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In This Issue
| This issue contains five articles. The articles analyze the creation of a business press in early modern Europe, the ordering power of racial beliefs and practice in European colonialism, the interpretive importance of notarial records, the gender dynamics of late nineteenth-century Italian patriotism, and the continuing importance of local history in studying European colonialism. In addition, the issue contains our usual array of book and film reviews. |
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Articles | |
| John J. McCusker argues that the publication of commercial and financial newspapers in early sixteenth-century Europe was a crucial component of the first step in the now five-centuries-long information revolution. The first newspapers were business newspapers. They delivered news that mattered to entrepreneurs much more conveniently and consistently than previous sources of such information. McCusker chronicles how these papers developed most fully in the major commercial and financial centers of the era, successively, as one superseded the other: in Antwerp during the sixteenth century, in Amsterdam during the seventeenth century, and in London during the eighteenth century. Critically, he emphasizes, no city in colonial British North America had even one such newspaper; instead, colonists relied on London as their source of news about the markets until the time of the American Revolution. Only after 1783 did cities in the United States begin to publish business newspapers, as first Philadelphia and then New York assumed the role for the new nation that London had performed previously. McCusker then argues that when New York replaced London as the commercial and financial center of the world at the turn of the twentieth century, and thus as the center of business communications, the second step of the "information revolution" had occurred: a shift to the faster transmission of the news, at first mechanically, by train and steamship, and then electrically, by telegraph and telephone. Finally, he explains, in the second half of the twentieth century, the world was introduced to the electronic transmission of news. McCusker charts these changes in the financial press to contend that the sixteenth century delivered news better, the nineteenth century delivered news faster, and the twenty-first century delivers news cheaper. As a result, he contends that the information revolution contributed to the globalization of the world economy. |
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| Saliha Belmessous examines the efforts of seventeenth-century French authorities to construct a colonial society in North America that included national settlers and indigenous peoples. She argues that they promoted the mixing of settlers and natives through intermarriage and common living. Their aim, however, was to create not a métis society but a homogeneous French society. Thus colonial officials encouraged native people to accept French religion and civility. Francisation became the official French policy toward the Amerindians. However, Belmessous explains, the policy failed because of natives' refusal to assimilate on these terms. To account for that failure, she maintains, French colonial officials developed a new ideology that racialized Amerindians. It is this ideological change, Belmessous contends, that accounts for the metropolitan formation of racialized attitudes. Consequently, in explaining the history of assimilation in New France, she argues that racial ideology in the colony was not the result of exploitation; nor was it influenced by metropolitan intellectual discussion of the ideas of civility and progress. Instead, she insists that racial ideology arose directly out of the political experience of colonization. Thus she challenges the idea that race emerged from modern science. Equally important, she demonstrates the importance of the longue durée for understanding the emergence of race. |
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| Kathryn Burns argues that understanding the rules and customs of record making is vital for interpreting the kind of truth that notarial archives offer. From the medieval Mediterranean world to the colonial Americas and beyond, notaries created and maintained official records in which they attested to the truth of their clients' dealings: sales, loans, dowries, wills, and much more. Historians prize notaries' records for the rich details they convey about the texture of everyday life. However, we still know relatively little about the conditions in which notaries, their assistants, and their clients collaborated to produce notarial truth. Using records primarily from colonial Cuzco, Peru, Burns considers the stereotypes that dogged notaries, the templates they used, and the pressures that might attend the work done in and around their workshops. She contends that the space of the notarized document itself should be considered a historical artifact that invites interpretation. She uses selected documents to trace the ways that unequal relations of power may show up on close, informed reading of the notarial record. Burns concludes that reading notarial archives for maximum insight into a society's power relations requires a methodologically informed understanding of their creation and use. |
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| Silvana Patriarca examines the major political writings of the Italian Risorgimento. She proposes a new reading of nineteenth-century Italian nationalist discourse that stresses its articulation with a Europe-wide conversation on the "character" of nations, its deeply gendered nature, and its similarities with the nationalist rhetoric of peoples in similar structural positions. She emphasizes the recurrent patriotic denunciations of the "vices" of the Italians, especially their "effeminacy" and "indolence," to show how those denunciations reflected and reacted to widespread negative European discourses about the Italian character. These negative stereotypes, Patriarca argues, relied on Enlightenment notions of national character that stressed the influence of the environment and history on a people's moral predisposition. Italian authors both challenged and embraced the stereotypes. Patriarca highlights their gendered representations of Italy's political "degeneration," which she argues resulted in calls for a national regeneration also expressed in gendered terms. She concludes that Risorgimento patriotism is indicative of basic continuities in European nationalism. |
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| Gregory Mann asks whether the much-heralded end of area studies and the rise of colonial studies must necessarily be accompanied by a declining commitment to local history. Focusing on the French town of Fréjus—and on war memorials built there and in the French Soudan (today's Mali) between the 1920s and the 1990s—he asserts the importance of the locality in colonial history and illustrates past and present connections between metropolitan and colonial sites. Mann argues that colonial histories deserve the kind of local analysis that illuminates the emergence of singular social forms or particular politics, as well as the accidents of history by which, for instance, a seaside town in southern France became the temporary home of thousands of West Africans, Southeast Asians, and Malagasy. Such colonial situations engendered a quality of locality that manifested itself in a web of memory and meaning elaborated over decades. Mann moves along that web as far as Mali before returning to Fréjus, but the web itself stretches to other places, particularly Southeast Asia. He concludes that historical studies rooted in garrisons, towns, or camps may illuminate issues that studies framed by colonies and empires do not. |
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