ARTICLES
Late Antiquity: The Age of Crowds?
Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira
Pages 3–52
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz063
The objective of this article is to place the study of urban protest and violence in the period from about 300 to about 600 CE in a broader perspective and to subject the investigation of plebeian activism to the basic precepts of analysis of collective action developed by social scientists and historians studying other periods. Its main argument is that, contrary to wide held assumptions in the historiography, what characterized Late Antiquity was not simply the exacerbation of violence or its tighter control, but the crisis of aristocratic hegemony and the expansion of opportunities for popular intervention in city life. What has been perceived as the product fanaticism, irrationality and deprivation of the masses, of the manipulation of bishops and aristocrats or of the failure of the mechanisms of coercion was actually the result of a dramatic social change that, on the one hand, involved a new dynamic of power and, on the other, a shift in the way the people understood their role and power in local communities.
Military Mobility, Authority and Negotiation in Early Colonial India
Christina Welsch
Pages 53–84
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz067
This article focuses on the career of Muhammad Yusuf Khan, an officer in the British East India Company who sought to turn his military service into political and diplomatic authority, only to be executed as a rebel in 1764. His rise and fall occurred early in the so-called colonial transition, a period characterized in recent scholarship as one of relative fluidity in contrast to later, more rigid instantiations of colonial rule. Institutionally, the Company’s armies seem to contradict that pattern: their rapid growth in the eighteenth century produced new exclusions and restrictions, including some of the earliest formal articulations of a racial binary between Indian and European actors. Yusuf Khan, however, gained political capital by mobilizing elements of those intended restrictions in new contexts, imbuing the Company’s military hierarchies with alternate meanings outside of its formal infrastructure. His innovative reinterpretation of military prestige becomes clear when the Company’s records are read alongside Persian-language material from the Indian courts against which he fashioned his political identity. His career offers insight into how the inequitable, but dynamic relationship between the Company and its soldiers shaped the former’s approach to and understanding of India s political landscape
The Animal Body As Medium: Taxidermy And European Expansion, 1775–1865
Alan S Ross
Pages 85–119
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa004
This article examines how the preserved animal body, with its roots in anatomy and the eighteenth-century culture of curiosity, came to evolve into a medium of European expansion by the mid-nineteenth century. It does so by concentrating on surviving specimens of preserved primates stemming from eighteenth and nineteenth-century collections which also produced documentation concerning the practices of their exhibition. Most historians now agree that the permeation of European society by the ideology of imperialism was crucial in ensuring the long-term success of expansion overseas at a time when questions of suffrage and representation were becoming increasingly volatile. Exhibitions and museums were of special importance in promoting the imperial agenda because of their appeal to broad sections of the illiterate and semi-literate public. Yet historians of empire have not dwelt on the fact that taxidermy objects were, in fact, European-made craft objects and as such reveal more about the time and place they were made in than about the animal’s country of origin. Taxidermy, unlike other media, not only told a certain narrative about other global regions, their wildlife and peoples. It also appeared to prove this narrative through the presence of the real animal body. As a result, the new medium was pivotal in reinforcing concepts of European superiority in the years between the establishment of the Raj in India and the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s.
The First World War and the Democratic Control of Foreign Policy
Jan Stöckmann
Pages 121–166
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz066
As the world went to war in 1914, a group of politicians, scholars and activists developed a radically new concept of foreign policy. It rested on the assumption that the war was the result of a flawed diplomatic system and that democratic institutions would make international relations more peaceful. Specifically, they proposed a set of reforms to improve parliamentary oversight, to prohibit secret treaties and to make foreign affairs more accessible to the general public. Most historians have written them off as pacifist propagandists or isolated national splinter groups. However, as this article shows, the advocates of democratic control built a transnational campaign across more than two dozen countries and drew up an elaborate agenda which anticipated long-lasting debates about foreign policy governance. The leaders of the campaign — including American educationalist Fannie Fern Andrews, German social democrat Eduard Bernstein and British politician Arthur Ponsonby — began by protesting decision-making in July 1914, but gradually worked out a more rigorous foreign policy critique. They hosted conferences, circulated academic-style publications and lobbied governments. Although their programme resonated with Wilsonian and socialist visions for a democratic peace, it failed to materialize in 1919. Ultimately, it remained an exercise in democratic governance.
