The lost cause: failed French ultimata and the restoration of papal rule in Rome in 1849

In one of history’s ironies, the republic that arose in Rome out of Europe’s revolutionary wave in 1848 was crushed by the new republic that had formed in France at the same time. In an additional irony, the destruction of the Roman Republic and the restoration of the papal theocracy were overseen by the internationally renowned champion of constitutional rights and freedom, Alexis de Tocqueville, then France’s foreign minister. This article sheds new light on this dramatic series of events through an examination of the French diplomatic correspondence, which reveals growing dismay at the direction in which events were unfolding. The correspondence also gives a sense of how close the French came to abandoning the pope, a decision that could have changed the course of Italian and French, as well as Church history.     

A Manchu itinerary

Abstract

Eighty‐nine business letters from European map sellers to the London firm of Thomas Jefferys and William Faden are preserved in the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Dating from the decade 1773–1783, the letters reveal through the invoices, accounts payable, bills of lading, and orders many detailed aspects of the map trade in the eighteenth century at the time of the War of American Independence. Special attention is drawn to the exchange of maps between England and France during this period of war.     

Rose de Freycinet and the French Exploration Corvette L'Uranie (1820): a Highlight of the 'French Connection' with the 'Great Southland'

Rose de Freycinet, the first woman to record her circumnavigation of the globe, was shipwrecked in the Falkland Islands in the closing stages of her three-year voyage. The significance of her account is slowly becoming widely recognised, rendering the archaeological remains at the wreck of her transport the corvette L'Uranie and the survivors' camp ashore of growing international importance. In March 2001 a team under the auspices of the Western Australian Maritime Museum conducted research, search and survey aimed at adding to the body of knowledge about the de Freycinets, their ship and their camp. This is a précis of their results.
© 2005 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

The Black Death in the diocese of Ely: The evidence of the bishop's register

The Black Death of 1348-9 is thought to have killed a third to a half of the population of Europe. More exact measurements of the plague mortality are hard to come by, but the ten episcopal registers of England which survived the great pestilence provide some of the most complete and reliable information about the number of deaths on a yearly basis. Although there are qualifications to be made before using this information, the defects in the bishops' registers are not so great that the historian can afford to neglect this valuable source. In addition, there is sometimes anecdotal evidence in the registers which speaks of the human drama of the plague, in contrast to the impassive testimony of numbers. This paper will examine the evidence of the register of Thomas de Lisle, bishop of Ely from 1345 until 1361, as it relates to the Black Death. The first half of the paper will address the statistical evidence, to be followed by a discussion of the anecdotal material. De Lisle's register has not been extensively studied since J. Lunn's 1930 thesis on The Black Death in the Bishops' Registers, which is now lost. A re-evaluation of this evidence will reveal that the inhabitants of East Anglia, and of Cambridgeshire in particular, were among the greatest sufferers of the plague.     

Patronage revisited: The dynamics of information and reputation

Recent revelations of corruption in Italy have encouraged speculation about its social foundations. This article addresses the specific issue of the relations between patronage and corruption, drawing attention to their common basis in control over the circulation of information. Examination of patronage from this perspective suggests some weaknesses in the conventional accounts of its distribution, organization and consequences. Since bureaucracies are the principal modern agencies for the collection and storage of information, changes in the relations between and within bureaucracies, political and administrative, can be expected to provoke changes in the structure and stability of patronage networks. That dynamic of patronage, shifting its basis from status to contract, is illustrated in the context of Italian politics in the 1980s.     

Cultures of the eighth and seventh millennia BP in the southern Levant: A review for the 1990s

The Pottery Neolithic of the southern Levant (the eighth and seventh millennia BP) was a crucial period in which the foundations were laid for the development of complex societies and urban civilization. This article summarizes the current state of research in this area during this period. Past and present research in Israel and Jordan is reviewed, and methodological problems in fieldwork and analysis are discussed. We attempt a systematic definition of the archaeological entities. For each such entity, we present the available data on chronostratigraphy, characteristics of the material culture (including lithics, ceramics and architecture), burial customs, figurines and images, economy, and site-distribution. While the Yarmukian and Jericho IX occupied territories of similar size and seem to represent entities on the scale of a culture, the later Wadi Raba entity extended over a larger area and was of longer duration. A chronostratigraphic summary is presented, and the major entities are compared in terms of site-types, economy, burials, and geographical distribution.     

A Single Thread of Meaning: Esperanza Ortega's Hilo solo

Scholarship on Marie de France's Lai de Lanval has long held Guinevere's accusation of homosexuality against Lanval to have been motivated by hurt feelings: it is made, in the words of one commentator, "in the fury of a woman scorned." This article suggests that subtler motives may have been apparent to the text's earliest audiences. By the twelfth century, sodomy was increasingly categorized by ecclesiastical legislation as a kind of treason. Accordingly, it is likely that Guinevere's charge is meant to counter Lanval's insinuation that, in attempting to seduce him, she has tried to lure him into an act of treason as well.     

