bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
In the Margins
Authors: Valenze Deborah
Published: September 2023

This chapter assesses how the concept of civilization was strategically important to Thomas Robert Malthus's argument in the Essay on the Principle of Population, even as it stood for many things. The chapter considers his personal contact with humans living “inside” the forces of nature, the legendary Sami reindeer herders in northern Norway. While touring Scandinavia in 1799, Malthus and his companion sought out a visit to an encampment of Sami herders, then called Lapps. Through his diary entries, one can see how he viewed the experience as a trip across a divide between civilization and a region of otherness or alterity, where people dwelled in nature in ways he would attempt to comprehend. In his greatly expanded edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population of 1803, Malthus made no mention of the Lapps and he also excluded more conventional Norwegian pastoral production, regarding the cattle he saw there as belonging to a primitive stage of economic life. Beyond that, he was not able to recognize “hunter-gatherer” techniques and tools as evidence of knowledge-gathering of any value; he looked upon the unfamiliar environment as merely barren, with nothing to teach him. Ultimately, his remoteness from Indigenous knowledge and local strategies of combining various forms of subsistence activities meant that he could only categorize them as desperate measures.
Malthus and the Margins
Authors: Valenze Deborah
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores a revealing account of agrarian production in postcolonial settings—the later location of Malthusian margins—which emerged from the work of Danish economist Ester Boserup. Her first book, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure (1965), demonstrated how Malthus's assumptions were backward in their logic. Increased population did not follow a rise in agricultural productivity; on the contrary, an increase in numbers of people usually led to greater rural productivity. Seizing the Malthusian bias by the throat, Boserup pointed to the inflexible models often imposed on divergent settings. The chapter then draws on the central insight of Boserup—the value of intensification understood in terms of local practices—to reopen a consideration of European agricultural history. Measures of agricultural output reveal that the relationship between food and population was moving in a direction opposed to a dire outcome in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the diversity of components contributing to the food supply stands out as the most significant factor involved in the success of sustainable food production.
Linnaeus and Classification
Authors: Flannery Maura C.
Published: September 2023

By the seventeenth century the number of known plants had risen considerably as the European species were more thoroughly studied, and explorers sent back new finds from around the world. Botanists attempted to discover order in all this diversity by constructing classifications systems, but found it difficult to agree on the most significant characteristics. In mid-century the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus developed a relatively simple system based on plants’ reproductive structures. He also limited species names to two words, the genus which included plants with similar properties and an epithet for each species. Names had become longer as more species were discovered and needed to be differentiated from each other. Now the name was separated from the description and kept brief.
Botanical Exploration
Authors: Flannery Maura C.
Published: September 2023

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, plant exploration intensified and became more organized as did European colonial expansion, where the economic potential of plants was the focus. Even naval officers were trained in natural history and drawing so they could gather specimens and document what they saw. The Spanish focused on the flora of their long-established Latin American colonies while the French and British mounted large-scale naval expeditions. British naturalist Joseph Banks participated in Captain James Cook’s first around-the-world voyage; Banks and his men brought back thousands of plant specimens, many new to science. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, on the other hand, traveled only with indigenous support as they ventured into Amazonia and scaled the Andes. One result was Humboldt’s seminal work on biogeography.
Gardens
Authors: Flannery Maura C.
Published: September 2023

Exotic plants were particularly attractive to serious gardeners with the means to acquire and care for them in greenhouses. Herbaria were often created to document what was grown. Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, preserved not only exotic plants, but also varieties of garden flowers. The Philadelphia nurseryman John Bartram sent seeds, seedlings, and specimens of North American plants to his British clients. Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, was a prodigious collector who studied botany and, along with her friend Mary Delany, who is known for her flower collages that often included leaves and other plant material, learned to press plants. European nations were also interested in horticulture, creating gardens in their colonies to acclimatize and propagate exotic species as well as to evaluate plants as possible crops for tropical plantations.
Managing Exploration and Collecting
Authors: Flannery Maura C.
Published: September 2023

In the nineteenth century, as plant collecting increased it also became focused on areas that hadn’t been heavily explored, including Australia, the United States, Africa, China, and Japan. Nurseries sent out explorers less to discover new species than to find plant varieties with economic potential. The Wardian case made it easier to transport living plants over long distances. Colonial powers intensified their searches for plants that could be grown on the large plantations they were creating in the tropics. This explains the worldwide movement of plants such as Brazilian rubber being grown in Southeast Asia, and nutmeg from Asia spreading to Madagascar and even to the West Indies. Managing plant collection and distribution was still being done by botanists working in major botanical institutions far from these areas of interest.
Changing Botany
Authors: Flannery Maura C.
Published: September 2023

