Journal of Interdisciplinary History最新文献

{"title":"<i>The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences</i> by Katja Guenther","authors":"Henry M. Cowles","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01981","url":null,"abstract":"Is history a mirror? One steals glimpses of this question throughout this excellent book, even though the author never steps through the looking-glass to answer it directly. Guenther’s subject is the mirror test, defined broadly as the use of mirrors to probe the capacity for self-recognition. This is a serious and superb intellectual history, tracking how mirrors function as material and metaphorical reflections of cognition across a range of fields. But the book also reflects aspects of the historian’s craft, or at least of the assumptions we bring to it. Near the frame, where the glass warps, there is a flickering image of the historian at work, projecting a model of the mind many of us take for granted onto the very figures who brought that model into being.Guenther’s chapters sketch a menagerie of human and non-human animals placed before mirrors. From Charles Darwin’s son in 1840, to many monkeys over the last century, to patients with “phantom limb” a decade ago, test subjects have helped hone ideas about consciousness, cognition, and cultural difference. In the first chapter, we watch the capacity for self-recognition become a milestone in child development; in the second, this capacity becomes quantitative data amid psychology’s shift toward behaviorism. Subsequently, robots and apes trouble our human exceptionalism by reacting to their reflections, and a wide range of humans in the second half of the book do the same by failing to react to theirs. Guenther gathers, chapter by the chapter, an exciting cast of characters around the scientific and medical mirror.And that is to say nothing of the book’s main subjects, the researchers and clinicians who scribbled notes and published papers about those whose behavior they observed. Figures like the cybernetician William Grey Walter and the psychiatrist Hilde Bruch drive the plot, even as apes and children (including Guenther’s own) are the ones looking in the mirror. It is in the ideas and ambitions of these scientific and medical practitioners that readers will begin to feel that they are staring not at historical actors, but at historians—that is, at themselves. After all, history is often classified as a human science, and we historians observe and account for behaviors as much as Guenther’s psychologists and primatologists do. What might we learn about our own limits by attending to theirs? How might The Mirror and the Mind be a mirror of our own minds?The advent of the “proper” mirror test, or the “mark test,” is a case in point. Developed in the late-1960s for infants and chimpanzees, testers “marked” subjects with dye and then exposed them to their reflections. If subjects rubbed at the dye, it was a sign that they saw “themselves” in the mirror, rather than a playmate or a rival. Gordon Gallup, one of the test’s inventors, used it to stretch the still-dominant paradigm of behaviorism. By plotting changes in chimpanzee behavior over time, Gallup thought he was seeing the kind of higher","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"293 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981410","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":"<i>The Complete Tutankhamun</i> by Nicholas Reeves","authors":"Bob Brier","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01979","url":null,"abstract":"It is rare for an Egyptology book to remain in print for more than thirty years, but The Complete Tutankhamun, published in 1990, has been an invaluable research source for more than three decades. It is the go-to reference for information such as how many servant statues were buried with Tutankhamun or the meaning of the hieroglyphs on the west wall of the burial chamber. Now there is a revised and greatly enlarged new edition, with more than 600 photos, high quality paper, extensive color, and long introductory essays by the author. This handsome volume will be welcomed both by Egyptologists and the layman as there has been much new, interdisciplinary research done on Tutankhamun, the tomb, and the artifacts that the boy-king hoped to take with him to the next world.The long introductory essays at the beginning of the book are a well-written account of the discovery of the tomb, the political turmoil surrounding the excavation, Lord Carnarvon’s death, and more. It is a fascinating story well told, but this is not where we see the results of current research. In the last decade or two, new techniques have provided insights into Tutankhamun’s life and times. The mummy has now been CT-scanned, giving a far more detailed picture of the young pharaoh and dispelling erroneous theories, such as the possible blow to the back of Tutankhamun’s head suggested by old X-rays. This gave rise to the theory that he may have been murdered.1 The more detailed CT-scans clearly have shown that there was no such injury and have also given rise new theories about the boy-king, such as that Tutankhamun may have had a clubbed foot.2 Though this theory is far from certain, it is new.Reeves gives an interesting account of another modern scanning technique that has given rise to his theory that Queen Nefertiti is buried behind one of the tomb’s walls. Because many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings are in danger of deteriorating due to moisture introduced by perspiring tourists, many of the walls have been laser scanned so that replica tombs may be constructed for visiting tourists. Reeves, a thorough researcher, obtained