In This Issue

     This issue contains the AHA Presidential Address, two articles, an AHR Forum, and a review essay. Robert Darnton's presidential address analyzes the information culture of eighteenth-century Paris. It is also the basis of the first electronic article published by the AHR. Readers can go to the journal's web page (http://www.indiana.edu/~ahr/) and find a button marked Darnton. By clicking on it, readers can find an electronic version of the address as well as an additional essay by Darnton, an interactive map of Paris that includes café sites where police gathered information about political activities, police reports, and songs that conveyed political news. In addition, the site contains information about an online discussion of the address with Darnton that the AHR will host March 13–27, 2000. The articles analyze medieval concepts of bodily pain and the experiences of slaves and other maritime workers in the Indian Ocean. The Forum looks at revolutions in the Americas. It contains essays on revolutions in the United States, Haiti, and Mexico, as well as a general assessment of these struggles. The review essay examines recent histories of modern China. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Presidential Address

     Robert Darnton begins his address by reminding us that, although we tell ourselves we have just entered the "information age" as the new century begins, we forget that information ages existed in the past. The information merely took different forms and spread by different media. In eighteenth-century Paris, the subject of his essay, most of it traveled through oral networks, which intersected with various print media to form complex communication systems. Thanks to the richness of the police archives, it is possible to follow messages as they were diffused through the most important modes of oral communication, gossip and songs. They fed print media, notably a literature of libel, which provided a powerful and seditious version of contemporary history. Darnton thus argues that the study of news and the media in eighteenth-century Paris opens up a new approach to classic questions about the origins of the French Revolution and, at the same time, demonstrates the promise of a new subdiscipline, the history of communication, which can be applied to research in virtually any field of study.

Articles

     Esther Cohen analyzes the manifestations of physical pain in the later Middle Ages (thirteenth-fifteenth centuries) as they appeared in learned discourse and in evidence of actual and normative behavior. She maintains that what we term "physical pain" was an oxymoron for late medieval people: it was consistently viewed as stemming from the soul, not the body. Learned discourses in theology, law, and medicine produced interpretations, uses, and applications of pain theory that were all based on this premise. At the same time, Cohen explains, there were strict norms for describing expressions of pain in art, literature, and drama. Yet she also contends that narrative sources give a more realistic description of actual behavior, proving that it did not invariably conform to the norms. Whenever a description of someone deviating from the norm is encountered, Cohen notes, their behavior elicits disapproval to the point of condemnation. Usually, the behavior is interpreted as madness. Thus she concludes that expressions of pain were allowed within certain parameters but not beyond all society's conventions. Cohen's essay convincingly demonstrates that expressions of pain, in all their variety of forms and symbols, ought to be considered cultural artifacts and not simply instinctive reactions shorn of normative trappings.

     Janet J. Ewald focuses on African and Asian seamen and port laborers to test the changing boundaries of the Indian Ocean world from the last half of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. By showing how African workers helped maintain newly vigorous commercial systems, she locates East Africa firmly within the historical boundaries of the northwestern Indian Ocean, from which it has been excluded in much of the scholarship. Some of the men she studies were freeborn, others were slaves or freedman, and many of them passed across these social boundaries in the course of their lives. In spite of the apparent blurring of the boundary between slave and free, she demonstrates that comparing slaves and freedmen with other migrant workers reveals how slavery made a difference in lives, work, and commerce. Ewald's essay makes a major contribution to scholarship about the Indian Ocean basin and studies of comparative slavery and other forms of controlled labor. It also highlights the attractions of the histories of oceans as a means of studying and teaching world history.

AHR Forum

     Jack P. Greene begins the Forum "Revolutions in the Americas" by arguing that the American Revolution can best be explained from the perspective not of the American nation to which it led but of the wider British Empire in which it occurred. He emphasizes the extent to which the early modern British Empire was a consensual empire, in which what was legal or constitutional was determined by negotiation between a weak center and largely self-governing polities in the peripheries. He thus interprets the revolution as a settler revolt against efforts by the metropolitan government to diminish settler authority in those polities and to deny free white colonists the traditional rights and systems of law that, for the English—and, after the act of union in 1707, the British peoples—had long defined their Englishness. Greene also emphasizes the radical character of the social polities that developed during the colonial era and stresses the extraordinary continuity between those polities and the republican regimes that emerged during and after the revolution.

