ARTICLES

Capital Accumulation, Supply Networks and the Composition of the Roman Senate, 14–235 CE

John Weisweiler

Pages 3–44

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa046

In the first two centuries CE, the Roman senate transformed from an assembly of Italian landowners into a multi-regional group. The admission of thousands of provincials into Rome’s governing elite is often taken as evidence for the successful integration of subject populations. This article challenges such views of the senate as an inclusive institution. It shows that the overwhelming majority of non-Italian senators came from merely four (out of more than thirty) provinces: Baetica (in southern Spain), Narbonensis (Provence), Africa (the coastlines of Algeria, Tunisia and Libya) and Asia (western Anatolia). The elites of these regions entertained close links to Italy since the second century BCE. In the first centuries CE, they acquired enormous wealth through predation, through investments in capital-intensive agriculture and through their ability to exploit state supply networks for their own benefit. The steep rise in the number of provincial senators should thus not be read as evidence for the large-scale participation of conquered groups in the imperial administration. Rather, it chiefly was a product of the new opportunities for wealth accumulation and exploitation generated by Roman imperialism.

The Bishop as Lawmaker in Late Medieval Europe

Rowan Dorin

Pages 45–82

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa045

Throughout the later Middle Ages, bishops across Latin Christendom issued statutes to guide the clergy and instruct the faithful within their dioceses. Following the lead of medieval jurists, modern scholars have understood this local episcopal legislation as disseminating and reinforcing the so-called ‘universal law’ promulgated by popes and general church councils. Yet a closer look at the surviving corpus of diocesan statutes reveals bishops’ readiness to wield selective citations and editorial omissions so as to shape local knowledge of church law in accordance with episcopal priorities. More broadly, this article contends that such local law-making also offered bishops a means to resist the papacy’s increasing claims to legislative and jurisdictional supremacy within the church. Faced with a wealth of new legislation that was firmly papalist in its origin and presentation, many bishops opted to emphasize their law-making authority by framing their borrowings of the universal law as emanations of their own episcopal will. The resulting corpus of diocesan statutes thus expressed in practice a vision of episcopal authority that differed sharply from the prescriptions of popes and jurists, and which presaged the explosive ecclesiological controversies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

A Pathology of Sacral Kingship: Putrefaction in the Body of Charles Xi of Sweden

Karin Sennefelt

Pages 83–117

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa025

This article uses the ailing body of King Charles XI of Sweden (1655–97) to explore how the king’s physicality was intimately connected not only with the nature of his kingship, its sacredness and legitimacy, but also with his personal faith. It shows that, while Charles’s body was exceptional in that it was the body of the king, at the same time it was reacting to illness and sin like any other Lutheran body. It also projected the body’s capabilities on a larger scale. In particular, the lethal putrefaction inside his belly came to play an important part in interpreting his kingship. These ideas had an impact that extended from his own stomach pains, via the anxiety of his suffering people, to the ending of absolute rule. By following the analogies that contemporaries drew from the king’s autopsy and his physicians’ notes, from sermons, official proclamations, diaries, weather reports, poetry, correspondence and prophecies, this article uncovers the powerful resemblances that connected Charles’s body with nature, his people, the realm and the divine. In the end it was the gathering of the cosmos into Charles’s body that paved the way for direct criticism of absolutism itself.

Care Work and the Family in Catholic Reformation Tuscany

Erin Maglaque

Pages 119–150

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa030

This article examines the care work undertaken by wet-nurses employed by Florence’s foundling hospital, the Spedale degli Innocenti. Left in a basin outside the Innocenti, infants were nursed for a few days in the hospital before being assigned to the homes of wet-nurses living in the villages and remote sharecropped farms of rural Tuscany. Some wet-nurses committed ‘fraud’ — so labelled by the institution — by contriving to receive a wage for wet-nursing their own infants, covertly exchanging the infant delegated to them by the hospital in return for their own. Their ‘fraud’ allows us to challenge assumptions by both historians and feminist economists concerning commercialization and measurement of women’s work; historians might more critically reflect on the systems of monitoring and auditing women’s work that gave rise to our archives. Finally, by receiving a wage for mothering, these wet-nurses allow us to perceive the historical contingency of our most deeply naturalized assumptions about the nature of work and the family. Wet-nursing fraud reveals that definitions of work were always predicated upon concomitant definitions of the family.