the original scans, in which he saw what looked like faint traces of a doorway behind the north wall’s painted surface.3 Reeves is convinced that Nefertiti, Tutankhamun’s stepmother, is buried behind the wall. This, of course, would be an incredibly important discovery and has attracted a great deal of attention. Indeed, three different radar scans have been conducted to see what is behind the wall. Only the first one—the most hastily done—claimed to have found evidence of a void behind the wall. When National Geographic was considering filming a documentary on the theory, they commissioned their own scan of the tomb, which convinced them that there was nothing behind the wall and led to the cancellation of the documentary. Another later scan produced the same results.Yet Reeves is confident that Nefertiti’s burial is behind the wall, and he presen","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981575","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":"<i>The Death and Life of State Repression: Understanding Onset, Escalation, Termination, and Recurrence</i> by Christian Davenport and Benjamin J. Appel","authors":"","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01986","url":null,"abstract":"Myanmar’s decades-long systematic discrimination against its non-Buddhist minorities is inherently repressive. India’s new marginalization of its 200 million Muslims is clearly repressive. Ethiopia’s invasion and war against Tigray counts as state repression. So do Sudan’s past and possible ongoing genocidal acts in Darfur. Equatorial Guinea’s leaving its mainland inhabitants without access to human and economic rights is repressive. When Mozambique excludes its northernmost citizens from schooling and medical care, that is also repressive. Madagascar’s long neglect of its coastal inhabitants, favoring the lighter-skinned inhabitants of the central plateau, is also repressive.State repression is governmental behavior “that is enacted by … designated agents of … authority” who employ coercive power to compel national inhabitants to do what the state (and the leader of the state) wants them to do irrespective of their own individual, or even cultural and group, preferences. When Mao sent Chinese elites (including Xi Jinping) into the countryside to be “re-educated,” and culturally subordinated, he and his security forces were clearly repressing. Likewise, Stalin’s many gulags were repressive, just as Putin’s punishment of Alexandre Navalny and others is repressive and meant to be controlling.This tightly argued book focuses squarely on “government behavior that … historically” has unleashed violence against “large amounts of population” (148–149). The authors are interested in what they call repressive “spells” of reasonable duration. They seek to detail how those “spells”—an odd concept with diverse meanings—begin and are sustained.Large-scale, systematic repression is driven, the authors say, by domestic more than international considerations. Political threats are obvious triggers. When they lead to the onset of repression, the forces of the ongoing repression resemble a slow-moving juggernaut that accelerates relentlessly in a self-reinforcing fashion. The ruling cohort imagines that its interest lies in insulating and digging into earlier positions, “reinforcing the application of government repression even further” (34).Once it is well underway, halting repression is difficult. Indeed, as the authors assert, once a campaign of repression has begun any cancellation or relaxation of the repressive juggernaut is almost impossible absent countervailing internal opposition or concerted international action. Think of extreme cases such as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, Ne Win’s Burma, or Sukarno’s Indonesia. Juggernauts cannot easily be disturbed (35).The dismantling of South Africa’s apartheid-driven repressive institutions after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and Africans were allowed to vote obviously marked the end of an era of repression. “Electoral democratization,” this book declares, “reduces repression.” Indeed, democratization obliterates repression, or should, because the availability of choice usually implies that the state has become res","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981576","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":"<i>Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality</i> by Mariana P. Candido","authors":"Mariana L. R. Dantas","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01995","url":null,"abstract":"Candido offers a critical revision of the history of African societies’ relationship to land use and rights. In the process, she delivers an insightful and fascinating narrative about the contested process of wealth accumulation underpinning the colonial dynamics of dispossession. Candido demonstrates her impressive command of the historiographies of pre-colonial and colonial Africa and the Portuguese Atlantic, as well as her deep familiarity and skillful treatment of Angolan archival sources. The richness of the book, and Candido’s generous and detailed sharing of her archival findings, make this an essential read for scholars of Africa and the Portuguese Atlantic. Candido’s analysis of the integral role of nineteenth-century Western liberalism in the continued enslavement, displacement, and impoverishment of African peoples—through its legal, judicial, and archival promotion of individual property rights—also makes this a crucial work of global economic and political history.The book traces the history of West Central African land regimes from the 1600s to the early twentieth century to demonstrate the