Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Making History: Robert Matthew Gildner

Interview by Zach Doleshal

For the fifth installment of our “Making History” series, Zach Doleshal talks to Robert Matthew Gildner, a senior doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the interview, Robert explains why 1952 represented a unique moment for indigenous Bolivians, why previous historians have overlooked this history, and how a trip to Holland inspired him to work on Latin American history.

Robert Matthew Gildner is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department of The University of Texas at Austin. He is currently writing his dissertation, tentatively titled, “Integrating Bolivia: Revolution, Race, Nation, 1952-1964,” which investigates the cultural politics of national integration in Revolutionary Bolivia to rethink postcolonial nation-state formation in Latin America. Abolishing colonial hierarchies of caste to transform segregated societies into unified republics was at the heart of Latin America’s postcolonial predicament. This predicament was especially acute in Bolivia. Indians constituted seventy percent ofthe population, but remained politically excluded and socially marginalized by a European-decedent, orcreole, minority still a century after Independence. Following the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, a new generation of creole nationalists sought, once and for all, to break with the colonial past. They uprooted the entrenched system of ethnic apartheid that characterized pre-revolutionary society and integrated Indians into a modern nation of their own making. In subsequent years, artists, intellectuals, socialscientists, and indigenous activists worked to transform Bolivia from a segregated, multiethnic society into a unified nation. “Integrating Bolivia” interrogates the dynamic interplay between state and societyas these diverse agents negotiated the terms of indigenous inclusion and the content of national culture.

Although the government granted political citizenship to indigenous Bolivians, it was the cultural politics of revolution that ultimately determined the limits of ethnic inclusion. State officials created a new national culture for the integrated republic, one that venerated Bolivia’s mixed Andean and Hispanic heritage. Historians recast national history as a multiethnic struggle against foreign economic exploitation. Archeologists reconstructed Tiwanaku, identifying in the pre-Hispanic ruins the primordial origins of Bolivian nationhood. Anthropologists studied rural communities, expanding the definitionof cultural patrimony to include indigenous art, music, and dance. Despite the inclusive veneer of this national culture model, it generated novel forms of indigenous exclusion by subsuming ethnic identity to national identity. This ambitious project to decolonize Bolivia thus operated to recolonize it on new terms. Yet, the Revolution did not result in the devastation of indigenous civilization, as dominant historiographical trends contend. Rather, by controlling their cultural representation in the narrow apertures opened by this exclusionary model, indigenous activists successfully bridged political citizenship and ethnic recognition.

Robert’s next project will use a transnational study of Andean mountaineering to examine the relationship between the physical environment, human geography, and nation-state formation in Latin America. During the nineteenth century, political leaders in the fledgling Andean republics of Bolivia, Ecuador,and Peru confronted a similar problem: forging cohesive nation-states in ethnically-fragmented and geologically-diverse territories. As national leaders struggled to overcome the daunting human andphysical geography of the Andes, mountaineering played a critical role in territorial integration, the making of environmental policy, and the definition of geopolitical frontiers. This project examines the adventures and imaginations of British, French, and German mountaineers, their engagement with rural indigenous communities, their reliance on local geographic knowledge, and their connections to liberal political projects across the Andes during a period of capitalist incursion and national consolidation.

Robert Matthew Gildner’s research and teaching focus on the cultural, political, and intellectual history of modern Latin America, with an emphasis on the Andean region. His broader research interests include indigenous politics, historical memory, race/ethnicity, and the construction of knowledge. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Award, and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships.

You may also like:

Jessica Wolcott Luther’s interview for Making History, in which she talks about her dissertation on the history of slavery in seventeenth century Barbados.

Christina Salinas’ interview for “Making History,” in which she tells us about her childhood growing up on the Texas-Mexico border.