In the twentieth century, interest in systematics dimmed as other areas of botany came to the fore. Plant physiology, anatomy, and development had long been studied, but now they were joined by the new fields of ecology and genetics. The discovery of DNA as the genetic material was pivotal, as was sequencing its building blocks for information on an organism’s traits. Molecular research as well as environmental studies eclipsed taxonomy, with financial and other resources moving away from herbaria and forcing many to close and distribute their collections to other institutions. Yet by the end of the century, there was a resurgence of interest in herbaria fueled by the same fields that caused its decline. Specimens were found to be sources of DNA for genetic studies and of information on environmental issues such as global warming.
Understanding and Conserving Biodiversity
Authors: Flannery Maura C.
Published: September 2023

Despite mounting loss of organisms to extinction, new species are being reported every year. Many are discovered in herbaria among already collected specimens, some stored for years. Plant collections are essential to understanding biodiversity because they document the plants themselves. Since specimens have been collected for several hundred years, they can be used to track changes in climate, indicated by shifts in the time of flowering or the appearance of warm-climate species in more temperate areas. They can also document the spread of invasive species and degradation of habitats. Herbaria are playing a key role in supporting conservation efforts, and seed banks are among the most important ways of protecting species’ integrity into the future.
Online Herbaria
Authors: Flannery Maura C.
Published: September 2023

As the importance of plant specimens to biodiversity research became more apparent, so did the need to increase their accessibility. The vast majority of specimens are held in developed nations, not where the greatest biodiversity occurs. One solution is to digitize information on specimens and image them, and make this information available online. The Global Plants website provides access to key specimens from herbaria around the world, and the Global Biodiversity Informatics Facility (GBIF) hosts billions of natural history specimens and observation records. Now the focus is on linking this information to other types of biological data on DNA sequences, traits, and geographical distribution in what is called the extended specimen network. Information online also enables research on climate change to be brought to a new level of sophistication.
Understanding Manufactured Consensus
Authors: Woolley Samuel
Published: September 2023

This chapter reviews how propaganda has been understood in the past. It builds on, amends, and alters existing theories of propaganda to take account of the current era and current state of media technology. This new theoretical work extends the propaganda model of Herman and Chomsky and complicates their view of the machinations of the mass media. It leverages their perspective, which is grounded in political economy, alongside the work of current media theorists and science and technology studies (STS) scholars to focus on the problems posed by propaganda in the era of the internet, particularly as they relate to communication, journalism, and media studies.
Between Memory and History
Authors: Chatonnet Françoise Briquel , Debié Muriel
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines the history of Syriac Christianity up to the fourth century. It shows that the life of Jesus in Palestine makes Christianity an Asiatic religion, one that spread west through the Roman Empire but also east, beyond the borders of the Roman world. The legend of the evangelization of Edessa during the apostolic era, on the initiative of Christ himself, gave it a prestige above the usual stories about apostolic foundations and very quickly earned it a reputation as far away as Europe. In the Syriac churches, the memory of their Christian origins centers on oral and written traditions of the Christianization of Edessa, Mesopotamia, and India, which imagine Christianity coming to the region very early. In reality, this first Christianization happened when the Edessan kingdom oscillated between the Parthian and Roman empires, during the Roman–Persian wars that marked the third and fourth centuries CE.
God as Teacher
Authors: Chatonnet Françoise Briquel , Debié Muriel
Published: September 2023

This chapter reveals that both writing and writing culture are highly valued in the Syriac tradition. Syriac not only inherited the Aramaic tradition of inscriptions but also gave birth to a rich body of literature, especially between the 2nd and the 14th centuries. According to a number of Syriac writers, Syriac was the language of Paradise, which God spoke with Adam and Eve before the Fall. The apostle Addai claimed that at the Last Judgment, at the end of time, everyone would have their deeds written on their bodies, and that everyone—male and female, great and small—would know how to read their deeds themselves, without needing the help of anyone else, because they would have received the illumination of the Christian faith. This vivid image of every one finally being able to read shows how prevalent illiteracy was in late antique society and consequently the importance that Syriac Christianity attached to writing.
Missionary Communities
Authors: Chatonnet Françoise Briquel , Debié Muriel
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on Syriac encounters with various cultures through evangelism. Syriac churches, especially the Church of the East, were strongly evangelistic and carried the gospel beyond the Mediterranean world in an expansion unparalleled in either antiquity or the Middle Ages. Bordered to the west by the Greek Christian world and to the north by the Armenians, the Syriac missions mainly focused on the south and the east. Syriac missionaries did not arrive as part of an army or invading power, but rather in merchant caravans and among refugees. The Syriac churches were thus in contact with all kinds of peoples, languages, and cultures. Bound together by the same religion, Syriac churches included not only those who spoke various vernacular forms of Aramaic but also those who spoke Persian, Arabic, Sogdian, Uighur, Turkic, and myriad languages from Central Asia, China, and India. As a result, Syriac could not be identified with a single people, ethnicity, or state, as was the case with Copts and Armenians. Instead, Syriac culture was truly international.
Separations and Flourishing
Authors: Chatonnet Françoise Briquel , Debié Muriel
Published: September 2023

