ARTICLES

Searching for Professional Women in the Mid to Late Roman Textile Industry

Anna C Kelley

Pages 3–43

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac007

Since the 1960s, feminist historiography has been hard at work challenging established narratives of women’s roles in past societies, although with greater impact in some disciplines than others. Studies of production in the ancient world, in particular, continue to exclude women from discussions of professional labour. When women do appear in texts, modern scholarship has tended to treat them either as exceptional cases, or as part of an unskilled, casual workforce. Utilizing a variety of source materials, particularly Egyptian papyri, this article examines women’s labour in the mid to late Roman textile industry, which in recent historiography has typically been relegated to the category of ‘domestic’ production. Drawing upon a comparative model for women’s manufacturing roles in the Middle Ages to highlight important distinctions between women’s roles and their documentation in manufacturing between time periods, it becomes evident that Roman women were crucial actors at all stages of commercial textile production, although they possessed limited levels of control within the industry. Establishing women within the better-evidenced Roman textile sector, despite legal and social norms that historically obscured them, opens the possibility of finding professional women in other industries in the ancient world, and continues the process of re-evaluating the economic history of women throughout the ages.

Papering Over Protest: Contentious Politics and Archival Suppression in Early Modern Venice

Maartje van Gelder and Filippo de Vivo

Pages 44–78

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab040

This article studies the intertwined processes of popular protest and archival suppression in early modern Venice. It concentrates on a cycle of contention extending over several months in 1569, including a labour protest that started among the workers of the state shipyard and turned into a large revolt, anonymous placards and food riots. Such was the extent of the unrest that a major explosion in the shipyard raised suspicion of sabotage. Eventually, the government had to capitulate to the workers’ demands. This cycle of protests in Venice, a city normally renowned for peace and concord, has left minimal traces in the official records: the government tried to suppress the protests not only in practice but also on paper. It carried out convictions in secret, obliterated the revolt from its archives, buried any mention of protest under countless other records, and elided dissent from published histories. By using a variety of non-governmental sources, it is possible to investigate how contentious politics were written out of government records, and hence of history. Manipulating archives was always easier than subduing people: the more power was contested in the streets, the more it needed to be asserted in the archive.

Water, Fish and Property in Colonial India, 1860–1890

Devika Shankar

Pages 79–114

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab043

Almost exactly a hundred years after the Permanent Settlement of 1793 revolutionized property relations in Bengal, a far less studied legislation would subtly extend the rule of property to include the province’s waters. Bengal’s Private Fisheries Protection Act 1889, which is usually regarded as having been motivated by conservationist or economic concerns, was in fact an attempt to resolve intractable legal problems surrounding the status of flowing waters and fish that had confounded judges and colonial officials in India for decades. Could water be owned like land? And could fish swimming in open waters be claimed as property? These questions would give rise to a number of important disputes in colonial India in the late nineteenth century, during a time associated with unprecedented changes in the agrarian economy. Coinciding with other legal manoeuvres that increasingly helped to render water as property in other parts of the world, the Private Fisheries Protection Act and important judgments that preceded it helped to create exceptional private rights over flowing waters in colonial India. Turning to these developments, this article examines the ways in which judges attempted to resolve contradictions generated by water’s very materiality in an economy that rested so heavily on property.

Frontiers of Civilization in the Age of Mass Migration from Eastern Europe

Cristina Florea

Pages 115–150

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab041

Between the 1870s and 1914, tens of thousands of peasants left Austria-Hungary’s easternmost provinces of Galicia and Bukovina, heading for the Americas. This article places this episode in the context of contemporary global labour migrations while also emphasizing the distinctive characteristics of this mass exodus. Unlike most migrants around the world, Galicians and Bukovinans emigrated overseas rather than internally; their destinations included the United States, Canada, Brazil and Argentina. By moving, the migrants transformed from objects of Austria’s ‘civilizing mission’ in its eastern borderlands into vehicles for multiple, competing imperial expansion and civilizing projects overseas. From an obstacle to Austria’s ambitions to modernize its eastern periphery, the peasant migrants turned into a disputed resource, simultaneously expanding and threatening Austria’s sovereignty. Paradoxically, because they were less economically developed and more peripheral than their counterparts elsewhere in the empire, Galicians and Bukovinans were more sensitive to shifts in global labour markets than to the policies imposed by their own state officials.

