Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. Correspondance 1982–85

In the early modern period, the European concept of “nobility” was rarely used to describe the upper classes of the societies born in the British or in the French Americas. The presence of French nobles in New France or in the French West Indies and the emergence of the native gentry in parts of the British Empire have been much studied. But the social impact of elites has not been fully recognized by Atlantic historians—due, perhaps, to a bias towards “authentically” New World systems of social recognition based upon wealth, emphasizing supposedly greater possibilities of social mobility. This paper takes a comparative perspective to the social meanings of being a noble or being a gentleman in both empires. It concludes that there were few substantive differences between French nobles living in the metropolis and in the colonies because legal definitions of the French noblesse were strictly determined by the Crown. The essence of the French nobility was, in theory, the same in Versailles, in a remote rural parish of France or in Quebec. The story was very different for British colonial gentlemen who encountered countless difficulties to be socially accepted by their metropolitan counterparts. The paper explores the consequences of the chasm between British metropolitan and colonial upper classes and assesses solutions taken by colonial gentlemen to be fully integrated in the gentry of Great Britain.     

殖民地时期美国史研究中的若干重要问题

国内美国史学界对殖民地时期研究相对薄弱,而美国学者的研究则至为丰富。在研究中通常会遇到许多棘手的难题：如何确定殖民地时期在美国历史中的地位?如何看待不同种族和族裔群体的历史作用?如何理解英格兰文化与北美文化的关系?如何解释北美13个殖民地从分到合的变化过程?如何借鉴和利用美国学者整理的历史文献和发表的研究成果?这都是研究殖民地时期美国史所必须处理的问题。     

The intellectual origins of Leninism, 1977

This essay is a general introduction to the special number on recent research on Atlantic history. While the topics here presented are diverse, most focusing on the first French Empire, particularly in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authors share several common themes: (1) In Africa and the Americas, they seek to view the question of the Empire as a series of contested, temporary, and uncertain alliances and collaborations, in which negotiation rather than submission was most often the basis of power relations; (2) In the realm of political economy in theory and practice, the authors refuse pre-established notions of an Atlantic “community” of commodities and merchants functioning within an Atlantic “system.” Instead, they focus on closed networks of merchants functioning within the dynamics of merchant capitalism. (3) The authors seek alternatives to traditional approaches focusing on the nation-state and its institutions. Instead, they examine communities and regions in the Atlantic that include social elites, such as, merchants, the nobility, the gentry, and intellectuals, as well as neglected native peoples and forgotten spaces such as Africa.     

Spaces of Intemperance & the British Raj 1860–1920

ABSTRACT

The history of the British Empire in India is one awash with alcohol. Drinking was a common practice throughout colonial society, acting as social necessity and source of a public anxiety. However, rather than only acknowledging what and why individuals in colonial India drank, it is of equal importance to consider where they did so. Despite its ubiquity, alcohol consumption in India was responsive to the dynamics of space and place, and both the habits of drinkers and the social, military or governmental response to their actions altered greatly depending on locations individuals were able to access, and in which they consumed alcohol. This article draws focus on the spatiality of colonial drinking through an examination of key environs that characterise the British experience of India, and in which colonial Britons drank regularly. Examining published sources alongside archival material, the article argues that drinking in colonial India is rendered simultaneously private and public, personal and socially performative, as a result of the hybrid spaces in which individuals access alcohol. The culture of drinking in colonial context, and the manner through which the drinker is constantly under scrutiny makes the act of drinking as much to do with social performance as it is to do with personal taste, with space in each instance a governing influence on choice of beverage, intent, behaviour, and the perceived identity of the drinker themselves.     