This chapter describes the history of the church from the 5th to the 9th centuries as one of gradual separation from western Christianity and the establishment of separate Syriac churches with their own hierarchy and geography, competing with one another and expanding toward East Asia. The political history of this era began with a series of conflicts between Rome and the Sasanians, caused by the question of Rome's tribute to Persia. The Roman Near East was occupied twice in the 7th century. This period of political disruption notably did not affect the development of churches or the Syriac cultures. During the 8th and 9th centuries, Syriac Christians played a central role in the translation movement that took place in Baghdad under the patronage of the ʻAbbasid caliphs, where scholars of all religions and areas of the empire participated in what is called the ʻAbbasid Renaissance. Although sometimes characterized as a resurgence of ancient Greek culture, it was in reality the extension of a process that had been ongoing since the end of late antiquity, especially in the Syriac world.
Traditions and New Influences
Authors: Chatonnet Françoise Briquel , Debié Muriel
Published: September 2023

This chapter traces Syriac's development into a literary and liturgical language, known as ktobonoyo (from the root word ktobo, “book”), and less and less a spoken tongue, replaced by local dialects of Aramaic, Arabic, or in some places Persian (and later Turkish). The exception was a number of high-ranking ecclesiastical officials in the Syriac Orthodox Church. By the 14th century, the use of Syriac had become only residual. The language was used only in ecclesiastical or scholarly circles as a “classical” language. Besides language, the Arabic educational system, literature, and scientific knowledge all exercised an increasing influence on Syriac writers, who trained together with Jewish and Muslim scholars in the same circles and by the same methods. The influence of Greek paideia faded in favor of a new dominant Arabo-Persian culture, in which these Syriac writers participated.
The Path West: The Conquest Of Italy
Authors: Wiemer Hans-Ulrich , Dillon John Noël
Published: September 2023

This chapter traces the history behind the conquest of Italy and its shift from emperors to barbarian kings. The chapter begins by studying the fall of the Western Roman Empire and how it is understood in Western historiography. Scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries unabashedly described this process as the “decline of the ancient world” when they wanted to indicate that its consequences extended far beyond the political, and the chapter considers the implications behind this and similar wording. Next, it examines the last emperors of the Western Roman Empire, before chronicling the rise of Odoacer as the new ruler of Italy. The chapter considers the particulars of his reign as well as his continually tenuous relationship with the Eastern Roman emperor. Finally, the chapter chronicles the struggle between Odoacer and Theoderic.
From Cooperation To Conflict: Theoderic’s Final Years
Authors: Wiemer Hans-Ulrich , Dillon John Noël
Published: September 2023

This chapter chronicles developments during Theoderic the Great's final years and death. It begins with Theoderic's attempts to avert a succession crisis by appointing a new heir, Eutharic, and grooming him to be the next king. Theoderic's efforts would eventually be frustrated, however, as Eutharic died sometime after. Next, the chapter discusses the trial and execution of Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus and how these events had affected the relationship between the king and the senate. With Theoderic's relationship with the senate showing signs of strain, the chapter then turns to yet another pillar of his power—the Catholic Church, and Theoderic's involvement in it. Afterward, the chapter delves into the tense history between Theoderic and his Burgundian son-in-law, Sigismund. Finally, the chapter takes a look at the problems mounting in various other areas in Theoderic's final years, exacerbating one another and proving impossible for the king to solve, as most of them had to do with his failure to appoint a proper successor.
THE GOTHIC KINGDOM IN ITALY AFTER THEODERIC
Authors: Wiemer Hans-Ulrich , Dillon John Noël
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses Theoderic the Great's death and its aftermath. It first describes Theoderic's mausoleum before turning to the larger issue of a succession crisis, as the Gothic aristocracy struggled to appoint a proper heir. Athalaric, Theoderic's grandson, initially succeeded him as per his grandfather's wishes, but soon enough court politics became increasingly complicated with the involvement of Theoderic's daughter and the mother of Athalaric, Amalasuintha, as well as Theoderic's nephew, Theodahad. The chapter also looks into the eventual war between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, as the Byzantine emperor Justinian sought to reconquer the West from its barbarian rulers. Here, the chapter describes the beginning of the end of the Gothic kingdom as wars and political intrigue tore it apart from the inside and out. Eventually, the Goths were defeated in a decisive battle at Mons Lactarius (“Milk Mountain”), effectively ending the kingdom, though the Goths themselves persisted for some time yet.
The Find
Authors: Smith Geoffrey S. , Landau Brent C.
Published: September 2023