Criminalization of Abortion in Late Qing and Republican China

Aymeric Xu

Pages 151–180

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab044

The offence of abortion was a Western legal disposition introduced into late Qing China in the 1900s and it remained in effect during the Republican period. In Imperial China, abortion did not constitute a criminal offence, and foetal life was generally considered inferior to human life. The widespread humanization of the foetus in early twentieth-century China was closely intertwined with the nationalist ideology that exhorted women to reproduce for the nation. In this narrative, the foetus was valued as a future citizen, and abortion came to be seen as a demographic calamity for the nation. Abortion was also condemned by conservatives who depreciated it as a scandalous act mostly attempted by women engaged in ‘illicit’ sexual relationships. Although the 1935 Criminal Code decriminalized therapeutic abortion, it was still illegal to terminate a pregnancy resulting from rape. In this regard, the vision of legal Orientalism that portrays Chinese law as the inferior other to modern Western law is problematic, as certain aspects of Chinese legal tradition may provide a more appropriate protection of personal choices.

Writing the Paris Commune in the Warsaw Ghetto

Andrew Sloin

Pages 181–211

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac004

This article examines the emergence and abrupt disappearance of discourses about the Paris Commune in the global Yiddish public sphere during the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing upon publications produced in transnational centres of Yiddish culture, it traces the rise of the Paris Commune as a historical trope through which Jewish authors sought to make sense of the class and anti-Jewish racial violence that erupted throughout the era of social revolution. As a narrative of class violence that exploded within the national body, the Commune also provided a political framework to critique dominant structures of power and privilege within Jewish society. Writing and re-writing the history of the Commune thus became a central mechanism to inculcate the politics of socialist internationalism among Yiddish readers. With the onset of the inter-war crisis and the rise of fascism, the Commune returned as a key trope through which to comprehend the existential threats to Jewish life and the politics of internationalism, globally, culminating in a remarkable retelling by Abraham Blum, written in the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, which laid bare the political and class dynamics at the core of Nazi eliminationist violence.

Oil, Money and Decolonization in South Asia

Matthew Shutzer

Pages 212–245

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac001

Why did oil become a privileged object for debating economic sovereignty during the Cold War? Recent scholarship has attempted to answer this question by drawing attention to decolonizing struggles for oil nationalization across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. At the core of these inquiries is the presumption that a global proliferation of oil production after 1945 — now referred to as ‘the great acceleration’ — reflected a growth in global demand for fossil fuels, and that oil’s economic significance thus motivated new political claims over national oil reserves. This article takes a different position by turning to one of the earliest projects to build a post-colonial national oil programme, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Commission, under the socialist politician K. D. Malaviya. Using Malaviya’s project to trace the international politicization of oil in the 1950s and 1960s, it demonstrates how sovereignty over oil was used to contest the structures of unequal currency valuation and foreign debt enforced by the Bretton Woods institutions and the Western bloc. Rather than a source of fuel, Indian politicians understood the struggle over oil as a struggle about money, and the power of global financial interdependence in demarcating the political horizons of post-colonial sovereignty.

VIEWPOINT

Globalizing the Second World War

Andrew Buchanan

Pages 246–281

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab042

Entrenched within national histories, the Second World War has largely resisted the ‘global turn’ despite its eminent globality. The broad reconceptualization presented here views the Second World War as a paroxysm of worldwide war (December 1941−September 1945) embedded within a capacious cycle of regional wars and revolutions beginning with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and ending in Korea in 1953. This expanded temporal frame is intertwined with a broadening of spatial horizons that allows the assimilation of world regions from Latin America to sub-Saharan Africa, facilitates the integration of transnational flows of matériel, people and ideas, and underscores hybridity and popular agency. These conceptual shifts challenge the reified imaginary of the war of 1939–45, blurring ‘war’ and ‘post-war’ and allowing us to picture an American-led world order emerging directly from the war while illuminating the fighting that continued uninterrupted by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This approach explores the tension between global and national histories — itself a reflection of the contradiction between capitalism’s push for worldwide markets and the nation states within which it is organized — and views American hegemony as the primary outcome of the long war while highlighting the qualifications posed by the Chinese Revolution, the strengthening of the USSR, and the rise of anti-colonial struggles.