ARTICLES

Singlewomen in the Late Medieval Mediterranean

Michelle Armstrong-Partida and Susan McDonough

Pages 3–42

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac010

This article challenges a long-entrenched model of two discrete marital regimes in northern and southern Europe. Demographer John Hajnal argued in 1965 that a distinctive north-western European Marriage Pattern emerged post-1700 when a large population of unmarried men and women married in their early to late twenties and formed their own household rather than join a multi-generational household. The corollary to this argument is that women in southern Europe married young and universally, and thus rarely entered into domestic service. Medievalists have embraced and repeated this paradigm, shaping assumptions about the Mediterranean as less developed or ‘less European’ than the north and ignoring the experience of women enslaved throughout the region.

Notaries and judicial officials in medieval Barcelona, Valencia, Mallorca, Marseille, Palermo, Venice, Famagusta and Crete recognized singlewomen owning property, buying, selling and manumitting enslaved people, appointing procurators, committing crimes and making wills. We reintegrate the experiences of singlewomen, both enslaved and free, into the daily life of the medieval Mediterranean. Understanding how these women made community, survived economically and participated in the legal and notarial cultures of their cities reframes our understanding of women’s options outside marriage in the medieval past.

The Impossible Reformation: Protestant Europe and the Greek Orthodox Church

Richard Calis

Pages 43–76

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac003

This article identifies one of the great but unstudied paradoxes in the history of early modern global Christianity: that the stronger the desire for a uniform Christian way of life burned, the deeper the fractures between different Christian denominations began to grow. It explores this issue by examining the learned exchanges between the infamous Greek Orthodox Patriarch Cyril Lucaris (1572–1638) and members of the Dutch Reformed Church. These efforts have often been seen as an expression of Christian ecumenism or as evidence that the early modern Middle East had become yet another arena for Catholic–Protestant rivalry. But once motivations on both sides are placed in the distinctly local religious climate that fostered them neither of these explanatory paradigms suffices. On the contrary: a decentred approach to this material reveals how Protestant and Eastern Christian understandings of what reform meant and how it could be attained were completely distinct and irreconcilable. It is thus imperative to resist any simple application to Middle Eastern Christianity of categories rooted in European Christian traditions and, instead, to tease out how different Christian denominations defined reform differently. Only then can we make good on our commitment to approach early modern global Christianity as a pluriform and multi-centred phenomenon.

The Maghrib in Europe: Royal Slaves and Islamic Institutions in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Thomas Glesener and Daniel Hershenzon

Pages 77–116

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac011

Did a slave mosque really operate for decades, out in the open, during the eighteenth century in the port city of Cartagena in Murcia, Spain? An alarmed Inquisitorial report submitted to the Spanish king in September 1769 left no room for doubt — the hospital of the Muslim arsenal slaves in Cartagena functioned as a mosque.1 Its live-in muezzin recited the adhān, the call to worship, from a room on the second floor, and believers convened twice a day. They left their shoes downstairs, walked up the entrance steps barefoot, kissed the steps, and prayed loudly in a large hall adorned with a lamp with three wicks and floors covered by reed prayer mats. Worse, the report states, not only had the hospital turned into a mosque, but it also acted as a sanctuary that provided asylum for fugitive Muslims. In 1768, a Muslim slave tried to flee Cartagena on the frigate of the Moroccan sultan, who had come to pick up Moroccan slaves as part of the peace agreement signed by Morocco and Spain on 28 May 1767. The slave was handed over to the Spanish authorities but managed to escape again, this time to the mosque, where he was provided with temporary asylum. This sanctuary allowed him to negotiate the conditions of his surrender. Indeed, he submitted himself to the authorities only after he was granted a pardon. The report’s sensationalist tone (‘they kiss the stairs . . . [and pray] in loud voice’) and its last bit about asylum, which proved to be an Inquisitorial fabrication, were intended to lead to the closure of the hospital-mosque.2 The plan succeeded, and in the autumn of 1770 the structure was razed to the ground.

Debasing Indigenous Statehood: Sovereign Monies, Markets and Imperial Power in the Indian Subcontinent, c.1893–1905

G Balachandran

Pages 117–154

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac017

Dense overlapping networks of multiple currencies were a feature of subcontinental commerce and statehood until the twentieth century. Twenty-seven subcontinental states in addition to the Raj issued their own currencies in 1893. Underpinned by a common basis in silver and an extensive market for their bills, they financed trade and circulated in one another’s territories, including British India. By 1905 most currencies had ceased and this sovereign prerogative belonged mainly to the Raj. The suppression of indigenous currency networks by a colonial monetary system presaged a dramatic reconfiguration of native sovereignty and imperial paramountcy. Triggered by silver’s demonetization in British India in 1893, these transformations unfolded amid gold’s elevation as the universal standard and the growth in London’s financial influence. They were cemented by the famines of 1896–1902, which crippled the native states’ finances and accentuated the conflict they faced between famine relief and currency stability. Markets magnified this conflict into a test of sovereign capacity that few states managed to withstand. The consequent redistribution of sovereign capacity between states and markets, and between states according to their ability to control the markets, helped to dematerialize, rearticulate and extend the reach of British power. This subcontinental story of money, markets and indigenous statehood is hence a British imperial story with resonances beyond the empire and its own time.

