The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.     

“Half Bacchanalian,Half Devout”: White Intellectuals,Black Folk Culture,and the “Negro Problem”

In the wake of the Civil War, white Americans generated an unprecedented amount of writing about the songs, stories, and “superstitions” of black southerners. This interest was not purely esthetic. In the late nineteenth century, folk culture was commonly conceptualized as a gauge of racial character and potential; in consequence, discourse on black folklore was entangled with the debate on the social and political place of African Americans. A number of scholars have noted the ways in which white supremacy was bulwarked by the work of folklorists, ethnologists, local color writers, and other intellectuals. The variety and contingency of this discourse on race, however, has sometimes been obscured, giving the impression of a static and monolithic racial ideology. Ideas about black folk culture shifted over time, shaped by a range of racial attitudes encompassing a liberal emphasis on uplift, a conservative commitment to stasis, and a radical insistence on regression. Moreover, the racial politics of intellectuals determined not only the ways in which they represented black folk culture, but also the particular cultural forms about which they wrote. Thus, while the Christian content of the “spirituals” suited the agenda of liberal reformers, the supposedly sinister figure of the conjure doctor complemented radical discourse on dangerous racial degeneration.     

Slavery in black and white: the racialisation of (male) slavery in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and/vs. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

This article revisits Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative as illustrative of the ‘birth’ of whiteness as ideology and, in particular, of the subordination of class to race interests in antebellum America. To do so, it compares Douglass’s text to Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), which traces the origins of the slave trade back to the seventeenth century, when American slavery was not fully ‘racialised’ yet. While Morrison focuses on the earliest stage of the increasing (class) animosity among different types of servants and slaves, black and white, Douglass’s nineteenth-century Narrative already reveals the explicitly racialised association of human bondage with non-whiteness. I argue that Morrison’s novel may thus be interpreted as a ‘prequel’ to Douglass, whose Narrative illustrates the increasing racialisation of slavery throughout the nineteenth century, but also elaborates on its class and gender biases. In this sense, the essay concludes that Douglass shows how the assertion by white workers, especially males, of their racial and gender supremacy over both black men and women entailed, paradoxically enough, their class subjugation, which, if not in form, ended up transforming them into virtual ‘slaves’.     

„Fremde Körperwelten”︁. Russische Anthropologie und Medizin im kolonialen Diskurs des ausgehenden Zarenreiches

?Exotic Bodies”?: Russian Anthropology and Medicine in the Colonial Discours of Late Imperial Russia. In the nineteenth century Russian anthropologists adopted Western theories on the biological superiority of the white man in order to justify Russian colonization at the Asiatic periphery. After the Great Reforms the imperial process of acculturation was discussed in the context of modernization that also touched the institutionalization of colonial medicine. Whereas Russian armchair anthropologists were operating with racial idioms, physicians as practitioners on the colonial spot were not receptive to the ideology of “white man's burden”. From experience with the socioeconomic backwardness of Russia's Asiatic periphery physicians stood up for the vital rights of the indigenous population in the colonial Public Health. With deep respect for indigenous medicine Russian physicians were not advocates of Russian colonial expansion and racial discrimination that made them different to their Western colleagues. On the basis of Russian nineteenth century medical literature and Siberian archival sources this paper outlines the critical reflections of Russian physicians on Tsarist colonialism     

Progress before modernization: Foreign interpretations of American development in James Bryce's generation

This essay considers how observers from various national backgrounds explained the late nineteenth‐century United States as a developing nation. Outsiders often portrayed American industrialization, urbanization, corporate capitalism, and similar modernizing trends as manifestations of transnational forces that would eventually reshape their own countries, but they also stressed ways that American development diverged from what was taking place at home. The evolutionary mindset that infused many of these writers ‐ law professor and politician James Bryce being a noteworthy example ‐ encouraged them to view the ‘progress’ of the United States as a product of Darwinian adaptation and variation. The enormous territory and resources held by the United States supposedly rewarded and reinforced the aggressive, enterprising qualities of Anglo‐American culture, which facilitated emergence of a distinctive American civilization. Racial thinking thus pervades these accounts. Nevertheless, they draw attention to ways that environment, resources, and regional dynamics ‐ factors often overlooked in the modernization framework normally applied by historians to this so‐called Gilded Age ‐ drove and molded American development.     

