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In This Issue
| This issue contains two articles and an AHR Forum. One article offers an argument for an expansive understanding of the history of sensibilities, while the other takes us to Berlin, circa 1800, for an analysis of the impact of public clocks on emerging notions of time discipline. The Forum provides three perspectives on the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the imperial presence of Britain, Spain, and France. As always, a large part of the issue is devoted to our extensive book review section, including four featured reviews. |
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Articles | |
In "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New," Daniel Wickberg queries the centrality of cultural representations in the field of cultural studies and seeks to map out an alternative way of thinking about cultural history that draws on a blend of older traditions and newer approaches. He sees this synthesis as embodied in the history of sensibilities. In studying sensibilities, he argues, we can access a broad and expansive cultural history that unifies and integrates a range of experiences and understandings, among them modes of perception, emotions, sensations, epistemologies, moral commitments, aesthetic values, and cosmologies. To inform its present uses, he examines the history of the concept of "sensibility," and compares it to other kindred concepts that have been deployed by cultural historians, such as episteme, paradigm, mentalité, habitus, structure of feeling, and ideology. And he examines a number of disparate works of the last eighty years that can be seen as having contributed to the history of sensibilities. Wickberg's article argues for the analytical superiority of the history of sensibilities over approaches that privilege largely textual representations of categories of thought such as race, gender, and sexuality.
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| "Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin," by Michael J. Sauter, argues that modern "time discipline" emerged during the eighteenth century with the rise of a more public and publicly discussed understanding of time. Taking eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Berlin as a case study, Sauter claims that before 1800, people disciplined clocks, but after 1800, clocks disciplined people. Several factors were responsible for this reversal of the disciplinary process. For one thing, there were significant advances in the technology of clockmaking. For another, the widely discussed emergence of a "public sphere" in the eighteenth century facilitated public discussion of time and time discipline. This print public sphere was complemented by the creation of urban public spaces, especially in metropolises such as Berlin, where publicly displayed clocks were prominent. Finally, advances of astronomy in the science of timekeeping meant that experts' control over "natural" knowledge could be asserted ever more convincingly. Sauter's article concludes with the general observation that the shift to modern time discipline was the product of a complicated series of changes in early modern Europe, but was ultimately the result of how Europeans produced and ratified knowledge about the world. |
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AHR Forum | |
Since its emergence, the study of the Atlantic world has figured prominently in the pages of this journal. This issue's AHR Forum, "Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World," can be seen as the latest report from that fertile field. The Forum comprises three articles and a comment. In "Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Picton and the Cause of Louisa Calderon," James Epstein revisits the brief sensation caused by the trial of the first British governor of Trinidad for ordering the torture of a free woman of color. He examines how the sensation and its narrative presentation worked on the sensibilities of a British public shielded from the day-to-day violence of empire, and how empire returned "home" in the form of scandal, while acknowledging the political limitations of scandal and the recuperative capacity of the imperial state. The article traces a complex circuitry of cultural and political exchange running between Britain and the Caribbean. The case opens up a range of key issues pertaining to law, the rights of subjects, interracial sexuality, and the exercise of colonial authority in the age of revolution, disrupting a national self-image of humane British colonial rule. Epstein seeks not only to recover an incident notable for its absence from the recording of British history, but to underscore the difficulties in maintaining markers of difference thought to distinguish Britain from colonial sites and on which metropolitan authority was based.
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In "The Western Question: The Geopolitics of Latin American Independence," Rafe Blaufarb argues that the collapse of Spanish rule in the Americas produced a revolution in Atlantic power relations by sparking international competition over the fruits of imperial implosion. He suggests that a "Western Question," comparable to the "Eastern Question" raised by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, resulted in a geopolitical rivalry over the fate of Spanish America, a rivalry that not only influenced relations between the Great Powers, but also figured significantly in the complex internal struggles within the transatlantic Spanish world. Just as the Powers sought to exploit factional rivalries in Spanish America for their own ends, the contending forces in the Spanish world saw in the Western Question opportunities to advance their respective causes by playing upon the hopes and fears of the rival countries. All of this created a vacuum into which freelance adventurers inserted themselves, giving rise to a kind of transnational diplomatic history "from below." By bringing together the international and internal, the geopolitical and local dimensions of the collapse of Spanish rule in the Americas, Blaufarb situates the movement for Latin American independence as part of the process of geopolitical realignment in the post-Napoleonic world.
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Eliga H. Gould's "Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery" interrogates the use of comparative methods in Atlantic history, proposing "entangled history" as an alternate model for histories that examine more than one national community. In the case of the Spanish and English-speaking Atlantic worlds, Gould argues that Spain's Atlantic empire played a central role in the history of the early modern British Empire and the early American Republic; at no point, however, were these communities distinct from each other, as comparative histories tend to suggest, nor were their histories in any way "comparable." Although historical comparison remains an important way to examine discrete parts of larger relationships and to engage in close analysis of a sort that is often missing from broader studies, Gould suggests that Atlantic historians need to think equally hard about what it means to write entangled history, especially when the history involves such interconnected but dissimilar communities.
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| Finally, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's "Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?" offers a comment on the three articles and suggests other ways in which we might understand the complex relationships between imperial powers in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. |
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