Past & Present最新文献

{"title":"Jurisdiction and Afro-Brazilian Legal Politics from Colonialism to Early Independence","authors":"Jake Subryan Richards","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae028","url":null,"abstract":"Every empire in the Americas developed a law of slavery that connected the forced transoceanic migration of enslaved people with land-based economic production and social life. Competing conceptions of jurisdiction over land and sea emerged from legal processes regarding slavery in the transition from colonial Portuguese rule to early independence in Brazil. Both the Portuguese monarch and post-independence Brazilian ministers sought to assert jurisdiction over residents inside the territory, including enslaved people. Their attempts to do so created social conflicts in which enslaved people put forth their own visions of jurisdiction and justice. Afro-Brazilian people developed a legal politics that drew upon diasporic maritime connections to overturn enslavement. The legal politics of cases regarding uprisings and contraband slave-trading animated concerns among judges and imperial administrators about effective legal order. A revolutionary movement in 1798 contested Portuguese colonial sovereignty with a vision of free-trade popular sovereignty. The monarch’s transfer from Portugal to Brazil in 1808 opened a small route for enslaved people to petition the crown for freedom based on innovative readings of free soil. A major case of capture in 1851 illuminated how the naval court judge adjudicated the case as the capture of an enemy. Captive African people testified in court to gain collective freedom in a liminal space. These claims to freedom raised important questions about legal equality and freedom from illegal trafficking for all people held in slavery in Brazil.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556190","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":"Mutiny on Trial: Law and Order among Seventeenth-Century Seafarers","authors":"Richard J Blakemore","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae031","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a new interpretation of mutiny, and of the ways in which this concept was defined and implemented in maritime law during the seventeenth century. It particularly focuses on British seafarers and the evidence surviving in the papers of the English High Court of Admiralty, placed in a comparative perspective with reference to other states’ legal provision. Scholars of maritime social history have been particularly preoccupied with the idea of mutiny but have rarely provided a precise decision of it, or explored its legal intricacies, while generally basing their ideas on the increasingly punitive regulations issued by state navies. Some have presented mutiny as an essentially responsive action by which mariners expressed grievances and appealed to shared ideas of patriarchal justice. Others have found in mutiny the stirrings of a distinctively maritime tradition of political radicalism which fermented throughout the early modern period and ultimately contributed to the age of revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Across this divide, most historians have concurred in presenting it as an extreme, and often violent, act of resistance to constituted authority. This article shifts our attention to the supposed origins of this authoritarian system in the seventeenth century and expands our analysis beyond the martial law of state navies, which applied only in a specific and limited number of ships. It begins by considering the fragmented nature of the multiple systems of national, municipal, military, and customary maritime laws which governed seafaring, arguing that even in naval law there was no consistent definition or prosecution of mutiny, and that the provisions of customary law (much more ubiquitous than naval law) were far less draconian than popular myth would suggest. The article then turns to the depositions of mariners presented in admiralty court cases to explore how seafarers themselves delivered narratives about their conduct at sea, countering accusations of mutiny levied by their employers. It is particularly important to take into account the legal purpose and context of these sources, which highlight disputes and divisions and where statements were strategically crafted – on both sides – to pursue certain objectives. Through this analysis of both legal codes and legal practice, this article demonstrates that authority and law at sea were not a simple matter of unconfined power meeting radical resistance, nor of acquiescence to established hierarchies. While conflict, mistreatment, and asymmetries of power were undoubtedly present in early modern seafaring, the evidence from the High Court of Admiralty shows that, even at sea, shipmasters’ and their crews’ actions were shaped by knowledge of maritime law. Moreover, seafarers and their employers (whether commercial or imperial) shared expectations about the limits of commanders’ power and about consensus and compromise aboard ship. Discuss","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556193","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":"A Sea of Households: Ordering Violence and Mobility in the \u2028Inter-Imperial Caribbean","authors":"Lauren Benton, Timo McGregor","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae024","url":null,"abstract":"Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the Caribbean—soldiers, sojourners, servants, and officials—drew selectively from European political and legal discourses about dominium to define households as essential to the constitution of colonial communities and governance. In imperial and colonial legal imagination, households were necessary for the constitution of political communities and their presence fortified arguments for interpolitical violence, especially maritime raiding. Affirming the rights of household heads to hold and command captives, imperial policies to foment household formation and regulate conflicts within households underpinned a regional regime of raiding, captive taking, and enslavement. The regional regime centred on legalities of violence. Demand for coerced labour in early plantation households fuelled a 