American Presbyterians,Freedmen's Missions,and the Nile Valley: Missionary History,Racial Orders,and Church Politics on the World Stage

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American Presbyterian “home” and “foreign” missions developed parallel and mutually reinforcing policies towards freed slaves in Egypt, Sudan, and the U.S.A. as well as towards Egypt's indigenous Christians, the Copts. Yet the racial ideologies and social hierarchies of these three countries reflected distinct historical trajectories of migration and conquest. In the Nile Valley, American missionaries struggled to understand, address, and sometimes revise Egyptian and Sudanese social hierarchies, which they found alternately idiosyncratic or unjust. This essay conjectures that these interactions, in the long run, induced the Nile Valley missionaries to confront the lingering injustices and incongruities in American social hierarchies, particularly in the mid‐ to late twentieth century. In this way, the “foreign” mission experience had a backflow for missionaries and their church by raising questions about American racial orders and by strengthening a commitment to civil rights and social justice agendas.     

Idylls of the piney woods: health and race in southeastern Louisiana, 1878–1956

Scholars have investigated the important connections between racial identity, geography, and environment. Frequently these studies have focused on the location of noxious industries, questions of environmental justice, or segregation of racialized groups in areas of deleterious environmental conditions. In this paper, I argue that beneficial environmental conditions can also be closely tied with racial identity and that racial identity in turn can influence perceptions of the environment. These connections are evident in southern Louisiana—specifically St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. St. Tammany Parish, located in the piney woods of southeastern Louisiana, served as a health resort for New Orleanians seeking refuge from yellow fever and for other Americans attempting to restore their health. Residents and medical specialists understood the healthful qualities of the parish to emanate from the fragrance of the pine trees and the restorative waters. St. Tammany Parish's reputation for health, however, only applied to people with a white racial identity, despite the fact that St. Tammany Parish had a significant black population. White residents within the parish reserved tuberculosis sanitaria, health clinics, and access to natural springs for white patrons only, even amid fears concerning illness among black residents. Additionally, late nineteenth and early twentieth century medical specialists pointed to morality, criminality, and racial characteristics in their determination of the causes of illness.     

Unsightly urban menaces and the rescaling of residential segregation in the United States

In this article, the author uses a slum clearance project in Lexington, Kentucky, as a lens through which to examine the spatial dynamics of racial residential segregation during the first half of the twentieth century. At the time, urban migration and upward socioeconomic mobility on the part of African Americans destabilized extant residential segregation patterns. Amid this instability, various spatial practices were employed in the interest of maintaining white social and economic supremacy. The author argues that such practices were indicative of a thoroughgoing reinvention of urban socio-spatial order that in turn precipitated the vastly expanded scale of residential segregation still found in U.S. cities today. Evidence of this reinvented ordering of urban space lies in the rendering of some long-standing African American neighborhoods as “out of place” within it and the use of slum clearance to remove the “menace” such neighborhoods posed to it.     

Spirometry, measurement, and race in the nineteenth century

Race correction is a common practice in contemporary pulmonary medicine that involves mathematical adjustment of lung capacity measurements in populations designated as "black" using standards derived largely from populations designated as "white." This article traces the history of the racialization and gendering of spirometry through an examination of the ideas and practices related to lung capacity measurements that circulated between Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. Lung capacity was first conceptualized as a discrete entity of potential use in the diagnosis of pulmonary disease and monitoring of the vitality of the armed forces and other public servants in spirometric studies conducted in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. The spirometer was then imported to the United States and used to measure the capacity of the lungs in a large study of black and white soldiers in the Union Army sponsored by the U.S. Sanitary Commission at the end of the Civil War. Despite contrary findings and contestation by leading black intellectuals, the notion of mean differences between racial groups in the capacity of the lungs became deeply entrenched in the popular and scientific imagination in the nineteenth century, leaving unexamined both the racial categories deployed to organize data and the conditions of life that shape lung function.     

