This article delves into a lacuna at the heart of Hannah Arendt's politics: the cleave of the human world into a set of known and named citizens and a larger set of nobodies. While she writes about the first with lucid care, the second serves only as a vaguely unsettling background. As she was an exile who wrote about exiles with care and fluency, this hiatus in her thinking is a bit puzzling. Nobodies dwell inside what Lewis R. Gordon calls a "hellish zone of nonbeing," a space of traumatic abjection from which they haunt and trouble the polis-and sometimes present themselves to challenge its walls. The trouble for historians is that nobodies in town become alike nobodies in its archive: How can we possibly hear them, twice erased? This article proposes a theoretical framework for doing so by responding to Arendt via Steven Bantu Biko and Walter Benjamin.
The changing relationship between structural changes to global capitalism under neoliberalism and transformations to the global working class has led to debates over the centrality of class and working-class strategy. This article makes an intervention in these debates by bringing recent theoretical perspectives on temporality together with social reproduction theory. By locating the central contradiction of capitalism as that between the reproduction of capital and the reproduction of workers, I argue that the sphere of social reproduction represents a unique moment, connected to capitalist production yet temporally distinct. Social reproduction is a key terrain of class struggle precisely because the reproduction of workers represents a circuit internal to yet distinct from that of capitalist production. The distinct temporality of social reproduction gives it a degree of autonomy that lends struggles over social reproduction a potentiality to combat the hegemony of abstract labor time and exert meaningful worker control over the labor process.
This article argues that historians of neoliberalism could benefit from Moishe Postone's call to move beyond the "surface" of market dynamics and engage the "deep structure" of capitalist value. Postone's approach offers several suggestions for historians of neoliberalism: (1) to resituate the neoliberal era as one of many different "historical forms" of capital; (2) to write a history of the 1970s crisis through the categories "value" and the "composition of capital" explicated by Marx; (3) to frame the 1970s less as a "terminal crisis" or "distortion" of capitalism's normal operations than as the latest in a long-term series of restructurings; and (4) to open up the historiographical fixation on north Atlantic deindustrialization and to think about stagnation more expansively. This article offers a suggestive exploration of Asia-Pacific history in the second half of the twentieth century that gestures toward a more global, capital-centered account of 1970s restructuring.
The rise of social democratic parties in the late nineteenth century constituted an important development in European politics. Social democratic parties have been credited as crucial forces behind both democratization and welfare state development. Scholars of social democracy commonly assume that social democrats must choose between appealing to the working class and the people as a whole. This article questions that assumption through a study of early Swedish social democracy. Drawing on archival evidence, the article shows that Swedish social democrats commonly invoked class and people simultaneously. The article further analyzes how social democrats sought to reconcile their appeals to class and people. By demonstrating the party's dual commitment to class and people, the article also challenges the commonplace notion that early socialist parties were exclusively oriented toward the working class.
This article reassesses Japan's relationship to the Spanish Indies at the turn of seventeenth century. During a "Spanish decade" lasting from 1598 until 1609, the Tokugawa shogunate saw in the Spanish Indies the potential to bring foreign trade to eastern Japan, to extend commerce across the Pacific Ocean, and to access valuable mining technologies at a time when Japan's production was booming. But authorities and intermediaries struggled to agree on the volume of trade, the geography of exchange, and how, if at all, to share expertise. The article assesses three paths of Japanese outreach: the "old route" of existing exchange between southwest Japan and the Philippines; the "new route" proposed between eastern Japan and Spanish America; and the "silver rut," in reference to the precious metal's role as both a catalyst and impediment to bridging the gap between two of the early modern world's leading silver producers.
This article presents a view of the monetary world of South Asia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, this region was a patchwork of polities that included an expanding East India Company. A dense sarrafi (banking) network extended into oceanic and land trade routes outside the subcontinent correlated to a lively circulation of monetary media and financial instruments across the region. Juxtaposing colonial and non-colonial archives, this article uses three mints as a prism to view monetary practices and governance: the mints of Benares, Calcutta, and Baroda. These mints demonstrate how the mint in South Asia moved from the Mughal imperial household to the post-Mughal bazaar, and then from the bazaar to the colonial government bureau. The article raises new questions about monetary jurisdictions while viewing these jurisdictions as spatial and conceptual claims by states and sarrafs.
Around the world, citizens and leaders seek to realign collective identities with political boundaries. These aspirations are reshaping the ways we discuss-and divide over-US history. This article asks whether the history discipline is prepared to respond to the changes taking place around us, including the revival of nationalism. Professional historians use three dominant paradigms to narrate the history of the United States: post-American, hyper-American, and mainstream. Too often, analyses tend to fuel rather than explain today's history culture wars. This article avoids judging the comparative worth of the three paradigms, focusing instead on analyzing seriously the ideas and aspirations of progressive, conservative, and mainstream scholars. The goal is to help scholars in each camp understand the deeper ideas animating their disagreements. This article both surveys the state of the field and offers guidance to academic and public historians as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
This article examines the development of a financial instrument, the poli & ccedil;e, through interactions with interstate finance in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. In doing so, it highlights the dynamism of Ottoman finance and the importance of interactions between European and Middle Eastern finance-a perspective missed by a long tradition in economic history of drawing comparisons between the European bill of exchange and the Middle Eastern suftaja. The poli & ccedil;e was described by European merchants as a bill of exchange and used in both Euro-Ottoman and intra-Ottoman transactions. Its usage facilitated the workings of the Ottoman fiscal system but also introduced questions about sovereignty, value, and money's mobility that had to be addressed across a plural Ottoman legal system. The poli & ccedil;e, consequently, shows not simply how institutions moved across the early modern world but also how they changed through interactions with other financial instruments, political authority, and local regimes of value.