‘L’île des bannis’: Jersey,Britain and the French Emigration 1789–1815

ABSTRACT

The case of the Channel Island of Jersey is an important yet understudied part of the British Empire’s response to the French Emigration 1789–1815. During its high point in 1792–3, the émigré population in and around Jersey’s main town of St Helier was as large as that in London and one of the European centres of political migration. This article explores the complicated relationship between Jersey’s political institutions, the British military authorities in London, the British government and the émigré community. It shows how a brewing humanitarian crisis in the island prompted the British government to sanction subsistence payments in Jersey and enlist Royalist émigrés months before these policies were adopted in Britain. But British support was intimately bound up with the émigrés’ anti-Revolutionary military activities, as much as humanitarian concerns. The forced expulsion of most émigrés to Britain in summer 1796 resulted not from concerns about the wellbeing of the émigré community in face of imminent French invasion, but concerns about the Royalists’ military loyalties. During the Napoleonic Wars, British policy towards the émigrés lacked coherence and was not categorized by overriding humanitarian goals, though such concerns did compete with strategic ones.     

Colonial Emulation,Competition and Opportunism: A Twentieth-Century Spanish Perspective on the British and French ‘Empire Projects’

ABSTRACT

Through the views of Francisco Franco’s major adviser on African Affairs, this paper reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the long-standing interaction between competing ‘imperial projects’ in the twentieth century. Tomás García Figueras’s (1892–1981) speeches, writings and personal archive provide a long-term and well-informed Spanish perspective on the British and French colonial systems, offering us a model to make sense of three major aspects of inter-imperial relations: emulation, competition, and opportunism. Through this insight into the dynamics of imperial interaction, and the ever-evolving dialogues and exchanges between ‘empire projects’ from around the European peninsula, this article provides some key elements to answer the long-standing question of what motivates empires to expand, adapt, or contract. It illuminates the ways in which officials engaged in the day-to-day running of European empires looked at each other, in search for examples and counter-examples, emulation or, simply, opportunities. Crucially, it illustrates how ‘empire projects’ of varying clout interacted with each other, within the limits of realpolitik but well beyond linguistic obstacles, as the multilingual material assembled in the García Figueras archive clearly attests. It also charts, among national and socio-cultural circles hitherto neglected, the evolution in thinking about colonialism and decolonisation throughout the twentieth century.     

‘Suppose They were to Do It in Mexico’: The Spanish Embargo and Its Influence on Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy

The US arms embargo during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) can play a key role in our understanding of the transformation of American strategic thought in the late 1930s. The embargo's most well-documented causes are isolationist sentiment, the influence of the Catholic vote in the New Deal coalition and the forceful diplomatic leadership of Britain's Foreign Office in European affairs. Less well known is the importance of Latin America, which was considered throughout the conflict in the debates about lifting the Spanish embargo. This article examines the Spanish embargo and the reasons behind it. It also analyzes the Latin American dimension of Roosevelt's Spanish policy. By doing so it reveals how the perceived threat of Fascist penetration in Latin America influenced US diplomacy regarding Spain. Since that threat was first perceived, Washington began to fear the consequences of a Francoist military victory. It considered that the success of German and Italian military interventions in Spain could encourage similar initiatives in Latin America. The lessons learned in Spain reinforced Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy in Latin America and, at the same time, also provided a subtle reasoning for abandoning continental isolationism.     

Defending the Individual: the Personal Rights Association and the Ligue des droits de l'homme, 1871–1916

This article investigates the conceptual and organisational connections between late nineteenth-century civil-liberties activism and the emerging human-rights paradigm of the twentieth century. The comparison of the two largest and most influential civil-liberties organisations to emerge in Britain and France before the First World War (the British Personal Rights Association and the French Ligue des droits de l'homme) has three objectives: to place the two groups in a wider context of civil-liberty organisations of the pre-First World War era and to identify personal connections and inspirations. Secondly, by analysing functional definitions of ‘rights’ and who these rights should apply to, the article argues that although one group conceptualised their activism on the basis of ‘civil liberties’ and the other on ‘human rights’ there were significant similarities between the approaches of the two groups. Moreover, differences stemmed from internal politics within each group rather than the dissimilar conceptual framework. Finally the article seeks to understand why the Ligue des droits de l'homme was much more successful than the British Personal Rights Association both in its ability to mobilise supporters, and in inspiring sister organisations in other European countries.     