Film Review – Baseball by the Numbers: Moneyball (2011)

By Tolga Ozyurtcu

Although its subject is one of the more interesting moments in recent sports history, Moneyball offers surprisingly little of that history. The film opens with the disappointing end of the Oakland Athletics’ 2001 season, followed by General Manager Billy Beane’s (Brad Pitt) novel offseason rebuilding efforts and the team’s unexpected success in the 2002 season. The novelty at hand was Beane’s decision to abandon most of the traditional measures by which baseball scouts evaluated talent, replacing an old-guard of “lifer” baseball scouts and their obsession with traditional statistics, with economics-inspired, statistical models designed to find hidden value in baseball’s talent market. Beane’s shift to the new approach was driven by the inability of his small media market franchise to offer salaries to ballplayers that could compete with the big money, large market teams, like the New York Yankees.

While all of this is communicated reasonably well in Bennett Miller’s film, the casual viewer may be misled to think that Beane’s number-crunching approach was a twenty-first century innovation. What the film does not adequately address is the history of Sabermetrics, the name given to the general approach to baseball statistics that Beane and Paul DePodesta (or Peter Brand, as he was rechristened in the film, played by Jonah Hill) employed in revolutionizing the Oakland team and all of baseball. Sabermetrics are the brainchild of Bill James, a baseball historian, writer, and statistician who has been publishing on the subject since 1977. Through the late 1980s, James published the annual Bill James Baseball Abstract, focusing his efforts on the objective analysis of the sport through unique metrics like “runs created,” “range factor,” and “value over replacement player.” For James and other Sabermetricians, such measures allow for a level of quantitative analysis that links player performance with the production of wins for a team. From the Sabermetric perspective, traditional measures, such as batting average, are limited in that they only describe what a player does, without a useful measure of that player’s impact on the team. For example, while batting average is a traditional measure of the frequency of a player’s hits, James’ category of “runs created” factors in all of the ways a player can produce runs from an at-bat. For a team like Beane’s A’s, value could be found in passing on broadly appealing players with high batting averages, and focusing instead on players with high “runs created” ratings.

The Abstracts were popular with stat-obsessed fans and fantasy baseball aficionados, but James’ ideas failed to gain serious traction in mainstream baseball until the late 1990s, when Sandy Alderson, Beane’s predecessor as the Athletics General Manager began applying Sabermetric principles to identify undervalued players. Beane’s ascension saw the first significant deployment of the methods in the major leagues, with other teams embracing the approach following the Athletics’ success. The ultimate validation for James would arrive in 2003, when he was hired as a consultant by the Boston Red Sox, a position he still holds. Some fans and commentators credit James for some of the organizational and tactical decisions that led to the Red Sox winning their first World Series in 86 years, breaking the “Curse of the Bambino” in the process.

The James approach, especially as applied by Beane, is predicated on a simple idea: the talent market in baseball operates inefficiently due to poor evaluation criteria, resulting in the under-valuation of potentially productive players who can help teams win games. While the innovative exploitation of market conditions is a common capitalist endeavor, the insular, old world, and oligarchical nature of the professional sports business under-incentivizes the type of innovation Beane and DePodesta employed. American professional sports, perhaps more so than any other industry, revels in stable isomorphic practices and employs “tradition” as a bulwark against new approaches to management.

Beyond the standard limitations of the feature film format, Miller’s decision to gloss over this history underscores the point that the concept of “moneyball” is essentially a managerial perspective on resource allocation, while the film Moneyball is baseball movie. In other words, Miller’s film is about the reception of new ideas in the stubborn world of baseball, and less about the ideas themselves. This is probably a blessing for most viewers, who will be thankful to avoid the minutiae of Sabermetric analysis, but those interested in more detail on the subject can read Michael Lewis’ original book, Moneyball or take a look at the Society for American Baseball Research

What does make it to the screen is the rare sports film that is restrained in its use of genre stereotypes and still compels viewers to root for the underdog. Pitt plays Beane well, and Miller is mostly successful in portraying his protagonist as a contrary, but calculating risk taker, only occasionally slipping into sportsman-as-solitary-brooding-hero mode. Opposite Pitt, Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays beleaguered Athletics manager Art Howe, and it is a testament to Hoffman’s talent he somehow manages to elicit sympathy from the viewer while embodying the entire baseball establishment that Beane was up against.

