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In This Issue
| In keeping with current trends in scholarship, the articles in this issue all cross oceans, bridge national boundaries, or take up global themes, highlighting the geographically broad and cosmopolitan vision of many historians. We should hasten to note that what finds its way into our pages is largely determined by the serendipitous nature of the submissions we receive: we certainly do not set out to emphasize one historical approach over others. It is true that we are particularly interested in articles that are wide in their appeal; those which deal with phenomena and experiences across nations and oceans often meet this standard. But there are many ways historians can appeal to a wide range of their peers, and we welcome any and all attempts to do so. In any case, December's issue offers several variations on the theme of transnational history. It contains three articles, an AHR Exchange between two of the contributors to the AHR Forum that appeared in our June issue, an AHR Conversation on "Religious Identities and Violence," six featured reviews, and our usual extensive book review section. |
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Articles | |
In "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas," David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson begin by noting that two contrasting models currently dominate interpretations of Atlantic history. One highlights Old World influences to explain the nature of societies and cultures in the Americas. The other assigns primacy to the New World environment. The authors do not seek to challenge these polarities but rather attempt to transcend them. They refuse to emphasize either Old World folkways or New World environments, preferring to consider both. For them, community and cultural formation in the early Americas were the result of many forces. One consequence of this approach, however, is that assigning agency becomes a complex and ambiguous task. In particular, they challenge the arguments of scholars that developments in rice cultivation in the Americas were largely determined by the knowledge and skills of Africans forcibly imported from rice-cultivating areas of precolonial Africa. Their findings will be the subject of an AHR Exchange in a future issue.
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The blurring of the lines of division between the Spanish and Portuguese empires that helped create a world-encircling empire for the Habsburgs between 1580 and 1640 has not attracted much scholarly attention. In "Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640," Sanjay Subrahmanyam raises a set of issues regarding imperial "connection" going back as far as 1500. In particular, he addresses four questions. First, he examines the distinctions between the imperial models proposed by Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the heart of the matter lies the problem of the allegedly land-bound nature of the Spanish Empire in comparison to the predominantly maritime profile of the Portuguese. Second, he asks whether the distinctions that existed early on in the sixteenth century came to be blurred over time on account of processes of mutual borrowing and imitation, the synchronic version of what is termed translatio imperii. Third, he attempts to sort out what part the "Union of the Crowns" played in these processes. Finally, his essay briefly examines how contemporary observers and writers attempt to grapple with these issues. As this involves a vast geographical and institutional canvas, the primary object of analysis here is the world of politico-fiscal and commercial institutions.
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| In "Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public," Michelle Brattain examines how the concept of race was reconstructed as a biological category, through a history of an international, post–World War II, antiracist public education project sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The project, intended to discredit Nazi-style scientific racism, ultimately produced two collectively authored scientific "statements on race." The first statement's claim that race was more "social myth" than "biological fact" was rejected by many scientists, who subsequently forced UNESCO to convene a second panel to revise the statement. The ensuing controversy, Brattain argues, should not be seen as merely an academic or disciplinary concern but was rather a historical artifact of race science itself. In spite of the lack of compelling evidence either confirming or denying racial differences, the UNESCO deliberations revealed the extent to which a belief in race and racial differences was a default assumption that fixed the logical structure of the debate. Although ostensibly antiracist, the postwar reconstruction of race as a natural category left science vulnerable to racist manipulation and enabled later demands for "colorblind" policy. While historians have frequently analyzed archaic constructions of races and racial identities, Brattain argues that they must extend historical analysis to the race category more generally and interrogate its use in historical scholarship. The preservation of race as an ahistorical, natural category, she concludes, whether as reformed by antiracist scientists or unintentionally reconstructed in the work of historians, compromises antiracism and facilitates racism. |
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AHR Exchange | |
| The AHR Exchange involves Eliga H. Gould and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, two of the participants in our June 2007 AHR Forum, "Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World." Gould responds to Cañizares-Esguerra's comments on his article, which, he claims, were critical of his emphasis on the importance of peripheries in understanding "entangled" imperial relationships. Cañizares-Esguerra then offers his own version of "entanglement," arguing that core narratives are more meaningful sites of imperial interaction and exchange than geographic peripheries. |
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AHR Conversation | |
| The AHR Conversation, an experiment in scholarly exchange that we initiated last year, focuses on the topic "Religious Identities and Violence." The AHR Editor and six other historians engaged in an online discussion that began in June and ended in early November. Presented here is a transcribed and lightly edited version of that rather extended conversation, which covers a lot of ground: from our different understanding of what we mean by "religion" to the shifting intensity of religious identities over time; from the targets of religious violence to the relationship of historical scholarship to contemporary concerns. The participants and their fields of expertise are Philip Benedict (early modern Europe), Nora Berend (medieval Europe), Stephen Ellis (modern Africa), Jeffrey Kaplan (religious studies), Ussama Makdisi (modern Middle East), and Jack Miles (theology, religion, and contemporary affairs). |
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