WHAT'S WRONG WITH ECONOMIC HISTORY?

In this polemical book, Francesco Boldizzoni argues that economic history is so moribund as to require resurrection. He maintains that economic history has been converted into a subfield of economics and has embraced the antihistorical and a priori intellectual style of mainstream economics departments: it has, in effect, ceased to be a form of history. Boldizzoni hopes to force a recognition of contemporary economic history's bankruptcy and to show the way toward a revitalization. He criticizes both economic history as retrospective econometrics, as in the work of Robert Fogel, and economic history as a branch of the new institutional economics, as in the work of Douglas North. Boldizzoni suggests that economic history should return to the sort of research and models that prevailed earlier in its own history—models based on induction from observed economic life rather than on deduction from the theories of contemporary microeconomics. He particularly singles out the work of Witold Kula, Moses Finley, and the Annales historians for emulation, but also praises the perspectives of economic sociology and economic anthropology. Boldizzoni's call for a return to a more inductive form of economic history is welcome, and his discussions of his heroes should remind us that economic history was once a vibrant and creative part of the history profession. But the book's advice is more useful for historians working on premodern than on modern economic life. The claim that self‐governing markets and interest‐maximizing individual actors are pure figments of economists' imaginations seems far less certain for recent than for premodern times. And his insistence that each society has its own distinct form of economic life that must be discovered inductively leaves unconceptualized the world‐spanning forces of capitalist development that increasingly shape societies everywhere. Boldizzoni's critique and his positive suggestions are certainly valuable, but he by no means supplies a sufficient recipe for economic history's resurrection as a vibrant field.     

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.     

WHAT'S IN A PLACE? AN APPROACH TO THE CONCEPT OF PLACE,AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE BRITISH NATIONAL UNION OF MINEWORKERS' STRIKE, 1984–85

There have been several calls in recent years for a revival of regional geography, focusing on the individuality of places and their roles as contexts within which social structuration occurs. As yet, little has been written about the ways in which such work can be undertaken, providing a framework for the study of places that both emphasises their individuality and sets them in the context of social theory. Using the example of a particular event, the 1984–85 National Union of Mineworkers' strike in Great Britain, and the individuality of one place during that event, this essay provides an initial framework for defining the nature of a place.     

A NEW ORIENTALISM?

Jean-Louis Schefer's study takes as its point of departure Uccello's predella, Profanation of the Host. The painting in question has generally been interpreted within the context of medieval anti-Semitism. However, Schefer argues that the meaning of the work, and of numerous other representations of this particular miracle, must be referred ultimately to the codification by Charlemagne of the dogma of the Real Presence. Uccello's painting in effect makes manifest the requirement that the profaned host should reveal its nature through the gushing of blood. This also involves a political significance, since the Carolingian theology organized around the consecrated host stands in direct opposition to the Byzantine theology of the icon. Schefer's argument leads him to make a thorough investigation not only of the many iconographic precedents, but also of some key Latin texts such as the Libri Carolini , which are published in a French translation. It also advances a methodology that is strikingly at variance with some of the more simple-minded attempts of historians to crack the codes of a complex visual tradition. One of its most original aspects is the new light that the overall thesis casts upon extremely well-known texts like The Merchant of Venice and Dracula. Thus the tendency to identify vampirism as an East European phenomenon, already discernible in Western sources in the eighteenth century, is shown to be closely linked to the historical extension of the myth of Profanation of the Host. In exploring the outcomes of this doctrinal split between East and West, Schefer has identified a deep fault-line in post-antique European history whose consequences are far from being understood at the present day.     

A Christian Islamist?

Abstract

In this review, the author discusses Volf’s paradigm from an Islamic perspective, and compares and contrasts some of Volf’s assertions with those of his avowed counterpart: the Muslim fundamentalist Syed Qutb. Some interesting questions are raised, and the differences between these two paradigms, it is claimed, is not as great as what might initially appear.     

MIGRATION AND THE WELL-BEING OF THE ‘LEFT BEHIND’ IN ASIA

This paper serves as an introduction to the three substantive papers in this themed section on the impact of migration on the well-being of the ‘left behind’ in Asia. In the light of recent migration trends such as the ‘feminization’ of migration and ‘brain-drain’ of health workers in the region, the paper provides a brief review of the existing scholarly literature on the vulnerability of different groups of the 'left behind’, particularly women, children and the elderly. It argues that a multi-dimensional approach is needed, taking into consideration not only the economic impact of remittances but also factors such as social networks and gender effects.