SPECIAL SECTION: SOCIAL HISTORIES OF THE SECURITY STATE, GUEST EDITOR: SAM LEBOVIC
Introduction: Social Histories of the Security State
Sam Lebovic
Pages 521–531
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad001
This introduction sketches the common themes of the five articles in this special section, outlines the importance of studying the security state as a central feature of modern social history, and suggests future avenues for research and analysis of security institutions devoted to policing, surveillance, violence, and control. It focuses particularly on: the globalization of security practices; the relationship between cultural subjectivity, social conditions, and state formation; the generative quality of security state activity; and questions of periodization, causation, and change over time.
Building Peshawar: Labor, Security, and Infrastructure at the Edge of Empire
Amanda Lanzillo
Pages 532–558
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac024
This article focuses on the recruitment and organization of labor for projects of colonial state infrastructure in the city of Peshawar between 1849 and 1947. Providing access to the Khyber Pass—and thus Afghanistan—Peshawar was an urban center from which the colonial state sought to organize security on the Indo-Afghan frontier. Peshawari laborers, recruited to support the city’s large colonial military cantonment, railways, jail, and other infrastructure projects, were regulated according to colonial narratives about the security threats posed by the city’s geography and ethnic composition. This article contributes to our understanding of the labor of colonial security and border-making by uncovering the circular logic that connected security and labor in colonial-era Peshawar. The colonial state sought to build physical infrastructure to protect the city from the perceived threats posed by the Indo-Afghan frontier. But to build this infrastructure of security, colonial administrators relied on a porous border. Through the porous border they recruited labor from regional populations who they characterized as intrinsically prone to violence or difficult to discipline, spurring a continuous expansion of security infrastructure. Therefore, though an analysis of how laborers were recruited for state projects, the article argues that the colonial regime reified ethnic and social hierarchies within the city.
The Surveillance of Subcultures: Gay Spies, Everyday Life, and Cold War Intelligence in Divided Berlin
Samuel Clowes Huneke
Pages 559–582
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac030
Although gay espionage is a well-established Cold War trope, this article analyzes new evidence that intelligence agencies in divided Berlin actively sought to recruit gay men. They did so because they believed that gay men’s contacts in the opaque and class-crossing queer subculture made them ideally suited for the purposes of intelligence work. Using files from the archives of the East German secret police, this article sheds light on these practices through the experiences of a gay agent recruited in 1960. It analyzes his experiences in order to question the relationship between sexuality and the modern security state. In so doing, the article highlights a gap in the Foucauldian model of surveillance, revealing not only how surveillance could play a permissive, rather than a disciplinary, role in queer lives, but also how the paranoias of the security state could reinforce themselves through the surveillance of subcultures.
Real and Imagined Encounters in the Social History of Surveillance: Soviet Migrants and the Petrov Affair
Ebony Nilsson
Pages 583–606
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac031
Soviet intelligence officer Vladimir Petrov’s defection to the West in 1954 was Australia’s first Cold War spy scandal, quickly dubbed the “Petrov Affair.” It was followed by a Royal Commission investigating Soviet espionage, during which the cover of Michael Bialoguski, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s main agent in the Petrov operation, was blown. Bialoguski, a Polish refugee, had been targeting not just Petrov but the pro-Soviet migrant community, infiltrating their lives over a period of six years. This article uses the Petrov Affair as a vantage point to examine pro-Soviet migrants’ experiences of Cold War surveillance in Australia. Soviet migrants arrived in the West with prior experience of ubiquitous security states and anticipated that they would be monitored. But for those involved with pro-Soviet groups like Sydney’s Russian Social Club, brushes with intelligence were not only expected but often desired. They had both real and imagined encounters with surveillance, and imagined encounters shaped their experiences and perceptions of the security state just as actual ones did. A social history of the surveillance of pro-Soviet migrants complicates our understanding of the effects of surveillance and of its panoptic qualities. It also reveals the Australian security state as mutually constituted—not just by the state itself, but by the personalities, perceptions, transnational experiences, and social worlds of its subjects.