Defining money and making the definition stick are political acts with a history. Arguments about the nature of money are part of this process. The question of the fundamental basis of money in law, the state, or exchange is less about history and more about the present. Definitions of money have also marked the boundaries of our historical imaginations. Historians have long been interested in making definitions as accurate and rich as possible. However, they have sometimes confused defining money for monetary history itself. Definitions are in tension with history. The American Revolution is a case in point. If we approach the monetary dimensions of that conflict with a preconceived definition, we miss the deep, specific monetary and social divisions between the two warring parties and the crucial imperial dimensions of the conflict itself.
This article proposes that social scientists have not appreciated how argumentative practices-the way we make claims with the aid of concepts and distinctions-can assume an invariant form. This invariant form raises difficulties for arguments that appeal to totality and other broadly critical notions. To illustrate and critique this state of affairs, the article sketches this invariant form and contrasts it with a form of argument involving appeals to capitalist totality. This effort relies on the account of capitalist totality in the work of Moishe Postone. But the article includes reasons that this analysis of totality and forms of argument can yield lessons for other treatments of totality as well as for the broader effort to forge a coherent and robust alternative to methodological positivism.
The ascendance of critical theory to the status of a global intellectual paradigm is the result of a half-century-long search for the Frankfurt School's foundations in philosophy and religion rather than its previously recognized source in contemporary social problems and the tradition of Marxism. Initiated by Max Horkheimer's turn to religion and political conservatism in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then defended by West German contemporaries, the resulting canonization of critical theory has been more recently consolidated by leading American representatives of Frankfurt School intellectual history. To reconstruct this process, this essay returns Horkheimer's late work to its context in Cold War-era debates about American militarism, political emancipation, women's rights, the "Third World," and related social struggles before showing how the controversies surrounding his religious rewriting of critical theory continue to inform influential accounts of Frankfurt School history.
Employing a microhistorical examination of the papers of planter Pierre Dessalles and French colonial civil records, this article examines how community and kin-based systems supported reproduction and mothering among enslaved women in nineteenth-century Martinique. Slaveholders in nineteenth-century Martinique mapped anxieties about the future of the plantation regime and white colonial rule onto slavery's sexual economy and enslaved reproduction. Yet, despite the pervasive exploitation of their reproductive labor, enslaved women on the Dessalles plantation fostered kinship networks and community support systems to assert some autonomy over their bodies and family lives. The article demonstrates how attending to the collaborative dynamics of enslaved reproduction reveals the broader strategies of survival and subversion of slavery's sexual economy, as well as the post-emancipation afterlives of the familial and social networks enslaved women relied on as they mothered (or not) in bondage.
This article revisits the capitalism and slavery debate, specifically regarding the role of sugar plantations in the long eighteenth century. It begins by distinguishing between the Williams thesis and a more defensible version recently developed by Marxist historians. It then distinguishes between historians those who see slavery as inimical or essential to capitalism and those who see it as a nonessential but accelerating factor. Next it argues that at issue in the debates is not so much the capitalist character of plantation agriculture but its contribution to industrial capitalism in imperial metropoles. Historians who argue for the viability and capitalist dynamism of the sugar-slavery plantation complex often mistake growth in production for the self-sustaining productivity growth definitive of industrial capitalism. Finally, this article observes that arguments for the viability of the sugar-slavery plantation complex generally ignore the besetting problem of soil exhaustion, a bias presently being overcome by environmental histories.
The article suggests that Nazi antisemitism inherited one of its key elements, the idea of the nation as a community of producers, from the tradition of modern bourgeois ideology inaugurated in the period of the French Revolution. It argues that this element of continuity can help explain its attractiveness to large constituencies across many political and social divides. First, the article provides a detailed interpretation of the January 1939 Reichstag speech in which Adolf Hitler publicly enunciated the genocide of European Jewry. Second, this speech is contextualized in other writings by Hitler, including Mein Kampf, as well as selected sources of nineteenth-century antisemitism. Third, the article relates these findings to the "rhetoric of bourgeois revolution," identified by William Sewell in his work on the French Revolution.
There is an apparent contradiction in recent scholarship on the Enlightenment and its relationship to the environment. Whereas intellectual historians have characterized the master discourse of Enlightenment social theory, political economy, as being uniquely unconcerned with sustainability and limits to growth, environmental historians have argued that eighteenth-century intellectuals were remarkably sensitive to natural constraints-especially in European colonial spaces. This article looks at the specific case of the French colonial Enlightenment to reassess the relationship between these two Enlightenments. It does so by applying the method of "symptomatic reading" to the political economy that informed France's eighteenth-century empire in general, and to the case of Pierre Poivre and his supposedly "environmental" reforms on the Mascarene Islands in particular. Symptomatic reading, the article argues, facilitates a necessary conversation between environmental and intellectual histories of the Enlightenment and reveals some of the fundamental dynamics and limitations of early modern capitalism.
