Social History Archives - Not Even Past

IHS Talk: Debt: A Natural History

Debt is a human constant. The social implications of systems of credit and debt, however, are not; they can vary significantly over time and space. Traveling freely across the human past, this paper explores the paradoxical nature of the borrowing and lending and provides signposts for writing the natural history of debt.

Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and on deep human history. In medieval European history, his work has explored the social and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the later Middle Ages. He has covered subjects ranging from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination, which was the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Cornell University Press, 1999). His recently published book, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016), approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille. Smail’s work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past. His most recent article in this vein asks whether there is a history of the practice of compulsive hoarding. His books include The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Cornell University Press, 2003); On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (University of California Press, 2011).

Smail has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and his publications have received several prizes. In 2007, he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from the undergraduates of Harvard University, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“Reclaiming the Pre-Modern Past” is an IHS lecture series that examines how new technologies and approaches are enriching our understanding of pre-modern eras and cultures

Other IHS Talks:

Climate and Soil: The Environmental History of the Maya
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919

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.

The End of White Christian America, by Robert P. Jones (2016)

By Diana Bolsinger

Robert Jones interprets many of today’s most contentious political and cultural battles as the product of shifts in America’s demographic make-up. He convincingly shows that ongoing demographic shifts in America’s ethnic mix are accompanied by unprecedented changes in religious affiliation. White Christian (by which he means Protestant) Americans dominated American politics and social life for most of our nation’s history. Jones dates the shift away from this dominance to the election of John F. Kennedy – a Catholic– in 1960, with the change accelerating through the 1960s and 1970s. In subsequent decades, the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans surged, along with increases in the numbers of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and others. The last year that Protestants represented a majority was 2008. Jones uses survey data to identify a generational shift within Protestant mainline and evangelical movements, finding younger believers to be far more accepting of gay and interracial marriage.

Jones argues that it is this demographic shift that has driven the furor over several key issues in recent years, including same-sex marriage, abortion, and a number of initiatives to infuse politics with “Biblical values.” Jones cites polling data indicating evangelical white Protestants are the least likely group to have black friends to explain their alienation from movements such as Black Lives Matter. He likens the passion driving the religious white conservative reaction to the “anger and denial” stage of grief, predicting believers will eventually refocus their energies on strengthening their own community of believers.

(via Jeff Kubina)

Jones’s interpretation of today’s culture wars is shaped by his own liberal outlook, but his account should also be interesting to conservative readers. Regardless of one’s political views, the demographic changes he outlines are real and are changing America’s politics and culture. The data Jones provides derives from solid sources. Most of the explanations for the rise of the “angry voter” behind the Trump campaign have focused on economic issues. While Jones does not address the 2016 presidential campaigns, his work provides a useful background on how demographics also factor into the rise of Trump’s popularity. The results of the campaign should also prove an interesting test of Jones’s argument that “White Christian America” has lost the political clout to dominate national politics.

Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016)

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block (2012)

By Ernesto Mercado-Montero

In Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean, Kristen Block explores the role of religious doctrines as rational, strategic discourses in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Certainly, Christianity shaped inter-imperial diplomacy, economic projects, and “national” identities. Yet, Block argues that powerless and disenfranchised individuals embraced or denied religious doctrines at will, in order to obtain advantageous political outcomes. Block illustrates that religion was not only a force of social inclusion and exclusion, but also a persuasive tool that allowed ordinary people to shape allegiances, perform Catholic or Protestant identities, and pursue justice and opportunity.

The book illustrates the instrumentality of lived religions by focusing on the personal stories of people of African descent and lower-class Europeans. The first part of the book traces the life of Isabel Criolla, a runaway slave who employed the Spanish legal system and religious discourse in Cartagena of the Indies in order to escape her mistress’ cruelty in 1639. The second part explores how Nicolas Burundel, a French servant and Calvinist, embraced Catholicism as a tactic for navigating Spanish institutions in 1652. Henry Whistler—a British seaman in the Cromwellian era—is the focus of an examination of England’s imperial designs and Oliver Cromwell’s millennial beliefs, in part three. Finally, part four follows the Barbadian slaves, Nell and Yaff, to analyze the role of religious doctrine and conversion, imperial competition, and slavery in the British sugar kingdom. In this “serial microhistory,” the author captures the entangled experiences of people who crossed imperial borderlands, survived slavery, and negotiated their identities in the colonial Caribbean.

Map of Cartagena de Indias from Gentleman’s Magazine, 1740.

