Innovation and Improvement in Infrastructures and Services as a Cultural Product of Italian Medieval Cities.

What does a city put into its development, its modernization? It plans more efficient communication systems, seeks new sources of energy while augmenting the old ones, improves the quality of life of its citizens. This is a cultural legacy that comes to us from all of our history. However, there have been moments in which the innovative push was particularly strong, periods in which plans for development were manifested and then realized in later times. There have been numerous particularly decisive periods on the road to innovation and “modernization”, but among them, one must not forget the centuries of the central Middle Ages, because it was then that the steps were taken which made our cities a cultural product that fosters growth.
In particular, during the 13th c and the beginning of the 14thc, ever more efficient sources of energy and supplies were sought. An urban setting that responded to a rapidly growing population was imagined. The city was organized so as to govern development and to meet the needs of the population. Then, like now, the citizens had to produce and live in the city, without wasting resources and in pursuit of a high quality of life.
In fact, all of the Italian cities that became Comunes (city states) in the 12th century strived as early as possible to create norms that would regulate ordered growth. The period witnessed the greatest urban development, development that would last until the 13th century. The cities were adjusted by increasing their surface area at such a rate as to satisfy, in reality, the urban needs up to the 19th century, and in many cases up to the beginning of the 1900s. However, it was also necessary to modernize the “historical city”, not only in terms of building renewal, but also with the collection of potable water, the regulation of plumbing in the homes, the rennovation of the sewage systems, the re qualification of drainage and of the large main sewers, without deteriorating the groundwaters which were used for motive power.
In the 13th and 14th centuries, when the city governments had acquired the strength to enforce all of their rules, urbanistic themes that had been started in the previous century were developed with rigour. The cities built aqueducts, straightened and widened roads, realized sewage networks, installed or finished the systems of walls around the cities. One could say that the “medieval” cities became “modern” in that period. In fact, illegal construction, invasion of public lands, artisans who worked on the streets, and the pollution of soil, air and water, were no longer tolerated. In the middle of the 14th century there was a drammatic arrest due to the plague that struck all of Europe. Recovery from that was fairly soon, and delapidated structures were replaced with buildings that were made less and less of wood and more and more of stone and brick.
The important legislative action taken by the Comunes during the centuries of the central Middle Ages determined the infrastructures and services of Italian cities for centuries after. Urbanistic intervention in the modern age (16th to 19th c.) was limited to small adjustments, improvement in construction quality, widening of roads, and unification of land parcels for the construction of luxury buildings, but the Italian urban identity did not change. In more recent times, some parts of the cities have been sacrificed to reclamation, to the flow of traffic, to the enactment of zoning regulations. In general, however, apart from a few execptions, the “culture of the city” that developed in the Middle Ages is the heritage of the present day city. This is because it combines the ancient and the modern, allowing people today to live in the city of yesterday where, in the Middle Ages, policies were enacted that allowed the cities to modernize without losing their identities.

Prussian Classicism as postcolonial lieux de mémoire: A transnational perspective on the Korean metropolis Seoul

This paper falls under the umbrella of comparative urban history. It will compare two modern capital cities, Berlin and Seoul, which do not seem to share any commonalities or special relations with each another. Seoul has experienced, however, multiple cultural transfers through Japanese colonialism which was strongly inspired by German authoritative culture.
The main topic of this paper will be the legacy of Prussian classicism in the Korean capital city Seoul. Inspired by new cultural history as well as cultural studies, this paper will explore the transnational mode of cultural transfer in terms of specific memory culture. Big cities must be places where various memories are formed, crossed, transformed, and occasionally fragmented, the alleged “lieux de mémoire”in the sense of Pierre Nora. This kind of the temporal dynamics seems to be in the case of postcolonial cities more evident. The Prussian classicism is relevant to the Seoul’s memory culture because it reminds most Korean people of Japanese colonialism and marks a turning-point in Korean history. It is no accident that in Korea the Prussian classicism of Japanese shade is simply identified as “early modern” style.
More concretely, this paper will connect Friedrich Schinkel’s neoclassicist Architecture in Berlin with the so called “capitol Hall” in Seoul by focusing on the temporal dynamics of cultural transfer. This work should be accompanied by following three methodological or heuristic questions.
1. How should a postcolonial city deal with its own memory, alleged historical trauma which will not easily disappear?
2. How can we apply a transnational approach to the cultural transfer between metropolises?
3. How do we analyze and value the visual representations of a city’s past through which places of memory might emerge and win a political, social, cultural pregnancy?

Métamorphoses d’une ville-témoin : la (re)création de Rome à l’époque moderne

Notre contribution se concentre sur Rome à l’époque moderne à la fois comme cas d’étude paradigmatique et comme chantier exceptionnel de production culturelle dans la longue durée. Dans cette double nature, nous croyons qu’elle représente un contexte particulièrement fertile pour mettre à l’épreuve les implicites interprétatifs et pour sélectionner les outils d’analyse d’une histoire de la ville comme produit culturel. Il s’agit d’observer l’imbrication des formes culturelles et des espaces urbains, la dynamique entre cultures savantes et cultures populaires, la sélection des thèmes et des modèles qui transforme le sens et la configuration des identités urbaines.
Dans notre intervention nous nous concentrerons sur le XVIIIe et XIXe siècles en tant que moment particulier de transformation du « langage de Rome », autour du quel se cristallisent les tensions entre attentes et contraintes de la production culturelle de la ville.
Des très nombreuses études ont analysé le mythe de Rome et la façon dans laquelle le caractère symbolique et exemplaire de la ville est implémenté dès le Moyen Age, et particulièrement à la Renaissance et à la Contre-réforme, pour en faire une véritable icône culturelle afin de renforcer le rôle que Rome exerçait en tant que capitale politique et religieuse à l’échelle mondiale. Mais que se passe-t-il quand le statut de Rome comme centre politique est mis en crise par les nouveaux équilibres après les paix de Westphalie ?
Le XVIIIe siècle est marqué par l’ambition des papes et des élites religieuses de re-affirmer le statut de capitale de Rome. Cela se traduit dans une complexe stratégie, qui se concentre sur la valorisation du patrimoine ancien (profane) et médiéval (sacré), et sur la promotion de la création artistique contemporaine. Un vaste programme urbanistique et culturel re-crée véritablement la ville, en modifiant en profondeur à la fois sa matérialité et le discours à travers lequel l’on peut « lire » son historicité.
Certes, les présupposés qui animent la volonté du pape et du sacré collège demeurent l’affirmation de la religion, de l’Eglise catholique et de son chef visible. Dans cette optique traditionnellement confessionnelle, les “monuments” antiques et modernes (y compris la production contemporaine) se trouvent placés dans une logique de contiguïté. Mais sous l’apparente continuité, des glissements s’opèrent : sous l’effet de la sécularisation progressive dans le regard que l’Europe porte sur Rome, et dans les pratiques culturelles de la ville elle-même, se creuse un écart entre les intentions politico-religieuses et les effets à long terme de cette politique. Il en résulte, par ailleurs, une re-configuration des identités urbaines, qui accentue la fragmentation sociale. Seulement après la Révolution française, les choix effectués par le pouvoir politique et les élites sociales se placent sous le signe d’une “antimodernité” qui semble réconcilier les multiples facettes d’une ville-témoin.
Nous analyserons donc quelques moments forts, dispositifs et acteurs de ce processus, en essayant d’en mettre en lumière les articulations sociales.

The idea of "Latin American City"

This paper proposes a historical analysis of the category “Latin American City” as a cultural construct. The central subject is that, during the period between the Second Postwar and the 1970’s, the idea of a “Latin American City” became a category of social thought, as part of the intellectual and political imagination in several regions of the continent.