In all, these performances and Miller’s subtle approach combine for a pleasurable film that is likely to have some appeal to viewers who do not normally enjoy sports films. Inevitably, some baseball aficionados will be disappointed with what was left out of the film, but most sports fans will appreciate the film and its celebration of a canny underdog.

Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex and Society Since Gorbachev ed. Adele Marie Barker (1999)

by Jessica Werneke

Published nearly ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union, this anthology explores the peculiarities of a culture that continues to fluctuate. Caught in the middle of this complex maze of post-Soviet change is popular culture, which “finds itself torn between its own heritage and that of the West, between its revulsion with the past and its nostalgic desire to re-create the markers of it, between the lure of the lowbrow and the pressures to return to the elitist prerevolutionary past.” The quest to find, maintain,and alter cultural identity manifests itself in a variety of ways, which accounts for the large scope of this study.

Contributors to Consuming Russia bring together such topics as pornography, rock music, soap operas, graffiti, and jokes. At the heart of this variety of subjects, all the authors attempt to answera common question: in what ways, both new and old, are contemporary Russians shaping their identityamidst so many conflicting cultural legacies?

Barker’s chapter, “Going to the Dogs: Pet Life in the New Russia,” explains the relationship between class status and pet culture, while Theresa Sabonis-Chafee’s article discusses the increasing usage of communist kitsch in commercial advertising and are popular as souvenirs, complicating the memory ofthe Soviet past with Russia’s current consumer culture. Other chapters address the rise of religious cultsin Russia, responses to the growth, production, and circulation of pornography, and how particular jokesreveal incipient desires to become part of the New Russian elite.

The greatest strength of this volume is the various ways it attempts to approach popular culture. Additionally, it provides an accessible account of a period fraught with ambiguities and thus is of interest to anyone looking to expand their knowledge of post-Soviet Russian consumption culture. Barker points out in her introduction that “popular culture is ultimately inseparable from the process of social changeand the re-formations of identity that accompany it.” As this book suggests, this is especially true of contemporary Russian society.

A street vendor selling Soviet-era souvenirs in a public square..

An elderly Moscow woman walking her dog near a church.

A wedding shoot in Moscow’s Red Square.

Photo credits:

Michelle Li, “Soviet souvenirs,” 22 March 2008

Photographer’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

Varvara Lozenko, “#2,” 20 September 2008

Photographer’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

Yana Skorobogatov, Untitled, August 2010

Photographer’s own via Not Even Past

You may also like:

Joan Neuberger’s review of the classic Soviet film “I Am Twenty.”

Yana Skorobogatov’s review of Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag.

The Long History of the Texas Border Patrol

[jwplayer player=”3″ mediaid=”7131″]

Download Audio Here

In the third installation of our series, “Making History,” Aragorn Storm Miller speaks with Christina Salinas about her experience as a graduate student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the interview, Christina tells us about her childhood spent living near the Texas-Mexico border, the long history of the Texas Border Patrol, and how her research interests have evolved over the course of her undergraduate and graduate career at the University of Texas.

Black and white image of members of the Texas Border Patrol with some on horseback

Christina Salinas is a PhD candidate in the history department at UT Austin. Her dissertation explores social relations forged on the ground between agricultural growers, workers, and officials from the U.S. and Mexico, and their impact on shifting national approaches to border enforcement and Mexican migration during the 1940s. She argues that, although border control policies have rested within the bounds of federal authority, it was the interconnection between federal power and local geographies of culture and history that inhabited these policies and gave them meaning.

Find the interview podcast here

Originally posted on February 21, 2012

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Making History: Jesse Cromwell

Interview by Zach Doleshal

For the fourth installment of our “Making History” series, Zach Doleshal talks to Jesse Cromwell, a senior doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. From his childhood among the crumbling Spanish forts in West Florida to his experiences in the archives of Chavez’s Venezuela, Jesse Cromwell shares stories of adventure with Zach Doleshal culled from both his own life and the experiences of the Caribbean smugglers who form the subject of his dissertation. The relevance of Cromwell’s work on the contraband trade in the Colonial-Era Caribbean, as well as the author’s own philosophy of history, comes through clearly in what may be “Making History’s” most swashbuckling interview.

