HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The authors explore a vast range of prehistoric, ancient, and non-Western peoples to undermine (neo)evolutionist, stadial theories of long-term human development, particularly any that imply determinism, inevitability, or teleology. If so many peoples in the past were so much freer than we are today, how is it that we got stuck? And are we really as stuck as we think? Graeber and Wengrow successfully undermine the social scientific template of stage-based human development from hunter-gatherers to modern capitalist nation-states, but their book suffers from two major omissions. First, they ignore almost entirely the Anthropocene epoch and show no grasp of its implications for their analysis of the present or prospects for the future. Second, their “new history of humanity” ignores the history that is most relevant to answering their own questions about how we have arrived globally in our current structures of violence and domination: the early modern and modern history of expansionist, colonialist, capitalist, belligerent, imperialist Western European nations and their extensions since the fifteenth century. These two omissions are connected: it is disproportionately the history of the (early) modern West before and after the Industrial Revolution that explains how the planet arrived in the Anthropocene with the “Great Acceleration” around the mid-twentieth century. But heeding this history and its consequences would have undermined the authors’ upbeat political vision about our prospects for the future—essentially, a recycled Enlightenment vision about human self-determination and individual freedom that depends on environmental exploitation as if we still lived in the Holocene. For all its undoubted achievement, The Dawn of Everything neglects the history that is most salient to answering the main questions its own authors pose. What matters most about that history is not that it was inevitable but that it was actual—and that its cumulative consequences remain with us.     

What Sort of Geographical Education for the Anthropocene?

As the Anthropocene concept gains in prominence, there is opportunity to explore it as a social and cultural process, not merely as a matter of scientific definition and debate. This paper seeks to sketch some of the social dimensions of the Anthropocene, in terms of anxiety about the human future, about risk, and about environmental limits. It considers how the term encapsulates a prophetic sense of concern and unease about people's place in nature, the very thing that the embrace of industrial capitalism was supposed to remove. It then explores four open‐ended attributes of a geographical education for the Anthropocene. These are: first, engaging critically with digital technologies; second, countering grand narratives with local encounters; third, setting hope alongside gloom; and fourth, remembering the past as well as the future. The purpose of such attributes is to prepare students for creative encounters with the uncertainties of the Anthropocene. The implications for educational practice are then considered, including the role of active and community‐based learning strategies within a university conceived of as a place of classrooms without borders.     

RACE AND ANIMAL‐BREEDING: A HYBRIDIZED HISTORIOGRAPHY

Because it associates animals with one of the most vital topics in human history, the historiography of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding is at once controversial and inspiring. This article wishes to position this historiography in a more systematic framework than has been done thus far by examining both its merits and failings along with the more and less appropriate ways to write on the subject. The article identifies two main narratives in race–animal‐breeding historiography: the influence narrative and the projection narrative. The first reveals how perceptions of animal breeds and livestock‐breeding practices influenced the rise of racialist and eugenic worldviews. By contrast, the second shows how conceptualizations of human racial segregation contributed to the construction of ideas about the subdivision of domestic animal species into different breeds. The article argues that despite the projection narrative's inherent anthropomorphism, this perspective renders it possible to draft a nonanthropocentric history of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding with a focus on human–animal relations rather than on human society.     

Businessmen in the Parliament of 1852–7: Players or Spectators?*

This article examines the activities of the business MPs who were members of the parliament of 1852–7. Largely coming from a different social background from those who had traditionally led the United Kingdom, with different educational experiences, and inhabiting a different social milieu, they demonstrated their interest in the governance of the United Kingdom by a vigorous participation in the activities of the house of commons. Although they composed less than 21% of the membership of the Commons, they disproportionately attended the sessions of the House, spoke often on topics of interest, participated regularly on committees, were quite active in sponsorship of public bills and sponsored more than half of the local and private bills.     

Autochthony and activism among contemporary Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland1, or: if ‘civic’ nationalists are ‘ethno’‐cultural revivalists,what remains of the civic/ethnic divide?

ABSTRACT. This article argues for dissolving the civic–ethnic dichotomy into several analytical dimensions and suggests ‘autochthony’ and ‘activism’ as two such alternatives. It does so by first presenting a case study of Irish language revivalism and identity discourses in the North of Ireland, in which locals turn out to be both ‘civic’ nationalists and ‘ethno’‐cultural revivalists. The article then advocates treating these aspects as belonging to two distinct dimensions: the first is concerned with the causal logic underlying the reproduction of nationhood in terms of autochthony, while the second specifies different forms of activism aimed at (re)constituting the nation. Finally, reinterpreting the empirical case in terms of these two dimensions, it is shown that the type of activism is dependent on the specificities of ‘threats’ to the nation rather than on the underlying type of autochthony, which further substantiates the necessity to disambiguate the civic–ethnic distinction.     

RESISTING MODERN TEMPORALITIES: TOWARD A CRITICAL HISTORY OF BREAKS IN TIME

This is an exceptionally sophisticated and wide‐ranging book on historical time, the construction of the past, present, and future, and the problem of periodization. Its major thesis is that temporal divisions of history are produced by social actors, including historians, who break up time from their distinct temporal positions. The book inquires about the theoretical underpinning and historical constitution of temporal breaks: the premises sustaining notions of pastness, presentness, and futurity; the relations constructed by these notions between historiography and other fields of knowledge; the specific articulation of shifting and mutually competing temporalities both within and beyond European history; and the political implications of temporal divisions. Throughout the book the breaking up of time is studied as a fundamental political operation. To engage with temporal breaks, the authors contend, is to engage with the historian's contemporary, to negotiate borders that act upon the present, including the border that safeguards the presumed autonomy of the time of history‐writing. Focusing especially on the temporality of European modernity, the book invites reflection on the politics of time as articulated through categories of historical totalization imposed on modernity's others. But it also suggests that this imposition gave rise to acts of resistance indicating how historical time defies the analytical categories through which social actors seek to organize and control it. This dialectic of imposition and defiance is made evident through the comparative study of temporal concepts that replace one another, compete with one another in certain historical settings without any of them constituting a final historical representation. It is also traced in the continuing significance of suppressed or “failed” temporalities, which are nonetheless still capable of challenging and qualifying our insights into historical time. The book's key contribution lies precisely in the attempt to intensify this challenge by translating the contradictory constitution of modern temporality into a language of self‐critique.     

Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu

In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu.