英属北美殖民地法律的早期现代化

关于英属北美殖民地社会经济属何种性质的讨论,涉及到对当时法律制度的历史地位进行评价的问题,美国学术界在这些方面至今还存在很多争议。从美国学者的学术交锋来看,尽管英属北美殖民地是否已进入资本主义发展阶段仍有待商榷,但当时市场经济的扩张确实已达到了一定的程度,从而使殖民地的法律制度出现了早期现代化的趋势,主要表现为陪审团在民事审判中的初步式微、从事实性答辩向法律性答辩的转变、普通法令状制度的逐步健全、专业律师队伍的出现和仲裁的正规化或边缘化。因此,英属北美殖民地法律在美国法律史上占有重要地位,殖民地时期绝不是美国法律的“黑暗时代”,当然也不可和19世纪混为一谈。     

英国的法治传统对北美殖民地的影响

英国的法治传统对北美殖民地的影响是深远的,一直延续到美国建国,迄今为止在美国法治法律中尚有很多渊源可寻。概括地说,英国的法治传统对北美殖民地的影响主要体现在两方面,一是对北美殖民地法律建设进程的影响,一是对北美独立战争的催化。     

美国殖民地时期资产阶级民主政治产生的经济基础

美国的资产阶级政治制度是十分典型的,而且产生得早。十七世纪初,北美殖民地还在草创时期,就出现了以代议制和移民自治团体为标志的资产阶级民主共和制的雏型。为什么资产阶级的民主政治竟能在北美殖民地首先出现呢?它产生的社会经济条件又是什么呢?这是个很值得研究的历史课题。它对于我们是有着深刻的实际意义的。     

比较研究中的陷阱--评劳拉·霍斯泰特勒《清朝殖民地事业》

近年来的西方中国学研究纷纷致力于以后现代主义、后殖民主义、中国中心论等视角来瓦解从前居统治地位的西方中心视角,目前又流行互动比较的视角,而且偏爱比较晚明前清与同时期欧洲的关系,但比较中总是忽略中国历史的连续性和整体性。美国学者霍斯泰特勒的《清朝殖民地事业》一书所作的中西历史比较研究,即存在这种不足,并且这种状况在西方学者中具有明显的普遍性。     

美国革命时期南部州政府的建构——以约翰·亚当斯《关于政府的思考》为中心的考察

美国建国精英约翰·亚当斯写于革命时期的《关于政府的思考:适用于北美殖民地现状,一位绅士写给朋友的信件》(Thoughts on Government,Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies.In a Letter from a Gentleman to HisFriend,以下简称《思考》),集中表达了他对于英属北美南部殖民地建构新型政府的思考。在美国革命时期,《思考》是最具影响力的关于政府建构问题的一本小册子,成为多数殖民地建州立宪的指南。在美国历史上,《思考》是一份重要文献,无论是研究约翰·亚当斯的学者,还是探讨美国早期政治思想的史家,都无法忽略这份文献。     

试探美国南部奴隶制种植园的形成

美国南部的奴隶制种植园形成于殖民地时期。种植园最初在北美大陆出现之际,主要是指在开拓的一块土地上相对集中地生产市场所需要的大宗商品作物,它并没有特定的劳动制度。黑人奴隶制的劳动制度是在以后的发展中逐渐形成的历史特征。在以弗吉尼亚和马里兰为中心的上南部和以南卡罗来纳为代表的下南部,奴隶制种植园经历了不同的形成道路。上南部的烟草种植园在北美奴隶制种植园的形成和发展过程中占据主导地位。奴隶制种植园对美国南部近代社会经济和历史发展产生了巨大而深远的影响。     

美国早期史上的奴隶主研究

在美国历史上,奴隶主是一个生命力极强的权势集团.它历经美国早期和内战前时期美国的社会变革,同时在许多方面对美国的早期发展发挥了决定性影响.在美国独立之前,英属北美的13个殖民地都允许对黑人的奴役,各殖民地也都有奴隶主的存在.凭借着他们的经济财富和社会关系优势,奴隶主成为殖民地社会的统治阶级.在反英独立斗争和创建美国共和政体的过程中,奴隶主政治精英人物发挥了领导作用.     

