OBITUARY

Sir John Elliott

Paul Slack

Pages 3–10

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac023

John Elliott, the historian of old and new worlds, died on 9 March 2022, at the age of 91. For most of this journal’s history he had been a powerful figure in its deliberations, and his conviction that it should aim to be at the ‘cutting edge’ of current historical research helped to determine its content and hence its success.1 He had been a member of the Editorial Board since 1960, and was elected Honorary President of the Past and Present Society in 2013, in succession to Eric Hobsbawm, who had invited him to become a member in the first place, in 1958.

From the journal’s point of view, Elliott’s attractions were obvious. A Scholar of Eton and of Trinity College Cambridge, in 1949 he had switched from foreign languages to history for his degree, and by 1958 he was already an established member of the Cambridge History Faculty, working on a topic — the decline of Spain — which neatly fitted the journal’s interest in papers on ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’.2 Elliott himself, however, was initially inclined to turn Hobsbawm’s invitation down. As he explained in a later interview, he had been ‘very dubious’ about it because the Marxist label in the journal’s subtitle, ‘A Journal of Scientific History’, ‘put a lot of people off’. In the end, however, he was persuaded to join by Lawrence Stone, who had also been approached (along with Trevor Aston), and Stone thought the three of them might ‘make a go of it’ if they went with certain conditions, including dropping the subtitle, in the hope of saving what they considered to be ‘the most promising historical journal in post-war Britain’. The Board agreed, and afterwards Elliott enjoyed being part of ‘what was very much a collective enterprise’, creating what turned out to be ‘the most influential journal in early modern history of my life-time’.

ARTICLES

‘Where Are the Proxenoi?’ Social Network Analysis, Connectivity and the Greek Poleis

William Mack

Pages 11–54

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab036

The aim of this article is to establish a new basis for exploring the network of ancient Greek city-states during the Classical and Hellenistic periods by applying Social Network Analysis to the record of inscriptions recording grants of proxeny. Proxeny was a generalized institution for facilitating interactions between Greek political communities. Because it left a rich and idiosyncratic record in the form of thousands of honorific inscriptions, it represents an important test case for Social Network Analysis. By drawing on work on partial samples of network data, we can identify a clear and historically significant structure in this material, namely a massively unequal hierarchy in the extent to which different communities were the focus of links. This allows us to compare, systematically, the hundreds of Greek city-states in terms of their connectivity in the network. As a result it provides a new empirical basis for testing prevailing models and assumptions about why these communities forged links and mapping the limits of the network. By reading this hierarchy alongside the other information we have, we can identify the role that political, economic and geographic factors played in determining connectivity in this network, and the surprising unimportance of religion.

Forbidden Love in Istanbul: Patterns of Male–Male Sexual Relations in the Early-Modern Mediterranean World

Noel Malcolm

Pages 55–88

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab039

West European visitors to the Ottoman Empire in the early-modern period frequently referred to sodomy. They depicted it as a common practice there, associated particularly with ‘renegades’ (converts to Islam). The report of an investigation into a sexual scandal at the Venetian embassy in Istanbul in 1588, discussed here, shows special sensitivity to this issue. Historians generally discount the comments of visitors to Ottoman territory on this topic, either dismissing them as mere prejudice, or arguing that the practices they observed were equally current throughout western Europe. This article contests both of those assumptions. While prejudice was indeed present, the observations were accurate overall –– as Ottoman sources confirm. The practices were not equally prevalent in western Europe; they were specific to a pan-Mediterranean culture of same-sex relations between adult men and adolescents. But although the practices were essentially the same, there were significant differences between the Ottoman/Muslim Mediterranean societies and those of the Christian western Mediterranean. In the latter, religious and legal norms were more severe, affecting the degree to which such sexual behaviour was public and culturally expressed; in the former, a strong cultural tradition of homoeroticism gave some legitimation to these same-sex relations, and made them more avowable.