Block uses both local and metropolitan archives to offer vivid and revealing portrayals of people’s lives. Records of the Inquisition and of the Jesuit School in Cartagena of the Indies illuminate how Spanish officials negotiated Isabel Criolla’s legal position after she had run away and denounced her mistress’ physical abuse. Isabel presented herself as a Christian woman before the tribunals, raising critical questions about the boundaries of cruelty among Spanish Christians. For Isabel, religion functioned as a rhetorical instrument of self-suffering and as a strategy to escape humiliation. Religion also empowered Spanish officials to rule in Isabel’s favor, taking her away from her mistress. Sources from the National Archives of Madrid and London provide Block with materials to challenge the dominant narrative of antagonism between Catholic and Protestant imperial powers. She illustrates how Spanish and British merchants worked together to maintain effective trade networks in the Caribbean despite turmoil and allegedly irreconcilable religious differences.

A Linen Market with a Linen-stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies by Agostino Brunias, circa 1780.

The complexities Block discovered in the lives of her historical actors demonstrate how European officials also manipulated religious discourses in order to pursue their own lucrative agendas. British commanders who embraced Oliver Cromwell’s millennial promise “to make England a nation flowing with American milk and honey,” also recruited lower-class white seamen and soldiers to work into harsh military discipline in Jamaica. Radical Protestant discourses on Christian martyrdom served Cromwell’s commanders to justify the “enslavement” of Englishmen such as Henry Whistler and to unequally distribute the enemy’s loot. For Block, Cromwell’s “Western Design” concealed tyranny as piety and failed unifying the English nation at home and abroad.

A new & correct map of the trading part of the West Indies, 1741.

Northern European interlopers, such as Nicolas Burundel, consciously performed the Old World rituals and religious conventions as a tactic for maneuvering the seventeenth-century Catholic orthodoxy. Burundel’s testimony in Cartagena’s Inquisition tribunals elucidates how Europeans embraced different religious discourses as a survival strategy. Burundel performed a Catholic identity while living in Spanish Jamaica and he maintained this position after the Inquisition charged him with the crime of Calvinism. Yet, he shifted his identity to that of “heretic,” hoping for the mercy of the Inquisition officials. For Block, Burundel’s testimony demonstrates that polyglot Northern Europeans became cultural and religious chameleons, who understood that “compliance or duplicity were preferable to conflict or the pain of coercion.”

Christianity also helped slaves maneuver the tensions between Quakers and British officials in Barbados. For Block, Quakerism proved to be a contradictory form of spiritual colonization of the enslaved population. While Quakers aimed to evangelize “faithful” black servants, they also pursued temporal prosperity and complied with the oppressive structure of chattel slavery. The crescent conviction among British that Christians should not be enslaved was influential in two instances. It allowed disenfranchised poor whites such as Henry Whistler to differentiate himself from African slaves, but also excluded the latter and their descendants from spiritual redemptive opportunities. Yet, slaves such as Nell and Yaff understood the inclusive social power of Christianity as a necessary step for obtaining manumission. Ultimately they obtained evangelical instruction, socioeconomic privileges, and freedom by performing loyalty to their masters.

“The Slave Trade” by Auguste François Biard, 1840.

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean is an excellent book for those interested in the interplay between religion and imperial rivalries. My only criticism is that Block reduces people’s religious experiences to rational instrumentality. She overlooks the Africans and their descendants’ complex spiritual world. One might question if Christianity was merely an instrumental force of social inclusion, a tool to avoid punishment, and a strategy to survive slavery. For instance, many of them were already Christians before arriving to the Caribbean. Perhaps their lived religion was even more entangled than it appears to be for Block.

Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profits (The University of Georgia Press, 2012)

Mark Sheaves reviews Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution 1750-1816, by Karen Racine (2002)

Bradley Dixon, Facing North From Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Ben Breen recommends Explorations in Connected History: from the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford University Press, 2004), by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) by Barbara Fuchs

Jorge Esguerra-Cañizares discusses his book Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-170 (Stanford University Press, 2006) on Not Even Past.

Renata Keller discusses Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007) by J.H. Elliott

All images via Wikimedia Commons.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia by João José Reis (1993)

by Michael Hatch

Shortly after 1:00am on January 25, 1835, a contingent of African-born slaves and former slaves emerged from a house at number 2 Ladeira da Praça and overpowered the justice of the peace and a police lieutenant. Throughout the night approximately six hundred rebels ran through the streets fighting and vandalizing a number of municipal buildings. Because the leaders of the revolt were African-born Muslims, some historians have characterized the revolt as a jihad. Others downplay the religious elements engrained in the rebellion, emphasizing instead ethnic differences among Africans. Joao Jose Reis effectively establishes a middle ground between these two arguments by describing networks existing across African ethnic and religious lines. Africans from a myriad of ethnic groups and religious affiliations counted themselves among the ranks of the revolt. For Reis, classifying the rebellion as either a religious or an ethnic phenomenon misrepresents the various forces of social solidarity in the Bahian slave society.

