History Compass最新文献

This article provides an overview of the historiography of indentured labor in the 18th and 19th centuries, along with a brief narrative of the origin and definition of indenture. It traces the evolution of the history of indenture in the “British World” (defined here as the areas under both formal and informal British imperial control) from a neglected field to a major focus of historical study. The final section summarizes the current state of the field, assessing how it has moved beyond its earlier focus on social history, demographics, and diaspora studies to become an entry point for wider discussions about the history of imperialism and colonialism, the global history of capitalism, and the history of networks and exchanges between the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean Worlds.

A 9-year-old girl presented with progressive, painless protrusion of the right eye for 2 months. She also complained of multiple bilateral neck swellings for 2 months. On examination, there was proptosis of the right eye with the eyeball displaced downwards and forwards. The extra ocular movements of the right eye showed limitation of abduction. The vision was normal in both eyes. A detailed clinical evaluation with investigations led to a diagnosis of spheno-orbital tuberculosis. Prompt initiation of anti-tubercular therapy (ATT) led to resolution of the lesion.

This article tracks the categories of social reproduction and reproductive labor as they appear in historical scholarship. Both within and beyond the historical discipline, scholars of diverse political, theoretical, and disciplinary persuasions deploy these concepts to denote a wide range of labors and processes in a manner that seems at times to have little coherence. The intentions of this article are to bring further clarity to these useful, if rather sprawling, terms and to reflect on the analytical work that they can do for historians.

The history of treaty-making, diplomacy, and international law has traditionally been written from Eurocentric perspectives, but since the middle of the 20th century, Southeast Asia has attracted relatively much attention because of the region's importance for the 17th-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. More recently, however, the interest in Southeast Asia's role in the history of international law and diplomacy in the early modern period has become more oriented toward understanding the dynamics of international relations and cross-cultural diplomacy in Southeast Asia itself, rather than focusing on the region's role in European legal and intellectual history. The prolific treaty-making and other diplomatic activities of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) during the 17th and 18th centuries have been the object of several studies, highlighting how the company adopted Asian practices of statecraft and at times functioned as a traditional ruler, tributary or stranger-king, rather than as an omnipotent colonial power. Moreover, several recent studies have expanded the study of diplomacy and treaty-making in Southeast Asia to imperial powers other than the VOC and into the 19th century. With regard to the practice of treaty-making during the colonial era, three main themes in the current state-of-the-art are identified: 1) Southeast Asian and inter-cultural perspectives on treaties and treaty-making; 2) the question of mutual consent or coercion and violence in treaty-making; and 3) discrepancies between Asian and European treaty texts and biases in printed and digitised compilations of treaties.

John Brewer's argument that eighteenth-century Britain developed a centralized and effective fiscal-military state that allowed it to become a great power has been instrumental in making early modern state-building an important field of inquiry for historians. New directions in the field explore conflicting eighteenth-century ideologies, the notion of a ‘naval-military’ state, the non-military dimensions of the state, the nature of the Irish and Scottish fiscal-military states, the relationship between Britain's central state and colonial states, and the relationship between the state and the informal actors who served it.

This essay traces different historiographical framings of the modern university in South Asia. Although the trajectories of this institution are manifold and complex, the university's deep imbrications with colonial expansion and developmentalist ambitions lend it to both national and global perspectives. Focusing on the late colonial to early postcolonial period, I examine how recent scholarship has positioned the university across multiple scales. In particular, I consider how the turn toward global, networked, and “entangled” perspectives — with examples drawn from global intellectual history and the history of international development — suggest fresh approaches, clearing the way for new questions as well as encountering unique limits. Ultimately, these frameworks help reorient the university toward its translocal dimensions: as a site of national imagining, internationalist claim-making, development meaning-making, global connectivity, and the transnational circulation of knowledge.

Over the last decade and a half, scholars have demonstrated increased interest in studying the history of young people, as signalled by an expanding presence of relevant societies and journals. Though children and young people comprise a significant number of the world's current migrant population, young migrants in the past are not often the central focus of historical research. This article aims to encourage historians of migration and forced migration to increase their engagement with the histories of children, youth, and childhood. Young migrants are moving subjects: they traverse space and time, and their portrayal often encourages compassion. Since the 18th century, they have frequently inhabited social ‘categories of exception,’ and as such have lent meaning to the category of ‘adult’ and ‘citizen’ and to normative expectations of families, communities, and society at large. With this in mind, we suggest that integrating histories of child and youth migration and mobility offers opportunities to reassess historiographical, methodological, and conceptual questions in the field of migration studies, including the relationship of policy to research, the creation of typologies, and the temporality of labels.

Portugal's empire brought together peoples and pathogens, along with wide-ranging forms of medical expertise and curative practice, into multiethnic and polyglot colonial settlements around the globe. Many aspects of Portuguese imperial policy and much of the work of colonial institutions were fundamentally linked to the challenges of disease, population loss, and the preservation of health. Only in the last half-century have these dynamics become an area of intensive archival research. The present essay surveys major developments in the history of medicine in Portugal's empire. It links historiographical shifts to the intellectual currents that accompanied colonialism, decolonization, postcolonialism, and the emergence of global health—identifying key interventions and noting significant opportunities for future research.

In the early 20th century, colonised people across empires rejected their status quo with visions and articulations of different emancipatory futures. The more radical and creative of these projects fused socialist thought with national, cultural or religious traditions. Grounded in ideas of equality, redistribution and common ownership, these visions offered futures of freedom beyond nationalism. Islamic Socialism was one of these revolutionary currents alongside Arab socialism, African socialism and Black Liberation Theology. The article reviews the historical scholarship on the relationship between Muslims and Left politics in 20th century South Asia and proposes Islamic Socialism as a new field of study. Some of the earliest articulations and enduring commitment to the politics of Islamic Socialism emerged from South Asia, yet the topic is not easily located in the existing scholarship on the region or elsewhere. Employing a diverse set of texts, I show how we can approach through three categories - time, space, and ideas– and map out subaltern Islam as a future area of research. Existing studies have treated Islamic Socialism variously as crude readings of Islam and Marxism, an immemorial Islamic tradition, the intellectual product of theoretical congruence, or as a novel and creative experiment. Reflecting on its minor status in historiography, the article argues for the importance of Islamic Socialism in thinking beyond Islamic literalism and furthering our understanding of decolonisation experiments, everyday subaltern politics, and the possibilities for Marxism and Islam in the Global South.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the expanding field of celebrity history. While there was once a debate surrounding the application of the concept of celebrity to the past, historians have recently recognised the importance of exploring transient fame and social distinction, solidifying this line of inquiry. However, our understanding of historical celebrity has since evolved, involving new themes, time periods, and geographical contexts, which has led to a diverse range of approaches and perspectives. By examining how historians have explored the topic in recent years, this article identifies the strengths and limitations of different approaches, offering a fresh and updated understanding of the complexities of studying the role of fame throughout history.