Microstoria,Pacific History,and the Question of Scale: Two or Three Things That We Should Know About Them

This article is prompted by the recent debate on the so-called crisis in the humanities, and the related call for historians to change direction by returning to history of the longue durée. While pointing out that the ‘crisis’ is more influenced by the changing political economy of the tertiary education sector than by specific historiographical practices, I suggest that small-scale analysis remains compatible with global history approaches. Articulating a parallel examination of Pacific historiography and the Italian variant of microhistory, the article argues that the latter provides fertile stimuli for Pacific history. In particular, I maintain that integrating social analysis can serve to counterbalance the over-emphasis on cultural aspects found in much Pacific historiography.     

Canadian Foreign Policy in an Era of New Constitutionalism

This article historically assesses Canada’s role in developing new constitutional mechanisms in the global economy. Drawing on the literatures of International Political Economy and analyses of Canadian foreign policy, a reassessment of Canada’s position in the international economic order is proposed. As a consequence of the geostrategic advantages afforded Canada between successive global hegemons, Canada’s path-dependent development has situated the country to benefit and insist on disciplinary mechanisms for all states. Canada’s defense of a rules-based order demands the country adopt an increasingly unfamiliar role as crisis threatens the stability of the global economy. Consequently, Canada has become a primary defender of the new constitutional order of global capitalism, a position that seems opposed to traditional cooperative visions of Canadian foreign policy. Moreover, as the Canadian state becomes an active global proponent of neoliberal economic reforms it undermines the intermediary role of the Canadian state in its own markets, potentially undermining one of the historical purposes of Canadian federalism.     

Women in European culture and society

Summary

Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of long-range intellectual history.     

AN APOLOGIA FOR ARTHUR LOVEJOY'S LONG-RANGE APPROACH TO THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

Arthur Lovejoy's long-range approach to the history of ideas is little appreciated and largely abandoned. The list of Lovejoy's supposed sins is long. His critics have charged that, among other things, he treated ideas as timeless entities with essences that are independent of individual thinkers, separate from specific texts, isolated from immediate contexts, and insulated from intellectual change. This article defends Lovejoy against such attacks and argues that his approach is still viable and valuable.     

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY CONFRONTS THE LONGUE DURÉE

This review of John Potts's Ideas in Time: The Longue Durée in Intellectual History discusses the advantages and disadvantages of writing intellectual histories that embrace the longue durée. It applauds Potts's concise account of historiographical discussions of continuity and discontinuity in the history of ideas in the last seventy-five years but laments his failure to discuss the contributions of historians of science and scholarship to the practices of knowledge-making and to the transmission of ideas. It suggests that the study of discontinuities can also be rich and revealing, and it proposes one approach to understanding the ways in which ideas go out of fashion. It concludes by noting, first, that the models that contemporary historians of ideas adopt also have to do with book-market opportunities and pressures and, second, that we have work to do to engage our contemporaries and students in whatever form of intellectual history we choose to write.     

Anti-methodology par excellence: Richard Cobb (1917–96) and history-writing

Richard Cobb (1917–96) was a well-known historian of modern France whose numerous studies contributed to revising our interpretations of the revolutionary period and its impact on the people of both Paris and the provinces. Cobb was also a very knowledgeable, sharp, witty and deeply entertaining essayist and reviewer not just of all things French across a wide chronological spectrum, but of historical matters more generally. Controversial and unusual, his work proved to be unique among scholars – and, for this reason, open to criticism. One trait that defined such uniqueness was his unapologetic and fierce aversion to methodological discussion as well as theoretical reflection in historical research. And yet, as this article attempts to show, his oeuvre – including a variety of different material – unveils a range of insightful and important considerations on the métier d'historien and the practice of history-writing. By focusing on a series of compelling images Cobb delineated throughout his works, reviews and essays in order to depict the role of the historian and the way(s) of going about the business of approaching the past, the following pages intend to provide a novel sketch of the ideas of this anti-methodologist par excellence. In particular, attention will be given to his configuration of the identity of the practitioner as wanderer, detective and novelist. It is thus hoped that the light cast on his writings might prompt a new reading of Cobb's opinions as a source of possible historiographical inspiration for new generations of historians.     

DEPROVINCIALIZING THE STUDY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS: A CRITIQUE

Though the fourteen contributors to this volume bring varied perspectives on method, most striking is their common engagement with contextualist approaches. While some of the essays advocate a temporally and spatially extended, renewed history of ideas with debts to Arthur Lovejoy, and are critical of excessive contextualization, several either defend contextualism, or the culture concept, or offer a more robust materialist foundation for the history of thought and culture. This review focuses on the logic and metaphors used to criticize contextual methods and highlights problems with both the new history of ideas and the new materialist gestures.     

