ARTICLES
Out of the West: Formation of a Permanent Plague Reservoir in South-Central Germany (1349–1356) and its Implications
Philip Slavin
Pages 3–51
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa028
This article deals with the origins and spread of the second outbreak of fourteenth-century plague pandemic, the pestis secunda, which swept over West Eurasia and North Africa between 1356 and 1366. Unlike the Black Death, its immediate predecessor, which seems to have originated in Central Asia, the pestis secunda emerged in Central Germany, most likely in the Frankfurt region, in summer 1356. Having seeded its new reservoir, the plague radiated from Central Germany, a landlocked region, into other parts of West Eurasia and North Africa, via inland routes. The inland mode of transmission is at odds with the geographic spread of the Black Death, whereby the plague arrived in West Eurasian and North African ports via maritime trade routes. To appreciate the appearance of the Central Germany plague reservoir in the early 1350s, the wider ecological, climatic and socio-economic context of the Frankfurt region is scrutinized, on the basis of textual, palaeoclimatic and palaeogenetic evidence. Although beyond the remit of this article, it argues that the Central German reservoir may have become the origin of recurrent late-medieval and early-modern plague outbreaks.
The Art of Mercato: Buying City-States in Renaissance Tuscany
Michael Martoccio
Pages 53–99
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa021
Italian communes from 1300–1600 bought and sold numerous towns and castles from Crete (enfeoffed to Venice in 1205) to Arezzo (offered to Florence in 1384) to Tabarka (given as mortgage to a Genoese family in 1540). Despite the popularity of this custom, however, existing scholarship claims Renaissance cities expanded territorially through violent conquests that centralized government finances and promoted militant imperialist discourses. Drawing on case studies of the Florentine purchase of two cities — Lucca (1342) and Pisa (1405) — this article reveals how the buyers of Renaissance cities instead drew upon a vast, little-studied network of private creditors to pay for new lands. The vendibility of space, moreover, helped foster a commercialized ideology of empire. Diarists heralded their city’s superior commerce. Civic leaders tied the good of their communes to keeping its honour and faith with city-sellers. And polemicists stained opponents with accusations of fraud while demoting cities such as Pisa and Lucca to mere merchandise. Buying cities thus allowed Renaissance merchant elites to demonstrate not only their city’s superior material wealth, but also mercantile prowess — their ability to bargain for a good deal (buon mercato).
The Political Day in London, C.1697–1834
Hannah Greig and Amanda Vickery
Pages 101–137
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa016
What did an eighteenth-century politician do all day? This may sound a mundane query, but the simplest questions are often the hardest to answer. The meaning and mechanisms of eighteenth-century high politics have long been debated. Was government personal, local and the possession of a narrow elite, or ideological, proto-modern and answerable to public opinion?1 Was politics a masculine bastion, or accessible to propertied widows and heiresses, lubricated by social politics engineered by women?2 Yet notwithstanding decades of scholarship, it is still not easy to discern precisely how and where a politician spent his time and how parliament and court ran on an ordinary day. What time did MPs and Lords clock into parliament? What did they do en route? How did Lords and ministers divide their time between court, allies, society and the House? To make these inquiries requires analysis of all the components of the political infrastructure of the eighteenth-century regime. This article uses the methodological and conceptual prism of a ‘political day’ to develop a new approach to the study of eighteenth-century political culture, using techniques developed by historians of time, space and gender to interrogate political life and to explore how court and parliament, Lords and Commons, noblemen and noblewomen, formal politics and social politics, complemented and countered each other.
