This article analyses the elimination of hand-spinning in Britain during the Industrial Revolution and shows that it produced large-scale technological unemployment. First, it uses new empirical evidence and sources to estimate spinning employment before the innovations of the 1760s and 1770s. The estimates show that spinning employed 8 per cent of the population by about 1770. Next, the article systematically analyses the course, extent and locations of technological unemployment produced by mechanization using more than 200 detailed qualitative sources. Evidence from more than 2,000 observations by contemporary social commentators, county agricultural surveys and the 1834 Poor Law Commission’s Rural and Town Queries shows the breadth and duration of unemployment following mechanization. The destruction of hand-spinning began to impact women and households in the 1780s, and the effects persisted until at least the mid 1830s. This technological shock likely had an unequal effect on family incomes that resulted from variation in household composition and local labour market conditions. The findings demonstrate that unemployment must be incorporated into analysis of the impacts of industrialization on living standards and they highlight the potential long-run costs of job-replacing technology.
{"title":"Technological Unemployment in the British Industrial Revolution: The Destruction of Hand-Spinning","authors":"Benjamin Schneider","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae049","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the elimination of hand-spinning in Britain during the Industrial Revolution and shows that it produced large-scale technological unemployment. First, it uses new empirical evidence and sources to estimate spinning employment before the innovations of the 1760s and 1770s. The estimates show that spinning employed 8 per cent of the population by about 1770. Next, the article systematically analyses the course, extent and locations of technological unemployment produced by mechanization using more than 200 detailed qualitative sources. Evidence from more than 2,000 observations by contemporary social commentators, county agricultural surveys and the 1834 Poor Law Commission’s Rural and Town Queries shows the breadth and duration of unemployment following mechanization. The destruction of hand-spinning began to impact women and households in the 1780s, and the effects persisted until at least the mid 1830s. This technological shock likely had an unequal effect on family incomes that resulted from variation in household composition and local labour market conditions. The findings demonstrate that unemployment must be incorporated into analysis of the impacts of industrialization on living standards and they highlight the potential long-run costs of job-replacing technology.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143813894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Historians of premodern economies, in contrast to modern ones, have only infrequently contemplated the economic contribution of slavery. Here, I suggest that quantitative and statistical tools allow us to evaluate the place of slavery in an early economy, using Roman Pompeii as a case study. At the time of its destruction in 79 ce, Pompeii appears prosperous, having benefitted from the economic development thought to have characterized the Roman world. Recent discoveries, meanwhile, shed new light on the conditions of working classes and slaves throughout the city. These narratives can be seen to form two sides to the same coin, as Pompeii’s prosperity was created in large part thanks to slave labour. The connection is supported by constructing a probabilistic model, which suggests some 6 million sesterces (HS) flowed every year to Pompeii’s masters through their exploitation of slaves. Slave owning probably formed the largest single income source for the urban economy. This scale of income is shown to be consistent with recent reconstructions of wealth and income inequality in the city. The results not only speak to slavery’s profound importance to Pompeii’s prosperity, but they encourage a recentring of labour and slavery in Roman economic history.
