Past & Present最新文献

{"title":"The Cult of Gay Relics and Queer Medievalism in 1980s Sydney","authors":"Miles Pattenden, Michael D Barbezat","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae043","url":null,"abstract":"This article explains how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of radical queer nuns, created gay ‘religious relics’ in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, in the 1980s. The Sisters’ relics are a neglected part of twentieth-century queer history and reflect the role of urban spaces and sexual cultures in the formation of contemporary queer identities. They also represent an early effort to preserve and commemorate queer histories. The Sisters drew on deliberately archaic medieval models to preserve pieces of destroyed sex-on-premises venues and cruising sites that were important to gay men. During the early 1980s, arson and hostile civic authorities destroyed these places and the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to threaten the gay community which patronized them. In Sydney, the Sisters also held reliquary exhibitions which commemorated and defended gay identity and dignity through the veneration of campy pieces of popular culture and the reclamation of seemingly homophobic religious discourses and concepts. The refashioning of the medieval cult of relics into a vehicle for queer identity and history speaks to the ongoing role of imagined pasts in the formation of present selves, and of the erasure of certain kinds of sexual experience from mainstream presentations of queer history.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142753573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Failure to Drain: Expert Resistance and Environmental Thought in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic","authors":"Anna-Luna Post","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae039","url":null,"abstract":"Historical scholarship has long highlighted the extensive landscape interventions initiated by state agents, early capitalists and experts in the early modern period, and pointed to the fierce, often violent resistance they evoked from local and rural communities. Such an approach risks narrowly aligning expertise with intervention in the service of states or capitalist elites and positioning experts in direct opposition to people. This article uses the history of land reclamation in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, usually told as a harmonious success story of premodern human intervention in nature, to explore the nature and politics of expertise and environmental thought as different elites clashed. Focusing on the proposed but not executed drainage of the Haarlemmermeer, it demonstrates how experts came to act as agents of resistance who argued for conservation and caution rather than intervention, and shows we can use expert exchanges to gain better insight into the divisive nature of environmental thought in the early modern period.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142672905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860","authors":"Daniel F Banks","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae044","url":null,"abstract":"When Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail for Sicily on the campaign that led to the unification of Italy in 1860, he gave a group of exiled political radicals living in the port city of Genoa the task of procuring weapons, equipment and reinforcements for his expedition. These exiled veterans of the 1848 revolutions quickly developed a fluid yet highly integrated fundraising and procurement organization that provided Garibaldi with the means for success. To do this, they leveraged decades of experience as clandestine transnational organizers, but also relied on the business and professional expertise and contacts they had accrued during a commercial and industrial boom in Genoa in the 1850s. Crucially, they took advantage of logistical innovations like steam travel to concentrate people and equipment where and when they needed them and guarantee a positive outcome for their revolution. They also successfully negotiated with trans-imperial power brokers and navigated jurisdictional gaps in the waters of the Mediterranean. These former 48ers used their experiences as exiles and businessmen to challenge the conservative status quo of the 1850s and force the creation of a united Italy. A focus on the material underpinning of their success restores their role in transforming nineteenth-century Europe.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142902260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Religious Tension and Ethnic Consciousness in the Later Russian Empire","authors":"Thomas Marsden","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae040","url":null,"abstract":"The Russian Empire collapsed because it failed to assimilate non-Russian minorities, and did not provide a coherent national narrative to unite the Russian population. Its religious policies were key contributors to these failures, and this article examines their impact in order to shine a new light on the religious background to the empire’s demise. The Orthodox Church was supposed to provide the means to assimilate non-Russians and offer up the core cultural component for a Russian national consciousness. Its inability to do so became clear in the 1860s–1880s when, in the liminal regions of the empire, Orthodoxy fragmented along ethnic lines. Russians deserted churches for the dissenting Old Believer movement, and non-Russians returned to their ancestral faiths of animism and Islam. This was partly down to an inconsistency in government, which meant that religious repression overlapped with the principle of toleration; however, an exploration of the dynamics of apostasy at a parish level shows that where Russians and non-Russians were compelled to worship together, religious tensions emerged and churches lost their sacred character. As well as providing new insights into how the empire alienated its subjects at a local level, this exploration reveals pathways to ethnic consciousness from below. Ethnicization was the process that separated ethnicity from religion, and places of worship possessed characteristics, most importantly the performance of communal historical memory, that made them into key sites of ethnic boundary formation.