complex and diverse ways indigenous societies and peoples claimed and occupied land. Candido discusses claims made by West Central African rulers and individuals, notably women, during disputes between African actors, and with Portuguese settlers and interlopers. This examination underscores the relevance of land to local economic, social, and political interests while successfully dismantling the historical and historiographical trope of “wealth in people,” which has supported erroneous views that Africans emphasized control over slaves and dependents over ownership of land. The author demonstrates how a growing reliance on Portuguese written records and courts to prove land rights, and a Portuguese colonial narrative that dismissed or ignored indigenous African systems of resolution of land disputes, cemented the myth that Europeans introduced the notion of private property to a backward Africa. Practice, rhetoric, and archival biases thus came together to promote greater Portuguese state and settler encroachment in Angola, leading to patterns of land dispossession among its indigenous population.Candido’s focus on land does not distract her from the question of slavery, and she explores the connection between land and territorial dispossession and the rising vulnerability of dispossessed people, which ensured the longevity of slavery in nineteenth-century Angola despite rising Atlantic pressures to abolish it. She highlights West Central Africans’ deployment of written records and court appeals as strategies to protect their interests, socio-economic position, and freedom from slavery, revealing the wholesale impact of European colonialism on African privation and broader racial inequality during the period. The imperial state’s efforts to record people, land, and goods—and to control their integration into an economic system structured around","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"148 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981573","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":"<i>For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America</i> by Jonathan D. Cohen","authors":"Jacob S. Hacker","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01983","url":null,"abstract":"Do you feel lucky? When Clint Eastwood asked this question on the big screen, a string of cash-strapped states were asking it of their residents, establishing the first publicly run lotteries in the United States in more than a century. Deindustrializing Northeastern states were under budgetary siege, caught between tax-resistant electorates and their own declining fortunes. They were fighting the mob and wanted to corner its winnings as well as its bosses. And they had ready customers; working-class Catholics fleeing to the suburbs were as eager to play the lottery as the Black urbanites they left behind. The states that pioneered this new wave of government gambling—New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts—were feeling lucky. Lotteries would make their day.They did not. Despite the many innovations to come—scratch-off tickets, growing jackpots, multi-state mega-prizes—lotteries did not rescue Northeastern states from tough choices in the 1970s, make up for property tax revolts in the West in the 1980s, or allow Southern states to revitalize cash-starved education systems in the 1990s. But they did become the biggest government-run business in the United States, with a staggering $45 billion revenue in 2020, surpassing even the profits of cigarettes or smartphones. In a society marked by growing inequality and insecurity, the product that lotteries offered was an increasingly improbable chance of increasingly astronomical riches.This little-known story is an ideal subject for interdisciplinary history, and Cohen seizes the opportunity. His slim book is deeply researched yet eminently readable, and it draws on political science, behavioral economics, public finance, cultural studies, and good old-fashioned political economy. Cohen is as comfortable citing Kahneman as he is Cowie, exploring popular images of wealth as trenchantly as he explicates religious ideals. He has also mined a remarkable number of archives. The only dimension that seems to be missing is the cross-national one; I could not help but wonder whether America’s lottery obsession is unique within the advanced industrial world and, if so, why.Cohen’s book has a straightforward structure, dividing the rise of state lotteries into three phases: their 1970s arrival, 1980s Western consolidation, and 1990s Southern expansion. For each, he pairs an archivally grounded history with a nuanced analysis of associated cultural and economic developments.Three sophisticated interdisciplinary claims are embedded in this simple approach. The first is that state lotteries are fundamentally the product of politics, driven by basic fiscal imperatives, elite-level jockeying, voter attitudes, and (particularly important) aggressive lobbying by the private lottery industry seeking lucrative contracts. Lotteries were established by politicians, and politicians could, in theory, dis-establish them.The second claim, which shifts the focus from politics to economics, is that the explosive growth ","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981605","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":"<i>America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911</i> by Mark A. Noll","authors":"James Hudnut-Beumler","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01992","url":null,"abstract":"Noll knows a lot about the history of religion in America and frames the Bible as his protagonist in this engaging, complex, and telling