ARTICLES
Innovation and Investment in the Roman Rural Economy Through the Lens of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy)
Astrid Van Oyen
Pages 3–40
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz062
The presence, uptake and economic impact of innovations in the Roman world have been much debated. Not subject to debate, however, is the agency behind innovation, which is assumed to be the large, elite landowner. Evidence of experimentation at the rural terra sigillata production site of Marzuolo (Tuscany, Italy) does not fit dominant models of external investment in the Roman world and challenges the directionality of innovation. Instead, this article makes the case that experimentation at Marzuolo was driven by intensification on the part of local smallholders, but was curbed by a lack of capital investment. A later, scaled-up terra sigillata production phase at the same site, linked to infrastructural investments, shows predatory investment behaviour by a landowner who appropriated a tried and tested facility. Recasting innovation as an open-ended process of trial and error that is centred on human capital development, labour and relations of production, changes the terms of study of the Roman economy and aligns it with broader conversations in economic history.
‘The Harmony of One Choir’? Music and Social Unity in Reformation Heidelberg
Matthew Laube
Pages 41–86
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz059
From early in the Reformation, Protestant leaders viewed music as a powerful tool not only for educating their followers, but also for forging unity within diverse and dispersed communities. Such a belief found expression in official and unofficial religious contexts, and left its mark on printed devotional material, congregational hymn books, public policies of church authorities, and the musical activities of individual churches. At the same time, the manner in which a person accessed, experienced and produced music in a Reformation urban environment was conditioned as much by social factors such as age, gender, social station and personal contacts, as by confessional affiliation and policy. Using a corpus of previously unexploited sources from the Protestant city of Heidelberg, this article challenges the rhetorical and outdated binary notions of social ‘harmony’ and ‘discord’. It argues that music in a Reformation city — whether congregational song in churches, secular song in taverns, inns and streets, or domestic devotional song — could function as a powerful platform for emphasizing rather than dissolving a range of meaningful social differences, even as it created new kinds of unity across urban society.
Time and Work in Rural England, 1500–1700
Mark Hailwood
Pages 87–121
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz065
‘Free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity.’ This is how Jacques Le Goff characterized the temporality of pre-industrial rural working life. In E. P. Thompson’s famous argument, it was only with the arrival of the factory and the industrial age that the erratic rhythms of English working people were abruptly swept away by a new imperative for long and regular working hours controlled by the clock. It is a thesis that has been much debated in relation to pre- and non-industrial cities, and with regard to the impact of industrialization when it arrived. There has, however, been very little scrutiny of its account of the relationship between time and work in rural England before industrialization. This article therefore offers the first extensive empirical study of both time consciousness and work-related time-use in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rural England. It does so by drawing on the testimony that ordinary women and men gave before the courts, testimony that often divulged both how those people told the time of day, and how they used it. What emerges is that English rural society in this period had a relatively high degree of clock-time awareness, and that everyday patterns of work followed more consistent and regular rhythms than Thompson’s thesis allows. As a consequence, the article argues that we need to question the assumption that the long hours and work discipline of ‘modernity’ had no roots in ‘traditional’ English rural life.
Petitions, Parliament and Political Culture: Petitioning the House of Commons, 1780–1918
Richard Huzzey and Henry Miller
Pages 123–164
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz061
This article analyses nearly one million petitions received by the House of Commons to reveal a culture of petitioning that recast the political culture of modern Britain and Ireland. It argues, first, that petitions provided a much more regular and continuous form of interaction between people and Parliament than elections. Second, petitioning–meaning the practices associated with the drafting, signing and presentation of petitions–enabled a vibrant, performative public politics. Third, petitions and petitioning were relatively open, inclusive forms of political participation since all British subjects enjoyed the formal right to petition. We examine the role of formidable campaigns of mass mobilisation, but also humble appeals of marginalised individuals. Our data has significant implications for our understanding of the nationalisation, organisation, and popularisation of politics in this period. We argue that attention to petitions helps us to decentre parliamentary elections as the principal connection between local and national politics. Indeed, petitioners responded to the shifting boundaries between the central and devolved state in deciding to which authorities they would direct petitions. Petitioning campaigns pioneered the mass, organised, national movements that would gradually emerge as the hallmark of stronger political parties. This did not undermine petitioning. However, the consequent growth of disciplined parties strengthened executive power, at the expense of parliamentary government, redirected petitions from the Commons. Furthermore, the continuing expansion of petitioning alongside extensions of the franchise suggests that petitions did not function as an ersatz ballot. Rather, petitions and debates between parliamentarians and petitioners over the meaning of growing lists of signatories suggest that petitioning catalysed a range of other forms of participation and hence forged an ever more popular politics.