Ellen Key and Rudolf Kjellén on war,peace, and the future of post-First World War Europe

During the First World War, intellectuals in both combatant and neutral nations engaged in debates on the justification for the bloodshed and in envisioning solutions for a sustainable peace. In the latter regard, the issues of democracy and future forms of government were focal. This article examines two public intellectuals from Sweden, Ellen Key and Rudolf Kjellén, and their conflicting views. A comparative and transnational perspective on their thinking about war and peace sheds light on their political backgrounds and wider worldviews. The article further reveals the international contexts in which their ideas were embedded. Using the concept of ‘the ideas of 1914 versus those of 1789’, the conservative geopolitician Kjellén spoke for the justification of German expansion and Swedish military intervention, whereas the Left-liberal pacifist Key condemned all parties involved, defending the legacy of the French Revolution and Sweden’s neutrality. Based on his geopolitical tenets, Kjellén could not envision a future with peaceful cooperation between nation states, while, for Key, the solution lay in the development of democratic decision-making. In this respect, the granting of political citizenship to women, to whom she accorded a special competence for peace-keeping, based on their maternalism, was crucial.     

Zwei oder drei Dinge, die ich von der Technikphilosophie weiss

Nearby a somehow “official“ philosophy of technique, works have appeared in recent German literature where different techniques are studied according a renewed philosophical agenda about their concrete historical development. Once 19th Century German philosophy of technique briefly sketched, a sample from this recent production is considered. Surprisingly, they are meeting current literary studies and cultural history.     

Les échelles de temps sur les marchés financiers

Modern financial modelling massively implements scaling laws to describe market fluctuations, with the use of stochastic processes in stock market price behavior equations. Scaling laws, which already existed as an implicit part of Brownian motion although notperceived at such, habe become increasingly and explicitely important, since the financial markets regulatory authorities have drawn the attention of the banking industry to the risk control issued posed by the ineffective current valuation achieved using the classical Gaussian distribution. The différent elements surrounding this debate are developed based around Mandelbrot's fractal models, which have underlined the main modelling conflicts of the behavior of stock market prices over the last forty years. I demonstrate that the root of the problem of whether scaling laws exist is the more fundemental issue of the nature of market time.     

Geographic accessibility to primary care providers: Comparing rural and urban areas in Southwestern Ontario

This research examines geographical accessibility to primary care providers (PCPs) across urban and rural areas of Southwestern Ontario and examines variations in the distribution of PCPs in relation to the senior population (aged 65 years and older). Information about PCP practices was provided by the HealthForceOntario Marketing and Recruitment Agency. Population data were obtained from the 2016 Census of Canada. To calculate scores for accessibility to PCPs (i.e., PCPs/10,000 population), we applied the enhanced 2-step floating catchment area method with distance decay effect within a global service catchment of 30-minute drive time. A geospatial mapping approach revealed disparities in the distribution of PCPs with a pattern of higher spatial accessibility in or around major urban areas in Southwestern Ontario. Comparative analyses were performed in association with the seniors’ population to identify how accessibility scores were mismatched with the population needs. The outcome of this study will assist researchers and health service planners to better understand the distribution of existing PCPs to address inequalities, particularly in rural areas.     

An Essay on the Context and Formation of Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Thought

SUMMARY

This essay combines the study of Humboldt's sources with a critique of the treatment of this subject in most studies of Humboldt and his linguistic thought. One crucial issue is the date of his early ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’, which is our first evidence of his mature thinking about language. This text is conventionally dated 1795, thus ruling out that Humboldt might be indebted to the anthropo-linguistic philosophy that he explored in Paris a few years later. But a host of facts make the date untenable and the debt unquestionable, including incontrovertible evidence that ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ relies on Condillac's argument for the anti-idealist principle that the distinction between subject and object is the absolute precondition for self-awareness and reflection, and thus, by the same token, for the concept of Weltansicht. ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ also shows that Humboldt was inspired to choose Condillac's and Destutt de Tracy's argument over that of Fichte for what Berkeley disapprovingly called ‘outness’. This analysis exemplifies the critique that is advanced in this essay.     

Der zentralarabische Zweig der Weihrauchstraße

The information of Eratosthenes (Strabo 16.4.4) is of crucial importance for the reconstruction of one of the branches of the 'Incence Road' between Gerrha and a ramawt. According to the Classical sources as well as linguistic data ancient Gerrha must be sought in the 'double city' of al-Hufūf–al-'Uqayr. Comparison with other sources on the correspondence of the number of stages and the travel days of a caravan shows only one way to reach a ramawt from Gerrha: this way would have led from Qaryat al-Fāw not to Nǎrān, but to the south towards the mouth of the Wādīs abb and aš-Šu ayf.     

La mobilité forcée des personnes utilisatrices de drogue par injection et inhalation en situation d'itinérance à Montréal

This article focuses on the various actors in the urban setting who contribute to the increase in the forced mobility of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers in Montréal, Canada. The objective is to analyze who these actors are and how they contribute to increasing this forced mobility from the perspective of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers in relation to three needs : basic needs, acquisition of financial resources, and drug use. One hundred and six semi-structured interviews were conducted among this population. The results indicate that various actors—police officers, community organization, peers, municipal administration, storekeepers, and residents—contribute to the forced mobility of this population in their daily activities. As for their needs, it is when they use drugs, sleep, or loiter that they are more likely to experience events of forced mobility. Police officers are by far the actors who contribute the most to this, often in a repressive way. The role of the municipality is also a determining factor in the daily activities of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers.     

