History Compass最新文献

Thomas Piketty argues that economists need to more seriously engage with history to understand inequality. In his two books on capitalism, Piketty does just that. But what type of history? This essay argues that Piketty, following the example of the Annales School and Braudel's The Mediterranean, has produced a powerful “descriptive” history, a still underappreciated form of work that is often incorrectly contrasted with analytical history. Piketty's insights stem from the power of description in telling us “what was the case,” as Allan Megill argues, and thus precedes causal explanation. When it comes to change over time, Piketty follows the model of eventful temporality that William Sewell has proposed. In contrast to positivist social science, which is built around deep constants over time, Piketty understands that the forces of history subject even seemingly stable structures to change. For this reason, he also believes it is possible to overcome the deep inequalities that have long existed in capitalism.

This article explores scholarship on the history of international development in Africa and highlights promising new perspectives. The literature review reveals common themes in writing on the history of development—neocolonialism, knowledge production, and statecraft—but also shows that scholars have given too much power to development paradigms and policies. While the scholarship has demonstrated the rhetorical significance of development and the importance of developmentalist states, historians have paid less attention to institutional cleavages, material outcomes, and the complexity of development intervention on the ground. New work draws on oral histories to center local communities, while also examining national and transnational actors and contexts. Examining how development was executed on the ground, and how local communities experienced and reconfigured development, has the potential to help scholars completely rethink these histories. Recent scholarship demonstrates the long-term continuities of development; the disjunctures between economic theory and development practice; the particular forms of power and modalities of governance that have emerged in different settings; and the social, political, and material implications for local communities targeted by the international development apparatus.

In the Indian Ocean Islamic world, Arabic-language texts have been the foundation of what has been called an Arabic cosmopolis and a Sunni Islamic ecumene. In East Africa, this historical material can be found in extant collections in manuscript and printed form, and has formed the basis of research over the past decades that investigate local, regional and trans-oceanic Islamic histories. The nature of this corpus means that it is spread across several modern nation states and a diverse range of custodians. Here is offered an overview of the material available for research in the Western part of the Indian Ocean, also known as the Swahili world. The Arabic textual material that can be found in this part of the Indian Ocean has a strong potential to enrich the study of Islam in the region, but also to inform the wider field of Islamic history. This article offers pointers to avenues for future research.

What messages did the patrons of Civil War monuments, both Confederate and Union, intend them to send to viewers? While it is commonly thought that Confederate monuments were erected to intimidate Black Southerners and keep them from voting, this article uses a combination of visual analysis and historical research to argue that these monuments were generally erected only after Jim Crow legislation and other means had already rendered Black political participation impossible. Instead, the monuments spoke to white, working-class Southerners, to persuade them not to cross racial lines, especially during labor disputes. Similarly, Union Civil War monuments also worked to enshrine racial inequality by erasing the memory of African-American soldiers' participation in the Civil War.

Though West Africa and West African gold is generally acknowledged to have played a critical role in the high and later medieval world economy, the full extent of the region's global influence remains understudied in Global Middle Ages scholarship. This is not a new development but instead a continuation of a trend begun with the development of world systems theory, a key methodological paradigm used in the production of Global Middle Ages scholarship. By tracing the development of world systems theory and contextualizing it in historiography of West Africa and the Latin West, this essay seeks to offer answers for this analytical lacuna and provide potential strategies for producing more holistic scholarship.