{"title":"Slavery, Prosperity, and Inequality in Roman Pompeii","authors":"Seth Bernard","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtaf006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaf006","url":null,"abstract":"Historians of premodern economies, in contrast to modern ones, have only infrequently contemplated the economic contribution of slavery. Here, I suggest that quantitative and statistical tools allow us to evaluate the place of slavery in an early economy, using Roman Pompeii as a case study. At the time of its destruction in 79 ce, Pompeii appears prosperous, having benefitted from the economic development thought to have characterized the Roman world. Recent discoveries, meanwhile, shed new light on the conditions of working classes and slaves throughout the city. These narratives can be seen to form two sides to the same coin, as Pompeii’s prosperity was created in large part thanks to slave labour. The connection is supported by constructing a probabilistic model, which suggests some 6 million sesterces (HS) flowed every year to Pompeii’s masters through their exploitation of slaves. Slave owning probably formed the largest single income source for the urban economy. This scale of income is shown to be consistent with recent reconstructions of wealth and income inequality in the city. The results not only speak to slavery’s profound importance to Pompeii’s prosperity, but they encourage a recentring of labour and slavery in Roman economic history.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143653358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Elizabeth Chatterjee, Sachaet Pandey-Geeta Mantraraj
On 11 December 1967, a large earthquake devastated the village of Koynanagar in Maharashtra, western India. Many blamed the new Koyna hydroelectric dam nearby. Prompting international inquests, Koyna became perhaps the world’s most famous case of reservoir-induced seismicity, a novel type of earthquake triggered by human activities. We use the dam’s history to explore the emergent consciousness of human geophysical agency that characterizes the Anthropocene, the putative new epoch when humans have become a planetary-scale ‘force of Nature’. The dam was explicitly designed as a geotechnical assemblage, a blending of technology, mountain topography, monsoon waters and rock. Striking a supposedly stable region, the 1967 earthquake revealed the more-than-human unpredictability of this composite. Scientists began to trace a radically new form of human agency at work, which owed its effects to complex chains of causality that extended deep underground and backward into deep history. Yet there was remarkably little policy fallout. Dam construction only accelerated in seismically active areas. The debates over reservoir-induced seismicity showed that human geotechnical agency could be read in diametrically opposed ways: as a source of anxiety or hubris, or simply irrelevant to practical policy making, thereby presaging today’s debates over human planetary stewardship in the Anthropocene.
{"title":"Dams and the Deep Earth: The 1967 Koyna Earthquake and Human Agency in the Anthropocene","authors":"Elizabeth Chatterjee, Sachaet Pandey-Geeta Mantraraj","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae037","url":null,"abstract":"On 11 December 1967, a large earthquake devastated the village of Koynanagar in Maharashtra, western India. Many blamed the new Koyna hydroelectric dam nearby. Prompting international inquests, Koyna became perhaps the world’s most famous case of reservoir-induced seismicity, a novel type of earthquake triggered by human activities. We use the dam’s history to explore the emergent consciousness of human geophysical agency that characterizes the Anthropocene, the putative new epoch when humans have become a planetary-scale ‘force of Nature’. The dam was explicitly designed as a geotechnical assemblage, a blending of technology, mountain topography, monsoon waters and rock. Striking a supposedly stable region, the 1967 earthquake revealed the more-than-human unpredictability of this composite. Scientists began to trace a radically new form of human agency at work, which owed its effects to complex chains of causality that extended deep underground and backward into deep history. Yet there was remarkably little policy fallout. Dam construction only accelerated in seismically active areas. The debates over reservoir-induced seismicity showed that human geotechnical agency could be read in diametrically opposed ways: as a source of anxiety or hubris, or simply irrelevant to practical policy making, thereby presaging today’s debates over human planetary stewardship in the Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143072374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bede and other authors describe a destructive wave of plague sweeping across Britain and Ireland in the period 664–87. In the decades around and after this time, the English kingdoms saw rapid economic changes as urban settlements grew, monasteries were founded, and a large silver currency appeared. Here, it is proposed that these developments were influenced by the effects of the plague. Exact levels of mortality are uncertain, but the survivors may have had the capacity to produce more, and more diverse, goods. Relatively weak seigneurial powers on the part of landlords meant that non-elite cultivators became a more important economic constituency in these circumstances, while elites turned in two directions: to development of small but intensively worked central farms, and to liquidation of large stocks of silver, which enabled them to profit by engaging with a diverse body of partners. This liquidation took the form of a much expanded currency of silver pennies, which provides a case-study of monetization as an important yet comparatively short-term economic change.