Rituals of Commemoration,Rituals of Self-Invention: Safavid Religious Colleges and the Collective Memory of the Shi‘a

Shi‘ism, perhaps more than any other current of Islam, places emphasis on numerous forms of commemorative culture. Throughout the history of Shi‘ism, commemorative rituals have provided a comprehensive framework for interpreting a wide array of historical encounters between the Shi‘a and the dominant Sunni culture, thereby allowing Shi‘ism to construct itself as a community of learning and remembering. This self-construction required both a high degree of institutionalization as well as specialists to preserve the religious identity of the Shi‘a and to transmit religious knowledge to the next generation. Madrasas (Islamic institutions of higher learning) as well as the shrines of the Shi‘i Imams and their progeny served as the best institutions to achieve these goals. This paper argues that Safavid madrasas were not only centers for disseminating religious knowledge and preserving Shi'a intellectual heritage. They also rearticulated and contemporized the community's past through the active memorializing of pivotal events in the religious calendar of the Shi‘a. More specifically, the paper delineates the nature and scope of religious rituals and rites carried out in the Madrasa-ye Sultānī and a number of other madrasa-mosque complexes of Safavid Isfahan in order to explore the process by which the Shi‘i past was contextualized or contemporized as salient to suit the needs of Safavid power and society.     

Political geographies, ‘unfaithful’ translations and anticolonialism: Ireland in Élisée Reclus's geography and biography

This paper addresses the role of Ireland and Irish republicanism in the geography, biography and political thinking of the French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905). This paper sheds new light on the construction of a scientific and political discourse, one which was radically opposed to external and internal colonialisms in the Age of Empire, analysing primary sources such as Reclus' texts and correspondence, along with his transnational networks. It draws on present-day debates on ‘geography and anarchism’, postcolonial Ireland and international circulation and localisation of knowledge. Finally, it is a contribution to evaluating the importance of the ‘British Isles’ as a place for production and reception of the geographical and political works by both Reclus and the other anarchist geographer Pëtr Kropotkin (1842–1921), scholars and militants who lived there in different periods of their respective careers.     

The Turkish Oedipus: National Self and Stereotype in the Work of a 1960s Greek Cartoonist 1

This article analyzes a particular type of radical political discourse in Greece—namely the articulation of stereotypes of Greek-ness and Turkish-ness in the work of Mendis Bostantzoglu, a Greek satirist and cartoonist. The author examines a poem and a sketch published in the 1960s, in which stereotypes of Greek-ness and Turkish-ness are presented and mocked. Relating their production to their specific historical context and current academic discussions in Greece on nationalism and Otherness, the author argues that the ways in which ethnic stereotypes of “self” and “other” are used to discuss political issues have more to tell about internal Greek issues (such as a critique of the government and its policies) than about Greece's foreign affairs. Such analyses, it is further argued, also lead to a greater appreciation of the complex and implicit sets of meanings negotiated by the stereotypes themselves.     

Dynamiques hydrogéomorphologiques historiques et actuelles d'une rivière perturbée par les activités de la drave et analyse des impacts d'un démantèlement de barrage

In Quebec, the fluvial dynamics of the Escoumins River have been disturbed by the forestry industry for over a century. Most specifically, a dam was built near the mouth of the river in 1846 and dismantled in 2013. These disturbances had significant repercussions on the equilibrium of the river and Atlantic salmon habitat. This study therefore proposes to characterize the fluvial dynamics of the Escoumins River and to analyze the impacts of the dam dismantling from the perspective of restoring hydrogeomorphological processes and improving Atlantic salmon habitat. The results suggest that the trajectory of the river evolved differently depending on the fluvial style and the grain size composition of each of its homogeneous segments. However, log drive activities in river and dam removal appear to have been the most important controlling factors on the evolution of the stream trajectory. The dismantling notably allowed the restoration of hydrogeomorphological processes and the free movement of salmonids. A better procedure for dam removal and monitoring should be put in place in Canada to encourage this practice.     

Conspiracy theories in Republican Italy: the Pellegrino Report to the Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism

This article analyses the draft of the final report prepared by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino, who from 1994 to 2001 chaired the ‘Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on terrorism in Italy and on the causes of the failure to identify those responsible for the massacres’. The document was completed in 1995 and attempted a general interpretation of the causes of the political violence that had been a major feature of the history of the Italian Republic up to that point. The report was closely connected with what is often described as the moment of the transition between Italy's ‘first’ and ‘second’ Republic and, in keeping with revisionist theories current at the time, attributed responsibility for misdeeds and occult plots (real or imagined) that occurred in Italy over a period of forty years primarily to ideological division caused by the Cold War. This paper argues that this resulted in a highly distorted narrative of Italian history in which events appear to be determined almost exclusively by external factors to the exclusion of important internal dynamics.