Journal of Social History

Laite,, Julia

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shy118pmid: N/A

Abstract Digitization has usually been considered a facilitator of what has been called “big” history. While digital history projects increasingly make good and sensitive use of individual and granular records and use them to bring human complexity into a larger analysis, the digitization of published material and archives have mostly been discussed by historians in aggregate: they are valued chiefly for their ability to give us “big data” about phenomena in the past. Yet for those interested in questions and methodologies of microhistory, biographical history, history from below, and other kinds of what we might call “small” history, the digitization of archives and individual records is an equally transformative development. This article will examine the way that digitization has changed how historians discover, concatenate, and communicate small stories in their narratives and arguments. I will consider the practice and the ethics of telling and digitizing individual histories, and I will suggest some different ways of dealing with the new boundaries—and boundlessness—that the “mass digitized turn” throws up, particularly for historians working in the period after 1800. Finally, amidst an increased emphasis on digitization and big data in the field of history, I want to assert the continuing power of all kinds of small histories to explain the past and to connect it to our present, and ourselves. The Emmet’s Inch, The Eagle’s Mile Make Lame Philosophy to Smile    —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” Digitization has usually been considered a facilitator of what has been called “big” history. While digital history projects increasingly make good and sensitive use of individual and granular records and use them to bring human complexity into larger analysis,1 the digitization of published material and archives have mostly been discussed by historians in aggregate: they are valued chiefly for their ability to give us “big data” about phenomena in the past.2 For most historians, digitization means that we can see connections, trends, change over time, and potential causations more quickly, more completely, and more convincingly than ever before. We can write longer histories, broader histories. Digitization is reconfiguring the work of historians who work on big questions in the long durée. Yet for those interested in questions and methodologies of microhistory, biographical history, and other kinds of what we might call “small” history, the digitization of archives and individual records is an equally transformative development. With digitized historical records now numbering in the billions, and with increasing sophistication of search technologies and machine learning, we have more and more ability to know the lives of individuals in history, even those who were humble, marginal, and obscure. We are facing a deluge of easily accessible, easily connectable, individuated human records and, with it, a serious, if largely unacknowledged, challenge to the previous methods we have used to keep the boundlessness of history in check. As Lara Putnam points out in a recent article, while digital historians have been reflecting on how digitization changes the way we research and communicate history for some time, the reality is that all historians have had their work transformed by digitization. Putnam’s path-breaking article traces this transformation and the serious problems it creates in transnational history, and she argues that “theorizing this mass ‘digitized turn,’ is urgent.”3 This article will contribute to Putnam’s urgent call for a more carefully theorized “mass digitized turn” by thinking about my own border-crossing research: a global microhistory of sex trafficking told through the stories of individuals connected to one transnational case of “white slavery” in 1910. I will examine the way that historians have used small histories and incorporated individuals into their narratives. I will suggest that digitization can change how historians discover, concatenate, and communicate small stories. As a historian writing from the perspective of someone not trained in “digital history,” I will consider the practice and the ethics of telling and digitizing individual histories and suggest some different ways of dealing with the new boundaries—and boundlessness—that “the mass digitized turn” throws up, particularly for historians working in the period after 1800. Finally, amidst the increasing emphasis on digitization and big data within the field of history, I want to assert the continuing power of all kinds of small histories to explain the past and to connect it to our present and ourselves. The Oldest Narrative Trick of the Bourgeoisie The whore and gambler by the state Licensed weave that nation’s fate    —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” We frequently turn to William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” when we cast about for metaphors for microhistory. “To see the world in a grain of sand,” goes the oft-quoted first line. It appears to simply and concisely capture the popular methodology of asking big questions of small things.4 However, this metaphor fails to adequately capture not only debates within the practice of microhistory itself but also the way in which Blake’s metaphors and paradoxes that pepper the original poem speak to much wider methodological issues within history.5 Blake’s poem—originally a series of couplets written in no particular order—is also deeply concerned with the ethics of the way we treat the voiceless and the powerless; the tensions between different scales and experiences; the juxtaposition of knowledge and ignorance; and the interconnectedness of the world. A starving dog seals the fate of his master; grief is entangled with joy; and the emmet—an old word that my grandmother still uses for an ant—can see an inch, the eagle, a mile. The question of the “emmet’s inch” is an enduring one, affecting social and cultural historians who identify as microhistorians, as well as those who do not.6 How do we answer big historical questions using (in the case of microhistory) one individual (or one event, or one small town), when we know that the individual herself—the “exceptional normal” person who tells us about their wider world—could never see beyond their own experience?7 How do we explain large historical trends while also keeping individual agency in sight?8 How do we turn the small examples we deploy in social and cultural history into evidence for wider trends? And, as microhistorian Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon asks, should we do such a thing? Or does making our individuals into exemplars—grains of sand—in which we can “see the world” do a disservice to them; does it mean that social history has failed in its fundamental aim “to make ordinary people the subject of history on their own terms”?9 Magnússon argues that that the only way forward is to “singularize” our accounts of people in the past and to stop trying to contextualize them, to make them part of a “bigger picture.”10 Jill Lepore examines this debate in a different light when she contrasts microhistory and historical biography, arguing that where microhistory sees its subjects as worthy only in that they are exemplary, historical biography is drawn to them for their singularity.11 This perspective is further developed in work on “the biographical turn” in history, but for the most part history and historical biography are seen as separate projects.12 Historical biography also continues to choose subjects who, if not always famous or well-known, have left significant sources behind. The recent turn to global or “far reaching” microhistory has renewed debates about our narrative tricks and devices for those who are thought to be largely unknowable. Tonio Andrade sees the early modern Chinese farmer he writes about as an accident of the historical record, a “fly pressed between the pages” of a history written by the more powerful, and goes on to reiterate the farmer’s insignificance except when seen as part of a bigger account: “his story is useful not so much because it is significant in itself but because it offers a glimpse into another world.”13 Jean-Paul Ghobrial sees a problem with this technique. “In our rush to populate global history with human faces,” he writes, we risk making them “little more than panes of glass through which to view the worlds in which they lived.”14 The problem global microhistory faces is compounded by its sheer scale: how do we do justice to the emmets of the world on their own terms but also engage in analysis that speaks to the wider historical concerns of global history? The debate over the way we can use individual or small stories to find answers to wider historical questions continues to animate microhistorians, but these debates reach well beyond microhistorical or biographical methodologies. Indeed, it is for this reason that the article bears the subtitle “small history” rather than “microhistory” in a digital age. In all social and cultural history, the quest to restore agency to and understand the experience of individuals and groups in the past is in tension with the desire to understand larger historical processes and structures. And whether they are the focus of the research or the subject of an illuminating paragraph, individuals become devices in the hands of most historians; they become cyphers, symbols of wider concerns, windows through which we view their worlds. Prostitutes, the subject of my own research, seem to be particularly susceptible to this allegorization. To Blake, the state-licensed “whore” “weaves the nation’s fate”; to historian William Lecky the prostitute was “the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of her people.”15 For a much later historian, Timothy Gilfoyle, prostitutes are “metaphors of modernity.”16 It is an apt description. One does not have to read very far into the historiography to learn that prostitution, and trafficking as well, tends to be viewed as a symbol of larger or wider issues that were suppressed: the control of women’s sexuality, the growth of the bureaucracy of crime control, the regulation of public health and public space, the encroachment of modernity, the rise of internationalism, the battles of feminism, the practice and impact of colonialism.17 Of course, prostitution is not the only phenomenon about which such things might be said. Caroline Steedman wryly refers to this technique as “the oldest narrative trick of the bourgeoisie: to evoke the sufferings of the poor to tell some other kind of tale.”18 More significantly for the case I am making here, when the social experiences of women working in the sex industry are discussed within histories of prostitution, this becomes the defining category through which the individual who we have plucked from the archive is understood. Historians have routinely claimed that women who sold sex were not necessarily defined by their prostitution, that they were other things: community members, domestic servants, migrants, mothers, daughters, and lovers.19 And yet, in every account we have of them, they appear primarily, usually only, as prostitutes. This is true whether the subject is examined microhistorically or in a longer or larger context and extends to many other histories of criminals, the poor, and other marginalized people. They are viewed through the category that the archives (and subsequently we) have assigned them. I am as guilty of this as anyone. I first introduced the people about whom I am now writing a global microhistory through a brief anecdote in my first book. In a few short pages, I relayed a story about two “notorious traffickers in women,” whose real names were Antonio Carvelli and Alexander Di Nicotera, who both came from northern Italy. These men had gotten their start pimping in Australia and New Zealand and, in early 1910, had recruited three teenage girls from France and one from New Zealand to sell sex on the streets of London and Buenos Aires. They did so with the help of two women who had worked for them as prostitutes in the antipodes. The two men were prosecuted as “white slavers,” imprisoned for six months, and then deported to Italy. Their two female accomplices steamed out of London and escaped arrest. The four young women were repatriated to France and New Zealand. I ended the chapter with a brief vignette about Lydia Harvey, the youngest victim, on a steamship bound for Wellington: it was the last glimpse I caught of her in the archive. Overall, this anecdote helped to narrate and evidence a chapter that was primarily concerned with the way in which foreign prostitution and sex trafficking was defined, policed, and experienced in London in the first half of the twentieth century.20 When I first told Lydia Harvey’s story in a few short pages, it was to evoke her extreme suffering at the hands of her trafficker so that I could tell a tale about the way that migrant prostitution was policed in London. I still stand by my arguments, of course: Harvey’s story does encapsulate the way that the modern state, purportedly so concerned with protecting victims of trafficking, was more inclined to punish them instead. But it was also a narrative trick. Concerned with promoting this argument, I held the fragments I knew about her life (gleaned from the police archive file in which I found her) hostage to the narrative I needed to construct. In one sentence, I catapulted her from the year she was born into the job at which she was working when she was recruited into sex work. The rest of her story was centered entirely around this experience. When her ship left the East India Docks in November of 1910, I did not follow her. In my story (and it was my story) she became one of the many “prostitutes” whose brief anecdotes enriched the analysis and (I hope at least) added meaningful details to a book that was “about prostitution.” Throughout the book, other women like Harvey appeared and then disappeared in similar ways, here as an example that proved a rule, there as an exception to a trend. I did this—and most social and cultural historians do similar things—in part because I believed that there was little more I could discover about these women, that I had caught a “glimpse” of a marginalized person who was “caught like a fly” between the pages of a larger archive. In her book Imperfect Histories, Ann Rigney notes the importance of anecdotes in communicating the unknowability of history, especially when discussing the vast majority of people who have left few, or no, ego documents behind. These people, as Rigney points out, “can only incidentally be revealed, in a negative way, by anecdotes or faits diverse in which the normally hidden routine is for some reason disrupted and hence recorded. The ‘glimpse’ becomes a methodological principle”21 Our ability to discover anything at all about the obscure, humble, and marginalized individuals in the past inspires fascination. As John Arnold writes, “there is little more seductive in social history than the promise of access to the ‘voices’ of those normally absent from the historical record.” But this fascination, this seduction, always exists in productive tension with our inability to discover everything about them. “About Menocchio we know many things,” Ginzburg writes in that famous work of microhistory The Cheese and the Worms. “About this Marcato, or Marco—and so many others like him who lived and died without leaving a trace—we know nothing.”22 “Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Hu,” writes Jonathan Spence in another example, “is that we know anything about him at all.”23 The boundlessness of the past has always been kept in check not only by the boundedness of the archive and library but also by our own cognitive and physical abilities to identify, search, collect, and connect records. This, argues Rigney, is where history meets the sublime—where historians admit the limitations of their ability to know, comprehend, and represent a boundless past. So, what happens now that our ability to chase so many people out of the bounded archive has become so much greater, faster, and finer grained? Running the Whole Universe Through a Machine Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour    —William Blake “Auguries of Innocence” Proving, perhaps, that historians make for terrible prophets, Lawrence Stone wrote in his seminal 1979 article “The Revival of Narrative” that “we all know of the doctoral dissertations which languish unfinished since the researcher has been unable to keep under intellectual control the sheer volume of print-out spewed out by the computer . . . One clear conclusion is surely that, whenever possible, sampling by hand is preferable and quicker than, and just as reliable as, running the whole universe through a machine.”24 Cliometrics—the technique, lampooned here by Stone, of using computer algorithms to analyze quantitative historical data—has faded into historiographical obscurity (or, at least, into economics departments). But nearly forty years on from the time of Stone’s article, the fact that computers make it quicker and easier to find and process large amounts of historical data can surely brook few arguments. Making at least some use of digital and computational resources for history has become the status quo, for established researchers and graduate students alike and, increasingly, for undergraduates as well. It has, in Putnam’s words, become “easy” and “quotidian.”25 The developments over the past four, let alone forty, years are dizzying. Digitized printed primary sources—books, pamphlets, periodicals—now number in the billions. Closely related is the mass digitization of newspapers: from Australia and New Zealand’s immense digitization of almost all of their national and local newspapers to the creation of digital archives for individual publications (most famously and problematically, the Times).26 The digitization of manuscript, unpublished, and unprinted archival material is following hot on the heels of these initiatives. The greatest push has been the digitization of what we could characterize as individuated archival records: birth, marriage, and death registrations; immigration records; criminal records; and other similar material that are searchable by name. A growing number of for-profit, nonprofit, and academic initiatives are digitizing specific collections, such as the Old Bailey Online, which hosts almost 200,000 trial records. Ancestry.com, the private company that runs the world’s largest genealogical database, boasts twenty billion individual records, with two million being added to the site every single day. This site is joined by many others: Find My Past, Family Search, Find a Grave, and more, which together make up what is increasingly being referred to as “the family history industry.”27 The digitization of sources, coupled with new technologies with which to process, interpret, and communicate them, is transforming the way we do history and the kind of history we can do. And yet, Stone’s comments about the challenges of keeping this kind of data under “intellectual control” remain apt. Even the most technophile writer on digital history often refers to the feeling of having a vertiginous number of sources at their fingertips. Google’s mass digitization of printed material has meant that even historians and classicists who worked with a (relatively) limited source base find themselves asking “what do you do with a million books?”28 Individual researchers are daunted by their “10,000 digital notecards,” lost in “a sea of information,” searching “a digital haystack,” dealing with “gaps of excess,” and with—a compelling term coined by William Turkel— “an infinite archive.”29 As Daniel J. Cohen argued in a recent Journal of American History Interchange on digital history, “It is now quite clear that historians have to grapple with abundance, not scarcity.”30 For most historians who consider these issues, confronting abundance has meant thinking big. “What is desperately needed,” wrote Armitage and Guildi in their provocative History Manifesto, “is a training capable of weaving [data] together into one inter-related fabric of time.”31 Digitization, for them, is a tool best used in service to big history and the “long durée.” While digital historiographers acknowledge that data does not always need to take the form of statistics or quantitative research, their focus is still on big history.32 There is a call for new techniques of “distant reading” of an enormous number of sources to replace the “close reading” of a limited number of sources and for a new “hermeneutics of data” in history that experiments with novel ways of communicating big and abundant data to audiences.33 Digital history, claim its advocates, also calls into serious question the most common ways that historians have been using small stories. “Digital history and the abundance it tries to address make many historical arguments seem anecdotal rather than comprehensive,” commented Steven Mintz in the Journal of American History discussion. The ability to quickly find thousands of stories has made the selective use of anecdote and example intellectually dubious.34 Some have passed over close reading altogether. Harking back to the cliometrics of several decades ago, a group of evolutionary biologists, social scientists, and computer scientists (among others) devised a project they called “culturomics,” in which algorithms used google Ngrams and other digital book resources to process enormous amount of data to analyze cultural and social trends over time.35 This, and other forms of “cultural analytics” have many historians raising their eyebrows. Tim Hitchcock, who was one of the lead historians on two of the most successful and ambitious archive digitization projects in the past decade, remains skeptical and reflective about big data’s potential. As he argues in his critique of “Culturomics,” many digital scholars have fallen victim to the “Casaubon delusion” and believe, like George Eliot’s tragic figure, that they can create a new “Key to all Mythologies.” More broadly, Hitchcock worries that a discourse of digitization that focuses solely on “big data” pushes out humanist perspectives in favor of social scientific ones.36 Like Putnam, he feels that historians need to be far more reflective on how digitization is changing the way we work and far quicker to defend our particular and humanist way of understanding the past against the tide of cultural analytics. Long before the advent of digital methods, Ginzburg and other microhistorians argued that historical query is not particularly well suited to big data—it is an epistemology that values “richer knowledge in which instinct and intuition are at work.”37 And yet, there is still a prevailing sense that, without “big” history, all we have will be “trivial history” made from (now digital) “trifles.”38 The conversation grows ever more urgent. Gaps of excess, scarcity, knowability, and representability are being dramatically reconfigured, virtually daily, by digitization projects. This has allowed “culturomics” to spot sweeping trends, but just as—if not more—importantly for historians, it has also given us the tools to create, in Hitchcock’s words, “a more useable history from below made of lives knowable only through small fragments of information” because it allows us to find out so much more information so much more quickly. It means we are able, as Hitchcock puts it, to “radically contextualize” individuals by exploring the multiple archival contexts in which they appear or are represented. Using different kinds of data and more data, we can tell fuller stories about people who have previously been considered lost, virtually unknowable, glimpsed fleetingly, invisible to history.39 Menocchio, in Ginzburg’s words, was “a dispersed fragment, reaching us by chance, of an obscure and shadowy world.”40 For modern historians—especially but increasingly for early modern ones, as well—digitization means that the origin of these fragments has changed. Some of them still reach us, that is, find their way to the archive, by chance. But others—especially the individuated records upon which my new project rests—reach us because of systematic efforts on the part of the modern state to count, monitor, and register every individual in their jurisdiction and beyond. They reach the digitized archive again not by chance but through the careful, systematized, but still biased and uneven process of digital resource creation. And they reach us—or make their way to our computer screens—because of search algorithms, a far more sophisticated fragment-catching net than historians have ever before had at their disposal. Digital history illuminates small details within complex contexts at great speed. We catch many more glimpses. We can see more traces. It means we can find more clues. We do not have more information—the gone is still gone—but we have more access to that information and thus more potential to have knowledge. It is simply not enough to say that digitization allows for a historical research that is bigger, faster, and finer grained, as though this will just augment the kind of history already being done. It is crucial for historians to start thinking more carefully about the relationship between the data and sources now digitally available and the way we use evidence to tell the stories of individuals and groups in the past. Whereas we could once attempt to radically contextualize those who had serendipitously left some meaty trace behind, we can now, if we are modernists, do it for a much larger portion of the world’s population. The potential to be able to place individuals within the fuller context of their own lives is being dramatically improved, and we must prepare to be more regularly astonished at the people whom we will be able to find in the past. A Global History of Sex Trafficking in Six Lives I first found the people whose lives I am writing about together in a court room, at a trial that was the denouement of the criminal investigation that forms the bulk of MEPO 3/197, a Metropolitan Police File on the trafficker Antonio Carvelli’s activities in London in the spring of 1910. Scanning this original file for clues that could lead to other sources about them, I have been able to reconstruct their lives and the story of their involvement with trafficking before and after the spring of 1910. There was the trafficker himself, Antonio Carvelli, born in Turin in 1879, who worked as a musician, a translator, and a shipping agent, while also defrauding and exploiting young women. He was joined by his wife and accomplice, Veronique White, an Australian who left home at nineteen, traveled the world by steamship, and worked in the burgeoning global sex trade. There is also Lydia Harvey, one of his young victims, who agreed to join the Carvellis in Buenos Aires because she had “always wanted to travel.”41 These individuals’ stories are set alongside those of PC William Mead and PC George Nicholls, the men who arrested them in London; Eilidh MacDougall, the woman who ran the refuge to which the victims were sent; and William Coote, the moral reform campaigner who mobilized the case to press for legal change.42 For each of these individuals, the case, and trafficking itself, meant something dramatically different, and I resolved that writing the story of the Carvelli case from each of their perspectives would be the best way to build an argument that purposely destabilized the meaning of “trafficking” by examining it within other personalized experiences of migration, exploitation, and work. Writing this global microhistory has involved using various techniques of historical biography and, not least, family history as I scour ancestry websites, piecing together traces of the lives of my individuals. I deploy nominal record linkage made possible by digitization to follow them beyond (before, after, alongside) the archive file in London in which I first found them. The very recent mass digitization of primary sources—census and immigration records, newspapers, criminal records, and more—is what makes this approach possible. This is, perhaps, a slightly controversial statement because these methodologies, and these sources, are in many ways no different from the way microhistorians have been working for years. And yet, I would never have considered—nor been able to—write the book I am writing even ten years ago. When I resolved to chase my historical actors off the archive page upon which I first found them, I had no idea how much or how little I would be able to find. Some of the clues were found in traditional archives in a traditional way—a family address discovered on a crumbling sheet of paper in the Turin state archives, for instance, that was located using a hand-written index.43 Others were discovered through various kinds of digital sources and databases: this is especially true of the wide use I’ve made of digitized newspapers that are—with significant shortcomings—character searchable. I found the trafficker Antonio Carvelli and his accomplices in archive files from Australia and New Zealand that had not only been digitally catalogued but also scanned and available online and accessible anywhere.44 I charted his various incarnations through advertisements, society pages, and crime reports in Victorian and Western Australian newspapers that had been digitized by Australia’s Trove project. From my home in Cambridge, I watch him get arrested for stealing a violin in Sydney in 1901.45 From my office in London, I see him offer Greek and Latin lessons in Perth in 1906 and win a bocce game in Fremantle the following year. I can hear the banter between him and his rival that was reported in full by the local sports correspondent; I can imagine the taste of the claret and frittata they enjoyed after the match.46 Without this resource, in order to learn how his life as a criminal was fundamentally entangled with his endeavors as a businessman and his experience as an Italian émigré, I would have had to go through hundreds of issues of over twenty different newspapers issue by issue. I would have had to do this in person at each individual state archives, searching for material that would never have been indexed, all the while without knowing whether I would find anything at all. It would, in sum, have been impossible. Or as Putnam puts it, “for the first time, historians can find without knowing where to look.”47 Even more impossible would have been my search for Carvelli’s wife, who had not been arrested during the 1910 investigation (she had slipped out of the country with her pet parrot and another young woman in tow). She was known in this case only by her pseudonym and left no significant presence in the original archive file. I was not sure I would be able to find her at all. But after I discovered her real name by puzzling through a mistranscribed online marriage certificate, I was able to start to connect her string of pseudonyms and global travels. Propelled by the power of her unique name after she had married, I was able to use Ancestry.com’s digitization of Australian and New Zealand immigration records, as well as New Zealand’s Papers Past project to chart Veronique Carvelli’s movements