{"title":"Economic Change, Silver, and the Plague of 664–687 in England","authors":"Rory Naismith","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae048","url":null,"abstract":"Bede and other authors describe a destructive wave of plague sweeping across Britain and Ireland in the period 664–87. In the decades around and after this time, the English kingdoms saw rapid economic changes as urban settlements grew, monasteries were founded, and a large silver currency appeared. Here, it is proposed that these developments were influenced by the effects of the plague. Exact levels of mortality are uncertain, but the survivors may have had the capacity to produce more, and more diverse, goods. Relatively weak seigneurial powers on the part of landlords meant that non-elite cultivators became a more important economic constituency in these circumstances, while elites turned in two directions: to development of small but intensively worked central farms, and to liquidation of large stocks of silver, which enabled them to profit by engaging with a diverse body of partners. This liquidation took the form of a much expanded currency of silver pennies, which provides a case-study of monetization as an important yet comparatively short-term economic change.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2025-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142936630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Starting in the fifteenth century, European city governments began to respond to the threat of plague by introducing quarantine measures, which presumed that risk arrived in the bodies and goods of travellers. The adoption of quarantine was long considered a milestone on the road to modern, rational public health and was linked to increased centralization and the rise of state power in the early modern period. Recent quarantine scholarship, however, is revealing a more contingent story. This paper uses surviving plague correspondence between the governments of Barcelona, Valencia, and Ciutat de Mallorca (now Palma) to uncover the chaotic practice of early quarantine in the late medieval Crown of Aragon. All three cities adopted quarantine in the later fifteenth century, but all of them also obscured their own health statuses and distrusted one another’s information about plague. Municipalities in the Crown of Aragon embraced quarantine during this period even as their correspondence thwarted cooperative plague control. The exigencies of quarantine demanded plague information in the form of fama (rumour or reputation), often linked to the behaviour of elites.
{"title":"Plague Correspondence, Rumour, and Mistrust in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon","authors":"Abigail Agresta","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae041","url":null,"abstract":"Starting in the fifteenth century, European city governments began to respond to the threat of plague by introducing quarantine measures, which presumed that risk arrived in the bodies and goods of travellers. The adoption of quarantine was long considered a milestone on the road to modern, rational public health and was linked to increased centralization and the rise of state power in the early modern period. Recent quarantine scholarship, however, is revealing a more contingent story. This paper uses surviving plague correspondence between the governments of Barcelona, Valencia, and Ciutat de Mallorca (now Palma) to uncover the chaotic practice of early quarantine in the late medieval Crown of Aragon. All three cities adopted quarantine in the later fifteenth century, but all of them also obscured their own health statuses and distrusted one another’s information about plague. Municipalities in the Crown of Aragon embraced quarantine during this period even as their correspondence thwarted cooperative plague control. The exigencies of quarantine demanded plague information in the form of fama (rumour or reputation), often linked to the behaviour of elites.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"113 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142805272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Taking its cue from the weather wars that unfolded around the Alps in the eighteenth century — conflicts between neighbouring towns and polities attempting to divert storms by firing cannons at clouds — this article studies the representation of an environment rarely seen in spatial history: earth’s atmosphere. A survey of maps in different historiographical traditions, climate history foremost, reveals a visual repertoire that is effective for determining the physical properties of weather and climate but detaches the atmosphere from its human and non-human environments. A more recent genre of historical maps employs algorithmic methods of layering data to represent the atmosphere at local scales and in close connection with the human environment yet remains committed to a physicalist vision of weather and society. Returning to the Alpine weather wars, the article introduces a sequence of maps that attempt to represent past storms as they were understood and confronted by the armed farmers at the foot of the Alps: steerable entities trapped in an atmo-terrestrial force field where physical, political and religious influences collided to determine the ways of weather. The wider proposition is for historians of atmospheric environment to craft cartographic arguments that complement the range and ambition of their prose.
{"title":"The Atmosphere in Spatial History: Digital Evidence and Visual Argument","authors":"Luca Scholz","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae042","url":null,"abstract":"Taking its cue from the weather wars that unfolded around the Alps in the eighteenth century — conflicts between neighbouring towns and polities attempting to divert storms by firing cannons at clouds — this article studies the representation of an environment rarely seen in spatial history: earth’s atmosphere. A survey of maps in different historiographical traditions, climate history foremost, reveals a visual repertoire that is effective for determining the physical properties of weather and climate but detaches the atmosphere from its human and non-human environments. A more recent genre of historical maps employs algorithmic methods of layering data to represent the atmosphere at local scales and in close connection with the human environment yet remains committed to a physicalist vision of weather and society. Returning to the Alpine weather wars, the article introduces a sequence of maps that attempt to represent past storms as they were understood and confronted by the armed farmers at the foot of the Alps: steerable entities trapped in an atmo-terrestrial force field where physical, political and religious influences collided to determine the ways of weather. The wider proposition is for historians of atmospheric environment to craft cartographic arguments that complement the range and ambition of their prose.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142805444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explains how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of radical queer nuns, created gay ‘religious relics’ in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, in the 1980s. The Sisters’ relics are a neglected part of twentieth-century queer history and reflect the role of urban spaces and sexual cultures in the formation of contemporary queer identities. They also represent an early effort to preserve and commemorate queer histories. The Sisters drew on deliberately archaic medieval models to preserve pieces of destroyed sex-on-premises venues and cruising sites that were important to gay men. During the early 1980s, arson and hostile civic authorities destroyed these places and the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to threaten the gay community which patronized them. In Sydney, the Sisters also held reliquary exhibitions which commemorated and defended gay identity and dignity through the veneration of campy pieces of popular culture and the reclamation of seemingly homophobic religious discourses and concepts. The refashioning of the medieval cult of relics into a vehicle for queer identity and history speaks to the ongoing role of imagined pasts in the formation of present selves, and of the erasure of certain kinds of sexual experience from mainstream presentations of queer history.