Le multiculturalisme dans les villes de l'empire des Habsbourg autour de 1900

Le développement urbain des villes marginales de l'empire les rend de plus en plus multiculturelles. Dans le même temps, le discours national se renforce et fait de chaque ville un lieu de conflit potentiel. La contribution entreprend de démonter deux clichés : celui de la confrontation d'une part, celui de la coexistence idyllique, de l'autre. On examinera les espaces publics, la vie associative, les institutions culturelles et éducatives à l'appui de cette thèse.

History and Cultural Heritage - Transfers Between Urban and Rural Culture (European experience)

This contribution will address the expansion of urban culture, the transfers of urban patterns in the attitude to history and cultural heritage. The examples from history as well as contents of cultural heritage are important elements in definition, construction and protection of collective identities especially in the multiethnic and multicultural environment so frequent in European conditions. The paper will ask about the strategies, their motivation and context and about their results. It will explore these strategies on the basis of case studies chosen from various European regions where history, culture and natural conditions create very contrasting context. It influences the perceptions, images and stereotypes in all kinds of social and spatial scales. I expect to have results from a research project focused on the construction of European cultural identities based in Prague and from an international research project Frontiers and Identities involving young and experienced researchers from twelve European countries within the Cliohres 6FP network of excellence, which will close its five year programme on 31.5. 2010 and at the moment when the Congress in Amsterdam opens, all its results have to be published. It will be then a unique occasion to discuss our results. The presentation will contribute to the discussion of interconnections between local (urban), regional and national (and supranational) identities and their spatialisation.

Urban cultural diversity and the quest for national unity: Helsinki and Dublin in the 1920s and 1930s

Urban cultural diversity has often been seen as a fertile ground for new ideas and groundbreaking innovations, but at the same time much concern has been expressed that celebrations of different cultural identities may also result in conflicts, segregation and the fragmentation of society. Therefore city governments and other important urban actors have continually sought to find a balance between enhancing cultural diversity on the one hand and regulating and repressing it on the other. Where exactly the 'right' balance lies at any given moment in history depends on many factors.

This paper will contribute to these discussions by examining attitudes towards urban cultural diversity in Finland and Ireland in the years after independence. Before the First World War Helsinki and Dublin were 'colonial cities' under the Russian and British rule respectively, and in the 1920s they were capital cities of independent states. The aim is to examine how cultural diversity and difference were constructed and treated in Helsinki and Dublin after independence. To what extent the independence and the accompanying quest for national unity altered existing cultural differences and perhaps created new ones. What cultural differences were seen as worth preserving and cultivating, what differences were defined as 'unacceptable' and 'disruptive' and how these disruptive cultural differences were accommodated or repressed?

From an industrial to a post-industrial urban culture

The idea is to analyse urban transformations during the turn from a society dominated by industrial culture to a society marked by post industrial norms and values. Preliminary, focus will be on changes of urban space linked to an evolving new concept for urban life. The time period under consideration will mainly be after 1950. Research is planned to be on Stockholm in a comparative way

Urban Culture – Cultural City: A case-study with regard to Vienna

Starting with considerations about possible definitions for “city” as well as “culture” it is clear and indisputable that the city is a cultural product; what about possible misunderstandings re ‘cultural product’?
Elements of urban or civic culture (from the medieval period to the present times): what can be called specifically ‘urban’ and does not (or not in this form) exist outside of the urban framework? What about the significance of urban or civic culture seen from the standpoints of rulers, of elites and of the mass of the city’s inhabitants?
Phenomenon of the modern (past?) self-identity of the city as well as the perception of the city seen from outside; the modern term of ‘Cultural City’ in the context of city-image, urban promotion etc. (the ‘Wiener Festwochen’, tourism, cultural heritage of the world …)

Globalization, Migration and City Development in Nigeria, Ibadan Example

Abstract.
This study intends to examine the existing nexus between globalization and migration as it influences or debars development of cities in Nigeria .On the surface, globalization as a process seems to enhance movement of people, goods services and information within and across the borders of countries. Boost in migration thus becomes a natural outcome of the phenomenon of globalization. To the proponents of the new economic order, globalization will bring more development to our cities ( Urban centers) by increasing the efficiency in industries, competitiveness, speedy growth of the economy in general and efficient environmental management. But opponents are also accusing globalization of impoverishing the greater percentage of world population, lowering standards of living and destroying the environment especially in the underdeveloped parts of the world. All of these to the benefits of the advanced countries\. This contradictory position, no doubts call for more serious research on the role of globalization on the local economy especially the activities of migrants as regards environmental management and city development in Africa. Ibadan- the largest city in sub-Saharan Africa will be the focus of this study.

Obviously, Ibadan presents a terrible environmental picture. Visits to major streets and residential areas especially the core city centers, reveals a prevalence of ubiquitous huge heaps of refuse almost everywhere and the ever repulsive aroma of open sewers. The general picture is that of urban crisis. Both people and factories are reckless in waste management; nearly all the infrastructures are in deplorable conditions. And to many these problems are as a result of increasing urbanization, which encourage influx of migrants to Ibadan city from within and without Nigeria. Hence the need for the study of this nature which will inter alia attempt to : explore the long term interactions of man and nature; study how these interactions enhance migration; analyses how migration affects development or otherwise of cities in Nigeria and Ibadan specifically; assess the migrants interactions with their environment and the impact on the development of Ibadan ;evaluate the attitude of the people towards personal hygiene and urban environment management ; generate useful scientific information for policy makers on how to utilize migrants for effective environmental management and city development.

The City as Cultural Laboratory: Trieste 1918-1954

The granting of maritime and commercial privileges to the higher Adriatic region by the Sacred Roman Emperor Charles VI’s in March 1717 led to the rapid transformation of Trieste from a small fishermen’s village into major hub for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The growing commercial role played by the Triestine port, together with the urban and architectural expansion carried out under the illuminated reign of Maria Theresia, brought about significant population growth in the course of nearly a century. Trieste welcomed a dynamic, upwardly mobile, cosmopolitan and increasingly culture-hungry middle-class. Demographically diverse and yet linguistically cohering thanks to a Venetian-based dialect, the Triestine port hosted heterogenous and increasingly competing ethnic and religious groups: a sizable Jewish community, significant from both the numerical and social view-point, as well as a numerically smaller though no less important Slav minority, Slovenian and partly Croatian. Faithful to the Empire, staunchly catholic and strenuously resistant to Italian cultural assimilation, the latter was in more or less latent competition with the former throughout, to name only one of the dynamics and contradictions nurturing local culture.
Following the First World War and the demise of the multi-national Empire, Trieste was assigned to Italy. The local middle-classes welcomed this ‘redemption’ in the bosom of an idealized Italian Kulturnation. However, even this coveted recovery precipitated the decline and fall of the Triestine port. Relying on its own established and substantial ports (Venice, Genoa, Bari), Italy had no long term interest in sustaining the peripheral Triestine hub. State subventions and investments provided by the fascist regime in the 1930s did little more than extend the city’s slow but steady agony. In the course of a handful of decades, Trieste became a pawn of political negotiations, a microcosm of the Cold War and its divisive politics, outpost of the democratic west on the cusp of the Balkans.
Even this cursory historical ride suggests a whole series of problems, ambiguities and contradictions framing the cultural identity of a rapidly growing and equally rapidly declining city poised at the unstable north-eastern borders of Italy. Not dissimilarly from other border towns, hinging on geo-political and national confines that are at once permeable and impenetrable, Trieste has historically been swayed by national and, frequently, nationalistic discourses, which I gather under the title italianità (e.g. the ‘quintessence of Italian culture’). On the other hand, Triestine culture traditionally entertained a number of localistic, regional discourses, aimed at highlighting the particularity of local culture, especially in the literary arena and in contrast with the Italian canon. I have labelled this second attitude triestinità, that is to say a ‘quintessence of Triestine culture’. Unstable and loosely defined categories, mirrors of disparate national, ideological and cultural loyalties, as well as heterogenous phenomena precipitated by the rapid and confusing succession of historical events and ideological stances, my contention is that the cultural identity of modern Trieste cannot be fully understood without reference to italianità and triestinità. Compounded with the pressing issue of its border identity, emerging from the proximity of an elusive border, itself a paradigm of instability and rapid change, Trieste can be regarded as one of the more skewed cultural cities in Italy, not exactly a modern city, perhaps, but a utopian modernist town nonetheless, a city to be understood as laboratory of future cultural, urban and political configurations.