account of how Protestant America became Bible-obsessed in the long nineteenth century. This massive sequel to his formidable In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (2015) is interdisciplinary insofar as it combines the history of political rhetoric, pro- and anti-slavery arguments before the Civil War, women’s history, history of the book and publishing, African American history, and the impact of biblical criticism.Noll attends to religious movements, innovations, and organizations that embraced biblicism, but also fairly channels individuals like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Maria Stewart, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who often were better interpreters from outside ecclesiastical precincts than the preachers who occupied the then-popular pulpits of the years from the Revolution to World War I.The net effect of Noll’s impressive synthesis of so many kinds of history is highly readable, employing thirty chapters to spotlight significant episodes, and sweeping when it comes to the topic of Protestantism. Since 1970, historians’ treatment of Protestantism in America has shifted from something passé (why study dead white people?) to a newly acknowledged monolithic force that accounts for everything old holding back an emerging diverse contemporary democratic society. Much like whiteness, therefore, Protestantism is now widely invoked but not historicized so much as summarized. Noll’s work corrects this lacuna.If his formal subject is the Bible, Noll’s greater story is how the social custodial Protestants (Congregationalists and Anglicans) lost out to the sectarian Protestants (Methodists and Baptists) who did not initially wish to run society, but only their own churches. The early national era saw most Americans becoming evangelical Bible consumers who believed that all answers could be found in the words of the scripture they fervently quoted. This worked, Noll argues, until slavery revealed that the Bible was used to support every conceivable moral position on the issue. Meanwhile, Catholics and Jews became increasingly vocal about the hegemonic use of the King James Version (kjv) in public schooling. After 1876, Americans produced a plethora of new versions of scripture to support their own religious ideas, evidencing both a diversity of faith and further fragmentation.Noll also tracks how religious consciousness shifted in the scripture passages clergy chose to memorialize American presidents upon their deaths. The shift he finds between the death of President Washington in 1799 and the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 is from biblical Hebraism, invoking the Old Testament, to a decidedly New Testament emphasis. The implication is that American Protestants went from thinking of America as God’s new Israel to comparing assassinated presidents mostly to Jesu","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981418","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":"<i>The Conquest of Mexico: 500 Years of Reinventions</i> by Peter B. Villella and Pablo García Loaeza","authors":"Ida Altman","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01978","url":null,"abstract":"According to a recent article in the New York Times entitled “Demoting the Conquest: How the Denver Art Museum Kicked Columbus Out the Door,” a Colorado art museum “obliterated all references to the canceled hero from its collections.”1 Regardless of how one views Columbus, the effort to “cancel” historical figures and events that have resonated for good and ill over the centuries is far from straightforward. In our continuing fascination with the conquest of Mexico, as with Columbus, the actual history can seem to take second place to the many interpretations that have colored our understandings of it.The conquest of Mexico usually is assumed to have been a singular, transformative episode in which the lands and peoples of what is now modern Mexico were brought definitively under Spanish rule. Scholars who have examined the events leading up to, resulting in, and following the fall of the Aztec (Mexica) capital of Tenochtitlan to the Spanish-Indigenous forces led by Hernando Cortés, however, paint a different picture of events. Over time, most have concluded that the ostensible conquest was far less definitive than generally thought, that Indigenous forces played a far greater role in the apparent Spanish victory over the Mexica than long assumed, and that the immediate impact of Cortés’ victory was limited to a relatively small area even within central Mexico, with large swaths of peoples and territories remaining outside the scope of Spanish domination, in some cases for years, decades, or even centuries.The chapters in this volume survey how the conquest of Mexico has been depicted, studied, understood, and portrayed in everything from history books to literature and opera. The editors write that the contributors consider the conquest of Mexico through an Atlantic lens, rather than an exclusively Mexican or even Spanish-American one. Thus, although chapters in the first part of the volume trace changing views and uses of the conquest in Mexico itself over time, contributors to the second part address such topics as the English response to the conquest, representations of the conquest in Enlightenment-era French and Italian opera, and the impact of William Prescott’s enormously influential mid-nineteenth century history of the conquest in the United States.Scholars and other readers with a solid command of Mexican history likely will not find a great deal that is new in the first part of the volume, although the interdisciplinary nature of the contributions, which range