around the world for three decades (newspapers reported shipping information daily in this period, including passengers who alit at various ports).48 Zooming down to the most micro of levels on Ancestry.com, I could see the original scanned passenger manifests and note who she was traveling with—often her husband, passing by a different name.49 The time and money these searches through British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and Italian records would have cost me would have made this unfathomable without digitization. But most of my clues and glimpses came not purely from traditional sources, nor purely from digitized ones, but from the combination of both. Digital searches across multiple library and archive platforms in various countries meant that I could identify faint trails of breadcrumbs that I could follow into physical archives, allowing me to take what would have once been a very time-consuming and expensive risk—checking “just in case”—with substantially more chance of finding something. Had my online searches of the digitized birth records of her potential siblings and one oblique mention of a truancy charge in the Oamaru Mail not suggested to me where I might find Lydia Harvey’s father, I could never have justified traveling to the New Zealand National Archives in Dunedin to scour the magistrates court records of her hometown in the 1890s. The massive public and private investment in digitization reduces the individual investment and risk-taking required to write about marginalized lives. Ginzburg and other microhistorians tend to describe their practice as “the intense study of a few revealing documents,” and even iconoclast microhistorians like Magnússon claim that it is only possible to write microhistories about individuals using a cache of good ego-documents.50 I disagree. Digitization means that my book project can rest on the intense study of hundreds if not thousands of documents, which on their own usually reveal extremely little. Digitization provides innumerable amounts of what Giovanni Levi has called “disorderly evidence for the words and deeds of daily life.”51 It means that I am able to write microhistories of individuals in the absence of ego documents: only one of my historical actors, the moral reformer William Coote, left any sort of biographical or ego-document behind. Of course, this means that these stories will lack interiority and voice, those coveted sources that have been used to bring the long dead to life. But they will not lack richness, detail, context, and agency. Most of all, these digitized sources allow me to write about these people as complex individuals rather than as brief examples, for the first time. The voicelessness of the sources I am using means that Lydia Harvey remains an absence, just the same. I cannot know what she thought or felt. I am almost certainly missing some important relationships in her life: friendship, for example, so often escapes the historical record. But I can see her in myriad contexts: standing on board the SS Ruahine enroute to Buenos Aries; traveling to Australia as a mariner’s wife; struggling for breath in an emergency influenza hospital; or sneaking out of her boarding house’s bedroom window and heading to downtown Wellington at night. Again, historians have used such methods before with physical records. When trying to imagine her indentured great grandmother’s journey from India to Guyana through only scant sources, Gaiutra Bahudar wondered “if I draw an imaginary line from moment to moment . . . from glimpse to glimpse . . . will her shape emerge?52 Assuming the sources are there in the first place, digitization provides the means to triangulate them rapidly, overlaying tiny details and glimpses like a computed tomography scan, to build a picture of someone who never attested for themselves. It helps me narrow the space from which Lydia Harvey is missing until it almost takes her shape. This process cannot happen without a two-tiered approach. One of Putnam’s major critiques of our use of digitized technology in transnational history is the way that it allows us to find out without going anywhere, without encountering real spaces and real people, and without gaining any real depth of local knowledge. There was no need for me to go to Australia, New Zealand, or Italy, technically speaking. Digital technology meant that archive files could be ordered and, for a fee, delivered to my inbox. Skype calls could have enabled me to speak to experts. Google Earth could have helped me trace old addresses. And yet, my research experiences there were irreplaceable online. Only by walking through the streets could I appreciate the palimpsests of cityscapes and the embodied sense of being somewhere: the cool breezes on Oamaru’s beach; the heat and humidity of a Newcastle autumn. But even here, digitization gave me more transparencies to overlay: I could carry a tablet through the streets of Wellington, matching modern streets with those at the turn of the last century, seeing where old buildings used to be. In Melbourne, I charted the way a suburb expanded, in Turin, the way a family flat near the (then) new railway station was converted to a hotel—a kind of historical augmented reality, if you will. All this has allowed me to build a radically contextualized picture of people about whom I thought I’d only ever catch fleeting glimpses. This methodology produces a social history that examines themes and people beyond conventional frames of reference, beyond the way in which the bounded archive forces us to label them “according to their conduct” or the category under which they had been filed.53 Digitization takes a key tenet of microhistory, and arguably history more generally, that “life has never been straightforward and simple truths should be regarded with suspicion” and follows it to newly possible conclusions.54 Of course, I still had to decide which narratives to tell and how, but it was easier to make this complicated, to cast a wide net, to see the way that individuals defy (and often also comply) with categorizations and metanarratives. The more common way to fill in the blanks in the life of a mostly unknown historical actor is to use the generalization, or proxy, method. If I did not have any other details, I could say that Veronique Carvelli probably got involved in prostitution because she was from a poor family, had poor social support, and had a strong aversion to domestic service: most women who sold sex shared these experiences.55 But this time, I do have the details. I can scour the Melbourne newspapers for information about her family; I can use Google Earth to examine the street where she grew up, facing one of Melbourne’s finest parks; I can even use an online real-estate listing to see the rooms in her remarkably well-preserved late-nineteenth century family home, “Trafford.” Using digital resources paired with long, hot walks around East Melbourne, I learned that Veronique was from a well-off and close family, grew up in a well-appointed house, never worked as a servant, and returned to live near her brothers and sisters at the end of her life in a leafy upper-middle-class neighborhood. So much for generalization. This failure of conjecture means that my stock character—the migrant prostitute—becomes a real person, with all of the complications, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies human beings bring. Being able to find these details for many, many more people than we ever have before means that saying “we cannot know” and “we can only glimpse” loses methodological and rhetorical power. It is a useful technique, as I’ve noted; one that keeps the boundlessness of history in check and that justifies our tendency to write about individuals within the category or theme we have put them in (because it is where the archive has put them) and to use them to evidence a wider trend. But this synecdoche of historical narration, as Hayden White would put it, needs to be reexamined. We can now easily chase many people out of the archive or, at least, from one kind of archive into another, in which they appear under different categories. Antonio Carvelli appeared in the first archive file I found as a pimp and trafficker; he appears, much more briefly, in another (the Victoria Public Record Office record of incoming passengers) as a young émigré and opera singer.56 Lydia Harvey appears in this same file as a destitute and ill young woman soliciting on the streets of Piccadilly; but in another place (the digitized newspaper from her hometown of Oamaru), she smiles on stage after winning a silver purse in a local beauty contest. In my first book, Lydia Harvey was deployed as symbol of one facet of prostitution. The irony of this became acute for me as I learned more about her life and discovered she had spent longer as a photographer’s apprentice, a hospital matron, and a wife engaged in “domestic duties,” than she had spent selling sex. The speed at which I can now deploy traditional microhistory methodologies means that this method can be done not just for one but for (in the case of my book) six people. It allows me to construct a prismatic view of a complex phenomenon, to write a kind of history in the round. I can massively expand the synchronic and diachronic connections between people, places, and experiences—an ability that makes digitization, as Putnam notes, particularly important for transnational and global historians. In this way, digitization could enable a different kind of “total history,” one that does not seek one true, capacious story but captures as many competing stories as possible.57 In other words, microhistory using digital research methods makes it easier to produce the kind of microhistory that Magnússon controversially calls for—singular accounts of individuals on their own terms. But it also means that we can still respond to larger challenges of significance, metanarrative, and big historical questions because it allows us to produce quite quickly, relatively speaking, a collectivity of stories that help explain the big picture not by being exemplars of it or cyphers for it but by being (in their number, their detail, and their connectivity) significant components of it.58 When a phenomenon can only be fully explained by examining the small stories that defined it, or were defined by it, then those stories become significant, in and of themselves. The age-old question of how to link small stories to a wider context is also being reshaped by digitization. Digitization complicates Revel’s “jeux d’echelles” by making it far easier to switch incrementally between scales of enquiry and perspective. When I go to place the small story of my historical actors into a wider context, the scales at my disposal have multiplied and the speed with which I can assess them has accelerated. To contextualize individuals, we can now not only consult more general accounts of the place they lived or the experience they had, we can now see what thousands of others like them were doing at the same time, chronologically and spatially. For instance, to understand what Veronique White was doing in Leonora, Western Australia, during the later years of the gold rush (I found her here via Australia’s Trove project), I do not just read books about prostitution on gold rush frontiers (though of course I do this too). I can easily, and quickly, add another layer first: that of the town of Leonora itself, whose local newspapers have all been digitized and provide a guide to day-to-day life in this goldfields supply town in the early 1900s. I can examine all the brothels that were operating there and the women who worked in them; the aboriginal families and the Japanese migrants who lived as their neighbors on the same street; the debates in the raucous town halls about them. While discovering this kind of context was always possible, the time it would have taken for the sake of a few paragraphs of final text would have made the endeavor preposterous. Digitization provides us with a macroscope, as Tim Hitchcock describes, which, to disambiguate, is not the opposite of a microscope. The macroscope cannot only see big things but rather has an infinite focus—it can show us the very tiny and then show us where the tiny is in relation to the big, all within the blink of an eye.59 No wonder vertigo appears to be a common sentiment amongst historians working in the digital age. “The [microhistorical] perspective contains something dizzying,” write Sabina Loriga in her work on biography and microhistory. “The work of contextualization appears inexhaustible (every space and all time refers to another space and another time).”60 Loriga identifies two major issues that arise when we attempt to come to terms with this boundlessness. The first—the attempt to tell the “average” biography—is, as I hope I’ve shown, not of as much concern when one sacrifices a quest for “representativeness” for a quest for complication and multiplicity. But the solution to the first only makes the second—the desire to tell everyone’s biography—more acute. As Loriga puts it, this is a “utopian dead end” that will merely create a map of the world that is the same size and shape as the world itself. “We have to accept the circular nature of knowledge,” she writes, “to understand the whole, we have to understand the parts, but to understand these, we have to understand the whole.” In this, the digital macroscope represents a crucial tool in the historian’s arsenal, which, if carefully configured, can help to reshape the way we think and work. It is time to make the most of that opportunity, but in doing so, we must, as microhistorians and transnational historians, attend to Lara Putnam’s enormous caveat about the pitfalls of “the mass digitized turn.” Who stands in the digital shadows? She insists we ask. Why are we finding what we are finding when we type into the search boxes? What does it leave out? What does it make possible, what does it discourage? And what gets lost when data becomes so accessible? Historians have long noted the risks of decontextualization that digitized archives create—we can’t see the files before and after the one our search engine spits out to us, we don’t appreciate the original order of things, we can’t be surprised by the other things we find in the box. Historians talk about reading against the grain of an archive or, as Marisa Fuentes does, along the “bias grain” in order to interrogate the way that it was created in the first place.61 But the digitization of individuated records—such as the ones on Ancestry.com upon which my book’s research so depends—erases the archive altogether, reducing resources created at particular moments by particular structures of power to a giant digital treasure hunt for hidden people. It may also help us forget that this treasure hunt itself comes with its own contexts, power structures, and ethical implications. Historical Rescue Work A Truth thats told with bad intent Beats all the Lies you can invent    —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” One of the six people in my microhistory is Eilidh MacDougall, an early social worker whose job it was to take statements from any victims of white slavery or sexual assault—including Lydia Harvey—who passed through Metropolitan Police station doors in the early twentieth century. She also ran a safe house, where the victims in the Carvelli case were sent. The daughter of a prominent barrister, MacDougall came from a long and diverse tradition of “rescue work,” which ranged from the work of women religious in Magdalen asylums to “outdoor relief” workers who would speak to women they considered to be at moral risks in the streets, offering them support, advice, and potentially work in domestic service.62 Most rescue workers had at least two things in common: the desire to rescue women from a life of degradation and moral turpitude and a lack of inclination to ask the women themselves if they needed rescuing. Rescue is a metaphor often found in works of social history and microhistory. We return again and again to E. P. Thompson’s exhortation to rescue the poor and marginalized from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” “The stories [historians] tell,” writes Joan Scott, “can make the difference between immortality and oblivion”—the historical equivalent, it seems, to salvation and damnation.63 Carolyn Steedman claims that “if you have made a life for the dead and gone, then they can see you.”64 Mark Salber Philips sees E. P. Thompson’s initial plea for historians to “rescue” people in the past as part of the process of history becoming “the scholarship of truth and reconciliation, offering the dignity of narrative as compensation for lifetimes of oppression and exclusion.”65 John Brewer has characterized the telling of small stories as doing “refuge” history, in which “the pleasures . . . derive from a sense of belonging, of connectedness.”66 John Arnold is critical but sympathetic to this process whereby the historian seeks to rescue or resuscitate “the vibrant and empathetically appealing voice of a real, living individual.” It is, he admits, “a desire, ultimately, to cheat the silence of death.”67 In this, historians have something in common with the group of people for whom most of the digitized, individuated records that I am using were created: family historians and genealogists. The yearning for knowledge about the history of our families is a new way of reasserting family bonds, argues Deborah Cohen, a way to counter the fragmentation of families’ past and present.68 This is a driver behind the world’s largest nonprofit genealogical database, run by the company FamilySearch, and owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The Mormons who run FamilySearch do so because they believe that the preservation of the family (conservatively conceived)—past and present—is a sacred mission, but their over 100-year-long dedication to genealogy is also related to their belief in “baptism for the dead.”69 The Church insists that the dead are free to reject the baptism from “the spirit world” in which they reside and that “the names of the deceased are not added to the membership of the church.” They are, however, added to FamilySearch.com.70 I am often struck by the disconnect of using family history methods to research my book, each time Ancestry.com asks me if I would like to add Antonio Carvelli, the pimp and trafficker to whom I almost certainly have no relation, to “my family tree.” Indeed, there are few refuges or comforts in my story.71 The stark fact is that one of my main characters defrauded a seventeen-year-old girl, coerced her into sex with him and with other men, and imprisoned her, first in a gonorrhea- and syphilis-ridden Buenos Aires brothel, then in a cabin of a transatlantic steamer, and finally in a north London flat. Another character, that seventeen-year old girl herself, in the rare moments that she speaks (under duress) into the archive, explicitly says that she wishes she could undo what had happened to her, that she wants to erase her experience of trafficking: “I wish I had never met them,” her witness statement concludes.72 Setting aside the potential performance of the deposition, I feel it is fairly safe to say that Harvey did sincerely wish to completely put her experience behind her. She successfully maintained her pseudonym when she returned to New Zealand, and her real name was never reported in the press. It is quite possible that even her husband never knew what had happened to her. Meanwhile, here I come, ready to rescue her from the condescension of posterity. The word “rescue,” used so often in writing on finding the voices and actions of “forgotten” or “invisible” people in history is particularly striking in the context of prostitution. I recently, rather jarringly, realized that I could be said to be part of the “rescue industry,” much maligned by sex workers past and present.73 Like these self-appointed saviors, I am marching into a situation that I do not have the full resources to understand, with my own agenda. Like William Coote, the early antitrafficking campaigner from the wrong side of the Strand who used stories such as Lydia Harvey’s to gain access to the drawing rooms of the rich and eminent, I am writing this story, at least partially, for my own benefit. Like rescuers of prostitutes in the past and today, I have not asked Lydia Harvey whether she wanted to be saved. Family history, like the rescue industry, is also big business. Their merchandise is the lives of the lost, marginalized, forgotten; their marketplace is the digital environment. Ancestry.com, the world’s largest for-profit genealogical database, is an enormous company with many subsidiaries in countries around the world and over a dozen spin-off products such as AncestryDNA and FindAGrave.com. In the first quarter of 2017, the company posted $850,000 USD in profit, up 25% from the previous year. On Black Friday, 2016, they sold AncestryDNA kits to 560,000 online shoppers, about 15% of whom went on to subscribe to the database, pushing this number over 2 million.74 And while companies like Ancestry and Find My Past, another for-profit genealogy database, commodify the search for small stories, many other companies use these small stories in their merchandizing. The easily accessible and publicly available records of individuals, especially their criminal records, have become useful marketing tools. For instance, 19 Crimes Wine, an Australian vintner, proudly displays the nineteenth century mugshots of convicts on their labels. “Our red blend bears the same traits as those banished to Australia,” they explain. “Defiant by nature, bold in character. Always uncompromising.” “Join the banished,” the website invites its visitors, evoking the sufferings of the poor to sell some other kind of tale.75 Historians also commodify individual lives. We use them to “tell some other kind of tale” in books and articles that feed into our academic appointments, our promotions, and, if we are lucky, our publishing revenue. Like family history, we also seek to find comforting connections and inspirational individuals in the past.76 Alain Corbin is one of the few historians to have pondered this ethical issue in his microhistory, a biography of an unknown nineteenth century man from a small village in North West France. “May he forgive me for this fleeting resurrection, and for the various ways in which reader may, because of what I have written, imagine the man he was,” he writes on the final page.77 But of course, Corbin’s “unknown,” being dead, isn’t able to forgive anything. Indeed, we frequently imagine our relationships with the dead-and-gone as bilateral, but most of the time, between historian rescuer and passive (aka, dead) historical subject, the relationship remains one-way. In Lydia Harvey’s case, I am very struck by the unreciprocal and unreconciled intimacy of the archive.78 I can scrutinize her, know very intimate details about her life, and she can never to do the same for me, no matter how much of myself I pour into investigating her. In John Arnold’s view, the historian isn’t—or isn’t always—a rescuer, so much as an inquisitor, a golem-builder, and even, provocatively, a necrophiliac.79 Digitization compounds these old ethical and methodological issues and presents new ones. Because it enables us to construct the lives of marginalized people so much more easily than before, it also means that we are more inclined to use them and expose them in our histories. Indeed, we are now more likely to “rescue” the poor cottager than, say, the census enumerator who first rendered him visible. We are more likely to give the biographical details of a prostitute than the policeman who arrested her, as though her past history is more important to her getting arrested than the police man’s past history is to arresting her. This is one of the reasons why my history of trafficking’s six lives includes those of the arresting officer, the rescue worker, and the antitrafficking campaigner alongside the criminals and the victims. Microhistorians have always been committed to, as Giovanni Levi puts it, “the search for a more realistic description of human behavior . . . which recognizes [people’s] freedom beyond, though not outside, the constraints of prescriptive and oppressive normative systems.”80 But no matter how many sources we digitize, the vast majority of these will still be created by the powerful, and the vast majority of these will still be created by the state, which, even in its most innocuous record keeping mode is still exercising “biopower.”81 It is no coincidence that historians who have thus far made the most creative use of digitized records to recreate “micro-studies” have been historians of crime and historians, therefore, of people who were surveilled, interrogated, punished, and controlled more than average.82 We need to remind ourselves—and make an effort to explain to others—that these individuated records that are being used on a daily basis to write academic and family history are themselves part of a wider industry of outing and deploying the dead for multiple purposes. So much of the family histories into which we delve hungrily from our living rooms are the traces that past state surveillance has left behind. We are seeing through the eyes of institutions that demand us to be legible: to know what we are called, when we get born, where we get taught and where we labor, who we marry, when we bear children, when we move, when we want, when we get sick, when we die, and where our remains are put afterward.83 These traces of lives that now crowd the internet did not come our way by chance, and finding them is not a happy accident, but rather both are products of past and present political, social, and economic power. We also deploy them, without much reflection, to reconstruct the lives of the dead and gone. Did they want to be “radically contextualized”? Perhaps we can assume that a person who has published their own writing, especially writing about their life, wants to be remembered, but can we make the same assumption for the legions of the unpublished dead: those who, because they were legally compelled to do so, had their marriage registered or their sea voyage surveilled; those whose criminal records were, as far as they knew, to be kept tucked away in a police station drawer; those whose names were briefly mentioned in newspapers that—they thought—became the next day’s kindling? Can we assume that these people, ripped from the dark ever-working chaos of the past and entered onto genealogical and historical databases, want to be there? And even if we ourselves are ever so careful with these sensitive and precious fragments of lives, digitization makes them available to the scrupulous and unscrupulous in equal measure. The digitized dead are deployed to sell products, to promote tourism, to illustrate click-bait BuzzFeed lists. Taking it as a given that all people want to be remembered by academic, westernized history—want to have their name digitized for the good of future generations on some passenger manifest or on some wine bottle or in some book—is a grandiose assumption.84 This, surely, is another way that posterity can condescend. Despite the dramatic rise in our conceit, as we digitize and catalogue individual lives at a pace never seen before, the truth is that some people simply have no desire to be saved by the sacred waters of history. Lydia Harvey’s mother may have been one of them: despite it being mandatory in New Zealand, she seems not to have registered her daughter’s birth. There are other problems, too. Digitization is also uneven temporally speaking. Of course, the period before the modern empire and state—and its surveillance and record keeping—presents fewer opportunities for the kind of digitization that would allow nominal record linkage about individuals, but there is also less investment in such digitization projects, not least because they are of less interest to family historians. And while this is slowly changing, digitization has also added to a much older problem, as Lara Putnam clearly demonstrates: a long-standing “chasm” in which people of color, indigenous peoples, people from the Global South, and colonized peoples remain the most archivally unknown and, simultaneously, in the present day, have less access to digitized resources. What is more, as Amy Stanley points out in her article on early modern maidservants, digitization could mean that the very thing that used to make people more difficult to find—mobility—now renders them far more visible than someone who stayed put.85 “The records of human social life now captured in the digitized world tell us so much about so much that we might forget to remember the systematic absences within them,” writes Putnam.86 This inequality of digitization lies at the heart of my project. Were it not for the massive digitization of most (but not all) Australian and New Zealand newspapers, my project would never have gotten off the ground. These newspapers have been so thoroughly digitized because they are the cultural heritage of affluent, Western nations who have the will and the resources to undertake such a project. Because of the thirst for family and community history in white settler nations, they also have a wide user base. It was this settler colonialism, and Lydia Harvey’s Anglo-whiteness, that meant her case garnered the attention of reformers and saw increased effort on the part of the police in her own time: she was, in other words, the quintessential “white slave,” an ideal trafficking victim. Similarly, it was Antonio Carvelli’s foreignness as a continental European, in an era that racialized and stigmatized Italian migrants, that produced the heightened newspaper coverage about him, both before, during, and after the trafficking prosecution in London. There is a connection between the contemporary inequalities that brought this case to light, in other words, and the layers of financial privilege and historical investment that are at work in the mass digitization projects that make them visible to me in the present. Jill Lepore calls the negotiation with the ethics of telling intimate stories about people who have no ability to consent “tricky work,” where the historian must be “nosy to the point of invasiveness.”87 Salber Philips writes that historical “sentiment also carries possibilities for facile pathos, or even more disturbingly, for a kind of fellow-feeling that becomes the cover for respectable forms of learned voyeurism.”88 These ethical quandaries become more acute when we recognize that we are often trying to rescue the doubly, even triply, silenced and marginalized, from our own positions of privilege and our own ideas about the importance and manner of remembrance. As Gyan Prakash puts it, following Spivak, this kind of historical rescue can be a “disfiguring liberation” done to appease “Western notions of sovereignty and free will.”89 We all need to be careful with glimpses, even when, as now, they have gone from being precious and rare to being innumerable and quotidian—especially then.90 Being careful can include thinking more deeply about the effect our categories have upon our interpretation of individual lives. It can encourage us to question whether we are using stories as mere illustrations, narrative tricks, or whether they help