Central Planning of Tourism in French Indochina

This paper explores the French colonial government's program of organizing tourism in French Indochina in the 1910-1939 period. Through examining the central planning of developing the infrastructure of travel, including hotels, the paper treats the vision of the French colonial government regarding tourism and travel, and compares this to the reality of travel patterns of the period.

From the Darkness of Barbary to the Enlightenment: the British Image of the Finn during the Enlightenment

My paper deals with the British image of the Finn (and Lapp) from the early 18th century to the times of the Napoleonic wars. The research material consists of maps, philosophical works, history books, review articles and especially of travel literature written mainly by British authors who toured Sweden-Finland. The main thesis of the paper is that the British perceived the Finns as living in an intermediate stage between 'savagery' and 'civilization', on the verge of becoming 'European' and a 'race' of its own, no longer Mongol, but not quite 'Caucasian' yet. What stroke the British was the ability of the Finns to acquire 'European' physical characteristics and learn 'civilized' ways, and some of their customs, like the sauna-going, were now deemed as useful, no longer as promiscuous. What the philosophers like Voltaire or historians like Gibbon had been telling of such peripheral 'races' as the Finns were, was now contested by the testimony and experience provided during travels to Finland and Lapland.

Delight and disgust: food and cultural identity in early modern travel accounts (1550-1750)

Handwritten and printed travel accounts, memoirs and correspondences testify of the travellers’ perceptions of the Other and of their reactions to it. Focusing on French and German travels through Europe from the 16th to the 18th century, my paper investigates the role of food as a means of symbolic communication and as a field of negotiation for cultural otherness.

Food was in fact a major concern for all travellers. There is hardly any travel account which does not relate experiences with foreign food. What is more, among the different elements of foreign cultures, food was the one that provoked the most vehement reactions, be they positive or negative.

In contrast with other elements of foreign cultures, such as language or religion, it was impossible for travellers to avoid immediate contact with foreign food. This contact implied an assimilation of the Other, and even a transgression of the limits of the traveller’s own body. Since food both expresses and constructs cultural identities, the exposure to foreign food necessarily had an effect on the travellers’ physical and psychic integrity as well as on their cultural identity. Disgust and delight were by no means expressions of the travellers’ individual taste, but were culturally coded. They are thus revealing for the way in which cultural frontiers were drawn, cultural hierarchies defined, and cultural contacts negotiated in early modern Europe.

When it came to eating and drinking, travellers had to give up the position of an exterior observer and become involved with a foreign culture. Focusing on food as an indicator of cultural otherness thus allows us to analyse interactions between travellers and inhabitants of their host countries. Food was both a means of symbolic communication (i.e. as gift or at courtly banquets) and a field of negotiation for cultural differences (i.e. through adoption, transformation or rejection of foreign food habits).

Travel for profit - European Travellers in India, 17th and 18th centuries

The paper focusses on the nature of travel in India in the 17th and early 18th centuries, when the East India Companies were involved in the trade to the country. Travel was part of the work of the factors, and was also undertaken for various other reasons.
It is argued in this paper that 'profit' was a major criterion. However, profit is to be understood in two ways - that of material gain, as well as that of knowledge. The paper therefore proposes to discuss the trvel writings of some select travellers, from the point of view of travel for profit in terms of both monetary gain, and knowledge acquisition.

From Barriers to Bridges: The African Union Border Programme in European Comparative Perspective.

Regional integration demands the effective devaluation of the barrier functions and effects of the boundaries between participating sovereign states. The elimination of the border as barrier and its promotion as bridge between one another constitutes the acid test of sincerity of purpose of the national states engaged in a regional integration project. Manifestations of “closed borders’, including unrelenting exercise of restrictive controls, suggest absence of a sense of commitment and a lack of seriousness of intention on the part of the participating State actors.
In Europe, beginning with the Western European initiatives in the aftermath of the Second World War, the spectacular regional integration success story has derived from an ever increasing lowering of borders as barriers between the World’s oldest nation-states with, hitherto, a history of recurrent and most devastating territorial and border conflicts and wars. The inauguration of the European Union has been based on the theory and practice of the concept of ‘Europe without Frontiers’ enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty and the Schengen Agreement of 1992 - 1993 as well as the evolving European Constitution mile-stoned in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty on the European Union.

The result of these developments, focusing on the elimination of restrictive controls on the Internal Frontiers of the European Union and the pooling of policy in respect of policing, immigration and the administration of criminal justice, has been a growing European regional constituency and a consciousness that tends to transcend national boundaries and identities. Of particular significance for the European regional integration process has been the incredible lobbying influence, if not power, exercised by the directly affected local populations in the diverse border areas organised into the highly pro-active Association of European Border Regions with headquarters in Bonn, Germany, and an influential operating office close to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.
In Africa, as indeed other regions of the developing world, on the other hand, regional integration experiments have not met with a similar success in spite of demonstrable similarities in the basic structures and functions of state territories and boundaries. In the particular case of Africa, focused in this presentation, the records of failure have been remarkably dismal. While the desire has remained strong, the actual performance has been one of disillusion. The events have for long been an affair of governments rather than of the people; and the chances of success are constantly put to flight by contra-indications of negative nationalism and the attendant actual and potential boundary and territorial disputes and conflicts within and, more manifestly, between many a territorially adjacent African state. Pro-integration decisions, taken usually in the context of familiar-type summits of Heads of States and Governments, are not reflected in the behaviour of the law and border-enforcement agencies of the individual national authorities.
The recently inaugurated African Union Border Programme (AUBP) is aimed at changing the trend in Africa in the general direction of the more desirable developments in the European Union. Based on a solemn Declaration of the historic Conference of Ministers in Charge of Border Issues held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 7 June 2007 and a unanimous endorsement of the Executive Council of the African Union in its 11th Ordinary Session held in Accra, Ghana, 26th-29th of the same month, the AUBP is a four-fold policy instrument targeted on a simultaneous pursuit of (a) Accelerated Demarcation of the International Boundaries Between Member States; (b) Cross-Border Cooperation Focusing on a Regional Approach to the Planning and Development of ‘Cross-Border Areas’, African Regions or ‘Afregios’ equivalents of the ‘European Regions’ or ‘Euregios’, (c) Capacity Building with particular reference to relevant knowledge infrastructural innovations and specialized training and research programmes in support of cross-border cooperation initiatives and wider regional integration orientations; and, finally, (d) Resource Mobilization within and outside Africa. The strategies for implementation embrace roles for local, national, regional and continental levels of execution, based on a strict adherence to the principle of subsidiarity.
Clearly the climax and the most comprehensive policy instrument ever designed at continental level on the issue of Africa’s problematic inherited borders, the AUBP has resulted from a long historical process that dates back to the accidental origination of the modern African State territories and boundaries in the European ‘Scramble’ and subsequent imperialist partition of the continent at the turn of the 19th century.
This presentation is focused on the African Union Border Programme in context of a comparison with the European historical experience. The essay is organised in five distinct but inter-related sections. The first, of an introductory theoretical and conceptual concern, discusses the problem of comparison with special reference to the issue of comparability between Europe and Africa in the matter of State territories and boundaries. The second provides a sketch of the history of the border factor in the European regional integration process. The third is a critique of the history in Africa with special reference to border policy-making and policy implementation in the era of the defunct Organisation of African Unity (OAU) from 1963-2002. The fourth, on the on-going African Union (AU) phase, is a more detailed description of the recently launched Border Programme. The essay concludes with a fifth section of critical reflection on the Euro-African historical comparison and the logic for linkages and networking’s of organized research and training programmes and institutions.

