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doi: 10.1093/jsh/shw006pmid: N/A
AbstractGeorge Whitefield's ability to enthrall audiences through a potent combination of drama, religious rhetoric, and imperial pride is well documented, as is the Hallam Theater Company's successful mid-eighteenth century tour of North America. Yet, as historian Odai Johnson recently asserted, scholars have almost always placed the two performers (and the larger movements they represented) in opposition. This article demonstrates that George Whitefield and Lewis Hallam Sr.—lead purveyors of the pulpit and the stage in mid-eighteenth century colonial America—should be understood as mutual contributors to the development of early American performance and, ultimately, professional theater. Both rose to prominence during a specific period (the mid-eighteenth century) in a specific place (the British American colonies) for a shared reason: to use professional performance to entrance the most colonists as possible. Ultimately, Whitefield and Hallam were quite different men who, through common pursuit of fame in North America, demonstrated just how much theatricality and religion—despite imagining themselves as oppositional forces—became entangled by the mid-eighteenth century.
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shv129pmid: N/A
AbstractThis essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as “commodities,” thereby “dehumanizing” them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians conceptualize how New World slavery contributed to the ongoing development of global finance capitalism—namely, that slaves represented capital as well as labor. But the recurring paradigm of the “dehumanized” or “commodified” slave, I argue, obscures more than it reveals.This article suggests that historians of slavery must reconsider the “commodification” of enslaved humanity. In so doing, it offers three interrelated arguments: first, that scholarship on slavery has not adequately or coherently defined the precise mechanisms by which enslaved people were supposedly “commodified”; second, that the normative position implied by the insistence that persons were treated as things further mystifies or clouds our collective historical vision of enslavement; and third, that we should abandon a strictly Marxian conception of the commodity—and its close relation to notions of “social death”—in favor of Igor Kopytoff's theory of the commodity-as-process. It puts forth in closing a reconstituted conceptualization of the slave relation wherein enslaved people are understood as thoroughly human.
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shv096pmid: N/A
AbstractThe history of illegitimacy has evolved since the 1970’s from pessimistic assessments that perceived single motherhood as a form of deviance among impoverished and mobile sections of the population, to recent optimistic assessments that stress the agency of single mothers, their relative local belonging and the leniency of local governments towards them. Based on a case study on illegitimacy in the eighteenth-century Dutch city of Leiden, this article argues that veracity is to be found in both readings of the fates of single mothers. A comparative analysis of single mothers who took legal recourse in paternity matters and those who did not, shows how only a limited part of single mothers exercised legal agency. The litigating mothers shared certain characteristics: they often came from families who were beneficiaries of poor relief, they baptized their children in the Dutch reformed churches and more often than not their own father was still alive. The article hypothesizes that the consistory and overseers of the poor actively encouraged legal action. The case study evidences that the barriers for single mothers to use these judicial means were considerable. These obstacles were not financial in nature, but rather related to the women’s social and cultural distance from the elites who staffed the local law courts.
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shw011pmid: N/A
AbstractThroughout most of the nineteenth century, steamships were the main tool of British informal imperialism in what is now southern Iraq. Despite that centrality, steam shipping on the Tigris was primarily characterized by environmental and political precariousness. This article explores the steamship business of the Lynch Company, which operated on the Tigris beginning in 1861. It examines the political controversies surrounding irrigation and the expansion of the steam fleet as windows on the complex relationship between ecological vulnerability and the practice of empire and diplomacy, arguing that the states of environmental and geopolitical precariousness in which steamships operated reinforced one another, eventually coming to define the British steam enterprise on the Tigris. This precariousness helped make steamships major geopolitical actors, shaping British-Ottoman relations as well as local trade and development policies. The persistence of environmental challenges meant that the Lynch steamships, along with their Ottoman counterparts, simultaneously shaped and were incorporated into local trade and shipping networks, as well as the tribal prestige politics of raiding. On local and international levels, environmental and political issues were intertwined, and steam shipping was crucial to both. The precarious technology that formed the crux of informal imperial intervention on the Tigris is indicative of a kind of empire in which the environment significantly shaped the possibilities of imperial intervention. Precariousness—both environmental and political—came to define technology and empire in late Ottoman Iraq.
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shv093pmid: N/A
AbstractThe article deals with love and emotions in late nineteenth century Iceland, in particular how feelings were expressed in ego-documents. It argues that ego-documents are vital for exploring and understanding emotions and love in this period of time. The study is a microhistorical analysis of the interaction between material culture and emotions (love)—seen through the lenses of a few individuals who grew up in this poor Icelandic peasant society—and how it was expressed through the perspectives of young males. At the same time, the focus is on how their reactions affected both genders. The lack of women's perspectives in these cases is discussed, as is the question of whether anything may be deduced about their emotional life from the impression described by the men. The interaction among work, grief, love, and education is responsible for the fact that people in nineteenth century Icelandic farming society were universally literate. Their expressed emotions, such as love and also grief, were channeled through letter writing, diaries, poems, or other creative thinking and had a major effect on the development of emotional release in the country.
doi: 10.1093/jsh/shv086pmid: N/A
AbstractThis article examines the relationship between water deity worship and dike management in the Jianghan plain of central China from 1788 to 2013. The Jianghan plain is a water-rich area that has frequently suffered from water calamities. Hence, the building and maintenance of the dike system there has been critical to the local society and economy. In late imperial times, the Jianghan people prayed to water deities, asking them to protect the integrity of the dikes. Many iron statues of oxen were also erected on the dikes to ensure their integrity, a tradition encouraged by imperial edicts for moral or psychological reasons. Nonetheless, if a dike ruptured, the emperors punished the responsible officials. Although China underwent dramatic political changes in the Republican era (1912–1949), the tradition of water deity worship continued. After 1949, however, the idea of “man can conquer nature” prevailed, and with a better-maintained dike system, the people of Jianghan no longer prayed to water deities. Instead, many water conservancy projects were turned into tourist destinations.
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