Reis begins his investigation by carefully crafting the social and economic setting of early-nineteenth-century Bahia. That society was fraught with social inequity and an atmosphere often fractured by revolts. Both free and enslaved peoples throughout the opening decades of the 19th century took to the streets as a means to voice displeasure with some aspect of society. He goes on to show the roles played by the African Muslim population in that setting. and the daily lives of the accused rebels. He ends with an examination of the depth and breadth of the Brazilian response to the revolt and subsequent repressive measures meted out against the free and enslaved Afro-descended community.

Reis utilizes documentary evidence including eyewitness accounts from Brazilian, French, and English sources in order to craft as complete an account of the events of that night as possible. The author then moves from the revolt itself to the various affiliations (religious, ethnic, social) that tied together and drove apart Afro-descended peoples in and around Salvador. Despite the majority of the primary conspirators being Muslims, religious difference did not prove an insurmountable obstacle to coordination or affiliation with the revolt.

Afro-Brazilian slaves performing “Capoeira,” a Brazilian martial art, 1825 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The Muslim rebels (Malês) “never posed a threat” to ethnic and religious plurality in Bahia, and Reis emphasizes that there is no evidence to support the claim that religious conquest was the rebels’ goal as state officials at the time and some scholars would argue. However, Reis the documentary evidence of the revolt does show that “ethnic identity continued to be an organizing and sociopolitical cornerstone of African life in Bahia.” According to one document translated from Arabic by a Hausa slave, “They were to have come… taking the land and killing everyone in the white man’s land.” Other documents from African-born slaves describe a desire to kill all whites, mulattoes, and native-born blacks, while testimony from the trials indicate a desire to enslave mulattoes.

Public flagellation of a slave, Rio de Janeiro, 1834-1839 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Reis also uncovers the tensions within the Afro-descended communities of Bahia, most notably, the friction between African-born and Brazilian-born people of color. Brazilian-born (crioulo) free people of color made up a large fraction of the city police, regular army, and slave hunters. In a way, Reis characterizes the face of oppression as Afro-Brazilian because many crioulos were viewed by African-born slaves as the most apparent beneficiaries of the slave society and economy. The author takes pains to emphasize the role that ethnicity played in the revolt, while tempering it with religious undertones. The relationship between religion and ethnic plurality played a key role in the revolt, and although “Islam is not an ethnic religion… it may have been ethnic in the 1835 scenario.” Although the religious motivations for the revolt were secondary to ethnic ones, religion was an important element in the development of a specific ethnic and cultural affiliation, which manifested itself, in this case, as confrontation. Reis utilizes the trial documentation as a window through which to view everyday life under the auspices of urban slavery. The revolt then becomes the vehicle to understanding a wider social and cultural history; a reversal of the introductory chapters which supply a portrait of the society which nurtured a rebellious tradition.

Receipt of a Rio de Janeiro slave sale, 1851 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The concluding chapters of Slave Rebellion in Brazil describe the response from governmental and political authorities and repression of the Afro-descended population of Bahia. In the immediate aftermath floggings, deportations, and death sentences characterized a swift and violent response to the revolt. After appeal and deliberation, however, the courts commuted many executions. Tomás, a Nagô slave and one of the leaders of the rebellion initially sentenced to death on March 10, had his execution commuted to 800 lashes on June 20. Reis argues that 1835 was a watershed moment because the response to the rebellion represented a systematic and far-reaching effort “exorcize [sic] anything African” from Bahian society. Additionally, the author hints that the post-1835 repression symbolized an effort on the part of Brazilian officials to develop slavery as a firm foundation for the newly independent nation. Of all assertions in this work, this is the least substantiated by evidence, and appears more a conjecture regarding official efforts to “whiten” society.

Slave Rebellion in Brazil is a magnificent example of interpretative historical analysis based on rigorous archival research. Slave Rebellion represents a dramatic shift in the historiography of Latin American and Brazilian slavery, emphasizing both slave agency and the importance of a plurality of African ethnic identities in the development of Afro-Latino cultures rooted in the Atlantic slave trade.

