In This Issue

     This rather full issue contains four articles, an AHR Forum Essay, and a review essay. The articles assess conspiracy obsessions during the French Revolution, French economic imperialism in nineteenth-century Mexico, the Algerian War for Independence, and Western Civ and World History textbooks. The Forum Essay uses the advent of a new millennium to raise questions about the twentieth century as a distinctive epoch and periodization as a tool of historical analysis. It is the third of a series that we call Forum Essays. Instead of commissioning comments on the essay, as is our usual practice with Forums, we are opening up the commentary process to readers by soliciting their reactions to the article. And this year, rather than print a few replies, we will take advantage of the new online AHR to hold a moderated discussion between the author and commentators in early September. Details can be found in the Forum Essay introduction. The article section concludes with a comprehensive review essay on the historiography of Rwanda. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

     Timothy Tackett reflects on the origins and nature of conspiracy obsessions among political leaders of the French Revolution and the links between this phenomenon and the psychology of the Reign of Terror. He contends that, unlike in the English-speaking world, in prerevolutionary France the fear of plots was not a conspicuous feature of the political culture of elites, despite its pervasive presence among the common people. However, he chronicles how a "paranoid style" of politics emerged during the revolution because of the discovery of real counterrevolutionary plots and the influence of conspiracy fears among the Parisian masses. In addition, Tackett argues that a new phase of this "paranoid style" arose after 1791, when many deputies came to believe in a single grand conspiracy in which all internal and external enemies were in league against the revolution. He links this development to the breakdown of collective identity caused by the anarchy and unpredictability of events that defied explanation by the revolutionaries' Enlightened analytical apparatus. Tackett's thoughtful analysis of the power of conspiracy beliefs addresses issues of concern to all historians who study revolutions.

     Steven C. Topik presents a biography of bonds issued by Emperor Maximilian in 1864 to finance the French invasion of Mexico: les petits bleus. He explains that, although Maximilian was executed in 1867, the bonds lived on until 1904. By following the money, he contends, issues not usually associated with financial history such as national identity and the power of symbols can be examined. The story of the bonds thus illuminates Mexico's changing position in the international capital market and the transformation of that market during a period of unprecedented expansion. The bonds' tale also reveals the nature and extent of imperialism in the Age of Empire, particularly French overseas activities and the budding acts of the United States. By exposing different layers of overseas ambition from early modern colonialism to modern colonialism to neo-colonialism, Topik's tale demonstrates as well that globalism has a long history. Equally important, he shows that the numerous actors in his tale were not simply motivated by cold calculations of profit and loss, they were also driven by dreams of colonial glory, nationalist and racial hatred, and the power of family allegiance among members of international financial diasporas. Topik's essay is thus a compelling demonstration of what can be found by combining cultural, political, economic, and diplomatic history.

     Matthew Connelly critiques the tendency of scholars to analyze imperialism as either discourse or elite decision-making. The result of doing so, he argues, is that an arbitrary distinction is drawn between imperialism's cultural and its political and economic elements. Instead, Connelly asserts, both approaches must be used to understand the nature and extent of critical issues such as decolonization. He makes that case through an analysis of Algeria's War for Independence that reveals how ideas and imagery of modernization and conflicts among civilizations shaped policy debates among French and American elites. While these discourses were intended to consolidate Western authority, Connelly demonstrates that they ultimately proved divisive and self-defeating. Indeed, he shows that Algerian nationalists managed to harness them to their own agendas. More generally, Connelly argues that the specter of North-South conflict preoccupied policymakers at a time when most historians assume that they viewed the world only through a "Cold War lens." By reexamining the period through different optics, he contends, scholars can see how and why people in the First and Third Worlds began to reject "us versus them" dichotomies that did not effectively represent their lived experiences. Connelly's thought-provoking essay makes a persuasive case for the need to de-center the Cold War in post–World War II diplomatic history and to bring together diplomatic history and postcolonial studies.