Jesse Cromwell is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department of The University of Texas at Austin. He is currently writing his dissertation, which is tentatively titled, “Covert Commerce: A Social History of Contraband Trade in Venezuela, 1680-1800.” This project examines the unexplored lives of non-Spanish smugglers, Venezuelan collaborators, corrupt Spanish officials, and Afro-Caribbeans involved in the colony’s flourishing illicit trade markets. It argues that the inter-imperial contraband carried out by these shadowy figures heavily influenced the development of Venezuelan society in the eighteenth century and facilitated a commercial separation from Spain that preceded its political rupture from the mother country.

His research interests include: seventeenth and eighteenth-century Latin American and Caribbean history, maritime history, imperial rivalry, commerce and trade, smuggling, and piracy.

In September 2011, Jesse presented a paper for UT’s Institute for Historical Studies’ “New Work in Progress” series entitled “Chocolate-Covered Colony: The Material Culture of Illicitly-Traded Cacao in Eighteenth Century Venezuela.” His talk focused on “the material culture of smuggled cacao, Venezuela’s most profitable cash crop, and how Venezuelans adapted to the presence of commercial criminality in their daily lives.”

You may also like:

Jessica Wolcott Luther’s interview for Making History, in which she talks about her dissertation on the history of slavery in seventeenth century Barbados.

Lauren Hammond’s review of “The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillio.”

The inaugural episode of “Making History,” which features an interview with UT history graduate student – and author! – Christopher Heaney.

Christina Salinas’ interview for “Making History,” in which she tells us about her childhood growing up on the Texas-Mexico border.

Film Review – A Separation (2011)

By Golsheed Bagheri

A Separation is an Iranian drama directed by Asghar Farhadi. As is indicated by the title, the film focuses on the separation of Nader and Simin, an affluent couple residing in Tehran. Simin wishes to escape Iran’s repressive society and move to Canada, which she believes is a more suitable environment to raise their daughter, Termeh. Nader refuses to leave under the pretext that he must stay in Iran to take care of his elderly father who is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Their situation is further complicated by Razieh, a devout Muslim woman from the lower economic class, who is hired to help care for Nader’s father. Numerous financial and personal conflicts pit the well-off Nader and Simin against Razieh and her unemployed, debt-ridden husband, Hojat.

The Family Protection Law of 1967 mandated that all marriage contracts must include certain rights to divorce for women. While the FPL increased the number of female-initiated divorces in the urban community as a result, the overall rate of divorce dropped substantially. Women became more assertive in the home and in public as a result of this law, and embraced their roles in society with much greater confidence. With the establishment of the Islamic Republic and the institution of the Islamic Civil code in 1979, however, the FPL was repealed. Under the new system, women were expected to endure most forms of sexual, physical and mental abuse in marriage. Female initiated-divorce was permitted only in the case of male impotence, severe drug addiction, or intolerable violence. Women who did achieve divorce sacrificed their right to their children, as divorced women had severely limited custody rights. Of course conditions are not quite as austere in the present day and children can sometimes choose which parent they want to live with.

Through these family frays and a vivid depiction of the limitations of the Islamic court system, Farhadi composes a brilliantly accurate rendition of the current issues in Iranian society today. The “bi-culture” phenomenon, which is often cited as a contributing factor to the culmination of the 1979 Revolution, is effectively demonstrated by the two conflicting families in the film. Nader and Simin represent the urban, upper-middle class, educated and with secular leanings, who grapple with such issues as to whether or not they should emigrate to a more open society for the sake of their child. Razieh and Hojat embody the lower economic echelon, which is composed of the more traditional and religious elements of Iranian society. The struggles endured by this class typically arise from poverty, as is exemplified by Hojat’s unemployment and debts, which in turn forces Razieh to take a job that gives her religious qualms.

Through his expert direction, Farhadi masterfully elicits a sense of empathy for each one of the characters, despite the nature of their involved conflict. Indeed there are no antagonists in this film; all of the characters are inherently good people and are simply striving to survive against life’s challenges. What distinguishes A Separation from other Oscar-nominated dramas is the fact that it is a portrayal of the experience of an entire nation, contained in an engaging story, based on the realities of present-day Iranian society.