     Franklin W. Knight takes the Forum to Haiti by placing the Haitian Revolution within the context of changes during the eighteenth century as well as the widespread series of revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic that accompanied those changes. He argues that, compared with the American, French, and Latin American revolutions, the Haitian revolt represented fundamental changes in all aspects of society, politics, and economics. The pervasive presence of colonial slavery and inescapable considerations of race, Knight maintains, created a deep fissure within the French Revolution and propelled its colonial counterpart in Saint Domingue on a singular course. Consequently, the coincidence of factors that resulted in such a revolution in Saint Domingue was not duplicated elsewhere, but the Haitian Revolution had far-reaching consequences across the Atlantic world and especially throughout the Americas. Apart from eroding general support for slavery, Knight contends, the success of a non-white state in Haiti exacerbated race relations and accentuated white self-consciousness among ruling elites everywhere. Thus he concludes that Haiti and its revolution are enormously important in the history of the modern world and should not be overlooked.

     Virginia Guedea adds Mexico to the Forum by analyzing the process by which New Spain became independent Mexico. Although emancipation from Spain was achieved after eleven years of fighting, her primary focus is not on that armed struggle but rather the political transformations New Spain endured as a result of the crisis that engulfed the Spanish Empire during those years. She argues that the crisis, and changes it caused throughout the empire, intensified political activity in New Spain and generated new forms of political life and thought that created a new political culture. And even though almost all of the Spanish dominions responded to the crisis in the same way, Guedea contends that differences emerged among them and led to distinct experiences. In New Spain, she explains, the overthrow of Viceroy José de Iturrigaray in 1808 radicalized the confrontation between the defenders of imperial interests and autonomists. Two years later, an armed insurrection began. Guedea demonstrates how those disaffected from the colonial regime took advantage of the possibilities for political action that emerged inside and outside the system and how, in the end, they opted for independence from Spain. The revolutionaries did so, she concludes, because they realized that the changes they sought could not be obtained while they remained at the mercy of the political fluctuations of the Iberian Peninsula.

     Jaime E. Rodríguez O. concludes the Forum with an assessment of the essays that compares and contrasts the processes of independence of the United States, Haiti, and Spanish America. He analyzes the exogenous factors that shaped post-independent society and government in the three areas. And he maintains that, despite contrasts between the three, relative economic abundance in the New World and distance from the Old World afforded members of these societies more political autonomy and economic opportunities than their metropolitan counterparts. Rodríguez also explains that the movements that ended in the independence of the three regions began as reactions of the settler societies of the New World to attempts by British, French, and Spanish monarchies to create centralized colonial systems. Finally, he argues that the fate of the new nations of America depended to a very significant degree on the timing of their independence. By providing an overarching analysis of the three essays, Rodríguez suggests the implications of the Forum for understanding not only these revolutions but also those that erupted in other times and places.

Review Essay

     Merle Goldman uses a review of recent studies of modern China to argue that in the post-Mao era, which began in the late 1970s, there has been a revival of historical trends that were interrupted by China's 1949 Communist revolution. She insists that, contrary to pundits who, at the conclusion of the Cold War, talked about "the end of history," just the opposite has taken place. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the general bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism, she maintains, the People's Republic of China has resumed its history where it left off in the mid-twentieth century. The Chinese have rewoven historical patterns that were diverted or unraveled by the establishment of the Communist Party state. Despite the fact that the Communist Party still rules, Goldman asserts, China's late twentieth-century expanding economy, international involvements, landholding system, intellectual and cultural pluralism, emerging civil society, and embryonic democratic procedures resemble more the pre-1949 period than the era of Mao Zedong. As a result, she suggests, these changes make the study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese history more relevant for understanding contemporary events than China's immediate past. Goldman, though, cautions that these developments also demonstrate that history does not repeat itself. She notes that they are taking place within a very different political, economic, international, and technological context than that of the early twentieth century. Understanding these new circumstances, she concludes, is critical to any assessment of the impact of the past on the present in China.

LOCKSS system has permission to collect, preserve, and serve this Archival Unit

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.