     Daniel A. Segal analyzes Western Civ and World History undergraduate courses textbooks written over the last eight decades. In a two-part argument, he first focuses on the formation and standardization of the Western Civ survey. He argues that it was organized by a social evolutionary construction of "history" as post-prehistory; that is, history became a developmental stage that began at the end of a much vaster expanse of human existence. Segal contends that this social evolutionary framework played a central role in the "new history" championed by James Harvey Robinson early in the twentieth century. Robinson then used this understanding of human time to organize his influential graduate course on the rise of rational thought, which, in turn, provided the model for the first undergraduate surveys of Western Civ that appeared after World War I. Segal then moves forward in time to examine Western Civ and World History textbooks currently in use. He maintains that texts in both genres continue to rely on the social evolutionary narrative pioneered by Robinson. According to Segal, by continuing to collapse such a great part of human socio-cultural diversity into prehistory, these textbooks provide students with a highly circumscribed sense of historical contingency and human possibilities. Segal's provocative essay thus raises challenging questions about the connections between scholarship and pedagogy of interest to all historians.

AHR Forum Essay

     Charles S. Maier asks whether the twentieth century represents anything more than a conventional period of one hundred years. After analyzing periodization as a critical tool of historical analysis, he discusses alternative narrative approaches to the question. First, Maier explains that "structural" narratives would use institutional changes to demarcate the era by focusing on trajectories of political, social, and economic development through time. But he concludes that current political and social histories do fit easily into span of the twentieth century. Second, he contends that the rise and fall of "territoriality" between the 1850s and the 1970s would be a far more compelling narrative approach. By territoriality, he means the organization of human institutions into bounded spatial units in which the reinforcement of boundaries and frontiers and the control of space at home and then abroad provided decisive political resources. Modern territoriality, he argues, arose nearly everywhere as nation-states were centralized and class coalitions came to dominate their politics with the participation of industrial, financial, and professional groups. It began to dissolve due to globalization and the advent of computer technology. But even though the era of territoriality did not coincide with the twentieth century in any neat fashion, Maier goes on to acknowledge, it is not easy to discard centuries as units of history, because they offer the traditional chronological framework for what he terms moral narratives. And he admits these already exist for the twentieth century in narratives that focus on the world wars, totalitarian regimes, and genocide. Yet, he notes, differences exist between Western moral narratives that focus on the Holocaust and/or the Gulag and those in the former colonial world that stress the human costs of imperialism. Although Western intellectuals continue to respond to the first narrative, he contends that the trends that accompany globalization seem to endow the imperialist narrative with renewed relevance. Maier concludes by examining the political implications of choosing among these periodization narratives. Rather than commission commentators for this Forum, we invite interested readers to participate in an online discussion of Maier's essay during the first two weeks of September 2000. Details can be found in the introduction to the Forum.

Review Essay

     David Newbury and Catharine Newbury evaluate dominant trends in the historiography of Rwanda. They explain that initial European travelers to the Great Lakes region of Africa were fascinated with the forms of centralized kingship they found there. Europeans constructed elaborate historical scenarios of migration and conquest by immigrant groups racially and culturally different from the local inhabitants to explain Rwanda's highly centralized political power, marked social stratification, and mixed economy. Then with the creation of colonial states and the marking of fixed boundaries, Europeans came to define the nation by the royal aristocracy and produced a new set of histories that equated the Rwandan past with the history of the dynasty. But, Newbury and Newbury maintain, this statist historiography omitted the evidence and significance of internal differences and local identities, and it excluded important historical actors. However, they report, research since the 1970s has overcome this narrow view of history by documenting the importance of local agency and internal differences during the precolonial and colonial past of the region now called Rwanda. And they also show that technical studies of rural areas have provided evidence to reassess the dominant historical assumptions about the postcolonial period as well. Drawing on this new work, they challenge the assumption that Rwanda's past was one of a modernizing elite and a traditional peasantry. Instead, they contend, the dynastic elite reinforced its legitimacy by claiming "traditional" status while rural people were being modernized through forced labor camps, cash crops, and ecological schemes such as reforestation and anti-erosion measures. Their historiographical analysis suggests how "bringing the peasants back in" will help transform our understanding of Rwandan history. Newbury and Newbury thus provide a compelling example of ways to analyze colonial societies and the construction of historical narratives.

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