Indigenous of Minas Gerais: Native Resistance in the Wilderness of the Portuguese Crown

In this lecture we seek to demonstrate the presence of indigenous peoples of various ethnic origins in the wilderness and towns of Minas Gerais / Brazil throughout the colonial period. We discuss the resistance of Indians in the eastern forests, taking into account the central role of conflicts with colonists and armed expeditions ordered to conquer the zone. In the second, we examine the struggle for liberty of those Indians incorporated into colonial society in the condition of “administrados” and/or slaves. In this context, we attempt to depict the conduct of Indians as important social agents in the socio-cultural formation of Minas Gerais.

Legends of National Borders. The Myth of the Nöteborg border (1323) in a Comparative East-European perspective

The paper (co-authored with Professor Jukka Korpela) studies the concept of border in Finnish historical literature from a comparative East-European perspective. We will analyse conceptual changes in the early definitions of Finnish Eastern border, especially to what extend the border has been defined in national terms as a demarcation based on ethnicity, language and national culture and to what extend it has been understood in broader supranational terms as a frontier between two civilizations, religious and cultural spheres.

The analysis of the historiography of the Nöteborg Treaty is based on the examination of key 20th century scholarly debates on the early construction of Finnish Eastern border. In the comparative analysis new studies on Central and Eastern European historiography as well as key contributions in Medieval Studies are utilized.

The preliminary analysis suggests that the national and European conceptualizations of the border can not be understood as two separate discourses producing overlapping interpretations. It seems evident that in this sense we can hardly speak e.g. of a post-war turn to modern “European” approaches after the “nationalist” 1930s. Rather it seems that both dimensions have been intertwined in the definitions of European borders from the beginning. The emphasis and character given to these dimensions has, however, varied from different political context to another.

Northeast Asia: Region, National Frontiers, and the Boundaries within

The major countries of Northeast Asia – China, Japan and Korea – are commonly seen as relatively self-contained countries whose borders have remained relatively unchanged over time. This paper seeks to challenge this perception, by exploring the ways in which the reshaping of the Northeast Asian region over the past 200 years has led to major shifts in the location and function of national borders. The changing nature of these borders in turn has profoundly the way in which, within each nation of the region, national identities are defined and the national “majority” is distinguished from “minorities”. Taking case studies from the borderlands of each of these three countries, the paper will trace the major shifts in the national boundaries of the region, and the impact of these shifts on the identity and status of minority groups within each nation.

Frontières entre "barbarus" et "humanus" dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine

Les notions de « barbarie » ou de « civilisation » ne sont familières ni aux Grecs ni aux Romains, ce qui n’empêche ni les uns ni les autres de concevoir une frontière entre celui que l’on nomme "barbaros" en grec, "barbarus" en latin, et le Grec ou le Romain. La démarcation est mouvante et devient, dans la perspective diachronique qui est choisie ici, complexe. L’opposition classique repose sur l’antithèse Grecs vs non-Grecs : l’analyse des occurrences de "barbaros" révèle que le terme grec a dès l’origine une valeur péjorative. La frontière est nette, d’un côté sont les Grecs, de l’autre les "barbaroi", mais aucun des deux groupes n’a de caractérisation abstraite : les concepts de « barbarie » ou de « civilisation » n’existent pas, ce sont les Romains qui vont les créer. Les Latins héritent de cette opposition Hellènes vs Barbares, dans laquelle ils se trouvent du côté des Barbares. Leur effort consiste à sortir de cette dichotomie en exploitant deux voies : substituer à l’hellénisme le concept de "latinitas" ; accentuer la séparation entre les Romains et les Barbares. Une première frontière, linguistique, est ainsi dressée pour se démarquer des Grecs. Celle qui sépare les Romains des Barbares définit encore plus nettement l’"humanitas". On peut se demander pourquoi les Latins, disposant d’une dizaine de termes pour désigner « l’étranger », ont emprunté le mot grec "barbaros". La frontière, pour les autres « étrangers », signale la différence entre un ici, romain, et un ailleurs auquel appartient l’étranger : "barbarus" est le seul terme qui définisse l’étranger comme « l’autre qui n’est pas romain, qui est exclu du territoire romain ». Face à la diversité et à la multiplicité des barbares, se dresse l’unité postulée du "populus Romanus" ; face au "barbarus inhumanus", rejeté aux confins du territoire romain, se présente le Romain "humanus". Mais un autre déplacement des lignes de partage se produit avec Cicéron, premier auteur latin à qualifier des Romains de « barbares ». Le brouillage de l’antinomie "barbarus" vs "humanus" va aller en s’accentuant. Bientôt les Grecs, d’Asie Mineure ou d’Egypte, sont considérés comme barbares, tout comme certains « sauvages » vont représenter la pureté originelle antérieure aux dégradations provoquées par l’homme civilisé. La frontière entre le barbare et le civilisé n’est plus géographique ou même ethnique, elle est une question de morale. Un nouveau brouillage est introduit par le christianisme : est barbare celui qui n’a pas accès au Verbe divin, donc le païen, l’infidèle. Désormais les lignes de partage entre civilisation et barbarie vont se multiplier et se déplacer selon les époques et les lieux, chacun devenant le barbare d’un autre au 16ème siècle et plusieurs auteurs s’interrogeant depuis sur les différents visages pris par la barbarie. Les Latins, en comprenant que la frontière entre "barbarus" et "humanus" n’est pas étanche, que la démarcation n’est pas absolue mais relative, ont franchi une étape décisive dans l’histoire de la définition des frontières entre le barbare et le civilisé.

Translation as Bordering - Translation and the Inderminacy of National Language

A plurality of peoples inhabits the world, and frequently the world is presented as a common space where differences among peoples are manifest. Each people is a group, so differences among peoples are not entirely reducible to differences among individuals. In order to tell the plurality of peoples from the plurality of human individuals, we often rely upon categories for collective identities such as family, kin, race, nation, ethnos, and culture. The most commanding category for collective unity in the modern world is given in language, so that the language is represented as expressing the primordial union of a people. If one human body is somewhat a marker of human ‘individuality,’ the image - or figure, trope, or schema - of a language gives the sense of an individual or indivisible collectivity. Yet, on what ground is it possible to claim that the image of a language is autonomous and self-oriented?
My paper argues that what is primarily given is not an image of a language but the image, figure, trope, or schema of languages; the locale where languages are identified is never contained in a language. The identification of a language is possible only in an heteronomous encounter of frontier where translation is conducted. Differences among peoples precede the union of a people, just as translation comes before the identification of a language. I call this process of social encounter “bordering,” borrowing the term introduced by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson.
Then my argument seeks the consequences of the language’s pluralist origin in two directions: the first is a historical analysis of a schematism by which the image of languages was reorganized in modernity. The national language comes into being through this schematism. The second is the question of culture, and of its subordination to the schematism of national languages. Culture is often modeled after the image of a national language.
From these two perspectives, I want to explore the concept of ‘heterolingual address’ and “bordering.”