us do justice to the complexity of the matter we are communicating. If Salber Philips is right, and the “dignity of narrative” can be a kind of truth and reconciliation for those on the hard end of history’s injustices, then being careful means thinking about how such an individual might choose how they would like their dignity restored and admitting that it would likely not be by appearing in our books as a “thief” or a “prostitute.” It ought certainly to prompt us to probe more deeply into the lives of the people we deploy as examples: for the first time, a few quick searches in the digital environment can often add nuance and humanity to a name, a label, and an anecdote from an archive file. There is, of course, a limit to how careful we can be if we still wish to write a kind of history that isn’t contributing to the “desertification” of the past, as Sabina Loriga puts it. If we still want real people to cross the stages of our historical narratives, we must accept that this brings with it all sorts of tricks and problems. I certainly have not overcome these ethical, methodological, and theoretical issues in the history that I am trying to tell. I remain a trafficker in other people’s stories. While this article has direct implications for those who write microhistory or use its techniques, it has been my intention to show the possibilities and challenges for all historians who use small and individual stories—as examples, vignettes, anecdotes, evidence—to think about what digitization means for the way we research and write. It is to especially encourage modern historians to reassess the “glimpse as methodological principle” when we deploy individuals as brief examples because, or so we claim, we cannot know any more. Simultaneously, it is to argue that we must not let digitization become easy and quotidian: we must recognize that this far reaching new technology requires new methodological conversations. I have also argued that, considering this newfound ability for our historical actors to so easily slip out of the bounds that our categories put on them, we need to rethink categorization and the ethics of this practice. It is fundamentally unavoidable in most histories (even frequent in microhistories), but this should not mean we should be complacent or cavalier about it. I am not necessarily advocating a “singularization of history” in toto, but I am certainly advocating a clearer recognition of our practice. Part of this means recognizing what we are doing in an ethical sense: we must all see our use of digitized sources and our deployment of individual stories as, in Marisa Fuentes’s words, “a methodological and ethical project.”91 We also need to be vigilant about the grain of the digital archive. We need to reflect on the structural inequalities of digitization and work toward redressing them. We need to do our best, as historical professionals, to make sure that amid the flurry of easily accessible digital sources about past people that the public remains profoundly aware of the “experience of uncertain knowledge.”92 Users of digital resources need to understand the inequalities and power structures that built the archive; both the original archive—the passenger manifests, school records, census returns, and many more—and the digital one into which these records are being poured. We need to recognize the power structures of digitization itself, what this means for data, both from the past and when today’s present becomes the past. Indeed, as the private company Ancestry.com collects more and more of the DNA of those who want to know “where they come from,” a new kind of biopower is being built. These companies sell genetic information on to pharmaceutical companies and other industries interested in genomic data, and almost all retain individuals’ DNA samples into perpetuity unless asked to delete and destroy them. Of course, much of this information will become invaluable to future scientists, social researchers, and historians: we will have very accurate maps of human migration, we will know more about potential bone marrow donors, we will better understand epidemiological problems.93 Yet, in this age of information at the most microscopic of genetic levels, it is ironic that people’s quest for their own small story sees them join an immense database from which all sorts of big stories will be told—and sold. And what remains? The story best suited to capturing the minute fractures in this power, to articulating the way individuals move within and between its networks, is still the small one. Indeed, care and attention to our small histories is important because they are, now more than ever, a political project. Social history has been accused of fragmenting over the past few decades. Where it used to seek sweeping explanations for huge social phenomenon over long periods of time, it now concerns itself with individual experience and small time-frames; with explorations of race, gender, class, and sexuality; with differences of meaning, cultural understanding, and identity. With this, argue its detractors, not least the authors of the heavily critiqued History Manifesto, it has lost its ability to offer meaningful explanations for matters of consequence in the world today.94 It is becoming increasingly clear that the push-back against this supposedly fragmented social history is part of a wider and troubling trend in popular culture that seeks to denigrate the postmodern politics of identity and diversity. Historians are faced with a unique task in an era that has created and digitized so many individual records and yet where the political climate demands increasingly unitary and simplified metanarratives of the world in which we live and lived. What social historian Nicole Eustace wrote over fifteen years ago in the Journal of Social History about the importance of having “more stories, not fewer” seems more pertinent today than it ever has been.95 The authors of the History Manifesto hold that it is “big history” backed up by big data that is best suited to political endeavors. Historians, they argue, ought to be writing long-durée, ambitious, “good, honest” history that “would shake citizens, policymakers, and the powerful out of their complacency.”96 Yet, it is the small stories that make people connect with history in the first place; it is the constant reiteration of the fundamental and idiosyncratic humanity of the past through story that inspires us to learn more of them—and bigger ones too.97 If it is the big-story historian’s job to shake complacent policy makers, it is the small-story historian’s job to convince people that the small stories from the past that have moved them are unfolding in myriad ways today as well; to encourage their sentiment to become conscience. Big history might “shake” citizens, but small history makes them. There is a power in complexity and imperfection, in showing, through histories of individual lives, that our understanding of a phenomenon such as sex trafficking simply cannot ever be complete or monolithic, nor can our response to it be. Thanks to digitization, complicating stories has gotten much easier. We have more power to deploy individual stories, to find exceptions, disrupt stereotypes, dismantle tropes, question stock characters, and challenge assumptions based on big data. We need to reassert, with renewed confidence, the importance of small history. Footnotes This article is the product in no small part of conversations with other historians, often conducted digitally. Special thanks to Brodie Waddell, Matt Milner, Helen Rogers, and Harriet Phillips for their careful readings of earlier drafts. I am very grateful to Deborah Cohen and Matt Houlbrook for including me in their enriching workshop, “The Individual in History,” at the North American Conference on British Studies in 2015; Brodie Waddell, Mark Halliwood, and Laura Sanga (and their blog The Many Headed Monster) for organizing the “Voices of the People” digital symposium in which I took part; and Will Pooley and the Storying the Past team for including me in the Creative Histories Conference in Bristol, 2017, out of which much of this thinking has come. Address correspondence to Julia Laite, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, 26 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DQ, UK. 1 “Convict Lives,” The Digital Panopticon: Tracing London Convicts in Britain and Australia, 1780-1925, accessed January 1, 2018, https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/Convict_Lives. See also Tim Hitchcock’s critical reflections about digitization and small data that have appeared on his blog, Historyonics, accessed on June 14, 2018, http://historyonics.blogspot.com/. 2 Anne Helmreich, Tim Hitchcock, and William J Turkel, “Rethinking Inventories in the Digital Age : The Case of the Old Bailey,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 11 (2014): 1–25; Alexis Weedon, “Digital Resources and Quantitative Research,” Journal of Victorian Culture 15, no. 2 (2010): 287–91; Toni Weller, ed., History in the Digital Age (London, 2013); Daniel J. Cohen et al., “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (2008): 442–51; Kristen Nawrotzki; Jack Dougherty, Writing History in the Digital Age, 2013; Adrian Bingham, “The Digitization of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for Historians,” Twentieth Century British History 21, no. 2 (April 5, 2010): 225–31. Or, they are discussed as a part of a larger conversation about communicating history to the online public. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, “Making History Online: The Collins Matthews Lecture for the Public Understanding of History,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (2015): 75–93. 3 Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” The American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 378, 389. 4 Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (London, 2013), 5. 5 For a clear and rich explication of these debates, see the coauthored book What is Microhistory, in which Sigurður Gylfi M Magnússon and István M. Szijárto present their differing answers to this eponymous question in two separate sections of the book. Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice. 6 Lara Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 3 (2006): 615–30; Matti Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research,” History & Theory 40, no. 3 (October 2001): 347; Chuanfei Chin, “Margins and Monsters: How Some Micro Cases Lead to Macro Claims,” History and Theory (October 2011): 341–57. 7 Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, and Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 33. 8 Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, 21. 9 Sigurḥur Gylfi Magnússon, “‘The Singularization of History’: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 3 (2014): 701, 712. 10 Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, 5–8. 11 Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 (2001): 144. 12 On the biographical turn in history, see especially Sabina Loriga, “The Plurality of the Past: Historical Time and the Rediscovery of Biography,” in The Biographical Turn: Lives in History, ed. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma (London, 2016), 31–41; Sigurḥur Gylfi Magnússon, “The Life Is Never Over: Biography as a Microhistorical Approach,” in The Biographical Turn: Lives in History, ed. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma (London, 2016), 42–52. See also Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, eds., Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing (Lewiston, New York, 2013). 13 Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 575. 14 Jean-Paul A Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory,” Past & Present 222, no. 1 (2014): 58–59. For a wider discussion on the problems of transnational and global history and the mass digitized turn, see Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable.” 15 William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (New York, 1869), 282. 16 Timothy J Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of Modernity,” The American Historical Journal 104, no. 1 (1999): 117–41. 17 See, for instance, Donna J Guy, Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (London, 1991); Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (Basingstoke, UK, 2011); Judith R Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London, 1992); Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Stephanie A Limoncelli, “The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Traffic in Women, 1875–1960” (Berkeley, CA, 2007); Daniel Gorman, “Empire, Internationalism, and the Campaign against the Traffic in Women and Children in the 1920s,” Twentieth Century British History 19, no. 2 (2008): 186–216; Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (London, 1995); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London, 2003); Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge, 2009); Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago and London, 1990). 18 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Mancheser, UK, 2001), 102. 19 Judith R Walkowitz and Daniel J Walkowitz, “‘We Are Not Beasts of the Field’: Prostitution and the Poor in Plymouth and Southampton under the Contagious Diseases Acts,” Feminist Studies 1, no. 3–2 (1978): 73–106; Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865–1890 (Urbana, IL, 1985); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1919 (Baltimore, MD, 1982); Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures; Julia Ann Laite, “Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints: Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth Century London,” History Workshop Journal 65, no. 1 (2008): 96–116. 20 Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens. 21 Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY, 2001),108. 22 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, (Baltimore, MD, 1991), 182. 23 Jonathan D. Spence, The Question of Hu (London, 1988), xv. 24 Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present 85 (1979): 11. 25 Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable,” 379, 383. 26 Richard Abel, “The Pleasures and Perils of Big Data in Digitized Newspapers,” Film History 25, no. 1–2 (2013): 1–10; Bingham, “The Digitization of Newspaper Archives”; Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press, 1918–1978 (Oxford, 2009). 27 Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: The Things We Try to Hide (London, 2013), 241–49. 28 Gregory Crane, “What Do You Do with a Million Books?” D-Lib Magazine 12, no. 3 (2006) np., accessed January 15, 2018, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/crane/03crane.html; Cohen et al., “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” 455. 29 Ainsley T. Erikson, “Historical Research and the Problem of Categories: Reflections on 10,000 Digital Note Cards,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed. Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (Ann Arbor, MI, 2013); Katherine Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, “Creating Meaning in a Sea of Information: The Women and Social Movements Web Sites,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed. Kirsten Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (Ann Arbor, MI, 2013); William J. Turkell, “Methodology for the Infinite Archive,” Digital History Hacks, 2006, accessed January 15, 2018, http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.co.uk/2006/04/methodology-for-infinite-archive.html. 30 Cohen et al., “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” 455. 31 Jo Guildi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, 2014), 112. For the strong criticism this book received, see David Armitage and Jo Guldi, “The History Manifesto: A Reply to Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler,” American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (2015): 543–54. See also a series of blog posts from the Modern British Studies group at the University of Birmingham, “Responding to the History Manifesto,” accessed June 14, 2018, https://mbsbham.wordpress.com/responding-to-the-history-manifesto/. 32 Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens, “The Hermaneutics of Data and Historical Writing,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed. Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (Ann Arbor, MI, 2013). 33 While they concede that “historians need not treat and interpret data only for rigorous hypothesis testing. This is another crucial difference between our approach and the approaches of the cliometricians of the 1960s and ’70s,” Gibbs and Owens do not really expand on the way that data can be used in ways other than identifying big trends (be they cultural, social, economic, etc.). Gibbs and Owens, “The Hermeneutics of Data.” 34 “Hypotheses based on a limited number of examples, as many dissertations and books still are, seem flimsier when you can scan millions of books at Google to find counterexamples.” Stephen Minz in Cohen et al., “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” 456. 35 Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331, no. 6014 (2010): 176–82. 36 Tim Hitchcock, “Culturomics, Big Data, Code Breakers and the Casaubon Delusion,” Historyonics Blog, June 19, 2011, http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/culturomics-big-data-code-breakers-and.html; Tim Hitchcock, “Big Data, Small Data, and Meaning,” Historyonics Blog, November 9, 2014,” accessed January 15, 2018, http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/big-data-small-data-and-meaning_9.html. 37 Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, 20–21. 38 Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, 32. 39 Tim Hitchcock, “Voices of Authority: Towards a History from Below in Patchwork,” Historyonics Blog, April 27, 2015, accessed January 15, 2018, http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/voices-of-authority-towards-history.html and Hitchcock, “Big Data, Small Data and Meaning.” 40 Carlo Ginzburg, cited by Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, 3. 41 “Witness Statement of Lydia Rhoda Harvey,” July 13, 1910, London, The National Archives, MEPO 3/197 42 Tim Hitchcock, “Big Data, Small Data, and Meaning,” HistoryonicsBlog, November 9, 2014, http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/big-data-small-data-and-meaning_9.html. 43 Informazione Varie, Cara-Cav; Questore di Torino, 1898–1906, Turin, Archivio di Stato di Torino, box 175. With many thanks to Archivist Silvia Corino at the Archivio di Stato for help with the translation and orthography. 44 “Cellis and Berard—White Slavery Suspects,” Canberra, Australian National Archives, 1926/20254. 45 Evening News (Sydney, NSW), Thursday, May 2, 1901, 6. 46 For the Greek and Latin lessons, see for instance West Australian (Perth, WA), November 19, 1904; for the bocce game see Daily News (Perth, WA), September 30, 1907. 47 Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable,” 377. 48 Marriage certificate of Kerinique Sarah White [sic] and Antonio Alfredo Carvelli, 1910, New Zealand Marriage Index, folio 1004; “Shipping: Port of Wellington—Arrivals,” August 15, 1921, New Zealand Herald. 49 “Veronique Carvelli and Jose (Guiseppe) Ferrero,” SS Borda—Names and Descriptions of Alien Passengers Embarked at the Port of London, February 17, 1927, ancestry.co.uk. 50 Edward Muir and Guido Ruggerio, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore, MD, 1991), x; Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, 123. 51 Giovanni Levi, “The Uses of Biography,” in Theoretical Discussions of Biography, ed. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Lewiston, NY, 2013), 62. 52 Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago, 2013), 63. 53 Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, 153. 54 Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, 11. 55 Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, chap. 2: “Selling Sex.” 56 Carvelli, Antonio, Ship: Karlsruhe Arrival Year: 1900; Arrival Month: May; Age: 19; Gender: -; Origin: -; Master: Oessleman, E; Origin port code: F; Fiche number: 340; Page of list: 4 Series Inward Passengers Index, Victoria Public Record Office, Melbourne, Australia. 57 John Brewer reflects on this in “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History 7 (2010): 87–109. 58 Hitchcock and Shoemaker’s book London Lives, which seeks to “radically contextualize” a series of people who lived in London in the early modern and modern period using both digitized and analog sources, is an example of how this might be done. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800 (Cambridge, 2015). Shoemaker did, however, bemoan the way in which the publisher, Cambridge University Press, seemed unwilling or unable to really explore the potential of digital history to link this radical contextualization to the sources that made it possible. Robert Shoemaker, “The Future of the eBook,” History Matters Blog, accessed June 14, 2018, http://www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/future-ebook/. 59 Hitchcock, “Big Data,” Historyonics Blog 60 Sabina Loriga, “The Role of the Individual in History: Biographical and Historical Writing in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century,” in Theoretical Discussions of Biography, ed. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Lewiston, NY, 2013), 90. 61 Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia, PA, 2016), 9. 62 On rescue work and rescue workers, see for instance Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860–1914 (London, 2000); Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge, 2007). 63 Joan W. Scott, “Storytelling,” History & Theory 50, no. 2 (2011): 204. 64 Carolyn Steedman, “On Not Writing Biography,” New Formations 67, no. 15 (2009): 24. 65 Mark Salber Phillips, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life,” History Workshop Journal 65, no. 1 (2008): 55. 66 John Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 1 (2010): 89. 67 John H. Arnold, “The Historian as Inquisitor: The Ethics of Interrogating Subaltern Voices,” Rethinking History 2, no. 3 (1998): 382. 68 Cohen, Family Secrets, epilogue. 69 “About Family Search,” accessed September 13, 2015, https://familysearch.org/about. See also “Why Do Mormons Perform Baptisms for the Dead?” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Website, accessed January 15, 2018, https://www.mormon.org/faq/baptism-for-the-dead. 70 “Some people have misunderstood that when baptisms for the dead are performed, deceased persons are baptized into the Church against their will. This is not the case. Each individual has agency, or the right to choose. The validity of a baptism for the dead depends on the deceased person accepting it and choosing to accept and follow the Savior while residing in the spirit world. The names of deceased persons are not added to the membership records of the Church.” accessed January 15, 2018, https://www.lds.org/topics/baptisms-for-the-dead?lang=eng. 71 For more critique on the concept of “refuge” in microhistory, see Filippo de Vivo, “Prospect or Refuge? Microhistory, History on the Large Scale: A Response,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 3 (2010): 387–97. 72 Lydia Harvey witness statement, London, The National Archives, MEPO 3/197 73 On the current “rescue industry,” see for instance Laura Maria Augustin, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry (London, 2007). 74 “Ancestry.com DNA database tops 3m sales,” Forbes, October 1, 2017, accessed January 15, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2017/01/10/ancestry-com-dna-database-tops-3m-sales-rise-to-850m-ahead-of-likely-2017-ipo/#e9c9d0f13b3d. 75 19 Crimes Wine Website, accessed January 15, 2018, http://19crimes.com/. 76 Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much,” 138. 77 Alain Corbin, The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 2003), 212. 78 I am grateful to Seth Koven and Lynda Nead for their discussion about this at a recent seminar focussing on Koven’s new book, Seth Koven, The Matchgirl and the Heiress (Princeton, NJ, 2015). 79 Arnold, “The Historian as Inquisitor,” 385. 80 Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (London, 1991), 94–95, 107. 81 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, 1976): 139–40. 82 Anne-Marie Kilday and David Nash, eds., Law, Crime and Deviance since 1700: Micro-studies in the History of Crime (London, 2017). De Vivo makes a similar point for the use of juridical records in early modern microhistories. De Vivo, “Prospect or Refuge?” 391. 83 Jane Caplan and John Torpey, “Introduction,” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton, NJ, 2001), 1–13; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Princeton, NJ, 1999). 84 Steedman, “On Not Writing Biography,” 19. 85 Amy Stanley, “Maidservants” Tales: Narrating Domestic and Global History in Eurasia, 1600–1900,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 437–60. 86 For more, see Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable,” 393, 400. 87 Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much,” 129. 88 Salber Phillips, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life,” 56. 89 Gyan Prakash, “Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride? A Reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 1 (1992): 174. 90 And, now that archives created by dispossessing power structures are easily accessible, we must teach our students this as well. 91 Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 2. 92 Magnússon and Szijárto, What Is Microhistory? Theory and Practice, 44. 93 See, for instance, “Ancestry DNA Research and Collaboration,” accessed June 14, 2018, https://www.ancestry.co.uk/cs/collaborations. 94 Guildi and Armitage, The History Manifesto. 95 Nicole Eustace, “When Fish Walk on Land: Social History in a Postmodern World,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 77–91. 96 Guildi and Armitage, The History Manifesto, 116. 97 As Hitchcock points out, small stories have also played an enormous part in letting us see the perspectives that have made us question our positivistic narratives of progress and change. “If today we have a public dialogue that gives voice to the traditionally excluded and silenced,” he writes, “. . . it is in no small part because we now have beautiful histories of small things.” Hitchcock, “Voices of Authority: Towards a History from Below in Patchwork.” © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Daen,, Laurel

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shy117pmid: N/A

