Colonialism Archives - Page 2 of 3

From Postcard to Picasso: Nakedness on Display

Francois Edmond Fortier (1862-1928) made a very good living working as a photographer in the French West African colony of Senegal. Fortier grew up in eastern France, close to the German border, and by 1899 was living in Senegal where he set up a photographic studio. In the early 1900s he travelled extensively in French Africa, taking pictures wherever he went. In 1908 he was appointed official photographer to French officials touring colonies in the region.

The new and hugely popular postcard industry was thriving at the time Fortier was active and his photographs were mostly transferred to postcards, a business in which he became very active by about 1905. He was an enormously prolific photographer and somewhere between 3000 and 4000 of his images survive. There is even a website devoted to him!

One of the early staples of the new postcard industry was a category often known as the ethnographic postcard. These were pictures of indigenous peoples, taken largely by European and American photographers, and mostly in Asia and Africa. Sometimes they had captions intended to be humorous and pointing to the differences between the viewer at home in the west and the subjects of the card. Sometimes they purported simply to offer an informative and realistic example of a particular people. Such cards often bore the legend “anthropological type” or indicated that the image typified a certain racial or social group.

‘Sénégal. Les circoncis’, photo by Edmond Fortier c. 1910. Via Wikipedia.

Among these postcards there was another enormously successful sub-set that depicted people, mostly women, either scantily clad or with no clothes at all. These cards are historically interesting for many reasons. This was, after all, an era in which obscenity laws were on the rise across the west and regulations forbidding the distribution of obscene items (from pornography to contraceptive devices) was a prosecutable offense. The US Congress passed the Comstock Law in 1873 to control the “Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” Booksellers who sold risqué photographs as well as literature were vulnerable under Britain’s Obscene Publications Act of 1857, as they were in France after 1811 when Napoleon introduced his Laws against Public Vice. In Germany a new country wide criminal code made the dissemination of obscenity illegal in 1872. Yet despite the crackdown on erotic images that was so common a feature of nineteenth-century law, postcards with nude or semi-nude images of indigenous peoples not only avoided the ban, but could be sent through the mail without fear of prosecution. This was because they marketed themselves as educational, demonstrating different varieties of the human form across the globe, and thus could avoid the taint of pornography that would have attached to them if their subjects were white and European. These cards echoed the displays of “natives” that became so popular at the world’s fairs to which people flocked late in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

Edmond Fortier photographs of Malinké Women taken in West Africa, 1906. The images are held in the Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris.

Edmond Fortier’s photographs of Malinké Women taken in West Africa, 1906. The images are held in the Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris.

Cards of this sort were enormously profitable for Fortier and many others in Africa, in India, in the Pacific and elsewhere. Fortier’s business was among the most voluminous and his work found its way into the collections of none other than the celebrated modernist artist, Pablo Picasso. Some forty Fortier postcards, mostly of bare-breasted women, are among the many ethnographic cards Picasso seems to have amassed in the early years of the twentieth century. His extensive Fortier collection dates from the time when he was painting what would become his most ambitious canvas to date, one that would rock the art world, and remains to this day among his most controversial and also his most emblematic paintings, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It’s a huge painting, almost 8’ by 8’, depicting five naked Spanish brothel workers. The two on the far right are wearing African masks. The picture was completed in 1907 and the postcards date from 1906. The painting signaled where his art was headed with its break from traditional representation and perspective. Most art historians associate the painting with the beginning of what became known as Primitivism, western art that included what were regarded as non-western art forms from societies that, at the time, would have been considered less advanced than colonial western powers.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso. Courtesy of Art Resource, NY.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) by Pablo Picasso. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

French art historian and former director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, Anne Baldassari, claims that Picasso used his collection of Fortier postcards to produce these startling and striking images. The exhibition where she made this claim debuted to great acclaim at Houston’s Museum of Fine Art in 1997 under the title Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror. In the exhibition, she traces Picasso’s use of photographic images to model his paintings, as well as his own enthusiasm for photography, both good examples of the changes new visual technologies augured in the art world. In the poses and the demeanor of the women in Picasso’s canvas she sees a reflection of the bold stares of the women in the postcards, expressing attitudes that at the time would have been unthinkable for European women.

