History Compass最新文献

Despite its long and layered histories, critical analyses of photography in India began rather late and remain comparatively limited in number. However, the burgeoining scholarship in the field illuminates photography's role in conditioning modern South Asian experiences, while also highlighting the global character of the medium that complicate the unmarked history of photography. Three intertwined historiographical threads are influential in narrating the colonial Indian camera cultures. The first thread emphasized descriptive histories, the second thread debated cultural essentialism, while the third thread inquired into myriad photographic genres to rethink colonialism. An inquiry into these three threads helps reflect on the intellectual scope of photographs from colonial India, while also directing to future archival and analytical possibilities.

The science of talismans was cultivated in Arabic, Greek, and Latin in the first millennium AD and entered European vernaculars in the seventeenth century. Its primary concern is the ability of images to produce effects in the world, even at a distance. In the eighteenth century, European intellectual discourse rejected the talisman on physical, moral, and aesthetic grounds. Today, it has returned and forms the object of distinctive and mutually complementary programs of study in art history, anthropology, and media studies. Its primary interest lies in its account of visual form as an intelligible cause and thereby as a mediator between distinct domains of experience.

The objective of this article is to review the historiography of the relationship between migration and firearms technologies in the early modern Islamic World. By examining historiographical debates on the role of firearms in early modern Islamic societies, we will look at the place of migrants in the historical literature of firearms. During the colonial period, debates shifted from the alleged conservatism of Islamic societies regarding firearm technologies to their respective agencies in the diffusion of firearms in the early modern world. In this article, I will show that the historiography of firearm technologies in Islamdom exhibits a shift from essentialist arguments towards a history of technology transfers and the role of migrants in this process.

Until the late 20th century, few studies focused on the history of charity and philanthropy in the Middle East from the medieval to modern periods. The work that explored this subject largely concentrated on the ideals of charitable practices, such as the faith-based tenets of social welfare as an Islamic communal practice and the religiously mandated form of almsgiving (zakat). But during the late 1990s, a new generation of scholars challenged the assumption of charity across the region as only a pious act and sought to address the dearth of literature on the subject. They shifted critical focus onto the history of philanthropy to consider and account for the social, economic, and political structures that shaped a wide range of charitable practices, activities, institutions, benefactors, and recipients. They also interrogated how communities determined the parameters of need, developed notions of the “deserving poor,” and mediated the relationship between the ideals and practices of beneficence. Overlapping fields such as social history and women's studies as well as analytics of gender, class, and national identity informed and advanced historical studies of charity and philanthropy across the Middle East. The subfield continues to innovate with new work across academic disciplines and new publishing venues for further studies of charity in the region across time periods.

This article examines the relative absence of historical literature pertaining to the battlefield disposal of military corpses during and shortly after the First World War. It posits that while First World War Studies constitute an enormously rich field of research, scholars are yet to consider corpses and their disposal as a central topic of investigation, as is the case with other disciplines and historians of other conflicts. To address this lacuna, this article proposes the notion of ‘administration of the dead’ that may serve to both conceptualise and explore how First World War battlefield body disposal was performed. This article demonstrates the rich avenues that this topic opens to historians and sketches out areas of investigation such as the administrative, medical and technological dimensions of body disposal in the First World War.

The historiography on Latin America's Cold War has grown significantly in the last few years. But though the field has expanded in ways that include new perspectives, much could be gained by engaging more closely with voices from the South or works produced by scholars based in Latin America. Similarly, more nuanced analytical framings that pay closer attention to post-World War II development, particularly in South America, would also enrich our understanding of the complex and multidimensional experiences of the Cold War in the region. We demonstrate this point by examining the works of rising Latin American scholars working on the hemispheric and international dimensions of the Latin America's Cold War, showing that this literature needs to be integrated into existing accounts.

In this essay, we call for a new approach to representative assemblies of early modern Europe and beyond. While there are vast national historiographies on their legal constitutional structure, little effort has been made to reconstruct the cultural and transnational dimension of such bodies, a phenomenon we describe as ‘parliamentary culture’. We argue that there is much to be gained from an investigation of the culture surrounding these bodies- how they influenced and shaped political behaviour and were shaped by it, and how they were embedded into the thought of their time and period- and from seeing them as part of a set of common European traditions of political negotiation and consent. We suggest an interdisciplinary and collaborative agenda for that investigation that might lead beyond Europe too, into some of its colonies, where Europeans also encountered other traditions of negotiated discussion and agreement.

While the last four-and-a-half decades has seen a growing body of historical scholarship on the administration of justice in England during the long eighteenth century, the administration of justice in Wales is a relatively neglected topic. This article reviews the relatively small historiography on the administration of justice in Georgian Wales, highlighting the ways in which patterns of indictments, convictions and executions were both similar and, crucially, different to those found in England during the period. After introducing the superior courts in the Principality during this period—the Wales Courts of Great Sessions - the article discusses the patterns of indictments, convictions and executions in the Great Sessions. The article then concludes by suggesting avenues of further research in the area.

1 AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

The African postcolonial state is in crisis, and it has been for a while. The sources and forms of this crisis are multiple in nature. My focus on this article is on the political aspects of this crisis. The idea of the African postcolonial state became a reality when the majority of former colonies in Africa gained independence from European colonial rule. What these former colonies inherited was not entirely clear at the time. What was evident was that they had to mould themselves into the model of the dominant European nation-state in order to gain recognition and acceptance as sovereign states. However, it soon became clear that the construction of a postcolonial state and nation in Africa would present the newly independent polities with serious challenges. These have congealed over the past half-century to result in the various crises that dominate the organisation of political community in Africa. These challenges take uniquely distinct forms in the Horn of Africa. In this region articulations and imaginations of the state and nation are highly contested in the Horn of Africa and are often marked by violence. These contestations have led to the emergence of what appear to be alternative forms of statehood. The various polities in the region are challenging the nation-state model and are simultaneously attempting to find alternatives to this foreign model. These processes are unique to this region of Africa and are worth analysing and thinking through in terms of what they could potentially mean for the future of the nation-state in Africa.

For decades, the history of gender and madness was a story about women. Individuals deemed lunatics were universally treated as passive victims of medio-legal forces beyond their control. New generations of scholars have looked beyond power binaries to interrogate the complex network of gender, class, family, and culture to place ‘the mad’ as historical actors in a complex and often contradictory story. This article reflects on some major themes in the British historiography of Victorian gender and madness since the mid-20th century. It highlights how feminist and anti-psychiatrist interdisciplinary works inspired new generations of historians to place gender at the forefront of studies of medical discourse about madness, lunatic asylums, and the experiences of those deemed insane. Recent literature on the history of gender and madness places itself as key to not only the history of medicine, but the history of Victorian Britain in general.