circum-Caribbean economy of captive taking and plunder, while settlers invoked the defence of households to authorise privateering and local warfare. As the primary legal framework for absorbing and commanding coerced labour, households became the object of inter-imperial competition and a vehicle for constructing enslavement as an institution. Contests over the rights of settlers to relocate to competing colonies at times pitted expansive understandings of the dominium of household heads—the exercise of private power over household subordinates—against the public authorities they nominally sustained. Such conflicts worked to reinforce the centrality of households to the expansion of plantation slavery. The politics of households made them an unstable underpinning for colonial governance and a site of resistance to the emerging plantocracy. Officials in Jamaica struggled to manage the volatile relation between raiding and planter household formation. In Suriname, Indigenous and African captives struggled to escape and subvert forms of slavery and coercion imposed under cover of household dominium. Examining the significance of households in colonial thought illuminates important and often overlooked continuities in the legal politics of nascent Caribbean colonies and the rise of a regional slave regime. Viewed from the colonial household, legal change across the Caribbean did not follow discrete stages of conquest, privateering, and plantation slavery. Instead, it evolved in relation to shifting accommodations between public and private claims to authority and legitimate violence. Authorising warfare and converting captives into property, households formed a legal fulcrum for balancing interdependent networks of raiding, slaving, and planting in emergent slave","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142556215","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":"Race-Making Festivities in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1652–1750","authors":"Alexander Bevilacqua","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae012","url":null,"abstract":"The four generations of Hohenzollern rulers who transformed the electorate of Brandenburg into the kingdom of Prussia — a regional player into a great power — all employed Black men at their courts and in their armies. Through court performance, including processions and tournaments, as well as through artistic commissions, the Brandenburgian rulers adapted existing traditions of representing and displaying human difference and hierarchy for their own ends. As the only member of the Holy Roman Empire to join the Atlantic slave trade, Brandenburg had a particular commitment to staging its global aspirations, both during its slave-trading venture and after it failed. Brandenburg-Prussia’s belated rise exhibits with particular clarity the importance to early modern statecraft not just of foreign enterprise but of its courtly representations. Through the display and representation of Black people in performance and art, the rulers of Brandenburg participated in forms of ‘race-making’ that altered the perception not only of sub-Saharan Africans but of the princely lineage as well.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142329183","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":"Jewish Networks Between The Persian Gulf and Palestine, 1820–1914","authors":"Eirik Kvindesland","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae002","url":null,"abstract":"Thousands of Jews moved from Qajar Iran and Ottoman Iraq to the Persian Gulf ports during the long nineteenth century. Attracted by colonial trade and British patronage, they formed communities on the Gulf littorals and expanded their social and economic networks across the sea. At the same time, modern transportation connected the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, enabling collective long-distance migration. This allowed Gulf Jews to imagine Jerusalem as a worldly and reachable city, making it home to a budding Persian Jewish community from the 1880s. This article traces these migrations between 1820 and 1914 through a reading of the Hebrew travelogues of migrating Persian rabbis alongside imperial records written by British, Ottoman and Qajar officials. By moving through four different cities, Shiraz and Bushehr in Iran, Bahrain off the Gulf’s Arab shore, and Jerusalem in Ottoman Palestine, it shows how Jews settled the Gulf coasts while incorporating Jerusalem into an oceanic Jewish network. Visualized in this way, the migration of Gulf Jews contributes to redefining Middle Eastern Jewish geographies while establishing a dialogue between Jewish history and transregional histories of the Persian Gulf.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142306421","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":"Transmisogyny, Ableism and Compulsory Cisness: Case Studies from Byzantium","authors":"Ilya Maude, Maroula Perisanidi","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae034","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses case studies from Byzantium to demonstrate a new trans framework for gendered historical analysis that recognizes identity as both fluid and painful. Instead of placing the emphasis on whether or not we can call an individual trans, it explores the forces that produced cisness, and the cis and trans lives people carved out amidst them. We find ableism and transmisogyny at the heart of three important pieces of trans history from the middle Byzantine period: a description by Michael Psellos of a child whose femininity is framed in terms of disability, Nikephoros Basilakes’ Confirmation and Refutation of the story of Atalanta, and Psellos’ own expressions of gendered identity in their epistolography. Focusing on the collusion of cisness and able-bodiedness produces a complex image of how some Byzantines could incorporate gender transgression into a cis life, while others negotiated life outside the boundaries of acceptability. More broadly, this framework reveals the entanglements of transness and cisness, which demand that historical analysis does not stop at the borders of inner states.