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142902263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘The Shipwreck of the Turks’: Sovereignty, Barbarism and Civilization in the Legal Order of the Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean","authors":"Guillaume Calafat, Francesca Trivellato","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae030","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the consequences of a single major international affair — the shipwreck of a French ship carrying 165 Muslim pilgrims along the southern shores of Sicily in 1716 — to address two pivotal issues in the reordering of eighteenth-­century legal and political systems: the limits of domestic sovereignty in absolutist states and the status of non-Christian polities in the theory and practice of the law of nations. Both the time and place of this episode, which had a vast resonance at the time, have broad implications for how we write about the development of modern international law. While much of the debate on the maritime dimension of the eighteenth-century law of nations focuses on the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, we spotlight the Mediterranean, where endemic corsairing activities coexisted with age-old diplomatic and day-to-day practices of accommodation and mutual recognition between Christian and Muslim polities. Here we draw attention to shipwrecks that occurred in foreign territorial waters and their heuristic potential for better understanding controversial issues of maritime law, such as the status of shorelines, neutrality and the law of the flag. Even after the Peace of Utrecht (1713–15), which is often regarded as a watershed moment in the history of international law, these rules were far from settled and shipwrecks continued to fuel legal and philosophical battles that extended well beyond the confines of the famous controversy between supporters of mare liberum and advocates of mare clausum. The close examination of the 1716 shipwreck leads us to challenge the land/sea divide as constructed by Carl Schmitt and demonstrate that territorial waters were objects of sovereign disputes in much the same way as land territories. We also show how the emerging Eurocentric discourse about the ‘barbarity’ of non-Christian peoples and nations coexisted with intellectual, economic and diplomatic forces interested in establishing formal agreements between Western European nations, the Ottoman Empire and its North African provinces.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prize court politics and regional ordering in the Caribbean","authors":"Jeppe Mulich","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae027","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes the practices and politics of Caribbean prize courts at the turn of the nineteenth century, in order to better understand the dynamics of these peculiar legal institutions on the ground in one of the most volatile inter-imperial maritime spaces of the period. The focus is on the daily operation of the courts, the relationship between different regional courts (within and between empires), and, importantly, on their role within wider Caribbean networks. The article asks how knowledge about these courts was shared within the trans- imperial networks of the region. Court shopping was a common practice and claimants would often go out of their way to take captures or cases to specific courts, either within a single empire or even in a different imperial jurisdiction, but how did potential claimants come to be so familiar with the characteristics of individual administrations and magistrates? And how did they disseminate this information? The story of Caribbean prize courts is the story of order-making at different, sometimes clashing, levels. While the legal regime around prizes can be seen as an ordering mechanism for interactions between empires, the Caribbean saw its own order-building project driven less by decision-­makers in faraway metropoles and more by individual actors within the region, equally likely to exploit, support, or circumvent the legal mechanisms set up by officials. These regional groups were especially likely to act against the prize regime when it posed a challenge to the sanctity of their private property, be it goods or enslaved.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"195 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Frauds on Navy Pay and the Men and Women of Maritime London, c.1620–1740","authors":"Margaret R Hunt","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae026","url":null,"abstract":"During the wars of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries tens of thousands of English sailors had their wages deferred because the government could not come up with the cash to pay them. Instead, Navy sailors were discharged with undated government promissory notes, usually called ‘sailors’ tickets’, which they and their families sometimes had to wait months or years to have paid. This essay traces the way the Navy tried to institutionalize this system, and it also looks at competing ordering projects coming from within the London maritime community that sought to pressure the government to pay the tickets in a timely fashion, to manage overextended credit networks and — in the face of considerable Navy opposition — to make tickets more fungible so they could be used as collateral for debts. One feature of these conflicts was the rise of frauds on sailors’ pay tickets, and over time the Navy endorsed increasingly punitive methods to deal with the problem, most notably various kinds of institutional prosecution. The people indicted for ticket fraud, many of them at the Old Bailey, were predominantly women, and their ‘crimes’ were linked to more legitimate activities long associated with sailors’ female relatives. This essay argues that predatory borrowing by the State and the competing ordering projects to which it gave rise helped to configure as well as to distort social relations and economic opportunity both for women and men within the maritime community.