Postcards depicting white women without their clothes on would not so easily have avoided the censorship that the new obscenity laws were busily imposing in western nations. But images of non-western women, and especially women from areas considered primitive and sexually bold, were, it would seem, available not only to the purveyors of smutty postcards dressed up as educational materials but to the priests of high art. Picasso’s painting is a magnificent and an important work but if Baldasseri’s hunch is right, it’s also the product of a world that profited from maintaining a huge divide between a civilized west and a primitive and sexualized other.

Further Reading

Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror (Paris and Houston: Flammarion, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1997)

Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb, ed. Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998)

Full image credit for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso: ‘Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973) ARS, NY. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Paris, June-July 1907. Oil on canvas, 8′ X 7’ 8″ (243.9 x 233.7 cm). Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we have been posting their suggestions throughout the month. This is our last set of book recommendations; this week we feature books on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia.

Huaiyin Li recommends:

Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999)

Focusing on the life stories of five prominent women activists in twentieth-century China, this book examines Chinese feminism in the Republican era and its fate under the socialist state. Its depiction of the feminists’ pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation contrasts sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of women’s liberation under its leadership.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011)

Based on interviews with 72 village women in Shaanxi province, this book shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s policy reshaped women’s agriculture work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting from the 1950s through the 1970s. It also addresses the intriguing questions of how memories are gendered and how gender figured in the making of socialism in Chinese agriculture. (Reviewed on Not Even Past).

Nancy Stalker recommends:

Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan (2014)

(Bloomsbury, 2016) is an engaging new work that reveals gender roles and gender politics in the 1950s through close readings of diverse popular media. Focusing on newsworthy events centered around women, such as the wedding of the imperial prince to a commoner and Japan’s first Miss Universe title, Bardsley reveals the media construction of the “housewife” embedded within discourses on postwar democracy, Cold War geopolitics, and US – Japan relations.

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (2012).

This book combines historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to track the fate of South India’s devadasis, originally Hindu temple dancers who came to be regarded as prostitutes as India was transformed by colonial modernity. Typically unmarried and residing in quasi-matrilineal communities, devadasis often served as concubines or courtesans for elite men but came under increasing condemnation by social reformists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; they were officially outlawed in 1947. Soneji goes beyond the standard narrative of social change in colonial India by including an extensive examination of the role of dance in Indian royal courts and a sensitive exploration of the memories of ex-devadasis in this innovative, well-written work.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Mapping The Slave Trade: The New Archive (No. 10)

By Henry Wiencek

Roughly 12 million Africans were forcibly transported to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas. It’s hard to conceptualize so many men and women being uprooted from their homes. But Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database helps users understand the vast proportions of this perverse exodus. The site pieces together historical data from 35,000 slave voyages between 1500 and 1900 and arranges them onto graphs and maps, offering readers a geographic, demographic, and even environmental context for the slave trade.

Screenshot of “Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900” (Emory University)

While people may assume that one singular “slave trade” took place, the database maps demonstrate that many existed. And not just across the Atlantic, but around the globe. Overview of the slave trade out of Africa, 1500-1900 charts the routes slave traders followed from Africa to various international ports. But you might be surprised at some of their destinations—traders ventured from East Africa to Arabia, Yemen, the Persian Gulf, and even various ports in India. Although the largest number of slaving ships do land in Brazil or the Caribbean, this map demonstrates that Africa’s slave trade was very much feeding a world market. The variety of international ports participating in the trade is also striking. This was not a black market undertaken by a depraved few, but rather a thriving worldwide industry that brought ships, employment and wealth to numerous communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The maps make this point visually with striking impact.