from Terraciano’s discussion of revisionist scholarship to Myers’ use of oral history to understand contemporary views of the conquest, should be noted. The second part, however, broadens considerably our understanding of the range of responses that the history of the conquest has evoked, in perhaps surprising ways.Altogether, this is a very readable and enjoyable volume—a useful reminder of the value of addressing historiography in conjunction with history. As Villella writes ","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"160 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981567","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 Origin of Electoral Absenteeism in Early Italy: New Evidence to Explain North–South Diverging Trends","authors":"Giorgio Brosio, Roberto Zanola","doi":"10.1162/jinh_a_01975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01975","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Low turnout rates with high geographical disparities characterized Italian national elections in the first six decades after the country’s founding in 1861. Historians have largely overlooked these regional voting differences and their potential economic implications. A multiple-group interrupted time series analysis regression model demonstrates distinct electoral trends between the Center-North and the South, coinciding with electoral reforms in 1894 that affected electoral competition, particularly in the South. Furthermore, a random effect panel regression model reveals determinants of regional abstention rates, which indicate that different factors influenced abstention rates in the Center-North than in the South, emphasizing the relevance of political factors in the creation and widening of regional divergences in Italy.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"155 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134981578","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":"Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers by John M. Sacher","authors":"P. Doyle","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01888","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"539-540"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47872978","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":"Imperial Incarceration: Detention without Trial in the Making of British Colonial Africa by Michael Lobban","authors":"Keally Mcbride","doi":"10.1162/jinh_r_01894","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01894","url":null,"abstract":"In this book, Michael Lobban examines the extensive use of detention without trial in British Colonial Africa at a period in which, seemingly incongruously, Diceyean rule of law thinking was at its height in the heart of the British Empire. Detention without trial, undermines the rule of law in that the liberty of an individual is constrained without due process, and sometimes without any legal authorisation whatsoever. Lobban begins by asserting that by the time Dicey first wrote Introduction to the study of the Law of the Constitution in 1885, “a unique spirit of legalism . . . was embedded in English constitutional culture” (p. 1). A consequence was that detention without trial was impermissible, and this prohibition was protected by the writ of habeas corpus. How, then, could such extensive use of detention without trial in British Africa at the time have been permissible? Lobban demonstrates that this question is complicated by the fact that many thinkers of the time did not consider the rule of law to be constrained to England itself, but to spread throughout the Empire. Indeed, by the time Dicey was writing, many British imperialists considered the spread of the rule of law to be a central justification for the Empire. In keeping with this, the writ of habeas corpus (in either its common law form, its statutory form, or both) spread across the Empire (p. 5). Of course, even in Britain itself, detention without trial could be justified by limited “suspension” of habeas corpus by Parliament (suspension here is a misnomer – such acts in fact empowered the executive to detain in certain circumstances, thus rendering habeas corpus inapplicable). Notably, Parliament had not enacted habeas corpus suspension legislation in Britain since 1818. Lobban shows that Dicey’s view was that such parliamentary exceptions to the prohibition on detention without trial were acceptable since Parliament could be trusted to introduce such powers only when there was a threat to the rule of law itself. Lobban contends that that this principle translated to the imperial context meant that detention could only be authorised when it was necessary and justifiable in terms of the “common law idiom” (p. 9). Throughout the book, and central to his conclusions, formal and substantive perspectives of the rule of law are distinguished. Though these terms may be considered by some to be anachronistic in the context of this history, Lobban certainly identifies an important distinction between commitments merely to legal authorisation (“formal” rule of law), and commitments to common law rights and liberties (“substantive” rule of law). Lobban uses his material to illustrate that the degree to which formal versus substantive versions of the rule of law were followed tended to be “determined by the attitudes and practices of particular individuals, and reflected the constitutional culture in which they operated” (p. 33). He contends that a substantive approach tended to occur wh","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"553-555"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46250511","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}