and desires for a better world found expression more in the realm of print than in direct action. Juster develops that argument by examining the writings of male and female millennialists in the revolutionary era. She argues that male prophetic writers adopted the rhetoric and hermeneutic stance of republican theorists while female prophets rejected rationalist, enlightened discourse for a more mystical and allegorical mode of communication. By contrasting the "demagoguery" of male prophets with the "mystagoguery" of female prophets, Juster places male and female modes of prophetic discourse in current debates over the democratic public sphere and its gendered nature.

     David G. Rowley provides the last example of millenarianism in the Forum by comparing two apparently similar Russian millenarians. He does so to contend that, while there is a common idea that underlies all manifestations of millenarianism, scholars have paid insufficient attention to a critical distinction between two different social expressions of that ideal. The predominant focus of millenarian studies has been on popular, counter-cultural movements, and millenarianism is usually treated as a religious social pathology. However, Rowley uses the example of United States "Manifest Destiny" to assert that a different form of millenarianism emerges when it is expressed in elite politics as secular and metaphorical. He also posits a connection between this form of millennialism and imperial beliefs. Rowley then turns to Russia to distinguish between a Russian religious millenarian tradition of counter-cultural protest and a Russian secular millenarian tradition of czarist imperialism. As a result of this distinction, he contends that Anatolii Lunacharsky was part of a movement, the Communist revolution, that was only metaphorically millennial and that most closely resembles the outlook of Russian secular imperialism. On the other hand, he places a present-day millenarian, Valerii Khatiushin, in the religious, "crisis cult" Russian millenarian tradition. Rowley's intriguing essay has three primary aims: to distinguish clearly between a "religious" application of the term millenarian that signifies a counter-cultural movement and a "secular" one that signifies a mainstream movement; to show that Russian czarism was millennial through its imperial mission and not through its connection to the Orthodox Church; and to show that the Russian Revolution of 1917 can be considered "millennial" only in the secular, metaphorical, and imperial sense. Consequently, it helps us avoid the indiscriminate use of millenarianism by clarifying its divergent uses in the past and present.

     Richard K. Emmerson, a medievalist, concludes the Forum with a comment on the four essays. Because the essays range widely over time and geography and examine a diverse set of phenomena, he does not respond to each in depth. Instead, Emmerson assesses each essay's contribution to comparative millenarian studies and analyzes how each one highlights the potential problems that historians face in studying millenarian thought. He stresses in particular the problems that often arise from the scholarly difficulty in understanding the belief systems of millenarian groups. Rather than impose sociological or other paradigms on millenarianism, Emmerson argues, scholars should seek to understand the discourse of millenarian groups and thus to discover what is so compelling about such discourse that it leads people throughout the world and in many ages to join such groups. He also addresses another problem faced by comparative studies of millenarianism evident in the essays: the lack of terminological clarity. Emmerson concludes his comment by offering some definitions of common terms and distinctions between related phenomena that could lead to greater clarity in future studies.

Millennium Review Essay

     Paul A. Cohen contributes a review essay to the special section on millenniums. He begins his essay by raising several problems concerning the year 2000. The most important of these, he argues, is that the significance of this year as "end time" is grounded in a particular method of reckoning the passage of time that does not have the same meaning for all peoples. The four books that Cohen discusses, although focusing on such diverse themes as the meaning of the twentieth century, fins de siècle in British history, and various manifestations of apocalypticism, all are overwhelmingly centered on the West. Cohn, as a Jew and a historian of China, questions the applicability of these themes in societies (or communities) where Christianity does not predominate and where the Gregorian calendar, though widely used, tends to have a somewhat different meaning. Many of the inhabitants of such societies, he argues, structure their lives around two different systems of marking time, one solar, the other lunar, which gives them a deeper sense of the constructedness of time than is perhaps available to many in the Christian West. With respect to China, he advances the further point that, for modern-spirited Chinese at the beginning of the twentieth century, embracing Western chronology was viewed as a mark of progressiveness, a way of differentiating the new China from the old; at the end of the century, the Western calendar, shorn of Christian eschatological meaning, continues to serve as a vehicle, partly practical, partly symbolic, for China's participation in a modern world order.

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