As early as the third century bce, references to labourers' work songs appeared in the Chinese court-sponsored compendium Lushi Chunqiu, and, for the 2,000 years that followed, labourers throughout China continued to sing these songs. Despite variations in their tones, rhythms, and lyrics, their chanting performed some essential functions: synchronizing movements, communicating information, and boosting morale. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the sound of such songs became controversial among newly arrived Anglophone settlers as well as Chinese intellectuals in Shanghai, evoking emotions ranging from frustration, contempt, and desperation to compassion, admiration, and even inspiration. This article historicizes the contested interpretations of Chinese workers' singing and shouting, exploring how different listeners' anxieties and agendas shaped what they heard. At the same time, it juxtaposes these reactions with the labourers' own justifications for the sounds they made, and their responses to the baffling modern cityscape they had to navigate. While reconstructing the histories of marginalized groups has long been hindered by the perception of archival silence, attending to sonic traces often dismissed as 'mere noise' can help to recover the vital sounds of those otherwise rendered voiceless by the historical record.
This article contributes to transnational perspectives on blackface by examining evidence of Black individuals and communities employing darkening make-up or black masks on both sides of the Atlantic. It challenges the assumption that all such practices derive from, or are analogous to, black minstrelsy in the United States. Drawing on historical and ethnographic sources, the article situates these performances within local and transnational festive traditions, particularly those rooted in Afro-Iberian cultural practices, with many pre-dating US minstrelsy. In some instances, black-on-black blackface reproduces racist stereotypes or engages with the codes of White blackface minstrelsy; in others, it functions as a racially affirmative practice unrelated to US traditions. Cases from across the world reveal multiple meanings, ranging from resistance to stereotypes to the symbolic restoration of ancestral blackness and affirmation of racial pride. Taken together, the evidence makes plain the need to interpret black-on-black blackface within its specific historical and cultural contexts. Furthermore, it calls attention to the transnational circulation of Afro-Iberian traditions of racial impersonation, largely overlooked in scholarship, alongside the diffusion of US minstrelsy. By foregrounding these alternative genealogies, the article contributes to a more nuanced and globally informed understanding of blackface and ethnic impersonation in the Atlantic world.
This article traces the rise and collapse of religious toleration of non-Christian Chinese merchants in Spanish Manila between 1571 and 1755, offering a case study in early modern global commerce and interfaith governance in European Asia. It demonstrates that Manila became the most religiously diverse and tolerant city in the Spanish Empire - and perhaps in the entire early modern Latin West - despite many hardline authorities' and jurists' insistence upon maintaining the widespread imperial practice of persecution of non-Christian ritual and belief. This deviation owed largely to coordinated efforts of non-Catholic Chinese merchants and sympathetic authorities - especially the Spanish governors and municipal aldermen. Jurists responded by formulating a theory of toleration rooted in scholastic contractualism, natural law, and voluntarism. Manila thus became a pioneer of the de facto and de jure toleration that underpinned Christian Asia - and whose arrangements resemble later developments in Dutch Batavia and French Pondich & eacute;ry. Yet while Manila's practices later became mainstream in many European-dominated entrepots, the risk of war between Manila and the Zheng maritime power in the early 1660s shattered the city's tolerant alliance, setting the stage for a slow dismemberment of non-Christian institutions culminating in the 1755 expulsion of non-Catholics. As other regional European powers adopted toleration, the regional trailblazer thus abandoned it. Manila toleration's unique trajectory compels a partial re-evaluation of the Spanish Empire's reputation for religious intolerance, underscores the critical importance of toleration in the emergence of commerce and governance in Christian Asia, and provides further evidence against the widespread liberal narrative in which toleration emerges exclusively in Northern Europe among a handful of eminent Protestant and deist freethinkers.
The idea that there was a ratio of people of colour to white people that, if exceeded, would prompt a white backlash was a tenet of folk sociology in Britain. This belief was the basis of strategies of 'dispersal'. In the 1940s and 1950s, officials counted on the labour market to spread people from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa around the country. However, the housing market had the opposite effect. It 'concentrated' Black and Asian people in run-down parts of British cities. Later, as urban authorities began to demolish these neighbourhoods and to integrate public housing, some (most notably Birmingham) introduced formal dispersal programmes with racial quotas. Dispersal in particular and housing policy in general illustrate the way central government devolved contentious matters involving race to local councils. Examining this process of 'peripheralization' brings two distinct concerns in the historiography - national policy on immigration and local social processes - into the same frame. City and regional authorities in France and West Germany pursued dispersal in parallel ways, despite the differences in the three countries' migration histories and citizenship regimes. The similarities in the project of dispersal and its failure point to a common European history of the origins of multiculturalism.
Abstract Completed around 1821, a monument commemorating the enslaver and industrialist Richard Pennant and his wife, Anne Susannah Warburton, elides any mention of the family’s sugar plantations in Jamaica and instead celebrates the Pennants as benevolent modernizers who transformed their Welsh estate and tenants. A material artefact of national history writing, the monument severs this local story from imperial concerns. Yet a comparative study of the transition to wage labour on the family’s properties in North Wales and Jamaica reveals the work the Pennant memorial’s story was doing for both Britain’s local and its imperial labour projects. In North Wales, estate managers confronted labourers’ independence; in post-emancipation Jamaica, plantation authorities similarly faced freed people’s efforts to defend their autonomy. Racial ideology reconciled these parallel histories by constructing Black labourers as uniquely idle, thereby legitimizing restrictive post-emancipation labour regimes while masking coercion within Britain itself. By tracing the circulation of labour ideologies, moral vocabularies, and managerial practices across North Wales and Jamaica, this article challenges historical narratives that separate industrial Britain from slave and post-slave colonies, a tendency epitomized in the Pennant monument, and instead exposes the joint construction of national mythology and imperial rationality.
