History Compass最新文献

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.

This article argues that Environmental History and History of Medicine are disciplines that are natural allies and productive partners; successfully working across the sub-disciplines will be essential to understanding current and future crises, including climate change and pandemics. While it is relatively easy to find acknowledged intersections between histories of science and/or technology and of the environment, so far these are less systematic and substantial in the history of medicine. Partly this is because there are points of serious methodological and theoretical tension, but I argue that these can function as moments of contact and provocation. Most obviously Environmental History poses challenges to historians of medicine in terms of the scale of our work in both its chronological and conceptual reach, and how we incorporate the non-human, and even the non-biotic as historical actors. History of Medicine offers approaches to help environmental historians negotiate their relationships with science, in particular the balance between science as a subject of study or as a source of data. Both disciplines share the struggle of combining focused, heavily contextualised local histories with the pressing need for globalised and ‘big picture’ historical explanations. In this review I will outline the main historiographical challenges to working across these subdisciplines—particularly in terms of scale and focus—and then consider the most productive intersections of these fields before making recommendations for future collaborative work.

In this paper, we argue that archaeology plays a significant role in promoting history, and the two disciplines complement each other. The study uses archaeological monuments and sites to assess how these can be used to effectively enhance the transmission of history to the public. This paper demonstrates the tremendous value of historical archaeology beyond colonial records as a source of data for the voiceless. Our study concludes that well-researched and packaged historical and archaeological information is essential to the promotion of the heritage tourism industry as part of the knowledge-based economy.

Late medieval slavery was profoundly entangled in urban life in particular. Cities all around the Mediterranean coast were implicated in the trade—although this article focuses on the Christian Mediterranean which was bound together by a general reliance on Roman law (alongside local customary laws and the canon law of the Church). Recently, scholarship on late medieval slavery has proliferated, offering a range of detailed studies primarily based on legal records. Late medieval slaves were predominantly women, and mostly worked in domestic settings. Scholars have addressed questions such as legal regulation; the ways in which racialized thinking emerged; the economics of slavery; the implications of slavery for Christian socio-religious frameworks; the extent to which slaves were integrated into the societies in which they were trafficked; and the role of slavery in geopolitics. This article flips all these questions to explore the experiences of slaves themselves. Surviving legal records allow us to see how slaves could articulate and even, to a limited extent, shape their own experiences through law; what race meant to slaves; how they experienced labour; how they articulated their religious identities; what social integration meant to individuals; and the ways in which slaves understood the geopolitics of their situations. All slave experiences were shaped by gender.

As a rich field of scholarship now demonstrates, from at least the early modern period, women have consistently contributed to natural philosophy, science, and medicine in Europe and the Anglo-American world. Their participation in these fields, like men's, has been shaped by gendered social and cultural expectations. It has risen and fallen on cyclical waves of effort to exclude them or minimize their contributions. In historical accounts, until recently, women's roles have been neglected or forgotten. Even today, in both scholarly and popular histories, women in science are often presented as surprising rediscoveries. Women are persistently perceived as newcomers in the sciences. Unless women's contributions are consistently integrated into mainstream narratives in the history of science, women could easily become invisible again. To counter this possibility, I first examine the structural factors shaping women's participation in the sciences and their historical visibility from the early modern period through the 19th century. I then suggest ways to include women in undergraduate surveys in the history of European and Anglo-American science that encourage students to engage with women's ideas and with women as complex, multi-valent historical actors. I show how we can situate women's contributions in a narrative that invites students to examine the history of science as a history of ideas, people, and practices and to explore history as a resource for understanding the role of scientific knowledge and authority in the present. Though my own examples are limited to the history of science in Europe and the Anglo-American world from the early modern period, I argue that a similar thematic approach could be explored and implemented in other historical contexts, given appropriate secondary and primary sources.