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In This Issue
| This issue contains three articles, an AHR Forum, and an AHR Forum Essay. The articles analyze biological and commercial exchanges in the Pacific, racial thought in East Africa, and global markets. The Forum examines the dynamics of power relations in early modern Europe. The Forum Essay raises questions about the use of counterfactuals in historical analysis. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews. |
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Articles | |
| David Igler investigates the biological and commercial exchanges that shaped the eastern Pacific Basin during the decades around 1800. He focuses on the regions that later became the American Far West, including California, the Northwest Coast, Alaska, and Hawai'i. As European, Asian, American, and native Pacific populations converged for trade, they linked isolated Pacific communities to global trade systems. But international commerce brought a hidden layer of global agents that transformed the Pacific: the spread of epidemic diseases from trading vessels to native communities. This influx of deadly microbes gradually culminated in demographic catastrophe for native peoples, and Igler's analysis highlights three crucial reasons: sexual contact between shipping crews and indigenous women, the pre-contact trade and social networks of native communities, and the increasing frequency of trade encounters with outsiders. His analysis of how commercial and epidemiological exchanges constituted a deadly set of relations for native communities during this period helps us understand the critical connections between the histories of disease and the marketplace. |
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| Jonathon Glassman contends that most studies of racial thought present it as a distinctly Western invention, carried to the rest of the world during the process of imperial expansion. He challenges that consensus by looking at the intellectual sources of race-thinking in a corner of East Africa that suffered violent tension in the final years of the colonial era between people who had come to think of themselves as belonging to separate racial categories. Although Western concepts were not irrelevant, Glassman shows how indigenous thinkers used them selectively to craft a locally compelling discourse that drew on a diverse range of intellectual traditions, foreign and domestic. Among those traditions was a multi-racial and ecumenically tolerant Islamic modernism, with which Zanzibari intellectuals challenged the claims that the West represented the only universalist civilization. A central irony is how even this liberal discourse, once put to the work of nationalist mobilization, became transformed into an exclusionary rhetoric of racial dehumanization. By arguing that the racialization of discourses of difference must be seen as the product of complex circuits of discourse among African intellectuals themselves, he contributes to a small but growing literature on race in which Western thinkers, and concepts of white supremacy, were of marginal significance. In this way, Glassman's article raises critical questions about explanations of race that assume the experience of the West, and of the United States in particular, are the norm. |
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| Jeremy Prestholdt considers how seemingly marginal people affected larger patterns of global integration in the nineteenth century by demonstrating how diverse and changing East African consumer demands had repercussions for locales as distant as Bombay and Salem, Massachusetts. As their connections to distant regions deepened in the second half of the nineteenth century, East Africans developed specific and highly differentiated consumer tastes. To profit from the East African trade, foreign manufacturers had to appeal to those changing demands. In the cases of Bombay and Salem, the manufacture of textiles for the East African market offered new economic opportunities and provided important stimuli to the industrialization of both cities. Prestholdt's vignettes of trans-regional engagement suggest that negotiated transactions and the consumer desires of people considered marginal to global systems have, at times, been just as important to patterns of global integration as have been "peripheral" adjustments to the demands of international capital. In tracing the international repercussions of African consumerism, Prestholdt demonstrates how a global narrative can be attentive to local contingencies. |
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AHR Forum: Negotiating Power | |
| The Forum analyzes the negotiations for power among various groups of people. Caroline Castiglione begins the discussion by examining the abilities of ordinary Europeans to utilize judicial and political systems in which they had restricted legal rights, a subject of considerable historical interest, especially during the early modern period, when overlapping jurisdictions offered a variety of venues for their grievances. Castiglione argues that noble governing practices had to recognize the political power exercised by the villagers through their use of what she terms "adversarial literacy." Giovanna Benadusi continues the discussion by exploring last wills drafted by servant women and their masters and mistresses in a Tuscan community during the decades straddling the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She reveals how women of the lower classes defined wealth and, in turn, used their definitions to appropriate for themselves notarial practices otherwise seen as outside of women's domain. Benadusi contends that last wills became an essential instrument of communication for servants through which they engaged in dialogue with their employers, the legal system, and cultural practices. This dialogue, as it took shape in last wills, afforded women an outlet for voicing publicly and legally an alternative vision of the social and gender order they inhabited. Cornelia Hughes Dayton concludes the Forum with a commentary that invites us to rethink the usefulness of agency as an analytical concept. She does so by explaining that the two essays encourage us to think about three major themes in recent scholarship on the negotiation of power relations among unequals in Renaissance and early modern Europe: subalterns' access to writing and to law, the spatial dimensions of village and household politics, and concepts of self. |
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Forum Essay | |
| Martin Bunzl probes the use of counterfactuals by historians. He contends that historians who defend the use of counterfactuals have usually done so by appealing to the role of imagination in historical analysis. But he challenges such arguments by offering his own defense of counterfactuals. Bunzl asserts three bases for their use: laws, rationality, and causal analysis. He defends these as legitimate means of grounding counterfactual reasoning based on indirect evidence. He also extends his defense of counterfactuals by contending that we should demand no greater standard of evidence for this form of historical argumentation than we do in other areas of historical judgment where informal methods reign. Bunzl's essay is intended to spark a discussion about the place of counterfactuals in historical analysis. AHR readers who want to engage in this debate can do so in an online discussion of the article during the first two weeks of September 2004. Details can be found in the introduction to the Forum Essay. |
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