The longue durée of the Human Terrain: Politics,cultural knowledge and the technical fix

The recent end of the Human Terrain System run by the US Army has brought to a close one of the most recent insidious challenges to the field of anthropology. But while the anthropological elements of the programme have been well documented, and contested, its historical roots have not. The HTS and cultural knowledge apparatus of the American defence establishment draw deeply upon the wells of British scholar administrators of the nineteenth century. Of particular importance, especially in regard to Afghanistan, is Mountstuart Elphinstone who published the foundational text about the country, An account of the Kingdom of Kabul, 200 years ago. But unlike the HTS and similar programmes run by other Western governments which treat culture as a kind of technical aspect of governance, Elphinstone appreciated the importance ‐ and legitimacy ‐ of local politics.     

For What Are Whites to Hope?

Before directly addressing the titular question, this chapter examines how conceptions of hope often lead us astray, reaffirming rather than challenging the status quo. In analytic philosophy, hope is often understood as a desire that is not entirely justified with reasons. In critical theory, hope has recently been looked upon suspiciously, as an affect the circulation of which is intensified by neoliberal economics. In mid-twentieth-century German theology and theory, hope is viewed as entirely other-worldly. In liberation theology, the object of hope is identification with the poor. This article argues that each of these views produces antinomies, and each of these views ends up perpetuating the status quo: in a racial context, white supremacy. After exploring the antinomies of hope, the article urges that whites are to embrace these antinomies. They are to hope for despair.     

‘The Colonial Children Cry’: Jo the Crossing-Sweep Goes to the Colonies

In this article I explore the affective power of Charles Dickens's character Jo, the crossing-sweep from his novel Bleak House, and his broader cultural significance. Contemporary audiences were deeply moved by Jo's tragic death, sparking a vast popular, and especially visual, culture around the homeless white child. Yet, by establishing an affective and moral opposition between white waif and black ‘heathen’, in a relationship Dickens termed ‘telescopic philanthropy’, audiences were directed to care about the white poor with the inference that black people were not a proper object of compassion. Jo's touching story circulated widely across the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, and was put to work in transmitting inherited British values and making sense of local political and social circumstances. By the late nineteenth century the emotional regime symbolized by Jo the crossing-sweep effectively consolidated racial exclusions.     

Whose Streets? Roadway Protests and Weaponised Automobility

The article examines the role of automobility in US-based anti-racism demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. We contrast the spatial strategies of highway occupations by racial justice activists, with so-called “weaponised car” attacks by the American far right. Analysing online memes and anti-protest legislation, the article explores under-acknowledged links between “automobile supremacy”—the structure of motorists' privilege as embedded in law, the built environment and the popular imaginary—and the patterns of racial stratification often termed “white supremacy”. We document three ways in which automobility has been enlisted as means of violence against protestors and against wider Black communities in the US: through the use of vehicles, right-of-way conventions, and roadways as weapons. The article demonstrates how the imperative to make way for the motorist has long provided cover for racial injustice.     

From Evangelizing to Modernizing Iranians: The American Presbyterian Mission and its Iranian Students1

This article examines the American Presbyterian education project in Iran from the early nineteenth century to 1940. While most literature on the subject concerns Iranian state-missionary relations and Presbyterian boys' schools in Iran, this article seeks to address the interactions between American Presbyterians, the Iranian state, and students and families of Iranian girls' schools. A study of the Presbyterians' flagship girls' school in Iran Bethel/Nurbakhsh and its sixty-six-year history reveals missionary intentions, tactics, and accomplishments, as well as the adaptations and accommodations pressed upon them by the Iranians they served. Despite the school's promotion of modern American norms and Christian teachings, the young graduates of Iran Bethel/Nurbakhsh developed a strong sense of loyalty to both Iran and Islam, thus turning an evangelist mission into an important feature of the construction of Iranian nationalism and modernity.     

Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916.     