Synagogues, Churches and Mosques

Amsterdan houses one of the most splendid synagogues of the western Sephardim. This building is one of a serie of synagogues erected by the members of the 'Portuguese' Naçao in Western Europe as well as in the new world in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. When we turn our gaze to the Levant, the skyline is dominated by the minarets of the mosques. We see nothing which is comparable with these western houses of prayer that where also meant to be showcases for the beauty and honor of Judaism in the eyes of non-Jews. My paper will try to explain the difference between eastern and western Sephardi congregations, the difference in the social space, the differing mentalité etc. Needless to mention that the various eastern Christian communities faced similar problems in erecting or reconstructing houses of prayer.
But the difference wasn't complete. In the Ottoman cities too, much of the outside came in. An ongoing process of deep acculturation was manifested in the seventeenth century on in the holy space as well – the décor of the synagogue, the style of the ornaments and the textiles. The influence of the Islamic culture affected the liturgy as well. Sephardi liturgy all over the east was stamped with the heavy stamp of Ottoman court music and the tariqat (religious orders) music.

The Jewish Ritual Bath as a Social and Religious Space in Early Medieval Europe

Scholars have noted that the ancient Roman bath and the Islamic hammam which succeeded it were not merely intended for the pursuit of cleanliness, but also “community centers of sorts.” My presentation will examine the degree to which the mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath, played a similar role in medieval and early modern Jewish society, particularly in the Mediterranean. The mikveh was intended primarily for married women who needed to purify themselves on a monthly basis, but could take on non-ritual functions as well, related to both material and social life.
Early in the thirteenth century the eminent Ashkenazic rabbi Baruch b. Isaac of Worms, who passed through Crete on his way to the Holy Land, was responsible for instituting a local ordinance decreeing that “no Jew may use the mikveh for washing any sort of clothing, nor for any other activity that might introduce dirt into the bath.” The latter phrase evidently alluded to the soaking of hides by Jews involved in the local tanning industry. Three centuries later the community of Crete faced a related, but even more curious problem: “We have…seen that some of the unmarried women go to the ritual bathhouse in the summer to cool off in its waters, and lock the doors behind them. As a consequence the [married] women desist from immersing themselves in a timely manner, as required by the Torah and our sages.”
My presentation will seek to get at the root of the problems faced by the Cretan Jewish community with regard to its ritual bathhouse, particularly through a comparison with the neighboring Jewish communities of Italy and Sicily.

Ezrat Nashim: The women's Section in the Early Modern Synagogue as Space that Tracks Cultural Transformation

This paper will discuss the development of the women's section (ezrat nashim) in northern European synagogues (especially in Poland)in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The thesis is that space for women in the synagogue became progressively more integral to the synagogue prayer area. This both paralleled and embodied the growth of Jewish women's cultural capital in this period.

The Shemita Controversy 1888-1910: Halacha and History

The debate over the observance of the Shemitta year is one of the foremost halachic issues to have been raised in the Jewish modern period. The most intense periods in the deliberation over this issue were the years 1888-9 and 1909-10, however the controversy continues, even to this very day, and it would appear to be an unsolvable halachic problem.
The issue concerns whether the Torah's prohibition from tilling the soil every seventh year is applicable today. Without entering into the detailed halachic issues involved, it is striking that a halachic precept which has been neither observed nor relevant for generations, and hasn't been a part of daily Jewish ritual practice, can become an issue of such acute concern among Jews in modern times. What has made this topic so important and the discussion so passionate?
I would like to suggest that the very fact that our issue touched upon the ideological and political turmoil of Jewish nationalism, provides a partial explanation for the events. The underlying question was whether halacha would be applicable in modern times. In other words, can a modern Jewish state exist whilst governed by a traditional Jewish jurisdiction? This problem attracted a spectrum of approaches. The Ultra-orthodox, at one extreme, argued that the halachic law overrides secular law, whilst the secular insisted that halacha is not relevant anymore to modern society. The issue has touched the core of Jewish identity, the very earth of the Holy Land, and Jewish memory, stirring deep emotions amongst Jews aspiring to 'Renew our days as of old'. All these elements combined have contributed towards making the controversy over the Shmitta altogether such an alarming, sensitive and complex subject.

Tolerating individual religious thought in collective religious politics. 17th century confessionalist Sweden.

This paper investigates the toleration of individual religious thought in the religious climate of 17th century confessionalist Lutheran Sweden. This is a climate usually thought highly collective and repressing all deviant behavior or thought, some consequences of which were court trials against witches and blasphemers as well as sexual offenders. However, these trials actually reveal a great deal of religious toleration, too. The material shows clearly a fluctuation of concern between the common good and the righteousness of the whole community threatened by individual error on one hand, and the individual religious thought that is evident in the for e.g. the defense of many witches who claim they were doing God’s work when they healed cattle, praying when they cited charms and who considered themselves in general good Christians. Similarly various cases of blasphemy often sprang from an individual’s unfortunately voiced deliberations on matters of religion. What is interesting in this context, however, is they extent to which these individual, possibly deviant religious opinions were discussed in courts. The defendants were given time to explain their views, they were listened to, and surprisingly often they were tolerated. More than a half of those accused of witchcraft, magic and superstition were acquitted – their thoughts and conduct had been considered acceptable, although it had been deviant enough to cause concern. Some defendants were also found guilty of religiously unacceptable (and therefore criminal) practices, but as they had not caused major harm, they were merely sent home with an exhortation to behave better in the future. The persecution of witchcraft and superstition tolerated and even expected some religious individuality, even in things thought erroneous. However, blasphemy was usually treated more severely.
This study will focus on the Finnish side of 17th century Sweden, but it will take the full context of the Swedish Great power in Europe into account.

Comparing Utopias, Checking Realities: tolerance among Sephardic Jews and Catholics in the Portuguese context

In recent years, scholars devoted to the study of apocalyptic, messianic, and millenarian phenomena have concluded that such movements were disappearing from most European territories by the beginning of the 1500’. However, the study of Iberian literature shows that in the Iberian world and its colonies this was not the case. Between the end of the 15th and the end of the 17th century, such movements had reached their peak in Portugal, Spain and their Atlantic colonies.
It is our purpose to argue in this paper that Catholics and Jews who lived in Iberia and its colonies shared a common hope: the achievement of a divine kingdom of God. Obviously, this expectation took different nuances according to the writer’s religious background, social status, and geographical location. The geographical mobility of most of these writers makes it possible to argue that this tradition spread to the Iberian Diaspora abroad, taken either by Catholics working outside of Portugal and Spain, and by Sephardic Jews into their Diaspora communities in Northern Europe (especially in Amsterdam).
Isaac Avravanel, Sebastião Paiva, Samuel Usque, António Vieira, Antonio de Montezinos, David Rubeni, the Cardinal Cisneros are some of the names one comes across when studying the emergence of eschatological movements in Iberia. Although the work of most of these authors cannot be detached from political events as the Maritime Expansion, the Union of the Iberian Crowns (1580-1640) or the Portuguese Restoration (1640), other factors may have influenced the intellectual development of most of their writings. That was the case of their religious affiliation and their cultural backgrounds.
The common feature in the work produced by these authors is a very strong, and continuous suggestion for toleration, tolerance, cultural exchange, and syncretism between Catholics and Sephardic Jews, opening the Early Modern Iberian intellectual world, in the first instance, and the Early Modern European intellectual community, secondly, to notions of toleration and cultural integration never seen before.
Therefore, we will compare how two major authors, Ben Israel and António Viera, a Jew and a Catholic, developed a theory concerning the need for religious tolerance within the Portuguese world, allowing in that way to consider the existence of a universal religion that would lead towards the establishment on earth of the divine kingdom of God.

