Pub Date : 2023-12-28DOI: 10.1177/02656914231216298
Amélie Nuq
This article explores continuity and change in Spain's reformatories. Looking at legal and normative documentation, we could argue, on the one hand, that the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) found little need to change how the reformatories worked. The juvenile court system, on which they depended, displayed strong similarities to those operating elsewhere in the West, and my empirical study of 2,300 personal and administrative records indicates that the reformatories were always characterized by archaic practices and were chronically underfunded throughout Francoism. On the other hand, after analysing the evolving profiles of adolescents confined under Francoism, we can see the connections with both specific processes of regime-sanctioned change from the end of the 1950s – in particular massive, accelerated, internal rural-to-urban migration – and the goal of the dictatorship of preserving a particular form of social order by maintaining tight control of those sectors of the population it considered a danger (i.e., predominantly marginalized, male adolescents living on the edges of Spain's cities – in the shanty towns ( chabolas) or poor suburbs ( banlieues)). The article also looks at how families from different social classes interacted with the reformatories to achieve their own goals, which overlapped with the dictatorship's while remaining partly distinct.
{"title":"Staying in Control? Youth Reformatories, Social Fears and Social Change Under Francoism","authors":"Amélie Nuq","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216298","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores continuity and change in Spain's reformatories. Looking at legal and normative documentation, we could argue, on the one hand, that the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) found little need to change how the reformatories worked. The juvenile court system, on which they depended, displayed strong similarities to those operating elsewhere in the West, and my empirical study of 2,300 personal and administrative records indicates that the reformatories were always characterized by archaic practices and were chronically underfunded throughout Francoism. On the other hand, after analysing the evolving profiles of adolescents confined under Francoism, we can see the connections with both specific processes of regime-sanctioned change from the end of the 1950s – in particular massive, accelerated, internal rural-to-urban migration – and the goal of the dictatorship of preserving a particular form of social order by maintaining tight control of those sectors of the population it considered a danger (i.e., predominantly marginalized, male adolescents living on the edges of Spain's cities – in the shanty towns ( chabolas) or poor suburbs ( banlieues)). The article also looks at how families from different social classes interacted with the reformatories to achieve their own goals, which overlapped with the dictatorship's while remaining partly distinct.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"87 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139151720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-28DOI: 10.1177/02656914231214917
Helen Graham, César Lorenzo Rubio
This article analyzes Francoism through its prison system – from the mass incarcerations of the 1940s (deployed as an instrument of overt political repression) to the gaols of the 1960s developmentalist dictatorship, by which time the majority of prisoners were not activists but the ‘ballast’/‘excess’ of high-speed industrialization/urbanization undertaken without any welfare safety net. The article discusses how the dictatorship conceived of the different groups it incarcerated, how it tried to manage them by ‘divide and rule’ and to what purpose. It explores prisoners’ counterstrategies and the paradox of ‘the political’ in a Francoist prison system which never used the term, yet saw each and every inmate as posing a threat to the dictatorship's ideology of ‘social peace’ (i.e., societal stasis). The article charts a prison transition by the early 1970s, from totalitarian to emerging neoliberal model, the latter still designed to ‘contain’ but no longer to ‘sculpt’ its inmates. Notwithstanding this key change, the article highlights core continuities in the prison system across forty years of Francoism: militarized discipline, rule by secret decree, ‘divide and rule’ strategies, and institutionalized abuse that was endemic and structural.