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"126 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Interpolity Legal Regime in the eighteenth century: \u2028procedural law of prize","authors":"Nathan Perl-Rosenthal","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae025","url":null,"abstract":"Prize law was a legal regime that played a crucial role in maritime trade and warfare in the European imperial world before the twentieth century, governing both the capture and disposition of enemy property seized by belligerents at sea during wartime. Prize law outlined the rules by which captures were to take place and how captured property was to be handled, adjudicated, and (if “condemned” or deemed a valid capture), disposed of. All European maritime powers had prize regimes during the early modern era, which collectively adjudicated the fates of tens of thousands of vessels worth the equivalent of hundreds of millions of today’s dollars. This article examines the procedural law of prize in the long eighteenth century: the rules that governed how legal actors in the prize regime brought cases before tribunals and the tribunals’ rules for adjudicating them. It shows that the law of prize was an interpolity legal regime, generated within the ambiguous legal spaces that existed between the jurisdictional boundaries of individual states and empires. The article focuses on three important areas of procedural law for evidence of the interpolity character of the prize regime. It looks first at the distinctive role played by mariners in prize procedures. Captains of privateers and other capturing vessels functioned as quasi-officers of the court, responsible for assembling the documentary record that prize tribunals used to adjudicate captures and bringing the cases before the courts. Imperial prize regulations gave almost no guidance on the rules that they were to follow. The proper procedures were defined by mariners and merchants themselves, as unwritten rules articulated at sea. Second, we turn to how the prize tribunals managed language diversity and translation. I show that, a few exceptions aside, prize tribunals did not acknowledge linguistic difference among litigants. Instead, the tribunals relied on silent and often unacknowledged translation processes, which embedded in their proceedings a fiction that all of the actors before them communicated in a common language. Last, the article shows that prize tribunals applied foreign law in their proceedings, in ways that were not formally authorized by imperial law. By focusing on the neglected procedural law of prize, this article offers a different view of the prize regime than the one that has been painted by many studies of substantive law of prize in the long eighteenth century, in at least two ways. One is that studying the procedural law of prize casts into sharp relief the bottom-up character of prize law. Far from being dictated by sovereigns or from imperial centers, much about the prize regime was created informally by lower-level legal actors. Second, a focus on procedural law reveals important continuities in prize law across space and time. Substantive prize law during the period saw extensive debates about the nature of neutral rights, among other issues, with different empires ","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Return of the Repressed: Political Deportation in the \u2028Indian Ocean during the Age \u2028of Revolutions","authors":"Renaud Morieux","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae029","url":null,"abstract":"Between the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Indian Ocean became a theatre of the global war waged by European imperial states. This article compares how three colonial powers, in French, Danish, and British colonial territories, dealt with interconnected political threats, in a region where the limits of imperial sovereignty and jurisdictions were often blurred and frequently renegotiated. Rather than a formally sanctioned doctrine and legal category, deportation should be understood as a crude tool for solving a variety of problems. Although the forced removal of criminals, religious minorities or political opponents was not a new instrument to the late eighteenth century, it is often ignored that political deportation was also a widely used legal practice in the Indian Ocean during the ‘age of revolutions’. In this region, deportation was used by imperial centres to get rid of political enemies, but also by regional authorities, without referring to metropolitan orders. It was usually not a judicial punishment, but an administrative measure justified in the name of political necessity. This article focuses on three small colonial enclaves, French Reunion, Danish Tranquebar, and British Pondicherry, where a siege mentality and fear of political sedition were omnipresent in this period. Contemporaries believed, with some justifications, that a single conspiracy linked these three colonial theatres, involving the same set of protagonists, who redeployed their projects as they were removed from one place to the next. But in these three sites and societies, deportation raises different issues. Dumping radicals on a foreign shore might have been a short-term fix, but it rarely solved problems in the long term: deportees often returned after some time, which was a direct consequence of the colonial authorities’ reluctance to take irreparable decisions, and of the entanglement of empires and polities in the Indian Ocean.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"52 2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Adrift in the Andaman Sea: \u2028Law, Archipelagos and the Making of Maritime Sovereignty","authors":"Kalyani Ramnath","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae033","url":null,"abstract":"This essay focuses on the long history of archipelagic formations in the Bay of Bengal as sites of legal experimentation. This history is often narrated beginning with convict transportation and the permanent occupation of the Andaman Islands as a British penal settlement in 1857 and the violent erasure of indigenous cultures that followed it. This essay focuses instead on the hundred years preceding it where the English East India Company experimented with abandoning jurisdiction over the lesser-known islands off the Bengal and Burma coasts and people who lived on them, despite being in the position of a territorial sovereign. These experimentations were recorded most eloquently in legal and administrative records about crime - which included, for example, how assault and “river dacoity” on the deltaic islands of the Sunderbans in lower Bengal were to be dealt with and how men convicted of murder on the islands off the Tenasserim coast in southern Burma were to be prosecuted. In each case, prompted by tensions between the Company and the British Crown, policing and prosecution were abandoned, but this escaped public attention as it took place on the empire’s maritime edges. Although jurisdictional claims were central to the expansionist aims of the British empire in the nineteenth century around the Indian Ocean, these instances offer an alternate account of sovereignty, one where assertions and abandonments were both critical to the making of empires.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142555890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}