The 50 most-cited articles in The American Historical Review, 2019

This article reflects on the rising use of concepts, theories, and methodologies taken from social network analysis in early modern history, along with the opportunities and challenges it presents. Scholars have been quick to attribute the growing interest in historical social networks to movements for interdisciplinary research, new possibilities presented by digital technologies, and the prominence of the term “social network” in present-day culture. In contrast, this article reconnects recent trends to longstanding attention to the nature of early modern social relations, which has its roots in the foundations of modern social thought laid in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and developed through the postwar decades in both history and sociology. In doing so, the article shows the extent to which social network analysis shares antecedents, interests, and goals with more traditional historical methods. It argues that, when sensitively applied, network approaches present many opportunities for historians engaging with enduring questions about the nature of social…

Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that…

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. But it was also the nation’s “necropolis,” with yellow fever routinely killing about 8 percent of its population. With little epidemiological understanding of mosquito-borne viruses—and meager public health infrastructure—a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated”: fall sick with, and survive, yellow fever. About half of all people died in the acclimating process. Repeated epidemics generated a hierarchy of immunocapital whereby “acclimated citizens” (survivors) leveraged their immunity for social, economic, and political power and “unacclimated strangers” (poor recent immigrants) languished in social and professional purgatory. For whites, acclimation was the quintessential demonstration of calculated risk-taking: that people had paid their biological dues, were worthy of investment, and could now justifiably pursue economic advancement in slave racial capitalism. For black slaves, who were embodied capital, immunity enhanced the value and safety of that capital for their…

Recent global legal histories argue that jurisdictional competition between authorities, often at the edges of territories, ordered empires and nations. But we still need more concrete, grounded understandings of how local actors understood and produced jurisdiction, and we need clearer methodologies for recovering those understandings from archives that privilege imperial, often European concepts of law, authority, and territory. A single case from southern Mexico, centered on the 1683 arrest of a native man named Juan Matías at a makeshift court built on a wheat field, provides both. Close attention to this case, supplemented with regional and temporal comparison, offers glimpses of how imperial law on the books animated local understandings of jurisdiction on the ground. In turn, in the very act of translating local events and native practices for a Spanish judge, Juan Matías demonstrates how jurisdiction—in this case “Indian jurisdiction,” a unique plane of native authority within the Spanish Empire—was not merely captured on the page in legal documentation but produced through…

This essay reconstructs a missing link in Frantz Fanon’s life and death. Based on an encounter with Fanon’s CIA handler, C. Oliver Iselin, it presents the firsthand experience of a mid-level figure in the U.S. security state who participated in the national liberation movements in Africa. The essay suggests that Iselin’s memories and images of decolonization reflect the wider arc of how liberal American attitudes evolved and congealed toward the Third World, as national liberation went from attracting hopeful sympathy, to disappointment, and finally to blame. The long, unedited samples of Iselin’s speech are meant to grant his perspective some autonomy from the author’s interpretations of them, and to provide the reader with raw material to make different interpretations. The essay also examines Fanon’s understanding of American liberals’ changing attitude toward national liberation movements. Both Iselin and Fanon’s projections are then counterpoised with the author’s own impressions of present-day Algeria.

Abstract The Haitian state shaped international definitions of sovereignty and national legitimacy after the Declaration of Independence in 1804. Haiti’s nineteenth century was not a period of isolation and decline; its first six decades were globally connected because the country’s leaders challenged their postcolonial inequality with diplomacy and state formation. This strategy aimed to establish Haiti’s membership in the “family of nations,” a central metaphor in European and American diplomatic, legal, and religious decision-making. In doing so, the Haitian state forced the Atlantic powers to redefine the boundaries of international relations. Haiti’s decades-long negotiations with the Catholic Church were tied to the racialization of the global hierarchy. After its Declaration of Independence, the Haitian state began clearing a theoretical path toward recognized sovereignty based on the dominant narrative that a society must be considered “civilized” on the world stage. But, as it cultivated internal policies and practices that rejected the dominant racist assumptions, these…