Abstract In 1786, Betty Trifle, a woman the townspeople described as “furiously insane,” arrived in Uxbridge, MA. Lacking family, property, town settlement, and the “wherewithall to support herself,” the Uxbridge selectmen arranged for Trifle to be boarded with local residents Nathan and Nancy Tyler. For the next twenty-three years, the Tylers and other townspeople housed, clothed, fed, and nursed Trifle—sending receipts for their expenses and labor to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which issued them annual disbursements. Trifle’s experience of poverty and disability was not unusual in eighteenth-century Massachusetts nor was the town-provided but state-funded care she received. Drawing on nearly two thousand requests for reimbursement from townspeople and selectmen to the Massachusetts General Court between 1786 and 1799, this paper recovers the extensive system of boarding sick and disabled “strangers,” or people without settlement rights, in the homes of town residents—a method of poor relief that historians have almost entirely overlooked. Accounts of the intimate caregiving and receiving relationships between boarders and hosts—which often continued for years and bridged racial, ethnic, and social divides—suggest that the bounds of eighteenth-century Massachusetts communities were flexible and capacious in ways that scholars have not fully recognized. At the same time, the labor associated with nursing ailing nonresidents laid bare the hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability within these communities, corroborating scholarship on the gendered and racialized dynamics of care. Lodging arrangements that bound strangers and residents together depended on the unrecognized and uncompensated work of women. In 1786, Betty Trifle, a woman the townspeople described as “furiously insane,” arrived in Uxbridge, MA. Although a member of the “wandering” or “strolling” poor, delirium and destitution soon combined to prevent Trifle from leaving town. “She is . . . distracted [and] exceeding[ly] troublesome,” the selectmen reported, and “has not the wherewithall to support herself.” Faced with these dire circumstances, the selectmen arranged for Trifle to be boarded with town residents Nathan and Nancy Tyler. Along with their growing cadre of children, Nancy Tyler took responsibility for clothing, feeding, nursing, and providing “almost continual” watch over Trifle for the next six years. In 1792, when Nathan Tyler passed away, town officials found other local lodgings for Trifle, who, despite being “extremely difficult to take care of,” remained in and tended to by the community until her death in 1809. For more than twenty years, the townspeople and selectmen of Uxbridge provided substantial support to Trifle, but they did not pay for it. Instead, they sent receipts for their expenses and labor to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which issued them annual disbursements.1 Historians of poverty, social welfare, and everyday life in early America have long been interested in people like Betty Trifle and the methods, such as those deployed by the Uxbridge selectmen, by which they received relief. Scholars have studied outdoor assistance and boarding arrangements in which towns provided cash and supplies to poor residents living in their own homes or those of other townspeople. Historians have also written about warning out, the forced (or at least suggested) removal of people without town residency, as well as the rise of workhouses and almshouses, first in the seventeenth century but especially in the nineteenth. Less studied is another method of poor relief, as common as the preceding measures and with characteristics of each: the colony- then state-funded boarding of sick and disabled strangers, or people like Trifle without town settlement rights, in the homes of residents like the Tylers. Excavating this system of boarding out strangers not only provides a fuller picture of colonial and early national Massachusetts social welfare; it also has important implications for how historians think about poverty, community, care work, gender, disability, and the state.2 A collection of nearly two-thousand petitions sent by town residents and selectmen to the Massachusetts General Court between 1786 and 1799 provides a valuable window into the state-sponsored home care of ill and impaired strangers. In each case, claimants sought compensation for services and charges associated with keeping and nursing nonresidents. The files associated with these appeals are substantial and rich in detail. To convince the legislature of the validity of their requests, petitioners included thorough descriptions of the people being boarded and the services townspeople had provided, along with receipts and tallies of expenses for food, clothing, and medicine. In 1796, new regulations required claimants to submit even more materials to the commonwealth. After this date, appeals also featured testimonials from boarders and those who boarded them; histories of strangers’ families, residencies, and physical and mental incapacities; and correspondence between townspeople and selectmen about settlement rights and supplies. Reading these materials in conjunction with records at the Committee on Accounts, the legislative commission that processed these petitions and issued disbursements, reveals whether and in what amounts these requests were paid.3 Ultimately, this wealth of material urges scholars to reconsider who was a “stranger” in eighteenth-century Massachusetts.4 The level of intimacy between caretakers and boarders, who did not know each other or one another’s families before they shared a home, is striking. Nathan Tyler submitted invoices for supporting Betty Trifle when she was “incapable of the least care of herself,” for making and mending her clothes, and for counseling her during periods of “great [mental] trouble.” Other claimants noted how they washed their charges, changed their dressings and linens, and fetched doctors and watchers at all hours. Such accounts of the deeply personal and physical nature of caregiving and receiving—which often occurred between people from different racial, ethnic, and social backgrounds and continued for periods of multiple years and even decades—suggest that the bounds of eighteenth-century Massachusetts communities were flexible and capacious in ways that scholars have not fully recognized.5 At the same time, the considerable labor associated with nursing sick and disabled nonresidents laid bare the hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability within these communities, corroborating scholarship on the gendered and racialized dynamics of care. It was the unrecognized and uncompensated work of women that allowed towns to absorb and attend to the poor ailing strangers in their midst.6 **** In colonial and early national Massachusetts, poor relief was locally governed and administered. Town selectmen, who often doubled as overseers of the poor, provided support in cash or in kind to needy individuals who had established residency in their community. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, residency was relatively easy to obtain. People born in a town automatically secured settlement rights; others could gain them through their parents, their master, their employer, their marriage, or by simply living in a town for three months without officially being asked to leave. As the eighteenth century progressed and immigration increased, adding to an already growing population in the commonwealth, towns strengthened their settlement requirements. By 1736, towns required newly arrived individuals to present themselves to the selectmen, precluding people from living in the vicinity undetected and gaining residency without official approval. In 1789, the state extended the inhabitancy duration to ten years and abolished settlement by birth, rendering children born of nonresidents ineligible for relief in their hometowns.7 With these intensifying requisites for residency, the number of nonresidents, known formally and colloquially as “strangers,” in Massachusetts expanded over the course of the eighteenth century. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, town selectmen were usually perfectly happy to let these individuals live and work in their communities provided that they were first “warned out” or formally alerted that they were not entitled to town assistance. Only when strangers needed relief—or seemed like they would need relief in the near future, most often due to sickness and disability—did they demand attention from town leaders. In these cases, selectmen pursued one of two courses of action. Either they required that the person return to their place of settlement, arranging for their transport to this location. Or, if no legal inhabitancy could be determined or the individual was too unwell to travel, town officials arranged for care in their community, sending the bill to the province or state.8 Legislation establishing this protocol—and the category of “state pauper” by which those boarding at the commonwealth’s expense were soon known—was first passed in 1701.9 In that year, lawmakers approved “An Act Providing in Case of Sickness,” which stipulated that “when it shall happen [that] such indigent persons, not to be inhabitants . . . need reliefe, then the charge of their sickness shall be defreyed out of the publick treasury.” Also that year, “An Act Directing the Admission of Town Inhabitants” allotted funds from the province to immigrants who became “lame” or “infirm” on their journeys and needed assistance before they could gain settlement. Although these acts and those renewing them shifted some control over poor relief from towns to the province, statesmen were careful not to compromise local jurisdiction. Town selectmen, such as those in Uxbridge, oversaw the support of nonresidents, usually boarding them in local people’s homes. Residents, such as the Tylers, then provided care for which they received state compensation.10 The nearly two thousand petitions from townspeople and selectmen to the Massachusetts General Court between 1786 and 1799 reveal the prevalence of the boarding out of strangers in the late eighteenth century. Each year, legislators at the Committee on Accounts received about 142 requests for reimbursement.11 In response, they dispensed nearly £44,000 and $120,000 over the course of the period.12 The commonwealth’s annual spending on state paupers remained mostly stable between 1787 and 1800; however, in the early nineteenth century, real and inflation-adjusted expenditures skyrocketed.13 This growth was primarily a product of increasingly stringent settlement laws. As towns continually amplified their residency requirements, more individuals became dependent on state, rather than town, support. The ballooning of state pauper spending was also due to political, economic, and social factors. The Revolution was costly in human lives and resources, and deflation and trade disruptions created economic instability that lasted into the nineteenth century. Financial panics, along with lengthy recessions and depressions, left many out of work and money. These hardships combined with intensifying immigration, industrialization, and urbanization to render individuals vulnerable despite national economic growth during much of the period.14 Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Number of state pauper petitions submitted to the Massachusetts Committee on Accounts, 1786–99. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide Number of state pauper petitions submitted to the Massachusetts Committee on Accounts, 1786–99. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Commonwealth of Massachusetts expenditures on state paupers, 1787–1800. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide Commonwealth of Massachusetts expenditures on state paupers, 1787–1800. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Commonwealth of Massachusetts expenditures on state paupers in US Dollars, 1787–1820. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Commonwealth of Massachusetts expenditures on state paupers in US Dollars, 1787–1820. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Commonwealth of Massachusetts expenditures on state paupers in inflation-adjusted US dollars, 1787–1820. Figure 4. View largeDownload slide Commonwealth of Massachusetts expenditures on state paupers in inflation-adjusted US dollars, 1787–1820. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Demographics of state paupers boarded in homes in Massachusetts, 1786–99. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Demographics of state paupers boarded in homes in Massachusetts, 1786–99. **** The state pauper petitions from 1786 to 1799 also provide insight into the demographics of the state poor. The 1,996 appeals reveal 831 unique adults who were boarded in the homes of town residents.15 This total excludes those who “boarded themselves”—or received regular allotments from the commonwealth to live in their own or rented homes—as well as those who lodged in workhouses or almshouses. This tally also, unfortunately, excludes children, who were usually either apprenticed separately or listed collectively in ways that obscured their names and numbers. Accounts show that 42% of the adults who boarded out were women. Scholars have convincingly demonstrated that women comprised a large segment of the poor in early America, and the fact that less than half of those boarding were women should not suggest otherwise. Instead, it is likely that officials were more inclined to let women use state monies to “board themselves” or live in their own homes as long as they were able. By comparison, single men were more apt to be lodged with town residents because selectmen considered them either unable or unfit to perform the tasks necessary for home care. Women may also be underrepresented in the sample because legislators filed petitions for families under the man’s name, concealing the names of his wife and children.16 State paupers were predominately white, but sizeable portions were also described as “black” and “Indian.” Blacks comprised about 12% of those who boarded out, a huge number considering that only 1.4% of Massachusetts inhabitants were black according to the 1790 census. After the commonwealth abolished slavery in 1783, lawmakers passed “An Act for the Suppressing and Punishing of Rogues,” which prohibited “African[s] or Negroe[s]” from “tarry[ing]” in the state for more than two months. This law effectively barred blacks from obtaining town settlement rights, which required a longer inhabitancy duration, and authorized selectmen to warn out blacks en masse. Individuals who could not leave because of sickness or disability—common conditions considering the harsh effects of slavery—became state paupers. Indians were also among the boarding state poor, making up about 8% of the sample. State-appointed guardians of Indian “plantations,” such as Mashpee, submitted their expenditures on poor relief to the legislature as state pauper accounts. Statesmen considered Indians to be unsettled strangers even when they lived on reservations that the commonwealth designated for their inhabitance. Legislators also missed or ignored the cruel irony of characterizing Indians as “nonresidents” on land often unjustly purchased and taken from them.17 Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Country origin of foreign state paupers boarded in homes in Massachusetts, 1786–99. Figure 6. View largeDownload slide Country origin of foreign state paupers boarded in homes in Massachusetts, 1786–99. The diversity of the state pauper population extended to nationality. Approximately 28% of the sample were born and most recently had lived overseas, while another 7% were labeled by selectmen and residents as “foreigners”—an ambiguous term that often connoted nationality but was also used as a synonym for “stranger.” Of those undeniably of foreign birth, 70% were from Britain and Ireland. Economic depression, land evictions, and political and religious persecution caused many to emigrate, although security in America proved difficult to find. Also among the foreign state poor were Acadians, whom the British had forcibly deported during the Seven Years War, and “European” and Hessian soldiers. In fact, with the recent close of the Revolutionary conflict, decommissioned servicemen made up more than 20% of the foreign state poor and 11% of the boarding population overall. Massachusetts, like other American states, provided pensions and healthcare to wounded veterans. Those who boarded as state paupers may not have qualified for this assistance because they fought for the British, hailed from outside of the state, or had not been injured in direct combat. Servicemen may also have lodged with residents simply because they required a level of care that they and their relations could not provide.18 Demographic analysis of the state pauper petitions further reveals the ubiquity of physical and intellectual disability. All strangers boarding with residents were sick or impaired in some way, otherwise they would have been either ignored or warned out by selectmen and not eligible for state-funded home care. Of the sample, about 6% were described as cognitively debilitated—either senile, “deficient in intellectual faculties,” or “insane,” as was the case with Betty Trifle. The remainder lodged with townspeople because of physical limitations. In some cases, these ailments were acute and short-lived. Adam Ryle, an Irishman “who had his leg broke[n],” for example, lived in a home in Sherborne for three weeks “until he got better.” In other cases, state paupers’ infirmities were long-lasting or chronic. These conditions included diseases, such as pleurisy; neurological disorders, such as palsy; sensory incapacities, such as blindness; and stubborn injuries that would not heal. Perhaps the most common cause of disability was old age. Nearly 12% of the sample were described as “aged,” a term that referred to individuals as young as sixty and as old as ninety-nine. Women were slightly more represented in the elderly population—about 62%. Also common were elderly couples who could no longer care for themselves. John Martin, a nearly eighty-year-old British man, for instance, boarded with his wife in Malden for over three years.19 The state paupers who lodged with Massachusetts residents were a racially, ethnically, socially, and corporeally diverse group. Their hosts, by comparison, tended to be white working-class families. Selectmen attempted to select hosts who were honest and upright community members—as the officials in Dalton declared, “in whose prudence and Fidelity they could confide . . . to procure the Medicine[,] nursing & provision necessary.” However, selectmen also chose residents who could benefit from the extra cash. By directing state monies to lower-class townspeople, officials aimed to prevent or lessen these individuals’ dependence on town-funded poor relief in the future. Thus, the Tisbury selectmen, for example, asked the family of George Mantor, an “Industrious Poor Man,” to board ill Hannah Peters—a decision they may have later regretted when Mantor reported that she “was a Great Hindrance to him in his Calling.” In only a few cases were strangers kept in the homes of white widows and black residents. Lydia Upham lodged a “palsied” woman and her “weakly” daughter from 1787 to 1791, while in 1792, “Negro Cally Bogus” cared for an Indian woman found on the highway with a broken leg. Widows and black people were infrequent hosts in part because they were smaller percentages of the resident population; however, officials may also have overlooked these households because they deemed them either less capable of caring for boarders or less deserving of state funds.20 Townspeople agreed to house state paupers on account of charitable sentiments and the desire for extra income. Mentions of the “dictates of humanity” appear often in selectmen’s and residents’ statements. Officials in Walpole, for example, wrote that “Strolling Person” Peter Holly “had one of the most Obnoxious and Noxious Distempers upon him . . . that nothing but the moral Obligation we are under to our fellow Creatures could Induce any person to receive him into their Houses.” Samuel Lawrence similarly noted that “common humanity” drove him to care for a British veteran sick with the “Bilious Colick.” As the Haverhill selectmen reminded state legislators, however, “pity at best is a short lived passion in the human breast,” and financial considerations were as important in compelling townspeople to open their homes—especially to paupers whom they viewed with racial, ethnic, or social prejudice rather than compassion. John Gray, an official in Kingston, for instance, stressed the significance of monetary reimbursement to widow Lydia Cushman’s decision to nurse Polly Williams, a single and pregnant woman recently arrived from Scotland. “[We] agreed with . . . Cushman to take care of her [Williams] promising her [Cushman] a reasonable Consideration for her trouble,” Gray explained. Cushman now had spent more than thirteen pounds in “Household Stores” and two months tending to Williams, he continued. She expected her labor and expenses to be compensated.21 **** Residents who decided to board an ailing stranger signed up for a massive outlay of time, resources, and caregiving energies. Their first tasks would have been to arrange for the pauper’s transport to their home, if this had not already been done by town selectmen, and to prepare bedding. Reuben Smith, for instance, procured a horse litter to carry George Reed, a Scotsman who had been “blasted by accident in a well,” to his house, while Benjamin Lane retrieved an ill militiaman on horseback, charging the state for both his time and an injury done to his horse in the process. Once the lodger arrived at the resident’s home, family members worked to make them comfortable. Townspeople often asked the commonwealth to reimburse them for their trouble in “finding [a] bed and linens.” Some also mentioned that they had to adjust their usual sleeping arrangements because of the newcomer. Lydia Cushman “was obliged to send abroad three or four of her family to board to make room” for Polly Williams and the “5 or 6 women who were called in to assist her.” Benjamin and Phebe Ames meanwhile gave up the use of three beds, one to “palsied” Mrs. Hall and two to her children. The Ameses charged the state for this inconvenience as well as for “damage done to them [the beds].”22 Washing and feeding were initial orders of business as well as everyday tasks. Thomas Hillhouse described how a “helpless” man he had “taken up” on the highway required “extra . . . washing & cleansing,” including the “killing [of] lice,” upon arrival in his home. The same was true, another resident reported, for Sarah George, an Indian “very ill of a putrid fever.” Washing the body as well as clothes remained regular duties. John Hall submitted an invoice for “my wife nursing 11 days [and] 2 gall[on]s [of] sope,” while another petitioner noted the trouble of supplying “linnens[,] Bandages and dresses” and “washing the same.” Residents also accounted for the costs of nourishing their lodger, often submitting lists of groceries they had purchased with their appeals. John Black, whose household kept an elderly veteran, for instance, issued receipts for “one quarter of beef[,] two quarts of molasses[,] one half a point of Rum,” and “half a day spent in going after necessaries.” Nancy and Francis Parker, who cared for partially-blind James Foster, found the delivery of food to be as demanding as the procurement. As they explained, they were often “oblige[d] for to Carry his Vittles up to his bed to him,” which added to the trouble.23 Clothing was another cost and concern for residents who boarded state paupers. Nearly all mentioned the burden of buying, making, and mending clothes in their appeals. The bills submitted by the selectmen of Reading on behalf of Joseph Pervoo, an aged man from Nova Scotia, in 1791 are typical. During the previous year, the selectmen wrote, the family lodging Pervoo had taped and mended his shoes, purchased him a wool hat, found trimmings for his breeches, and bought nearly fifteen yards of cloth to make his shirts and trousers. Aware of the expensiveness of apparel, some residents noted in their petitions that they had tried to cut costs. David Vaughan claimed that his family had asked “charitable neighbors” to contribute garments to a woman who was “intirely insane” and living in his home, while Thomas Emerson procured “second-hand breeches” and a “second-hand waistcoat” for his lodger, “one Alexander a negro.” In some cases, townspeople found that obtaining clothing for their charges was only half the battle. Many strangers were bedridden and not able to dress themselves. Such was true for Samuel Bancroft, whom the officials in Reading described as so “very helpless . . . that we cannot have him Boarded under seven shillings per week.”24 Residents were also responsible for nursing and watching the state paupers they housed. Washing and dressing sores, making and applying poultices, bandaging wounds, turning a boarder in bed, and “clarefy[ing]” the house with vinegar were all mentioned as daily duties performed by townspeople. Some claimants wrote about their near constant “keeping & [at]tendance” of cognitively-impaired people, as Eliphelat Stack did in his appeal on behalf of distracted John White. Other appellants related extraordinary feats of caretaking. Jonathan Lacey described how his family had “shift[ed] the [bed] sheets 2 or 3 times every 24 hours” to manage the discharge from their boarder’s burns. Another resident recounted his travails in finding Anna Clark, an “insane person” who was lodging in his home, after she had “run away and wandered into the woods.” To reduce the burden of caretaking, some townspeople employed nurses and watchers to assist, passing on this expense to the commonwealth. Lydia Upham, for example, hired “Two Watchers and Two Nurses” to help care for her charges, which, she reported, was a “great and uncommon cost.”25 Finally, residents provided state paupers with medical care from physicians, surgeons, and nurses, often in tandem. The experience of Charlestown Edes, a “negro man . . . late servant to Isaiah Edes” of Charlestown, is revealing. Edes lodged in the home of Emerson Cogswell of Concord due to an “inveterate ulcer” that had “broke[n] out upon his hips & thighs.” While the family took daily care of him—cleansing his “fetid discharges” and changing his bed pans—Cogswell also contracted with a doctor, a surgeon, and a nurse for their services. During the months of July and August 1791, Edes was visited fifteen times by Doctor Joseph Hunt, who treated his wounds and offered advice; eight times by “surgeon” Major Abijah Brown, who dressed his “soor Leggs”; and daily by a black man named Brister Freeman, who carried out these doctors’ orders and applied bandages. Other state paupers received similar levels of medical intervention. James Phillips submitted bills from two physicians and one nurse in his petition on behalf of a woman living in his home who was “deprived of the use of her limbs and of sight.” Another resident described how he fetched doctors at all hours, including on a “very stormy night,” for a sick Indian woman named Betsy Oceote.26 Figure 7. View largeDownload slide Duration of boarding stays of state paupers in Massachusetts, 1790–92. Figure 7. View largeDownload slide Duration of boarding stays of state paupers in Massachusetts, 1790–92. From feeding to washing, nursing, and doctoring, residents provided significant levels of care to the state paupers who lodged in their homes. And these paupers often remained there for years. Approximately one quarter (24%) of those who boarded out lived with their hosts for over ten years. For a decade or longer, as was the case with Betty Trifle, residents cared for their charge; managed their physical and mental health; and provided them with food, clothing, and medicine. Paupers who lived with townspeople for such a length of time almost certainly had long-term disabilities, from senility to sensory incapacities, that prevented them from living on their own. By contrast, a similar percentage of boarders (28%) lodged with townspeople for less than a year. At the other extreme, this grouping most likely had severe infirmities, such as injuries or diseases, from which they soon either recovered or died. The fewest numbers of state paupers lived with residents for durations of between one and nine years, underscoring the fact that boarding out was primarily for either the acutely ill or the chronically impaired. For the latter group, stays of six, eight, or ten years were common: 40% of boarders—approximately 332 people of the sample of 831—remained with their hosts for more than six years.27 The large numbers of state paupers who lived with townspeople for multiple years, the intimacy of the care that sickness and disability often demanded, and the frequent racial, ethnic, social, and corporeal disparities between boarders and their hosts all suggest a blurring of the boundaries between resident and stranger and capacious notions of community in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. By focusing almost exclusively on town poor relief, almshouses, and warning out, historians have missed the integration of a diverse set of strangers in families and towns across the commonwealth. Certainly, those who boarded out lacked the same rights as established residents: male state paupers, for instance, could not have voted in town elections or run for political office. Yet, many impoverished ailing strangers were not simply warned out to the next town or sent to the nearest poorhouse. Instead, motivated by charity and payments from the state treasury, residents extended housing, nursing, and provisions, both immediately and for years to come. The different racial, ethnic, and social backgrounds of boarders and their hosts and the intimate nature of caregiving for infirm and impaired people underscore these findings. Residents opened their homes to people who looked, spoke, and acted differently and proceeded to wash them, clothe them, feed them, and turn them in bed. Lodgers may have been known as “strangers,” but they and townspeople came to know each other well, both part of the network of care in early Massachusetts towns. **** Yet, just as the boarding arrangements of state paupers suggest broad conceptions of community in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, so too did the practices of caring for strangers expose entrenched hierarchies based on gender, race, class, and capacity. Women provided most of the care of boarders, but they were only occasionally formally recognized or compensated for their work. Certainly, men also lent their services, and many petitions mention the employment of male nurses when heavy lifting and restraining was required. The officials in Hardwick, for example, hired a man to “help move” Paul Morgan and “dress his Leg twice a day,” while selectmen in Boylston asked Captain Jotham Bush to watch John Fasel and “prevent his making way with [harming or killing] himself.” Women, however, remained the primary caretakers, completing the bulk of the nursing, clothing, washing, watching, and feeding. Despite this, petitions rarely acknowledge their performance of these tasks. Selectmen and male residents generally composed their invoices entirely devoid of a subject, simply listing the chores of home care without noting who did the work. David Pearce’s bill for boarding Roland Laurance is typical. Pearce charged the state for three linen shirts, four gallons of wine, six gallons of vinegar for cleaning, one gallon of “sweet oil” for washing the body, and for repairing and replacing one mattress and four bedsheets. Never mentioned is Pearce’s wife, Bethiah, and their three adolescent daughters, Abigail, Sarah, and Harriet, who surely completed these tasks. Assumed and expected, women’s labor is silenced in the records.28 The few invoices that do acknowledge women’s work suggest the extent to which they were responsible for home care. Benjamin Ames’s bill for boarding Mrs. Hall and her children in 1790 is revealing. Benjamin repeatedly detailed the labor of his wife Phebe in the account. In May, he charged for “three weeks of Phebe nursing”; in June, for “2 weeks & two Days work of Phebe”; and in July, for “Mrs. Ames taking care of Mrs. Hall” and for “Phebe Nursing [Hall’s] Child.” Phebe Ames clearly spent considerable time and resources on their sick boarders. The selectmen of Reading’s invoice on behalf of John Millar, a Scotsman who was “bereaved of reason,” also reveals women’s labor. The selectmen submitted generic charges for “nursing Millar,” making shirts, mending, and finally “laying out the Corps”; however, a legislator at the Committee on Accounts commented on the bill that “the nurse charged in this account is the wife of John Millar.” The familial relationship between Millar and his nurse might seem to disqualify the account, the official explained, but “as the Town of Redding was at the expense for the support of the family[,] the Committee allowed the Charge.” Despite women’s extensive labor on behalf of state paupers, few received direct compensation from the commonwealth. Widows, such as Millar’s wife, did collect disbursements, but payments for the work of married women and their daughters, such as Phebe Ames and Bethiah, Abigail, Sarah, and Harriet Pearce, were issued to and then held by their husbands and fathers.29 The caretaking of state paupers also exposes the racial lines that marked eighteenth-century Massachusetts communities. If the labor of (primarily white) residents’ wives and daughters was elided in petitions, the contributions of black ex-slaves and servants were all but invisible. Only one invoice—that of Brister Freeman for nursing Charlestown Edes—explicitly accounted for the care work of black attendants, although more houses where paupers lived must have had such laborers. The charges submitted by the few black townspeople who lodged strangers were similarly opaque, listing fees generically for “nursing & boarding” in the handwriting of the selectmen. Black male residents who housed state paupers did receive payments from the state for their services. Prince Patterson who kept James Moorwood in 1790, for example, collected a disbursement of about four pounds, which he certified with his mark. Black female residents, such as Prince Patterson’s wife Nelly, together with the black men and women who assisted paupers in the homes of white townspeople, however, would not have received direct compensation. Despite completing much of the tending, clothing, and feeding, money issued to black female residents would have been held by their husbands, while payments for the work of black servants would have been retained by the white male household head. The labor of black men and especially black women was crucial to the well-being of boarders but rarely recognized and compensated.30 While the obscured and often unpaid care work of women and black people on behalf of state paupers reveals the hierarchies of gender and race in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, the lack of care and resulting destitution of poor unwell strangers before they were boarded out exposes divisions of class. In testimonials appended to petitions, state paupers described their challenges to support themselves and their vulnerability in times of affliction. As Polly Williams explained, she and her husband had a “means of subsistence being very small [so they] were obliged to work separately wherever they could find employment.” After he died, she began traveling about “tak[ing] shelter and sleep[ing] in barns.” Now, detailing her “very ill state of health,” she prayed that “some body would take compassion on her.” Racial