This chapter discusses Morton Smith's journey to and stay at the ancient monastery of Mar Saba, and how he found Clement of Alexandria's Letter to Theodore. It begins by describing how Smith ended up stranded in Jerusalem for several years, when travel to and from the Mediterranean halted because of the Second World War. The chapter looks at his relationship with Kyriakos Spyridonides, a high-ranking official within the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, who invited him to visit the monastery of Mar Saba. After two months at Mar Saba, however, Smith returned to Jerusalem and resumed his work at Hebrew University. The conventional wisdom is that Smith did not return to Mar Saba until 1958, when he discovered the Secret Gospel of Mark. But now there is reason to believe that he traveled to Mar Saba again in 1944. Those who have accused him of forging the manuscript propose that Smith forged the manuscript sometime between 1942 and 1944, and that it was during this second, concealed trip to Mar Saba that he deposited it in the tower library where he would “discover” it fourteen years later.
The Vetting
Authors: Smith Geoffrey S. , Landau Brent C.
Published: September 2023

This chapter examines how Morton Smith deciphered and studied Clement of Alexandria's Letter to Theodore. Smith devised a game plan, a fourfold strategy for determining the authenticity and significance of the text. First, he would need to assess the handwriting. While he was relatively confident in assigning the hand to the eighteenth century, Smith contacted leading experts in dating Greek hands, especially late ones, since the handwriting was certainly later than the publication of Voss's 1646 edition of the Letters of Ignatius. Second, Smith needed to investigate the history of the text. While an eighteenth-century monk may have composed the text, he may also have copied it from an earlier—even ancient—manuscript. Third, Smith had to answer the question of the authenticity of the text. Was this a genuine work of Clement, or was it the spurious work of some later author, ancient or medieval, who wrote under the pen name of Clement? Fourth and finally, he had to answer the question of the authenticity of the passage from the Secret Gospel of Mark. Smith later published his findings in 1973, years after he announced his discovery in 1960.
The Skeptic
Authors: Smith Geoffrey S. , Landau Brent C.
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the arguments of Quentin Quesnell, who was the first scholar to accuse Morton Smith of forging the manuscript that he claimed to have discovered. In 1973, Smith's definitive study of his discovery at Mar Saba finally appeared in print, published with Harvard University Press under the title Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark. What had until then been discussed mostly in private could now be studied and evaluated by anyone, be they specialists in biblical studies or curious laypersons. In his 1975 article for the prestigious academic journal Catholic Biblical Quarterly, “The Mar Saba Clementine: A Question of Evidence,” Quesnell alleged that Smith's discovery was in fact a twentieth-century forgery. Quesnell makes two central arguments. First, since Smith had the good fortune to make a discovery of potentially profound implications for the study of Christian origins, he also had a duty to ensure that the evidence for this discovery was kept safe and made readily available for other scholars to examine. In Quesnell's opinion, this was a duty that Smith neglected. Second, since Smith had failed to secure and document his find adequately, the possibility remains that the Mar Saba manuscript is a modern forgery.
The End
Authors: Smith Geoffrey S. , Landau Brent C.
Published: September 2023