L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present by Josh Sides (2003)

by Cameron McCoy

For African Americans in the twentieth century, Los Angeles was a dream destination; black migrants were drawn to it (much as they were drawn to Chicago and Detroit) in search of freedom from the Jim Crow South. However, Los Angeles African Americans quickly confronted their limitations as a minority group. Jobs, housing, education, and political representation spearheaded blacks’ struggles for greater equality in Los Angeles. In L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present, Josh Sides argues that the migratory experience of blacks in Los Angeles was more representative of the history of urban America than that of northeastern cities such as Chicago and Detroit.

Sides begins L.A. City Limits by introducing the Great Migration from the early 1900s through the 1930s, as African Americans migrated from Louisiana and Texas. He explores the growth, development, and sustainment of the Los Angeles African American community as compared to the nation as a whole, both in the north and the south. Sides highlights the roles of Leon Washington and Loren Miller as members of the black press, and the significance of the color line in the labor industry as it applied to blacks and Mexican Americans. He discusses the complex nature of racial equality and organized labor among blacks and Mexican Americans. He also uses several examples that emphasize the separation of the races; not along ethnic lines, but rather to the extent of “white” and “non-white.” As Sides notes, “Multicultural neighborhoods brought blacks and other groups into contact with one another not just as neighbors but also, at times, as fellow parishioners, club members, consumers, friends, and even spouses.” Although Los Angeles African Americans did not live in all-black neighborhoods like in Chicago and Detroit, they still struggled to define their status and “were justifiably ambivalent about their progress” prior to World War II.

World War II was a landmark event for African Americans. Between 1940 and 1970, the black population of Los Angles swelled from 63,744 to nearly 763,000. Sides labels this period as the “Second Great Migration,” and provides case studies of the African American experience from three southern cities: Houston, New Orleans, and Shreveport. He then examines how Los Angeles adjusted to this large influx of black southern migrants, revealing the adverse effects of racial segregation, by highlighting major World War II industry opportunities, the “Negro problem,” and the challenges migrants faced as they settled in South Central Los Angeles.

During the postwar era Los Angeles African Americans experienced a negative restructuring of the postwar economy, as economic parity with whites remained outside their grasp. However, there were advances in employment in major industries such as automobile, rubber, and steel manufacturing. Nevertheless, Sides emphasizes that the aerospace industry, which produced significant suburban residential growth, held to racist hiring practices. Despite these economic and employment limitations, Sides concludes that after World War II, life for black men and women in Los Angeles vastly improved. Housing discrimination during the urban crisis in the postwar era, however, together with “ghetto flight” and the emergence of a black middle class widened the gap among blacks, both financially and geographically. In addition, Mexican Americans, who at times adopted a “white or near white” identity, occupied an area within the racial hierarchy where they were viewed with far more tolerance and acceptance than blacks, according to Sides. This increased Mexican integration into white society was largely a reflection of white attitudes toward blacks and Mexicans.

Sides’s treatment of black political activism illustrates the steps Los Angeles African Americans took in responding to workplace discrimination and police brutality. In his treatment of black activism, Sides examines the signature event of the 1965-Watts Riot and the ideological differences between prominent black organizations, arguing that during the 1940s and 1950s the Communist Party was “the most outspoken and militant advocate for black equality in postwar Los Angeles.”

L.A. City Limits is an important work for students and historians of the American West, race relations, and urban studies. Sides takes a defensive position in his study of the city of Los Angeles in comparison to Chicago and Detroit. He argues that scholarly studies overemphasize the Great Migration to northern cities and a study of Los Angeles provides a more comprehensive view of the overall experience. Sides convincingly constructs the racial hierarchy among minorities, providing an element of Latin American studies that is largely absent from most Great Migration studies. Nevertheless, L.A. City Limits does not completely live up to its title. Sides’s work centers on the years 1945–1964, as opposed to the Great Depression to the present. Despite this limitation, Sides’s examination is a suitable companion to works such as Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) and James R. Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989).

Photo Credits:

An employee of the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, CA, circa 1940s (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Los Angeles, circa 1950 (Image courtesy of The National Archives and Records Administration)

Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey through Chinese History by Joseph W. Esherick (2011)

by Huaiyin Li

This book reconstructs the history of the Ye family beginning in the fifteenth century, when its first ancestor was recorded, all the way to the present. The focus of the book is on Ye Kunhou and his son in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and on the Ye brothers (Kunhou’s great great grandsons), who experienced the turbulence of war and revolution under the Republic, and took different paths after the Communist Revolution in 1949. The author’s father-in-law, Ye Duzhang, is one of the key protagonists of the family’s history, which gave Esherick access to a variety of personal sources, including family genealogies, memorials, biographies, poems. memoirs, oral histories, and Ye Duzhang’s personal dossier.

