ARTICLES

City States in the Later Medieval Mediterranean World

Patrick Lantschner

Pages 3–49

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab004

This article offers a comparative study of city states in the Christian and Islamic spheres of the later medieval Mediterranean world, with a particular focus on Italy, Syria and al-Andalus. Medieval city states are not usually associated with the Islamic world, but rather with a narrative that has foregrounded the exceptional nature of European cities in world history, especially the famous city republics in Northern and Central Italy, and the role that city states played in the formation of European states. Yet city states were a phenomenon that could be observed across urbanized regions of the Mediterranean world where cities turned into important political arenas in the context of sustained political fragmentation. City states are best approached as political systems that were characterized by brittle regimes and experienced high levels of political volatility: they often lacked a clear boundary between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of city states and were characterized by the multiple political organizations that crystallized in, and fought hard to control, urban political space. The most commonly shared type of political organization in city states was the urban lordship, but city-based lords usually found themselves in intense competition with elite-based collective associations, families and factions, and popular political organizations.

Christian Hospitality and the Case for Religious Refuge in Interregnum England

Jeremy Fradkin

Pages 51–85

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab007

This article shows how English supporters of Jewish immigration in the 1650s articulated a universal model of Christian hospitality for all foreigners fleeing religious persecution, regardless of whether they adhered to the Protestant faith of their English hosts. It thus urges a reconsideration of the widespread assumption that European Christians in this era were willing only to admit their own co-religionists as refugees. At the same time, however, the article points to the 1650s as a pivotal turning point in the relationship between the resettlement of refugees and the development of the British Empire. Severe crises of depopulation in newly conquered Ireland and Jamaica prompted a proliferation of schemes to resettle refugees in those two spaces. Empire, it was argued, would allow the English to be benevolent and charitable without having to share their own country with people different from themselves.

Time Warps During the French Revolution

Rhys Jones

Pages 87–125

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa048

On 10 August 1792, the Parisian sans-culottes surrounded the Tuileries Palace, overthrew the monarchy and helped to found a Republic. What might otherwise have taken centuries to achieve appeared to materialize within hours. During the preceding weeks, sans-culotte discourse began to coalesce around the belief that a demonstration of collective violence could enable France to bypass the ordinary laws of history and thereby realize, instantaneously, the revolutionary ideal of regeneration. It would create, in effect, a time warp. While historians are familiar with the perception of accelerated time that accompanied the Revolution, insufficient attention has been paid to ways in which time, as a discursive category, remained circumscribed by ideas of space. It was problematized as an interminable distance, a gulf or abyss, that separated present and future, nullifying the sense of limitless possibility unleashed in 1789. The process of political radicalization that culminated in 10 August was prompted not so much by a desire to quicken time as by a need to escape it altogether. In centring upon a micro-historical analysis of the time discourse that accompanied 10 August, this article reassesses the theories of temporality that have emerged in the historiography of the Revolution by foregrounding the perspective of lived experience.

Seeing Like the Sea: A Multispecies History of the Ceylon Pearl Fishery 1800–1925

Tamara Fernando

Pages 127–160

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab002

The pearl fishery of Ceylon was a lucrative source of pearls as well as a theatre of colonial power. But instead of narrating a story of abstracted governmentality, this paper dives below the waves, braiding Tamil poetry with scientific material relating to the oyster and state sources concerning fishery administration. Taken together, these unearth a multi-species history of the human relationship to the seas. In the same way that pearl divers’ labour was a mode of knowing nature, so too, natural processes and marine creatures shaped, in turn, the economic, social and cultural worlds at the fishery. This nacreous, layered approach combines natural history, maritime labour and historical ecology to explore the fragile and interlocking balance below the waves which extended beyond humans to the molluscs, sharks, boring sponges and parasitic tapeworms of the Gulf of Mannar. The archive around the pearl fishery advances the animal and ecological histories of the Indian Ocean and also points towards ways of suturing the gulf between Indian and Sri Lankan scholarship.

Mass Media and the Colonial Informant: Messaoud Djebari and the French Empire, 1880–1901

Arthur Asseraf

Pages 161–192

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab008

The nineteenth century saw an explosion of mass media as well as an expansion of colonial states. These two processes mutually influenced each other, and at the intersection lay a thin layer of individuals who could gain inordinate power to influence global information flows. This article follows the career of one such individual, Messaoud Djebari, an Algerian man who generated several controversies by fabricating information first in Tunisia in 1881, and then across West Africa and France in 1892–5. Djebari’s case suggests that some men trained to act as colonial intermediaries could end up playing important roles in shaping the circulation of information well beyond their territory of origin. Colonial informants were defined less by their role within a given colonial territory than by an ability to portray themselves as conduits to valuable information inaccessible to Europeans, irrespective of the location. Beyond the colonial context, this calls our attention to a particular practice of information manipulation characteristic of this age: the art of making oneself into a conduit by passing off one’s opinions as somebody else’s information.

Hidden Spaces of Empire: Italian Colonists in Nineteenth-Century Peru

Lucy Riall

Pages 193–233

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab010

Among the clichés in modern European history, one of the most common is of Italy as ‘the least of the Great Powers’, unable to punch above its weight in the international arena and classed as a ‘latecomer’ to imperial conquest. In this article, I suggest instead that historians have been looking in the wrong place, and in the wrong period, for evidence of Italian ambition. By concentrating on territorial acquisitions in Africa, they are assessing only a small, relatively unproductive and arguably atypical slice of Italy’s global presence. I argue that even before national unification, and long before acquiring a formal Empire, Italy built a global influence structured by the activities of overseas migrants. Yet, despite the recent ‘turn’ to global history and the stress on diversity in colonial experience, the chronology and geography of the European nation-state still shape our understanding of nineteenth-century Empire. Looking at the hugely successful Italian colony in Peru, at both its commercial and scientific interests and at a violent attempt to establish a settler colony in Chanchamayo, in the Peruvian Amazon, I argue that this Italian world was driven not a nation state but relied instead on a common culture, a culture that was created by a capacity for local assimilation, by Catholic notions of civilisation and by ideas of white racial superiority. Modern imperialism was shaped as much by ‘lesser’ powers, often before – or without – the nation-state, and in continuity with the practices of the early-modern period. Moreover, mundane migrants could be the most successful empire-builders. I conclude with a call to take note of the full and diverse range of nineteenth-century colonial activities, and not to assume the primacy of formal Empires in the period of ‘High Imperialism.’

Transforming a Brazilian Aeronaut into a French Hero: Celebrity, Spectacle, and Technological Cosmopolitanism in the Turn-of-the-Century Atlantic

Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira

Pages 235–275

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab011

This article explains how the Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont, who at the turn of the twentieth century became the first global celebrity aeronaut, operated as a symbol of ‘technological cosmopolitanism’ — a world view that ostensibly promoted a vision of global unity through technology-enabled exchanges while simultaneously reproducing a core-periphery imagined geography that threatened to erase marginalized populations. Technological cosmopolitanism fitted snugly within the rubric of the Third Republic’s aspiring universalism, which assumed that France offered a model to be emulated around the world, but it was not hegemonic. If for the French appropriating Santos-Dumont meant safeguarding France’s leadership in aeronautics and assuaging their claims of universality, for Brazilians the elision was marked by ambiguity. Brazil’s First Republic hungered for heroes, and authorities saw Santos-Dumont as a symbol of modernity that showed that its place in world history was more than peripheral, even though that very vision was shaped by a Paris-centric world view. But marginalized Afro-Brazilians also found ways to appropriate a white ‘Frenchified’ Brazilian and reimagine their place in a cosmopolitan order. Technological cosmopolitanism evoked a world united by transportation, communication and exchange, but imagining who got to construct and partake in that community was a process continuously marked by erasures and reinsertions.

Vernacular Discourses Of Gender Equality In The Post-War British Working Class

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson

Pages 277–313

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab012

Why did women’s roles change so dramatically in the West in the period after 1945? These years saw major changes in those roles, and in dominant understandings of female selfhood, from a model based on self-abnegation to one based on self-fulfilment. The roots of this shift have often been located in the post-1968 feminist movement and in economic change. Examining this question through the lens of Great Britain, this article, however, centres working-class women as drivers of these changes, drawing on oral history interviews with over 100 women from coalfield communities. In the decades after 1950, these women constructed a new vernacular discourse of gender equality which had profound implications for the position of women in society. This vernacular discourse shared some similarities with post-1968 feminism, but rather than focusing on the division of domestic and paid labour, or sexual violence, it emphasized women’s autonomy, individuality and voice. In constructing it, working-class women drew on pervasive post-war ideas about equality and democracy, discourses of individualism and individual fulfilment, and discourses of ‘companionate’ marriage and ‘child-centred’ parenting in order to make claims for women’s rights. Through doing so, they constructed women not only as wives and mothers, but also as free and equal individuals.

VIEWPOINT

Viewpoint New Approaches to the ‘Plague of Justinian’

Peter Sarris

Pages 315–346

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab024

This viewpoint is meant as a contribution to debate over the nature and significance of the ‘Justinianic Plague’, which struck Western Eurasia between the sixth and eighth centuries CE, and the methodological challenges posed by attempting to reconcile historical evidence with that derived from the realm of the Natural Sciences. In recent years, major advances have been made in our genetic understanding of the Justinianic Plague. Yet growing scientific interest in the disease has coincided with a concerted effort amongst some historians to seek to downplay its historical importance. This article surveys our current state of historical and scientific understanding with respect to the sixth-century pandemic, responds to the recent attempts to argue that the disease had only a minimal impact on the societies that it struck, and considers how historians should respond to the burgeoning scientific evidence in order to take study of the plague forward. For co-operation between geneticists, environmental scientists, archaeologists and historians, it argues, offers the chance to transform our understanding of how, when and where the plague spread and to assess its impact across the Afro-Eurasian world as a whole, and not just on the Mediterranean, for which we have our best written sources.