Protestantism and liberty: Catharine Macaulay’s politics of religion as a response to David Hume

ABSTRACT

Catharine Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James I (1763–1783) was intended by its author and received by its audience as, in part, a response to David Hume’s History of England. Macaulay’s writing has been read as a Whig counter to Hume’s Tory interpretation of England’s seventeenth-century history; more recent work has explored whether Macaulay or Hume has a better claim to be considered an “enlightenment historian”. This article will suggest that Macaulay’s views on the role of England’s Protestant belief and practice in the development and maintenance of the nation’s liberties contained, in the earlier volumes of her History, some of her substantive and important refutations of Hume’s arguments, and, further, that Macaulay’s well-argued claim that Protestantism was instrumental in the formation of England’s national character and potential enjoyment of political liberties was received by her readers as a particularly valuable part of her historical argument. Her accounts of Roman Catholic violence against Protestant victims at the Siege of La Rochelle and in the Irish Massacre of 1641 became some of the most quoted parts of her historical writing.     

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.     

Understanding Prehistoric Lithic Raw Material Selection: Application of a Gravity Model

Provenance studies can tell us which sources of lithic raw material were used in the past, but can they tell us why? After all, many factors can have entered into a person’s choice to use one source rather than another. Those factors can be grouped into two categories, the geologic/geographic characteristics of the source itself (quality, abundance, size of pieces, etc.), and the human factors (direction of travel, time available, social restrictions, etc.). This paper demonstrates how the geologic/geographic characteristics can be quantified and calculated together to give one value, the attractiveness of the source, which can then be used in a gravity model approach to predict which sources ‘should’ have been used more than others. Deviations from the predicted pattern point to situations where the human factors were of greater or lesser importance. The values are also used to delineate geographical areas within which particular sources would be likely to be used (‘areas of influence’), which gives us a useful new way of understanding the landscape within which the prehistoric group lived.     

Book reviews

Luciano Guerci and Giuseppe Ricuperati (eds) 1998 Il coraggio della ragione. Franco Venturi intellettuale e storico cosmopolita (Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi promosso da Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Università degli Studi di Torino, Accademia delle Scienze, Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, Torino, 12–14 dicembre 1996) (Turin: Fondazione Luigi Einaudi), pp. 1–497, ISBN 88–430–1129–4.

Stefano Levati ( 1997) La nobiltà del lavoro. Negozianti e banchieri a Milano tra Ancien Regime e Restaurazione (Milan: Franco Angeli), pp. 1–320, 40,000 lire.

Guido Formigoni (1998) L'Italia dei cattolici: Fede e nazione dal Risorgimento alla Repubblica (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–176, 22,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06314–5 paperback.

Albert Schram ( 1997) Railways and the Formation of the Italian State in the Nineteenth Century, ’Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–164, Bibliography and Index, $59.95, ISBN 0–521–57159–6 hardback.

Catherine Brice (1989) Monumentanté publique et politique à Rome. Le Vittoriano (Rome: École Française de Rome), pp. 1–439.

Hans Woller ( 1997) I conti con il fascismo: L'epurazione in Italia 1943–1948 (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–603, 50,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06198–3 paperback.

Maria Stone ( 1998) The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 1–334, ISBN 0–691–05999–3 paperback.

Angelo Ventrone (1996) La cittadinanza repubblicana. Forma‐partito e identità nazionale alle origini della democrazia italiana (1943–1948) (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–305, 38,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–05508–8 paperback.

R. J. B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani (eds) (1999) kalian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation (Houndmills and New York: Macmillan/St Martin's Press), pp. 1–245, ISBN 0–312–21717.

Ernesto Galli della Loggia (1998) L'identità italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–171, 18,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–066 12–8 paperback.

Aldino Monti (1998) I braccianti (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–161, 18,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06582–2 paperback.

Giuliana Gemelli (ed.) (1998) Scuole di management Orìgini e primi sviluppi delle business schools in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–543, ISBN 88–15–06297–1 paperback.

Valeria Fargion (1997) Geografia della cittadinanza sociale in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–351, 42,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06127–4 paperback.