{"title":"Not Recognizing the Political: Analyzing Franco's Long Dictatorship Through a Genealogy of its Prisoners","authors":"Helen Graham, César Lorenzo Rubio","doi":"10.1177/02656914231214917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231214917","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes Francoism through its prison system – from the mass incarcerations of the 1940s (deployed as an instrument of overt political repression) to the gaols of the 1960s developmentalist dictatorship, by which time the majority of prisoners were not activists but the ‘ballast’/‘excess’ of high-speed industrialization/urbanization undertaken without any welfare safety net. The article discusses how the dictatorship conceived of the different groups it incarcerated, how it tried to manage them by ‘divide and rule’ and to what purpose. It explores prisoners’ counterstrategies and the paradox of ‘the political’ in a Francoist prison system which never used the term, yet saw each and every inmate as posing a threat to the dictatorship's ideology of ‘social peace’ (i.e., societal stasis). The article charts a prison transition by the early 1970s, from totalitarian to emerging neoliberal model, the latter still designed to ‘contain’ but no longer to ‘sculpt’ its inmates. Notwithstanding this key change, the article highlights core continuities in the prison system across forty years of Francoism: militarized discipline, rule by secret decree, ‘divide and rule’ strategies, and institutionalized abuse that was endemic and structural.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"346 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139148938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-28DOI: 10.1177/02656914231216272
Helen Graham
The article analyzes increasingly militarized state power and public order in twentieth-century Spain, discussing these in the context of other European states’ disciplinary regimes, with their ubiquitous social-Darwinist dimension in an era of accelerating urbanization, industrial change and emergent mass societies. The article offers a dissection of the often problematically opaque term ‘liberal’, arguing that wherever Spain or other twentieth-century European states were positioned on the dictatorial-through-parliamentary-constitutional spectrum, they all came to be ‘gardening states’ (Bauman). Each state's goal was to sculpt its population as part of a nationalist project – nationalism being the norm, whether named as such or not. Francoism is analysed in this framework, as a hybrid war-born political order blending old-style, top-down military control with new forms of populist mass mobilization from below, the latter enabled and accelerated by the war of 1936–1939. The article defines the Franco dictatorship as fascist in the 1940s and totalitarian for far longer, until macro-economic changes – which its cupola believed for a long time need not affect the deep form of Spanish society – hollowed out Francoism's own ideological categories (and its ‘disciplinary’ efficacy), but not its obsession with social control, which it called ‘social peace’.
{"title":"When Was the War in Spain? Liberal State, Illiberal Justice in the Twentieth Century","authors":"Helen Graham","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216272","url":null,"abstract":"The article analyzes increasingly militarized state power and public order in twentieth-century Spain, discussing these in the context of other European states’ disciplinary regimes, with their ubiquitous social-Darwinist dimension in an era of accelerating urbanization, industrial change and emergent mass societies. The article offers a dissection of the often problematically opaque term ‘liberal’, arguing that wherever Spain or other twentieth-century European states were positioned on the dictatorial-through-parliamentary-constitutional spectrum, they all came to be ‘gardening states’ (Bauman). Each state's goal was to sculpt its population as part of a nationalist project – nationalism being the norm, whether named as such or not. Francoism is analysed in this framework, as a hybrid war-born political order blending old-style, top-down military control with new forms of populist mass mobilization from below, the latter enabled and accelerated by the war of 1936–1939. The article defines the Franco dictatorship as fascist in the 1940s and totalitarian for far longer, until macro-economic changes – which its cupola believed for a long time need not affect the deep form of Spanish society – hollowed out Francoism's own ideological categories (and its ‘disciplinary’ efficacy), but not its obsession with social control, which it called ‘social peace’.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139149267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-28DOI: 10.1177/02656914231216874
Michael Richards
Recent accounting for disease in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War has been contained within study of hunger in the early 1940s. Historians have cited the typhus epidemic which hit Spain between 1939 and 1945 as demonstrating a causal link between widespread semi-starvation and disease. Though important, the focus on hunger risks losing sight of other vital elements in the onset and transmission of typhus, however, as well as the way the epidemic's progress sheds light on population movement as central to the broader social history of the war and its aftermath. By paying close attention to epidemiological records, this article argues that the direct causes of typhus and its vertiginous spread were primarily ideological and spatial. It shows first how the war's victors used the language of political and bacterial contagion to claim spuriously that the wartime Republic was responsible for the epidemic. It then demonstrates how the intense confinement on a huge scale of those linked to the Republic was at the root of the disease. Transmission depended on this mass imprisonment and on the increased circulation of families to support those in captivity. Finally, typhus influenced the social imagination of the Franco regime and its anxiety about hygiene, prisons, and control of the movement of the urban poor.