The book is divided into three parts, to cover the imperial, the Republic, and the People’s Republic periods. The surviving genealogies and Kunhou’s volumes of poems illustrate the ways that the Ye ancestors regulated the family by adhering to Confucian mores and conventions, such as filial piety to parents, fraternity among brothers, harmony with neighbors, eschewing involvement with the local authorities and educating boys in Confucian teachings to prepare for the civil service examination. What is particularly interesting in this part is the impressive success of Kunhou and other Ye men of his time in moving up the ladder of the imperial bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. Beginning with the position of a magistrate candidate, Kunhou advanced to the ranks of prefect and circuit intendant, owing to his ability to assist provincial governors in supervising water-control projects and providing logistic service in suppressing the Nian bandits. His two brothers served a county magistrate and a prefect, respectively. His son, Boying, began with a purchased position in the Board of Reveue and eventually escalated to the position of governor, thus surpassing his father’s rank. Surprisingly, none of the Ye men ever passed the civil service exam beyond the initial levels for a degree to qualify them as upper-gentry members. Critical to their successes was the protection they received from the key figures in the military and civil bureaucracy. These patronage networks, as Esherick notes, reflect the overall deterioration of the regular bureaucracy in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Part II begins with an examination of the life of Kunhous’ great grandson, Chongzhi, a banker in Tianjin under the aegis of the famous industrialist Zhou Xuexi in the early Republic and then centers on Chongzhi’s children. Unlike the daughters of the Ye family who received no school education (except for the fifth) and later had unhappy arranged marriages, the ten surviving sons all attended the elite Nankai Middle School. Here Esherick observes an interesting distinction among the sons of different ages. The three older sons followed a conservative pattern of serving family interests, in Chongzhi’s banking business in Tianjin or going into business shortly after graduating from college and they all stick with the loveless marriages prepared by their parents.

In sharp contrast, the younger boys were “born to rebel.” They each had a love marriage of their own choice and they participated in student movements, either against the Japanese invasion or in the Nationalist government’s non-resistance policy. Two of them eventually became members of the Communist Party, enduring the subsequent hardship and personal sacrifice in wartime. One became so troublesome he was expelled from the family and ended up as a comedian who would not resume contact with his brothers for decades. A noticeable exception was the seventh son, who pursued an academic career in China and the U.S., and eventually returned to the New China in 1950 after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago despite a well-paid job available to him in the U.S. The younger Ye brothers’ life stories are revealing. What drove them to join the CCP or return to China, as Esherick points out, was not their faith in communism but their discontent with the corruption and dictatorship of the Nationalist regime and their idealist dedication to the cause of national salvation and betterment.

Part III traces the Ye brothers’ family life and political career after 1949. Two of the brothers were victims of the Party’s repeated political campaigns that aimed to tame the liberal intellectuals. They both had to endlessly confess their “wrongs” for befriending or collaborating with Americans in China before 1949 and for criticizing local Party leaders in the 1950s. Both were classified as “rightists,” losing their jobs and even being divorced or alienated by family members. The Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966 turned out to be disaster to all of the Ye brothers. Not only were the two rightist brothers arrested and imprisoned on the charge of being American spies, but the other two brothers, who had joined the CCP before 1949 and served as high-ranking government or party officials in the 1950s and 1960s, were also attacked by Red Guards as “capitalist power holders” and exiled to the countryside for political reeducation. The seventh brother, an American trained scientist, was labeled as a reactionary “academic authority.” They would not be rehabilitated until the early 1970s with the reversal of the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution.

Weaving the vicissitudes of an elite urban family with the turbulence of the entire nation in the past centuries, Esherick presents in this book an exceptionally rich and authentic picture of the Ye men and women experiencing family life, education, government service, local politics, and nationwide movements. Unparalleled in the study of family history in modern China, it will be of interest to all readers interested in China.

Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico 1702-1710 by Christoph Rosenmüller (2008)

by Susan Zakaib

Christopher Rosenmüller is one of a number of recent scholars to revisit history’s “great men,” who were the focus of most studies on colonial Spanish America until social history’s rise to popularity in the 1960s. These historians are reassessing the roles of individual rulers and colonial institutions, using methodologies borrowed from social and cultural history more often used to examine the ruled rather than rulers. Rosenmüller brings to life the “palace intrigues” of the Duke of Albuquerque, who served as viceroy of New Spain (now Mexico) from 1702 until 1710. His approach, though centering on a single figure, echoes that of many social historians: he examines the viceroy not as an intrepid leader or a cog in an imperial machine, but as a participant in a complex social network. While scholars have already begun to examine the relationship between social networks and state power in early modern Europe, Rosenmüller is the first to apply this methodology to new world viceroys, who are surprisingly understudied. The result is at once a compelling biography and an insightful contribution to scholarship on colonial Mexico.

Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues explores Albuquerque’s political career in vivid detail, focusing especially on his relationships with New Spain’s elites. Although royal law required viceroys to remain detached from local society, in practice the rule was rarely observed. From the late seventeenth century onward, especially, these representatives of the King often constructed a power base by fostering close ties with local traders, entrepreneurs, and friars, waiving royal laws that harmed these elites’ businesses in return for their loyalty. Viceroys also bolstered their local authority by appointing their clients and allies to offices in the colony. Albuquerque was no exception to these trends.

In the early eighteenth century, King Philip V began a campaign to curtail these practices, in hopes of ensuring that the viceregal court would serve royal prerogatives rather than local ones. Instead of extending royal authority as the King had ordered, however, Albuquerque, continued the tradition of power-by-patronage. In doing so, he not only filled his own coffers and reduced local opposition to his rule, but also helped New Spain’s elites to deflect the royal reforms that threatened their interests. Yet, as Rosenmüller demonstrates, Albuquerque’s disobedience ultimately worked to the Crown’s advantage. The Bourbon dynasty only recently had wrenched the Spanish throne from the long-reigning Hapsburgs, which made the maintenance of the viceroy’s local power networks more critical than ever. By pandering to local interests, Rosenmüller argues, Albuquerque played a crucial role in maintaining New Spain’s loyalty to the Bourbons during a period of instability.

Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, the 10th Duke of Alburquerque

Although Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues neglects to address the roles of non-elites in viceregal political culture, it is nevertheless an excellent study. Rosenmüller’s consideration of local actions and interests alongside broader political developments tells the fascinating story of Albuquerque himself, but also reveals the workings of Spain’s imperial power more broadly. It shows that viceroys were not mere mouthpieces of royal authority, but active mediators between colony and metropolis, charged with balancing their often-competing interests. Consequently, the maintenance of the Crown’s authority and legitimacy in early eighteenth-century New Spain was as much a product of local interests and political intrigues as of royal policy. Taken together with Alejandro Cañeque’s The King’s Living Image (2004), Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues provides valuable insight into the role of viceroys in upholding and legitimating colonial rule, which is critical to understanding political culture in colonial Mexico.

You may also like:

Zach Carmichael’s review of a book about the relationship between Bourbon Spain, its New World possessions, and the native peoples living on the borderlands of the Spanish empire.

UT Professor Susan Deans-Smith’s DISCOVER piece on Casta Paintings, which depict the inhabitants of Spain’s American colonies.

Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South by Hannah Rosen (2008)

by Cristina Metz

To say that the US Civil War (1861-65) was tragic and destabilizing is a glaring understatement. Hundreds of thousands died or were wounded in combat, entire cities were destroyed, and afterwards, the large segment of the nation that had seceded had to be reincorporated into the national body, and a new citizen-subject remained to be embraced by post-bellum societies. Hannah Rosen’s Terror in the Heart of Freedom analyzes the experiences of recently freed blacks, released from the bonds of slavery and plantation life, who sought to create new lives as freedmen and women. Many headed to cities as part of a “mass exodus from slavery.” The city of Memphis, Tennessee became one such “city of refuge” where freedpersons practiced their freshly conferred citizenship. They established new communities, built churches, opened their own schools, and formed African American benevolence societies that sponsored community events. In short, freedpersons in Reconstruction Memphis, as in many other cities, catalyzed changes in the socio-spatial boundaries of urban spaces that had previously been closed to them.

These changes did not come without tensions, which the continued occupation of southern cities by federal troops exacerbated. White society had also undergone transformations in the wake of the Civil War. In Memphis, working-class white immigrants filled a political vacuum left by the outmigration of the city’s antebellum commercial and political elite. These immigrants lived primarily in South Memphis, a region of the city that also happened to be a major destination for recently arriving freedpeople. Not only did the emerging white elites have to contend with a federal force that undermined their hegemony, they also encountered an expanding entrepreneurial and professional Black elite that they viewed as another threat to their political and economic ascendance. These tensions came to a head on Tuesday, May 1, 1866 in what is known as the Memphis Riot.

On this day, black Union soldiers that had been the primary federal force occupying Memphis turned in their weapons as part of their very public discharge. Because of the public nature of their de-armament, Rosen believes that the city police and white civilians chose this day to act. Over the course of three days, white rioters killed 48 African Americans, wounded 70 to 80, and set fire to 91 homes, four black churches, and 12 black schools. The rioters also raped several freedwomen. What started as a clash between black Union soldiers and Memphis police soon came to affect many more people and to symbolize much more.