A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post-Colonial Quest for Oil (1930–1975)
Antoine Acker
Pages 167–211
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz069
This article aims to identify new historical causes for the making of the Anthropocene (the rise of humans to a geological force) by addressing Brazil’s transformation into an oil producer and an oil-dependent country between 1930 and 1975. This example allows an escape from the essentialist explanation of the Anthropocene as the result of humans’ insatiable appetite for consumption, commonly rooted in an analysis of Western industrial society, and to focus instead on the notion of freedom in a former colony. Indeed, in the context of nation-building and modernization debates, petroleum appeared to many Brazilians as an opportunity to emancipate the country from its peripheral role as global raw material provider. The rise of petroleum gave a post-colonial sense to the nation-founding myth of Brazil’s exceptional nature, which served as romantic background for a movement towards resource sovereignty embedded into a global anti-imperialist context. In Brazil specifically, oil production became an opportunity for a process of ecological transformation that promised to rid the country of colonial landscapes of exploitation, and even appeared as a solution for stopping the unsustainable destruction of tropical forests. Ultimately, these petro-ideals of emancipation, by positively linking nature and the nation, also hindered fully detecting the scope of the pollution problems that oil was generating. As argued in the article’s conclusion, this example should rekindle the discussion about the unintended link between freedom and geological change in the analysis of Anthropocene causalities.
‘Funk Money’: The End of Empires, The Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event
Vanessa Ogle
Pages 213–249
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa001
This article explores the question of what happened to European assets in the process of decolonization. It argues that decolonization created a money panic of sorts that led white settlers, businessmen, and officials to seek to liquidate assets they owned and move funds out of the colonial world. Instead of being repatriated to metropolitan countries with high tax rates and exchange controls, money moved to tax havens. Decolonization thus provided an important share of early postwar tax haven business in a period when tax havens and offshore finance expanded during the 1950s and 1960s. In turn, the withdrawal of Euro-American investments from the decolonizing world set the stage for the politics of development and modernization in the coming decades. Ironically, the outflow of funds during decolonization and the subsequent return of some funds in restructured form as investments by multinational and other companies soon caused difficulties in newly independent developing countries. Companies soon found ways to rebook profits to have occurred in a tax haven rather than in the developing world, thus depriving low-income countries from tax revenue. The withdrawal of Euro-American investments from the colonial world during decolonization moreover had implications for the growth of portfolio investment, as funds removed from colonies were often invested through a tax haven onwards in US securities. All in all, decolonization was an economic and financial event that is only beginning to emerge in full detail.
‘Loving Capitalism Disease’: Aids and Ideology in the People’s Republic of China, 1984–2000
Julian Gewirtz
Pages 251–294
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz068
This article examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interpreted HIV/AIDS in the period from 1984, when the Chinese government first introduced policies reacting to the disease’s emergence, to 2000, when China’s devastating epidemic began to receive worldwide media attention. Important new sources show how the CCP cast HIV/AIDS as a staging ground for debates about the risks of liberalization and an evolving metaphor for deviance from socialism even in an era of capitalistic changes. Just as anti-capitalist ideology shaped official understandings of HIV/AIDS, so too did HIV/AIDS shape official views about the perils of China’s ‘reform and opening’ and the risks of capitalism to China. This two-way flow of meanings, which carried epidemiological and human consequences, illustrates the need for scholars of this period to foreground the evolving official ideology and forms of resistance to global capitalism — in politics, culture, society and even public health — rather than only the more common and sanguine narrative of rapid growth and economic development. Far more than previously understood, the interplay between AIDS and CCP ideology in this period reveals crucial dynamics in the evolution of China’s ongoing encounter with global capitalism.
VIEWPOINT
The Human, The Animal and the Prehistory of COVID-19
Sujit Sivasundaram
Pages 295–316
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa024
In Asia, pangolins have generated a rich set of indigenous oral traditions. These contrast with the often confused, or failed, colonial and Western scientific practices of classifying, domesticating and collecting the pangolin. More recently this long-standing encounter between the pangolin and human has shifted into exponential killing. The pangolin has become the mammal which is most trafficked by humans. This trade has been a global one, a fact that is important to remember given the racist ideas and inequalities that have been highlighted through the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The changing relationship between the pangolin and the human in modern history is used here as a window onto the interlinked histories of the pandemic and environmental crisis, both of which arose partly from human encroachment into biodiverse and forested areas, including pangolin habitats. The phases of the pangolin–human relationship can be read for the preconditions of these interlinked crises that face the planet and its historians in 2020. It is vital that historians respond confidently and fully to causation at the interspecies frontier without using the pandemic to mount theoretically naive ‘compare and contrast’ exercises with past disease events to provide lessons for the present. A post-pandemic historiography will surely be interdisciplinary, with critical, philosophical and collaborative engagement with scientists.
INTRODUCTION TO VIRTUAL ISSUE
Capitalism In Global History
Andrew David Edwards and others
Pages e1–e32
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa044