美国独立战争爆发前的政治辩论及其意义

独立战争爆发前十余年间 ,北美殖民地人士针对英国的“新殖民地政策”展开激烈辩论 ,阐述殖民地反对英国政策的理由和依据 ,辩论从伸张殖民地居民的权利开始 ,逐步发展到否认英国对北美的宗主权 ,为谋求独立制造思想舆论 ,为进行革命寻找理论根据。通过这场辩论 ,北美居民对殖民地的地位和命运的认识更为清醒 ,维护自由和争取独立的信念逐渐明确 ,《独立宣言》的理论思路和逻辑框架已具雏形 ;欧洲的政治哲学在辩论中转化为北美民众的常识 ,初步形成了独具特色的美国政治自由主义     

卡罗来纳殖民地创建史探微

卡罗来纳殖民地的创建是英属北美十三个殖民地发展史上的重要里程碑,在整个美国殖民地时期历史上具有典型意义。 (一) 卡罗来纳殖民地系今美国南卡罗来纳州和北卡罗来纳州的前身,它是斯图亚特王朝时期英国人在新大陆建立的第一块业主殖民地。值得注意的是,与马里兰、纽约等殖民地不同,卡罗来纳殖民地是英王查理二世对其8位宠臣或朋友即一帮大业主进行集体性赐封的结果     

英属北美殖民地的契约奴役制度

在英属北美殖民地的历史上,白人契约奴役制度占据着相当重要的地位。契约奴作为北美早期欧洲移民的主体和穷动力的重要来源,在开发和建设北美各殖民地的过程中,作出了不可磨灭的贡献,在美国早期的经济、政治、社会及文化等的各个方面无不打下了他们的烙印,对美国历史的发展有着深远的影响。然而,对契约奴这一重要历史制度,无论是在史实     

Dialectical movements with the Toba people in the Argentine Chaco

Since 1998, I have undertaken fieldwork with the Indigenous peoples of the Argentine Chaco, focusing initially on their dances and embodied practices. After this ethnographic research, I began to think more deeply about the relationships between fieldwork and reflexivity and the possibilities of redefining analytical categories in the global South. The purpose of this article is to revisit my emphasis on a ‘dialectical approach to embodiment’ as a starting point for analysing cultural transformation in Latin America. I argue that this methodological approach has been closely linked to the interweaving of conflicting embodied experiences and peripheral geopolitical locations. In this regard I analyse how the contradictory experiences identified in my fieldwork with the Toba people, and also in my intersubjective and geopolitical positions as a Latin American academic woman, led me to a critical re-examination of dialectics. Further, I describe how this methodological approach, while well received among Latin American scholars has to some degree been resisted by (North) American and British scholars, and I explore the geopolitical implications of these disparate academic positions. Through these critical movements, I hope to contribute to rethinking dialectics in postcolonial contexts, adding some embodied voices from the Latin American South.     

Reactionary modernism: Technology,culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich

Scholarship on European imperialism in the Americas has become increasingly prominent in the historiography of early America after a long period when the subject was hardly discussed. Historians have come to see that local experience in the Americas needs to be placed in a wider, comparative Atlantic context. They have realised that what united most peoples’ experiences in the Americas was that they lived as colonial subjects within colonies that were part of imperial polities. This article examines recent writings on European empires in the Americas, relating imperial history to related developments in fields such as Atlantic history. It suggests that renewed attention to imperialism allows historians to discuss in a fruitful fashion the relationship between power and authority in the formation of colonial societies and draws attention to the continuing importance of metropolitan influence in the articulation of colonial identities.     

Gender,Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth‐Century Anglo‐Caribbean World

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo‐Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth‐century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio‐sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.     

Views from the “South”: Intellectual Hegemony and Postmodernism in Latin America

Euroamerican scholars mark Latin America as a site of utopian revolutions, foreign intervention, troubled economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm of development. Four recent books critically assess this construction by addressing its source in the international imaginary. They advocate a subaltern perspective on colonial difference and argue that postmodernity as promulgated by Euroamerican scholars may become yet another intellectual trend ignorant of Latin America's particularities and complexities. Latin American scholars have embraced postmodernity far longer than their Euroamerican counterparts, whose relatively recent applications remain problematic.     

Vocabularies of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: The North American Fur-Trade and the Imperial World

This article examines the particular work that languages of slavery and abolition did in British North American fur-trade territories with an eye to comparing these histories with those of slavery and anti-slavery in Australia. Temporally, it focuses on the two decades following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and geographically it examines the parts of northwestern North America claimed by Britain and administered by the Hudson's Bay Company. Here traders, missionaries and critics wrote of slavery and anti-slavery in the fur-trade in ways that repeated metropolitan patterns but were also arguably distinct, and certainly merit our attention. In British fur-trade space, vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery provided language for the particular unfreedom of Indigenous people, the experience of indentured migrant labourers, and the political arrangements of colonial space. Seeing how the vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery tracked through different colonial spaces reminds us of the uneven and intertwined histories that cut across and through the nineteenth-century world.     