Shifting Geographies of Migration in Southeast Asia: Continuity and Change in Proletarian and Gendered Migrations

Transnational Asian labour migration to Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an essential dimension of European imperial expansion into Asia and coincided with the growth of the global trade in commodities. Asian mass migration also approximated European transatlantic migration during the same period. The Asian migration flows comprised mainly Chinese and Indian males who migrated predominantly as indentured migrants or “unfree” wage labour, and were considered as sojourners or temporary migrants. Few women migrated of their own accord and it was not until the India Office stipulated a small percentage in the labour flows that Indian women migrants became a regular feature in the Indian labour movements. Chinese women’s migration also grew in the 1930s when they went either as domestic workers or to work as panners in the tin industry. Crucially, the region’s demographic configuration had important implications for the location of colonial economic activity and determined migration processes, migrant workers’ destinations and gendered migration movements prior to the Second World War.
Since the 1970s disparities in economic growth and demographic divergence between the ‘more’ and ‘less’ developed Southeast Asian nations have created conditions of complementarity between these countries, resulting in the resumption of labour migration within the region. The new regional (and trnsnational) flows are premised on the guest worker program and are increasingly seen as one of the best ways to manage labour migration. The guest worker programs invite foreign nationals to work temporarily, in an industry – either high- or low-skilled – that is experiencing labour shortages. The migrants are offered short-term contracts that come with a range of restrictions. The most important change however has been the feminization of migration. The gendered migrations have also coincided with emerging gender-selective policies of labour-importing countries and the development of gender-specific employment niches. This in turn has resulted not only in the self-sustaining feature of this migratory stream, but also the appearance of particular female migratory linkages between groups of countries. In particular, care-giving demands are both being generated and met through migrant women’s employment, underscoring the complex causal relations that tie together migration, gendered labor and care-giving regimes.

Women Migrant Workers and Visibility in Malaysia:

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese and Indian migrant labour played a key role in the economic development of Southeast Asia The migrant workers worked in the mines and plantations to produce mineral and agricultural commodities for the international market. These workers, who were mainly men, endured harsh working conditions and were regarded as expendable commodities. Their poor working conditions were often reported in newspapers in China and India, and increasingly in local newspapers in the colonies. By and large migrant workers were invisible and had no voice. Migration to the region, which had virtually ceased by the1940s, resumed in the 1970s. The new migration flows are no longer between colonies but between independent nation states and regional flows between Southeast Asian countries dominate. Moreover, women now comprise a large percentage of the labour flows, and work in gender-specific roles, predominantly as domestic workers. They enjoy few labour protections and their situation has captured media attention both in the destination and source countries, and internationally.
Malaysia is the largest importer of Indonesian domestic workers and increased media reporting of abuse and denial of labour rights of these migrant domestic workers, coupled with regional campaigning on the isssue in the last two decades, has led Indonesian women to reject Malaysia as their preferred destination country. Intense negative reporting in the Indonesian press about the abuse has further contributed to deteriorating relations between the two countries. Malaysian media’s retaliation about the problems employers face with regard to migrant workers and the agents/intermediaries in the sending countries has aggravated this situation. Generally, migrant women workers have little visibility in the mainstream media. When there is any, the mainstream media in the host country focus on issues of their unreliability, dishonesty and other negative images while the mainstream media in the country of origin of the migrant workers focus on issues of employer abuse of employees. The migrant workers are thus not given a voice in the host country’s media. Most do not have access to Internet sources, and although some may have mobile phones to contact their families, a majority of them are not allowed to own mobile phones.
This paper examines how the media serves its agenda setting role by providing (or not providing) the information required to address societal problems and issues relating to migrant domestic workers in Malaysia. It reviews the media’s role in the earlier period in addressing migrant workers’ rights in Southeast Asia; and compares the roles of Malaysian mainstream media vis-a-vis the ethnic/community media in countries such as Thailand and Hong Kong where migrant workers have visibility and a voice.




Kiranjit Kaur, PhD
Associate Professor,
Faculty of Communication and Media Studies
Universiti Teknologi MARA
40450 Shah Alam, Selangor
MALAYSIA
Email: kiran126@salam.uitm.edu.my
Mobile: +60123813145

Chinese Migration in Global Context, 1850-1940

This paper provides an overview of the origins, destinations and timing of Chinese emigration from 1850-1940 in global and comparative perspective. It then focuses on trends in return and female migration, the features that are often said to distinguish Chinese from other migrations. These trends are compared between different flows of Chinese overseas migrants, with Chinese migration to Manchuria, and with non-Chinese migrations. The most interesting conclusions have implications for the methodology and assumptions that shape the study of global migrations: 1) Comparisons should be situated in historical time because the most interesting results are often the long-term trends of convergence or divergence, and time series provide different results than the comparison of average trends; 2) Cycles and patterns may converge across different migration flows while diverging across others; 3) The results of comparison change along with the scale of units being compared; and 4) Both extensive comparisons and an awareness of the global context are necessary to understand the patterns, causes and organization of mass migration.

The Empress Frederick and Female Education in the late Ninteenth Century: Germany, England, and Italy

The two most common approaches to Crown Princess Victoria/Empress Frederick of Germany have been to view her as either the great "might have been" for German liberalism or the overbearing mother of Wilhelm II. This paper will focus instead on her work in the area of educational reform for girls and young women. Beginning with her patronage of numerous institutions in Berlin, it will then examine her support for both the Maria Grey Training College and the Froebel Educational Institute in London and for the Istituto Froebeliano in Naples. In the process it will illuminate both the international networks of women reformers with whom she worked and the positive accomplishments of a much maligned monarch.

Women, Education and Intellectual Co-operation in the Inter-war Period

This paper examines the “entangled history” of “intellectual sociability and the transfer of ideas and practices”1 around women and international intellectual co-operation in the inter-war period. International intellectual co-operation aimed to foster “an international outlook” by promoting “collaboration between nations in all fields of intellectual effort in order to foster a spirit of international understanding as a means to the preservation of peace”.2 International intellectual co-operation was adopted by the League of Nations (SDN) after the failure of the SDN in 1921 to establish an International Committee on Education in the face of resistance from British delegates and representatives of new countries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, who considered national education to lie outside the competence of any official committee of the League.3 The paper argues that international intellectual co-operation provided a contested, shifting and gendered cultural space for women’s political activity in the inter-war period in both international and national arenas.

The paper uses the International Federation of University Women [IFUW] to explore this “entangled history” of “intellectual sociability and the transfer of ideas and practices” between organisations and individuals. These include the SDN and intellectual circles; the SDN and national committees of intellectual co-operation; intra-national transfer between national committees of intellectual co-operation; committees of intellectual co-operation formed by women’s international and national organisations and their inter-and intra-national transfer; and women embedded in this web of intellectual sociability and transfer, including those employed in the SDN. The paper draws on approaches from ego network analysis and group biography, and from studies of transnational advocacy and networks. It focuses on two aspects of international intellectual co-operation in which the IFUW was particularly active: first, shifting ideas around the “intellectual worker” and second, the notion of “moral disarmament”.

The paper concludes that in the changing European economic, social and political contexts in the run up to the Second World War, the cultural (and at times philanthropic) orientation of international intellectual co-operation enabled women to enter and shift political debate, albeit on less than equal terms.

1. See Christophe Verbruggen and Julie Carlier, “An entangled history of ideas and ideals. Feminism, social and educational reform in children’s libraries and children’s literature in Belgium before the First World War”, unpublished paper. I am grateful to the authors for sight of this paper prior to publication.
2. League of Nations, International Intellectual Co-operation 1933, Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1934, 3-5.
3. Eckhardt Fuchs, “The creation of new international networks in education: the League of Nations and educational organisations in the 1920s”, Paedagogica Historica, 43, no.2 (2007): 207.

