History Compass最新文献

Commodities and global trade are central to the history of Latin America. As scholars have pointed out, the cultivation, extraction, and shipping of commodities produced in the Americas have been vital in deepening our knowledge of the scale of its global entanglements. While crucial for understanding the region's political, economic and cultural past, this approach has inadvertently overlooked the equally vital role of consumption. This article aims to cast light on how the studies on the history of consumption—histories of what people bought, owned, ate, wore, and discarded—can provide greater insight into the region's cultural, political, and economic history from the 1820s until the mid-20th century. It prioritizes scholarship that recognizes Latin American consumers as active agents of historical change. The article also aims to show how the history of consumption can bridge various historiographical fields—including environmental history, the history of capitalism, labor history, and the history of race—to offer a richer and more comprehensive knowledge of Latin America's past.

The 21st century solidified the quintessential role of gender in the political and academic spheres. The contestations over the idea of gender as a valid analytical concept and the viability of feminist methodologies, approaches and analyses as legitimate scientific inquiry have essentially become a moot point. The discipline of gender studies in sub-Saharan Africa has evolved with active contestations around power, representation, sexuality, masculinity and knowledge production. This study examines the evolution and role of gender studies centres in making gender a legitimate business of the University of Ghana. The institutionalization of the concept of gender within the Ghanaian academe contributes to the theorisation of African women's experiences from multiple angles. It problematises the forces that shape women's differentiated lives, raising the bar on feminist scholarship on the African continent.

Animal history has flourished as a field of study and worked its way into Latin American scholarship. This essay traces relatively recent developments in the historiography to update areas of focus scholarship warranting further efforts. A brief overview of the field uses a key 2013 work as its launching point toward understanding animal history. It considers the geography of studies which have slowly turned from exclusively rural to more urban in focus. Specific areas of niche scholarship addressing insects, ecologies, conservation, and companion animals fuel a discussion of current trends. Related to this, new appraisals about the epistemology of nature and the authority of Latin Americans as agents in this formulation continue to challenge old assumptions. This leads to the consideration of subjectivity and indigenous worldviews that add enormously to the nuance of the field. The final part of the essay ponders some new ideas emerging on the topic and those that remain underserved. It concludes that further scholarship should account for postcolonial and post-structural approaches, and work toward highlighting the subject formation of animals in our history.

This article discusses current conceptual frameworks and new directions in disability studies, with a focus on certain disabilities and particular groups of people with disabilities in early modern Japan (or Tokugawa Japan, 1600–1868). Disability historians of non-Euro-American societies can benefit from asking the common questions that motivate disability history and, more generally, disability studies. Historical research on disability in early modern Japan contributes to the collective effort of explaining how disability is related to the understanding of medicine, disease, and illness, how people with disabilities embody their experiences, and how disability intersects with cultural knowledge, gender, and material conditions in society.

This essay surveys the history of aromatics in China from antiquity to the 17th-century. Compared to the extensive study of the spice trade that has shaped world history, much less has been explored on the movement of these fragrant substances from their natural habitats in South, Southeast, and West Asia to China. By reviewing both early and recent scholarship on the topic, the essay demonstrates the wide circulation of these materials along the Silk Roads enabled by multiethnic traders, religious practitioners, and diplomats. Once imported into China, they acquired diverse uses in healing, food culture, and religious practices that generated new knowledge and transformed Chinese society. Their unique smells could also alter the ways of prescribing medicines and relishing food, and enhance the bodily experience of the devoted. An in-depth study of aromatics using a multidisciplinary approach will not only deepen our understanding of premodern Chinese society but also offer an alternative worldview of aromatics that counteracts the one habituated by the “rise of the West” in early modern times.