You may also like:

Jonathan Hunt’s blog post on the history of US policy towards Iran’s nuclear program and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Lior Sternfield’s review of Haggai Ram’s book “Iranophobia” and Asef Bayat’s book “Making Islam Democratic.”

People Are Not the Same by Eric Silla (1998)

by Tosin Abiodun

This book follows an academic tradition that illuminates the historical experience of everyday people, particularly individuals and groups hidden from the limited vision of African nationalist historiography. Eric Silla, scholar and leading member of a think-tank on African Affairs in the US Department of State, brings his skill to an assessment of leprosy, otherwise known as Hansen disease, in Mali. His primary objective is to situate bodily transformations and the social identity of Malian lepers within a broad context of human experience, especially within a framework that accounts for historical changes marked by ‘big events’ such as migrations, technological innovations, bio-medicine, colonialism, political evolutions and economic innovations. The events described follow a detailed chronological order that covers much ground in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial history of Mali.

Silla’s central argument is that from a historical point of view, lepers in Mali have been accorded a “stigmatized social identity.” This identity, rooted in human fear and lack of medical understanding, reduces the social power and humanity of carriers of the disease. Silla explains, for instance, that during the pre-colonial era, some agrarian communities in Mali restricted lepers from participating in ritual activities and getting married. French colonial administrators and health officials took the stigmatization of lepers a step further during the colonial period, especially when they labeled lepers who moved too close to European settlements or urban areas as “vagabonds and criminals,” instituted penal codes to restrict the migration of lepers, called for the physical confinement and segregation of lepers to agricultural leper villages and segregation camps, and created medical institutions such as the Institut Central de la Lepre, in which health directors and medical doctors fostered a martial atmosphere which made the surveillance and social control of lepers possible. The stigmatization of leprosy patients did not end with the termination of colonial rule. In Mali today, most lepers have been reduced to a beggarly status, becoming easy targets for police ‘round-ups’ and victims of unlawful incarceration.

Silla’s analysis is elevating and satisfying mainly because it gives credence to the historical agency of Malian lepers. He argues that in spite of social and political constraints, lepers in Mali found creative ways to negotiate their identity and make their demands and discontents known. For instance, during the colonial period, segregationist policy backed by French administrators failed as a result of the resistance put up by lepers. Lepers who chose to remain within medical institutions fostered a sense of communal identity and organized revolts to protest against oppressive medical administrative policies. In the post-colonial context, a number of informal associations were created by former leprosy patients to lobby for medical assistance and welfare services. The Association des Malades Lepreux du Mali instituted by leprosy sufferers in Dijkoroni quarter of Bamako serves as a clear example.

Two significant attributes make this study stand out in historiography on leprosy in Africa. First, the author delivers great scholarship with the use of a wide variety of historical materials. Archival sources consulted include French missionary documents, letters, and diaries located in Bamako, Dakar, Aix-en Provence and Rome. Other non-conventional sources used in the study include Arabic texts, linguistic evidence, and oral testimonies. Silla provides a multi-voiced narrative by conducting interviews with leprosy patients and health practitioners at Bamako’s leprosarium known as the Institut Marchoux. Second, the book offers a remarkable comparative perspective that links the experience of lepers in Mali to that of lepers in China, Brazil, Hawaii, Europe, India, West Africa and the United States.

Overall, this study is an important and consequential piece of scholarship that students of history would be advised to read. Its impressive innovative ideas set an agenda strong enough to engage the attention of social historians, medical practitioners, international organizations and policy makers for a long time.

You may also like:

Tosin Abiodun’s favorable review of Toyin Falola’s “The Power of African Cultures” and Karen Bouwer’s “Gender and Decolonization in the Congo: The Legacy of Patrice Lumumba.”

Making History: Christina Salinas

Interview by Aragorn Storm Miller

You may also like:

The inaugural episode of “Making History,” which features an interview with UT history graduate student – and author! – Christopher Heaney.