Female education and the cultural transfer of pedagogical knowledge in the 18th century

In the course of the socio-structural transformations at the end of the 18th century, the rise and emancipation of the bourgeois class as well as the emergence of systematised pedagogical knowledge, attention in Germany also was focused on female education. Numerous pedagogical publications addressed the hitherto largely neglected question of educating the female sex. Though this discourse was strongly shaped by the national formation of Enlightenment thought, it nonetheless took place in the context of an intercultural exchange. The educational interchange of ideas is exemplified not only by the broad geographical reception of Rousseau’s conception on female education and its cultural different adaptations, but also by the numerous translations of publications on girls’ education whose role in the flow of ideas must not be underestimated. Thus, Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Väterlicher Rath für meine Tochter (Fatherly Advice for my Daughter, 1789) not only saw several editions and reprints in German, but was also translated into Dutch (1791), several times into French (1803, 1804, 1812, 1820), into Russian (1804), Polish (1805) and Danish (1804). And Wilhelmine Karoline von Wobeser’s book Elisa, oder das Weib wie es sein sollte (Elisa, or: Woman as she should be, 1795), which had gone through five editions and several reprints by 1800, was translated into French in 1798 and into English in 1799 (under the title Elisa or the pattern of women: a moral romance). This manner of knowledge transfer operated in both directions and played a formative role in the national pedagogical discourse as well. August Hermann Niemeyer’s frequently reedited work Grundsätze der Erziehung und des Unterrichts (1796ff.), regarded as one of the earliest attempts to systematise the state of pedagogial knowledge in Germany, listed among the “properly pedagogical works on female education” not only the traditional French writings by Fénelon (1687, German trsl. 1698), Mme de Lambert (1729, German trsl. 1729) und Mme Leprince de Beaumont 1764 (German trsl. 1764, 1768) as well as several German works such as F. H. C. Schwarz’ Grundriß einer Theorie der Mädchenerziehung (Outline of a Theory of Female Education) (1792), but also the German translation of John Burton’s Vorlesungen über weibliche Erziehung und Sitten (Lectures on Female Education and Manners, 2 vol.).

Burton’s Lectures were first published in Germany in 1795, translated by Christian Felix Weisse, a poet and author of children’s and youth books; a second, improved edition followed in 1798 and 1799. The two volumes were reprinted in Vienna 1799, too. However, the impact of Burton’s writings on female education on the contemporary pedagogical discourse was not limited to Britain and Germany. They contributed to the transfer of pedagogical concepts and values in other English-speaking countries as well, with several editions and reprints both in Ireland and the United States. In my contribution I will deal with the international circulation of pedagogical thoughts, taking the translation and reception of Burton’s Lectures in Germany as example. A particular emphasis will be placed on the manner in which educational thoughts emerging from a specific cultural context are adopted into a different discursive system, how they served to support certain concepts and values and how they differed from the specifically national characteristics of the discours.

Gendered Dimensions of Education Controversies: The Case of the Greek Debate of Marasliaka, 1925-1926

Education has been constituted more and more, during the 20th century, socially, culturally and politically as a favourite field of encounters and antagonisms between different groups and agencies, a domain of power relationships revealing dominant trends and alternative attempts for changes. History of Education as well as social or political history tends to explain the phenomenon by taking predominantly advantages of the analytical categories of the ‘nation’ or the ‘class’. Gender is neglected or disregarded all though it is in many cases a category through which controversies and debates are rendered legible.
The aim is to highlight that gender dimension of the educational debates in Greece in the first decades of 20th century as well as its omission by the dominant historiographical explanations. The case of a Greek controversy taking place in 1925-1926 in a progressive school preparing teachers for the elementary schools is going to be paradigmatically the occasion to proceed to the above statements. In the focal point of the debate, stood a Greek pedagogue Roza Imbrioti and her way to teach history. Imbrioti was simultaneously an active member of the feminist movement of the period asserting political rights for women.

Language learning versus vocational training: French, Arab and British voices speak about indigenous girls’ education in XIXth-century colonial Algeria

The first school for indigenous girls in Algeria emerged in 1845 and was followed in 1850 by the creation of three other “Arab-French” schools for girls. These schools focused on teaching girls the rudiments–French language and grammar, reading, arithmetic and Arabic. The afternoon hours were devoted to sewing as in French primary schools at the time. This early focus on teaching French in order to achieve the “fusion of the races” by forming women who would be intermediaries between the French colonizers and indigenous families foundered in the early 1860s. In the place of language learning, the colonial administration decided to support vocational training and transformed the existing schools into embroidery workshops. These workshops, however, did not develop and multiply until the end of the 19th century when colonial administrators once more sought to include women in their “civilizing” efforts. The new legislation paid careful attention to the development of vocational skills, rather than learning French, revealing how policy had changed since mid-century.
This paper focuses in particular on the first school and then workshop created by Eugénie Luce whose example decisively influenced later developments. The workshop continued to exist until 1906 under the responsibility of Luce’s granddaughter, Henriette Benaben. The two women’s friendship with British women tourists had an impact on the way they promoted their activities and played a role in the shift toward teaching vocational skills. An analysis of the debates and discussion surrounding the nature of the Luce-Benaben school and workshop provide a way to question how cosmopolitan encounters and imperial examples shaped educational experiments in Algeria. By including the voices of French colonial administrators, Arab notables, British women visitors and, of course, Mme Luce herself, the paper argues for the importance of considering trans-imperial encounters, as well as the weight of individual actors, in the interpretation of shifting colonial educational policy.

Transnational connections in early twentieth century women teachers’ work

This paper focuses on Lillian de Lissa, foundation Principal of Gipsy Hill Training College in London, United Kingdom, and her graduates ‘who carried Gipsy Hill to the ends of the earth’. The first section highlights ways in which de Lissa, an Australian by birth, drew on and fostered transnational networks of people and discourses of progressive education. She was especially proud that a handful of students from countries such as China, Turkey and Canada studies at Gipsy Hill. Likewise, graduates who left British shores, either temporarily or permanently were featured in the College magazine, the Gipsy Trail. Some emigrated as teachers and missionaries, and others accompanied their husbands to countries such as Canada, the United States, New Zealand and South Africa. The second section of the paper examines reports from various British graduates for the ways in which they represented their lives and work overseas to readers of the Gipsy Trail. Together, de Lissa and these graduates constructed Gipsy Hill as a progressive educational institution whose influence transcended national boundaries. At the same time, however, they upheld a range of social divisions in their portrayals of people and places ‘in the uttermost parts of the earth’.

L'échange dans les campagnes au XVIe siècle: dette et société en Terre Ferme vénitienne (Vicence)

L'intervention consiste à prêter l'attention sur les échanges qui définissent les relations interpersonnelles en Terre Ferme vénitienne lors de la première modernité. Mis en lumière par les actes notariés enregistrés dans une vallée du nord-ouest de la province de Vicence au XVIe siècle, le lien social autorise une lecture renouvelée des rapports interindividuels, sur la base du contrat de nature économique, à les envisager sous l'angle anthropologique, conjuguant à la fois l'histoire sociale et politique, l'individu et l'émotion, la norme et la pratique de la justice civile.

Aspects of credit markets in Finland

n.a.

Without of sight? - Kinship, credit, risk and geographical distance in the 19th century Sweden

The aim of this paper is to outline a qualitative perspective in studying the importance of credit strategies in the rural area of Sweden, forming a base for successful entrepreneurship. The conditions that form the discussion is – according to geographic location, social relation and social position - why different creditors were more or less successful as "bankers", why they gave credit to different households, why the sustainability among credit relations were different, why some creditors forced some households to stake, but not others, the possibilities for negotiating credit agreements, and if the behaviour among creditors changed over time.