This chapter describes how, during Morton Smith's final years, he did his best to continue his academic research and writing, shifting his attention from Jesus to the apostle Paul. On July 11, 1991, Smith died by suicide, a decision born out of his own belief that all people have the right to die. Despite the fact that he wrote seven books, co-wrote two, and published well over one hundred articles during his lifetime, Smith would be remembered most of all for his work on the Secret Gospel of Mark. The main reason the authenticity of the Mar Saba manuscript remains in doubt is that scholars have struggled to imagine a place and time in Christian history from which a text like this could plausibly emerge. If this book's argument is persuasive, then the Letter to Theodore adds to the growing body of evidence for same-sex relationships in late antique monasticism and opens the door for new work on the place of Christian apocryphal writings in the history of sexuality.
The Moral Image of Empire in Restoration England
Authors: Glickman Gabriel
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks at how English authors debated the moral and intellectual foundations of overseas expansion. The English view of territorial empire was tinged with ambivalence. While great empires could be acclaimed as agents for human improvement, the prospect was viewed by many commentators through the prism of Roman, Renaissance, and Protestant texts that warned against territorial expansion as the forerunner of despotism, luxury, and decline. English authors crossed swords over the ways to make their emerging empire Christian, virtuous, and durable. One cohort argued that the Spanish model of territorial conquest and the Christian mission could be adopted and purified by a Protestant realm. Other voices promoted a commercial “empire of the seas,” centered only on control over selective ports, islands, and peninsulas, as the way to achieve national enrichment without the moral dangers arising from territorial occupation.
Conflict, Commerce, and Political Economies of Empire
Authors: Glickman Gabriel
Published: September 2023

The moral and strategic questions provoked by overseas expansion were accompanied by intense debates over political economy. Here, too, authors fell into conflict over whether the English should emulate the Spanish template for overseas empire, which centered on the extraction of gold and silver, or develop a different economic model entirely. Alternative visions of an empire of commerce and plantation created new disagreements over the appropriate commodities for production, the trading freedoms suited to overseas dominions, and the way to make colonies work to the benefit of the mother kingdom. These debates took place against a background of shifts in international relations, which disrupted the original blueprints for the king’s new territories. The militaristic rationale for Jamaica was challenged in the later 1660s by a push for peace and diplomacy with Spain. Conversely, deteriorating relations with the “Barbary” powers cast doubt on the initial hopes for Tangier’s development as a peaceful free port and fueled rival plans for the city as a seat of warfare and further expansion into Africa.
“People of Another World”: Colonial Subjects, Colonial Liberties, and English Domestic Opinion
Authors: Glickman Gabriel
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks at the image and reputation of overseas colonists in domestic opinion. English statesmen encouraged wide degrees of self-governance among settler-colonists as ways to reduce the burden on the Crown. But commentators were agitated by the possibility of dominions developing interests at odds with their mother kingdom and were sensitive to an older strain of moral anxiety over the impact of foreign travel on identities and allegiances. Domestic misgivings were brought home in the 1670s by outbreaks of disorder in the Caribbean and Chesapeake colonies. As commentators examined the state of the overseas territories, they reflected on the contact between settlers and non-European peoples and questioned whether these associations strengthened or corrupted migrant societies. It was in the context of these debates that domestic authors made their first, hesitant, and conflicted responses to the growth of the slave economy within important parts of the overseas dominions.
Protestantism, Pluralism, and the Politics of Allegiance in the Restoration Empire
Authors: Glickman Gabriel
Published: September 2023

For many statesmen, the greatest challenge posed by the overseas dominions consisted in the liberties available to radical Protestants, with the Massachusetts Bay Colony identified as a particular source of peril to the Crown. This chapter shows how commentators debated the confessional framework of an expanding empire. Their discussions were framed by domestic questions over the most effective way to manage religious pluralism within the Stuart kingdoms. While the Crown increasingly sought to impose a stronger grip over the colonies, it diverged from domestic policy by upholding wide religious liberties, declining to export the powers of the established Church, and seeking other ways to assess the loyalty of overseas subjects. The contrast between policies on different sides of the Atlantic registered in English opinion. By 1685, and the accession of the Catholic James II, the precedents of colonial rule were creating provocative questions over the relationship between religion and allegiance within England itself.
Warfare, Luxury, and the Domestic Critique of English Overseas Expansion
Authors: Glickman Gabriel
Published: September 2023

This chapter looks at the beginnings of organized opposition to overseas expansion in English domestic politics. After the disappointments of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667), critics began to attack the fiscal and military burden of designs outside Europe. Simultaneously, they mobilized fears over a decline in English population growth, questioning whether the national interest lay in dispatching thousands of subjects into overseas plantations. Many of these commentators raised equally vigorous controversies over the trading links created in the East Indies, accusing the court of sponsoring tastes in luxury that carried civil as well as economic dangers. Misgivings over English expansion, in its territorial, commercial, and military forms, became a unifying banner for parliamentarians who challenged the interests and priorities of the court of Charles II. These debates threw attention on the way in which England itself was being altered as a result of ventures outside Europe.
The Colonies and the Meaning of “Britain”
Authors: Glickman Gabriel
Published: September 2023