Screenshot of “Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins” (Emory University)

The site also reminds readers that the process of moving enslaved Africans across the ocean was as much an environmental process as an economic one. The map, Wind and ocean currents of the Atlantic basins reveals how oceanic forces played a role in determining the travel routes for slave ships. Red and blue lines respectively denote winds and currents swirling between Africa and the Americas, facilitating particular geographic courses better suited for crossing the ocean. These natural forces effectively created two separate “slave-trading systems,” as the site identifies them: one originating in Europe and North America and the other originating in Brazil. Historians have certainly detailed the racism and greed motivating the slave trade, but comparatively little time examining the environmental processes that made it possible. Particular centers of trade emerged along the coasts of Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa to meet an economic need, but also to harness the currents and winds essential to moving so many men and women such vast distances. And here too, the visual character of the map makes it easy to see how natural forces worked to shape the historical events.

Numerical timeline graphing the number of African captives in the trans-Atlantic slave trade between 1500 to 1866 (Emory University)

In addition to these visual aids, the site also includes a more quantitative rendering of this nefarious business. A timeline graphs the number of captives who embarked and disembarked between 1500 and 1867. Users can make the information even more precise by expanding or contracting the time frame or manipulating different variables, including sites of disembarkation, embarkation, and nationality of the slave ship. This visual tool reveals a steadily growing trade, with the number of embarked Africans peaking at around 115,000 in 1792. You will also find a chilling disparity between the number of “Embarked” and “Disembarked” Africans in the statistics—a powerful indication of the deadly voyages these individuals were forced to endure.

A white slave trader inspecting an African male up for sale, ca. 1854 (Wikimedia Commons)

The sheer numbers documented in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database are astonishing. With much of the globe participating, an elaborate network of ports, ships and trade routes uprooted millions of African souls with ruthless efficiency. Some users might find the site’s emphasis on graphs and maps to be sanitizing or dehumanizing to the enslaved individuals—too many numbers and figures, not enough people. But the story this site wants to tell is a big and highly important one. The African slave trade had a global reach; it was an environmental force as well as an economic one; and it displaced millions upon millions of men and women from their homes. Visualizing the statistics makes the global reach of their human toll palpable in new ways.

Earlier editions of the New Archive:

Charley Binkow reads through declassified CIA documents relating to the creation of Radio Free Europe

And Henry Wiencek explores a new, more visual, way of understanding emancipation in America

How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century, by Tonio Andrade (2008)

by Shery Chanis

Focusing on seventeenth-century Taiwan, the island east of mainland China populated by aborigines who specialized in deer hunting, Tonio Andrade seeks to explore the theme of early modern colonization in a much larger context as part of his greater effort of analyzing global history. According to Andrade, Taiwan, neighboring China, Japan, the Philippines (controlled by Spain), was part of a colonial trade network and soon a focus of contention between the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Japanese and the Chinese.

Employing a variety of sources including travel and missionary accounts from Europeans, official records and correspondence from the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and documents from the Chinese, Andrade discusses the early modern colonization of Taiwan, known as Ilha Hermosa by the Portuguese, La Isla Hermosa by the Spanish, or Formosa by the Dutch. Spain strategically established a colony in northern Taiwan while the Dutch established theirs in the south in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

1640 Dutch map of “Formosa,” the colonial term for Taiwan (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Fort Zeelandia, the Dutch East India Company’s Taiwanese headquarters (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

After Spain’s decreasing interest in Taiwan and their defeat by the Dutch gave it control of the island, the VOC corrected the Spanish mistake of not making their colony self-sufficient by developing an interesting strategy which Andrade calls “co-colonization”. Having determined that it would be too costly to send Dutch to Taiwan, the VOC introduced various incentives including free land, tax exemptions and property rights to attract Chinese from the nearby Fujian province in China to immigrate to Taiwan. The plantation of sugar and rice soon became lucrative business not only for the immigrants but also the VOC. In the process, the VOC also developed a lord-vassal relationship with the aborigines and gained control over the native population. Andrade argues that this co-colonization strategy was a key difference between the Spanish and the Dutch in their colonization efforts in Taiwan. This period of co-colonization between the Dutch and the Chinese was successful so long as the interests of both parties were met. Towards the end of the century, however, the VOC’s tax increase lost the support of the Chinese immigrants, ultimately leading to rebellions from many Chinese settlers and to the Dutch defeat by Zheng Chenggong, the Ming loyalist of great military power.