Kerosene Nights: Light and Enlightenment in Late Ottoman Jerusalem
Avner Wishnitzer
Pages 165–207
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz057
Street lighting was first introduced into Ottoman cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, unlike in larger Ottoman cities, where coal gas was used, in Jerusalem it was kerosene that served as burning material, creating the distinct nocturnal reality that is here called the ‘kerosene night’. This reality was the result and, simultaneously, one of the most glaring manifestations of Jerusalem’s economic, administrative and infrastructural peripherality. Between the early 1890s and the First World War, kerosene allowed the Jerusalem municipality an affordable means to respond to inhabitants’ expectations for more light. Both public expectations and municipal action were fanned by a discourse that associated street lighting with Enlightenment, order and progress. Yet, kerosene illumination also set the limits of nocturnal conviviality and frustrated the very expectations it kindled. Measured against larger metropoles, the relative darkness of Jerusalem heightened among residents feelings of provinciality and governmental neglect — feelings that the kerosene lamps, paradoxically, brought to light.
Patchwork States: The Localization of State Territoriality on the South Sudan–Uganda Border, 1914–2014
Cherry Leonardi
Pages 209–258
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz052
This paper takes a localized conflict over a non-demarcated stretch of the Uganda–South Sudan boundary in 2014 as a starting point for examining the history of territorial state formation on either side of this border since its colonial creation in 1914. It argues that the conflict was an outcome of the long-term constitution of local government territories as patches of the state, making the international border simultaneously a boundary of the local state. Some scholars have seen the limited control of central governments over their borderlands and the intensification of local territorialities as signs of African state fragmentation and failure. But the article argues that this local territoriality should instead be seen as an outcome of ongoing state-formation processes in which state territory has been co-produced through local engagement and appropriation. The paper is thus of wider relevance beyond African or postcolonial history, firstly in contributing a spatial approach to studies of state formation which have sought to replace centre–periphery models with an emphasis on the centrality of the local state. Secondly it advances the broader field of borderlands studies by arguing that international boundaries have been shaped by processes of internal territorialisation as well as by the specific dynamics of cross-border relations and governance. Thirdly it advocates a historical and processual approach to understanding territory, arguing that the patchwork of these states has been fabricated and reworked over the past century, entangling multiple, changing forms and scales of territory in the ongoing constitution of state boundaries.
The Kinetics of Our Discontent
Mehmet Döşemeci
Pages 253–289
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz058
Why do we think of social struggles as movements? What is in motion and where is it going? Has struggle been thought and practised otherwise? Not as movement but as disruption, arrest, stasis? If so, what are struggles trying to stop? Asking these questions pushes us to think about struggle kinetically: to analyse social struggle through the register of motion and its interruption. This article questions why we have come to understand the history of social struggle through the category of movement and the consequences and costs of this understanding for historical analysis. Against this association, it underscores how movement, as a practice and idea, was central to the establishment and legitimation of the capitalist economy and, using two case studies of labour and the New Left, examines how significant strands of these struggles sought freedom in the arrest of its coerced motion. Drawing from these examples, the final section discusses the usefulness of kinetic analysis for historical inquiry.