{"title":"Imagining Contagion: Epidemic, Prisons, and Franco Spain's Politics of Space, 1936–1945","authors":"Michael Richards","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216874","url":null,"abstract":"Recent accounting for disease in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War has been contained within study of hunger in the early 1940s. Historians have cited the typhus epidemic which hit Spain between 1939 and 1945 as demonstrating a causal link between widespread semi-starvation and disease. Though important, the focus on hunger risks losing sight of other vital elements in the onset and transmission of typhus, however, as well as the way the epidemic's progress sheds light on population movement as central to the broader social history of the war and its aftermath. By paying close attention to epidemiological records, this article argues that the direct causes of typhus and its vertiginous spread were primarily ideological and spatial. It shows first how the war's victors used the language of political and bacterial contagion to claim spuriously that the wartime Republic was responsible for the epidemic. It then demonstrates how the intense confinement on a huge scale of those linked to the Republic was at the root of the disease. Transmission depended on this mass imprisonment and on the increased circulation of families to support those in captivity. Finally, typhus influenced the social imagination of the Franco regime and its anxiety about hygiene, prisons, and control of the movement of the urban poor.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"37 3‐4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139149308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-28DOI: 10.1177/02656914231214932
Gutmaro Gómez Bravo
Francoism's repression of its civilian population was based on a massified prison system and parallel system of punitive parole. At their core were religious personnel who fulfilled key disciplinary functions for the new state. By the latter stages of the civil war (1936–1939), church and lay Catholic personnel had already produced the legal justifications to underpin the repression. They blended older quasi-theocratic and anti-egalitarian philosophy to meet the disciplinary needs of the new moment where a politically mobilized society was challenging older forms of traditional order and hierarchy (before and during the war). This church–state symbiosis in Spain was already explicit by the early-twentieth century. After World War Two, as before it, Franco's ‘National-Catholic’ dictatorship deployed religious personnel speaking an antiquated language of ‘re-Christianization’ and ‘religious conversion’ to impose a modern, state disciplinary project – i.e., the sculpting and close surveillance of its population. Given the Church's full participation in this ‘divine totalitarianism’, it was paradoxical that by the time of Cold War ascendancy in the mid-1950s, it would be the same Church providing an alibi for Franco's state – in which judicial and penal systems remained militarized, and the everyday lives of its population closely controlled – to reassure Western interlocutors, who were themselves mostly socially conservative and/or Christian-Democratic, of Francoism's ‘non-totalitarian’ nature.
{"title":"Forging New Instruments of Mass Social Control from Traditional Materials: The Disciplinary Role of Catholic Church Personnel in Franco's State Prison System of the 1940s and 1950s","authors":"Gutmaro Gómez Bravo","doi":"10.1177/02656914231214932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231214932","url":null,"abstract":"Francoism's repression of its civilian population was based on a massified prison system and parallel system of punitive parole. At their core were religious personnel who fulfilled key disciplinary functions for the new state. By the latter stages of the civil war (1936–1939), church and lay Catholic personnel had already produced the legal justifications to underpin the repression. They blended older quasi-theocratic and anti-egalitarian philosophy to meet the disciplinary needs of the new moment where a politically mobilized society was challenging older forms of traditional order and hierarchy (before and during the war). This church–state symbiosis in Spain was already explicit by the early-twentieth century. After World War Two, as before it, Franco's ‘National-Catholic’ dictatorship deployed religious personnel speaking an antiquated language of ‘re-Christianization’ and ‘religious conversion’ to impose a modern, state disciplinary project – i.e., the sculpting and close surveillance of its population. Given the Church's full participation in this ‘divine totalitarianism’, it was paradoxical that by the time of Cold War ascendancy in the mid-1950s, it would be the same Church providing an alibi for Franco's state – in which judicial and penal systems remained militarized, and the everyday lives of its population closely controlled – to reassure Western interlocutors, who were themselves mostly socially conservative and/or Christian-Democratic, of Francoism's ‘non-totalitarian’ nature.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"231 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139152629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-28DOI: 10.1177/02656914231216611
Nicola Camilleri
There are few research fields in European history that have received as much scholarly attention over the last few years as citizenship and the First World War. While this is also true for the Italian case, there is still a striking absence of research on citizenship laws in the colonial territories under Italian sovereignty. The present article addresses this gap and challenges the long-established assumption – due to an all too narrow focus on the historical military framework – that the First World War did not really affect the colonies of the Kingdom of Italy. An investigation of how the legal status of the colonial population – especially in Eritrea, on the one hand, and in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, on the other – was regulated, but also contested, claimed and negotiated, both during the conflict and in its immediate aftermath, reveals that a global event like the First World War actually had a significant impact on the Italian territories in the Horn of Africa and in North Africa. To illustrate this point, the article adopts an approach based on local players in the colonies rather than on legislators or policymakers in the metropole. Contemporary sources collected from several different archives are used to retrace personal stories and administrative processes which reveal important aspects in the story not only of Italian colonialism but of the Italian state in general. Citizenship in the Italian territories in Africa, as much as in other European colonies, was marked by the prejudicial concept of the backwardness of Africans, who were thus excluded from metropolitan citizenship. Beyond that, the article highlights utilitarianism as a concept that can help us to understand how Italy dealt with the inhabitants of its colonies during the First World War.