Dutch sketch of a native “Formosan” circa 1650 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

1661 Dutch engraving of Chinese soldiers in Taiwan (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Andrade’s study of the colonization of Taiwan demonstrates the connections between Europe and Asia, which helps to illustrate a larger picture of early modern colonization beyond the Atlantic world. The multiple European and Asian colonizing powers in Taiwan also highlighted the intricate network of colonization in terms of not only military power but also trading relations and migration patterns. Interestingly, Andrade does not include any maps or other supplementary illustrations in the original/English version of his work, but he does so in the Chinese translation. Even more thought-provoking is the book title of the Chinese version. Instead of How Taiwan Became Chinese, the Chinese title is How Formosa Became Taiwan Prefecture, carrying a much more Sinocentric undertone. Nonetheless, Andrade’s book is a fascinating study on early modern global relations.

Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, by Gauri Viswanathan (1989)

Gauri Viswanathan provides a fascinating account of the ideological motivations behind the introduction of English literary education in British India. She studies the shifts in the curriculum and relates such developments to debates over the objectives of English education both among the British administrators, as well as between missionaries and colonial officials.

Viswanathan argues that British administrators introduced English literary study in India in the early nineteenth century to improve the moral knowledge of Indians. Since Britain professed a policy of religious neutrality, Christian teachings could not be used in India, unlike the situation in Britain. In order to resolve this dilemma, colonial officials prescribed English literature, infused with Christian imagery, for government schools. Initially, Indians studied English literature using poetical devices, such as rhyme, alliteration, and reduplication. However, missionaries decried such secular practices and insisted upon a more religious reading of English literature. As a result, between 1830s and the mid-1850s, government schools in India used English literature to explain Christian teachings and emphasize the higher levels of historical progress and moral standards of English society. By the end of the 1850s, however, British administrators again changed their stance and advocated a secular reading of English literature to encourage commercial and trade literacy. This reversal of stance occurred as British officials realized that a religious reading of English literature did not provide Indians with the proper knowledge to join the colonial administrative services. Besides, after the 1857 Indian revolt against foreign rule, British officials did not wish to adopt policies that might ignite fears of conversion among Hindus and Muslims.

775px-Pandit_Bapudeva_Sastri_1821-1900_Professor_of_Astronomy_teaching_a_class_at_Queens_College_Varanasi — *Bapudeva Sastri, Indian Astronomer and Professor, teaching a class at Queen’s College, Varanas, 1870*

Viswanathan gives a detailed account of the various debates that influenced the introduction of English literary study in India. While she minutely examines the stances of Utilitarians, Anglicists, and missionaries, the absence of chronological benchmarks at regular intervals prevents the reader from fully understanding the shifts in education policies in British India emerging from such debates. However, her work changes our way of studying British educational policies in India. Previously, scholars merely studied the transformative effects of British education to understand the historical function of educational policies. Viswanathan ably proves that it is necessary to examine the discourse and the context of the formulation of educational policies to better understand educational history.

La_Martiniere_1858 — *La Martiniere, a British private school in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 1858*

Photo Credits:
All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Failed Enlightenment: Urban Design and French Modernity in Beirut

by Kate Maddox

This year’s John Ferguson Prize for Best Undergraduate Thesis went to Kate Maddox, a history major at the University of Texas at Austin. Her thesis explored the European political, social, and ideological influence in the making of the Lebanese city of Beirut. Read her abstract and take a look at some old photographs of early twentieth century Beirut below.

Abstract:

The processes that led to the remaking of Beirut reveal European powers’ economic penetration of the city, which resulted in to an ideological penetration of the city. This ideology, informed by the Enlightenment and French conceptions of modernity, manifested itself in several dominant themes, both in the period of informal European influence under the Ottomans and continuing during the period of direct French rule under the Mandate system.