Archiving Faith: Record-Keeping and Catholic Community Formation in Eighteenth-Century Mesopotamia

Lucy Parker and Rosie Maxton

Pages 89–133

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab037

This article investigates the archiving practices of a little-known group of Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, the Diyarbakır Chaldeans, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues for a flexible definition of archives, based not on traditional characteristics such as links to a defined institutional repository, but on their purpose of community formation. The loose institutional structure of the Chaldean Church resulted in an unconventional archive, which never had one physical centre and consisted largely of liturgical manuscripts; nonetheless, it recorded recognizably archival material and gained cohesion from the overlapping circles of families, scribes and churches involved in its production, as well as from systematic innovations in scribal practices. The Diyarbakır Chaldean archive not only reflected the distinctive form of the community but also contributed to creating and reshaping it. By recording social ties, it kept these obligations alive for decades and generated ongoing commitments. It also imagined the community on an illusory level, occluding tensions and troubles in order to preserve an idealized image of a church united under pious leadership. This dispersed, mobile archive thus was intimately connected to community formation and contributed to the survival of the Chaldean Church in a time of immense difficulty.

Switzerland, Borneo and the Dutch Indies: Towards a New Imperial History of Europe, c.1770–1850

Bernhard C Schär

Pages 134–167

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab045

When Switzerland was created in 1848, one of its founding fathers went by the name of ‘Borneo Louis’. Before becoming a Swiss state builder, he had served as a mercenary in the Dutch East Indies. There he had founded a family with his native ‘housekeeper’, Silla. In Switzerland, he continued to benefit from Silla’s exploited labour.

Stories such as these seem unusual today, not for historical but for historiographical reasons. Borneo Louis was only one of c.70,000 mercenaries from all over Europe in Dutch imperial services. Silla was one of the countless ‘native concubines’ who were forced to support these men and thereby help the Dutch build their nineteenth-century empire in South East Asia. Other empires, too, depended on auxiliary services from Europeans hailing from regions with intra-European or short-lived empires, or none at all. Recent new imperial histories, however, have remained conceptually limited to the study of interconnections within national empires (mostly the British Empire). Pan-European dimensions of colonial histories have continued to lie outside their focus. Explaining how Switzerland became part of the Dutch imperial project, this article therefore calls for a renewed new imperial history: a history that explains how Europe emerged out of continuous connections across the boundaries of national empires.

The Meanings of a Port City Boundary: Calcutta’s Maratha Ditch, c.1700–1950

Joshua Ehrlich

Pages 168–208

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab032

Global histories have fixated on connections, notably in their treatment of colonial and postcolonial port cities. While such cities have been intensely connected places, however, they have also been intensely bounded ones. The present article takes as an example of this phenomenon the archetypal port city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and its historical boundary, the Maratha Ditch. From the eighteenth century to the twentieth century, the ditch was a vital site of meaning-making that sustained lasting political, legal and social divisions. It separated Calcutta, in an evolving fusion of concrete and abstract, formal and informal ways, from the surrounding province of Bengal and from the rest of India. Nonetheless, for generations of rulers, citizens and outside observers, refiguring or repurposing the ditch was a means to remake the city. The story told here is instructive in two broad respects. Firstly, it suggests a new way to study the history of a port city like Calcutta: from its margins. Secondly, it provides the basis for a new historical geography of the urban world: one attentive to boundaries and connections alike.

Protection Shopping among Empires: Suspended Sovereignty in the Cocos-Keeling Islands

Lauren Benton and Adam Clulow

Pages 209–247

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab023

The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in the Indian Ocean about 1,700 miles west of Australia, remained unresolved from the time of the islands’ settlement in 1827 until their effective incorporation into Australia in 1984. For a century and a half, protection shopping helped to create and sustain the islands’ condition of suspended sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, the ruling family actively cultivated the protection of Dutch and British imperial agents and played one empire against the other. Imperial agents veered between intervention and restraint, and Cocos-Keeling islanders invoked protection to blunt rulers’ power over them. The politics of protection continued into the twentieth century. Despite international attention to self-determination, the Cocos-Keeling Islands were not positioned for statehood, and full and effective integration into the British empire or Australia was perennially delayed. The territory’s history as a place of seemingly permanent semi-autonomy illuminates a global pattern in which protection politics worked to suspend sovereignty and in some cases perpetuate social and racial inequalities, both inside political communities and across the international order.