Was there an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the limits of a historiographical concept

Proponents of the increasingly prominent “Atlantic history” paradigm argue that ocean-centered, transnational perspectives shed crucial light on connections which tied together Europe, Africa and the Americas in the early modern period, and which older forms of national and imperial histories obscured. In spite of these scholars’ calls for the construction of a truly inclusive history of the Atlantic basin and all its inhabitants, Amerindian peoples have received relatively little attention in the work of Atlantic historians. This article examines the place Amerindians have held in scholarship on the early modern Atlantic. It argues that it is precisely because Atlantic history has been constructed from fundamentally Eurocentric categories like transatlantic empire and commerce that it has accorded little space to Amerindians. It points to this absence as an important shortcoming of such approaches, and suggests that Atlantic history will have to be reconceptualized in fundamental ways in order to bring Amerindians fully into the picture as historical actors.     

Catholic Relief and the Political Awakening of Irish Catholics in Nova Scotia, 1780–1830

Over the course of the eighteenth and early-to-mid-nineteenth centuries the Irish, who moved throughout the British Empire, helped to build the social, political and economic structures that would enable the success of countless colonial settlements. They were merchants, traders, fishers and labourers, and a significant proportion of them were Catholic. While many would go on to play pivotal roles in the development of Catholicism in the colonies, the Irish were not alone and often joined or were joined by other Catholic groups such as the French, Spanish and Scottish Highlanders. That the Irish achieved greater political and economic success, though, had a knock-on effect for the other Catholic groups could then use the foundation that the Irish established for their own progress and development. This article considers the place of Catholics on Britain’s expanding colonial landscapes by examining the political awakening of Irish Catholics in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, two of Britain’s north Atlantic colonies, between 1780 and 1830. These two colonies, like many others, witnessed the growth of an Irish Catholic laity that was ambitious, pragmatic and adept at using the political structures available to reframe their legal status. The election of Laurence Kavanagh, a second-generation Irish Catholic merchant from a tiny fishing outpost on Cape Breton Island, to Nova Scotia’s legislative assembly in 1820, is offered as an example of how this process actually worked on the ground and opens up a broader discussion about the importance of minority populations like Catholics to Britain’s imperial programme.     

The Many Tongues of the King: Indigenous Language Interpreters and the Making of the Spanish Empire

General language interpreters of Lima's High Court of Appeal (Audiencia) played a significant part in gaining access to the Spanish system of justice for the indigenous populations of Peru. These interpreters worked as translators in lawsuits, notarial transactions, and other legal and administrative procedures conducted or supervised by the viceroy, the justices of the Audiencia, the public defender of the Indians, and other officials stationed at the viceregal court. But they also served as legal agents and solicitors for native leaders and communities litigating in Lima or aspiring to take their cases to the Supreme Council of the Indies in Spain. Through formal and informal dealings, these interpreters brokered between the king and his native subjects, thus connecting indigenous groups with the Habsburg royal court. The careers of these official translators illustrate the crucial roles played by indigenous subjects in the formation of what can be termed the ‘Spanish legal Atlantic,’ an organic network of litigants, judges, lawyers, attorneys, and documents bridging courtrooms on both shores of the ocean.     

Harvesting the Seashores in the Late Mesolithic of Northwestern Europe: A View From Brittany

The shell middens of Brittany provide the last evidence of a Mesolithic way of life along the French Atlantic façade. This is partly a result of Holocene marine transgressions that prevent easy access to earlier coastal settlements. Nevertheless, the dependence on the sea seen in the Late Mesolithic seems to be a consequence of a long-established exploitation system. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope signatures in human bone reflect a dominance of marine protein, while the zooarchaeological components of shell middens show a high species richness of exploited marine resources. Paleoenvironmental reconstruction suggests that more or less the whole range of resources exploited was accessible in the immediate vicinity of the sites. Seasonal aspects of the utilised and potentially available subsistence resources, along with stable isotope and lithic data, raise the possibility of restricted mobility for these populations, within relatively limited territories. The impression of extreme dependence of these coastal populations on the seashore might have been a key factor in their final disappearance, whether this is viewed as replacement or acculturation. Indeed, the Mesolithic communities of Brittany could have been caught between rising sea-levels and the arrival of Neolithic communities from the east and the south.