The Rise of the Parish Welfare State in England, C.1600–1800*

Brodie Waddell

Pages 151–194

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa027

The world’s first nationwide, publicly funded welfare system emerged and solidified in England over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its influence on society and economy during this period was profound, but this article is the first attempt to determine the scale of its impact by examining the amount of money annually spent on relief across the whole period. Drawing on data from 184 widely dispersed parishes over more than two centuries and a new estimate for spending in c.1600, it shows that poor relief experienced alternating phases of rapid expansion, relative stability and occasionally outright retrenchment. Levels of redistribution were pushed higher by both ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ factors. Specifically, trends in relief spending are compared to other indices such as population, economic expansion, central government revenues, labourers’ wages and inflation to show how the growth of poor relief related to wider demographic and economic changes. Such comparisons make it possible to think more clearly about causation: how much of the growth in spending can be attributed to such developments? While law, demography, inflation and other well-attested factors certainly contributed to the rise of this early modern welfare system, the poor themselves may well have played an important role.

African Cultures and Creolization on an Eighteenth-Century St Kitts Sugar Plantation

Stephen D Behrendt and others

Pages 195–234

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa023

Ottoman and Egyptian Quarantines and European Debates on Plague in the 1830S–1840S

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

Pages 235–270

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa017

In the 1830s, plague, which had been all but forgotten by most Europeans, was on everyone’s lips again. Shortly after the Ottoman and Egyptian governments instituted their first permanent quarantines, the disease broke out in the Levant and the Nile delta, and the global medical community watched anxiously to see whether these new western Mediterranean-style quarantines would be able to contain it within the eastern Mediterranean. By tracing two Russian medical expeditions from the Black Sea port of Odessa to the Ottoman empire and Egypt in the 1840s, this article examines the world of European medical practitioners who engaged in vigorous debates about plague and its prevention. Did the disease have a ‘birthplace’ somewhere in the Middle East? Did it spread through contact with its victims, or was it omnipresent in the bad air? Russian, French, British and other medics questioned old assumptions about plague and its contagiousness, while testing out their hypotheses in Ottoman and Egyptian domains. By the 1840s, the Middle East had become a global site for epidemiological research, driving the internationalization of prevention against epidemic. Meanwhile, Ottoman and Egyptian quarantines, and the elusive nature of plague, became entangled with European political ambitions and commercial interests in the Middle East.

Death in the Archives: Witnessing War in Ireland, 1919–1921

Anne Dolan

Pages 271–300

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab003

In a relatively brief, not very lethal, but meticulously documented guerrilla war in Ireland there is an opportunity to reflect on who historians choose to listen to when writing about violence. Across 1920–21 thousands of inquests captured the voices of the men, women and sometimes children who were the first to describe and define the act of killing in this conflict, but who very quickly fell out of the historical record after that point. This article considers the contribution these bystanders can make to a history of violence, and some of the challenges their evidence presents. By witnessing death were they an integral part of how killing was meant to be understood? Are they fundamental to an understanding of how terror worked, and did they, by their presence, by the way they spoke of what they saw, contribute to why so few deaths were needed for the message to be understood in the Irish context? Ultimately, these witnesses also raise questions about the reactions they prompted then as well as now. Is it easier to hear of killing from a combatant than from a child, and are there consequences for the history of violence in the making of that choice?

Sons and Daughters of the Soil: Politics and Protest of Kenyan Resettlement to Tanzania, 1961–1968

Kara Moskowitz

Pages 301–337

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab005

This article focuses on contestations over an international resettlement programme to move landless Kenyans of Gikuyu ethnicity to Tanzania during the early 1960s. It centres on three interconnected issues of decolonization: migration, statecraft and humanitarianism. Forced migration was integral to post-colonial statecraft, as both colonial and independent actors used displacement to construct their imagined nation state. In this case, the spatial ordering of politics, which focused on securing the profitable interior, departs from conventional narratives about refugees and nation-building. The colonial authorities in Kenya attempted to move Gikuyu not because of their ethnic or religious identity, but because they were poor and made populist claims to land. The withdrawing colonial power partnered with the post-colonial Tanzanian government and with humanitarian agencies. Through their involvement in this programme, aid agencies continued a long tradition of engaging in forced resettlement, and the relief they offered diminished the effectiveness of migrants’ claims to return to Kenya. Despite the power of the institutions involved, landless Gikuyu made compelling claims in the language of human rights, and local politicians encouraged dissent, while at the national level, Kenyan officials, by then part of an interim state, refused to support the programme publicly, illustrating the complexities of shared governance and bureaucracy at the end of empire.