In their production of the city center, and in the Ottoman urban planning projects that preceded the Mandate, French efforts drew directly and indirectly on concepts of the Enlightenment and modernity as well as other trends in imperial city building. The theory behind the making of a space deserving of the nickname “the Paris of the Middle East” can be divided into three motives, each addressed in turn in this thesis. The first, accessibility between the port and the city, owes more to economics than the social paternalism that marks imperial efforts of Westernization. The second principle manifests those efforts, the improvement of permeability of the downtown area and its buildings. Finally, the threat posed by disease and illness for the local population and, more importantly, European agents unaccustomed to the environment, combined with the concept of individual needs resulted in a focus on public health and hygiene. These ideas, however, are not mutually exclusive and developments often addressed all three. But together they drove the planning schemes in the central district that created the urban landscape that still exists, for better or worse.

About Katherine Maddox:

Katherine Maddox was born and raised in Houston, Texas. In 2008 she graduated from the High School for Performing and Visual Arts where she specialized in clarinet and bass clarinet. In the summer of 2011 she traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to study Arabic at the American University in Beirut and conduct research for her thesis. After completing her bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Texas she is travelling to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Following that she will be returning to Beirut where she will continue her Arabic studies and work for an NGO.

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin (2010)

by Cristina Metz

Greg Grandin has written a page-turner that tells the story of Henry Ford’s foray into the Brazilian Amazon and much more. In 1925, Ford met with Harvey Firestone to discuss England’s challenge to the US rubber supply. Much as the Belgians had done in Africa in the late nineteenth-century, England had extracted this resource by proxy—through companies such as the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in the Amazon and its Asian colonies. Ford’s response was to embark upon his own South American venture into the world of rubber.

That same year, the governor of Pará sent Custódio Alves de Lima, a Brazilian diplomat, traveled to the U.S. with the aim of enticing Ford into establishing a rubber plantation in the region. The governor was prepared to grant Ford a number of perquisites, including land and tax concessions. Henry Ford took the bait. Within two years, he received a concession of close to 2.5 million acres, half private property at a cost of $125,000 and half public property granted to him free of charge. This tract of land that would soon be called “Fordlandia” became more than just a potential rubber plantation. Ford saw it as an opportunity to begin a new socio-industrial experiment that sought to impose his brand of Americanism on a people and environment.

Over the next few decades, Ford’s determination to build a place that would “safeguard rural virtues and remedy urban ills” would meet its match in the Amazon. Ford’s emissaries began a Sisyphean attempt to clear land during the rainy season, they siphoned money to line their own pockets, and they began exploiting workers who were already leery of working on Ford’s jungle experiment. Workers were expected to work in extremely high heat and humidity. Adverse work conditions, coupled with an ignorance of Amazonian epidemiology, led to many deaths. Such a high rate of mortality at Ford’s Amazon project was a common feature of other U.S. and European forays into Central and South America in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In The Path Between the Seas, for instance, David McCullough tells the story of how the building of the Panama Canal, which at various points in its history was in the hands of a Frenchman and an American who each refused to give up in the face of nature’s challenges, also resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of workers from disease and various threats of the Panamanian jungle.

Ford also tried to impose a lifestyle that did not jibe well with Fordlandia workers. His attempt at cultural imperialism met violent resistance, such as a multi-day riot that started in the worker’s dining hall. Up until the riot, the men had often taken their meals at local brothels and saloons. Ford, who was a teetotaler, implemented a new policy to coerce the men into eating their meals at the mess hall instead. Money for meals was automatically deducted from their paychecks and the workers resented this. To make matters worse, Ford managers chose a bland menu: oatmeal, canned peaches, and unpolished rice. The mess hall riot signaled the beginning of the end of Ford’s project aimed at restoring a bygone era. By 1945, Fordlandia had failed.

