OBITUARY

Clare Morton

Pages 3–4

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac014

ARTICLES

Peasants, Market Exchange and Economic Agency in North-Western Iberia, c.850–c.1050

Robert Portass

Pages 5–37

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab001

Our understanding of the economic foundations of rural society in early medieval north-western Iberia remains wedded to explanations that emphasize the structural limitations that framed human activity while seeking to attenuate the economic agency of non-elite groups and individuals. This article argues that the early medieval peasantry of north-western Iberia was not the staid caricature presented by much of the historiography, but a much more economically dynamic section of society. To demonstrate this dynamism, it uses charters to analyse peasant productive strategies that went beyond subsistence. These reveal that peasants not only dabbled in the land market but invested in non-movable capital goods, with the result that some peasants produced surpluses for the express purpose of exchange by the tenth century, fundamentally altering the contours of their communities from within. By examining the evidence concerning peasant ownership of watermills, the article sheds new light on causal explanations for phenomena as diverse as social mobility, the possibilities of commercial integration, and the logic of market exchange. It concludes by contending that narratives focused on uncovering the beginnings of growth must more readily concede that its origins are to be found both beyond as well as within seigneurial contexts.

Transforming the Urban Space: Catholic Survival Through Spatial Practices in Post-Reformation Utrecht

Genji Yasuhira

Pages 39–86

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab014

This article argues that historians have underestimated the agency which Catholics, a politico-religious minority within the Dutch Republic, wielded in surviving the Reformed regime in seventeenth-century Utrecht, the main theatre of the confessional struggle between Calvinists and Catholics on Dutch soil. The Reformed public authorities strategically attempted to deprive Catholics of their spaces where they could live as Catholics, claiming that they were being Catholic too publicly even inside their private homes. Catholics, for their part, persisted in practising their faith not only in their houses, but also in public facilities, tactically deploying diverse spatial practices; they continued to use the urban space as they had in medieval times, and newly appropriated that space as they sought to adjust to the early modern environment of confessional coexistence. Through their spatial practices, Catholics not only actively facilitated their Catholic way of life, but also played an indispensable role in transforming Utrecht from a mono-religious medieval city to a multi-confessional early modern city. The Utrecht case thus bears witness to a hitherto neglected, yet surprisingly dynamic agency exercised by politico-religious minorities in shaping an urban landscape of coexistence.

Cotton Textiles and the Industrial Revolution in a Global Context

Giorgio Riello

Pages 87–139

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab016

In recent decades, economic historians have revisited the Industrial Revolution in a global context. Their interpretations rely mostly on comparative methods. This article shows instead that there is a profound and significant relationship between industrialization and global exchange, and that consumption of cotton textiles was central to such a relationship. Yet, historians should not consider global trade in the context of separate world regions. The history of cotton textiles reveals the extent to which the worldwide integration of different spaces of commerce and consumption, most especially those of the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, brought advantages to European traders and manufacturers. Taking this view, the article argues that the demand and consumption of textiles were important in determining the scale as well as the shape and specialisms of European textile production. This was not only the demand generated by European consumers — as supported by much of the European ‘consumer revolution’ literature — but also the demand of a wider group of users in the Atlantic region. The reshaping of trade and consumption in turn had important consequences for the production of cotton textiles both in India and in Europe.

Domestic Servants and Master–Servant Regulations in Colonial Calcutta, 1750s–1810s

Nitin Sinha

Pages 141–188

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab021

In the Indian historiography of law and labour, master–servant regulations are an under-explored subject. Based on English precedents, these regulations acquired a specifically colonial nature when applied to control labour in the growing city of Calcutta. Questioning the assumed associations of domestic servants with privacy and informality, this article shows that in fact they were unambiguously one of the earliest groups to be regulated. It approaches the law from both ends, from its formal promulgation to its actual implementation. It analyses various regulations from 1759 to the 1810s that were passed to control employment relations between masters and servants, while for the first time analysing three different sets of court records to reconstruct the history of justice and the enforcement of law. It argues that domestic servants engaged with the law strategically: they made complaints of the non-payment of wages against their Indian masters but never brought such charges against their European masters. This absence is better understood if we unpack the hidden histories behind the juristic terms of these complaints, such as neglect of duty, running away (with or without advance payment of wages), demand for exorbitant wages, and theft, and see them as interlinked modes of control exercised under the master–servant regulations.

