Performing Inequality in Mediterranean Diplomacy

Abstract

Early modern Mediterranean diplomacy was marked by multiple and contrasting claims to superiority which derived from competing normative orders. These practices are the focus of the first part of this paper, which shows how claims to superiority were performed in the practice of diplomacy and how stable and pacific relations could be maintained within a context of competing normative orders. Instead of privileging the religious divide between Islam and Christianity, the paper suggests that a better understanding of how multiple universalisms interacted with each other in practice may better explain the apparently paradoxical durability of pacific relations between Muslim and Christian rulers in the wider Mediterranean area of the early modern period. The second part reframes the transformations in Franco-Tunisian diplomatic practice from the late eighteenth century onward within the context of a global history of growing imbalances. The espousal of definitions of sovereignty derived from the European ius gentium to the exclusion of all others led to a redefinition of who had the rights and honors to engage in foreign relations. The early modern pluralism evolved into an increasingly unequal bipolarity, finally resulting in the economic, military and symbolic predominance of allegedly ‘civilized’ European powers over the ‘uncivilized’ rest.     

Absent husbands, single wives: success, domesticity, and seminuclear families in the nineteenth-century Great Lakes world

The industrial and transportation revolutions of nineteenth-century America separated work from home (at least for the growing middle class) and intensified the development of masculine and feminine spheres devoted to success and domesticity, respectively. This development tended to reduce the husband's traditional patriarchal roles to that of provider only, while leaving the wife and mother with enhanced authority over household management and child rearing, a development with consequences for feminism. This article examines two extreme cases of separation of work from home: absent husbands, respected professional men, who left their wives alone for months or years and, while they provided financial support, surrendered all household authority to "single" wives.     

Environmental history in the Mediterranean world: cross-disciplinary investigation of cause-and-effect for degradation and soil erosion

Environmental history is a multidisciplinary enterprise united by shared interests in ecological change and the complex interactions between people and the environment. Its practitioners include expertise in the natural sciences, in history or archaeology, or in political ecology and related social sciences; but there is no agreement on a common agenda and limited success in bridging methodological and epistemological divisions that impede integrative and interdisciplinary research. World-systems history and environmental history also have overlapping interests in long-term change and matters of sustainability. The Mediterranean world sustained agricultural lifeways across some 8000 years, yet its environment has repeatedly been described as degraded, suggesting conceptual confusion between transformation and destruction. This paper is didactic in purpose and uses landscape histories for the Peloponnese and eastern Spain to show that the impact of recurrent, excessive precipitation events and of reduced quality of land cover are difficult to unravel, because they commonly appear to work in tandem. As a result (a) environmental change cannot be assumed or “predicted”, but must be studied inductively by experts with science skills, and (b) cause-and-effect relationships demand an understanding of ecological behavior, for which humanistic insights are indispensable. Social science models highlight systemic relationships from socioeconomic and structural perspectives, but are less suited to deal with the complexity of environmental change or the contingencies exemplified by human resilience. Near Eastern, Greek and Roman agronomic writings offer elite “voices” that speak to cumulative technological change, scientific understanding, and the context of intensification. Rural voices can be heard through ethnography, and in eastern Spain are extended into the past by archaeology and archival research. In the absence of structural constraints, they reveal collective decision-making with respect to a shifting repertoire of agricultural strategies that take into account market opportunities, demographic growth, finite resources and environmental problems. Such adaptability spells resilience, and “good farming” is culturally embedded as a civic responsibility, both in the ethnographic present and in the older, elite agronomic writings. But if the “moral economy” erodes in the wake of food stress, tax extortion, instability, insecurity, or ideological oppression, there is little incentive to pursue long-term strategies, so that behavior focuses on short-term survival. The context for this dialectic of poor versus good ecological management may be structural, but cause-and-effect in the traditional Mediterranean world ultimately depended on ecological and human resilience. Long-term sustainability is similarly non-predictive. It depends on people, rather than social theory.     

War and Diplomacy in the Middle East

Book reviewed in this article: The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992, James A. Baker, III, with Thomas M. DeFrank The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait: Saddam Hussein, his state and International Power Politics, Mussallam Ali Musallam     

News wire services in the nineteenth-century United States

News wire services were established in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century to gather and distribute news for local newspapers, using the new technology of the telegraph. With that early beginning in the era of electronic communication, the expansion of news wire services spans the change from a society of local communities to a more nationally integrated society. This paper assesses the importanceof changes in the medium's spatial organization which promoted national culture. The first wire services were local, ad hoc groups, organized to achieve greater efficiency in news-gathering. Formal services were first organized on a local basis, but in 1848 they began to sell news to the major urbanized portions of the United States. As the nation grew, the desire for greater efficiency conflicted with the desire for greater autonomy. Regional wire services persisted from the 1860s to the 1880s but after the 1880s, a tenuous national organization was achieved, cementing itself into a national system after the turn of the century. Efficiency in news collection was the primary reason for the increasing scale of news collecting groups. Each step toward larger spatial coverage, fed the growth of a complex interdependent urban system.     

Determinants of divorce in nineteenth-century Flanders

In 1830, the year Belgium became independent, there were four divorces in Belgium. From about 1870 to 1910, there were about one hundred divorces per year, and since 1910, there have been about 1,000. The aim of this research is to investigate the factors that played a role in the increase in the number of divorces in Belgium in the course of the nineteenth century. The research relates to information from four Flemish municipalities for the period 1800-1913. Results indicate that an explanation of the rising divorce rate can be sought in the psychological and social consequences of the more pronounced shift in marriage, gender and family expectations. Increasing numbers of women threw themselves more and more into their gender-specific expressive gender role, whereas the objective opportunities and attainability of this role did not increase commensurately. The result was role strain: high marriage and family expectations soon come up against intrinsic limitations. As a result of this, both individual and general frustration increased, and this was an ideal social substratum for facilitating divorce.