{"title":"India: A History in Objects by T. Richard Blurton","authors":"H. Dehejia","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01947","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47298726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London by Vic Gatrell","authors":"Philip A. Harling","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01952","url":null,"abstract":"issues of social justice by inaccurately grouping all Galton’s work with eugenics as part of a political narrative, criticizing Galton as a conservative moral failure, who emphasized the differences among people, unlike the earlier liberal Quetelet who grouped populations and ignored divisive variation. A more accurate view would appreciate Galton’s theoretical demonstration of how the heritable variation in individuals is consistent with the stability of species. A narrative different from Goldman’s would celebrate Galton’s reconciliation of the harmony between inclusion and diversity. Contrast that with Quetelet, who once likened individual differences to the result of errors and came close to questioning the existence of free will by invoking an unavoidable budget of crime or suicide. Galton, however, provided a way to measure statistical associations and relationships, issues that Quetelet’s averages could not address. Galton did not pretend to solve the problem of causation statistically. A few years later, he and Karl Pearson called conspicuous attention to dangers in inferring causality from correlation, with caveats associated with their aptly named phenomenon of “spurious correlation.” Goldman’s book has much of value in the earlier parts. His insistence on the importance of Babbage to the statistical movement is idiosyncratic but only a minor distraction. His neglect of W. Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth, and most of later Victorian economics seriously limits the book as a general study of the topic of its title. The discussion of the final part misfires by joining other recent writers in “rushing to justice,” attributing motives in support of a currently attractive social narrative that is contrary to what a reading of the sources reveals. Much about eugenics deserves condemnation, but it falls after the Victorian era, by no means the inspiration for work in the 1880s.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46903803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer","authors":"Charles S. Maier","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01958","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42151928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths by Taylor C. Sherman","authors":"M. Fisher","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01948","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01948","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48377770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe by James Belich","authors":"A. Carmichael","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01945","url":null,"abstract":"Was plague a significant agent of global historical change within the last millennium? Belich argues that catastrophic human mortality from the Black Death (1346–1353) affected only western Eurasia and Mamluk Egypt, killing half or more of all humans in these regions before returning unpredictably in murderous local or interregional epidemic waves. “Why Europe?” he asks anew. His answer is Yersinia pestis (2). In the wake of Western Europe’s staggering population losses, survivors devised (or invested in) laborand cost-saving ways to boost their newfound fortunes at home and abroad, even though population numbers remained well below pre-plague levels. By the 1400s, the reorganization of production and transportation technologies was well underway, and by the 1500s, maritime polities began a spider-like diaspora that led to the Industrial Revolution. The upshot of Belich’s argument is that the swerve to Western European global dominance resulted not from cultural practices, governing institutions, or religious convictions (in his terms, those of a “OneGod world”), nor even from the technological edge that powered early expansion and resource extraction; it happened because the peoples west of the Volga River uniquely faced one of the “random curveballs from nature” (2). Calling it a history-determining first “strike” (Belich never deploys the language of epidemiology or ecology), he effectively reprieves a Cold War–era trope of plague as an exogenous destructive agent that left infrastructure and other material wealth intact. Meanwhile, because the peoples of once-dominant eastern and southern Asia escaped plague, they did not similarly transform their economies, not even later when they benefited from the windfall stimulus of Western Hemispheric silver and staple food crops. Belich’s meticulously researched economic history will be indigestible for many readers not already familiar with its central claims. In this respect, his book is a critique made of recent, theory-avoiding global histories. The book further recycles Belich’s own prior scholarship— including a cogent precis of how the Black Death figures into his overall argument in The Prospect of Global History (New York, 2016) and a slight updating of the wide-ranging introduction written with fellow-editors John Darwin and Chris Wickham. The intention of that essay collection was to provide models of global studies that situated premodern eras in expansive global, semiglobal, or “sub-global” studies. Human successes across semiglobalized Eurasia, from the Bronze Age to the Black Death, in this new work serve fundamentally to purify the current study from","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44288391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Global History of Black Girlhood edited by Corinne T. Field and LaKisha Michelle Simmons","authors":"J. Jordan-Zachery","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01954","url":null,"abstract":"carries and thus to “un-reify, or de-exceptionalize” Europeans’ path to the Industrial Revolution (22). The World the Plague Made is nonetheless useful in the multidisciplinary effort to re-think the role of pandemic disasters in human history. Belich claims, rightly, that economic history has not occupied sufficient