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142306422","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":"Inter-Urban Alliances and the Archives of Legitimacy in the Southern Low Countries, 1250–1450","authors":"Ron Mordechai Makleff","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae035","url":null,"abstract":"By the thirteenth century, confederations of communes in western Europe were claiming important legal, political and military prerogatives for themselves in written charters of inter-urban alliance. Scholars have seen these alliances as a tool of the emerging economic elite or as forces of resistance to the sovereign territorial state taking shape in the late Middle Ages. To understand alternatives to princely polity formation in the wealthy, urbanized regions of Brabant, Flanders and Liège, however, this article studies urban alliances as a power in their own right by examining how new documentary practices contributed to older traditions of inter-urban collaboration. Towns and their coalitions created and distributed bilateral, multilateral and hybrid or concentric charters of alliance and kept them in their own archives, which they saw as repositories of legal security and authority. Meanwhile, archivists, chancellors and other technicians of legitimacy helped princes to consolidate legal superiority over their supposedly subject towns by spearheading the confiscation and destruction of communal archives, in particular their charters of alliance. They thus obscured the scale of inter-urban solidarity: this article reports fifty-eight unique alliances preserved in over 200 charters between 1219 and 1444 across these three regions.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142231199","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":"Needed but Deplored: Spinners and Singlewomen in Industrial Coventry, c.1490–1525","authors":"Judith M Bennett","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae023","url":null,"abstract":"Late medieval Coventry attracted so many in-migrating singlewomen that it might have seemed a city of women — for every ten women, only seven men. Some of these peasants-turned-townswomen supported themselves as labourers, domestic servants or prostitutes, but it was the demand for their industrial labour as spinners of cloth-yarn and cap-yarn that drew most women to the city. Coventry’s merchants and masters, who needed spinners’ work but deplored women’s autonomy, tried with considerable success to push these spinners into supervised living within the city’s established households. The experiences of Coventry’s singlewoman-spinners show that ‘maidservants’ were sometimes industrial workers; that singlewomen were corralled into ‘little commonwealths’ well before Protestantism; and that ‘girl power’ was more about economic growth than the empowerment of women.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142158877","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":"Electoral Violence in England and Wales, 1832–1914","authors":"Luke Blaxill, Gidon Cohen, Gary Hutchison, Patrick M Kuhn, Nick Vivyan","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae017","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses over 19,000 articles from newspapers and parliamentary commission reports to reveal endemic electoral violence in England and Wales between 1832 and 1914. It offers a new understanding of the phenomenon in three main ways. First, the extent of election violence, which regularly featured major riots requiring police and military intervention, disturbances of the peace, and deaths, questions conventional understandings of Britain's comparatively peaceful political development through a century of gradual suffrage expansion, rising literacy and economic development. Second, the trajectory of the electoral violence, which peaked in the period after the Second Reform Act of 1867 rather than after the Great Reform Act of 1832, challenges the linearity of these accounts. Third, despite the recent historiographical emphasis on explaining electoral violence as a ritual expression of discontent, much violence resulted from elites strategizing to win elections. Electoral violence occurred disproportionately when and where it was most useful to candidates and parties, and often involved the previously overlooked figure of the ‘hired rough’: men employed to disrupt elections by force. We thus advance a political, rather than cultural, explanation for electoral violence.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"368 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141904265","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":"‘Natural’ disasters, ignorance, and the mirage of Italian settler colonialism in late nineteenth-century Africa","authors":"Angelo Matteo Caglioti","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae004","url":null,"abstract":"This article places the origins of Italian settler colonialism and its defeat in the battle of Adwa (1896) in the global perspective of the environmental history of European imperialism. It argues that the Italian project to turn the highlands of the Horn of Africa into a settler colony was an “imperial mirage”: the perception that the momentarily depopulated landscape of Ethiopia, produced by “natural” disasters that were in fact the social products of colonial warfare, would be available to Italian settlers in the future. This mirage was based on a domino effect of environmental catastrophes connecting climate history, animal disease, and the politics of European imperialism. Italians’ introduction of rinderpest in Eritrea in the wake of an El Niño-related drought triggered “the Great African Rinderpest Panzootic” and the “Great Ethiopian Famine”. The mixture of willful ignorance and wishful self-deception that fueled Italian projects explains Italy’s defeat in the battle of Adwa. Building on the methodology of environmental historians and scholars in Science and Technology Studies, this article shifts focus from the power of the state to the techno-politics of colonialism in its impact on natural environments and African communities through the lens of the cultural production of ignorance.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141891655","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}