Globalization is classically defined as the increased movement of people, goods, and information around the world. Yet not all aspects of globalization and deglobalization happened simultaneously. This article uses the development of an international health information network to explore why information did not globalize concurrently with migration and trade. Nearly seven decades after states had understood disease as a cross-border problem, the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) brought together states, empires, and foundations in a voluntary exchange of health information that reached two-thirds of the world’s population and outlasted the League itself. The LNHO organized an infrastructure based on new wireless technology around colonial networks, port cities, the sea, and the air. Singapore and Saigon were more central than Geneva. Health information was meant to prevent epidemics; it enabled the LNHO to justify its own existence as a neutral broker for standardized, technical information; it helped colonial powers like Britain and France to share the financial burden…

On September 2, 2018, a fire destroyed the 200-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, along with the vast majority of the nearly 20 million items it housed. Located in the historic São Cristóvão Palace, the museum originated as a colonial institution, and its history was intertwined with that of the Brazilian nation. Among the millions of items consumed in the flames were more than 40,000 indigenous artifacts, as well as a rich Africana collection reflecting the relationships developed between Brazil and the African continent during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. This article summarizes the history of the National Museum and its holdings, details Brazil’s long-term neglect of its tangible heritage, and highlights the magnitude of the museum’s loss—a loss not just for the national and international scholars who researched its collections, but also for the low-income residents in the neighboring areas for whom it was the only accessible institution of its kind.

Technological and economic forces are radically restructuring our ecosystem of knowledge, and opening our information space increasingly to forms of digital disruption and manipulation that are scalable, difficult to detect, and corrosive of the trust upon which vigorous scholarship and liberal democratic practice depend. Using an illustrative case from China, this article shows how a determined actor can exploit those vulnerabilities to tamper dynamically with the historical record. Briefly, Chinese knowledge platforms comparable to JSTOR are stealthily redacting their holdings, and globalizing historical narratives that have been sanitized to serve present political purposes. Using qualitative and computational methods, this article documents a sample of that censorship, reverse-engineers the logic behind it, and analyzes its discursive impact. Finally, the article demonstrates that machine learning models can now accurately reproduce the choices made by human censors, and warns that we are on the cusp of a new, algorithmic paradigm of information control and censorship that poses…

Abstract What can we learn from reading the acknowledgments in academic books? Many of us read acknowledgments to learn about how the field works, as well as to glean personal information about our intellectual companions. Although they are intended as an expression of gratitude, acknowledgments also reveal some of the processes of exclusion that shape academia.

The Namibian Independence Memorial Museum presents a narrow history of Namibia, focused on the brutality of colonial rule and the triumph of anticolonial resistance via the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), its military wing, and its first president, Sam Nujoma. As such, the museum reflects recurring state-sponsored presentations of history in Namibia—a form of historical production that Terrence Ranger, in his reflections on early twenty-first-century Zimbabwe, dubbed “patriotic history” (“Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 2 [June 2004]: 215–234). Here we draw attention to the particular form that patriotic history has taken at the Namibian Independence Memorial Museum, with its exceptionally decontextualized and melodramatic presentation of the Namibian past. From its origins, the Independence Museum (as it is commonly called in Namibia) has had a precarious relationship to Namibian contexts. Built by the North Korean firm Mansudae Overseas…

Compared to related phenomena such as revolutions, coups d’état have been undertheorized, approached in imperial and national histories as individual case studies, and analyzed by social scientists through the prism of democratization theory. This article argues that coups merit greater historical reflection, highlighting their significance in shaping sovereignty arrangements in the post–Second World War era. Alongside the pursuit of counterinsurgency, imperial powers depended on leadership change to either tackle or preempt existing and potential transnational anticolonial challenges. Through a close examination of two major British coups—entailing the removal of the sheikh of Sharjah in 1965 and the sheikh of Abu Dhabi in 1966—the article proposes the “colonial coup” as a useful concept for understanding depositions carried out by empires against dependent rulers. Far from being the mere outcome of local palace struggles, colonial coups were powerful political instruments utilized in a preemptive global war that was waged against popular sovereignty on the eve of decolonization.…

Abstract For decades, historians portrayed the immigrants who arrived in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century fleeing the great Irish Famine as a permanent proletariat, doomed to live out their lives in America in poverty due to illiteracy, nativism, and a lack of vocational skills. Recent research, however, primarily by economic historians, has demonstrated that large numbers of Famine refugees actually fared rather well in the United States, saving surprising sums in bank accounts and making strides up the American socioeconomic ladder. These scholars, however, have never attempted to explain why some Famine immigrants thrived in the U.S. while others struggled merely to scrape by. Utilizing the unusually detailed records of New York’s Emigrant Savings Bank in conjunction with the methods of the digital humanities, this article seeks to understand what characteristics separated those Irish Famine immigrants who fared well financially from those who did not. Analysis of a database of more than 15,000 depositors suggests that networking was the key to economic advancement…