{"title":"Citizens, Subjects, Enemies: The First World War and Citizenship Policies in the Italian Colonies","authors":"Nicola Camilleri","doi":"10.1177/02656914231216611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231216611","url":null,"abstract":"There are few research fields in European history that have received as much scholarly attention over the last few years as citizenship and the First World War. While this is also true for the Italian case, there is still a striking absence of research on citizenship laws in the colonial territories under Italian sovereignty. The present article addresses this gap and challenges the long-established assumption – due to an all too narrow focus on the historical military framework – that the First World War did not really affect the colonies of the Kingdom of Italy. An investigation of how the legal status of the colonial population – especially in Eritrea, on the one hand, and in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, on the other – was regulated, but also contested, claimed and negotiated, both during the conflict and in its immediate aftermath, reveals that a global event like the First World War actually had a significant impact on the Italian territories in the Horn of Africa and in North Africa. To illustrate this point, the article adopts an approach based on local players in the colonies rather than on legislators or policymakers in the metropole. Contemporary sources collected from several different archives are used to retrace personal stories and administrative processes which reveal important aspects in the story not only of Italian colonialism but of the Italian state in general. Citizenship in the Italian territories in Africa, as much as in other European colonies, was marked by the prejudicial concept of the backwardness of Africans, who were thus excluded from metropolitan citizenship. Beyond that, the article highlights utilitarianism as a concept that can help us to understand how Italy dealt with the inhabitants of its colonies during the First World War.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"45 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139149722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945z
John Biggart
{"title":"Book Review: <i>V. I. Nevskii – uchastnik i istorik pervoi rossiiskoi revoliutsii</i> by M. V. Zelenov","authors":"John Biggart","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945z","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134937566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945x
Gary Marker
Galicia’s inhabitants. Furthermore, without commenting on this decision, Jews are also excluded from purview, though they concentrated in the towns and cities and amounted to over a tenth of the crownland’s population. Hence, the book shines light on a fifth of the politically most influential inhabitants, among which, Polish Ruthenians could account for as much as 15 per cent. In Galicia’s increasingly nationalized reality, Polish Ruthenians’ influence spiked due to their ability to operate in both Polishand Ukrainian-speaking milieux. Furthermore, Polish and Ukrainian organizations strove to woo them to their own national camp, which boosted their visibility and importance. After a somewhat muddled discussion of methodology, which gives too much credit to qualified primordialism (62), Polish Ruthenians are defined in historical and ethnocultural terms (55–200). Their story in Galicia is introduced during the first half of the nineteenth century (201–54), before it enters the central stage during the 1848 revolutions (255–338). Polish Ruthenians played an important role during the period of absolutism, when the ‘Ruthenian language question’ arose (339–64) and the remembrance of Poland-Lithuania pushed Poles and Ruthenians (Ukrainians) to stand together for the last time in the face of Polish-Lithuanian nobles’ 1863–1864 uprising against the tsar (365–406). Finally, the study comes into its own in the period of Austria-Hungary, when the participation of Polish Ruthenians in Galicia’s politics is analysed (407–80), followed by their reaction to a range of official commemorations of events from the Polish(-Lithuanian) past (481–544). Despite its wealth of indexes, this extensive work sorely misses a basic index of subjects tackled. Most of today’s Ukrainians and Poles stem from peasantry, so a reflection on the rural population’s reaction to the Polish-Ruthenian identity is a must. But a pioneering work rarely exhausts a broached issue, while the task requires an interdisciplinary approach. Curiously, the book is silent on Galicia’s Jews and does not even cite Larry Wolff’s The Idea of Galicia (2011). Jews were the crownland’s most urban and multilingual inhabitants. Did some assimilationists convert to Greek Catholicism and choose the Polish Ruthenian identity? For the time being an answer to this query is buried in Galicia’s rich but neglected publications and archival material in Yiddish and Hebrew.