Aliens in a Revolutionary World: Refugees, Migration Control and Subjecthood in the British Atlantic, 1790S–1820S

Jan C Jansen

Pages 189–231

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab022

During the political and military upheavals between the 1770s and 1820s, societies and states across the Atlantic world grappled with intricate issues of political belonging and sovereignty. Along with the rise of new concepts of national citizenship, older concepts of monarchical or imperial subjecthood underwent fundamental changes. While scholars tend to ascribe these transformations to revolutionary innovation, the movement of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing revolutions and violent conflict was no less important in reshaping the terms of political membership. In response to these migrations, national and colonial governments passed legislation meant to control the mobility of foreign refugees. Based on the case of three men of colour, the sons of Haitian refugees, deported from Jamaica in 1823, this article explores the wider impact the regulation of alien status had. The 1823 incident set off a major legal battle and a sprawling debate about the terms of membership in the transforming British Empire. The affair raised fundamental questions about the status and rights of foreigners, the definition of who was a subject of the British Crown, and about how sovereignty was to be conceived in a period of continuous territorial transfers and military occupations.

Apostasy in the Baltic Provinces: Religious and National Indifference in Imperial Russia

Catherine Gibson and Irina Paert

Pages 233–278

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab013

There has been a rich body of scholarship in recent years that challenges the accepted idea of the spread of nationalist thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by highlighting the flexible, ambiguous, opportunistic or instrumental ways in which the inhabitants of central and eastern Europe engaged with ideas about nationhood. However, so far these discussions of ‘national indifference’ have not extensively examined the crossovers with flexible and ambivalent attitudes and actions regarding matters of religion, such as oscillating religious commitment, hybrid forms of religiosity and conversion. This article examines cases of conversion and reconversion (apostasy) between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy in the Baltic provinces of the Russian empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, in order to deepen our understanding of how institutionally determined forms of religious ascription often became blurred at the level of everyday activities as people exercised choice over matters of faith for various personal, social and economic reasons. By extending the concept of national indifference through an examination of religious indifference, the cases under consideration elucidate how confession became entangled with ideas about national and imperial belonging in the late nineteenth century.

Superstition and Statecraft in Late Qing China: Towards a Global History

Albert Wu

Pages 279–316

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab017

The late nineteenth-century age of empire was also an age of anti-superstition. In China, Western missionaries, diplomats and travellers labelled practices that resisted Western technologies and ideas as ‘superstitious’. This article examines how a group of Qing scholar-officials, all members of the diplomatic corps, interpreted and ultimately defended these customs. Conventionally viewed as tragic figures unable to transcend a ‘Sinocentric’ world view, they were deeply embedded in the global circulations of empire. During their time in Europe and the United States, they compared Western culture and the development of capitalism with the changes they saw in China. For these cosmopolitan actors, Chinese popular cultural practices offered potential sources of anti-imperial resistance to Western presence in China. Yet they also had differing, at times conflicting, visions for how the Chinese state should relate to the ‘superstitious’. Some argued that they needed to be kept in place, undisturbed from the onslaught of Western influence; others believed the ‘superstitious’ could be mobilized as an anti-imperial force.

Of Maiming and Privilege: Rethinking War Disability through the Case of Francoist Spain, 1936–1989

Stephanie Wright

Pages 317–350

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab030

This article attempts to reconfigure current historiographical debates on war disability, which have hitherto tended to rely on ‘masculinity’ as an analytical framework. Instead, the case of the Francoist war disabled of the Spanish Civil War underscores the need to consider war disability in relation to broader social hierarchies, and the socio-political topographies in which these operate. In doing so, it is possible to understand how the Francoist war disabled occupied a relatively privileged space in twentieth-century Spain, despite and even because of the impairments they sustained in the Civil War. At the same time, Francoist war disability benefits left much to be desired, and clear differences emerged between the experiences of ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ veterans. In this sense, the Francoist war disabled were both favoured and under-served by the regime’s war disability policies. This research has broader relevance to scholars working on contexts beyond modern Spain, as it disrupts the traditional association of physical impairment with marginality, while highlighting the fluidity of perceptions and experiences of war disability according to socio-political context.

‘Water Has Aroused the Girls’ Hearts’: Gendering Water and Soil Conservation in 1950s China

Micah S Muscolino

Pages 351–387

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab009

Water and soil conservation in the village of Dengjiabao in Gansu province, north-west China, gained nationwide renown through state-led campaigns against erosion during the 1950s. This was deeply interconnected with shifting conceptions of women’s work and had far-reaching effects on their everyday lives. Investigation of these conservation programmes adds to recent efforts to integrate gender and environmental history. Since the gendered division of labour in rural China dictated that women should do the work of acquiring fuel and water, measures that conserved these resources brought genuine improvements for them. They also reshaped local marriage patterns by making previously resource-starved villages more attractive to young women from other areas. However, a dissonance existed between the official propaganda and the experience of conservation for rural women. Oral history interviews and archival documents show that balancing the demands of conservation work with household responsibilities intensified the pressures placed upon women. Mobilization for the highly militarized conservation campaigns that were an integral part of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61), and the famine they helped to precipitate, subjected women to unprecedented burdens that affected their domestic lives and had an enduring effect on their health and well-being.