Networking the Counterrevolution: The École Supérieure de Guerre, Transnational Military Collaboration, and Cold War Counterinsurgency, 1955–1975
Terrence G Peterson
Pages 607–636
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac059
Over the past several decades, scholars have devoted considerable attention to tracing the influence of French counterinsurgency practices developed in Indochina and Algeria on other militaries during the Cold War. This article builds on that literature to offer an explanation for why French counterrevolutionary knowledge circulated so broadly, and to connect the French military more concretely to an emerging literature on anticommunist internationalism. At the center of French efforts, this article argues, stood the Army’s École Supérieure de Guerre (ESG) in Paris, which trained growing numbers of high-ranking foreign officers after 1945. The ESG taught counterrevolutionary warfare directly, but as this article argues, it also helped constitute an audience abroad for such ideas by cultivating affective bonds, strategic preferences, and personal connections over the longer term. In tracing the partnerships cultivated through the ESG in this period, this article also illustrates the broader entanglements between counterinsurgency, international military cooperation, and professionalization at midcentury. For military partners seeking to professionalize their own forces, the attractiveness of French doctrines lay as much in the easily accessible set of materials, training, and expertise the French military offered as in their capacity to combat subversion. By tracing the transnational networks of exchange knit together by military academies in this period, this article concludes, scholars can better historicize the rise of counterinsurgency as a key paradigm of cold warfare.
The Rise of the Airport Metal Detector: Colorblind Racism, Police Discretion, and Surveillance Across Borders
Ryan A Archibald
Pages 637–671
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac049
Metal detectors became ubiquitous throughout the United States after their use in airports during the late-1960s and early 1970s when they were installed to address hijackings. While earlier perceptions of the technology’s invasiveness prevented the metal detector’s deployment in the United States beyond jails and prisons, security officials came to identify the device as a means to address the carceral-security state’s legitimacy crises and square mass surveillance with demands for civil and political rights. Those designing and implementing the first airport security program understood hijackings as elements of global rebellions against U.S. empire and drew from policing efforts at home and abroad in their efforts to securitize airports. Officials and courts argued that the universality and objectivity of the machine that determined potential danger solely through the presence of metal removed individual police discretion and was thus race-neutral. Claims of the technology’s novelty not only obscured its carceral and counterinsurgent origins but helped propel the metal detector’s deployment to new spaces including public schools and workplaces. The metal detector reproduced existing class and racial hierarchies and strengthened police discretionary authority.
REVIEWS
The Birth Certificate: An American History. By Susan J. Pearson
Craig Robertson
Pages 672–674
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac011
In 2009, media historian Ben Kafka wrote an essay on the historiography of paperwork for Book History. It was an attempt to draw attention to shared interests across a range of disciplines and fields, but in the dozen years since its publication a critical mass of self-identified paperwork historians have emerged such that the history of paperwork is now a thing, no longer needing to be brought into being by Kafka. This scholarship takes seriously the need to think about how paperwork and documents shape the collection and circulation of information, how they mediate everyday life, especially encounters between people and institutions (to that end, it is not surprising that many media historians have been drawn to think about paper as a medium of communication with its own unique affordances). The history of identification documents has proven to be particularly fertile ground for scholars of paperwork. A history of the U.S. birth certificate is a much-needed addition to this body of work and especially to the history of the documentation of identity in the United States. In terms of the latter, Susan J. Pearson’s book joins existing work on the Chinese Exclusion Act (Lau, 2007), the passport (my own book, published in 2010) and credit reporting (Laurer, 2017), along with discussions of documentation and identification in other histories of the Chinese Exclusion Act, immigration, and border control.
How Welfare Worked in the Early United States: Five Microhistories. By Gabriel J. Loiacono
Nicole Schroeder
Pages 675–677
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac020
How Welfare Worked in the Early United States tracks the lives of five individuals in Rhode Island from the 1790 s through the 1850 s. Chapter by chapter, Loiacono strings together the lived realities of individuals engaged in the colonial and early national welfare system (otherwise known as the poor relief system). Breaking down the legal, economic, and political dimensions of the welfare state, Loiacono offers readers a detailed investigation into welfare infrastructure. Case studies thread together both top-down and bottom-up narratives helping readers understand the complexities of the welfare system. Early chapters highlight the overarching structure of the system from the top-down lens, detailing how poor relief officials dispensed aid. Most chapters, however, track the recipients of government-centered welfare programs. Using detailed microhistories, Loiacono teases out the complex intricacies separating rhetoric from reality in early America. How welfare was supposed to work often differed greatly from how it did work.
Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer
Sergio Lussana
Pages 678–680
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac023
Mastering Emotions details how emotions were central to the slave-master relationship in the American South. It shows how slaveholders exerted and maintained power, through emotions such as fear and terror, and the variety of ways enslaved people resisted such efforts. The book chiefly focuses on slavery in the antebellum South. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the rise of sentimentalism encouraged people to feel and express emotions—evident in the proliferation of sentimental literature during this period. Antebellum slave autobiographies authored by fugitive slaves—many edited by white abolitionists—gave tremendous weight to emotions as they sought to counter the narrative that enslaved people were incapable of feeling emotions to the same extent as white people. Famous autobiographies from the likes of Frederick Douglass, Charles Ball and Henry Bibb described the trauma and grief enslaved people experienced as they were brutally punished, witnessed the daily abuse of loved ones, and sold and separated from their families. Dwyer makes extensive use of these narratives to chart the emotional politics of slavery in the antebellum South.
Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania. By Beverly C. Tomek
Lucien Holness
Pages 681–683
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac014
Beverly C. Tomek’s Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania provides a succinct and engaging synthesis of the history and scholarship of slavery and abolition in Pennsylvania. In her introduction, Tomek makes three important claims. First, even though a plantation system never took root in the North, slavery was still profitable in Pennsylvania where black bondage was just as inhumane and brutal as plantation slavery in the South. Second, the reason for the abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania cannot be solely explained as simply a triumph of humanitarian sentiment led by Quakers. For Tomek, this interpretation considerably downplays the extensive resistance that abolitionists faced from those who profited from slavery, conceals the role of anti-black sentiment in motivating many whites to take an antislavery stance, disregards the important role of African Americans in the abolitionist movement, and ignores the important legacy of slavery and racism that continues to shape the Keystone State today. Third, the advent of the antislavery movement was just the first phase of a long civil rights movement that continues to this day.
Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. By Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr.
Elizabeth J Wood
Pages 684–686, https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac009
Nearly fifty years ago, historian Ira Berlin wrote the first comprehensive study on the status of free people of color in the pre-Civil War South, analyzing legal and social realities in all post-Revolutionary slaveholding states. Though recognizing that free African Americans were sometimes able to achieve stability in a slave society, he nevertheless concluded that the strictures on Black freedom became so oppressive over the antebellum period as to nearly mimic the conditions of slavery. In the decades following Berlin’s work, historians have challenged aspects of this interpretation, demonstrating that free people of color were able to exploit legal gaps and to form relationships allowing them to achieve more than law and radical rhetoric should have allowed. However, as Warren Milteer points out in his introduction, most of those studies have focused on specific localities and regions, which he contends leaves historians “to grapple with the proper way to characterize the collective lives of free people of color” (11). His recent book, Beyond Slavery’s Shadow, brings together these local studies, supported by his own archival research, to demonstrate more broadly the ways African Americans achieved and sustained freedom throughout the antebellum South.
Empire and Indigeneity: Histories and Legacies. By Richard Price
Bain Attwood
Pages 687–689
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac022
In Empire and Indigeneity Richard Price seeks to understand both the nature of the encounter between the British empire and the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand in what he calls the early nineteenth century, and the consequences and legacies of that encounter for these countries as well as British imperial culture more generally. In doing so, he challenges both popular historical accounts that interpret the history of colonialism backwards from a privileged perch when the structures of settler colonial rule and the racial order of high imperialism were well and truly established, and a body of academic work known as settler colonial studies that has become popular in some quarters in recent decades even though its best-known champions have seldom if ever set foot in an archive.
Price realizes that there were strong similarities between all the settler colonies that Britain founded, including those in North America, but sets out to reveal that the history of the relations between the imperial power and indigenous peoples was determined primarily by the particular circumstances in each of those colonies. In this wide-ranging study—each chapter could readily have been a monograph in its own right—he demonstrates the importance of historical context in understanding what took place in the early to mid-nineteenth century in the Australian and New Zealand colonies, the role that contingency played in the unfolding of events and processes, and the possibility of alternative endings. He thereby shows that the making of empire was far from being a clear-cut process.
Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. By Juliana Hu Pegues
Jessica Bissett Perea
Pages 690–693
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac013
I am a Dena’ina woman born and raised on my ancestral homelands in what is now known as southcentral Alaska, and currently working on Patwin lands in what is now known as Davis, California. A majority of my personal and professional activities are dedicated to correcting erroneous myths and falsehoods academia and popular culture continues to tell southern audiences about Indigenous Peoples in/and Sub/Arctic places, stories which hold concrete implications for our sovereignty and self-determination projects. I offer this brief relational introduction to better situate my review of Juliana Hu Pegues’s beautifully written book Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. In it, Pegues offers multiple entry points into one of our most vexing questions: “why is Alaska not considered a colonial space, given the imperial ambitions of American administrators as well as the perspectives and experiences of Alaska Native peoples?” (3).