Umberto Gentiloni Silveri (1998) L'Italia e la nuova frontiera: Stati Uniti e centrosinistra 1958–1965 (Bologna: Il Mulino), pp. 1–343, 45,000 lire, ISBN 88–15–06282–3 paperback.     

White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War

This article examines miscegenation fears in Britain in the period after World War I, noting three dominant discourses: that miscegenation leads inevitably to violence between white and black men (focusing on the 1919 race riots), that these relationships involve sexual immorality (analysing the 1920 ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’, a case involving a white woman, a Chinese man and drugs and a trial of a white woman for killing her Egyptian husband) and that miscegenation has ‘disastrous’ procreative consequences. It is suggested that miscegenation stood as one British boundary marker, separating the nationally acceptable and the nationally threatening. The parties concerned – the ‘primitive’ man of colour, the white woman of a ‘low type’ and the ‘misfit’ offspring – were each pathologised in terms of their deviant sexuality. Yet interracial relationships did not decrease, quite the contrary. The move in Britain towards a more racially mixed community began in the years after the Great War, when certain white women made choices against the norms of respectable femininity.     

Evaluating inputs to models of hominin raw material selection: map resolution and path choices

Selection of an appropriate scale is an important decision in study design in many branches of science, since perceived patterns often change with the scales of spatial extent or resolution of an analysis. In previously published work, we created a resource selection model to determine the importance of several independent variables for the selection of lithic materials by hominins at a Middle Palaeolithic site in southern France. Two of these independent variables (calories exerted and difficulty of the terrain covered in travel from source to site) were calculated using elevation data extracted from maps. In the present paper, we examine the differences in model performance when the variables ‘Calories’ and ‘Difficulty’ are calculated using 1) three base maps for elevation that differed in map resolution (from finest to coarsest: a 1:25,000 topographic base map, SPOT DEM, and SRTM DEM), and 2) two different methods for determining the route from source to site (straight-line route and least-cost route; both methods exclude areas with slopes >60% from travel). Our best model was the one that used data calculated using the topographic base map; however, the SRTM DEM-based data produced models of essentially equal quality. Regardless of map scale, models that used data calculated using a straight-line route always outperformed models that used data calculated using a least-cost route. This supports our previous finding that a straight-line route is a more appropriate measure for the path from lithic source to site than a least-cost route. We conclude that the map resolution of each of the base maps used here is appropriate for analyses involving spatial data pertaining to Neandertal activity because this type of data is essentially always coarse-grained.     

Stable isotope analysis of Neolithic and Chalcolithic populations from Aktopraklık,northern Anatolia

This paper presents the results of stable isotope (carbon and nitrogen) analysis of human and faunal remains from the site of Aktoprakl?k, one of the earliest farming sites in the Eastern Marmara region of Northwest Anatolia. Excavations at this site have shown that occupation occurs from the middle of the 7th millennium BC through to the middle of the 6th millennium BC. The earliest Neolithic activity at this location occurs at the settlement site of Aktoprakl?k C. Since 2004 a number of Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic burials have been recovered from the settlement areas and an Early Chalcolithic cemetery (Aktoprakl?k B and A respectively). To date a total of 60 individuals have been recovered from Aktoprakl?k, 23 of which (20 adults [10 males, 8 females and 2 indet adults] and 3 children below ca. 12 years of age) form the basis of the current isotope study. In addition, 14 faunal samples from cattle, pig, sheep/goat and fallow deer are included in the analysis in order to facilitate a consideration of trophic level shifts and to interpret the ¹³C data. The data represents the first isotopic study of a farming community from this region of Anatolia. This region is important to our understanding of the north-westwards transmission of farming into Europe from the Near East, and as such Aktoprakl?k represents a key site for studying the diet of farmers at the transition to agriculture. The close clustering of isotope values overall indicates homogeneity in subsistence practices for this farming population. Interestingly, the isotope values indicate a general focus on C₃ terrestrial resources at Aktoprakl?k, despite the close proximity of both freshwater and marine environments where alternative resources could have been procured.