Death on the Seine: The mystery of the pagan king Setric

In 943, a pagan king called Setric arrived with a fleet on the Seine, seeking to ‘take over the whole area without a grant from the king’ and to bring the young Richard and his Rouen Northmen back ‘to the worship of idols, and to bring back pagan rites’. But this was not to be because the young Carolingian king Louis IV d’Outremer was quickly on the scene and engaged Setric and his dux Turmod in battle. Louis’s mounted forces were victorious and both Setric and Turmod were killed. As the great French historian Philippe Lauer said: ‘La défaite du viking Setric et du renégat Turmod est un événement important dans l’histoire de l’établissement des Normands en Neustrie’. The mystery examined in this article is, who was this pagan king Setric (ON Sigtryggr) who had been sent to Valhalla? And where had he come from —York or Denmark? It is shown that whilst a Danish origin for King Setric cannot be completely excluded, the equation of a King Sihtric of York with King Setric on the Seine is more likely and is supported by a plethora of onomastic, chronological, numismatic and contextual evidence.     

Pillars and electoral behavior in Belgium: The neighborhood effect revisited

This paper explores the processes behind the neighborhood effect in electoral geography. Studies on neighborhood effect have largely ignored the local institutions and cultural milieu within which people are socialized. By taking into account the spatially differentiated social embedding of individuals, we are able to highlight the impact of local institutions on electoral behavior and restore the temporal dimension that has shaped the political specificities of places. In the case of Belgium, we show that social embedding (which took the very accomplished form of pillars) affects voting behavior through two different channels: a direct effect, coming from the family transmission of pillar values, and a contextual effect captured by a measure of the local embeddedness of the pillar.     

The 2006 election: more than ever,a Berlusconi-centred campaign

Abstract

The article offers a review of the most salient events of the 2006 electoral campaigns. It argues that with exception of 1994, the recent 2006 electoral campaign has been more focused on Berlusconi than the previous campaigns. As a matter of fact, Berlusconi, trailing in the polls, made all possible efforts to set the campaign agenda. He resorted to a massive overexposure of himself on the television stage and gave rise to a number of ‘media events’ that have dominated the electoral narratives, like the Vicenza speech at the Confindustria conventions and his final announcement of abolishing the municipal tax on homeowners. All that was not enough to gain re-election, but his frantic campaign activity allowed him to re-acquire a clear leadership of the House of Liberties, which had been previously challenged by his own coalition partners. The article analyses also the Berlusconi – Prodi debates, and the reasons why electoral debates promise to become a fixed feature of the Italian politics.     

Puppet troops revisited: A case study of the Northwestern Army during the Anti-Japanese War

After the Japanese occupation of North China at the beginning of the Anti-Japanese War, the Nationalist government adopted the strategy of using the regular army to develop the battlefield to the rear of the enemy in order to sustain a protracted war. As a result, the Northwestern Army, which was organizing anti-Japanese forces in North China, became the Nationalist government's main military force in the occupied area. However, caught between Japanese and Communist troops, the Northwestern Army surrendered to the Japanese for the purpose of self-preservation and thus became a puppet army. From a nationalist point of view, the collaborationists who covered up their self-serving motives and later defended their actions as a crooked path to national salvation had a negative image. In response to Communist expansion, the Nationalist government acquiesced in the measure of collaborating with the puppet troops to annihilate the Communists. To reinforce the battles at the front, the Nationalist government also attempted to plot anti-Japanese mutinies among the puppet troops, but its plan was never implemented. The Northwestern Army forces planned to build an alliance in order to survive as a third force both in the confrontation between the Chinese government and the Japanese army and in the confrontation between the Nationalists and the Communists. Yet, due to the tight control exercised by the Japanese in North China, it was difficult for the Northwestern Army to gain momentum as a third force. After the end of the Anti-Japanese War, the Northwestern Army had to take sides in the Civil War, and this dilemma caused its final collapse.     

Argentine territorial nationalism revisited: The Malvinas/Falklands dispute and geographies of everyday nationalism

This paper is concerned with expressions of Argentine territorial nationalism with a specific focus on the Malvinas/Falklands dispute. Billig’s (1995) notion of banal nationalism has been widely applied as a means to understanding the ways in which national identities are learnt and reproduced by the populace, through a multitude of ‘mundane’ representations. More recently Billig’s (1995) thesis has been critiqued (Jones & Merriman, 2009) for its rigidity and inability to take account of the different ways these nationalisms are produced and received (Müller, 2008) within and outside of the nation-state. We build on these interventions by arguing that research into territorial nationalism should not ignore the wider temporal, spatial, political and everyday contexts in which such discourses emerge and are consumed. To illustrate this diversity we contend that territorial nationalism and, more specifically, the attention placed on the Malvinas dispute by the Argentine government has varied in its intensity, depending on wider political events and agendas in the South West Atlantic and Latin American regions. Secondly, through the use of interview extracts from a pilot study conducted with 20 young people in Buenos Aires, we suggest that Argentine territorial nationalism is not received uniformly across the nation-state and, rather, should be explored in its everyday contexts. These contexts take into consideration things like respondent’s geographical location, personal/familial relationships and generation, amongst other variables, in order to more sensitively appreciate Argentine territorial nationalism’s multifarious reception.     

