In This Issue

This issue contains the American Historical Association presidential address, two articles, and an AHR Forum. The presidential address takes on the large problem of the development of the nation-state in the context of European history. One article presents an analysis of the use of airpower by the British in the Middle East after World War I; the other is an examination of the use of ethnography by the Japanese in their rule over Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s. The Forum confronts a central problem in American history: the perennially high murder rate in the United States. In addition, the issue contains our usual extensive book review section. Readers will note, however, that there are no film reviews. An explanation for this omission is given below.
Presidential Address
James J. Sheehan's presidential address, "The Problem of Sovereignty in European History," is an expanded version of the one he delivered at the AHA meeting in Philadelphia on January 3, 2006. In this survey of several centuries of European political history, taking us right up to the establishment of the European Union, Sheehan observes that sovereignty has too often been understood in terms of the inexorable "rise of the sovereign state." The historical record, he argues, shows a much more complex and varied story than a simple process of state making. Indeed, a look beyond the handful of Western European states that have served as the paradigm of political development reveals sovereignty's limits, unevenness, and incompleteness. First, he reminds us that sovereignty is not a thing, nor an institution, but rather a "collection of...rights, powers, and aspirations"—of "claims" put forth by state authority upon other elements of a polity with some shared sense of legitimacy. He then proceeds to lay out the historical obstacles that confronted the claims of sovereignty—religious, territorial, and legal. But law, in particular, was both a brake on sovereignty and a means of consolidating it, which leads Sheehan to counsel historians to pay more attention to legal history. "We have too often been content to leave legal history to the lawyers," he cautions, "which ... is as unfortunate as leaving war to the generals." Sheehan then turns to the crucial relationship between sovereignty and self-determination, especially for the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pointing out the often destructive tensions generated when nationalistic expectations met the imperatives of state making. He ends his essay with a look at the European Union, which he sees as a variation on the theme of sovereignty. Not a superstate, it is nevertheless a political order that will "make claims"—reminding us that "sovereignty remains, but with new meaning." Sheehan's address exemplifies a form of history somewhat rare today, an essay that is at once synthetic and analytical.
Articles
In "The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia," Priya Satia offers a blend of cultural and military history to show how Britain's imagined conception of "Arabia" (present-day Iraq) served in the strategic reliance on aerial surveillance and bombardment in the years immediately following World War I. Her analysis unfolds in three parts. First, she presents a sketch of Edwardian intelligence agents in the Middle East, showing them to be wedded to their intuitive insights into the land and people of "Arabia," even when these did not jibe with actual experience or realities on the ground. Their self-confident claims to expertise, often derived from literary sources and their own spiritual attachments to the region, endowed them with a singular authority over the design and priorities of wartime and postwar surveillance. In the second part of the article, Satia examines these agents' postwar role in devising an aerial surveillance strategy that, they believed, would be suited to a romantic yet inscrutable region where, given the inherent inaccuracy of all information it yielded, little concern was warranted for inaccuracies and excesses in the use of force. She also traces the way these agents' romantic conception of "Arabia"—a place of chivalric values and biblical tales—supported official justifications of this strategy and muted criticisms of its inhumanity. Finally, she reveals how the principle of intuitive insight bolstered a claim of empathetic rule, and helped to justify a continued British presence in the region through the 1950s. Satia argues that the cultural imagination shaped the imperial state in very concrete, strategic ways, more than recent observers have realized. Besides shedding light on the relationship between cultural representations and state-sanctioned violence, her story of British agents' influence on the invention of air control in interwar Iraq contributes to the growing literature on the continuities between the violence of imperialism and total war.