{"title":"The Cult of Gay Relics and Queer Medievalism in 1980s Sydney","authors":"Miles Pattenden, Michael D Barbezat","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae043","url":null,"abstract":"This article explains how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of radical queer nuns, created gay ‘religious relics’ in San Francisco and Sydney, Australia, in the 1980s. The Sisters’ relics are a neglected part of twentieth-century queer history and reflect the role of urban spaces and sexual cultures in the formation of contemporary queer identities. They also represent an early effort to preserve and commemorate queer histories. The Sisters drew on deliberately archaic medieval models to preserve pieces of destroyed sex-on-premises venues and cruising sites that were important to gay men. During the early 1980s, arson and hostile civic authorities destroyed these places and the HIV/AIDS epidemic began to threaten the gay community which patronized them. In Sydney, the Sisters also held reliquary exhibitions which commemorated and defended gay identity and dignity through the veneration of campy pieces of popular culture and the reclamation of seemingly homophobic religious discourses and concepts. The refashioning of the medieval cult of relics into a vehicle for queer identity and history speaks to the ongoing role of imagined pasts in the formation of present selves, and of the erasure of certain kinds of sexual experience from mainstream presentations of queer history.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142753573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Historical scholarship has long highlighted the extensive landscape interventions initiated by state agents, early capitalists and experts in the early modern period, and pointed to the fierce, often violent resistance they evoked from local and rural communities. Such an approach risks narrowly aligning expertise with intervention in the service of states or capitalist elites and positioning experts in direct opposition to people. This article uses the history of land reclamation in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, usually told as a harmonious success story of premodern human intervention in nature, to explore the nature and politics of expertise and environmental thought as different elites clashed. Focusing on the proposed but not executed drainage of the Haarlemmermeer, it demonstrates how experts came to act as agents of resistance who argued for conservation and caution rather than intervention, and shows we can use expert exchanges to gain better insight into the divisive nature of environmental thought in the early modern period.
{"title":"Failure to Drain: Expert Resistance and Environmental Thought in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic","authors":"Anna-Luna Post","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae039","url":null,"abstract":"Historical scholarship has long highlighted the extensive landscape interventions initiated by state agents, early capitalists and experts in the early modern period, and pointed to the fierce, often violent resistance they evoked from local and rural communities. Such an approach risks narrowly aligning expertise with intervention in the service of states or capitalist elites and positioning experts in direct opposition to people. This article uses the history of land reclamation in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, usually told as a harmonious success story of premodern human intervention in nature, to explore the nature and politics of expertise and environmental thought as different elites clashed. Focusing on the proposed but not executed drainage of the Haarlemmermeer, it demonstrates how experts came to act as agents of resistance who argued for conservation and caution rather than intervention, and shows we can use expert exchanges to gain better insight into the divisive nature of environmental thought in the early modern period.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142672905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail for Sicily on the campaign that led to the unification of Italy in 1860, he gave a group of exiled political radicals living in the port city of Genoa the task of procuring weapons, equipment and reinforcements for his expedition. These exiled veterans of the 1848 revolutions quickly developed a fluid yet highly integrated fundraising and procurement organization that provided Garibaldi with the means for success. To do this, they leveraged decades of experience as clandestine transnational organizers, but also relied on the business and professional expertise and contacts they had accrued during a commercial and industrial boom in Genoa in the 1850s. Crucially, they took advantage of logistical innovations like steam travel to concentrate people and equipment where and when they needed them and guarantee a positive outcome for their revolution. They also successfully negotiated with trans-imperial power brokers and navigated jurisdictional gaps in the waters of the Mediterranean. These former 48ers used their experiences as exiles and businessmen to challenge the conservative status quo of the 1850s and force the creation of a united Italy. A focus on the material underpinning of their success restores their role in transforming nineteenth-century Europe.