discrimination and racially biased settlement laws made blacks especially vulnerable. “I . . . was sold by [my master Ezekiel] Needham to one of the [military] Classes in Concord,” Charles Adams reported, but “Needham rec[ieve]d the greatest part of the pay.” After the war, Adams recounted that he and his family had begun “Strolling about the Country,” looking for work to no avail. Now sick in Walpole, Adams asked the state to “grant them a compensation.” Selectmen and residents often provided assistance when the destitution of strangers became life threatening. Up until that point, however, nonresidents had few resources available for their relief.31 The dearth of care prior to boarding similarly reflects the hardships of people with physical and intellectual disabilities; however, the state’s response of lodging incapacitated strangers in residents’ homes is strikingly different from the institutionalization of later periods. Selectmen and townspeople regularly described how chronically impaired people had been denied support from family members and towns prior to their taking them in. The Attleborough officials, for example, reported that Francis Roggers “ran away” and left his wife in “a Fit of Numb Palsy,” while another resident wrote that a “non compos person” had wandered through the state before arriving at his home. Disability was often met with exclusion and deprivation during the period. The practice of housing disabled people with residents, however, worked, at least in part, to restore community ties. Methods of assistance increasingly adopted by townspeople and officials in the nineteenth century did the opposite. With the establishment of almshouses in more Massachusetts towns and the opening of state welfare institutions—such as the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1821, the Worcester Insane Asylum in 1833, and the Massachusetts state almshouses in 1854—poor people with physical and cognitive disorders were removed from the general populace. Increasingly their care was placed in the hands of “experts,” such as doctors and asylum superintendents, rather than community members. Hierarchies based on impairment and incapacity cut across eighteenth-century Massachusetts society, but integration in, rather than exclusion from, the community guided the state’s response.32 Figure 8. View largeDownload slide State pauper accounts paid in full by the Massachusetts General Court, 1787–1800. Figure 8. View largeDownload slide State pauper accounts paid in full by the Massachusetts General Court, 1787–1800. **** The practice of boarding sick and disabled strangers in the homes of Massachusetts residents simultaneously suggests broad boundaries of community and deep social divisions based on gender, race, class, and ability. The system of lodging out, however, was not to last. Over the course of the 1780s and 1790s, legislators at the Committee on Accounts began to reduce the amounts they paid for the care of state paupers, causing townspeople and selectmen to reconsider the resources they spent on nonresidents. In 1787, about 70% of invoices submitted by towns and individuals were paid in full. By 1796, however, this number dwindled to 20%.33 Statesmen adjusted claimants’ invoices in two primary ways. Beginning in 1790, politicians set standardized rates for different types of care work—boarding, for instance, received five shillings per week—and paid petitioners only as much as these specified amounts. In addition, legislators discounted claims by disqualifying certain charges, usually clothing and nursing, from coverage. State-level deductions frustrated selectmen and residents, who often resubmitted outstanding accounts complete with detailed explanations of their expenses. As the Cape Elizabeth town leaders declared, “the Hon[ora]ble Court saw good to deduct the sum of £2”19”6 . . . [but] we Expended the Cash at the Prudentest Rate.” “We have no way by law to git rid of [this state pauper],” they went on, “and therefore pray your honors . . . would order the Deduction paid.”34 Statesmen reduced their payments for the care of ailing strangers due to fears of the rising costs of poor relief and their declining faith in the boarding out system overall. Even as officials at the Committee on Accounts left most invoices partly unpaid, state spending on state paupers increased, dramatically so in the early nineteenth century. Mounting expenditures incited controversy among politicians, whose party allegiances tended to guide their response. While Whigs recommended abolishing state support for paupers altogether, leaving the sick and unsettled entirely dependent on private charity, Democrats argued for economy within the established approach. In 1832, the Massachusetts legislature formed a bipartisan committee to investigate the “pauper laws” and recommend revisions. The committee’s subsequent report railed against the practice of boarding out as responsible for fueling immorality and indolence among recipients, stifling private charity, and incentivizing town selectmen to overcharge the state for their services. The solution, committee members claimed, was a system of state-funded almshouses that would house all state paupers. These institutions, legislators declared, would improve care and reduce expenses; in addition, they might deter sick and poor people from coming to Massachusetts and thus begin to phase out the state pauper population.35 Politicians’ calls for “state almshouses” to house needy strangers were supported by town selectmen. They expressed irritation at their legal obligation to care for ill nonresidents and the commonwealth’s unreliability in issuing payments. Town officials strategically boarded strangers with lower-class residents to support these individuals and protect their town’s poor relief coffers. But, this system proved ineffective when reimbursement from the state was erratic and often incomplete. In fact, by the time the legislative committee on “pauper laws” recommended building state almshouses, town leaders had already begun experimenting with quasi-institutional measures to reduce their expenses for the state poor. Many towns, for example, kept sick strangers in their local poorhouses, which were ostensibly for the relief of residents but soon also accommodated those whose support came from the state. In addition, some towns pursued collective boarding arrangements in which one resident cared for all the town’s unwell state poor and was paid less than the costs of lodging each pauper separately. Eventually, town selectmen’s frustrations with the care of nonresidents led many to organize a petition campaign to press the legislature to erect state almshouses. “We your petitioners, inhabitants of the Town of [Blank],” a pre-printed petition began, “request the attention of your Honorable Body to . . . the propriety of establishing houses . . . for the paupers of this State.” “Your petitioners are induced to believe,” they continued, “that great advantages would result from the adoption of such a course.”36 Massachusetts residents also tended to support the move away from boarding and toward institutional care. Many saw in the plan the promise of reduced taxes. Others praised the order and civility that almshouses might impart on needy strangers. A few residents, however, raised concerns about state welfare institutions and proposed alternative solutions not discussed by state and town officials. One writer to the Newburyport Herald, for example, claimed that state almshouses would compromise the bonds of charity and humanity between community members. “It has been the general opinion that to build a house for the poor is a great saving of expense,” the author declared. “But such a house would . . . quench that individual and voluntary spirit of exertion, which it ought to be our great purpose to awaken.” Another columnist, by contrast, argued that the problem was not home care but rather that boarders did not repay the money expended by the state on their support once they regained health. “Now even when they do earn their living,” the writer noted disapprovingly, “the State gets no credit, but pays the whole sum.” Most residents, however, supported legislators and selectmen in the building of almshouses. As one subscriber to The Pittsfield Sun proclaimed forcefully, “the poor are . . . scattered through the community and quartered in some hovel, the wretched home of a kindred being.” “Sweep away the whole of it,” the author asserted, and institute “well regulated Poor Houses” that will “add to the glory of the Commonwealth.”37 Advocacy from politicians, selectmen, and residents culminated in 1852 when the Massachusetts General Court voted to discontinue the practice of boarding out and to construct almshouses to support state paupers. An act allocated $60,000 to build institutions at Tewksbury, Monson, and Bridgewater and to renovate structures on Rainsford Island, which had previously served as a quarantine hospital. While the Tewksbury, Monson, and Bridgewater houses were intended to lodge strangers who could be “set to work,” the buildings on Rainsford Island were specifically designed to accommodate the sick and disabled. In 1854, these establishments opened, and town selectmen sent all nonresidents boarding in their towns to these institutions. At this point, lawmakers stipulated that no home boarding arrangements could continue. State paupers could only remain in their current locations if the state almshouses were full and, in these cases, they had to live in the town poorhouse. For the most part, the move to institutional care was praised by statesmen, town officials, and residents as “better and cheaper,” although controversies about state poor relief spending continued. For state paupers, however, the transition to almshouses was mixed. Leaving towns and families in which they had lived for years was disruptive and often heart-wrenching. Institutional life also tended to afford less freedom, autonomy, and personalized care than the boarding situations to which they were accustomed.38 **** The study of the boarding out of ill and impaired nonresidents in eighteenth-century Massachusetts suggests new interpretations at the intersection of poverty, disability, community, care work, gender, and the state. Scholars focusing almost entirely on towns’ relief of residents, almshouses, and warning out have overlooked the extensive involvement of the Massachusetts colony and state in poor relief and the resulting level of support that was provided to sick and disabled strangers. Despite the term, many ailing paupers were not truly strangers, instead living with their hosts for multiple years and profiting from the considerable caregiving issued at the expense of the commonwealth. For eighteenth-century legislators, selectmen, and residents, the problems of poverty and disability were best addressed by investment in community, a concept that included poor and ill nonresidents as it did the families who cared for them. The realities of who delivered this care, however, exposed entrenched hierarchies of gender, race, class, and capacity. White and black women performed most of the nursing of state paupers yet town officials and male residents rarely recognized their work in petitions or issued them direct compensation. In addition, selectmen and residents assisted strangers when their lives were in danger but often ignored their needs up until that point. Eighteenth-century Massachusetts communities may have been expansive enough to include nonresidents during their times of distress, but social hierarchies always permeated the distribution and reimbursement of care. The boarding of state paupers also urges scholars to pay attention to disabled people as central members of eighteenth-century Massachusetts society. As the petitions from residents and selectmen suggest, during the period, disability did not demand segregation in a hospital or asylum nor did it require exclusive treatment from an alienist or physician. Instead, impaired people, including those without town residencies, remained in local communities and received medical attention from lay individuals as well as doctors. This provision of care in and by the community often strained familial, neighborly, and municipal ties as much as it shored them up. Yet, this locally-issued, but state-funded, approach to incapacity differed markedly from the institutionalization and medicalization of later periods. In fact, the home care of ailing state paupers stands as a provocative precursor to late twentieth-century disability rights movements advocating independent living, enabling architectural design, and inclusive neighborhoods. Eighteenth-century Massachusetts statesmen certainly did not fund the boarding of impaired strangers due to an interest in disability rights or even benevolence. Nevertheless, these home care arrangements brought strangers and residents together in intimate relationships, which all but vanished in later periods. Finally, the story of state-funded boarding substantiates narratives about the rise of institutional care in the nineteenth century even as it highlights a long and established history of state support for sick and unsettled people. Many scholars have argued that local and home-based assistance declined in the mid-nineteenth century as centralized, state-run institutions—from almshouses to hospitals and asylums—increased in number and prominence.39 The lodging out of unwell nonresidents in Massachusetts corroborates these findings. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, legislators began to reduce their payments for the care of state paupers and to question the practice of boarding out—a process that culminated in the abolition of state-sponsored home care and the opening of state almshouses in 1854. The longevity of the boarding out system, however, is as remarkable as its mid-nineteenth-century conclusion. For more than one hundred and fifty years, Massachusetts townspeople housed, nursed, fed, washed, and watched sick and disabled strangers, providing them with extensive care for years at the expense of the commonwealth. The personal and physical relationships that developed between boarders and hosts were premised on unequal structures of labor that governed the provision and payment of care. Boarding arrangements that facilitated close and enduring interactions between strangers and residents were founded upon the often unrecognized and unpaid work of white and black women. Footnotes 1 Town of Uxbridge, 1786–1796, Committee on Accounts (hereafter COA), Massachusetts State Archives, Boston; Nathan Tyler and Nancy Man, Marriage Notice, December 12, 1788, Uxbridge, MA, “Massachusetts, Town Clerk, Vital and Town Records,” Family Search; Nathan Tyler, Uxbridge, MA, “United States Census, 1790,” National Archives and Records Administration, Family Search; Nathan Tyler, Burial, November 4, 1792, Uxbridge, MA, “Find a Grave” Index, Family Search; “Pauper Accounts,” Massachusetts Acts and Resolves (hereafter MA&R) (1786–1809). The Uxbridge townspeople supported Betty Trifle periodically before 1786 as well; see: Massachusetts Archives Collection 125 (Treasury Records, 1759–1770): 270, 293, 352, 382, Massachusetts State Archives; “Province of the Massachusetts Bay to the Town of Uxbridge,” 1766, Massachusetts Collection (1673–1835), New-York Historical Society; MA&R (1775–1776), 19:162, 537, 833; Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Philadelphia, PA, 2014), 50, n24. 2 Scholarship on poverty, poor relief, and warning out in early America is vast; see especially: Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (New York, 1974); Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986); Robert E. Cray, Paupers and Poor Relief in New York City and its Rural Environs, 1700–1830 (Philadelphia, PA, 1988); Billy G. Smith, The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, eds., Inequality in Early America (Hanover, NH, 1999); Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia, PA, 2001); Billy G. Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America (University Park, PA, 2004); Gabriel J. Loiacono, “Poverty and Citizenship in Rhode Island, 1780–1870” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2008); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, MD, 2009); Lorie Charlesworth, Welfare’s Forgotten Past: A Socio-legal History of the Poor Law (New York, 2010); Dayton and Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings. Dayton and Salinger discuss province support for nonresidents but focus on warning out rather than boarding. For other mentions of the province and state poor, see: Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State, 21, 37–38; Josephine Chapin Brown, Public Relief, 1929–1939 (New York, 1940), 18–19; Robert W. Kelso, The History of Public Poor Relief in Massachusetts, 1620–1920 (Boston, 1922), 121–23; Stephen Edward Wiberly Jr., “Four Cities: Public Poor Relief in Urban America, 1700–1775” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1975), 54–55, 208. 3 Massachusetts General Court, Committee on Accounts (CO6), Account Roll Submissions, Massachusetts State Archives; “Resolve Establishing the Evidence to Accompany Accounts Exhibited for the Support of State’s Poor,” MA&R (1796), 582–83. Legislators also augmented the materials to be included in state pauper claims in 1799, 1831, and 1844; see: “An Act Specifying the Evidence to Accompany Accounts Exhibited for the Support of the Poor of the Commonwealth,” MA&R (1799), 89–90; “An Act Relating to the Support of State Paupers,” MA&R (1831), 671–73; “Resolve Concerning the Manner of Making Claims for the Support of State Paupers,” MA&R (1844), 333. The Massachusetts State Archives collection of state pauper petitions spans 1786–1799; however, summaries of claims were printed in the MA&R from 1786–1853. 4 This paper focuses on the state-funded boarding of paupers in Massachusetts; however, all New England states adopted some version of this approach to relief throughout their histories. As early as 1656, the New Haven colony provided support to sick servants after their terms of service had expired. In 1657, New Haven also allowed towns to deduct from their taxes their expenditures on “suffer[ing]” unsettled people. From 1775 to 1813, Rhode Island issued relief to incapacitated residents who had relocated because of the Revolutionary conflict. Maine and New Hampshire, by contrast, adopted “county pauper” systems in which towns charged their counties, not the state, for ailing strangers’ support. Vermont paid for the care of state paupers who were housed in county jails. More research is needed to determine how extensive these state-sponsored relief systems were throughout New England and America more generally. As a result, this paper makes claims exclusively about Massachusetts. Nevertheless, there is evidence to suggest that state support for strangers was not unique to Massachusetts but rather a feature of early American poor relief at large. Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Jurisdiction of New Haven, from May 1653 to the Union (Hartford, CT, 1858), 2:218, 611; Edward Warren Capen, “The Historical Development of the Poor Law of Connecticut” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1905), 23, 27; Margaret Creech, Three Centuries of Poor Law Administration: A Study of Legislation in Rhode Island (Chicago, 1936), 34–35; Acts and Resolves at the General Assembly of the Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island (Providence, RI, Oct. 1775), 140; “An Act for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons . . .,” 1791, Laws of the State of New-Hampshire (Exeter, NH, 1815), 353–65; “An Act Ascertaining What Shall Constitute the Legal Settlement . . .,” Laws of the State of Maine (Brunswick, ME, 1821), 2:544; “State Paupers,” The Revised Statutes of the State of Vermont, Passed November 19, 1839 (Burlington, VT, 1840), 106. Also see: F. B. Sanborn, “Poor-Law Administration in New England,” The North American Review 114, no. 234 (1872): 1–23; Kelso, The History of Public Poor Relief in Massachusetts, 121–23. 5 Town of Uxbridge, 1786, 1790, COA. The practice of warning out has led many scholars to interpret colonial New England communities as exclusive and reticent to extend aid to outsiders; see, for example: Josiah Henry Benton, Warning Out in New England, 1656–1817 (Boston, 1911); Douglas Lamar Jones, “The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 8, no. 3 (Spring 1975): 28–54; Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from its Founding to the Revolution (Philadelphia, PA, 2009); Herndon, Unwelcome Americans. Herndon’s work shows that warning out functioned differently in Rhode Island in ways that may have influenced community care and belongingness. The term “community” itself is nebulous and contested. In this paper, I follow Bruce Mann and use the word to refer to “a network of social relations, often but not necessarily among people who lived near one another,” which was defined by “mutual obligation and shared experiences.” Bruce H. Mann, Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), 4. For more on community in colonial New England, see the works cited in: John M. Murrin, “Review Essay,” History and Theory 11, no. 2 (1972): 226–75; Darrett B. Rutman, “Assessing the Little Communities of Early America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Apr. 1986): 163–78. For recent work in this vein, see: Mary Babson Fuhrer, A Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815–1848 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014). 6 For the significance of women’s labor to poor relief, see: Ruth Wallis Herndon, “Poor Women and the Boston Almshouse in the Early Republic” and Monique Bourque, “Women and Work in the Philadelphia Almshouse, 1790–1840” in “Women on the Edge: Life at Street Level in the Early Republic” Special Issue, Journal of the Early Republic 32, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 331–492. For gender, race, and care work in American history more generally, see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983); Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990); Rebecca Tannenbaum, The Healer’s Calling: Women and Medicine in Early New England (Ithaca, NY, 2002); Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT, 2009). 7 Jonathan Leavitt, A Summary of the Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Settlement, Support, Employment, and Removal of Paupers (Greenfield, MA, 1810); “An Act in Further Addition to an Act Directing the Admission of Town Inhabitants,” MA&R (1736), 835–36; “An Act Determining What Transactions Shall Be Necessary to Constitute the Settlement of a Citizen in Any Particular Town or District,” MA&R (1789), 408–10. The 1789 law provided expedited paths to settlement for people with property. Those who lived in a town and paid town taxes became residents after five years, while those with estates with annual incomes of more than £3 became residents after two years. Also see: Kelso, The History of Public Poor Relief in Massachusetts, ch. 3; Dayton and Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings, ch. 3. 8 Dayton and Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings. Race and gender informed selectmen’s decisions about who might need relief in the near future, leading to the quicker and more frequent warning out of blacks and single women. For more on race and warning out, see: Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1998), esp. ch. 5; Herndon, Unwelcome Americans; Gabriel Loiacono, “Poor Laws and the Constitution of Race in Early Republican Providence, Rhode Island,” Journal of Policy History 25, no. 2 (2013): 264–87. For the increase in nonresidents in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts, see: Jones, “The Strolling Poor,” 28–54. 9 An act passed in Massachusetts in 1675 actually presages the 1701 laws. “Acts Relating to the Poor” stipulated that colonists who were displaced by King Philip’s War would be “supplied out of the publick treasury.” While this 1675 law was meant to be short-term, the acts in 1701 established province funding for strangers as a central component of the commonwealth’s poor relief. “Acts Relating to the Poor,” 1675, The Charters and General Laws of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1814), 173–75. “Province pauper” was the most common term before the Revolution. The province poor accounts can be traced in the Massachusetts Provincial Treasury Records, Massachusetts Archives Collection, Massachusetts State Archives. 10 “An Act Providing in Case of Sickness,” MA&R (1701–1702), 469–70; “An Act Directing the Admission of Town Inhabitants,” MA&R (1700–1701), 451–52. Also see Dayton and Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings, 49–51. The 1701 acts were renewed and revised in 1717, 1728, 1738, 1742, 1743, 1749, 1751, 1756, 1757, 1764, 1766, 1789, 1794, 1796, 1799, 1820, 1821, 1823, 1831, 1841, 1849, 1852, and 1853. 11 “Pauper Accounts,” MA&R (1786–1799). Towns often submitted charges for multiple state paupers in one petition. As a result, the data shown in figure 1, the total of 1,996 petitions, and the annual average of 142 requests does not suggest the number of state paupers in Massachusetts during these years. Instead, these findings simply demonstrate the considerable number of appeals submitted on account of poor nonresidents. 12 “Pauper Accounts,” MA&R (1786–1799). Legislators in the Committee on Accounts assessed petitions and reported their recommended disbursements to the Massachusetts General Court. The Court then passed a resolve for this amount to be paid out of the public treasury. In total, this process took about a year, so claims reported from 1786–1799 were actually paid from 1787–1800. This explains the slightly later time frame of figure 2 as compared to figure 1. From 1787–1795, the Massachusetts treasury issued payments in British pounds; in 1796, it switched to US dollars. I tallied these currencies separately when determining the total monies spent in figure 2. 13 “Pauper Accounts,” MA&R (1786–1819). For the years 1793–1801 and 1811–1820, also see “Report of the Commissioners . . . on the Subject of the Pauper System of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” House, No. 6 (Boston, 1833), 32. To facilitate comparison across time, in both figures 3 and 4, I represented the values for the years 1787–1795 (which were issued in British pounds) in US dollars. I calculated these amounts using the annual exchange rates printed in Fleets Pocket Almanack. . .Calculated Chiefly for the Use of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston, 1787–1795). For more on historical exchange rates, see Lawrence H. Officer, “Dollar-Pound Exchange Rate from 1791,” MeasuringWorth, 2018. The dip in 1789 is likely an accounting error in the tallies printed in the MA&R. I suspect that a few zeros may be missing from some large accounts, such as the seaport towns of Gloucester or Salem. To adjust for inflation in figure 4, I consulted the “Annual Inflation Rates” at MeasuringWorth and used 1787 as my base rate. Samuel H. Williamson, “Annual Inflation Rates in the United States, 1775–2017,” MeasuringWorth, 2018. 14 Leavitt, A Summary of the Laws of Massachusetts; Douglas A. Irwin and Richard Sylla, eds., Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s (Chicago, 2011), 2. For more on the US economy, economic policy, and poverty during the period, see note 2 and: George Rogers Taylor, “American Economic Growth Before 1840: An Exploratory Essay” and Gordon C. Bjork, “The Weaning of the American Economy: Independence, Market Changes, and Economic Development” in The Journal of Economic History 24, 4 (1964), 427–44, 541–66; Irwin and Sylla, eds., Founding Choices; Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York, 2012), ch. 1, postscript. For immigration, see Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York, 2017); Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (New York, 2015). 15 The tally of 831 state paupers boarding out and corresponding demographic analysis is based on my reading of selectmen’s and residents’ petitions. To distinguish between state paupers who boarded in the homes of residents, those who “boarded themselves,” and those who were housed in workhouses and almshouses, I used a variety of methods. First, I took cues from the petitioner’s language—“to supporting” and “supplies to,” for example, were key prefixes denoting people who “boarded themselves.” Second, I looked at the charges in the petitions, excluding those from my sample that mentioned “house rent” and including those that had bills from residents or signatures confirming that they had collected payments. In ambiguous cases, I considered claims mentioning the boarder in question from other years. Finally, if I was still unsure about whether the boarder was in their own home or that of a resident, I omitted them from the sample. Overall, I suspect that the total of 831 state paupers boarding out is much too low. I may have inadvertently omitted boarders who were mentioned in petitions that were brief or undetailed. In addition, as noted in the text, my sample excludes children. Too often selectmen submitted claims for a boarder and their “children” or “family” without detailing how many additional people this entailed. As a result, I decided that it was most accurate to omit children from my sample altogether. For more on children and poor relief, see: Ruth Wallis Herndon and John Murray, eds., Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America (Ithaca, NY, 2009). Finally, the 831 value is likely too low because married women, like children, were often not mentioned in petitions submitted on behalf of them and their husband. 16 Karin Wulf has also found that gender shaped poor relief in colonial Philadelphia. Like in Massachusetts, women in Philadelphia often received regular allotments to stay in their own homes. Karin Wulf, “Gender and the Political Economy of Poor Relief in Colonial Philadelphia,” in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Smith, 163–88. Susan Grigg has similar findings for Newburyport, MA. Susan Grigg, The Dependent Poor of Newburyport: Studies in Social History, 1800–1830 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984). 17 “Historical Census Statistics on Population Total by Race, 1790–1900,” Census.gov (July 25, 2008); “An Act for Suppressing and Punishing of Rogues, Vagabonds, Common Beggars, and Other Idle, Disorderly and Lewd Persons,” MA&R (1787), 623–26; Leavitt, A Summary of the Laws of Massachusetts. For more on race, poor relief, and warning out, see note 8 and Parker, Making Foreigners, esp. ch. 2. Town selectmen’s and residents’ labeling of paupers as “black” or “Indian” was messy and indistinct, to say the least. For the complexities of racial descriptors in poor relief registers, see: Herndon, “Poor Women and the Boston Almshouse in the Early Republic,” 358–59. The inhabitants of Mashpee fought to be incorporated as a town and freed from guardian control for over one hundred years; see Donald M. Nielsen, “The Mashpee Indian Revolt of 1833,” The New England Quarterly 58, no. 3 (1985): 400–20; David J. Carlson, Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law (Urbana, IL, 2006), 114–19. 