Abstract Our reconsideration of domesticity comes at a time when empire and colonial and postcolonial categories of analysis are informing many fields of historical study. This essay traces the historiographic origins of the intersection of domesticity and empire, focusing on domesticity’s usefulness as a window on cross-cultural intimacy and conflict. It also offers an example of how previous treatments of domesticity might be revised by taking empire and settler society into account.

This article explores one of postwar Europe’s most dramatic ideological transformations: the end of prolonged animosities between Protestants and Catholics. It charts how a series of political upheavals between the 1930s and the 1960s led Christian elites to develop new conceptions of religious pluralism and religious freedom, which called for political and legal equality between Christian denominations but simultaneously excluded religious minorities, especially Jews and Muslims. First, the article shows how the crisis of the 1930s, especially Nazism’s promise to unite the two denominations in a militarized racial community, instigated the first systematic interconfessional cooperation. Christian thinkers and politicians who sympathized with the regime’s fierce anti-Marxism and antisemitism launched joint publications and formed new organizations. Second, the article shows how the unfolding of decolonization in Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s further expanded this early Catholic-Protestant cooperation. The loss of European governments’ support for missionary organizations,…

Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that…

Abstract Hayden White’s 1973 Metahistory tossed the entire concept of historical science out the window, claiming that historians are fundamentally artists who imbue historical action with aesthetic and ethical purpose. The book urged historians to grapple with whether and how their writing creates rather than reflects reality. It also celebrated the ethics and art of history-writing and diminished historians’ empirical claims. There were two receptions of White’s work: the first, amply documented, was among intellectual historians and others in humanities’ disciplines, especially literary theory; the second took place within the mainstream of the discipline and has received little attention. This essay assesses how mainstream historians’ reception of Metahistory unfolded from the 1970s, and with what consequences. Historians focused on White’s purported conflation of language and reality and neglected his argument about how and why historians resist theory. In so doing, he demonstrated—and the reception of his work demonstrates in turn—that historians most effectively resist theory…

Abstract At the height of the “Second Cold War” of the early 1980s, Britons from all walks of life engaged in a wide-ranging public discussion about the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon. Historians have generally understood this cultural conversation as having been motivated by deeply seated fears of nuclear war. This article, however, shifts the focus from fear to risk. It traces the precise ways that British men, women, and children conceptualized the nature of nuclear warfare and debated how its associated risks could be managed. While left-wing activists espoused unilateral disarmament as the best way to alleviate the nuclear threat, a wide swath of the British public turned instead to “self-help” strategies that aligned with the neoliberal ideals of personal autonomy, self-reliance, and individualism. The nuclear risk debate thus reveals the contours of an emerging “neoliberal sensibility” of the period. It also illuminates how the prospect of nuclear war offered Britons a means to articulate and define their expectations of the state amidst Thatcher’s broader prioritization of…

Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that…

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that…

This article traces how ecological context shaped the actions and ambitions of the United States and the Soviet Union, through a comparison of their use of the Pacific walrus. Based in the shared environmental context of the Bering Strait, it examines how the two countries implemented opposing ideological projects in the Arctic, expecting to increase production and by doing so make Indigenous peoples into capitalist or socialist citizens. In an environment impossible for agriculture and difficult for industry, walrus-harvesting became one of the few productive options for these ambitions. Between the 1870s and the 1950s, both the U.S. and the USSR experimented with massive harvests of blubber and ivory to feed ideas of economic growth, before adopting mirrored conservation policies. This article argues that the reason stems from the inherently metabolic nature of modern states, which function by ensuring flows of energy through their economies and citizens. In the Bering Strait, that energy came in part from walrus, making environmental management and the economic practices it…