Migrations of Decolonization, Welfare, and the Unevenness of Citizenship in the UK, France and Portugal

Claire Eldridge and others

Pages 155–193

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac005

Among its many global impacts, decolonization triggered the migration of several million ‘repatriates’ — white settlers or others associated with the imperial power — who left Asia and Africa and ‘returned’ to their European ‘motherlands’. This article explores the arrival of several thousand Anglo-Egyptians into Britain in 1957 following the Suez crisis, the one million pieds-noirs who left Algeria for France in 1962, and the 500,000 retornados who entered Portugal amidst the 1975 Carnation Revolution. Offering an integrated comparison of these three key moments of decolonization via the migrations they triggered, it underscores the importance of citizenship, understood here as both a ‘hard’ legal category and a set of ‘soft’ social practices. The comparison equally demonstrates how, across different national contexts, citizenship was unevenly applied. Despite holding the same rights, returnee-citizens faced discrimination from resident-citizens in subtle (and sometimes less subtle) ways. Moreover, subgroups of returnee-citizens were treated differently by the state, in a process that amounted at times to their physical and social segregation and a racialization of welfare. This unevenness of treatment illuminates how the British, French, and Portuguese national communities were reimagined in the era of decolonization, and the crucial role ‘repatriated’ citizens played in that process.

The Many Values of Night Soil in Wartime China

Nicole Elizabeth Barnes

Pages 194–228

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac021

In March 1940, leaders of the Chongqing night-soil trade union sent a petition to the governor of China’s Sichuan province to contest health officials’ attempts to seize the night-soil industry. Cleanliness in Chongqing, the national capital during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45), held profound significance for China’s hygienic modernity, but Nationalist authorities failed to ensure it. On their part, the petitioners failed to recognize the centrality of odour in health officials’ agenda. These joint failures left the wartime capital mired in muck. This article employs microhistorical analysis of the 1940 petition to highlight a significant shift in olfactory sensibility. Comparison with a similar instance in nearby Hankou eleven years later, when Communist cadres succeeded in breaking the local night-soil gang, elucidates key distinctions between the Nationalist and Communist states. The conclusion considers what might be possible if we imagine using night soil to fertilize soils not as an anti-modern practice but as a sustainable means of processing waste and caring for our planet. To regain a portion of night soil’s many values, we must conquer the obstacles of disease transmission and disgust. The former is a technical problem for which solutions already exist; the latter is a formidable social problem.

Ghana Must Go: Nativism and the Politics of Expulsion in West Africa, 1969–1985

Samuel Fury Childs Daly

Pages 229–261

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac006

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Nigerian and Ghanaian governments staged a series of massive forced removals of one another’s nationals. The first was in Ghana in 1969, and the largest was Nigeria’s 1983 deportation of over one million Ghanaians. A further expulsion from Nigeria happened in 1985, and smaller ones took place in the years that followed. Each was an enactment of the state’s sovereign right to define its national community — and a devastating blow to the principle of free movement in Africa. Using records from Nigeria and elsewhere, ‘Ghana Must Go’ places the expulsions in the longer history of law and nationality policy in the British Empire. Mass expulsions were made possible by colonial-era jurisprudence that tied political membership to indigeneity, often through codified, neo-traditional ‘customary’ laws. The mass deportations of the 1960s–1980s were underwritten by this jurisprudence, even though their immediate causes lay in economic resentment, the failure of regional co-operation, and Ghana and Nigeria’s rocky diplomatic relationship.

VIEWPOINT

The New History of Old Inequality

Trevor Jackson

Pages 262–289

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac009

Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the publication in 2014 of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, income and wealth inequality have returned to public and scholarly interest. Most subsequent discussion has focused on the fall and rise of inequality in the twentieth century, but meanwhile another body of economic history literature has reconstructed long-run inequality dynamics in early modern Europe. This article surveys the new history of old inequality and discusses its three principal findings: first, that between about 1300 and about 1900 inequality increased continuously almost everywhere, meaning there is no clear link between economic growth and inequality. Secondly, the only phenomena that substantially reduced inequality were unprecedented catastrophes. Thirdly, although few things have decreased inequality, many strategies of elite wealth defence have increased it, motivating new comparative concepts like the ‘inequality possibility frontier’ and the ‘extraction ratio’. Inequality will continue to be a subject of urgent political and moral attention, and this field opens up a research agenda that could bridge the methodological divide between economic history as practised by economists and by historians.