18 For immigration, see note 14 and Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (New York, 2012). For veterans and invalid pensions, see: William Henry Glasson, “History of Military Pension Legislation in the United States” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1900), ch. 1–2; Ben Mutschler, “The Province of Affliction: Illness in New England, 1690–1820” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2000), ch. 6; Daniel Blackie, “Disabled Revolutionary War Veterans and the Construction of Disability in the Early United States, c. 1775–1840” (PhD diss., University of Helsinki, 2010); Laurel Daen, “Revolutionary War Invalid Pensions and the Bureaucratic Language of Disability in the Early Republic,” Special Issue on Early American Disability Studies, Early American Literature 52, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 141–67. 19 Town of Lenox, 1792; Town of Uxbridge, 1790; Town of Sherborn, 1792; Town of Malden, 1788–1791, COA. For aging, see: Corinne Field, “What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Age in Early America?” Common-place.org 17, no. 2 (Winter 2017). 20 Selectmen of Pownalsborough, 1787; Town of Warwick, 1792; George Mantor, 1791; Selectmen of Weston, 1786; Town of Weston, 1787–1791; Town of Hanover, 1793, COA. For the involvement of townspeople in poor relief, see Elna C. Green, This Business of Relief: Confronting Poverty in a Southern City, 1740–1940 (Athens, GA, 2003); Bourque, “Women and Work in the Philadelphia Almshouse.” 21 Town of Medford, 1789; Selectman of Walpole, 1791; Town of Haverhill, 1793; Town of Kingston, 1791, COA. Townspeople’s charitable sentiments were shaped by racial, ethnic, and social prejudices. For example, white residents may have been more willing to house white wounded soldiers, whom they saw as unjustly impoverished and honorably disabled, in comparison to black people, whom they viewed with racial bias and intolerance. The large number of black boarders in relation to the percentage of black Massachusetts inhabitants, however, suggests that selectmen’s and residents’ financial interests in receiving state funds often overrode their racially and ethnically motivated disinclinations to extend care. In the collection of state pauper petitions from 1786–1799, no town official mentioned difficulties finding accommodations for paupers because of their racial or ethnic background—although prejudice was certainly ever-present and such circumstances may simply have gone unrecorded. There is also no evidence in the petitions that residents attempted to use black boarders as servants, extracting household labor from them when they were able to complete it. In the few petitions for orphan unsettled children, claimants often included deductions in their total requested monies for “work that [the children] hath done.” But, such deductions very rarely occur in claims for adults, including those described by caregivers as black. This may be because adults were only boarded during times of extreme sickness and debility when they were unable to perform any labor. In addition, as selectmen and residents hoped to get as much money from the state as possible, they may have been disinclined to report the work of boarders, which legislators would have assessed and deducted from their total compensation. For more on race and poor relief, see note 8. Also see Green, This Business of Relief; Bourque, “Women and Work in the Philadelphia Almshouse.” 22 Doctor John Heilman, 1790; Benjamin Lane, 1788; George Mantor, 1792; Town of Kingston, 1791; Town of Andover, 1791, COA. 23 Town of Brookfield, 1797; Town of Newton, 1791; Town of Andover, 1791; Reuben Smith, 1790; Town of Barre, 1790; George Fecham, 1786, COA. 24 Town of Reading, 1791; Town of Hancock, 1788; Town of Topsfield, 1791; Town of Reading, 1792, COA. 25 Town of West Springfield, 1792; Town of Rehoboth, 1790; Town of Gloucester, 1791; Town of Pittstown, 1792; Town of Weston, 1787, COA. 26 Town of Concord, 1792; Town of West Springfield, 1792; Francis King, 1789, COA. For more on Brister Freeman, see the Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area. 27 My analysis of the duration of boarders’ stays is based on a sample of 230 state paupers who boarded between 1790–1792. I selected these years because they were about halfway into the collection of detailed petitions, which range from 1786–1799. Studying those who boarded out between 1790 and 1792 thus gave me the best chance of locating long-term lodging arrangements. At the same time, the thirteen-year time frame of surviving petitions makes it difficult to identify boarding stays that continued for more than ten years, which, as the records of Betty Trifle suggest, certainly occurred. In my sample of 230 paupers, I necessarily omitted those who were unnamed, described in the petition only, for example, as an “Indian woman.” 28 Town of Hardwick, 1790; Town of Boylston, 1793; Town of Gloucester, 1792, COA; David Peirce, Gloucester, MA, “United States Census, 1790,” National Archives and Records Administration, Family Search; “Capt. David Pearce, 1736–1818,” Person Details KFPN-6Y6, Family Search; “David Pearce,” in The New England Historical & Genealogical Register, Vol. XXI (Boston, 1867), 258–59. David Pearce may have assisted with Laurance’s care, but, considering his thriving business as a merchant and gendered divisions of household labor, Laurance was likely the primary responsibility of Bethiah, Abigail, Sarah, and Harriet. Pearce’s bill does mention the hire of “one watcher” for two weeks and “two watchers equal to one man’s board” for four weeks. Surprisingly, widows’ petitions also obliquely represent their labor on behalf of state paupers. Like selectmen and male residents, widows generally omitted information about who completed which tasks as well as related details, such length of time and difficulty of the work. I suspect this is either because selectmen wrote or oversaw the writing of widows’ petitions or because widows followed the conventions of petition-writing set by selectmen and male residents. For the elision of women’s work in poor relief records, see: Herndon, “Poor Women and the Boston Almshouse in the Early Republic”; Bourque, “Women and Work in the Philadelphia Almshouse.” 29 Town of Andover, 1791; Town of Reading, 1790, COA. There are other situations in which women were compensated for their care work. Some women owned boarding houses, for example, while others worked as nurses. 30 Town of Concord, 1792; Prince Patterson, 1790, COA; Prince Patterson and Nelly Jackson, Marriage Notice, May 27, 1784, Boston, MA, “Massachusetts Marriages,” Family Search; Prince Patterson, Boston, MA, “United States Census, 1790,” National Archives and Records Administration, Family Search. For more on the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts and the employment of ex-slaves as servants, see Melish, Disowning Slavery. For black laborers in almshouses, see Bourque, “Women and Work in the Philadelphia Almshouse.” 31 Town of Kingston, 1791; Town of Walpole, 1786, COA. 32 Town of Attleborough, 1798; Daniel Robbins, 1788, COA. The process of institutionalization was neither smooth nor comprehensive. Even in the late nineteenth century, most people with physical and cognitive impairments never visited hospitals or asylums. Nevertheless, there was a significant increase in the number and usage of these institutions over the nineteenth century. Scholarship on asylums is extensive; see especially David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston, 1971); Gerald N. Grob, Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 (New York, 1973); Gerald N. Grob, The Madamong Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill (New York, 1994). For asylums and their impact on family and community care, see Nancy Tomes, A Generous Confidence: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Art of Asylum-Keeping, 1840–1883 (Cambridge, 1984); David Wright, “Getting out of the Asylum: Understanding the Confinement of the Insane in the Nineteenth Century,” Social History of Medicine 10, no. 1 (1997): 137–55; James E. Moran, “Asylum in the Community: Managing the Insane in Antebellum America,” History of Psychiatry 9 (1998): 217–40. For hospitals, see Guenter B. Risse, Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals (New York, 1999). 33 I calculated the percentage of accounts paid in full by comparing the state pauper expenditures detailed in the MA&R and the amounts requested by individuals and town selectmen in their petitions. Most petitions have markings by a legislator at the Committee on Accounts showing which charges were disallowed as well as other deductions taken. 34 “Resolve on the Petition of the Clerks in the Treasurer’s Office,” MA&R (1790), 223–24; Town of Cape Elizabeth, 1792, COA. The Massachusetts legislature revised the standardized rates for care work in 1820, 1821, 1831, and 1851: “An Act Providing for the Support of State Paupers,” MA&R (1820), 428; “An Act Providing for the Support of State Paupers,” MA&R (1821), 588; “An Act Relating to the Support of State Paupers,” MA&R (1831), 671–73; “An Act Relating to Accounts for the Support of State Paupers,” MA&R (1851), 581. 35 Massachusetts General Court, Report of the Commissioners. . .on. . .the Pauper System (Boston, 1833). Whig legislators repeatedly introduced bills to abolish state pauper funding; see: “State Expenditures,” Salem Gazette (MA), March 25, 1831; “Pauperism,” Essex Gazette (Haverhill, MA), March 7, 1835; “Whigs of New Bedford!” New-Bedford Mercury (MA), November 1, 1839; “State Pauper Laws,” The Pittsfield Sun (MA), April 9, 1846. For an overview of the Whig position, see “Whigs of New Bedford!” New-Bedford Mercury, November 1, 1839. For the Democratic response, see “Worcester County Address,” The Pittsfield Sun, November 3, 1831; “Comfort for the Farmers—Or Which Is Which,” The Pittsfield Sun, March 3, 1844; “The State Pauper Tax,” The Pittsfield Sun, November 5, 1846. The legislature regularly convened committees on “pauper laws”; see “Massachusetts Legislature,” Boston Daily Advertiser, February 19, 1820; Massachusetts General Court, Report. . .[of the] Committee on Pauper Laws (Boston, 1821); “House of Representatives,” Independent Chronicle & Boston Patriot (MA), January 15, 1825; “House,” Village Register and Norfolk County Advertiser (Dedham, MA), January 18, 1827; “Senate,” New-Bedford Mercury, January 23, 1829; “General Court,” Salem Gazette, June 1, 1830. For more on the decline of state-funded boarding, see Kunal M. Parker, “State, Citizenship, and Territory: The Legal Construction of Immigrants in Antebellum Massachusetts,” Law and History Review 19 (Fall 2001): 583–643; Parker, Making Foreigners, 108–14. 36 “To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives,” (18??), Massachusetts Historical Society. For the quasi-institutional measures adopted by selectmen, see the annual returns on state poor relief compiled by the legislature beginning in 1837: “An Act Providing for a Return by Overseers of the Poor,” MA&R (1837), 207–9; Massachusetts General Court, Report and Bill Providing for a Return by Overseers of the Poor (Boston, 1837); “An Act Concerning Returns by Overseers of the Poor,” MA&R (1841), 396; Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, “Abstracts of the Returns of the Poor,” (1835–1860), Massachusetts Historical Society. 37 Scrutator, “The Prospect Before Us,” Newburyport Herald (MA), May 1, 1821; “Van Buren Politics,” Essex Gazette, April 12, 1839; Henry Shaw, “To the Editors,” The Pittsfield Sun, April 21, 1831. 38 “An Act in Relation to Paupers Having No Settlement in this Commonwealth,” MA&R (1852), 190–93; “An Act Concerning the State Pauper Establishments within this Commonwealth,” MA&R (1853), 572–74; “An Act in Addition to an Act Concerning the State Pauper Establishments within this Commonwealth,” MA&R (1854), 127–28; “An Act in Relation to the Hospital on Rainsford Island for State Paupers,” MA&R (1854), 187–88; “An Act Concerning the State Pauper Establishments within this Commonwealth,” MA&R (1854), 262–64; “An Act Concerning Lunatic State Paupers, and Admission to the State Pauper Establishments,” MA&R (1854), 344–45; “An Act Providing for the Classification of State Paupers,” MA&R (1855), 811–12; “The Message,” The Barre Patriot (MA), January 23, 1852; “Second Address,” The Pittsfield Sun, November 4, 1852. For more on the Massachusetts state almshouses, see David Wagner, Ordinary People: In and Out of Poverty in the Gilded Age (New York, 2016). 39 See especially works mentioned in notes 2 and 32. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Ankit,, Rakesh

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shy119pmid: N/A

Abstract This article documents in detail hitherto unavailable what Shail Mayaram called an “onslaught by the modern bureaucracy of the postcolonial state” on the liminally placed Meo community in the Mewat region, comprising the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur and the Gurgaon district of the former province of East Punjab. A people well-described as “in-between Hinduism and Islam,” the Meo community found itself, at a time of “two-nation” theory and consequent “partition politics,” a misfit. This article begins in 1949, when existing accounts of the story of the Meos end and traces the fraught process of their reterritorialization on their own land, now part of a partitioned nation state. Given the current ascendant culturally nationalist Indian state and society, it represents the Mewat of 1949–50 as a community lab of the early Indian nation state; tests its claims of parity, equality, and freedom; and provides a “prehistory” of the contemporary violence there. Introduction Alongside social-political identity, religious-cultural organization, and community territorialization, land (or property) has been a key trigger for violence in South Asia in colonial and postcolonial times. The lingering “partition violence” of 1947 has been explained prominently along the first three criteria and to a comparatively lesser extent, along the fourth factor. This is especially so when one moves away from Punjab and Bengal, the provinces that were partitioned.1 In other centers of “partition violence” and its considerable afterlife, like Delhi, conflict was as much about property and the possibility of land, as it was about proselytizing religion and nation.2 The peculiar situation of the Meo community in the Mewat region, comprising chiefly the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur and the Gurgaon district of the former province of East Punjab, is a case in point. The Meos, residents of Mewat since the twelfth century, represented “a people in-between Hinduism and Islam,” in the words of Shail Mayaram, the foremost scholar of their modern identity, marginality, and agency.3 Their “marginality” vis-à-vis the state in Delhi has been traced back to the establishment of the sultanate there.4 Inhabiting settlements around the southern periphery of Delhi, in the contemporary states of Haryana and Rajasthan, they were spread across a region that was historically and cartographically carved across British Indian provinces and princely Indian states. At a time of “two-nation” theory, partition politics and state sanitization of social categories, they were looked upon as misfits, and their “resettlement” became a matter of incursion by an ambiguous society and anxious state. As a result, they were at the receiving end of a “fourfold onslaught” from early-1947: “by the state, by other social groups, by sections of the press and by the modern bureaucracy of the postcolonial state.”5 This article focuses on the fourth of these features, namely the handling of the Meos by the bureaucratic apparatus of the post-1947 Indian state, from New Delhi downward. Based on previously unused official sources, it begins in 1949, when existing accounts of the story of the Meos end. By that time, “partition violence” had subsided,6 and rehabilitation of refugees, on one hand, and resettlement of evacuees and internally displaced persons like Meos, on the other, was under way. The Meo community was reterritorialized on a patch of land that had been its medieval homeland but to which it no longer had an automatic claim since the land was now part of a nation-state that had emerged out a process of political partition and religious rhetoric. The story thus reveals many of the fault lines that divided the newly independent Indian nation state. Indeed, the resettlement of the Meos was a microcosm of the clash between competing ideas of India, waged within and through the conflicting directions emanating from the Union Government of India and its regional and provincial counterparts. Given the current configurations of a culturally majoritarian Indian state and society, it is especially relevant to revisit such litmus tests of the early independent Indian nation state. In reconstructing the story of the state’s segmentation of Meos through its own files, this article follows Ann Stoler’s work in showcasing these files “as sites of the expectant and conjured—about dreams of comforting futures and forebodings of future failures.”7 These documents, with “itineraries of their own,” comprised “the administrative apparatus” that, in turn, “opened to a space that extended beyond it. Contrapuntal intrusions emanated from outside the corridors of governance, but they also erupted . . . within that sequestered space.”8 As such, “these archives are not simply accounts of actions or thoughts.” They are records of “rubrics of rule [in] a changing world [of] efforts to ‘catch up’ with what was emergent and ‘becoming’ in new situations.”9 May 1949 provides a suitable starting point for two reasons: that month, the fact-finding committee that had been set up in July 1948 to accompany a census of Meos submitted its final report, and the region of Mewat, whose four princely states of Alwar, Bharatpur, Dholpur, and Karauli had been functioning as the Matsya Union with a senior civil servant as an administrator, was amalgamated in the United State of Rajasthan. Prelude The Meos, a mix of Rajputs, Minas, and Muslims, had been driven out of their homeland in Alwar and Bharatpur states from March 1947 onward, as the communal polarization of that year determined that the Meos of Mewat, along with “the Momins of U.P. and Bihar [and] the Mapillas of Malabar” were “simply ‘Muslims’ and . . . nothing else . . . [a] ‘fundamentally’ different and ‘forever’ suspect minority.”10 This expulsion represented the climax of the effort by Alwar and Bharatpur states to help create a Hindu nation, assisted by the social agenda of the revivalist organization Arya Samaj, on display since the 1930s.11 By the autumn of 1947, forty thousand Meos remained in Alwar state out of an original population of 100,000–140,000, and almost all of these had to “convert” to Hinduism in return for their lives. Similarly, about sixty thousand Meos had to leave the Bharatpur state. Taken together, some of these 200,000–250,000 Meos moved to Pakistan, but a majority stayed put in the villages of the adjoining Gurgaon district.12 As pressure mounted on them to vacate these villages, they were urged by Gandhi on December 19, 1947, to die in their homeland rather than live elsewhere, a call that reverberates seventy years on.13 Calling them the “backbone” of India, Gandhi urged the Meos to remain and resist, promising his moral support and leaving disciples like Vinoba Bhave and Mridula Sarabhai to lend their voices to the Meos’ cause in the corridors of power. Simultaneously, in November 1947, the All-India Congress Committee passed a resolution recommending that evacuees return to their original homes, and the Union Government proclaimed this policy. R. C. Hadow, of the British High Commission, was visiting Alwar that month, and, on successive days, he sent reports of Meos “on their way to Pakistan” and Meos returning, having “decided against going to Pakistan.”14 Through 1948, the Meos got caught in a binary with Punjabi Hindu and Sikh refugee rehabilitation, which was privileged in terms of land-allotment in Alwar, Bharatpur, and Gurgaon. Not refugees but rendered homeless in their homeland, the Meos’ restoration or resettlement took a back seat to providing relief to refugees from Pakistan. As Ann Stoler has shown, “colonial administrations were prolific producers of social categories [through] unsure and hesitant sorts of documentation and sensibilities.” There was not much that was “hegemonic about how those [categories] worked on the ground,” and “disquiet, anxieties, uncertainties repeatedly unsettled the conceit that all was in order, because papers classified people.”15 To a great many in the Indian state, including Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, who also headed the crucial Ministry of States (MoS) as well as Home Affairs, Meos were best removed to Pakistan. But they stuck it out, had the sympathy and support of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and influential social workers like Pandit Sundar Lal, and clawed their way back into the “official mind,” which conceded a census, a fact-finding committee and a “compact area” scheme for first temporary and then permanent resettlement of Meos in four contiguous tehsils (administrative blocks) spread across the East Punjab district of Gurgaon and the princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur.16 Kunwar Mohammad Ashraf, a scholar and revolutionary from Alwar state, who had been a linchpin of Nehru’s Muslim mass-contact program in the late 1930s, was a participant in peasant movements in Alwar and Bharatpur in that decade. In his life-story one finds a slice of Meo history illuminated.17 Ashraf, along with others in the Communist Party of India, was involved in publishing the magazine Naya Daur against the “conspiracies of the communalists and the princely states,” and he supported the demand for popular government in the latter. In response, these states’ administrations charged him with “founding a small Pakistan or Meostan in Mewat,”18 Ashraf opined that “the integrity of the Meo nation” could “only be safeguarded in Mewat” and argued that “for a Meo there was nothing to choose between a Pakistani Muslim and an Indian Hindu.”19 He tried to “prevent the Meos from going to Pakistan” and welcomed their return.20 In this, he was supported by the prime minister himself, who chastised C. M. Trivedi, the governor of East Punjab, for “the Punjab Government [having] not quite grasped [our] basic policy about the Meos who had come back from Pakistan,” thus: This Meo question has become a test issue and the people of Kashmir are closely following it . . . Apart from this, it is not quite clear how people are forcibly sent to Pakistan . . . Suppose, if they refused to receive them, as indeed they have stated on several occasions, how are we to push them across then?21 Summing up the statistical situation for Governor-General C. Rajagopalachari, Nehru had tried to show the scale of “this Meo question” in July 1948: The pre-migration population of Meos in Gurgaon-Alwar-Bharatpur was 431,000. The number of Meos resident now is about 208,000 [Alwar-7038, Bharatpur-1685, Gurgaon-174, 115]. Of these, 11,000 have been converted to Hinduism. [Another] 10,000 went to Pakistan and came back. The figures I have given do not tally. The main point is that there are at present 60,000 Meos in Gurgaon district, belonging to Alwar and Bharatpur, who should go back to these states. The Meos [there] used to possess 400,000 acres [of land]. Of these, 116,000 acres have been temporarily leased to refugees and 150,000 acres have been temporarily leased to local people . . . to avoid the land lying uncultivated. There are still 134,000 acres lying empty, but these consist of rather inferior land.22 Six months later, by February 1949, the resettlement of Meos had become important in Nehru’s thinking not only on its own account but also “in terms of food production.” Reminding the relief and rehabilitation (R&R) minister, Mohanlal Saksena, of the “great need for additional food production,” the prime minister pronounced it a “tragedy to have lands lying uncultivated in Alwar and Bharatpur because we cannot settle as to who should be sent there. Obviously, the easiest way of utilising those lands quickly is to send the old residents of the place that is the Meos.”23 Two months later, in April 1949, a fact-finding committee comprised of the Gandhian Sudhir Ghosh, social worker Roshan Lal, and a senior ICS officer, Tarlok Singh, issued its final report, describing the events of September 1948. Then it had been decided to temporarily allot to Meos, both those who had remained in India throughout and those who, having migrated to Pakistan, had returned by the census of July 1948, 45,987 acres of cultivated land in Nuh and Ferozepur Jhirka tehsils of Gurgaon district and 13,315 acres of cultivated land in Tijara and Pahari tehsils of the Matsya Union. This resolution did not fully satisfy the Meos, since they were not restored to their original homes and land holdings, which had been declared evacuee property—upon their enforced departure—and distributed among not only Punjabi refugees but also local tillers. Pending a scheme of permanent resettlement, to take effect beginning with the crop cycle of 1949, the Matsya Union had verified the claims of 6,329 Meos, 3,016 from Alwar and 3,315 from Bharatpur, amounting to 70,220 acres, 34,400 in Alwar and 35,820 in Bharatpur. In the villages ear-marked for them, 9,449 acres in Alwar and 4,567 acres in Bharatpur had been allotted. In Gurgaon, Meos belonging to the district had been allotted 19,904 acres, of which possession had been taken to the extent of 19,039 acres. A total allotment of 11,635 acres had been made to the Meos of Matsya Union in Gurgaon district, of which possession had been taken of 5,193 acres. In Ferozepur Jhirka, possession of 4,808 acres had been taken out of 5,748 acres allotted. It was only in the Nuh tehsil of Gurgaon, where the allotted area was 5,887 acres that barely any possession had been taken, just 385 acres. At the same time, about twenty-five thousand Meos of the Matsya Union had managed to return to their original villages, taking the matter of their “restoration” into their own hands. This was despite tremendous official resistance and concerns about testy relations between local Jats, Meos, and Punjabi refugees, although men nearer the ground, for instance Matsya Union politicians and ministers, were welcoming of a community that knew how to till the drylands of Mewat, as against the Punjabi agriculturalist indulged by decades of colonial canalization. By then, even in East Punjab, one half of the epicenter of partition violence, it had been decided to restore confiscated land and property to all Muslims who had remained in the Indian Union, and it seemed that it was only a matter of time before Meos, even returnees from Pakistan, would be allotted permanently cultivable land, alongside—if not adjoining to—the refugees from West Pakistan.24 And yet, this was not to be, as “administrative fiat itself served as a mode of displacement.”25 May–June 1949: Skirmish at the Apex On May 14, 1949, on the eve of the amalgamation of the Matsya Union with the United State of Rajasthan, an interdepartmental meeting was held in New Delhi to consider the above-mentioned final report of the fact-finding committee. It was attended by V. P. Menon, the powerful advisor in the MoS; A. B. Chatterjee, joint secretary, MoS; V. Shankar, the influential secretary to Patel; V. D. Dantyagi, joint secretary, R&R; Sudhir Ghosh, commissioner, R&R; and Gopilal Yadav, the out-going minister for R&R of the Matsya Union. The Meo question seemed to be in need of reexamination, as Yadav explained that “Meos had, in fact, already filtered through to their original homes in the Matsya Union [as] the local people preferred to give them land as sub-tenants and Meos would rather work as sub-tenants or labourers in Matsya Union rather than take the lands, which had been reserved for them in Gurgaon.” The “official” position was that land had already been allotted in the Matsya Union to nearly fifty thousand West Punjab refugees “in exchange for the land in Gurgaon district where the Meos were to be resettled.” If now, the Meos insisted on returning to their original holdings or were to be allotted lands there, “these Punjabi refugees [must] be disturbed”26 at a time when they needed to be encouraged to pursue cooperative, mechanical farming (tractor cultivation) to contribute in the “grow more food” campaign.27 Clearly, the Meo community was not playing the part—nor plying the land—assigned to them by the bureaucracy of the old-new Indian state. However, they had a supporter in Sudhir Ghosh, who had been made a deputy commissioner in the Ministry of R&R by Nehru, precisely with the hope that he would outflank the bureaucracy beholden to its shibboleths as well as to Patel. Writing to Chatterjee, four days after the above-mentioned meeting, Ghosh, supported by Yadav, laid out the case for Meos: The 25,000 Meos who have gone back to Alwar from Gurgaon have gone back to their own lands and homes and the land allotted to and reserved for refugees in Alwar belong to those Meos who went to Pakistan. As regards Bharatpur, the total area left by Muslims is 1,60,000 acres (area temporarily allotted to refugees—56,000 acres, area belonging to Muslims who went to Pakistan—10,000 acres, area to which refugees are entitled under new scheme—45,000 acres; in consequence, area, which it will not be possible to restore to the Meos—35,000 acres (22%)). Therefore, 78% in Bharatpur and 100% in Alwar of the original holdings can be restored to Meos. If the Meos are to be resettled in certain segregated areas as was envisaged last year, it will entail displacing them from their own homes where they have already returned—100% in Alwar and 50% in Bharatpur (18,000/35,000 Meos from Gurgaon). Matsya Union ministry [was] of the opinion that there [was] no risk of conflict between the Meos and the local population because things [had] returned to normalcy. This view is justified by the fact that although as many as 43,000 Meos have already returned to the area there has so far been no untoward incident.28 Chatterjee was not convinced “looking at the history of the Meos,”29 but the prime minister was starting to match his sympathy for the Meos with support. He wrote to V. P. Menon and M. L. Saksena, minister for R&R, that it appeared from Ghosh and Yadav’s report that forty-three thousand Meos had already been settled in Alwar and Bharatpur, “quite peacefully and rather automatically.” This left 22 percent of the Meos behind, and Nehru was hopeful: There should be no difficulty in resettling them also in the same way as the others have settled themselves . . . no exact rule is necessary because resettlement is taking place so peacefully and naturally that all one has to do is to help this process to continue.30 Plainly, Meos had been taking matters in their own hands. K. B. Lall, administrator of Matsya Union, informed Chatterjee that about 90 percent of the Meos of Alwar had returned, 70 percent to their original homes. As for Bharatpur Meos, 50 percent were reported to have returned, though not to their old houses, which were occupied mostly by refugees. Lall, unlike Ghosh and Nehru, feared that “any encouragement to the Meos in their