In December of 2018, the renovated Royal Museum for Central Africa (the RMCA, which now goes by “the AfricaMuseum”), in the Brussels suburb of Tervuren, reopened its doors after a five-year-long process of renovation and reinstallation. When it closed its doors in 2013, its permanent displays were hopelessly outdated, revealing their deep roots in the country’s colonial past. This review is based on two visits to the museum: one during its reopening in early December of 2018, and one about a month later in early January of 2019. The opening event itself was marred by the fact that many displays weren’t yet finished, with missing texts, empty vitrines, and a lack of audiovisual materials. Several of the unfinished displays have been completed since. The Belgian king Leopold II planned and built the museum in order to promote his colony to the Belgian population. Created as the Museum of Congo (Musée du Congo) in the aftermath of a colonial exhibition at the 1897 Brussels International Exposition, the museum’s current building was finished in 1908 and inaugurated in 1910. It has…

Abstract In this response to the roundtable, Burton emphasizes the unsettled and unsettling character of domesticity and challenges facile definitions of its global history. She offers ways of reading the essays in pairs, backwards and forwards in time, and together as a kind of prospective course syllabus.

Abstract The placement of Indigenous girls and young women in white homes to work as servants was a key strategy of official policy and practice in both the United States and Australia. Between the 1880s and the Second World War, under the outing programs in the U.S. and various apprenticeship and indenturing schemes in Australia, the state regulated and constructed relations between Indigenous and white women in the home. Such state intervention not only helped to define domesticity in a modern world, but was integral to the formation of the modern settler colonial nation in its claims to civilizing authority in the United States and Australia. In the context of settler colonialism, domesticity was not hegemonic in this period, but rather was precarious and uncertain. By prescribing and demanding from employers demonstrations of domesticity, the state was engaged in perfecting white women as well as Indigenous women, the latter as the colonized, to be domesticated, and the former as the colonizer, to domesticate.

Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that…

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that…

Five decades ago, feminist historians introduced the history of the household into the historiography of North America and Europe, arguing that interrogating “domesticity” within the home was integrally embedded in histories of capitalism and industrial labor outside the house. Taken together, the essays that follow seek to unsettle the historiographical legacy of domesticity as a category of analysis to recuperate new histories of ideologies that define and describe the spaces and practices of home and family. Initially conceived by Annelise Heinz and Elizabeth LaCouture, this roundtable developed over three years of recursive in-person and written conversations between the authors, including sessions at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association and the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities. The result is a forum that has deepened over time, with intellectual threads that connect and enrich the conversation as a whole. In her essay that serves as the coda to the roundtable, Antoinette Burton notes that domesticity has always been a…

Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World is as much about the present and the future as about the past. It is a cri de coeur, a lament about the narrowing objectives of human rights activists in today’s political climate and a plea for them to mount a fundamental challenge to the forces that have brought about extremes of inequality within and among nations. Moyn fears that in the absence of a principled critique of the concentration of wealth, people across the globe will turn to forms of populism that will endanger even the gains made by human rights movements. Moyn’s fears are all too justified. Moyn nevertheless finds in the historical record openings to a fuller integration of economic equality with individual rights and liberties. He makes clear the limitations of those openings but sees them as an antidote to assumptions of structural determinism in the present. Moyn acknowledges the “fit” between the individualism of human rights discourse with the individualism of market fundamentalism. But the relationship, he argues, is not a necessary one, offering…

This article explores the social and economic preconditions of the French nobility’s political collapse in 1789. It argues that the nobles’ position in eighteenth-century society was much weaker than is suggested in recent historical writing, and that this social reality matters for understanding revolutionary politics. Between about 1660 and 1770, nobles’ landed revenue fell, and in the last generation before 1789, they sold a significant amount of property. Over the same period, the state reduced its support and increased its demands; nobles who served as military officers typically lost money doing so, and those who served in high civil and judicial offices fared only slightly better. Partly as a result of these financial pressures, the nobility’s numbers shrank over the eighteenth century, leaving them a very small group, even as the total French population grew. These changes do not explain the political crisis that culminated in the Revolution, nor the political decisions that followed 1789. But they help explain the nobles’ inability to control events as the revolutionary…