The second episode of “Making History,” featuring an interview with seventeenth-century Caribbean scholar Jessica Wolcott Luther.

Footnote (2011)

By Yoav Di-Capua

Is family solidarity more important than academic fame? Is empiricism a better guide to historical truth than theory? Is intellectual self-esteem generated internally, or externally, by communal acknowledgment? Taking as its subject the arcane field of Talmudic Studies and the Jerusalem School that persistently practices it, Yosef Sider’s latest film, Footnote, manages to transcend the cultural specificity of his subject matter to embrace a much broader theme. Far from being a film about narrow Jewish, Israeli, or obscure academic subjects, its universal concern is that of fame and recognition, the eternal quest for historical truth, the pursuit of power, and the dynamics of intellectual rivalry.

Eliezer and Uriel are competing professors of Talmudic Studies. Eliezer is a stubborn purist, a philologist who dedicated his life to the painstaking reconstruction of barely-legible manuscripts. Hard-working as he is in the eyes of some colleagues, after decades of work, all he has to show for himself is a footnote in the grand opus of his mentor, the founder of the Jerusalem School of Talmudic studies. Never recognized for his work, Eliezer hopes to win the prestigious Israel Prize for academic achievement. His rival, Uriel, is an up-and-coming star in the same field. He produces a string of enticing, cutting-edge and theoretically inspired books, which energize the next generation of Talmudic scholars. Deserting the purist tradition of textual reconstruction for the benefit of theoretical insight, Uriel differs markedly from the elderly Eliezer. Uriel is loved, respected and celebrated. Eliezer is marginalized and quite unliked. The duo symbolizes two different ways of thinking and represents two different generations. Yet, metaphysically, they share the same fate: for the philologist, Professor Eliezer Shkolnik, is in fact the father of the trendy son, Professor Uriel Shkolnik. The father, reduced to a mere footnote, looks with disdain on his son’s intellectual pursuits and constant need for the limelight, which he reads as sheer populism. And thus, academic rivalry intersects with the age-old theme of fathers and sons.

At the heart of this drama, which at times takes comic turns, is a peevish community of bickering scholars. A community infested with age-old rivalries, small jealousies and an endless cycle of bad blood. When the members of this community need to decide who is going to win the prestigious Israel Prize for Talmudic Studies their choice is between father and son. With both bearing the same family name, a fatal mistake occurs in the notification process, and the thus far restrained rivalry gets out of control.

Footnote, Israel’s official entry for the Oscar in the category of best foreign film, is a smart, sensible and nuanced film whose original cinematography and beautiful score realistically capture a subject greater than the sum of its individual parts.

You may also like:

Yoav di-Capua’s FEATURE piece on his recent book, “Gatekeepers of the Arab Past.”

Yoav di-Capua’s blog post about political and social conditions in Egypt eight months after Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011.

Julie Hardwick on the Early Modern French Family

In the spring of 1691, Louis Thebeaudeau, a shoemaker in the French city of Nantes, was asleep in a small room off his workshop when a ghost in the shape of his wife, Marie Monnier, woke him up. He was so astounded that he prayed on his knees for forgiveness of his sins. Only after he got back into bed “all trembling,” and the ghost pulled off the blankets and boxed his ears, did he think that it was actually his wife although she almost never came to his workshop as they lived in an apartment a few blocks away. They slept together. When he woke up alone in the morning, he presumed she must have left early to start her day’s work as a smalltime fabric seller. He presumed the events of the night meant that they were “reconciled” after a long period of conflict and so went to look for her. To his surprise, Marie said she hadn’t been there, so he must have seen a ghost and in fact had sex with the devil. Some months later, she went to court to ask for a separation. During the legal process, many neighbors testified about that evening’s episode and the couples’ many other marital difficulties, including their debts and his beating her.

The spectre of spousal discord that appears quite literally in this curious story illuminates a reality of many marriages, but the challenges the household faced haunted all families. Many of their seventeeth-century problems continue to haunt us: they had borrowed money they couldn’t afford to repay, their arguments included violence, their family, neighbors and co-workers watched, judged and sometimes interceded. Eventually their difficulties led to the involvement in the legal system.