clamour of possession of their old houses” carried “the risk of precipitating a disturbance of public tranquillity,” as it “would upset the resettlement programme for refugees.”31 Every passing day brought new numbers. The evacuee land utilization advisor in Alwar claimed that 95 percent of about thirty thousand Meos had returned and, except in the two areas of Ramgarh and Govindgarh, the returnees had moved into their old homes, “without permits.”32 This still left around twenty thousand Meos without homes and lands. At heart of both the bureaucratic anxiety and the community action was the decision taken in June–July 1948 that “resettlement of Meos on their original holdings should be avoided as it would create [a] law and order problem of major magnitude.” Instead, a “compact area scheme” was devised by the fact-finding committee, to avoid having Meos and refugees “mixed” with local Jats and Mahajans. With the change in communal climate and given the situation on ground, the fact-finding committee, in its final report, went beyond its bureaucratic brief and advocated acknowledging the return of Meos to their original homes, already underway. This conflicted with the “official mind’s” sanitized solution,33 and ministries in New Delhi baulked at it. Mandarins in the MoS in particular, led by Patel, resisted Nehru’s support for the returning Meos, while the prime minister was backed by his secretariat (the PMS) and supporters like Ghosh and Yadav. If the summer of 1947 saw intense movement on the ground by Meos, then the summer of 1949 saw intense maneuvering about them on paper, as differences of opinion between bureaucrats based in New Delhi across and within three ministries—MoS, R&R, and PMS—and their political patrons mounted. At stake were the four pillars of “Nehru’s idea of India: democracy, religious tolerance, economic development and cultural pluralism.”34 The MoS enumerated for Patel its objections to the return of Meos to their own homes: (1) Mechanical cultivation scheme may be upset [as] a portion of the area in which the scheme is being operated belongs to Meos who did not migrate to Pakistan. (2) In Bharatpur, if the original holdings are restored, refugees settled on 46,000 acres will have to be uprooted. [In all] most of refugee and cultivation schemes on the evacuee area of 4 lakhs acres would end up in smoke. Facilities may be offered, and arrangements may be made for the resettlement of Meos belonging to Alwar and Bharatpur, who have not gone to Pakistan, [elsewhere]. (3) There seems to be a general impression that 100% of the Meos from Alwar and 78% from Bharatpur have come back and that this process is going on as a matter of course. This is incorrect, all that has happened is the Meos have just trickled back and in several cases occupied their old homes, hanging in the hope that they will be able to force the hands of the Central Government. (4) This infiltration took place in the face of clear directions given to the Matsya Government.35 Patel considered the above and decided that “the situation [was] not so much beyond control as was represented” by Nehru. His understanding of the “history of feuds between Meos and Jats” convinced him that “the present improvement cannot but be a passing phase,” and his desire to “avoid clashes between Meos and refugees” remained paramount, notwithstanding the improving communal climate. There was always the specter of Pakistan bringing India “into disrepute in [the] international world” by indulging “in further stories of persecution of minorities.” He held the line that “any return of Meos to their original homes/holdings must be subject to the conditions of mechanical cultivation schemes, ‘grow more food’ schemes [and] refugee resettlement plans.” Where Meos had already returned to their original homes and holdings, his hands were tied, but otherwise, he wanted to adhere to their separate, compact resettlement. Overshadowing the irony and injustice inherent in this situation—that Meos were getting second-preference in their own homeland and were being made a scapegoat for “partition violence” in West Punjab—Patel was more invested in lashing out at how Meos managed to return, leaving no room for doubt as to where his sympathies stood. Here is a case in which specific directions were given to the Matsya Government not to allow Meos to return. The Matsya Government flagrantly violated these and presented us with accomplished facts, largely occasioned by . . . their preference for the devils whom they knew to theircountrymenwhom they did not know.36 Here was a written variation on the spectrum that Ann Stoler drew “to distinguish between what was ‘unwritten’ because it could go without saying and ‘everyone knew it,’ what was unwritten because it could not yet be articulated, and what was unwritten because it could not be said.”37 Whether or not they were devils, Meos were certainly not Patel’s countrymen. The latter distinction was reserved for the non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan. Bolstered by its minister’s prejudice, the MoS pushed with all the force it could muster. Meos were becoming an “over-weighted case.” They had been “residing” for over two years in Gurgaon and had just started “infiltrating” into Alwar and Bharatpur. Refugees were “anxious” and Meos “apprehensive”; if refugees could be displaced, then why not Meos “in the interest of their own security,” from their original homes to a “compact area”? Finally, what about those Meos who had left for Pakistan? These returnees did not “qualify” for restoration.38 The MoS mandarins then confabulated with their R&R counterparts and condemned the collusion between East Punjab government, which “had put pressure on the Meos in Gurgaon to leave,” and the Matsya Union authorities, who “had actively interested themselves in permitting the return of the Meos.” Permits had been granted, and some 95 percent of the Meos of Alwar and 60–80 percent of the Meos of Bharatpur had returned to their homes, creating villages of “mixed populace.” It was no longer possible “to insist on Meos occupying the compact area without uprooting them [again] from their homes.” The officials admitted that the “local population or a large percentage of it welcomed the return of the Meos” and were now focused on those Meos who “had not occupied their homes,” as “they could be directed to compact areas.” The conflict between the MoS and the Matsya Union government over this issue reveals another underlying and enduring layer of tension in the official political apparatus. Mindful that Patel was “angry that the two governments concerned have sabotaged the scheme as envisaged by the Government,” his MoS officials magnified his thoughts—“what purpose taking decisions which will be disregarded by all concerned?”—and meekly agreed with him that “the resettlement of Meos alongside Hindus and other locals will in the long run create a situation similar to the past.”39 They prepared a note for the upcoming meeting of the Cabinet Committee, which concluded with the observation that, despite all this gnashing of teeth, about half of displaced Meos remained in a “fluid position.”40 All this while, Nehru was terming “the old idea that the Meos should be put in compact areas” as “impractical” and wanted to give them “a chance to go ahead and cultivate the land” for the next harvest. To him it was “very important that neither the Meos nor the crops should suffer.”41 He was drawing these conclusions, unlike Patel, based on his talks with local politicians and ministers like Gopilal Yadav. Accordingly, on May 25, 1949, Nehru presided over a crucial meeting of the Committee of the Union Cabinet for Rehabilitation. Patel, who had been ill for almost a year, was indisposed and was represented by his two departmental secretaries, M. K. Vellodi and H. V. R. Iengar, while the R&R was represented by its most senior officials, C. N. Chandra and V. D. Dantyagi. Among Nehru’s cabinet colleagues, the ministers of transport, finance, and health were present. The R&R group began by summarizing that, notwithstanding the decisions taken in 1948, the situation in 1949 was that in Alwar, 95 percent of Meos were in their original homes and 50 percent on their original holdings; in Bharatpur, 50 percent were in their old, “more or less compact,” villages (175 out of 350) and 50 percent in a “fluid state.” The MoS representatives followed by reading out Patel’s lament that this state of affairs was “neither in the interests of the Meos nor in the interests of the general population . . . undesirable from the point of view of the internal situation [and] international opinion.” Nehru then commented: Sardar Patel is obviously thinking more of the events that occurred in the past. When the Cabinet met last, the Meos had not begun to move into these states in any appreciable number. The situation has, however, changed completely . . . The Meos are now in Alwar and Bharatpur and it would . . . be awkward to disturb them. [Their] uprooting from their homes might become a source of embarrassment vis-à-vis Pakistan. Of course, care should be taken to see that our plans re: tractor cultivation and “grow more food” were not upset and that refugees settled in the area were not disturbed.42 Nehru was supported by his cabinet colleagues, and it was decided that the existing situation should be allowed to continue subject to necessary adjustments but that nobody in situ, whether Meos or refugees, should be disturbed. The participants agreed to provide tractors for refugees and a loan scheme for Meos and to allot for cultivation forty thousand acres of land that had become available in Gurgaon, after the Meos had moved to Alwar and Bharatpur, to refugees.43 This was the second time that Nehru was able to take advantage of Patel’s absence and overpower his officials on the question of Meos. Patel was left “most unhappy” and lashed out at the Rajasthan Government, instructing it to inquire into the circumstances, persons, and agencies that had encouraged “the influx of these Meos.” He demanded that officials “prevent further influx of Meos”; they were to be “careful and vigilant about the Meos from Pakistan.” He ordered them “to have, as soon as possible, a census taken of Meos who are already in Alwar and Bharatpur for ascertaining how many are covered by the lists of the census taken last year and secondly, how many have infiltrated from Pakistan.”44 Adding insult to injury was a letter Patel received from the prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Shaikh Mohammad Abdullah. In it, Abdullah congratulated Patel on the “heartening decision” to resettle Meos “on their lands,” adding that “small concessions here and there made to the deserving Muslims in India [were] conducive to a sympathetic understanding between the people of India and Kashmir.”45 Alongside the letter, Abdullah forwarded a representation from the president of District Jamiat Ulema Gurgaon, which contained a list of requests including rehabilitation of homes not only to Meos but also to non-Meo Muslims; restoration of mosques, madrasas, and Jama Masjids in Gurgaon, Alwar, and Bharatpur; return of abducted Muslim women; reinstatement of ousted Muslim employees; posting of unbiased and fair-minded officials, “as present officials do not view Muslims favourably”; granting of loans; instructions to police not to interfere with Muslims in the performance of their religious rites; restarting azaan and namaaz hitherto forbidden in Alwar; and inclusion of Urdu script in educational institutions. Patel’s reply showed his frustrations and fears: “People have, for the time being, forgotten their old quarrels but having regard to the history of Mewat area, we cannot be certain that this will last very long. I should like to explain, however, that the problem of Meos is not a Hindu-Muslim problem at all. It is virtually a problem of internal feuds between twos sects viz. Meos and Jats.”46 Meanwhile, V. P. Menon fired off a missive to Pandit Hiralal Shastri, the first premier of Rajasthan, mincing no words against the former Matsya Union ministry and its premier Sobha Ram for “completely bypassing decisions regarding Meos.”47 But most outrageous were the fresh instructions issued by the MoS to the chief secretary of Rajasthan expressing decisions taken by the Cabinet Committee on May 25: (a) Only such displaced Meos of Alwar and Bharatpur as were included in the census held in July 1948 should be allowed to return. (b) Meos belonging to areas in Alwar intended for the resettlement of [refugees], should not be restored to their original holdings but allotted land in Tijara tehsil in lieu. (c) In Bharatpur, the [refugees] resettled in 60 villages should not be disturbed. Similarly, the Meos who have gone back to the compact area in their 175 villages need not be disturbed. Adjustments may be made in the remainder of the villages numbering 115, so that Meos and the displaced persons are consolidated in different villages.48 If the Matsya Union had flagrantly disregarded the MoS, then this was the MoS flagrantly disregarding the prime minister, who was not amused. Nehru archly pointed out to Vellodi that “prima facie his rigid letter [was] at variance with decisions [taken on May 25] and [came] in the way of permitted adjustments,” demanding an explanation.49 It also omitted any mention of loans to Meos, while the R&R had already moved ahead with a sum of one million rupees. Vellodi stalled by replying that the “file has been sent to Sardar,” and “the whole matter is to be considered again by the Cabinet Committee on 24th June.”50 It was time for yet another direct engagement between the two leaders of the post-1947 Indian state, reflecting a clash between their respective understandings of the Indian nation. Patel wrote from Dehradun, where he was convalescing, summarizing “the new problems” of the Meos question. It seemed to him that the only course open, “consistent with previous decisions,” was “to restrict the resettlement of Meos in their original homes and holdings to those who remained in India, and who were included in the census held in 1948.” For others, he insisted that “they go into the compact area comprising Gurgaon and the adjoining portions of Alwar and Bharatpur, which was originally fixed for their resettlement.” Anything else, to him, “compromised” the rehabilitation of refugees. Reminding Nehru that he had “always expressed apprehensions regarding the security problem,” Patel asserted that “Meos have never settled down peacefully and will never do so.” The only way “to avoid recurring feuds was to settle [them] in a compact area, [which] the social workers and the Alwar Ministry made impossible.” The only thing to be done now was “to ensure that ‘grow more food,’ mechanical cultivation schemes and refugee resettlement schemes are not disturbed by the resettlement of Meos.” Then, there was “the problem of Jats who would be displaced as a result of resettlement of Meos.” Citing the “history of feuds between Jats and Meos,” Patel insisted that “any Meos who are to be settled in addition to those who were included in [the] Gurgaon census must be settled in the compact bloc, set apart.” Finally, Patel turned on the “undesirable social workers,” who had “developed a habit of misrepresenting Government decisions [and] using pressure tactics on lower revenue officials to allot lands to Meos.”51 Patel’s note covered old ground but mentioned forty-nine thousand Meos from UP and Bombay who were not included in the 1948 census, while casting doubts on their claims, as these could have been persons who had gone to Pakistan and returned. It also dispensed with the earlier fiction that all lands evacuated by Meos were meant for refugees, by readily admitting that in Bharatpur, “lands evacuated by Meos were settled by the Bharatpur government with Jat cultivators so that these would not lie uncultivated. The leases given to them were temporary for one year, but they had been assured by the government of Bharatpur before integration that they would be given permanent possession of land.” On this basis, the Jats had paid the nazrana (tribute) as well as certain debts and other charges incurred by the Meos who were the former landholders. The note claimed that if these Jats were to be displaced now, they would claim a compensation worth 250,000 rupees, and “who should pay this compensation?”52 Nehru responded and at greater length. Reminding Patel that Nehru had long believed that “the best solution” was “for the Meos to go back to their original homes without major upsets,” the prime minister called it the “natural course [with] every reason in favour,” one that also reflected “Bapu’s [Gandhi’s] assurance to them.” The East Punjab government did not want Meos and “wanted them to go” to the Matsya Union, where “many people were agreeable to it.” The ironic fact that “land in the Matsya Union was not very good or very suitable for other refugees, was also an inducement [for] food production would suffer because newcomers would not take easily to the land.” Finally, the intercommunity “economic [relations] there for many hundreds of years was a further reason.” Nehru then moved to Patel’s main point of law and order and argued that “there was in fact greater danger to law and order if the Meos were forcibly put elsewhere and not far away from their old homes . . . They will feel aggrieved and resentful.” Then there was the wider aspect of “the way we treat our Muslim citizens . . . the Muslims of Kashmir were disturbed.” The reality on the ground was that “owing to stress of events, the Meos were back roundabout their old lands and homes . . . to push them out would require a major operation and create a tremendous uproar,” notwithstanding “the question of the [local] Jats,” who—to Nehru—had “no claim at all to evacuee lands.” As for social workers, which meant Vinoba Bhave and his group, Nehru appealed to Patel that “surely [they could] trust Vinoba Bhave to act correctly and not to create difficulties.” Ultimately, what Nehru was worried about was that “owing to slowness of governmental machine,” a whole month had passed “in argument” and nothing was done.53 For Nehru, this was tantamount to failing the Meo question that for Gandhi had become “a test case of our bona fides,” in his last days. And so, he had urged the Rajasthan Premier, Hiralal Shastri, “to pay special attention to this matter.”54 Next, he sent a strong note to the MoS. He brought up Vellodi’s letter of instructions to the chief secretary of Rajasthan and reminded them that he did not think “it conveyed that decision correctly.” In any case, that “letter itself was sent nearly three weeks after the decision, which was supposed to be an urgent one.” His note seeking an explanation of the above had not yet “had an answer.” Now, Premier Shastri and Vinoba Bhave had expressed a “great deal of confusion, embarrassment [given the] difference of opinion [and] conflicting directions from the Government of India.” To the prime minister, “nothing [had] been done although nearly a month [had] passed since the Cabinet Committee’s decision . . . progress [had] not only been slow but might be said to be absent.” He was calling a meeting of the Cabinet Committee, “because of this confusion and lack of coordination.”55 With the duumvirate in direct contact, the ministry for R&R could barely get in a word. On the Meo question, as on other matters of relief and rehabilitation, it often found itself caught between Nehru and Patel. In 1948, it had briefly lost its locus standi when the prime minister had handed this matter over to his confidante N. Gopalaswamy Ayyangar, minister without portfolio.56 The ministry had no objection “to the return of the Meos, listed in 1948 census, to their homes/holdings in Matsya Union.” Here, it sided with Patel. In Alwar, it wanted those Meos who belonged to the area already allotted to refugees to be resettled in the compact block in Tijara tehsil, so as not to disturb the refugees. In Bharatpur, it did not want either the refugees in sixty villages or the Meos in 175 villages to be disturbed. Here, it sided with Nehru. In the remaining 115 villages, it preferred “adjustments” for separate consolidation. Of course, it had its own figures and claimed that instead of thirty-five thousand Meos in Bharatpur, nearly fifty-four thousand had returned. Siding with Nehru, it agreed to resettle them all, but, siding with Patel, it did not want the social workers to assist in this resettlement.57 At the next meeting of the Committee for the Cabinet for Rehabilitation, held on June 24, 1949, Vinoba Bhave and Hiralal Shastri joined Nehru, while an absent Patel was once again represented by Vellodi. Nehru began with the need to be “more precise” in terms of actions desired and agencies responsible, “so as to avoid any misinterpretation.” The committee decided that the Meos to be included in the resettlement scheme should be “those covered by the census as well as those who were present in Alwar and Bharatpur at the time and numbered about 9,000–10,000. Thus, roughly the total number to be provided for was 70,000–72,000.” The agency for undertaking this work now was to be the Rajasthan Government and resettlement was to be based on “general enquiries and not enquiry into each individual case.” On the question of temporary allotment to local persons of seventy-five thousand acres of land in Alwar, in order to avoid land remaining untilled, the committee decided that “the claims of the refugees were paramount,” though some of this land had been temporarily allotted for cultivation to local persons and that cultivation should not be interrupted, as in any event, the refugees could not undertake it for this season. Finally, on the thorny question of coordination between social workers and governmental agencies, Bhave and Shastri were asked to keep in touch. This round of discussion and decisions represented Nehru’s domination of the MoS, and this time, Vellodi faithfully reproduced all of the above in the formal order to the chief secretary of Rajasthan.58 June–October 1949: Settlement on the Ground As attempts began to expedite the resettlement of Meos in villages occupied by local cultivators, a new problem emerged, threads of which went all the way back to March 1947 and showed the admixture of prejudice and profiteering that went hand in hand in with deterritorializing the Meos then and reterritorializing them now. When large-scale communal disturbances had broken out in Bharatpur state in March 1947 and Meos had been forced to leave, the then-government of Bharatpur had decided, by July 1947, in a transparent bid at dispossession, that if arrangements were not made for cultivation of the large areas left behind by the Meos, there would be considerable loss of land revenue as well as crops. The revenue minister submitted a scheme for resettlement of these areas on July 21, 1947, which was approved by the Dewan. The chief feature of the scheme was that under Bharatpur’s revenue code, the government was competent to transfer “abandoned” land to other persons in perpetuity. This scheme was sanctioned by the Bharatpur State Council on August 8, 1947. At the same time, the Bharatpur government declared that even those who could not take possession immediately could get lands reserved on payment of one year’s land revenue in advance, subject to the condition that such persons would bring the land under plough within three months. Though only tenant rights were to be conferred on persons gaining possession in 1947, the government gave an assurance that such persons would be made proprietors in exchange for payment of a nazrana, which was to range from ten to thirty times the assessed land revenue. Under this scheme, the government allotted as much as 23,792 acres. In addition, proprietary rights in five former Meo villages were sold outright for ninety thousand rupees. Khem Chand, collector of Bharatpur, who was looking into the matter, also expressed his inability to ascertain “the exact amount of ‘advance land revenue’ paid by these cultivators,” for lack of revenue records. The collector also clarified that, while in the tehsil-level account books, the advance land revenue was shown as nazrana, it was not so. He was categorical that no nazrana was ever received. When, in March 1948, the Bharatpur state was integrated with the Matsya Union, the latter did not follow the policy of the former and herein lay the problem. Now that both did not exist and had been amalgamated into Rajasthan, the question was whether any advance land revenue paid for the reservation of land by the locals in 1947 should be refunded to those who were now to be evicted and were insisting on the payment of this amount as a precondition to their giving up the lands, which were never theirs. It is obvious that not many in Bharatpur state and society believed and hoped that the Meos would ever return. Those who moved in to possess their lands therefore proceeded, in some cases, to pay the dues owed by the former landholder (i.e., Meos) to the state. How confident most were that Meos would never return can be seen from the fact that many had invested in repairing the former houses of Meos. These houses, which “were never allotted formally” by the Bharatpur government, were thus occupied in an unauthorized manner. Yet, “in view of the contention of the [locals] that they were given assurance by the-then Bharatpur government that they would be made proprietors,” their claim could not be dismissed. Further, ministers like Gopilal Yadav and social workers like Vinoba Bhave, in urging these locals to vacate homes and holdings for the returning Meos, had supported these claims for compensation and made them hopeful. From his preliminary survey, however, Khem Chand felt that “the investment of the [locals were] not very great and their claims [were] certainly exaggerated. The legal position is that they are not entitled to any compensation . . . Morally, of course, their claim in not without substance as they . . . did have some hope of becoming permanent settlers.”59 This last point, of course, was loaded with irony. A bureaucracy that was so concerned about the moral claims of local Jat cultivators or Mahajan moneylenders had not given much thought to the hopes and moral claims of the equally native Meos. Now, two years later, the demands of cultivation meant that orders were being issued to lease temporarily “land earmarked for refugees to local people.”60 The locals were restless, and the Meos could be excused if they felt more than a moment of schadenfreude. On one typical occasion, seven villagers of Tilakpuri village, Bharatpur, traveled to Dehradun to petition Patel on June 27, 1949. After a patient hearing and promise, Patel handed them to V. Shankar, who wrote about them to M. K. Vellodi, who was out of New Delhi, and the villagers met with Chatterjee, who forwarded their grievances to N. R. Chandorkar, administrator of Alwar. Their representative story was illustrative of the insensitivities of state against society; bureaucracy against communities—Meos, refugees, and local agriculturalists: We settled in village Tilakpuri, Pahari tehsil, Bharatpur state in November 1947. This village was allotted to us by the state government permanently and we spent about Rs. 60,000/- on purposes connected with agriculture. Now, we are being asked by the present government to leave these lands and make them over to the Meos. Why we are being displaced at a time when rains have fallen and when we have prepared land for sowing [and] for no fault of ours . . . We request that we may not be disturbed in the circumstances stated above and permits for the settlement of the Meos in our village may be cancelled. We are the best cultivators of land and no one can compare us in agriculture and we assure you that we would be able to produce as much food as possible.61 More than this pitiable representation, it is the perverse response of the officials that is interesting. Chatterjee wrote to Chandorkar with a sympathy that was absent when he was writing about the Meos: “I shall be glad if something could be done to help these poor unfortunate people, some of whom have come from long distances and can almost be described in that sense as refugees.”62 In reply, DR Pradhan, the advisor on evacuee property to Rajasthan Government, wrote equally tenderly. There is no doubt that they were invited by the-then government . . . that oral assurances were given . . . [but] changes occurred before the Bharatpur government could give effect to its intention . . . While, therefore, they cannot legally retain the lands, their moral and equitable claims cannot be denied . . . We have decided to return whatever money they have paid and invested. But, this has naturally not satisfied them . . . To permit them to continue will give rise to difficulties in rehabilitating the Meos . . . There will, however, be no objection to giving them land elsewhere . . .63 Of course, underlying this very different response was that both the local tillers and refugees were non-Muslims, while the equally native Meos were non-Hindus. In any case, the category of “locals” was left suitably vague. They could be natives of Bharatpur state or from outside. At times, it was claimed that they had come from “long distances,” but it was clear that they were not “refugees.” Nor were they “displaced” in distress, and it was admitted that “before [coming] to Bharatpur, [they] had source of livelihood elsewhere in India.” It was plainly “not desirable to allot them lands in Bharatpur or Alwar at the cost of [either refugees or evacuees].”64 Between August and October 1949, R&R sent four letters to Alwar, Bharatpur, and Jaipur seeking a copy of orders of the Rajasthan authorities regarding the termination of the local cultivators’ lease so that their original holdings could be restored to Meos. Finally, on October 19, 1949, the chief secretary of Rajasthan sent a copy of the note submitted to the cabinet on the subject. It was easy to issue this order but difficult to implement it. In many villages, these cultivators started creating obstructions. In village Livana in tehsil Kama of Bharatpur, they refused to leave and invited eviction by force. In the same tehsil were those five, formerly Meo villages, in which proprietary rights were sold for ninety thousand rupees, which the government was willing to return. It was also willing to consider compensation for improvements done to houses of Meos by these “unauthorized” tenants. As for investments done to improve the lands, the government argued that as the Meos were to now inherit such improvements, they should pay for them in installments. Similarly, it decided to refund the amount realized from the cultivators of dues outstanding against the Meos and to recoup it from them in installments.65 The leases for uncultivated land were extended for the crop cycle of 1949–50.66 By the middle of August 1949, on paper, 78,846 Meos had returned to Alwar and Bharatpur, including about sixteen thousand new returnees from Pakistan. These numbers, like many others in this article, carry a whiff of what Ann Stoler refers to as “non-events . . . records of things that never happened.”67 In any case, at a meeting held on September 13, 1949, between the Rajasthan government and New Delhi, it was decided that no more Meos would be allowed to resettle “as that would