Mapping the Contours of Race: Griffith Taylor's Zones and Strata Theory

This article explores the ways in which cartography served as a tool to reinforce racial divisions in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century race science. Racial and anthropometric mapping was an endeavour in which both European and new world anthropologists and geographers were involved. The focus here is on the work of Thomas Griffith Taylor – regarded as one of the founders of modern geography in Australia – who deployed a number of cartographic techniques to reinforce his racial theorisations. This article explores Taylor's ‘zones and strata’ portrayal of racial evolution, and other geological‐ style maps of racial difference. These representations are investigated from two standpoints. Firstly, Taylor's theories are situated within the wider context of the Victorian tradition of classifying race, a tradition where physical race type was often correlated with moral and intellectual traits, and which was supported by the acceptance of environmental determinism within geographical circles. Secondly, his maps are considered from the perspective that, as J.B. Harley has argued, maps are social texts that contain power and, as such, can be deconstructed. Taylor's cartographic representations resulted from the manipulation of the internal elements of the map text, such as shading and projection, and were supported by the widely held belief that human racial groups could be delineated through physical anthropometry.     

Hume,Bishop Butler,and the Revival of Ritual in Anglophone Protestantism

A sweeping reassessment of the role of ritual, ceremony, and aesthetics took place in anglophone Protestantism between the late eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries. While the nineteenth‐century developments themselves have been extensively studied, little scholarly attention has been paid to the importance of the earlier emergence of philosophical language capable of explaining and justifying, in a Protestant context, the ritual and aesthetic dimensions of religious practice. I argue that this language, paradoxically, grew out of a symbiosis of sceptical modernity, traditional religious apologetics, and the religious “enthusiasm” of the early eighteenth century. I approach the topic through the interconnected oeuvres (and careers) of David Hume and Joseph Butler, presenting the first synoptic account of their ideas about the psychological underpinnings of religious worship, and the use made of their ideas by later generations of anglophone Protestants. As mainstream Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians confronted the challenges presented by Methodism and Evangelicalism, they found support in a synthesis of Butler's and Hume's ideas. Eventually, the beneficial role of ritual and aesthetics in religious worship came to be widely accepted throughout the anglophone Protestant world.     

From universal homogeneity to essential heterogeneity: On the visual construction of “the Lappish race”

During the second half of the nineteenth century, a radical change took place in the representation of the Saami. Whereas physical variation earlier was insignificant to cultural representation, from then on it became the very essence of their otherness. In this paper I relate the change in the representation of the Saami to the emergence of a modern discourse in which the concept of ‘race’ became central to the organization of knowledge and social practices as well as to the understanding of cultural difference. Moreover, I try to demonstrate how the “success” of the racial discourse was conditioned by new visual technologies.     

To Rid the Italian Soul of One Dark Blot: Recognising Race in White Christian Religion

This article describes white Christian missionary uses of racial imagery for assimilating early twentieth‐century immigrants into U.S. society. In early twentieth‐century America, white Methodist missionaries sought to convert Italian immigrants from so‐called “pagans” to “one hundred percent Americans” by distancing them from racial darkness. In their attempt to convert the objects of their evangelism, Methodists syncretised secular marketing and metaphorical images and trained their audiences in a racial conversion narrative. In spite of their effort to combat the racial limitations of perceived Italian darkness, missionaries' use of darkness and light metaphors in conversion narratives reinscribed a racial Manichean dualism in their missionary practices and publications.     

The Bullion Controversy and the history of political thought: experience,innovation and theory

ABSTRACT

In 1797 the British government relieved the Bank of England of the obligation to pay specie for its notes upon demand; then, after bitter debate and sustained inflation, it restored this burden in 1821. The episode is studied as the “Bullion Controversy”, and it is commonly assigned high significance in the development of monetary theory. Yet the Bank stood as an old target for so-called “country” thought, which suspected commerce of corroding virtue and undermining the proper functions of Parliament. Both the Bank and the Whig regime that created it in 1694 had withstood such attacks, but in the nineteenth century these critical voices were joined by political economists who reworked the existing lines of attack, above all by presenting themselves not as defenders of an ancient virtue but as the champions of a modern, commercial society that was being endangered by the government's and the Bank's ignorance and self-interest. This paper thus examines the Bullion Controversy in relation to the history of political thought, and reveals how the return to convertibility represented an early victory for political economy's self-styled “theorists” in reforming the state's institutions in the nineteenth century.