analytical prominence among historians in general, though it is “the very guts of history. Whether they had food in their bellies, clothes on their backs, and roofs over their heads mattered to people in the past, and it should matter to us” (446). Most historians of medicine, infectious diseases, disaster studies, and public health still pay insufficient attention to the economic drivers of epidemic mortality in premodern eras, including the structural and differential costs of huge endemic health challenges. But Belich himself avoids entangling his own thesis with recent scholarship from historical demographers, zooming out instead to delineate an unsuccessful struggle to repair human numbers only during the “first plague era” to c. 1500 and a renewed impoverishment of home-front working populations in the “second plague era.” Laborers typically benefit in the aftermath of great epidemics. Does the shifting burden of morbidity and mortality to working people reflect a return of full economic power to investors and landowners? Or do regional great plagues and other disease curveballs determine winners and losers within the regions selectively felled by the Black Death? Belich is not convinced by recent environmental and climate histories that challenge his construction of a geographically uniform spread of Y. pestis in the initial Black Death wave, indifferent to local nonhuman ecological parameters. His characteristically granular arguments also unfold with a fascinating but fully eclectic reading of available documentary evidence constrained by selected scientific evidence. The text is unrelieved by graphic or tabular summation, partly compensated by splendid maps. Overall, his synthesis, resting on written evidence validated by some scientific “answers” to a set of long-standing historical debates about the Black Death, highlights the epistemological chasm between plague scientists and traditional plague historians.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43344419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Madagascar Youths: British Alliances and Military Expansion in the Indian Ocean Region by Gwyn Campbell","authors":"Robert M. Rouphail","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01965","url":null,"abstract":"highlights a deep knowledge of the available archives about South Africa in this period, as well as a keen ability to bring a critical, interdisciplinary eye to these sources. Although Arndt places great importance on European intellectual production of these ideas, he also highlights the African interpreters and interlocutors who contributed to the standardization, translation, and promotion of the language projects at the heart of this effort: “At crucial moments of linguistic knowledge production, this dependence on African interpreters was particularly intense, which created opportunities for African ideas about language to shape and Africanize the missionaries’ understanding of the ‘Caffre’ language community” (90). The recovery of figures like Klaas Love, Charles Henry Matshaya, Diyani Tzatzoe, Noyi Gciniswa, John M. Nembula, and many others will inspire generations of scholars interested in African contributions to the intellectual development of the region.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45560726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins","authors":"Aidan Forth","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01949","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01949","url":null,"abstract":"heads of its perpetrators among the great and the good of Manchester, Westminster, and Whitehall. Nor did the British revolution for which the conspirators yearned ever arrive; indeed, their final breaths arguably marked the last gasp of the British revolutionary tradition. In the next few years, the political temperature cooled considerably, as the relatively stable and prosperous 1820s progressed. A generation later, the conspiracy was all but forgotten, and the legal and extra-legal Terror of the immediate postwar years to which the conspirators had fallen victim was a quickly receding memory. But Thistlewood’s accusatory stare and Gatrell’s splendid book are unforgettable reminders that Austen’s age of civility was also one of ferocious repression.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43966796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: Living the Silk Road in Medieval Armenia by Kate Franklin","authors":"K. Richardson","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01962","url":null,"abstract":"prediction of sociologists as recently as a decade ago that modern societies were becoming more secular has suffered hard rebuffs in many respects. By virtue of marriage, this reviewer was an observer of remarkably changing Catholic practices for half a century. He remembers, too, his undergraduate history tutor, who was still a devout enough Catholic at the end of the 1950s to assign a sympathetic biography of Pius IX, confessing to a completely disoriented faith twenty years later. Was there any trace of this fluidity in the 1930s and 1940s? What was the range of beliefs and practices in different classrooms, confessionals, and masses? Can we unite the history of religious practices, in the way that modern religious anthropology does, with the high politics of the curia? The liberal veering of the Church in the 1960s and thereafter may have represented not merely a reaction to the orthodoxies of Cold War Catholicism but an effort to compensate for the silences of the Church under fascism a generation earlier. It aroused the same kind of opposition from both European and American cold warriors that Pope Francis faces today. If contemporary Church spokespersons can overcome the tendency of any criticized institution to close ranks in defense, they, too, should be grateful to Kertzer whose successive histories have documented the administrative Church and, alas, in this latest study, its eminently fallible shepherd.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43274653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity by Gregg E. Gardner","authors":"O. Lester","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01957","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41910796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}