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In This Issue
This issue contains five articles along with our usual extensive book review section. The articles offer an eclectic sampling of contemporary historical scholarship, from a consideration of commodities exchange in the United States in the late nineteenth century to a look at anticolonial struggles in early-nineteenth-century Latin America; from theatrical transvestism in Russian prisoner-of war-camps in World War I to fifteenth-century witchcraft treatises; and concluding with a piece on superstitious rumors in Mao's China.
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In "Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905," Jonathan Ira Levy explores the ascendance of futures trading, a significant innovation in the global history of capitalism. In these years there emerged a professional class of merchants who never delivered or received physical commodities but rather dealt in things that did not exist—that is, futures. In "bucket shops," distinct venues for this sort of organized exchange, futures trading was democratized. Indeed, these institutions revolutionized the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world economy. Yet futures also posed a moral and epistemological dilemma: Should there be a traffic in fictional things? This question was mooted in the political arena—in statehouses, in Congress, and, finally, at the Supreme Court. What emerged was the doctrine of "contemplating delivery," which said that traders could deal in thoughts so long as there was true intent in their minds actually to deliver tangible commodities. This ultimately led to the sanctioning of futures trading in state-chartered institutions, such as the Chicago Board of Trade. The popular bucket shops, however, were abolished. The Supreme Court's decision was emblematic of both a new world view regarding uncertainty, probability, and knowledge and a new imperative in political economy—risk management. Because futures trading determined the pricing of primary commodities everywhere, these developments had ramifications for the production and exchange of commodities around the globe.
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In "Race War and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena, 1810–1832," Marixa Lasso argues that modern racial conceptions in the Americas originated during the anticolonial struggles of the Age of Revolution. In particular, she examines the emergence of a nationalist ideology of racial harmony and equality—the twentieth-century myth of racial democracy—during the Spanish American wars of independence. While most historians trace the origins of modern race relations to colonial slavery, Lasso argues that it was during this later period that nations with similar histories of colonialism, slavery, and racism developed divergent national racial imaginaries, such as manifest destiny in the United States and the myth of racial democracy in Latin America. Her analysis focuses on Gran Colombia, one of the key sites of the struggle for Spanish American independence, where war shaped racial imaginaries in two ways. War infused racial equality with the emotional strength of patriotism, transforming it into a nationalist ideology that transcended partisanship and regional differences. At the same time, however, the phantom of another type of war, "race war," set the boundaries separating legitimate from illegitimate racial discourse. The fear of racial war restricted the political actions of people of African descent, limiting their opportunities to denounce persistent patterns of informal discrimination and prejudice.
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In "The Disruptive Comforts of Drag: (Trans)Gender Performances among Prisoners of War in Russia, 1914–1920," Alon Rachamimov examines the theatrical activities of German-speaking prisoners of war in Russia during World War I. He describes the creation of elaborate theaters in dozen of camps, many of which staged sophisticated productions of contemporary plays and operettas. He argues that these theaters were more than a source of entertainment for the POWs. They helped to express the men's anxieties, hopes, and desires, while also reflecting an acute sense of male disempowerment that accompanied captivity. In officer camps, prisoners created a quasi-bourgeois theater life that aimed at evoking prewar comfort, power, and the illusion of self-worth. At the center of this theatrical sociability were the female impersonators, usually younger officers, who not only performed women's roles but also continued their performances offstage. These performers were often addressed by their feminine names, and they enjoyed the attentions of fans and admirers. Following recent theoretical writings on cross-dressing, this article demonstrates that drag is, by definition, ambivalent, possessing both disruptive and normalizing potential. For some of the participants and spectators, the POW theater provided a means to preserve "normalcy" and masculine vigor. For others, it sanctioned homoerotic feelings and transgender identifications by blurring the lines between the conventional and the illicit. In this sense, some POWs found life in the camps a liberating experience.
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Weberian "disenchantment" is a salient, although much contested, feature of modern Western culture. And the removal of directly effective power from religious ritual, associated mainly with the Protestant Reformation, is often considered an important stage in the process of disenchantment. In "The Disenchantment of Magic: Spells, Charms, and Superstition in Early European Witchcraft Literature," however, Michael D. Bailey argues that elements of disenchantment were already present in the late medieval period, deriving from long-established conceptions of the operation of magic. To make his case, he examines how authors of major fifteenth-century witchcraft treatises, above all Johannes Nider and Heinrich Kramer, regarded the practice of witchcraft and other common spells and charms. Witchcraft functioned through demonic agency, these authorities insisted, not through any power inherent in the simple rites the witches might perform. These authorities also sought to invalidate other rites that presumed to call on divine agency. But here they encountered difficulties, for their arguments could be construed as calling into question the effectiveness of orthodox religious practice as well as magical rites. Ultimately, the tensions that Bailey explores reveal that "disenchantment" should not be seen as simply antithetical to magical beliefs. Rather, the sources of this process are deeply rooted in medieval Christianity and were given new emphasis by the growing concern over witchcraft and superstition in the fifteenth century.
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| S. A. Smith's article, "Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of 'Superstitious' Rumors in the People's Republic of China, 1961–1965," examines what the authorities in the People's Republic of China called "superstitious rumors" in the years between the famine of 1959–1961 and the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. It argues that the prevalence of such rumors was linked to a widespread belief that demonic forces were on the increase because religious rituals of propitiation and exorcism—rituals that supposedly regulated relations between the human and spirit worlds—were no longer being observed properly. The article proceeds to ask whether superstitious rumors that touched more directly on politics were in fact a form of popular resistance. Smith concludes that, objectively, at least, the rumors constituted a challenge to the efforts of the party-state to centralize meaning, but that their principal effect was to reveal the supernatural forces that many believed were at work behind the visible operations of power. The article suggests that the influence of superstition and a belief in occult phenomena have been seriously underestimated in the context of Communist studies, where scholars, insofar as they focus at all on popular politics, concentrate on politics couched in a secular idiom. Indirectly, the article thus contributes to a debate about the extent to which the Communist state eroded "traditional" beliefs and practices and the extent to which it created conditions in which these were reactivated to meet new challenges. |
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