Living With the Other's Pain: The Ethical Implications of Mitsein in Simone de Beauvoir's Le sang des autres

This article establishes that the suffering of the other represents a serious philosophical and ethical problem in Beauvoir's first post–World War II novel. In fact, the other's suffering poses such a complex problem in Le sang des autres particularly because Beauvoir depicts her characters’ world as a kind of Mitsein, which is Heidegger's word to describe how our lives necessarily intertwine with and envelop the lives of others while still allowing for the existential experience of separation. In the novel, the main characters’ potential responses to the other's suffering—quietism, indifference, charity, and empathy—fail according to the novel's existentialist ethical framework because of the ways these responses deny the fundamental ambiguity of Beauvoirian Mitsein. Only in accepting separation and connection as codependent ethical values do the characters find an ethically palatable response to the other's suffering at the end of the novel.     

Value chains,business conventions,and market adaptation: A comparative analysis of Norwegian and Icelandic fish exports

Business transactions’ value chains can constrain their capacity to maximize market value from limited resources. Seafood markets exhibit a strong demand for fresh, high‐quality seafood yet empirical studies show large variations in value chains’ adaptation and exploitation of market opportunities. This article presents a comprehensive model that identifies the main drivers and constraints in value chains for wild harvested seafood that generate differences in market adaptation. The model is built on theories of value chains, business conventions, competitive behaviour, governance conventions, legal regulation, and direct ecological and economic constraints. The model is applied in a comparative case analysis of market adaptation by value chains for North Atlantic cod products in Norway and Iceland, which explains why business conventions in Iceland are more consumer market adapted than those in Norway.     

Identity and social solidarity: an ignored connection. A historical perspective on the state of Europe and its nations

The article comments on the ongoing de‐Europeanisation and re‐nationalisation of Europe from a historical perspective. The article argues that the building of national community from the 1870s onwards focused on the problem of social integration where the development of emotional feelings of belonging and solidarity was linked to the building of institutions for social politics in mutually reinforcing dynamics. The social question emerged in the wake of the spread of industrial capitalism. Its role is underexplored in the study of the building of national and European communities. The social question draws attention to the institutional capacity of nation states rather than nations based on emotions. Nationalism did not only mean the building of friend‐ enemy distinctions through ethnicity but also national socialism as a conservative reform strategy against class struggle socialism. This contention between two approaches to the problem of social integration moulded together national communities through emotions and institutions without deploying the concept of identity. The article outlines this development, culminating in the (West) European welfare states as nation– states in the strong sense of the merger of these two terms, and how it came to an end in the 1970s when a reverse development began towards social disintegration at the end accompanied by accelerating nationalism and xenophobia. The identity concept was mobilised in 1973 as a tool in the European integration project to compensate for the erosion of social institutions by means of emotions. It was taken over and politicised from having been a technical term in mathematics and psychoanalysis. The politicisation of the identity concept was an indication of a deep identity crisis in Europe and its nations. The identity therapy failed, and the identity crisis remains, accompanied by an ever louder nationalistic and xenophobic vocabulary. Emotions replace institutions. The methodological focus of the article is on the semantics around key concepts such as social politics, solidarity and identity in their historical context as forward‐looking and action‐oriented concepts in the construction of community. This approach with a focus on past futures is an alternative to the application of the retrospective analytical concepts of ethnic and civic nationalism outlining present pasts.     

The dregs of trembling, the draught of salvation: the dual symbolism of the cup in medieval literature

This article examines the symbolism of the cup in Old English poetry and Old French romance. It argues that the dual symbolism of the cup in the Bible, both the cask of divine wrath and the vessel of mercy, invested the image with a particular dichotomy that was inherited by its metaphoric social functions in the literature of the middle ages. In Old English literature, the cup became a metonym for the contract for lord and thane, the conviviality and treasure exchange that united the mead-hall community. But never far beneath the surface is the fact that this contract requires the thane to die, and this unspoken yet unavoidable truth is writ large in the contagious imagery and vocabulary of the cup. In Old French romance, dichotomy crystallises into binary. The association of the cup of the Last Supper with Joseph of Arimathea, and the development of the Grail legend, made the service of the cup an exclusive loyalty, at the expense of social obligation, and its exigencies are made absolute and immediate. This article offers parallel readings of the same biblical metaphor in different literary cultures and a detailed analysis of a symbol that stands simultaneously for the positive image and its reversal, opposites that are mutually contingent: the community’s desire for unity and preservation and its concomitant fear of disintegration and death.     

1. DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.