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.     

试论美国奴隶制时期的黑人家庭

生活在美国奴隶制下的黑人奴隶被看作主人的财产,其婚姻和家庭没有法律保障,但黑人在特殊的生存环境中并未放弃这种最基本的权利,他们建立了属于自己的家庭生活并形成了奴隶制度下特有的家庭观念。黑人在家庭中找到一种群体归宿感和个体身份,家庭生活是黑人奴隶在奴役和剥削下得以生存的重要策略。     

Pedigree and productivity in the British and North American cattle kingdoms before 1930

The origin of the concepts of breed and pedigree in cattle in late eighteenth-century Britain, and the circumstances of their translation to north America are examined. Pedigree had a particular value to north American importers and was more widely adopted in both Britain and America for that reason. However, from the outset, competitive pressures developed which owed little to performance as measured in beef or milk. The descendants of early importations of improved but unpedigreed Shorthorn cattle were stigmatized as «unfashionable» while other bloodlines, particularly those descended from the stock of British breeder Thomas Bates, gained the attention and the premiums associated with fashion. The «fancy» thus attracted both north American and British enthusiasts, but with different results. As in Britain, fashionable pedigrees were acquired as positional, non-material goods within a general environment of speculative excess, though with less serious consequences for the overall performance of north American livestock agriculture. There appear to have been two reasons for this. First, north America had no equivalent to the British landlord–tenant system, which encouraged the wider dissemination to the productive sector of costly cattle with indifferent productivity credentials. Second, and more important, in north America the «fancy» and those who promoted it acted as a stimulus to a different kind of boosterism, which promoted competing breeds of cattle on the basis of productivity. Though breed boosters had less success in the dairy than in the beef sector, the net outcome was the more constructive application of pedigree to productivity in north America than in Britain.     

英法对北美整体性的认可与美利坚民族的形成

殖民地内部的整体意识乃美利坚民族形成的先决条件。本文作者通过仔细研读相关的历史文献 ,考察并比较了从“七年战争”结束到 1 789年法国大革命期间英法两国对北美整体意识的促进作用。尽管英国政府和英国民众强烈反对北美的独立运动 ,但英国政府法令的颁布方式、颁布对象、措辞以及英国民众的冷漠态度 ,从客观上刺激了殖民地的整体意识与独立意识。而法国政府与法国民众则出于历史因素、战略考虑以及国内社会文化形势而对北美独立运动给予了热情支持 ,并在法国和欧洲其他地区塑造了美利坚民族崭新而独特的形象。英国的作用因此是客观间接的 ,法国的作用则是主动直接的。     

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。     

The Canadian Rebellion,the American South,and Slavery

ABSTRACT

In the past few decades, thanks in large part to the work of several historians that appears in my edited collection, Revolutions Across Borders: Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion (2019), there is a growing trend to consider the Canadian Rebellion within an American historical and historiographical context. Despite this exciting new research, most studies on the Rebellion and the United States continue to focus on the northern borderland. However, the Canadian Rebellion was a significant event that gained attention all over the United States, including the American South. Similar to the North, the American South was also invested in the outcome of the Rebellion. This was due to one reason: slavery. By specifically focusing on the American South and, more importantly, its influence on American foreign policy during the period, I want to encourage historians to take a more definitive stance; that slavery—just like the Panic of 1837, the Anglo-American rapprochement of thepost-War-of-1812 period, or the fear of British retaliation—played a major role in the United States Government’s official opposition to the Rebellion.     

The Exact Men of the North from Tool Makers to Historians

Abstract

This account of northern social scientists, historians, and machine-tool and astronomical instrument makers carries forward the author's construction of an intellectual profile of the North of England in previous articles. Principally by analysing entries in relevant biographical dictionaries, the author has demonstrated that northerners of distinction have been disproportionately numerous among 'men of science' in general and machine-tool engineers and astronomical instrument makers in particular, and — at least since the eighteenth century — among musicians and historians. Astronomical instrument makers and machine-tool engineers were above all exact men; so were the 'new' (scientific) historians like Stubbs and Mandell Creighton who followed the research methods of Leopold von Ranke; while the musicians produced in symphonies and oratorios exactly dovetailed, multi-layered structures of sound. A distinction is drawn between two forms of exactness: one of 'correspondence', the other of 'coherence'. The contrasted social contexts in which they are likely to arise are discussed. Musicians and historians (whose exactness lay in 'coherence') were big-city men; astronomical and mathematical instrument makers were more likely to have come down from the hills. The final result: the North was strongly represented in the front ranks of the nation's historians, mechanical engineers, and musicians; with only weak representation in the foremost ranks of social scientists and imaginative writers.     

试论美国工业化的起源

学术界对于美国工业化起源的一般说法是:由于拿破仑战争的影响和向西部的开拓带来东部农业和商业的衰退,引起商业资本向制造业转移.本文在借鉴原工业化理论的基础上试图指出:美国从奠基时代开始,就与世界上最先进的国家站在了同一个起跑线上.建国以后,它在殖民地时期所奠定的工场手工业的基础上,又积极借鉴英国的先进技术,利用东部繁荣的农业所带来的旺盛的市场需求,结合当地的实际情况,走上了一条越来越远离英国的工业化发展道路.     

美国史学界关于美国建国初期商业组织的研究

美国建国初期的商业组织不仅推动了经济发展,而且对社会民主化进程产生了重要影响。在过去一百多年间,美国史学界涌现出众多研究美国建国初期商业组织的论著。美国史学家围绕商业组织的政策制度、思想意识以及商业组织发展中的社会冲突展开讨论。随着研究的不断深入,学者们将商业组织的发展转变看做一个综合体,涉及社会各层面与领域的因素。在这个意义上,经济史变成了政治史和社会史。政治精英的态度、大股东活动与平民百姓生活都融入商业组织发展转变的叙述中,展现了一个时代的发展。