While the dominions were nominally “English,” overseas expansion was, increasingly, a British experience, reliant on people and resources from Scotland and Ireland. Through the later seventeenth century, authors in both kingdoms began to assert their interests in the emerging empire, intervening in English debates and seeking out allies in the colonies. This final chapter looks at how English statesmen and commentators negotiated Scottish and Irish involvement and examines the impact on the fragile structures of a “composite monarchy.” In 1698, the Scottish design to conquer the Isthmus of Panama (Darien) confirmed the expansionist turn within the northern kingdom and raised the explosive question of how it could be reconciled with foreign and colonial policies steered by English ministers. Royal authority was threatened by the prospect of rival colonial policies emerging from different parts of the king’s domain. The result was to shine a light upon unresolved questions over the future relationship between the Stuarts’ three kingdoms.
The Struggle for Maritime Order
Authors: Kardon Isaac B.
Published: September 2023

This chapter explains whether and how China is indeed changing international order, which inspires an analytical move to examine the concrete rules of international law. It discusses legal rules that constitute a fundamental part of nearly all conceptions of order. It also highlights how the Chinese party-state seeks to shape and use those legal rules and to what practical effect. Through intensive focus on the treaty and customary rules of the international law of the sea, the chapter charts China's struggle to change international order in the maritime domain. It considers the maritime order as a likely arena for observing a changing order as it is the site of China's most legally explicit and politically contentious challenge to the rules.
Order, Rules, and Change in the Law of the Sea
Authors: Kardon Isaac B.
Published: September 2023

This chapter considers the subject of order, detailing how it may change and to what effect. It develops a historical and theoretical framework for understanding the rules of the international law of the sea and conceptualizes rules of international law as fundamental building blocks of international order. It also reviews the primary sources of international law rules in custom and treaties, noting the processes by which these rules may formally change and situating them in the context of a specifically maritime order nested within international order. The chapter discusses the historical dynamics of change and stability in the law of the sea, detailing the specific ways that its rules have changed over time. It explores theoretical and historical considerations that inform a practical method for observing and categorizing the ways China may effectively change or revise the law of the sea rules.
Aristocratic Émigrés and Luxurious Temptations in Hamburg and Altona
Authors: Polasky Janet
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on the first refugees to arrive in Altona and Hamburg, on either side of the Danish–German border: Aristocrats fleeing revolutionary France in 1792. It assesses how the assault on the Bastille in July 1789, the French declaration of war against Austria in April 1792, the fall of the monarchy later that year, and the Terror of 1793–94 convinced first royalists and then moderate republicans to leave revolutionary France. The chapter highlights that emigrant left France for the relative safety offered by England, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States in what has been called the first mass migration in modern history. It analyzes how the colorful collection of literary émigrés in London and of counterrevolutionary troops drilling in the shadow of the massive fortress in Koblenz provide the standard pictures of eighteenth-century asylum. The chapter explores how Britain served as the undisputed anchor for revolutionary emigrants. For decades, aristocrats had moved freely around Europe. It considers the two definitions of cosmopolitanism, embodied by the well-traveled émigrés and the free-trading entrepreneurial neutrality.
French Connections
Authors: Polasky Janet
Published: September 2023

This chapter explores how Altona and Hamburg adeptly navigated between their allegiance to the ideals of the French, on the one side, and the threats posed by their traditional commercial partners, the British, Prussians, and Austrians, on the other. It argues that the two harbors were busier than ever in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The diplomatic relations of the cosmopolitan ports, though, were decidedly fraught. The chapter highlights that both states were concerned about the political influence of the refugees on the supposedly neutral cities. It examines how Hamburg Senate and the Danish monarch struggled to keep diplomatic and commercial doors open. The chapter underlines that free trade was key to the prosperity of the ports. At the end of the eighteenth century, more world commerce flowed over water than land. It considers how the success of the French Revolution fit the economic interests of the local merchants, and also often aligned with their politics, at least in the first half of the decade.
“The Spectre of Communism” and a Revolution “on Our Doorstep”
Authors: Polasky Janet
Published: September 2023

This chapter recounts Karl Marx's personal misery, like the suffering of those around him, and examines how it was subsumed in a deepening world trade crisis with rising prices and falling wages. Crops failed and unemployment rose across Europe. That winter, in the company of Belgians and his fellow exiles, Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. The chapter follows Marx's travel from Brussels to London in December 1847, in part for the gathering of the Communist League, which would commission the Manifesto. The Communist League discussed, among other things, who would write a manifesto to call workers of the world to unite for “the abolition of the old bourgeois Society founded on class antagonism and the foundation of a new Society without class and without private property.” The chapter then looks at the rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto. From their headquarters in Brussels, it explores how democrats and workers both collaborated across national lines in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The Forty-Eighters in America
Authors: Polasky Janet
Published: September 2023