In his impressively researched book The Soviet Union and the Gutting of the UN Genocide Convention, Anton Weiss-Wendt offers an in-depth account of the drafting of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, documenting the UN General Assembly’s adoption of it in 1948, its entry into force in 1951, and UN members’ arguments for and against ratification. Although the book focuses on Soviet views regarding the definition of genocide and specific provisions of the draft convention, it provides an important window into how other UN members responded to the Genocide Convention, particularly the United States. Weiss-Wendt faults the Soviet Union for undermining the scope and efficacy of the international treaty. It opposed the inclusion of political groups alongside national, ethnic, racial or religious groups as targets of genocide—an omission that is widely considered one of the convention’s major limitations. Although Soviet delegates argued that a “scientific definition of genocide” precluded the protection of political groups, who did not have…

In this article I argue that in order to understand how empires expand, we must pay close attention to cross-cultural credit relationships on imperial margins. A fine-grained comparative analysis of two simultaneous financial crises in Madras and Canton during the late eighteenth century shows how voluntary and (initially) mutually beneficial financial transactions and fiduciary relationships could morph into something imperial, and how cross-cultural credit could be transformed into colonial debt. More specifically, my analysis demonstrates how a global network of British brokers and investors connecting Madras, Canton, and London used legal, diplomatic, and military means, exploiting imperial resources while concurrently lobbying British statesmen in London to enforce their contracts abroad. This article thus reveals the interplay between events, actors, and interests abroad and at home, and makes visible the process by which imperial engagement became amplified and relationships of power could change.

Abstract At the turn of the twentieth century, two architects—Itō Chūta in Japan and Rajendralal Mitra in Bengal—sought to counter Eurocentric accounts of aesthetic modernity by insisting on the inclusion of Japanese and Indian building traditions in the world history of architecture. In different and indeed opposing ways, they mobilized the idea of classical Greece; while Itō saw ancient Japanese buildings as directly influenced by Greek models, Mitra denied any such connections. Beyond these differences, however, both scholars were aligned in their effort to use references to “Greece” in order to claim equivalence for their native architecture on a world stage. While invoking a Eurocentric standard to battle Eurocentrism may sound paradoxical, this article shows that a confluence of global forces went into the making of this late Victorian moment of imperial universalism. The globality of the standards both actors referred to should not be imagined as the result of a gradual spread and diffusion from a European center. Rather, actors constantly invented and co-produced these…

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

Abstract In this essay I argue for opening up South Asian historiography on the home to explore not just ideals of middle-class domesticity, but also the material goods and spaces of home lives. This helps to rethink class, as ideals of middle-class respectability were often worked out in buildings and through goods shared with lower classes, deploying caste hierarchies to articulate definitions of proper home life. At the same time, taking materials and spaces seriously allows attention to the role of men in shaping and experiencing homes, whether as designers, retailers, planners, or residents themselves. Drawing on the specific example of the iconic firm Kamdar Ltd., which created modern home interiors in mid-century Bombay, I argue that thinking through the materials of home allows attention to the global engagements of home life defined in class and caste terms, by men and women alike.

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval begins with a note on method that situates the book as the practice of the methodological ground that Hartman laid out in her widely cited article “Venus in Two Acts.” In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman described the archive as a site that “recount[s] the violence” inflicted on black women, often by reducing those women to data and to “fragments of discourse.” This is, Hartman argues, “as close as we come to a biography of the captive and the enslaved.” In place of dominant historical writing practices that treat the archive as the repository of truth, one which reads enslaved women’s lives as a “collective biography of dead subjects,” Hartman’s article developed a method called critical fabulation (“Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 [2008]: 1–14, here 2–3). As a practice of scholarly imagination and as an interpretative practice, critical fabulation mobilizes the archive to construct and to imagine what it can never represent—black life, except when it is conscripted to death. In its…

Dóra Vargha’s Polio across the Iron Curtain: Hungary’s Cold War with an Epidemic is an innovative and outstanding book that powerfully demonstrates that the study of even seemingly marginal topics, if properly contextualized and imaginatively framed, can make a significant contribution to mainstream scholarship. Rather than just having the potential to nuance existing viewpoints, such a study can fundamentally alter them. Positioned at the intersection of the (sub)fields of the history of global health, Cold War studies, the history of science, technology, disability studies, and childhood studies, the book connects fields that are rarely studied together in this combination. As such, it uncovers complexities that remain invisible when viewed through the exclusive lens of one subfield or one narrow research question. Moreover, the book’s focus on Eastern Europe diversifies global health histories that typically revolve around the colonial and postcolonial contexts or the histories of international institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO).

Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that…

Abstract A century after the victorious Allied powers distributed their spoils of victory in 1919, the world still lives with the geopolitical consequences of the mandates system established by the League of Nations. The Covenant article authorizing the new imperial dispensation came cloaked in the old civilizationist discourse, entrusting sovereignty over “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” to the “advanced nations” of Belgium, England, France, Japan, and South Africa. In this series of AHR “reflections” on the mandates, ten scholars of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the international order consider the consequences of the new geopolitical order birthed by World War I. How did the reshuffling of imperial power in the immediate postwar period configure long-term struggles over minority rights, decolonization, and the shape of nation-states when the colonial era finally came to a close? How did the alleged beneficiaries—more often the victims—of this “sacred trust” grasp their own fates in a world that…

Abstract The fractured nature of emergent domesticity in its first phase in the 1760s was inextricably tied to the perils as well as promises of commerce for individual households in an unpredictable global economy, although historians have focused on the metropolitan roots of domesticity. A microhistorical exploration of the world of a single household in the French city of Lyon brings the fault lines of a globalizing economy, consumption, and domesticity into sharp focus as lived experience. It suggests the uneven terrain of domesticity, in terms of gender, household, and family, as well as for producers and consumers. In the experiences of household members and in the classified advertisements in the local newspaper, fractured domesticity was manifest, the conjugal labor—reproductive and productive—that made global domesticity local was evident, and the centrality of commercial risk as a fault line in domesticity was clarified. The power and limits of “domesticity” as an emotional, cultural, and economic as well as political project were located in familial practice. The potency…

Screenwriter Craig Mazin had begun researching the miniseries Chernobyl before “fake news” became a political buzzword. Nevertheless, the drama and its official promotions convulse in fiction shame. Fabulation, both imply, is a devious exercise, best avoided for the sake of authenticity, may authenticity itself increasingly depend on “rhetorical invention instead of spontaneous expression,” as Bradford Vivian reminds us in his 2017 Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (here 79). While no novel underpins Mazin’s creation, the series inherits the impulse that had earlier prompted writers to rechristen novels “memoirs” and critics to herald the end of literature. Alas, fiction shame is a trap when evidence of contrivance—the gratifying sort that lends mass culture its power—is obvious even before the viewer sees anything, as in Chernobyl’s opening. To pitch-black credit frames, an apartment door groans open. Feet shuffle across the creaky floor, ostensibly toward the refrigerator that, with a smack, releases a container with liquid.…

Abstract This article examines knowledge about “domesticity” in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and argues against the naturalization of Euro-American historiographical frameworks around “domesticity.” “Domesticity” was not a Chinese concept: although Confucianism had long connected the household to the state through ideology and prescriptive practices, Anglo-American ideas about “domesticity” were translated into Chinese first by way of Japan in the late nineteenth century, and second by way of American missionary educators in the twentieth century. “Domesticity” did not translate easily into Chinese, however; neither the ideology nor its pedagogical practices ever became popular in China. The history of translating “domesticity” into Chinese thus reveals that Euro-American historiographical terms that were once thought to be universal map poorly onto other places and suggests that we need more inclusive frames for comparative gender history.

David W. Darrow’s Tsardom of Sufficiency, Empire of Norms: Statistics, Land Allotments, and Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1700–1921 is a well-written, clearly organized, and deftly argued study of the idea of the nadel (a sufficient land allotment) in Russia over time. Darrow traces the origins of the concept and its development through the era of serfdom, into the years following the formal emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861, through the revolutions of 1917, and into the period of civil war. He argues that as the Muscovite tsars came to dominate the Russian principalities, the lands of Muscovy became the tsar’s patrimony to reward his servitors and to produce recruits for his army. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was firmly believed that peasants, as the state’s principal resource, needed a sufficient allotment of land to guarantee their own, and the state’s, well-being. That conviction, in turn, shaped how reformers conceptualized the form that the emancipation of the serfs would take after 1861, molded the critique of the emancipation settlement as it unfolded,…

Frederick the Great’s famous quip about the Russian-Ottoman wars as “the one-eyed fighting the blind” diminishes the significance of these titanic clashes, which unleashed mayhem upon huge populations, spread epidemic diseases, forced human migrations, and shredded territory throughout Eastern Europe and Transcaucasia. These wars determined the boundaries of modern nation-states and forged a sense of identity among millions of people. According to Will Smiley’s new book From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law, the wars shaped the development of international law, including regulations for ransoming military captives and the trafficking of slaves, and defined subjecthood. What makes the book particularly intriguing (and its subject so difficult to research) is how the borderlands interacted with the international legal system during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thus helping us understand the context in which these new international rules emerged. Divided into five parts, each prefaced...