{"title":"Book Review: <i>Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire</i> by Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva","authors":"Gary Marker","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945x","url":null,"abstract":"Galicia’s inhabitants. Furthermore, without commenting on this decision, Jews are also excluded from purview, though they concentrated in the towns and cities and amounted to over a tenth of the crownland’s population. Hence, the book shines light on a fifth of the politically most influential inhabitants, among which, Polish Ruthenians could account for as much as 15 per cent. In Galicia’s increasingly nationalized reality, Polish Ruthenians’ influence spiked due to their ability to operate in both Polishand Ukrainian-speaking milieux. Furthermore, Polish and Ukrainian organizations strove to woo them to their own national camp, which boosted their visibility and importance. After a somewhat muddled discussion of methodology, which gives too much credit to qualified primordialism (62), Polish Ruthenians are defined in historical and ethnocultural terms (55–200). Their story in Galicia is introduced during the first half of the nineteenth century (201–54), before it enters the central stage during the 1848 revolutions (255–338). Polish Ruthenians played an important role during the period of absolutism, when the ‘Ruthenian language question’ arose (339–64) and the remembrance of Poland-Lithuania pushed Poles and Ruthenians (Ukrainians) to stand together for the last time in the face of Polish-Lithuanian nobles’ 1863–1864 uprising against the tsar (365–406). Finally, the study comes into its own in the period of Austria-Hungary, when the participation of Polish Ruthenians in Galicia’s politics is analysed (407–80), followed by their reaction to a range of official commemorations of events from the Polish(-Lithuanian) past (481–544). Despite its wealth of indexes, this extensive work sorely misses a basic index of subjects tackled. Most of today’s Ukrainians and Poles stem from peasantry, so a reflection on the rural population’s reaction to the Polish-Ruthenian identity is a must. But a pioneering work rarely exhausts a broached issue, while the task requires an interdisciplinary approach. Curiously, the book is silent on Galicia’s Jews and does not even cite Larry Wolff’s The Idea of Galicia (2011). Jews were the crownland’s most urban and multilingual inhabitants. Did some assimilationists convert to Greek Catholicism and choose the Polish Ruthenian identity? For the time being an answer to this query is buried in Galicia’s rich but neglected publications and archival material in Yiddish and Hebrew.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134937850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945d
Robert Justin Goldstein
soldiers were followed by civilian administrators, geographers such as Petr Semenov, explorers such as Nikolai Przheval’skii, cartographers, ethnographers, botanists and biologists. At the geopolitical level, this imperial expansion would intensify diplomatic confrontation with Britain over control of Afghanistan and India. To modern readers in an age critical of imperialisms, Fielding may seem to underplay the sheer brutality of the Russian conquest and the racist attitudes that supported it, attitudes shared by the Hungarian-born anthropologist Charles-Eugène de Ujfalvy and his Parisian wife, Marie de Ujfalvy-Bourdon, who are among the travellers he examines. At the same time, he is alive to the lasting implications of Russia’s imperial interest in Central Asia for defining the nation’s own identity. That said, Travellers in the Great Steppe should be read not so much as a work of scholarship but rather as a description of the accounts left by bold spirits who explored a region with which the author has fallen in love. It is for the most part a compendium of factual information interspersed with extended quotation from the travelogues used and it lacks close analysis or sustained defence of particular theses. Fielding himself defines his intention as to ‘entertain and inspire’ (xi) and hopes that the ‘book and the stories it contains will stimulate further exploration of this beautiful and exciting region’ (312). Irrespective