Recently, historians have found that the Memphis Riot was not entirely spontaneous, random, or anarchic. It was “well-orchestrated” and the assailants made a “clear political expression.” What historians have missed in previous studies, Rosen argues, is the symbolic weight of the sexual assaults that African American women suffered during the riot. In the wake of the riots, a series of Congressional hearings were convened in Memphis with the aim of clarifying what had happened in Memphis that May. Rosen goes back into the records of the congressional investigating committees that took freedpeople’s testimonies in Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, as well as the records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to uncover the “coherent symbolic order” demonstrated in the riot. This order was the “nexus of racial and gendered meanings…performed and rearticulated through [rape].”

Why did freed people testify? Rosen’s close analysis of the meanings and discourses embedded in their testimony about the rapes suggests that for freedmen and women, testifying was an act intended to claim the right of all citizens “to live free of violence.” Freedom for formerly enslaved persons meant more than “to be free.” It also meant “to be a citizen,” which presupposed the same rights and protections for all citizens (in law and practice, however, citizen typically signified adult male). Women who described acts of rape had to “find the words to narrate and record” what they had witnessed or experienced. Many of the testimonies of freedwomen who the white rioters raped described the men as having acted very nonchalantly before the sexual assault. Rosen interprets this as stemming from a mentality that saw black women as occupying a position so low on the socio-sexual hierarchy that they simply did not have the choice to refuse a sexual act. Several women recalled having asserted their free status to no avail. Quite convincingly, Rosen contends that by ignoring freedwomen’s freedom claims “the assailants thereby asserted, through their words and gestures, that emancipation was of no significance and that black women continued to be different from white women…who were…protected from sexual exploitation by patriarchal family structures and the rights of citizens.”

White northerners viewed the Memphis Riot as evidence of the continued need to take a hardline in the reintegration of former Confederate states. One of the most polemical Reconstruction Acts, which set the terms for the reincorporation of the seceded states, was the 14t Amendment. Southern states debated the issue of universal citizenship rights and their extension to former slaves in a series of Constitutional Conventions. Rosen examines one such convention held in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 1868 to uncover the meanings ascribed to masculinity and femininity that contributed to the “racist terror” that continued unabated from 1865 to 1876 even though Congress and the northern press publicized the riot and the testimonies of freedpeople.

What is so powerful about Rosen’s study is that it shows the hope that freedpersons had for their future, their trust that government institutions would protect their rights as citizens, and the mentalité that “impinged on their ability to claim their rights as citizens.” The subject matter is not light, but Rosen offers a study of the post-bellum period that helps us interpret the violence against African Americans that was to come and it proposes a way of “reading” rape that has relevance to studies of violence against women used as a political weapon, both past and present.

Photo credits:

Alfred R. Waud, “Scenes in Memphis, Tennessee, during the riot,” 1866.
Harper’s Weekly via The Library of Congress

Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960 by Ann Farnsworth-Alvear (2000)

by Lizeth Elizondo

Dulcinea in the Factory presents a gendered historical analysis of the boom in the textiles industry in Medellín that goes beyond the typical economic analysis of industry-based modernity. It places gender in the context of the roles of the church and the paternalistic factory owners as well as the memories of the workers, to tell this history of forgotten myths and morals in the workplace. Dulcinea in the Factory shows that male factory owners, managers, and church officials saw themselves as Don Quixotes protecting fragile, virginal Dulcineas –their female employees. However, as Farnsworth-Alvear reveals, the real Dulcineas, the mujeres obreras (working women) found clever ways of coping with such fervent guardianship.

Farnsworth-Alvear offers a synopsis of the evolution of industrial work in Medellín by examining the modernizing projects pushed by the technocrat elites who established the first textile factories. As the title implies, this industrial project was an experiment that merged modernity and religion on the factory floor. Housing, recreational facilities, and company-sponsored activities simultaneously monopolized control and granted factory owners opportunities for public display of their protective and affectionate nature toward the female workforce. In the same vein, Catholic rhetoric depicting a vulnerable, virginal, working woman influenced factory guidelines aimed at protecting women from arduous factory work and sexually precarious situations. As the author emphasizes, the close relationship between the factory and religious rhetoric is an important component to consider when evaluating the shifts in factory policy in Medellín.

Yet, these imaginary threats to chastity, painted by the church and reinforced by factory rules, were often challenged by those women who did not consider themselves in need of protection. The author’s interviews reveal that some women were far from afraid of their workingmen counterparts and they often spoke out defending themselves in a variety of ways. Farnsworth-Alvear brilliantly utilizes a combination of statistical sources and oral history that together reveal the ideologies, challenges, and lived experiences of the workers. Oral interviews uncover the secret ways in which both women and men obstructed severe factory regimens: courtships, secret marriages, pregnancies, and even abortions occurred under this strict paternalism.