Our continued familiarity with these dynamics indicates some of the ways in which marriage has always been a resource and a risk. For early modern men and women, getting married was an important source of potential financial stability. Husbands and wives both worked, sometimes in the same enterprise but more often in separate occupations like Marie and Louis. Young couples did not talk about being in love but about wanting partners who would work hard in a shared effort to make enough money to pay their rent, buy food, and take care of their families. Mutual success in these efforts meant that spouses were able to achieve a measure of stability in a precarious world. In many marriages though, individual shortcomings and the sheer pressure of daily life led to plenty of conflict, uncertainty, or worse.

More and more, early modern families relied on borrowing to make up the shortfall between what they could earn and their expenses whether quotidian (like food), periodic (like stock inventory or rent) and occasional (like dowries for daughters). Prices of food and rent rose while incomes stagnated in this early modern version of a familiar modern story of inflationary pressure on working families. At the same time, and for a related reason, the terms of borrowing changed. Price changes, income stagnation, and new lending terms were all related to the emergence of capitalism. A key feature of a market-driven economy, for example, was legal security for creditors and, in the seventeenth century, this security was sought both by new laws and by the increasing use of contracts rather than agreements made over a handshake. What difference did this make? Rents were one part of daily life affected by this shift. Traditionally, rent had been paid every six months, it was very common to be at least one payment in arrears – that is a year behind – and landlords often accepted payment in kind rather than cash. Gradually, though, landlords began to insist on regular payment in cash. For working families, almost all of whom were tenants rather than owners, this shift required a large, often jarring adjustment in their practices, including a rapid increase in landlords going to court to get eviction notices, which sent families fleeing in the middle of the night if they could not pay the rent they owed.

622px-Le_Nain_-_Repas_de_paysans_(1642) — Antoine Le Nain, Peasants’ Meal (1642)

The use of force was a mundane and common part of early modern family life. Marie was known to have boxed Louis’s ears, and plenty of other instances indicate that husbands did not have a monopoly on domestic violence. Husbands, however, had the legal right to “discipline” their wives, which was accepted as long as it remained within limits. Court records show wives, their neighbors, families and co-workers actively resisted what they regarded as “excessive” violence and the legal system was quick to discipline husbands who were judged to have gone too far. These standards are far more accepting of violence than ours today, but paradoxically because the use of force in families was a matter of public knowledge and supervision rather than a hidden secret and source of shame, seventeenth-century wives were quick to complain about their husbands’ “abuse” and to seek assistance.

In these areas and many others, a transforming feature of the early modern world (and not only in France but across Europe and its global colonies) was the rise in the use of the legal system to help resolve domestic challenges. Litigation rates rose rapidly from the mid-sixteenth century. Individuals increasingly sought legal backing for their actions, both commercial (such as borrowing money) and personal (such as domestic violence). The French government, like that of other states, at the same time passed rafts of new legislation about personal matters, such as family life and sexuality, and public ones like the rights of creditors. As the state sought to increase its role in daily life, working families, women as well as men, more often decided to use the courts to help them manage the challenges they faced. With their decisions, repeated thousands of times in towns and villages and across many decades, families were key participants in making the new economic patterns we came to call capitalism as well as in new political developments we now associate with the emergence of centralized governments. The institution and experience of marriage itself was an integral element of the developments that came to shape the modern world.

Recommended readings on early modern Europe (linked page)

Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (1984)

A now classic work by the prominent historian exploring a sensational early modern family drama and how it played out in court in a village in southern France

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education

An eighteenth-century bestseller, Emile criticized “traditional” families and advocated for a new mode of modern companionate, child-centered marriage that could be the literal cradle of citizens for democracies.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: A Novel (2009)

A twenty-first-century bestseller and the 2009 Booker Prize winner, Wolf Hall includes a wonderful representation of family life in Tudor London intertwined with its better known narrative of the rise of Thomas Cromwell as a key adviser to Henry VIII.

Posted February 29, 2012

Photo Credits:

Adriaen Van Utrecht, Old Vegetable Seller (Wikimedia Commons)

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