affect the plans for displaced persons.” Instead, a loan of a million rupees was sanctioned by the R&R. Thus, in February 1950, there remained 113,885 Meos in neighboring Gurgaon; close enough to their former homeland but not in it.68 May–November 1950: “As the Rebels of 1857” In summer–autumn 1950, almost exactly three years from their expulsion, life came full circle for the Meos. Kashi Ram, president of Alwar District Congress Committee, sent a report to Patel, which was about the four thousand Meos of sub-tehsil Govindgarh and the one thousand Meos of sub-tehsil Ramgarh of Alwar, who had not been resettled in 1949 “on the pretence that Govindgarh and Ramgarh area were reserved for tractor cultivation.” Now, Kashi Ram claimed that “the real reason was not this.” These Meos were asked to go to the designated “compact area” in Tijara tehsil, “an impracticable proposition as that area [was] quite at the other end, and when all other Meos were allowed their holdings in their own villages throughout the district.” The Govindgarh Meos “were prepared to accept land in other villages of that very sub-tehsil,” and “enough area was available,” but, wrote Ram now, “instead of acceding to the legitimate demand of the Meos fresh batches of refugees were rushed into the area.” After the passage of a few months, “the farce became clear. Tractor organisation proved utter failure and was disbanded. The Meos became tenants of refugees,” on their own soil, in their own homes. This was not all though. As old refugees failed to cultivate areas allotted to them, their areas started to be “revised and reduced.” The freed-up area could have accommodated the Meos, and Kashi Ram approached the Rajasthan government “more than once,” only to hear that “officials of the States Ministry and the Union R&R ministry were against rehabilitation of Meos.” Kashi Ram could not understand how, on one hand, the Nehru-Liaquat Pact was being signed in Bengal,69 and, on the other, Meos were being refused land, “which legally belongs to them.” Kashi Ram’s concluding sentences were ironic: The Meos are in their own villages but without land . . . In case, they are to remain in India, they should be given land when it is available, the other alternative is to let them go to Pakistan . . . There is no use showing one thing to the world and doing another.70 Patel was not moved by the plea, but he was certainly moved “to enquire whether what [was] said [was] correct.”71 It transpired that “Kashi Ram had settled, of his own initiative, 5,283 Meos on 13,072 acres mechanically cultivated area, [although] the area was reserved for [refugees].” However, “as mechanical cultivation did not [work], it was decided in May 1950 that these Meos may not be disturbed. The Meos of Govindgarh tehsil were asked to go to Tijara but, here too, Kashi Ram pointed out lands to them in Govindgarh itself.” The state government also dismissed Ram’s claim that “the scale of land allotment to displaced families was revised because old refugees failed to cultivate the area allotted to them.” In any case, it was not meant for Meos. Finally, his statement that “officials were against rehabilitation of Meos” was declared “absolutely incorrect.” By way of evidence, it was added that another group of 18,000 Meos were being settled in Tapookra sub-tehsil, although they were reluctant to go and preferred to cultivate lands in their old villages, “as sub-tenants and farm labourers.”72 There the matter, which now served “no useful purpose” for the MoS,73 would have rested, unlamented, had it not been for Sardar Sajjan Singh Mirgindpuri, a member of the legislative assembly from East Punjab and a resident of Amritsar. In a nineteen-hundred-word letter to Nehru, accompanied by nineteen pages of enclosures, enumerating in extraordinary detail the plight of more than three thousand Meo families from Alwar and Bharatpur, the sardar set the dying embers of the Meos’ question ablaze.74 That it came from a Sikh, whose community had lost so much during Partition, meant that it could not be easily dismissed by the “official mind.” It provided a moment of reckoning for officials to consider how their “colonial sense and reason conjoined social kinds with the political order of colonial things.”75 This was the third letter on this subject that Sajjan Singh was sending, urging Nehru to make the bureaucracy do what should be done “with clean hands” and to remove the “highly objectionable brakes on the honest working of law.” He began by noting that the “compact area scheme, ‘reservation of area’ and ‘alternate lands’ for original holdings” brought “no credit to the government,” as there could be “no two opinions that land owners who live on cultivation cannot put their souls and hearts in their work if they are forced to accept other than their original holdings.” Having recently visited twelve villages of Alwar and Bharatpur districts and met the Meos there, Sajjan Singh had heard their “woeful tales of suffering and unspeakable hardships of life brought about through the callous, anti-Muslim and communal-ridden policy of local administration.” They had no confidence in the administration of Alwar district wherein the presence of “those very officers who hunted them down during 1947” was “bound to create mistrust in their minds.” Having also met government officials, Singh had no doubts that “the secular character of the State is doomed,” given the nature of Meos’ main grievances: In the city of Alwar, all mosques have been demolished . . . On the vacant side of Lal Shahi Masjid, a new building has been erected . . . The site of Jama Masjid has been occupied and shops have been erected thereon. On the vacant side of another Masjid, a new building [is] being constructed . . . Meo boarding house and Sarai are being occupied by refugees . . . at Lakshmangarh town, debris of a mosque has been auctioned by the government. On the question of resettlement, those Meos who had been resettled in their villages had not been restored to their lands. Even when “permits were issued by the government, local officers refused to comply . . . in full,” leaving some with “only a minor part of their holdings.” In some cases, owners holding land in more than one village were “restored their land in fragments”; in other cases, lands had been restored “but homes refused.” In yet others, “homes restored but land refused.” They were living “either in newly built huts or in adjoining villages.” In many cases, even those Meos included in the July 1948 census had received neither their lands nor their homes. To still others, land was allotted in adjoining villages, “but full area [was] not given.” Then, “many Meos restored or allotted land last year [had] their possession partly disturbed this year [with] some lands taken away from them.” No wonder that Sajjan Singh found “the Muslims most depressed, demoralised and dejected.” The vengeful local administration, “while refusing to allot an inch of their lands in some villages where they had resettled in their original homes [had] tried to starve them.” In many cases, they were “refused possession of their pucca houses.” Despite all orders and “as a delaying tactic,” “district authorities [had] failed to bring the census record from Gurgaon up [to-date] till 5 July 1950,” because of which, many Meos could not be settled. Singh too confirmed that “in leasing of lands, which could not be allotted to the refugees, preference has been given to the local Hindus over Meos, though the latter were the owners of these.” Sajjan Singh, with experience of the evacuee establishment in East Punjab, saw that in Mewat, . . . owners [were] not allowed to get their own land even on lease . . . [refugees had] been allowed to occupy the land and homes of even those Muslims who are present . . . The authorities [had] not been able [or, willing] to differentiate the properties of those migrating to Pakistan and living in India. He followed his claim with an illustration. In Govindgarh town of Alwar district, Chaudhary Nathoo, who was the owner of 550 bighas of land, had been restored 140 bighas, including 70 bighas belonging to some other Muslim. More callously, in Lakshmangarh, which had the most fertile lands in the region, “neither the refugees [had] been allotted any lands nor the Meos [had] been given back their land in full, [with] lands [being] leased to local Hindus on nominal rents.” Shyam Lal, the deputy director of R&R Rajasthan, admitted to Singh on July 19, 1950, at Alwar, that those Meos who had been restored their property “do not enjoy proprietary rights and no decision has been taken by the Rajasthan government in this respect.” Singh then gave an instance of “alternate allotment.” In village Dhakadinapur, tehsil Deeg, district Bharatpur, fifty-five families of Meos were living before Partition. During the disturbance of 1947, five families left for Pakistan. The remaining fifty were entitled to 12.61 bighas of land in their own village but had been resettled in five different, adjacent villages. His next series of queries juxtaposed prejudice with bureaucratic claims of parity, practicality, and preference: In Rajasthan, constitution is being violated to please the goddess of communalism . . . under what provision of law, the “compact area, reserved villages and alternate holdings” proposals have been put up? There is no justification . . . to order the Meos to be resettled without disturbing the refugees . . . The refugees should be put into possession of evacuee property only. There is no reason why the Meos and other Muslims of Rajasthan be victimised for the rehabilitation of the refugees. Government has no right to rehabilitate the refugees at the cost of Rajasthan Muslims. Having ranged over moral and legal landscapes, Sajjan Singh moved to “human psychology” and the government’s failure to appreciate it. He brought up “every human being’s unbounded love for own home and holding” and willingness to “sacrifice everything to save their existence,” Meos being no exception. As a fellow agriculturalist, he understood their attachment to ancestral land and their difficulty in seeing their “home and holdings in sight and [yet be] unable to get hold of them.” That the state had created “such [a] helpless situation” was deplorable. How far double standards had permeated this project could be seen by the fact that the same “compact area scheme” had been “relaxed in the case of Meos of Gurgaon district” but not “in the case of Rajasthan Meos.” Thus, Singh claimed that “every displaced Muslim who is now in India has a right to get back his original property. Even returnees from Pakistan . . . have [this] right as the presumption of law goes in their favour.” Questioning the whole basis of the census of July 1948, he asked why it had been applied to Meos in Gurgaon, Alwar, and Bharatpur districts, when nowhere else in India had displaced Muslims been subjected to it. While the MoS tried to dismiss Sajjan Singh’s letter as “impracticable” and feigned ignorance “regarding the demolition of mosques, etc.,”76 it roused the Union Ministry of R&R, which asked the Jaipur State Rehabilitation Department to investigate it. Consequently, an inquiry was initiated in September 1950 by a reluctant state government, after which, K. Radhakrishnan, the chief secretary of Rajasthan, reported on November 15, 1950, promising more inquiries, the appointment of a commission, and the release of a questionnaire on the subject. In other words, the state government did not contest the contents of Singh’s letter.77 Instead, writing three days later, Radhakrishnan sought to question Singh’s character and motives. Sending a spurious report on “seriously objectionable” activities of Sardar Sajjan Singh, he claimed that the latter was “encouraging the Meos to take the law into their own hands.” As an example, the chief secretary singled out one offending passage from a letter by Singh: “Muslims are being treated in Rajasthan as the rebels of 1857 were treated by the Britishers . . . You should not sit as a mere spectator.”78 Conclusion This article has aimed to offer an account of the conflicted political and bureaucratic working out of the Meo question after Partition. In this sense, it seeks to complement existing accounts that focus on the community of Meos, the shaping of their “Muslim identity,” and the consequent making of their “marginality”79 by tracing the incomplete project of Meos resettlement in independent India. In this case, it is more than the nearby Punjab story of “agency, denial, corruption and refugee-state tensions.”80 The Meos’ presence, forced absence, and scattered return threatened the state order, social environment, and resource structure. In the process, humanitarian concerns and moral principles were far from many minds, given that the Meos represented “the internal other” for the “official mind(s).” Officials, from local to “national” levels, were complicit in a corruption of communalism. Their sanitized and standard juxtaposition of Meos’ restoration and resettlement with refugee relief and rehabilitation flattened a complex reality. Their bureaucratic responses to the problem exemplify Levi-Strauss’s assertion that “the primary function of writing . . . is to facilitate the enslavement of other human[s].”81 Officials of the government(s) of India and Rajasthan, reeled uncomfortably between attention to the minutiae of domestic arrangements and generic social kinds, between probabilities and positivistic evidence, between what could be known about the past and what could be predicted for the future, between abstract principles and a keen awareness that what mattered as much was . . . everyday lives.82 In pursuing these concerns, different echelons of government stumbled in the face of differences among them as much as between them and the Meos. Of course, the latter’s “affections and attachments . . . were often impervious to the meddling priorities of a supposedly ‘rational’ and reasoned state.”83 That Meos returned at all revealed their autonomy of action, as they resisted the bureaucracy more than they did the neighboring, non-Muslim community, which accepted—howsoever reluctantly—the return and resettlement of Meos in their own territories, albeit without their former land-owning status. The culture of corruption here was both material and moral. That the Meos survived what Shail Mayaram has called “the attempted extermination by the princely states in 1947” was heroic in itself; that they survived the post-1947 state-formation of “sovereignty, nationalism and religious identity” and its attempt to “create an ethnically favourable population”84 is no less impressive. Sikh/Hindu refugees, on one hand, and local tillers (Jats), moneylenders (Mahajans), and neighboring others—all were preferable to the Meos, “inhabitants of decades and centuries.”85 As the independent Indian nation sought to forge its state, it intensified the clash among multiple ideas of India/n, a clash that culminated in a question mark over the “in-between” Meo community. Their status and habitus were reduced and redefined, respectively. This was reflected in the tension within the state apparatus, from the duumvirate at the political-ideological apex to the interest-oriented multitude on the ground. It fed into the broader question of “Muslim belonging in secular India” in partitioned times and its long afterlife,86 whose subsequent subterranean existence has been cruelly exposed in the ascendant “majoritarian” electoral democracy and “committed” government service sheltering the recent increase in violence against Meos.87 From land then to law today, the Meos’ access to attributes of the independent Indian nation-state has been circumscribed through their condensed, communal characterization. The contemporary crisis of “official secularity” in India, as evidenced in the region of Mewat, was foreshadowed in the incursions of a colonial bureaucracy, the intentions of nationalist leadership, negotiations between competing claims to identity, and the consequent community resettlements. Footnotes 1 Among recent writings, on Punjab, see Ilyas Chattha, “Competitions for Resources: Partition’s Evacuee Property and the Sustenance of Corruption in Pakistan,” Modern Asian Studies 46 (2012): 1182–211 and “The Impact of the Redistribution of Partition’s Evacuee Property on the Patterns of Land Ownership and Power in Pakistani Punjab in the 1950s,” in State and Nation-Building in Pakistan: Beyond Islam and Security, ed. Roger Long et al. (London, 2015), 13–34. On Bengal, see Haimanti Roy, Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–65 (New York, 2012). 2 On Delhi, see Rotem Geva, “The Scramble for Houses: Violence, a Factionalised State, and Informal Economy in Post-Partition Delhi,” Modern Asian Studies 51 (2017): 769–824. On all-India law, see Rohit De, “Taming the Custodian: Evacuee Property Law and Economic Life in the Indian Republic,” in The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia, ed. Gyan Prakash et al. (New York, 2018), 87–106. 3 Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi, 1997), 208. 4 Shail Mayaram, Against History: Against State, Counterperspectives from the Margins (New York, 2003), 23. 5 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, 206. 6 See Ian Copland, “The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan in 1947,” Past and Present 160 (1998): 203–39. 7 Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ, 2009), 1. 8 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 1–2. 9 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 4. 10 Gyanendra Pandey, “Can a Muslim Be an Indian?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999): 610–11, 626. 11 Mayaram, “Belonging/Unbelonging to the Nation,” in Perspectives on Violence and Othering in India, ed. R. C. Tripathi and Purnima Singh (Delhi, 2016), 73–75. Also see, Majid Siddiqi, “History and Society in a Popular Rebellion: Mewat, 1920–1933,” Comparative Study of Society and History 28 (1986): 442–67. 12 See Mayaram, Resisting Regimes and Copland, “The Further Shores of Partition.” 13 See Gulam Jeelani, “Ghasera, Where Mahatma Gandhi’s Legacy Lives on, Waits for India,” Hindustan Times, October 2, 2016, accessed 13 September 2018, http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/ghasera-where-mahatma-gandhi-s-legacy-lives-on-waits-for-india/story-I8Z0XY4IrAW07aIc3pw48I.html. 14 Quoted in Pandey, “Can a Muslim Be an Indian?” 628. 15 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 1. 16 See Mayaram, Resisting Regimes. 17 Horst Kruger, ed. Kunwar Mohammad Ashraf: An Indian Scholar and Revolutionary 1903–1962 (Delhi, 1969), 297–304, 390. I am grateful to one of the reviewers suggesting this reference. 18 Chowdhry Abdul Haye, “The Freedom Movement in Mewat and Dr. K. M. Ashraf,” in Kruger, ed. Kunwar Mohammad Ashraf, 311, 326. 19 Haye, “The Freedom Movement in Mewat and Dr. K. M. Ashraf,” 326–28. 20 Haye, “The Freedom Movement in Mewat and Dr. K. M Ashraf,” 330–35. 21 Nehru to Trivedi, July 5, 1948, S. Gopal, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (hereafter SWJN), second series, vol. 7 (New Delhi, 1988), 37–38. 22 Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi. Nehru to Rajagopalachari, July 13, 1948, No. 1000/PM, JN (SG) Papers, File No. 11 (Part I). 23 Nehru to Saksena, February 11, 1949, SWJN, second series, vol. 9 (New Delhi, 1990), 263. 24 National Archives of India (hereafter NAI), New Delhi. April 24, 1949, final report of the fact-finding committee, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (Ministry of States-MoS, Government of India-GoI). 25 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, 206. 26 NAI. May 14, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 27 See Taylor C. Sherman, “From ‘Grow More Food’ to ‘Miss a Meal’: Hunger, Development and the Limits of Post-colonial Nationalism in India, 1947–1957,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 36 (2013): 571–88. 28 NAI. Ghosh to Chatterjee, May 18, 1949, DO No. RHA-502 (78), File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 29 NAI. Chatterjee’s note, May 18, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 30 NAI. Nehru to Menon, Ghosh and Saksena, May 19, 1949, No. 519-PM, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 31 NAI. May 19, 1949, Chatterjee’s note, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 32 NAI. Kashi Ram to Lall, May 20, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 33 NAI. H Soni’s note, May 20, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 34 Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (Delhi, 2004), 12–13. 35 NAI. Ganesan to Patel, May 21, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 36 NAI. Shankar’s note, May 22, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 37 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 3. 38 NAI. Ganesan’s note, May 23, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 39 NAI. Vellodi’s note, May 25, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 40 NAI. Dantyagi’s note, May 25, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 41 Nehru to ML Saksena, May 20, 1949, SWJN, second series, volume 11 (New Delhi, 1991), 97. 42 NAI. Vellodi to Patel, May 25, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 43 NAI. Minutes of the meeting, May 25, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 44 NAI. Shankar’s note, May 31, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 45 NAI. Abdullah to Patel, May 31, 1949, No. 1343/PRS, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 46 NAI. Patel to Abdullah, June 8, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 47 NAI. Menon to Shastri, June 12, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 48 NAI. Vellodi to CS, Rajasthan, June 16, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 49 NAI. AV Pai (PPS to PM) to Vellodi, June 18, 1949, No. D/S/4996, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 50 NAI. Vellodi to Pai, June 21, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 51 NAI. Patel to Nehru, June 21, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 52 The note was prepared by officials in MoS, with inputs from Pradhan, advisor to the Rajasthan government, and Chandorkar, administrator of Alwar. 53 Nehru to Patel, June 23, 1949, SWJN, second series, volume 12 (New Delhi, 1991), 111–13. 54 Nehru to Shastri, June 4, 1949, SWJN, second series, volume 11 (New Delhi, 1991), 98–99. 55 NAI. Nehru’s notes, June 20 and 23, 1949, Nos. 829 and 862-PM, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 56 NAI. KB Lall to MK Kirpalani, June 20, 1948 and Kirpalani’s note, June 23, 1948, File No. F.8 (14)–G (R)/48 (MoS, GoI). 57 NAI. R&R’s note, June 23, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 58 NAI. Vellodi to CS, Rajasthan, June 25, 1949, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 59 NAI. Chand’s report, June 25, 1949 and Chandorkar to Chatterjee, July 5, 1949, File No. 8 (3)—R./49 (MoS, GoI). 60 NAI. R&R, Jaipur to Administrator Alwar, June 26, 1949, File No. 8 (3)—R./49 (MoS, GoI). 61 NAI. Petition to Shankar, June 27, 1949, File No. 8 (3)—R./49 (MoS, GoI). 62 NAI. Chatterjee to Chandorkar, June 29, 1949, File No. 8 (3)—R./49 (MoS, GoI). 63 NAI. Pradhan to Chatterjee, July 25, 1949, D3618-R/49, File No. 8 (3)—R./49 (MoS, GoI). 64 NAI. MoS’ note, August 22, 1949, File No. 8 (3)—R./49 (MoS, GoI). 65 NAI. Note by Niranjan Swaroop, October 25, 1949, 1858/RR, File No. 8 (3)—R./49 (MoS, GoI). 66 NAI. MoS’ note, October 27, 1949, File No. 8 (3)—R./49 (MoS, GoI), NAI. 67 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 5. 68 NAI. February 27, 1950, File No. F.8 (2)-R/49 (MoS, GoI). 69 See Pallavi Raghavan, “The Making of the India–Pakistan Dynamic: Nehru, Liaquat, and the No War Pact Correspondence of 1950,” Modern Asian Studies 50 (2016), 1645–78. 70 NAI. Ram to Shankar, May 31, 1950, File No. 12 (10)—R/50 (MoS, GoI). 71 NAI. Bhanot-Nisar to CS, Rajasthan, June 15, 1950, No. D1429-R/50, File No. 12 (10)—R/50 (MoS, GoI). 72 NAI. CS, Rajasthan to Bhanot-Nisar, August 23, 1950, F-12 (91) RR II/50, File No. 12 (10)—R/50 (MoS, GoI). 73 NAI. September 7, 1950, File No. 12 (10)—R/50 (MoS, GoI). 74 NAI. Singh to Nehru, August 4, 1950, D.2073-R/50, File No. 12 (14)—RC/50 (MoS, GoI), NAI. 75 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 9. 76 NAI. MoS’ note, August 23, 1950, File No. 12 (14)—RC/50 (MoS, GoI). 77 NAI. Radhakrishnan to Bhanot-Nisar, November 15, 1950, DO No. F.12 (91)-RR/II/50, File No. 12 (14)—RC/50 (MoS, GoI). 78 NAI. Radhakrishnan to Ganesan, November 18, 1950, DO. No. 513/PA/CS, File No. 12 (14)—RC/50 (MoS, GoI). 79 See Mayaram, Resisting Regimes and Against History, Against State. 80 See Ian Talbot, “Punjabi Refugees’ rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances,” Modern Asian Studies 45 (2011), 109–30. 81 Quoted in Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 1. 82 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 2. 83 Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 2. 84 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, 203 85 Mayaram, Resisting Regimes, 206. 86 See Pandey, “Can a Muslim Be an Indian?” and Taylor C. Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad (Cambridge, 2015). 87 See media coverage of/since the lynching of Pehlu Khan in April 2017. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Regan, Amanda, E

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz006pmid: N/A

Governing Bodies examines moments when the body, and more specifically physique, became both an instrument and object of federal public policy in United States. Moran argues that the “advisory state” drew on tools such as quantification, advertising, and voluntary programming to encourage behavior related to the physique that could not be explicitly legislated in the American political context. Expanding on the existing historiography of diet and fitness and relying on feminist scholarship on the body as well as histories of the “hidden” or voluntary state, Moran’s work is a valuable addition that highlights how the advisory state “has played a critical role in facilitating federal investment in the weights and bodies of American citizens” (156). Spanning the twentieth-century, each chapter in Governing Bodies focuses on a moment when the advisory state sought to shape the physique of American citizens often relying on quantitative measurements to “reveal information about a citizen’s worthiness in the eyes of the state” (156). The first chapter places the roots of the advisory state’s continued interest in body projects in the development of nutritional science and concern over military unfitness during the Progressive Era and World War I. Using Wilbur Atwater’s research on caloric requirements as a foundation, Moran examines how scientific nutrition arose as an emphasis for women’s Progressive reform work and public health reformers arguments that approaching nutrition from a scientific standpoint could contribute to the work of Americanizing immigrants or easing the problems of the working poor. Focusing on the work of the Children’s Bureau, Moran argues that the organization’s vast networks of public health reformers sought to reshape “the public discourse around child health and physique” through height-weight measurements, maternal education, and conferences and other events (18). Further this chapter establishes concern over military preparedness and American male strength as both motivation for the deployment of nutritional science outside of the laboratory in clinical settings and as a recurring justification for advisory state programs. The role of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in shaping and altering the “bodies and circumstances of young, low-income American bodies, rehabilitating them and transforming them into breadwinning men” is the subject of Moran’s second chapter (38). The CCC, Moran argues, placed muscular bodies at the center of its message and also sought to develop muscular bodies using hands-on methods, such as calisthenics, in its camps. Linking improved physical form to “better individual and national prospects,” the CCC, Moran shows, was key to rehabilitating and transforming men from weak boys into breadwinning men (39). If the CCC helped to transform “Boys to Men,” Moran argues that the wartime state in the 1940s worked to transform “Men into Soldiers.” The Selective Service’s more aggressive approach to intervening in the masculine body was made possible, in part, by the wartime context but also because of the previous thirty years of precedent built by the advisory state. Moran frames the Selective Service’s aggressive approach to physique building as an outlier made possible by the expanded wartime state and argues that approaches to shaping the American body shifted back to advisory approaches after the war. Selling fitness in the postwar era is the subject of the fourth chapter and Moran outlines the state’s brief flirtation with aggressive or interventionist programs, and its ultimate reversion to an advisory state approach. Examining the President’s Council which focused on fitness for children, and later all adults, Moran argues that the council sought to “bring attention to adult men—and for the first time on this large a scale—adult women’s fitness” (85). Moran’s examination of the advisory state program for adult women argues that by the early 1960s the council identified young women as paid workers. In contrast to the Council’s program under Eisenhower which relied on expectations about family unity and resisting communist influence, Kennedy’s program adapted policies that were concerned with working bodies to reflect women’s presence in the workforce. Moran is at her best in the final two chapters where she analyzes the hunger and racial politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing first on the debates about food welfare in the 1960s, Moran chronicles how “hunger politics and racial politics collided in what became a debate over how body politics apply to different Americans” (112). Addressing the issue of hunger sparked a complex debate about how to “address the emaciated bodies of poor Americans” resulting in a situation in which both political sides were “wary of applying advisory techniques to manage those who had so long been characterized as irrational citizens” (112-3). Moving on to analyze the politics of the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program in the mid-1970s, Moran argues that by conceptualizing women as “nutritional delivery services rather than individuals, federal involvement in the female body could become notably harsher than it could with other weight-oriented body projects” (134). The WIC saw state efforts to intervene in the body move beyond advisory approaches and shift from doling out food and advice to mandatory nutritional programs that were focused on body weight. The WIC’s strict nutritional guidelines, Moran argues, “implicitly defined low-income mothers as risks to their children” (134). Governing Bodies is an important and valuable addition to the landscape of histories about fitness and the body. Moran’s work is a valuable examination of “why the federal government cares about weight and muscles and the mechanisms through which it regulates them” and it is essential reading for the field. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)