A Business Archive of the French Illegal Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century
Joseph la Hausse de Lalouvière
Pages 139–177
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa026
Following the abolition of the transatlantic trade in African captives, slave traders from France, Spain and Cuba devised strategies of concealment to perpetuate and even expand their enterprise. A close reading of the unexpurgated logbooks and business correspondence of the Jeune Louis, a French ship that transported more than three hundred captives from the Bight of Biafra to Havana in 1825, identifies three decisive innovations in the Franco-Cuban branch of the illegal slave trade. Transnational business structure, risk management through honour-based marine insurance policies, and redacted record keeping transformed the wider Atlantic slave-trading sector into one capable of eluding attempts at international suppression. The clandestine techniques that this transnational slaving network developed to skirt the law also distorted the archival record of that traffic. Accounting for the resulting distortions and disappearances will enable future researchers to better navigate them.
A Printer’s Odd Plea to Reform Legal Pluralism in Khedival Egypt
Omar Youssef Cheta and Kathryn A Schwartz
Pages 179–211
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa047
In 1871, an Italian-Jewish printer published a peculiar Arabic treatise from Cairo. It promoted strengthening legal pluralism in Khedival Egypt by realigning laws there to accord with those of the Ottoman Empire and European states. Composed by the printer’s legal team, the treatise questioned how justice could be obtained if the extraterritorial privileges of European subjects and protégés were not guaranteed. The printer had been motivated by his own plight: a test of the Egyptian merchant courts left him mired in a catch-22, whereby he could either accept an imperfect verdict, or demand extralegal measures. Choosing the latter option, the treatise embodied his desperate bid to promote his cause. Its importance stems from its very existence. It gave form to the printer’s tricky predicament by grasping at different genres of legal writing; it made his personal story relevant to all by entering it into the public domain; and it audaciously called for strengthening Roman law in Egypt. While the document’s actual influence cannot be ascertained, it anticipated wider historical developments regarding the practice and conception of print and law in the modern Middle East.
Heathrow and the Making of Neoliberal Britain
James Vernon
Pages 213–247
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa022
How might we understand neoliberalism and its history differently if we trace its emergence and operation in a particular place? As the first airport in the world to be privatized in 1986 Heathrow is a paradigmatic neoliberal space. And yet for decades before it was sold the airport’s services — catering, cleaning, retail and security — had been steadily deregulated and outsourced in ways that force us to reconsider neoliberalism as discrete from, or emerging from a rupture with, welfare capitalism. The precarious and cheap outsourced forms of labour at Heathrow were performed by Commonwealth citizens of colour, often women, who had paradoxically arrived in Britain through an increasingly hostile immigration regime at the airport. The racialized forms of neoliberal capitalism at the airport depended upon and reproduced a post-imperial social formation that was no less marked by postcolonial crises and a new biopolitics of immigration control designed to restrict their diasporas in the metropole. Seen from Heathrow, neoliberalism is less about the global flow of ideas and capital than the local social formations and labour regimes engendered by changing forms of accumulation.
Chronology and Causality in Africa’s HIV Pandemic: The Production of History Between the Laboratory and the Archive
Shane Doyle
Pages 249–290
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa020
By 2018 approximately 32 million deaths worldwide had been attributed to HIV/AIDS. Yet the impact of the AIDS pandemic has been profoundly uneven. In the Global North, HIV has been constructed as marginal; in much of Africa, it is pervasive and transformative, fundamentally reshaping local economies, civil society, state structures and the continent’s relations with the outside world. HIV is in reality a series of distinct epidemics, each with their own histories. In recent years, scientists have challenged historians’ understanding of HIV’s chronology and patterns of transmission, providing alternative histories of the virus’s origins, expansion and resilience within mature epidemic settings. Epidemiologists and geneticists have realigned the temporal focus of archival and oral research while conceptualizing change over time around moments of divergence and focusing on historical episodes rather than process, and on diffusion over intensification. This article analyses scientists’ historical understanding of sexually transmitted infections, migration and same-sex relationships, challenging narrow understandings of causality and the assumption that the contexts of the recent past can be applied backwards to more distant periods. Reconstructing HIV’s long history requires recognition of the evolving complexity of sex and marriage, morality and discretion, migrancy and displacement, ethnic and racial preconceptions, and locality and connection.