‘A General Insurrection in the Countries with Slaves’: The US Civil War and the Origins of an Atlantic Revolution, 1861–1866

Samantha Payne

Pages 248–279

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab027

This article reveals how the beginning of US Reconstruction precipitated a revolutionary crisis in Cuba and Brazil, the last two slave societies in the Atlantic World. Throughout the US Civil War, slave-owners in Cuba and Brazil faced the immense challenge of containing black revolutionary currents across the Atlantic. Despite their intensive policing of black transnational networks, many slaves in Cuba and Brazil learned of the Civil War and became convinced that it heralded their emancipation. In response, they walked off plantations, fled to maroon communities, and organized and launched revolts. Although the scale of this insurrectionary violence never reached the same heights as in the Confederacy, the beginning of Reconstruction transformed the political implications of slave rebellion across the hemisphere. The fall of the Confederacy forced slave-owners in Cuba and Brazil to confront the possibility of their violent destruction at the same moment that the apparent radicalization of Republican politics stirred fears of US support for an international slave insurrection. It was in this context that many white elites in both nations became convinced of the necessity for a gradual abolition measure, which they hoped would ensure subaltern loyalty at a moment when revolutionary violence threatened the future of slavery.

Hyakushō in the Arafura Zone: Ecologizing the Nineteenth-Century ‘Opening of Japan’

Manimporok Dotulong

Pages 280–317

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab038

In the 1880s, ordinary fishers and other commoners who were intimately familiar with the seas left the Japanese archipelago in search of bluer waters. Ending up in South-East Asia and Australasia, these hyakushō used their local knowledge of nature to navigate unfamiliar ecological contexts and create ocean-spanning infrastructures capable of facilitating their everyday lives. The resulting transnational connections gave birth to the ‘Arafura Zone’, a largely non-state space where empires had little influence and mechanisms of the global marketplace met with both human and environmental friction. This article tells a new story of Japan’s nineteenth-century global connections. It shows how the so-called ‘Opening of Japan’ was not primarily characterized by the temporality of industrial civilization and the spatiality of an international community of civilized nation-states. Hyakushō developed a new understanding of time and space based on the monsoonal climate and the geographical distribution of marine biota. As a result, they came to share a nature-centric intellectual common ground with those who were more indigenous to the Arafura Zone. Drifting beyond conventional historical narratives of globalization, Japan’s transnational encounter with the Arafura Sea forces us to rethink the possible forms that global connectivity might take.

The Christian Anti-Torture Movement and the Politics of Conscience in France

Rachel M Johnston-White

Pages 318–342

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab025

This article investigates how the concept of ‘conscience’ emerged as a battleground within the French Catholic Church and as a politicized concept with implications for ideas about human rights. State-sponsored torture during the Algerian War (1954–62) prompted dissident Christians to pioneer the use of ‘individual conscience’ as a tool of resistance. The Christians of the anti-torture movement embraced the theologically informed language of conscience alongside a French, secular tradition of rights drawn from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The way that Catholic dissidents thought about rights transcended the secular–religious divide; while recognizing a liberal concept of rights coming out of the French Revolution, these Catholics also insisted upon the spiritual function of individual conscience as a check upon the state. Intra-Catholic debates about conscience thus reveal the political and theological diversity within mid-twentieth-century Christianity, long assumed to have been dominated by actors on the political right, as well as the multiplicity of coexisting ways of speaking about and interpreting human rights.