The 10 most-cited articles in The American Historical Review, 2017

This article traces the emergence of an archipelago-like landscape of distinct legal and economic spaces throughout the long midcentury. Consisting of tax havens, offshore financial markets, flags of convenience, and economic free zones, this archipelago allowed free-market capitalism to flourish on the sidelines of a world increasingly dominated by more sizable and interventionist nation-states. It argues that certain characteristics of the rise of free-market capitalism since the 1970s and 1980s were previously practiced in the offshore archipelago, only to move back to Europe and North America with the rise of neoliberalism.

What can a big data approach bring to the study of the early modern Republic of Letters? This is the question we asked ourselves in our collaborative project Mapping the Republic of Letters. For the past nine years, we have been exploring the limits and possibilities of computation and visualization for studying early modern correspondences, whose massive and dispersed character have long challenged their students. Beyond cliometrics, what new ways of discovery and analysis do today’s big data offer? What can we learn by visualizing the archives and databases that are increasingly accessible and viewable online? In a variety of case studies focusing on metadata (in the letters of John Locke, Athanasius Kircher, Benjamin Franklin, and Voltaire, and in the travels of those engaging in the Grand Tour), we experimented with visualizations to produce maps of the known and unknown quantities in our datasets, and to represent intellectual, cultural, and geographical boundaries. In the process, we experienced collaborative authorship, and worked with designers and programmers to create an…

During the last third of the nineteenth century, a debate emerged in a number of European countries on the “American danger.” Responding to the rapid rise of the United States as the world’s most important economy, some European observers feared their nations’ declining competitiveness in the face of the territorial extent of the United States, and its ability to integrate a dynamic industrial sector with ample raw material supplies, agriculture commodities, markets, and labor into one national economy. This “second great divergence” provoked a range of responses, as statesmen, capitalists, and intellectuals advocated for territorial rearrangements of various European economies, a discussion that lasted with greater or lesser intensity from the 1870s to the 1950s. Their sometimes competing and sometimes mutually reinforcing efforts focused on African colonialism, European integration, and violent territorial expansion within Europe itself. Using the debate as a lens to understand the connections between a wide range of policy responses, this article argues that efforts to…

Historians of slavery in America—most notably Edmund Morgan—had their ideas shaped by the struggles of the Cold War, and debates over the connections between political and economic liberalism. As we have paid more attention to slavery, we have made increasingly strenuous efforts to rationalize slavery, democracy, and capitalism, efforts that have also occurred in other academic fields, ranging from philosophy to political theory to sociology and literature. Many of these efforts, for right or wrong, have focused on John Locke, a crucial figure of the Enlightenment and the beginnings of modern democratic ideals. In this article I contextualize Locke’s ideas and actions with regard to slavery in the empire to argue that we need to begin with different assumptions and questions. Those policies did not emerge from Locke, but instead from those he argued against: the Stuart kings. To understand the origins of slavery, we need to pay more attention to how various laws and policies enabled it across the empire, to who was behind those policies, to who profited the most from those policies…

Experiences of emancipation varied in the greater Caribbean, from the struggles of the formerly enslaved to carve out autonomy on small sugar islands to those of larger arenas and different modes of production, but everywhere a climate of contest prevailed. In the mid-nineteenth century, the political consciousness of the residents of the deeply rural Dominican Republic demonstrates the deep imbrication of putative “non-plantation” spaces with their surroundings. Their aspirations and fears highlight how subaltern Caribbean residents engaged in regional news networks that brought—rather than liberation stories—tales of retrenchment, hostility, and dynamic imperial threats. Re-enslavement warnings, glossed and dismissed by authorities as “rumor,” were rather distinguished by detail and ubiquity; they constituted the new politics of defending an emancipation and independence. When Spanish authorities reoccupied Dominican territory in 1861, Dominican rebels mobilized these warnings and joined together in urgent solidarity. The subsequent erasure of these dynamics, in both local and…

This essay examines the relationship between race and suicide in the Americas. I show how ideas about suicide helped generate and reinforce multiple forms of racial difference and demonstrate how colonial ideas survived long after independence and the abolition of slavery, often in new forms. The extant historiography on suicide emphasizes moral, religious, and medico-legal responses to self-destruction. Less attention has been paid to race or to the brutal fact, widely acknowledged (though rarely discussed in depth) by scholars of slavery, that forced servitude also made suicide a quintessentially economic issue—a threat to planters’ and traders’ bottom line and a threat to production. As slavery and forced labor became dominant global value systems that determined who counted as human, the ability to perish by one’s own hand became a means for making that determination. Eventually, exceptional stories of heroic suicide by native or black martyrs became part of national narratives, but that process depended on the decoupling of self-destruction and economic production, which helped…

Vladimir Zadorozhny for their contributions to the preparation of this essay, and to AHR Editor Rob Schneider for his valuable questions and suggestions.I drew inspiration for the worldhistorical approach I employ here from Barbara Weinstein's exploration of Brazilian material inequality in a global context in

This article traces state practices for governing Roma in the late Habsburg Empire. In the years leading up to the First World War, Roma became troubling symbols of the limits of the Habsburg state’s sovereignty over its borders and people. In their alleged resistance to authority, they seemed to embody both the failures of the Empire’s “civilizing” mission and its efforts to control mobility. A growing number of Austrian authorities began to call for the forcible internment of individuals labeled “Gypsies.” This represented a shift from earlier strategies for governing Roma, which typically entailed policies of forcible sedentarization or deportation. This turn toward internment took place in the context of a broad panic over uncontrolled mobility, escalating border control, and the rise of a racialized understanding of the category “Gypsy.” Persecution of Roma in this period prefigured the treatment of refugees later in the twentieth century, and may shed light on the origins and dynamics of contemporary “migration panics.”

This article analyzes the global debate on the authenticity of cultural heritage as a lens through which to view the process of elaborating and reshaping global cultural norms. Drawing on interviews and mostly untapped archival records across several countries, it reveals that the groundbreaking Nara Document on Authenticity resulted from a surprising coalition of actors from diverse locations in the Northern Hemisphere. At Nara, Japan, in November 1994, Canadians, Japanese, and Norwegians came together at a Conference on Authenticity in Relation to the World Heritage Convention to challenge the prevailing Eurocentric definition of authenticity based on distinct yet partially overlapping interests. While adding a new focus on the arts and culture to the literature on twentieth-century international institutions as loci of transnational experiences, this article also offers a methodological illustration of how historical analysis can combine macro- and micro-perspectives, retaining primary materials as sources of evidence. It shows that the focus on entrepreneurial actors across…

Between 1924 and 1925, the armies of ʿAbd al-ʿAziz b. al-Saʿud captured the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, consequently assuming the responsibility of the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Although the religious significance of these events has long been recognized, their importance to the emergence of modern government in what became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has often not been recognized. This article contends that the management of the pilgrimage was critical to the articulation of a new form of government that took as its object life itself, or what Michel Foucault called “biopolitics.” With the annual influx of thousands of pilgrims from across the globe, the Saudi authorities erected a public health administration to tend to the physical needs of the pilgrims while simultaneously creating a religious administration that saw to their spiritual health. The result was the emergence of an understanding of life in its physical and spiritual capacities that could be actively governed by the state.