{"title":"Ships, Guns and Money: The Logistics of Revolution and Garibaldi’s Campaign of 1860","authors":"Daniel F Banks","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae044","url":null,"abstract":"When Giuseppe Garibaldi set sail for Sicily on the campaign that led to the unification of Italy in 1860, he gave a group of exiled political radicals living in the port city of Genoa the task of procuring weapons, equipment and reinforcements for his expedition. These exiled veterans of the 1848 revolutions quickly developed a fluid yet highly integrated fundraising and procurement organization that provided Garibaldi with the means for success. To do this, they leveraged decades of experience as clandestine transnational organizers, but also relied on the business and professional expertise and contacts they had accrued during a commercial and industrial boom in Genoa in the 1850s. Crucially, they took advantage of logistical innovations like steam travel to concentrate people and equipment where and when they needed them and guarantee a positive outcome for their revolution. They also successfully negotiated with trans-imperial power brokers and navigated jurisdictional gaps in the waters of the Mediterranean. These former 48ers used their experiences as exiles and businessmen to challenge the conservative status quo of the 1850s and force the creation of a united Italy. A focus on the material underpinning of their success restores their role in transforming nineteenth-century Europe.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142902260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Russian Empire collapsed because it failed to assimilate non-Russian minorities, and did not provide a coherent national narrative to unite the Russian population. Its religious policies were key contributors to these failures, and this article examines their impact in order to shine a new light on the religious background to the empire’s demise. The Orthodox Church was supposed to provide the means to assimilate non-Russians and offer up the core cultural component for a Russian national consciousness. Its inability to do so became clear in the 1860s–1880s when, in the liminal regions of the empire, Orthodoxy fragmented along ethnic lines. Russians deserted churches for the dissenting Old Believer movement, and non-Russians returned to their ancestral faiths of animism and Islam. This was partly down to an inconsistency in government, which meant that religious repression overlapped with the principle of toleration; however, an exploration of the dynamics of apostasy at a parish level shows that where Russians and non-Russians were compelled to worship together, religious tensions emerged and churches lost their sacred character. As well as providing new insights into how the empire alienated its subjects at a local level, this exploration reveals pathways to ethnic consciousness from below. Ethnicization was the process that separated ethnicity from religion, and places of worship possessed characteristics, most importantly the performance of communal historical memory, that made them into key sites of ethnic boundary formation.
{"title":"Religious Tension and Ethnic Consciousness in the Later Russian Empire","authors":"Thomas Marsden","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtae040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae040","url":null,"abstract":"The Russian Empire collapsed because it failed to assimilate non-Russian minorities, and did not provide a coherent national narrative to unite the Russian population. Its religious policies were key contributors to these failures, and this article examines their impact in order to shine a new light on the religious background to the empire’s demise. The Orthodox Church was supposed to provide the means to assimilate non-Russians and offer up the core cultural component for a Russian national consciousness. Its inability to do so became clear in the 1860s–1880s when, in the liminal regions of the empire, Orthodoxy fragmented along ethnic lines. Russians deserted churches for the dissenting Old Believer movement, and non-Russians returned to their ancestral faiths of animism and Islam. This was partly down to an inconsistency in government, which meant that religious repression overlapped with the principle of toleration; however, an exploration of the dynamics of apostasy at a parish level shows that where Russians and non-Russians were compelled to worship together, religious tensions emerged and churches lost their sacred character. As well as providing new insights into how the empire alienated its subjects at a local level, this exploration reveals pathways to ethnic consciousness from below. Ethnicization was the process that separated ethnicity from religion, and places of worship possessed characteristics, most importantly the performance of communal historical memory, that made them into key sites of ethnic boundary formation.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2024-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142902263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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