of the book’s overriding thrust and purpose, it would have benefitted from closer editorial scrutiny. It contains numerous inconsistencies in spelling and presentation of proper nouns. We find, for example, both Bokhara and Bukhara, the Muscovy Company and the Moscovy Company, and Turcomans and Turkomans. The Aral Sea is referred to as both ‘Lake Aral’ and ‘the Aral Lake’ as well as by its established modern name. Errors of transliteration of Russian words are legion, e.g., ‘Asov’ for Azov, ‘Grosni’ for groznyi (‘terrible’, as a descriptor of Ivan IV), ‘Tatischev’ for Tatishchev. Material is repeated (e.g., a quotation from a source on pages 47 and 52–3 and details of a Russian defeat on pages 130 and 133). Small factual inaccuracies include the date of the capture of Astrakhan’ by Ivan IV and, at one point, the location of Lake Zaisan in north-east Kazakhstan. All the same, Travellers in the Great Steppe succeeds as a tour d’horizon, reminding twenty-first-century readers of the fortitude of the pioneering explorers of earlier times and helping to rescue from oblivion some important contributors to the collection of human knowledge of various kinds.
{"title":"Book Review: <i>Censorship of Literature in Austria, 1751–1848</i> by Norbert Bachleitner","authors":"Robert Justin Goldstein","doi":"10.1177/02656914231199945d","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914231199945d","url":null,"abstract":"soldiers were followed by civilian administrators, geographers such as Petr Semenov, explorers such as Nikolai Przheval’skii, cartographers, ethnographers, botanists and biologists. At the geopolitical level, this imperial expansion would intensify diplomatic confrontation with Britain over control of Afghanistan and India. To modern readers in an age critical of imperialisms, Fielding may seem to underplay the sheer brutality of the Russian conquest and the racist attitudes that supported it, attitudes shared by the Hungarian-born anthropologist Charles-Eugène de Ujfalvy and his Parisian wife, Marie de Ujfalvy-Bourdon, who are among the travellers he examines. At the same time, he is alive to the lasting implications of Russia’s imperial interest in Central Asia for defining the nation’s own identity. That said, Travellers in the Great Steppe should be read not so much as a work of scholarship but rather as a description of the accounts left by bold spirits who explored a region with which the author has fallen in love. It is for the most part a compendium of factual information interspersed with extended quotation from the travelogues used and it lacks close analysis or sustained defence of particular theses. Fielding himself defines his intention as to ‘entertain and inspire’ (xi) and hopes that the ‘book and the stories it contains will stimulate further exploration of this beautiful and exciting region’ (312). Irrespective of the book’s overriding thrust and purpose, it would have benefitted from closer editorial scrutiny. It contains numerous inconsistencies in spelling and presentation of proper nouns. We find, for example, both Bokhara and Bukhara, the Muscovy Company and the Moscovy Company, and Turcomans and Turkomans. The Aral Sea is referred to as both ‘Lake Aral’ and ‘the Aral Lake’ as well as by its established modern name. Errors of transliteration of Russian words are legion, e.g., ‘Asov’ for Azov, ‘Grosni’ for groznyi (‘terrible’, as a descriptor of Ivan IV), ‘Tatischev’ for Tatishchev. Material is repeated (e.g., a quotation from a source on pages 47 and 52–3 and details of a Russian defeat on pages 130 and 133). Small factual inaccuracies include the date of the capture of Astrakhan’ by Ivan IV and, at one point, the location of Lake Zaisan in north-east Kazakhstan. All the same, Travellers in the Great Steppe succeeds as a tour d’horizon, reminding twenty-first-century readers of the fortitude of the pioneering explorers of earlier times and helping to rescue from oblivion some important contributors to the collection of human knowledge of various kinds.","PeriodicalId":44713,"journal":{"name":"European History Quarterly","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134978173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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