This chapter chronicles how revolution engulfed Europe in 1848. Beyond demands for legislated rights, the chapter stresses how revolutionaries acknowledged the pressing urgency of the social right to eke out a living amid the grinding poverty of an industrializing continent. Within the year, in another tide, this time of reaction, governments throughout Europe restored order. The chapter emphasizes that conservative forces crushed revolutionaries battling for national independence from empires and for the constitution of republican governments. Uprooting their families in the immediate aftermath of 1848, the chapter also looks at refugees who crossed borders in such large numbers that they swamped asylum systems. It then focuses on our imagining of modern immigration: caravans of refugees at the border, full boats in the harbor. The chapter seeks to answer the following questions: What would happen when this unstable republic welcomed refugees arriving in ships by the thousands to escape political repression and agricultural failure? Would open doors close? Or would the need for laborers—especially white settlers to colonize lands to the west recently cleared of their indigenous occupants—eclipse fears of foreigners? How would their revolutionary dreams transform American politics?
Epilogue
Authors: Polasky Janet
Published: September 2023

This chapter focuses on national governments' insistence on repelling migrants unloosed by wars, political unrest, and a changing climate in the twenty-first century. It examines how the deportations of innumerable refugees through the nineteenth into the twentieth century, the so-called century of migration, foreshadowed the dire crises of a globe devastated by droughts and threatened by rising seas. The chapter also delves into how climate change is causing a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented scope. It asks the questions: What are the responsibilities of those nations most responsible for the impending environmental crisis to the refugees forced to flee their homes? Or might the solution be sought at another level of governance? With forced displacement at the highest levels in human history, even in a world of codified international laws, this chapter highlights the question posed in the wake of the American and French revolutions remains: Who will grant asylum to the refugees? The chapter then studies the desolate history of refugees caught between nation-states over the last two and a half centuries.
Stateless in Brussels
Authors: Polasky Janet
Published: September 2023

This chapter recounts how Karl Marx found asylum in Brussels to imagine a proletarian revolution in a world without borders. As the chapter highlights, it was in the capital of the newly independent nation that this stateless political refugee called on the workers of all countries to unite. Belgium consciously opened its borders in the middle of the nineteenth century, allowing the easy passage of individuals and goods. The chapter then explores the contrast between the immigration policies of a small industrializing nation and some of its larger, more protective neighbors. It then shifts to investigate how the Italian revolutionaries, Portuguese constitutionalists, German communists, and Polish freedom fighters discovered whether these constitutionally guaranteed rights in Brussels could withstand the threats to Belgian national security when the next round of revolutions embroiled the European continent. The chapter studies how the early industrialization of the small nation promised economic opportunities for laborers, artisans, and those with capital to invest. It then looks into the founding fathers of Belgium who debated and worked out their differences, for the most part in public, over the next two decades.
Actants
Authors: Bray Francesca , Hahn Barbara , Lourdusamy John Bosco , Saraiva Tiago
Published: September 2023

Actants applies to the writing of history some of the core themes of Actor Network Theory—further enriched by other recent approaches like interspecies agency and critical Anthropocene studies. It integrates the anti-humanist or post-humanist and the emic, anthropological, or ontological approaches to explicate the constituents of a cropscape unfolding with an inner momentum of their own while inflecting the others—but none totally in control nor inevitable. The cases address the varied experiences (and losses) of power and agency, of love and violence, in rubber tapping, elephants in tea gardens, cinchona extraction, boll-weevils in cotton fields and fire in eucalyptus plantations. They elucidate how the capacity of actants to effect change depends on their ever-changing identity and associations—all marked by very significant moments and instances of epistemic disjuncture and quiet jettisoning.
Reproductions
Authors: Bray Francesca , Hahn Barbara , Lourdusamy John Bosco , Saraiva Tiago
Published: September 2023