The relationship of knowledge and imagination to imperial rule is also a theme of this issue's other article. Thomas David DuBois examines the development of Japanese ethnography in the client state of Manchukuo during the 1930s and 1940s in "Local Religion and the Imperial Imaginary: The Development of Japanese Ethnography in Occupied Manchuria." Here he demonstrates both the role of academic social science in exploiting local knowledge and the place of religion in Japan's Pan-Asian imperial expansion. Following the founders of European ethnography such as Bronislaw Malinowski, the Japanese school that emerged with the work of Yanagita Kunio sought to discover fundamental and undying values in local experiences and cultures. But while European anthropology had prized the objectivity of an outside observer, Yanagita and his disciples believed that only a cultural insider would be able to discern the transcendent Japanese "national essence" lurking in the customs of local communities. When Japan began its commercial and imperial expansion onto the Asian mainland, this search for a national essence followed along, linked to a self-conception of Japan as the quintessential Asian civilization, spiritually endowed with a mission to protect and enlighten the whole continent. With total war imminent in the late 1930s, and other students trained in the Yanagita ethnographic school took up positions in Manchukuo (Manchurian) universities, and recast the spiritual mission of their discipline to serve the rhetoric of Japanese empire. In his rural investigations, ‘ machi found the villages of Manchukuo to resemble those of Japan and emphasized the spiritual unity that encompassed Manchukuo and connected it to a Japan-centered Asia. This image, however, favored one particular aspect of religion, specifically its ecclesiastical organization, which could be easily made to conform to a fabricated conception of ethnicity. In this process of selective appropriation, the heart of Chinese religious life was dismissed as folk custom, unworthy of consideration as a proper religion. Ethnography was made to serve national and imperial ends.
AHR Forum
The late Eric Monkennen's lead essay, "Homicide: Explaining America's Exceptionalism," concerns two issues—that America has had a murderous history and that historians have too long failed to explain why. He sets out the dramatic contrast between Europe's tumbling homicide rates from the medieval era well into the modern urban present, now documented with increasing precision, and the remarkable persistence of high incidences of murder across the United States and throughout its history. He then offers several potential explanations that singly or in combination might unpack the special American circumstances. These include persistent notions of American "manliness," murder being largely associated with males; a mobility that may have enfeebled social restraints in poor neighborhoods and increased recourse to murderous solutions to social and personal discord; an American political federalism that shifted law enforcement to states with highly variegated criminal laws, policing, and judicial practices; the legacy of slavery, which included patterns of personal violence, retribution, and cruelty extending far beyond race relations and far beyond the South; and legal practices and traditions that often meant surprisingly low arrest rates for murder, relatively few convictions, lenient sentences, and frequent pardons. Monkkonen believed that progress in documenting and explaining American homicide could help us confront our murderous past and shape more intelligent public discussion of a great American tragedy. His article is followed by two comments. The first, "Getting Away with Murder," by Elizabeth Dale, considers the legal aspect of Monkkonen's argument. Dale largely accepts his point and urges historians to spend more time considering why and how courts in nineteenth-century America tended to treat leniently those accused of homicide. She uses several cases from antebellum South Carolina to suggest some possible explanations and to raise questions for future research into the relation between law and homicide there and throughout the United States. Pieter Spierenburg's "Democracy Came Too Early: A Tentative Explanation for the Problem of American Homicide" offers a challenge to Monkkonen's argument largely through resorting to Norbert Elias's theory of the civilizing process. He starts with the basic assertion that European development, both economically and politically, took place over several centuries, while this process in the United States was, in comparison, quite rapid. Likewise, in Europe the monopolization of force was imposed slowly, with centralizing agencies gradually gaining the upper hand over those elements that resisted them. Simultaneously, as Elias explains, the nature of opposition and rebellion shifted from aiming to destroy royal monopoly to striving to gain a share of it. In the latter case, citizens already accustomed to being disarmed struggled to participate in the political process, thus subscribing to the principle of monopoly of force. In the United States, however, democratization took hold without popular disarmament. Hence, the idea persisted that the very principle of a monopoly over force threatened self-defense as a democratic right. Vigilantism, private guard companies, the persistence of an honor code based upon "machismo," and high homicide rates are among the manifestations of this abortive process of state formation.
The absence of film reviews in this issue reflects a long-standing dissatisfaction with how the AHR has dealt with this medium to date. On the one hand, there is a consensus that we must find a way to continue to address the scholarly and pedagogical relevance of films, and in particular to do so in a way that acknowledges film's global impact and reach. On the other, however, it is apparent that we have neither the resources nor the expertise to provide anything more than inadequate and uneven coverage of historically pertinent movies. Thus, we have decided to temporarily suspend film reviewing, pending the development of a more appropriate way for the AHR to address this important and influential medium. Look forward to discussion of this question in a future issue of Perspectives.

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