In This Issue

     This issue contains two articles, an AHR Forum, and a review essay. The articles offer a transnational analysis of the Irish famine and an assessment of nineteenth-century Japanese attempts to imitate Western imperialists. The Forum is intended to spark debate about how to understand and evaluate the development of a global economy over the last few centuries. And the review essay examines the emergence of a new media history informed by recent theory. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews.

Articles

     Tyler Anbinder examines the great Irish famine that began in 1845 and the unprecedented emigration that it precipitated. He argues that most studies of the famine consider the story either solely from the Irish perspective and make no attempt to follow the emigrants to their new home or from the American, English, or Australian perspective and give the reader little sense of how the immigrants' lives changed after they arrived in their adopted lands. Anbinder bridges this historiographical divide by analyzing the circumstances and fate of the impoverished tenants of Lord Lansdowne's vast County Kerry estate. He details their miserable living conditions both before and during the famine. And then he tracks the Lansdowne immigrants to New York's infamous "Five Points" district, renowned as the most decrepit and dangerous neighborhood in all of North America. He finds that although the Lansdowne immigrants generally took the lowest-paying and least desirable jobs in the city, and lived in Five Points' most squalid tenements, they were able to squirrel away substantial sums in their bank accounts. Anbinder concludes that scholars must begin to reassess their previously pessimistic accounts of the famine immigrants and consider the possibility that even the most impoverished Irish famine victims living in North America's slums were able to improve their lives quickly and dramatically once they relocated to the United States. His article thus demonstrates the analytical benefits of transnational histories and the new immigration history that seeks to link people's experiences in the Old and New Worlds.

     Robert Eskildsen argues that Japan's expedition to Taiwan in 1874 and the way that commercial publications represented it shows that that mimesis of Western imperialism took place as part of the process of nation building and Japan's engagement with the West. He explains that the Japanese government sent the expedition to Taiwan in part to punish a group of aborigines there but also to establish colonies. It justified colonization on the grounds of bringing civilization to the "savages" who lived there. Commercial publications, however, did not take up the government's legalistic justification of colonization. Instead, their explanations accentuated the aborigines' savagery and justified Japanese dominance over the aborigines with a variety of analogies to domestic political and social hierarchies and to Japan's own troubled encounter with the West. In doing so, Eskildsen maintains, they claimed a higher status for Japan in the Western-dominated international order and thus revealed a tendency to respond to an emerging domestic political order and the nation's new engagement with the West by preferring dominance over other East Asian peoples versus solidarity with them. The publications thus demonstrate, he concludes, that the mimetic imperialism of the expedition bore a close relationship to the Japan's broader adaptive response to Western civilization and to its efforts to build a modern nation state. Eskildsen's essay thus challenges our understanding of imperialism as a popular and cultural phenomenon as well as the relationship between state creation and empire.

AHR Forum

     The Forum is a multifaceted examination of the history of the global economy. Patrick Manning introduces the subject by explaining that the essays in the Forum emphasize linkages among regions, not simply comparisons of wealth. As a result, they stress the strength of early modern Asian economies and argue that only in the nineteenth century did European economies pull ahead in all levels of output and productivity. Manning contends that their arguments represent a paradigm shift in our understanding of the world economy. And yet Manning urges the authors to make explicit their choices among various models for analyzing the world economy. The first author, Kenneth Pomeranz, reports on recent research that suggests many important economic indicators were surprisingly similar for China and Europe, even in the late eighteenth century. The efficiency of markets, changing patterns of work and consumption, and, most surprisingly, the degree of environmental strain in core regions were all similar. Consequently, he maintains, just as scholars are now much less inclined to infer from Britain's nineteenth-century economic lead that other economies in eighteenth-century Western Europe were blocked, a similar revision is now due for parts of East Asia. Pomerantz develops these contentions with an explanation of why the economic fortunes of Britain and the Yangzi Delta did ultimately diverge. He does so by emphasizing contingent factors that broke an ecological impasse potentially common to East and West in an attempt to restore a sense of discontinuity to the industrial revolution that has been lost in recent analyses. R. Bin Wong continues the discussion by comparing patterns of economic expansion in Asia and Europe during the early modern period. He contends that broadly parallel dynamics of commercial expansion were embedded in distinctive political economies and suggests its significance through a counterfactual assessment of China. He then compares the characteristics of early modern international trade to those that have emerged since the mid-nineteenth century to argue that European dominance is a recent phenomenon. Wong argues that until historians are better able to delineate the similarities and differences among economies in different historical eras, it will remain difficult to craft persuasive explanations of how and when parts of Europe did in fact embark upon a distinctive path of economic growth. David Ludden concludes the Forum by suggesting that it should compel historians to take a fresh look at the origins of global inequality. He explains that Pomeranz and Wong demonstrate that the great modern divergence, which thrust China into the ranks of poor countries and Europe into the ranks of the rich, did not emerge only from indigenous sources. It began after 1800 in ways that implicate the entire world and constructed distinctively modern inequalities inside rich and poor countries as well as across national boundaries. Ludden argues that the processes by which intra-national and inter-national divergence influenced one another are a major problem for historical research and offers examples from South Asia to demonstrate the importance of these issues. He concludes by insisting that because the great divergence implicates historians around the world and has conditioned historical writing about pre-modern history at every stage, historians in rich countries must take it much more seriously.

Review Essay

     Michael Schudson reviews several important new works on the history of journalism in various times and places. He argues that this emerging scholarship reveals a growing interest in media history that has been stimulated and in significant measure organized by theorists who place the media front and center in their broad interpretations of modern history. These theorists, most notably Benedict Anderson and Jürgen Habermas, focus on different aspects of the news. Habermas sees it as the raw material for rational public discourse in a liberal society; Anderson sees it as a central part of the public construction of particular images of self, community, and nation. Consequently, where Habermas connects the study of news to scholarship on politics and democratic theory, Anderson ties it to other studies of the literary or artistic products of the human imagination. Weaving between these broad perspectives and the specifics of the books at hand, Schudson suggests that Habermasian-inspired histories do not give credit to the liberalizing and democratizing influence of commercial motives and commercial news organizations. And he contends that Anderson-influenced histories of how the news media contribute to a sense of nationhood fall short of the conceptual resources (that might be found in Habermas) for distinguishing what contributes to nationalism from what contributes to the formation of liberal and democratic institutions. Schudson's essay thus helps us understand the rise of a new kind of media history that explores the concrete processes through which the press became commercialized and professionalized in particular historical contexts around the globe.

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