Have tropical Africa's nationalisms continued imperialism's world revolution by other means?

Many scholars argue that European imperialism shaped today's tropical Africa, for better or worse. Some imperial historians see the British empire as a fertile capitalist pioneer, kindling class‐conscious, national, politics overseas. Economists of differing persuasions can see it, to the contrary, as the engineer of an underdevelopment that strangles popular sovereignty. Together with most Africanist historians, this article doubts that Europe had such creative or destructive power; British rule, among others, had to respond as much to African history as to metropolitan will. Anti‐colonial nationalisms, in turn, were neither class not ideological vanguards but regional coalitions. Nation‐building thereafter was an elusive aim, steered by minority visions imperfectly seen and widely disputed, from capitalism to socialism. All these complexities rest, it is widely argued, on the historic difficulty of exercising power in what was until recently an underpopulated continent with openly available resources.     

Transitions in the Ottoman Waqf’s traditional building upkeep and maintenance system in Cyprus during the British colonial era (1878–1960) and the emergence of selective architectural conservation practices

How did the Waqf, a widespread Islamic historic institution in the non-Western world which promoted traditional building upkeep and maintenance systems, cope with the emerging architectural conservation understandings of the modern era? How did colonial transfers of knowledge, expertise and political considerations influence these systems? The present study explores these questions by examining the case of the Ottoman Waqf (Evkaf) institution in Cyprus. By collecting and analysing archival evidence on conservation projects, initiated during the British colonial period between 1878 and 1960, a model framework of initiation, authorisation and implementation processes of the upkeep of the Waqf maintained properties has been identified. This framework has been used to show the transitional role of the colonial influence at different stages, which finally led to the dissolution of the Waqf system’s sustainable elements, and initiated the emergence of selective architectural conservation practices. By shifting the focus of conservation discourses to look specifically into the background dynamics of the institutional practice, a new argument has been developed. This revealed how heritage conservation practices are negotiated with the existing institutions and how they are transferred and/or transformed at different levels of institutional governance.     

Working/Touring the Past: Latin American Identity and the Political Frustration of Heritage

This article explores the pervasive impact of the pre-Hispanic past on contemporary Latin American identity, using the Ecuadorian Indian movement and the Yucatacan town of Izamal as two symbolic sites where many of these factors vie for official recognition. Therefore, the central topic of this article is also an essential element of the debate contained within the global development discourse: How is it possible for Latin American to face the constant onslaught of powerful North America and European iconic images and not in some way embody its own inherent internalized forms of colonial oppression?     

Brown Britain: post‐colonial politics and grand strategy

How do we approach the subject of British grand strategy today? This article seeks a new approach to this question. It argues that there is a gap of grand strategic significance between actually‐existing Britain and the Britain its political elites tend to imagine. The colonial and imperial histories that helped constitute and still shape the contemporary United Kingdom have fallen through this gap. One consequence is a grand strategic vision limited to a choice of partner in decline—Europe or the US. Overlooked are the power political potentialities of post‐colonial generations situated in multiple sites at home and abroad. In search of this potential, we lay the conceptual basis for a strategic project in which the British ‘island subject’ is replaced by a globally networked community of fate: ‘Brown Britain’. This entails reimagining the referent object of British strategy through diaspora economies, diverse histories and pluralized systems of agency. What might such a post‐colonial strategy entail for British policy? We offer initial thoughts and reflect on the often occluded social and political theoretic content of strategic thought.     

When is a Nation not a Nation? The Crisis of American Nationality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract. The United States of America is conspicuous by its absence from most studies of nations and nationalism. The reasons for this omission are essentially twofold: America is a ‘nation of immigrants’, and therefore clearly lacks the ethnic homogeneity that sustains many modern European nations; more importantly, the focus, the core of the American nation has, since the late-nineteenth century, become obscured as American society has continued to diversify and expand. In those studies which do examine the American case, an over-concentration on the colonial and revolutionary periods has led both scholars of nationalism and historians of the United States to miss the most crucial period in the development of the American nation, the early to mid-nineteenth century. Evidence is offered here that this period witnessed an identifiable process of ‘nation building’. In order to demonstrate this, the period 1854 through 1856 has been isolated for particular attention, since those years witnessed the emergence of a new political party, the Republicans, whose ideology and rhetoric were aggressively national, yet whose appeal was essentially sectional.