There are many non-Native, non-Alaskan, and often senior scholars who argue that settler colonialism is not an appropriate framework for understanding the histories and ongoing predicaments facing Indigenous Peoples and places in the so-called “Last Frontier.” At its core, such denials of settler colonial structures in Alaska serve to uplift exceptional narratives about Alaska’s occupation by and incorporation into the colonial U.S. nation-state, narratives that mask immense violence as well as overdeterminations of our lives, lands, and waters as logical colonial accumulations for a global American empire. Yet an emerging generation of intellectuals, including Pegues, are crafting more trenchant evaluations of Alaska as “an imperial project of a settler colonial nation” with analytics that refuse heteronormative white supremacist and settler colonial multiculturalist frames (16).
“Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain. By Charles Upchurch
Andrew Israel Ross
Pages 694–696
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac005
Charles Upchurch’s “Beyond the Law:” The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain constitutes an important contribution to the political history of sexuality in nineteenth-century Europe. An effective companion to his previous work, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (2009), Beyond the Law returns to the same period, but shifts the focus away from the practice of regulation to politics. The book explores the shifting meanings of sodomy, and how its very malleability came into play in debates over law reform generally and the abolition of the death penalty specifically. In Parliament, in the press, and in private and public publications, sodomy became not simply an illegal act, but also a politically valent symbol that could be deployed for and against politicians, political positions, and ideological commitments. Sodomy, Upchurch argues, was a special category, “time and time again…separated out from [the] general reform process, treated as an exception to the rule, for reasons often not specified, at least not in the moment” (5). Sodomy, Upchurch successfully demonstrates, provided an avenue for working out—or at least putting into play—issues that vexed the reform efforts of early nineteenth-century Britain.
The Suicide of Miss Xi: Democracy and Disenchantment in the Chinese Republic. By Bryna Goodman
Susan R Fernsebner
Pages 697–699
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac007
In this compelling study, Bryna Goodman offers a rich analysis of 1920s China and its fragile democracy, with a focus on gender and the role of the “new woman,” economic speculation, as well as notions of morality and justice in an evolving legal culture. She presents these intersecting themes through a famous—though now largely forgotten—case of a female office clerk, Xi Shangzhen, who in 1922 was found hanging in the office building of her employer, a businessman and social reformer named Tang Jiezhi. Tang also served as the managing director of the Journal of Commerce. He was, moreover, active in the manically-inflated stock exchange bubble of the day. So was Xi Shangzhen, who, involved financially with Tang (and perhaps otherwise, as some of the day’s popular press suggested), had lost a great sum of money she had given Tang to invest. In exploring this case and its broader context, Goodman offers an invaluable contribution to the literature on the early Chinese republic as she masterfully weaves together an analysis of gender, legal, and economic perspectives.
An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland. By Kenneth B. Moss
Sarah Ellen Zarrow
Pages 700–702
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac026
Kenneth B. Moss’s new book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland offers a new take on Jewish politics in the interwar period, particularly during the Piłsudski regime. Rather than focusing on the fractured nature of Jewish politics, Moss trains his eye on the hopelessness many Jews grew to feel, and the non-political nature of that hopelessness. Moss uses the press to demonstrate that Polish Jews’ political imaginations did not necessarily indicate political convictions. Rather, much like studies in the history of nationalism in the region have demonstrated, political choices often followed practical considerations. An Unchosen People is an ambitious book in scope and sources; Moss questions categories historians of the region and era are used to and offers new categories that deserve serious attention.
Bringing a wealth of sources ranging from published economic treatises to youth autobiographies to literature, in several languages, Moss argues that we must consider Polish Jewish political culture in interwar Poland not (only) as the fractured and fractious space of contestation, particularly between Zionists and Territorialists, but rather as an arena in which ordinary Jews participated, not as ideologues, but as despairing citizens disillusioned with the choices they were offered. The nature of the despair that came to engulf many Polish Jews—even as they forged ahead with their lives—transcended politics even as it forced many Jews to make choices that later historians viewed as politically motivated.
Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico. By Tanalís Padilla
Kevan Antonio Aguilar
Pages 703–705
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac034
Student activism has long been a crucial line of inquiry in the study of radicalism in the twentieth century. Most historical works have focused on the urban-based student movements that emerged during the global uprisings of 1968. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution, Tanalís Padilla shifts our attention away from city-based student movements and instead analyzes the escuelas normales (normal schools), rural boarding schools that trained the children of campesinos to be teachers in the Mexican countryside. The normalista schools made international headlines when, on September 26, 2014, Mexican security forces intercepted a group of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College as they attempted to commandeer buses in Iguala, Guerrero for an upcoming march in Mexico City. By the end of the night, six were dead and forty-three students were disappeared, with state officials claiming that a local drug cartel was responsible for the disappearances. Despite the government’s claims, protests broke out across Mexico and then around the world, unified in their charge: “fue el estado” (“it was the state”) that was responsible for the atrocity. It is within the shadow of Ayotzinapa that Tanalís Padilla situates her study of normalista radicalism and its challenge to the Mexican state.
Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II. By Stephanie Hinnershitz
Eric L Muller
Pages 706–708
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac016
The last half decade has been a time of new lenses in the scholarly study of the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. Two significant books have looked at the camps through lenses of religion (Anne Blankenship’s Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II (2016) and Duncan Ryuken Williams’s American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (2020)), and another through the lens of environmental history (Connie Chiang’s Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration (2020)). To this list we can now add Stephanie Hinnershitz’s new book examining removal and incarceration through the lens of labor history.
The book fills a significant, and somewhat surprising, hole in the literature. Work was central to the lives of adult Japanese Americans in the concentration camps. Securing their labor was also a key objective of the government agencies responsible for confining them. Once the reader has finished Hinnershitz’s well-documented monograph, they will be astonished that no one thought to write a labor history of the camps before.
Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics. By Rebecca L. Davis
William Stell
Pages 709–711
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac012
According to a popular narrative about religious revival after World War II, Americans of all stripes rallied around the conviction that religion was crucial for the survival of democracy, that the spread of “Judeo-Christian values” would secure victory in the Cold War. That spread was an astounding success, we are told, as indicated by unprecedented levels of membership in religious bodies at mid-century as well as by a less quantifiable religious ethos, which inspired Will Herberg to proclaim that “to be an American today means to be either a Protestant, a Catholic, or a Jew.” Recent histories, such as K. Healan Gaston’s Imagining Judeo-Christian America, have rightly complicated this narrative of religious ubiquity, unity, exuberance, and assurance. Rebecca Davis’s excellent book Public Confessions sets the mid-century scene in similar fashion: “An undercurrent of anxiety thrummed beneath this postwar religious enthusiasm. Arguments for religion’s role in sustaining democracy flourished alongside an equally potent fear of false beliefs” (5).
Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes. By Nayan Shah
Ian Miller
Pages 712–714
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac027
The history of hunger striking is fast becoming a well-trodden area of study. There exist numerous articles and book-length studies of specific countries such as India, Ireland or Northern Ireland. In the past decade, my own research, which focuses on the ethics and experiences of force-feeding has explored hunger striking across the twentieth century, with a focus on Britain and Ireland. Kevin Grant’s 2019 book, Last Weapons, adopts a transnational approach to demonstrate that hunger striking spread from Russia to England, and then across the Empire, in complex, multifaceted ways between around the 1890s and 1940s.
Nayan Shah’s book, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes focuses mainly on the power which hunger striking yields, its capacity to undermine punitive institutions in which the rhythms of mealtimes and food provision provide rigid structure to prisoners’ lives, and the medical ethical dilemma which both force-feeding and letting prisoners starve raises for prison doctors, governments and medical communities. A further theme is the communicative potential of most hunger strikes, particularly political ones, in conveying messages about institutional life, mistreatment or alleged wrongful confinement to a broader, sometimes sympathetic, public.
The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era. By Margarita Fajardo
Christy Thornton
Pages 715–717
https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac035
The United Nations Economic Commission on Latin America, usually referred to using its Spanish-language acronym CEPAL, has long been something of a scholarly paradox. The institution and its most prominent officials have been widely written about as key originators of Latin American developmentalism, structuralist economic thought, and what came to be known as dependency theory. But more than 60 years after its founding, CEPAL had not yet been the subject of a major historical monograph—likely because the institutional records covering its formative period from 1948 to 1970 were destroyed. Margarita Fajardo’s highly anticipated The World That Latin America Created resourcefully confronts this archival challenge, supplementing published CEPAL material with extensive archival research in Brazil, Chile, and the United States, among other countries, to carefully reconstruct the intellectual and institutional history of the organization’s first decades. The result is a book that will be required reading for scholars of development, international institutions, the history of economic thought, and Latin American history.