Reproductions reflects upon what many scholars consider the beginning of the story—a plant’s reproduction and how it shapes the cropscape associated with that plant. Its history of technology perspective emphasizes the ways production inheres in all processes of reproduction, highlighting the different technologies involved in reproducing a cropscape in place and extending its reach in space and time. It considers three successive phases of crop reproduction. “Breeding” takes germplasm as the cropscape component that best reveals the socio-material components of the cropscape. “Blendings” shifts the focus from field to processing. The cases of soy sauce and port wine offer two unconventional accounts of the deep lineages of commodity production and how they wove into modern global markets. “Reclaiming Waste” uses historical cases of the sorting of valuable from non-valuable to ask how technologies and taste (cashew), the politics and science of racial justice (George Washington Carver) or the talismanic power of heritage as post-industrial redemption (Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems) have served to reverse established categorizations of waste, and how such loopings and recuperations over the history of cropscapes have again and again disrupted linear trends, in material change, in models for the future, and in the telling of histories.
Introduction
Authors: White Ashli
Published: September 2023

The introduction makes a case for the importance of material culture to the age of Atlantic revolutions. Focusing on the period of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions (1770–1810), the chapter establishes the impressive volume and variety of objects associated with these political movements. Within this vast field, it draws attention to those items with transnational reach—ones that circulated from one revolutionary site to another. This subset included everything from furniture and ceramics to uniforms and accessories to maps, prints, and popular amusements. By proposing new approaches to understanding the political possibilities of these things, the chapter contends that material culture was a dynamic means through which diverse actors at the time tried to understand and steer the courses of revolutions.
Clothing the Cause
Authors: White Ashli
Published: September 2023

Military clothing was one of the most pervasive revolutionary things, given the thousands of men who required it annually. This chapter examines governments’ struggles to meet this pressing demand. It argues that because of the persistent gap between the promise of military garments and the actual delivery of them, soldiers agitated for their right to these goods—and by extension, to the sartorial equality they made possible. The call for this kind of equality had particular political resonance for Black soldiers, especially when they realized it.
Terrible Amusements
Authors: White Ashli
Published: September 2023

Visual representations of revolutions explored new ideological terrain when translated into three dimensions. This chapter examines how objects in popular amusements, like life-size wax figures and bone-ware miniatures, engaged with debates over revolutionary violence. Produced in the Anglophone Atlantic, these amusements fixated on violence associated with the Reign of Terror in France and with Black militancy in Saint-Domingue. In their selective renditions, these portrayals wrestled with the question of whether change brought about by the guillotine and by violent action at the hands of women and Black people was a legitimate means to a revolutionary end.
Introduction
Authors: Mathews Andrew S.
Published: September 2023

Abstract and Keywords to be supplied.
Shapes of Liberation and Wholeness
Authors: Dorrien Gary
Published: September 2023

The Black social gospel is the self-identifying touchstone of many Black churches and a reminder of America’s greatest story, the civil rights movement of the King era. In the generation of Ransom and Wells-Barnett it named all Black Americans who espoused a social justice theology on behalf of the new abolition, whether or not they employed the specific jargon of the social gospel. Today it should not be restricted to figures who keep alive the idioms of the early generations or the King era. The past half-century of Black social Christianity includes many figures who devoted their careers to “fulfilling Martin’s dream,” as they said, but does not consist only of those in this line. After King was assassinated, every figure and organization associated with the Black social gospel reeled from his loss and the traumas of the 1960s. Yet the Black social gospel thrived in seven spheres, undergirding the careers of civil rights leaders who became prominent public figures, lifting second-tier civil rights leaders to leadership positions, electing hundreds of Black mayors, constituting a kind of new orthodoxy in thousands of Black congregations, raising a new generation of female leaders, undergirding a new generation of denominational leaders, and creating a new Black intelligentsia in the academy, especially theological education.
Antiracist Politics in A Neoliberal World
Authors: Dorrien Gary
Published: September 2023

Many of the Black social gospel activists who knew King personally did not have to wait until the late 1980s to appreciate the radical King. James Bevel, Vincent Harding, Rosemarie Harding, Jesse Jackson, Bernard Lafayette, James Lawson, John Lewis, Joseph Lowery, Samuel DeWitt Proctor, C. T. Vivian, and Andrew Young were keenly aware of King’s anti-imperialism, anti-militarism, postcolonialism, and democratic socialism. They were grounded especially in King’s anti-racist postcolonialism, expounding it before and after civil rights liberalism became a passé topic. This commitment united these figures as disciples of King even when “radicalism” otherwise did not. Andrew Young was not radical in any other sense of the term. Otherwise he would not have achieved immense success in electoral politics, diplomacy, and corporate fundraising. The anti-racist postcolonialism that Young, Jackson, and Lewis shared with King gave them a different view of the world than the regnant frameworks of Cold War militarism and U.S. American exceptionalism. It did not fit neoliberalism either—the other regnant worldview framework of the past half-century. But Young, Jackson, and Lewis—especially Young—had too much at stake in corporate capitalism to contend against it.