By focusing on gender relations and by comparing statistical and archival material with interviews of workers, the book offers a rich history of labor, gender, and class relations in Medellín. What emerges in Dulcinea in the Factory illuminates the experiences of those involved in the Medellín modernizing project. For sixty years, workers – whatever their gender and social stratum – had significant power in negotiating their own fate. This book offers an important contribution to the study of labor and gender. More importantly, it effectively incorporates the often-neglected social and cultural component into our understanding of industrial modernity.

Photo credits:

Dmitri Kessel, “Overhead view of housing project for workers,” Medellin, Colombia, July 1947

LIFE Magazine via Flickr Creative Commons

Dmitri Kessel, “Worker sorting leaves in a tobacco factory,” Medellin, Colombia, July 1947

LIFE Magazine via Flickr Creative Commons

Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey (2005)

by Andrew Weiss

On October 2, 1968, the Mexican government sanctioned the killings of an estimated three hundred student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the main square in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco neighborhood. Hundreds more were arrested, many subjected to torture. Plaza of Sacrifices is the first English-language monograph of the events leading up to and following this massacre. Carey, Associate Professor of History at St. John’s University, offers a gendered analysis of the Mexican student movement of 1968. While Carey focuses on Mexican issues and events, she places the movement into the larger context of international student protests. Because student demands went beyond academic concerns to include calls for democracy and civil liberties, the 1968 movement was unprecedented. The protests revealed a public crisis of confidence in the Mexican government. Mexicans had come to see the divergence of the state’s policies from its revolutionary rhetoric of social justice. Young people protested for change.

Carey reveals how the student movement challenged gender norms and placed women into the public sphere as never before. Young, educated, middle-class women subverted traditional femininity as they engaged in public political discourse. Organizing protests and debating issues in public spaces traditionally reserved for men, female protesters constructed new identities and possibilities within the movement and in public and private life at large. Participant interviews demonstrate the significance of renegotiating gender roles among student protesters. After challenging the established gender order, many female protesters were forever changed; these women never again considered public life to be the exclusive realm of men. Carey contends that the mobilization of women in 1968 set the stage for a second wave of Mexican feminism in the 1970s.

Carey provides insight into the relationship between the individual and the state under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which held power in Mexico from the late 1920s to 2000. She analyses the paternalistic language used by the PRI, which had cast itself as the protector of the Revolution and student protesters as unruly children needing to be brought back into the fold of the revolutionary family, thus revealing how the party conceived its sociopolitical role. This dynamic was both challenged and reified by the events surrounding the movement of 1968. The student movement represented a direct challenge to government paternalism, but was eventually suppressed, ultimately confirming the state’s position as head of the revolutionary family. Nevertheless, Mexican society was reshaped. The events of 1968 threatened the legitimacy of PRI rule as well as traditional notions of femininity. The impact of 1968 was still being felt in 2000, when a non-PRI candidate became president for the first time in over seventy years.

Student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas

Carey’s approach sheds light on many important aspects of the student movement and its aftermath. Her sources include participant interviews, both conducted by the author and others, student and government propaganda, newspapers and other periodicals, novels, plays, poetry, music, films, and photos. Her detailed interpretations of visual media, including editorial cartoons and student propaganda, are particularly useful in understanding the nuances of government and student rhetoric. And, by tapping formerly unreleased U.S. and Mexican state records, Carey provides a valuable look past the government and student propaganda.

While a welcome addition to the historiography of modern Mexican history, Plaza of Sacrifices has some shortcomings. Carey’s emphasis on government control of the public response to the movement takes away popular agency, so the book misses a large aspect of the sociopolitical discourse related to the formation of this response. While government propaganda surely influenced the public, students and other ordinary people did find their own voice, as the large scale demonstrations show. Carey’s overwhelming support of the student movement comes across in her writing. For Carey, public opinion is either pro-student or influenced by government propaganda and pro-government. She could have explored more fully how public opinion was formed, giving more agency to the public.

Plaza of Sacrifices provides a valuable narrative of events surrounding the Mexican student movement of 1968. Accessible to both lay and academic readers, this book should be read by anyone interested in this important chapter of Mexican history.

Group photograph: Anonymous Mexican students on a burned bus, July 28, 1968.

Credit: Marcel·lí Perelló via Wikimedia Commons

You may also like:

John McKiernan-Gonzalez’s article Onda Latina The Mexican American Experience.

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