In The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, Beth Lew-Williams provides an excellent analysis of how nineteenth-century Chinese restriction and exclusion led to the development of the concept of the alien in the twenty-first century United States. The author clearly explains the development of the drive to rid the United States of the Chinese. In particular, she looks at the growth of violence against the Chinese in Washington Territory and California. She traces the West Coast’s fear of the Chinese to an American fear of losing power to China in terms of trade and efforts to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Developed in three major sections—on restriction, violence, and exclusion—the book emphasizes Washington Territory because it has not been studied by scholars as much as other regions, and because it provides a good look into the relationship between the whites in the area and the Chinese. While the author notes the traditional arguments proposed by the whites who lived in the Northwest—which maintained that the Chinese were unwilling…

This article responds to Jonathan Dewald’s “Rethinking the 1 Percent” by examining the case of the “medieval Chinese aristocracy” during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). It proposes that we conceptualize an elite not as a social class with a static relationship to state power and the economic means of production, but rather as a network of families better positioned than any other group in society to overcome new challenges brought about by changing circumstances. From this perspective, one better understands how an elite can survive the demise of institutions that once protected it, the emergence of rival elites tapping into new sources of wealth, and even a revolutionary social movement. The demise of the medieval Chinese aristocracy—as was true of many elites in world history—came as a consequence not of gradual change but rather of catastrophic violence spanning two decades at the turn of the tenth century.

Drawing on institutional studies of the nobility, this comment argues that understanding status as a type of social power is critical to exploring the abrupt fall of the nobility in 1789. The Bourbon state’s manipulation of status both supported and weakened the nobility in important ways. On the one hand, the sale of ennobling offices, the favored position of nobles at the royal court, and the nobility’s ties to high finance created powerful ties between the state and certain segments of the nobility. On the other hand, this situation also enhanced the state’s control over the nobility’s legal status, engendered acrimonious rifts within the nobility, and provoked charges that the nobility’s honor was being degraded. When war and financial crisis revealed that noble privileges could no longer be sustained by the state, a revolutionary situation arose that led to a transfer of sovereignty and then allowed disaffected members of the National Assembly to abolish privileges and eventually the nobility’s legal status itself.

In July 2017, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta approved the constitutional inclusion of Kenya’s South Asian citizens as the nation’s forty-fourth tribe. This came on the eve of a tightly fought general election between Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, both of whom lay a familial claim to the nation. Raila Odinga’s father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, briefly served as vice president to Uhuru Kenyatta’s father, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, before becoming his most ardent and vocal critic. As “fathers of the nation,” Oginga Odinga and Jomo Kenyatta were bitterly divided over the shape their nation would take. Kenyatta deflected his vice president’s leftist opposition with a racializing populist politics that positioned Kenya’s Indian middle class as a colonial hangover that did not belong in the nation. Using new immigration and trade licensing bills that were tabled in Kenya’s National Assembly in 1967, Kenyatta deported large numbers of Indians and legislated Indian shopkeepers out of the country. Fifty years later, in stark contrast to his father’s disavowal, Uhuru Kenyatta’s…

For a good decade now, historians have taken a keen interest in population policies in the modern Middle East. In States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Laura Robson synthesizes much of that literature and makes an innovative twofold contribution. First, she looks not at one case but three—Zionists, Armenians, and Assyrians—and second, she argues for an overall shift in population policies during the interwar years, from transfer to partition. Respective policies were driven principally by France, Britain, and the League of Nations, as well as by Zionists, and such policies were embraced by Armenians and Assyrians. These policies deepened three pre-1914 sets of “ethnonational citizenship” ideas and practices (3), all based on a “racialization of religious difference” (10). These three were Zionist “territorialist” transfer plans to Palestine and elsewhere (e.g., Uganda); colonial practices, also outside the Middle East; and Ottoman-European wars that “turned the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia into an enormous arena of experimental…