History Compass最新文献

This essay explores the relationships between food and health in Chinese history, from ancient times to the present. It briefly reviews how historians have written about dietary knowledge in China's past, from a midcentury focus on discoveries that prefigured those of modern nutrition science to a more expansive recent understanding of healthy eating. From there, the piece draws on scholarship from the past 2 decades to highlight the complexity of pre-modern Chinese ideas about food and its connection to ritual, social order, moral rectitude, pleasure, and physical and emotional well-being, all of which factored into dietetic prescriptions and prohibitions. Finally, the last section focuses on the modern period. It suggests that while Western foods and nutrition science acquired great prestige in early twentieth-century China, by the early 21st century both had lost some of their luster, and interest in classical and folk understandings of diet—inflected by the postsocialist political and economic order—was again flourishing.

This article considers the problems that arises in linking colonialism and colonial violence to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Links between colonialism and the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, have again become popular with the increased focus on colonial violence. In German colonial history, a dominant tendency has been the ‘colonial sonderweg’ where continuities are drawn from colonial Africa to the Holocaust. Recently, British colonial violence too has been contextualised with the Holocaust, thus expanding the continuity thesis. Furthermore, Germany's confrontation with the Holocaust after 1945, some argue, serves as a model for how Britain should confront its past as a colonial power. This article argues that the invocation of the Holocaust as a benchmark for violence and a way to gauge colonial violence is generally unproductive and problematic. While intended to promote the historical significance of colonial violence, it does the opposite: it reduces it to a precursor and flattens the historical complexities that explained colonialism and colonial violence. Colonial violence, it is argued, is in itself significant and should therefore be separated from the Holocaust if we are to maintain its colonial context and historical specificity.

The Avars have been recently been of some interest to historians, but only from a political point of view, given that the written sources cover almost exclusively only the first century of Avar history. Comparatively less attention has so far been paid to the social organization of the Avar qaganate. Archaeologists, on the other hands, are now in a privileged position, as the quantity of material culture evidence has grown exponentially over the last decades or so. However, even the archaeological approach to social history is marred by serious problems deriving from the slavish application of a model of analysis first promoted by Gyula László. That model is based on dubious ethnographic parallels and does not account for the variety of situations within the Avar qaganate either in chronological or in geographical terms. Most archaeologists concerned with the analysis of cemetery sites (which produced the bulk of the evidence under discussion) still maintain that Avar society was divided into lords, middle class and commoners. New excavations, but especially new techniques (such as those associated with bioarchaeology) have slowly, but steadily eroded the simplistic model advanced by László and his students. A review of the most recent archaeological literature reveals a shift towards an intepretation that takes into account the staged representation of status in death, and therefore privileges the symbolism of the artifacts associated with social rank. “Princely burials” are now regarded as a sign of political and social crisis, and weapon burials have by now received a much more sophisticated interpretation largely inspired by gender archaeology.

In the states of the European Union (EU), the question currently raised is to what extent dependence on technologies from the USA and China will have a lasting impact on state sovereignty. The concept of digital sovereignty represents the EU's efforts to compensate for the deficits of the past decades caused by an inadequate positioning of Europe as a location for software and hardware development. Autocratic states use the path of digital autarky, the USA a path of liberalisation and high degrees of openness. In the EU, on the other hand, regulation, data protection and liberal values developed over centuries play a major role in the less pronounced IT development. The path of European states to more digital sovereignty has been addressed politically as an “action plan”, but there is still no common understanding or definition of what digital sovereignty exactly means, where the EU and thus also an individual European state stands. There is a lack of a target and a measurable index as well as evaluated measures derived from it. The present article articulates the basis, namely the common understanding and the definition of digital sovereignty. It places the concepts of digitalisation and state sovereignty in a historical framework and locates them in the current literature, then analyses digital sovereignty as a composite term and places it in the context of current research. Finally, a definition is proposed that can serve as the basis for further research to identify an index of digital sovereignty. This definition can also become the basis for EU legislation to implement the “action plan”.

Before the 1980s, France's colonial past, and in particular the Algerian Independence War, featured among the blind spots of the official curriculum for lycéens – or high school students. Yet, with the publication of Pierre Assouline's article ‘Faut-il brûler les manuels d'histoire?’ in 1983, critical voices started to call for the integration of controversial subjects such as the Algerian War and the Vichy Regime in the national history curriculum. Based on bibliographical research undertaken at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this paper investigates the extent to which the Algerian War of Independence has been present in French high school history textbooks published in the period between 1983 and 2017. It analyses the presence or absence of this theme in lycées programmes, particularly at the final-year level (classe de terminale). It also engages with the strategies of representation of the Algerian War, considering the relative absence of details in descriptions of the conflict and formulating possible reasons for this lack of engagement.

This short article explores the role of medical practitioners from across Europe in the practice of slavery and in the making of early modern race. Medical practitioners were present from the earliest moments of European encounters with African slavery. As the slave trade developed, their participation developed and became more formal. From their role on board ship, to their bureaucratic role in the process of inspecting enslaved peoples, to their practices within colonial administration, the nascent arena of the slave trade depended on a transnational network of medical practitioners. The politics of their expertise linked the practice of slavery with the production of scientific ideas about race. Drawing together the current literature along two lines of theory and practice, I suggest that the construction of the slave trade relied on thousands of such medical encounters. Examining this process reveals a history of enslavement and race as intimate practices, defined in a case-by-case manner, by people, rather than systems. Ultimately, I suggest that thinking about medicine and slavery through categories of knowledge and practice provides insight into the intimate and embodied way in which racial categories of difference were constructed.

Over the past 10 years, the Greater Caribbean has emerged as an instructive historical concept for scholarly studies on slavery, race, disease, climate, commerce, and culture. During the era of Atlantic World slavery, this region spanned the Carolinas to the Caribbean, was home to racially diverse inhabitants, new diseases, flora and fauna typically not found in Europe, and climates that were equally as unfamiliar. Scholars have increasingly come to recognize this space as an ideal one for studying knowledge production about health and race. On the topic of race, in particular, the Greater Caribbean provided the context in which white commentators challenged or affirmed notions of innate racial difference through what they witnessed while living in the region. Questions about race, disease, climate and constitutions, could be posed at any locale; however, the ability to make side-by-side comparisons of how living, breathing Black and white bodies experienced sickness, treated illness, and labored in distinctive disease environments and climates was easier done in the Greater Caribbean than in Europe. Bearing that in mind, we should strive toward recognizing how knowledge about human bodies produced in Europe and the Caribbean worked in tandem to reify race. A number of scholars have made just that point, and amplified the significance of this region in contributing to the development and circulation of knowledge about race, as well as medical therapeutics, and disease.