|
|
|
In This Issue
|
This issue contains four articles and a review essay. The articles
examine the use of social-science methods in historical analysis,
urbanization in Eastern and Western Europe, transatlantic scientific
innovation, and diplomatic maneuvers at the end of a war. The review
essay uses an assessment of recent trends in Russian history to
probe the utility and significance of an emerging Eurasian approach
to historical analysis. In addition, the issue contains our usual
array of book and film reviews.
|
|
| |
|
Articles
|
|
|
Sheilagh Ogilvie explores the increasing influential concept
of "social capital" through an analysis of women's position in early
modern Germany. Social capital is formed when a closely knit group
invests in multi-stranded internal relationships, thereby fostering
shared norms, information flow, effective sanctions, and collective
action in ways thought to benefit the entire society. Two historical
institutions—the guild and the community—are widely viewed
as prime examples of social capital at work. Using detailed evidence
on gender-specific economic activities for a region of Germany between
1600 and 1800, Ogilvie examines precisely how guilds and communities
affected females and other vulnerable groups. She demonstrates,
for example, that male members of these powerful social networks
used their social capital to sustain their norms and privileges
by reducing and restricting women's contribution to the wider economy
and indeed harming their very well-being. Ogilvie also explains
why "social capital" has important implications for the historical
analyses of gender by showing particular features of social institutions
like guilds that were used to discriminate against women. At the
same time, she makes it clear why gender also has important implications
for analyses of social capital. For instance, she points out how
a gendered analysis of social capital illuminates the revealing
role of network "closure," the harm social capital inflicts on outsiders,
and its costs for society. As a result, Ogilvie concludes that historical
analyses like hers suggest why social scientists and policymakers
should scrutinize social capital with caution. Her article demonstrates
the mutual benefits that can be derived from subjecting social-science
concepts to historical analysis.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Balázs Szelényi challenges the traditional view
that locates the divergence of Eastern from Western European development
in the subjugation of towns by nobles in the early modern period.
Using the case study of urbanization in sixteenth and seventeenth-century
Hungary, he shows that no logical connection exists between the
rise of the manorial reaction and urban decline. The occidental
city, he argues, was not an island of liberty, progress, and modernity,
surrounded by a backward, traditional, feudal countryside. Instead,
under feudalism in both Eastern and Western Europe, towns and lords
lived within a system of shared values and norms. The logic of the
feudal political economy did not exclude but, at critical junctures,
promoted urbanization. It is true that the first stage of second
serfdom was an unstable social system, and led to a weakening of
royal authority as well as contested sovereignty. Yet it was precisely
in this atmosphere of contested authority that towns made a comeback.
Szelényi concludes by emphasizing the need to reevaluate those
theories that claim the weakness of nineteenth-century Eastern European
middle-class development to be a natural consequence of the manorial
reaction. In their place, he proposes a new theory and narrative
to explain the dynamics of urban development in sixteenth and seventeenth-century
Hungary. In doing so, Szelényi makes a significant contribution
to debates about the nature and sources of urbanization.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Julia Rodriguez adds a new dimension to the study of the
transatlantic exchange of ideas. Historians have much to gain, she
argues, by looking at science as a multidirectional force that shaped
the organization of modern states. Through an examination of turn-of-the-century
Argentina, she explores the development and precocious adoption
of fingerprint technology for both forensic and identification purposes.
In Argentina, an unusual combination of economic prosperity, rapid
immigration, and an infatuation with proto-scientific solutions
from Social Darwinism created a hothouse environment in which the
development of fingerprinting flourished. As Rodriguez shows, this
story illuminates the dynamics of state expansion of disciplinary
institutions during a key period of liberal state-building. She
sheds light on the process of state formation common to all Atlantic
societies that rested on appropriation of scientific innovations.
Rodriguez thus contributes to our understanding of the efficiency
and legitimacy of modern states' ability to track, control, and
confine their criminals and their citizens. And in the process she
compels us to reexamine our understanding of the mechanisms of state-building.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Yukiko Koshiro examines the origin of today's East Asian
order by analyzing what she contends was Japan's calculated delay
in surrender during World War II. She does so by placing the decision
within a complex web of international politics, recently revealed
by a cache of surviving documents. In the last phase of the war,
she argues, Japanese policymakers concluded that the United States
and the Soviet Union were going to compete for hegemonic leadership
in postwar East Asia and, therefore, that the best time for the
Japanese continental empire to collapse would be upon Soviet entry
into the war against Japan. Japanese policymakers, Koshiro maintains,
hoped that a Soviet presence in postwar East Asia would create a
new balance of power and thus prevent the United States from dominating
East Asia and postwar Japan. Indeed, she points out, events sustained
these assumptions. The massive Soviet attack on Japan's continental
empire, in August 1945, for example, aided the Chinese Communist
Party in its fight against Chiang Kai-shek's regime and also contributed
to the partition of Korea. Thus, in a divided postwar East Asia,
defeated Japan secured the top status in the U.S. security system,
withdrew into a niche in the Cold War, and concentrated on its own
recovery. In positing a new narrative for the era, Koshiro explains
the nature and origin of postwar Japan's "successful" recovery,
while bringing to light Japan's responsibility for spatial and temporal
dimensions of the Cold War in East Asia. Ultimately, she concludes,
a new look at Japan's delay in surrender should challenge the conventional
understanding of the American use of the atomic bomb. Koshiro's
essay thus raises some provocative questions about our sources for
understanding the construction of a post—World War II world
order.
|
|
| |
|
Review Essay
|
|
|
Mark von Hagen surveys several recent key trends in the writing
of the history of the former Soviet-dominated region and situates
that writing within broader developments in the historical discipline.
He notes that many scholarly journals and other research organizations
have adopted the term "Eurasia," a designation laden with some past
and present political controversy. How do the scholars who adhere
to the new use of this term understand it? The author sees it not
as a new paradigm but, if anything, an anti-paradigm in several
senses. First, Eurasia is meant to engage polemically with two major
paradigms in the field, the essentializing and static Russia/Orient
of the high Cold War and the more dynamic but shorter-termed perspective
of Soviet Union/modernization. Second, today's historians who adopt
the Eurasia designation contest the anti-modernist, illiberal, and
often imperialist geopolitical programs that characterized both
classic interwar émigré Eurasianist thought and its contemporary
legatees in the region. Much of the new historical writing shares
commonalities with socio-cultural anthropology and postcolonial
or transnational cultural studies but is also positioning itself
in the debates in world and global history. Von Hagen's essay thus
reveals how this new body of scholarship addresses critical issues
of direct concern to specialists and nonspecialists alike.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
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.
|