Exploring trade globalization in the long run: The RICardo project

Initiated in 2004, the RICardo project focuses on bilateral trade data of all the world's countries from the early nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War. The project includes the construction of a database and the creation of a website. It is a pioneering work in the field of historical trade statistics that aims at providing easy-to-access research material to the scientific community and at attracting a wider public to the history of trade relationships. The article emphasizes the originality of the project and sums up its various aspects by reviewing previous trade databases, clarifying the main features of historical trade statistics, and describing the construction and use of the RICardo website.     

The equally “bad” French and English farmers of Quebec: New TFP measures from the 1831 census

New TFP estimates drawn from the neglected census of 1831 for Lower Canada are used to test the controversial (but still dominant) traditional “poor French farmers” explanation for a prolonged economic crisis. The new evidence shows that French-speaking areas were equally as productive as English-speaking areas, something that upturns the established consensus and reinforces the minority viewpoint that culture had little to do with the crisis. Using a broad range of controls, the researchers find that this conclusion is robust and that other variables such as settlement recency, environment, and economic structure were much more significant determinants of TFP. These results warrant the abandonment of the cultural explanation and a shift toward other explanatory channels.     

A third road to the past? Historical scholarship in the age of big data

Is a third passage to the past possible, beyond Elton's and Fogel's two roads of narrative history and scientific/quantitative history? One that would combine narrative history's focus on the event, on individuals and their actions, at a particular time and place, to scientific/quantitative history's emphasis on explicit behavioral models based on social-science theories? That is the question this article addresses. It illustrates a computer-assisted methodology for the study of narrative—quantitative narrative analysis (QNA)—that does just that. Based on the 5 Ws + H of narrative—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—QNA quantifies events without losing the event itself, without losing people behind numbers, diachronic time behind synchronic statistical coefficients. When used in conjunction with dynamic and interactive data visualization tools (and new natural language processing tools), QNA may provide a third unforeseen road to the past.     

Reading “wrecks of history” and the Harley family narrative

During the English civil wars, many elite families faced the destruction of the buildings, monuments, and movables that had served for centuries as testaments to their social standing. The Harleys of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire faced just this situation after their estate was demolished during a Royalist siege in 1644. While the family had ample cause to lament, this study reveals that destruction could also be framed as a generative force. In this framework, the broken artefact works in multiple ways, recalling the intact pre-war family while simultaneously attesting to its suffering and sacrifice. As the Harleys and those close to them wrote about loss and destruction, they evoke the family’s ancient prestige and re-frame loss in a way that lays the groundwork for local reconciliation and the success of the Harley line. Out of the ruins of their lives, the Harleys are re-created as a godly, genteel family.     

Finding Thoreau in French Canada: The Ideological Legacy of the American Revolution

Henry David Thoreau’s Yankee in Canada is easily overlooked. Because it is so selective in its depiction of life in the St. Lawrence River valley, historians of mid-nineteenth-century Canada have shown little interest in Thoreau’s first-hand account. To American readers, it offers little of the characteristic Thoreau found in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. Yet, it is highly significant as an expression of national self-definition. Thoreau borrowed themes at least as old as the American Revolution when noting the pernicious rule of Catholic and British power in Canada. He set out to expose the promise of republican values by emphasizing the contrast between these and the poor and morally stunted life under Old World institutions. His work must therefore be interpreted as a call to his audience to commit more deeply than ever to the ideals that animated the Great Republic’s founding moment. It must also stand as a civic interpretation of American nationality at a time when this perspective was waning. Before long, Old World peoples would be racialized and the ideological embrace of the republican values advanced by Thoreau would no longer suffice in making American citizens.     

“Inhabitants of rustic parts of the world”: John Locke’s collection of drawings and the Dutch Empire in ethnographic types

This article analyses a collection of 26 watercolour drawings which portray ethnographic types from the Americas, Asia, and Africa. These drawings, presently kept at the British Library, were made for John Locke by his servant Sylvester Brounower during Locke’s exile in the Netherlands in the 1680s.     

Europe's confused transmutation: the realignment of moral cartography in Juan de la Cosa's Mappa Mundi (1500)

Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci in the last decade of the fifteenth century, the New World of the Americas entered the cartographic and moral consciousness of Europe. In the 1500 mappa mundi of Juan de la Cosa, navigator and map-maker, we see Europe as a hybrid moral entity, a transitional blend of the medieval and the modern at the crossroads between two mappings of Europe. This paper argues that the Juan De la Cosa map represents a blurred transition between map-making traditions and a mixed moral rhetoric of European identity. The De la Cosa map operates across two sets of imagined axes: held horizontally, the map is set to a Ptolemaic grid with Europe straddling the Prime Meridian, and yet when held vertically it presents a medieval moral continuum in which the Americas occupy an ascendant position, a verdant new Jerusalem in contrast to the Babylon of the Old World. Europe is both drawn to the centre of a new world order, and also pushed to the moral margins in an echo of the medieval mappa mundi still imperfectly resolved.     

FROM CATASTROPHE TO HOPE

In his recent book, Amir Eshel focuses on over thirty recent German‐, Hebrew‐, and English‐language novels to develop a reading method—the “hermeneutics of futurity”—that would replace moralizing approaches to past traumas, including German guilt over the Holocaust and Israeli denial of Palestinian suffering. Futurity demonstrates how various narratives imagine a future liberated from denial, guilt, and thus traumatic repetition. In so doing Eshel emphasizes human agency to counter the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that has long dominated a great deal of literary theory, and focuses on how novelists construct human choices and their consequences. He covers two generations of German‐language novels spanning the Adenauer era to the present, and two generations of Israeli writers reflecting on 1948 and later, 1967. In order to develop fully the concept of futurity he also writes on recent American and English novels, often with implicitly political themes. The book succeeds in demonstrating the value of how various novelists read the past otherwise in order to reconstruct the present and future. At the same time, Eshel conceives human agency and “choice” so capaciously that the book often neglects the institutional constraints on agency that afflict victims of traumas in particular. His treatment of Martin Walser's controversial fictionalized memoir is exemplary of this problem in an otherwise stimulating work.     

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.