Grandin is ambivalent about explaining this failure as rooted in Ford’s hubris, opting instead for the negative effects of deindustrialization. Much of the evidence, however, points to Ford’s excessive self-confidence as a primary factor for the failure of his Amazonian project. To begin with, he purposely did not hire experts—botanists, agronomists, interpreters—who could have helped Fordlandia succeed. The Amazon was not the only place where Ford’s personal hang-ups, like his suspicion of experts and his cantankerousness, caused problems. Grandin transports readers back and forth between Brazil and the U.S. to show that at the same time that Ford was trying to build a perfect world in the middle of the jungle, his empire at home was beginning to show the strain of scandals and shop-floor abuses of despotic foremen in his factory.

In typical Grandin style, the book ends in the contemporary period. Today the Amazon forest suffers from rapid deforestation caused in part by projects like Ford’s. His doggedness in growing rubber trees his own way led Ford to clear acres upon acres of forest. Soy farming, another of Ford’s projects, required the use of toxic chemicals that have allowed this non-native crop to thrive by killing off native species. The environmental degradation that modern industry and agriculture cause is not often something that consumers consider when they purchase a car that has Brazilian soy-based plastic parts or purchase a piece of furniture containing particle board made from young trees that could have reforested the Amazon if they had been left to mature. This disjuncture between the environmental and human degradation associated with mass production and consumption is characteristic of far too-many commodity chains.

If Fordlandia is a story about one man’s attempt to impose his will over nature, it is also a story about modernity and globalization. While Grandin mentions only superficially the presence of women, Chinese, U.S. Confederates, and West Indian workers in the Amazon, readers can be sure that their presence was an effect of the shortening of time and space brought on by modernity that facilitated increased movement of people, goods, and ideas. In contrast to works that exalt the benefits of the modern world—in the realm of ideas and technological advancements, for instance—Grandin implies a weighty question. Has global industrial capitalism, of which Fordlandia is a microcosmic case-in-point, actually advanced humanity or are we now in an age of what scholars have called “the coloniality of power” where all of the old imperial modes are as entrenched as they were in the none too distant past, but now sporting the sheen of the twenty-first century?

Photo credits:

All images courtesy of thehenryford/Flickr Creative Commons.

“Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800.”

by Paul Conrad

This past May, the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin awarded the Lathrop Prize for Best Dissertation to Paul Conrad, a PhD graduate in early American history. His dissertation, titled “Captive Fates: Displaced American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800,” chronicles the history of Native American capture by Euroamerican settlers in the Greater Rio Grande River Basin.

Abstract:

Between 1500 and 1800, Spaniards and their Native allies captured hundreds of Apache Indians and members of neighboring groups from the Rio Grande River Basin and subjected them to a variety of fates. They bought and sold some captives as slaves, exiled others as prisoners of war to central Mexico and Cuba, and forcibly moved others to mines, towns, and haciendas as paid or unpaid laborers. Though warfare and captive exchange predated the arrival of Europeans to North America, the three centuries following contact witnessed the development of new practices of violence and captivity in the North American West fueled by Euroamericans’ interest in Native territory and labor, on the one hand, and the dispersal of new technologies like horses and guns to American Indian groups, on the other. While at times subject to an enslavement and property status resembling chattel slavery, Native peoples of the Greater Rio Grande often experienced captivities and forced migrations fueled more by the interests of empires and nation-states in their territory and sovereignty than by markets in human labor. Uncovering these dynamics of captivity and their effects on Apachean groups and their neighbors serves to better integrate American Indian and Borderlands histories into central narratives of colonial North American scholarship.

Contemporary view of the Rio Grande, New Mexico.

Map of the Rio Grande River in 1718.

Castle of San Juan de Ulua (Veracruz, Mexico) where Native captives were housed en route to Cuba.

About Paul Conrad:

Paul Conrad is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Colorado State University-Pueblo. He will spend the 2012-2013 academic year at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where he has received a research fellowship to work on revising his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Visit Paul Conrad’s homepage.

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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.

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.

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.

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