The ‘Parish Bankers’. Credit Relations and Early Banking: Evidence from Sweden during the 18th and 19th Centuries

Internationally there is a growing interest in exploring credit market structures before the modern industrial period, but research is often obstructed by the lack of adequate quantitative sources. In the Swedish case probate inventories of a homogeneous standard, at the level of the Swedish population statistical data and national registration, give greater opportunities for research than in many other countries.
The paper – that will set out from my doctoral dissertation at the Department of Ethnology, Stockholm University – will include not only a focused summary of this, but also make an attempt to make this field of investigation a subject to further examination, following the traces of this history backwards in time to the late 1700´s.
This new analysis will be established from the same kind of empirical data, supplemented with parish records, dealing with the same local community. It will achieve its purpose by deepening the analysis of interpersonal relations, taking also into consideration the cultural-theoretical implications of the developed interest in transaction costs, as well as possibly game theory.
Theories on human behaviour and transaction costs contribute to our present understanding of why new institutions, such as banks, were established. Private promissory notes had long been circulated as local instruments of credit, and to a much greater degree than the new banknotes. While the time period in question certainly favoured the development of banks, institutional economic theory doesn’t really highlight the cultural conditions relevant to their creation. People are cultural creatures. This narrative focuses on the importance of that – from an economic perspective.
Conditions for the institutionalisation of the credit market and its significance for economic growth and structural social change are investigated through a local historical study. Interpersonal relations are in focus – the social activity field expressed through credit transactions – both before and after the establishment of the local savings bank. In this particular case, the epistemological starting point and analytic method is the new cultural history.
The study has been facilitated by a technique that makes use of population statistical data and probate inventories where the economic circumstances of deceased persons are compared to those of a corresponding living population group. In short, the latter’s credits are estimated and compared with the local savings bank’s actual lending activities, and of which the discrepancy is not more than 10 percent.
The result shows that there were specific people in the local community who had the knowledge and ability to change the credit market in a very short time – within a generation. This happened during an intensive period for the country’s financial markets, where all the credit segments expanded at the same time.
This transformation was not, however, prompted by these “parish bankers”. In the economic web that had previously connected households to each other, and that consisted of chains of situations of a ritual character, the parish bankers had dominated. The formation of the savings bank meant the appearance of new actors: bank officials with strictly formalised routines. A kind of power shift occurred that contributed to a definite change – a discontinuity – in the history of the local credit market.
Are there possibly any more discontinuities transforming the credit market before the late 1800´s? One important question to ask is therefore how this set of locally active parish bankers emerged, by which methods they were discerned in the local community, and when that happened. And how may their emergence be viewed; what kind of difference did they make, from a wider societal perspective?

References
Anders Perlinge 2005. Sockenbankirerna. Kreditrelationer och tidig bankverksamhet. Vånga socken i Skåne 1840-1900. Nordiska museets handlingar 130. Nordiska museets förlag: Stockholm. ISBN 91-7108-500-9. 312 pp. Ill. With a 20 pp. English Summary. http://www.diva-portal.org/su/abstract.xsql?dbid=612 [Diss. Stockholm.]

National History in Global Perspective: Theoretical Considerations

The growing prominence of world history and the lived experience of contemporary globalization have combined to prompt fresh considerations of national histories and particularly of their relationships to larger patterns of global history. The most successful efforts to globalize national histories have enriched the understanding of national historical experiences by locating them in comparative and cross-cultural contexts that both extend and deepen received explanations of national histories. Nevertheless, there remain some tensions between the kind of global historical analysis favored by world historians and the approaches taken by those seeking to globalize national histories. World historians by no means deny the significance of national communities, but they do not recognize national communities as permanent or natural forms of social organization, and they certainly do not regard national communities or national states as meriting special privileges as focuses of historical analysis. In the very nature of their project, however, scholars working to globalize national histories run some risk of naturalizing the nation and (re)inscribing it as the default focus of historical attention. What status would globalized national histories afford to nations within the nation, such as Lakota and Native Hawaiians within the United States of America, Tibetans and Uighurs within the People’s Republic of China, or Kurds within the Republic of Turkey, the Republic of Iraq, and the Islamic Republic of Iran? Shall we envision globalized national histories for all 192 member states of the United Nations, many of which are also home to colonized or demographically overwhelmed minorities? While acknowledging that efforts to globalize national histories have enhanced the study of national historical experiences, this paper suggests that this scholarly project has not yet come fully to grips with the problem of the

National History in a Global Perspective: The American Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and the American Myth

The history of the United States as found in textbooks appropriate for middle level and secondary students from the nineteenth century through the early 1970’s provided students with a story of the nation that highlighted the exceptional nature of the Republic accompanied by a triumphal narrative of progress. Stories of slavery, civil war, economic hardship, and civil rights were included largely to demonstrate how American institutions and people were able to overcome such obstacles to further strengthen the State. The critique of this type of grand narrative has a long history and includes notables such as Charles and Mary Beard, William Appleman Williams, and more recently Eric Foner who took exception to the conceptual shallowness of these narratives that left out controversy and largely omitted the global context in which the history of America unfolded. In spite of, and because of their critique the controversy over national, or what is also called traditional history continues, intensified by the rapid changes that took place after World War II. The story of the American Civil Rights movement and its connection to the War in Vietnam encapsulates this controversy. To this day, textbooks continue to emphasize the traditional civil rights era and the politics engagement at the expense of a meaningful attempt to examine the more controversial black power years.

The ascendancy of the United States as a superpower in the context of the Cold War following World War II ensured that global contingences would have to be factored into the American narrative. For example, America’s record on civil rights already utilized against the United States by the Axis powers was highlighted by the Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China and their suzerains in a bid to make American assertions about the exceptional nature of their State problematic. The connections between the inequities found in the Third World were not lost on those within the Civil Rights movement in the United States who increasingly challenged American segregation and racism based on international law and precedent. The continued resistance to civil rights following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 led to a growing radicalization within parts of the civil rights movement. The intensification of American efforts in Vietnam 1962 – 1965 coincided with the seemingly unending violent resistance to the demand for civil rights. This led civil rights leaders such as John Lewis and Malcolm X to draw parallels to the violence being unleashed against people of color in the United States, Africa, and most notably Vietnam. Connecting the liberation struggle of the Vietnamese to the cause of civil rights was political fire. In many ways the Cold War liberal consensus found in mainstream American politics could tolerate the critique of those demanding equality before the law and dissent against foreign policy. It was another matter entirely however to align in a critique of the United States that was joined by America’s nemeses in the global system. Vietnam and the radicalized struggle for Civil Rights made the connection between the United States and the world explicit at a global level. Not surprisingly, setting this part of American national history in a global context has met extraordinary resistance.

This paper briefly revues the well established scholarship regarding Cold War Civil Rights and then continues, establishing linkages between Civil Rights and Vietnam as found in intellectual critique, the street, and at a popular level in sports. The division spawned by this critique of American foreign policy that seemingly linked parts of the civil rights movements with America’s nemeses further deepened divisions within the American polity that are felt today, reflected in both political discourse and importantly in the curriculum and standards found in American public schools. How do arguments pitting traditional vs. revisionist history resonate in schools? Are their lessons to be learned from contested national histories found outside the United States? This paper concludes with a review of current scholarship set against what is being taught in American public schools utilizing curriculum and standards found in Rhode Island, New York, and Virginia.

World War II: national or global history?

This paper focuses on the representation of World War II in popular culture (1945-2008) in Europe, North America and Asia. How do popular images of World War II, as (re)presented in internationally distributed (and translated) novels, movies and comic books, relate to the national narratives of this global conflict, which have been dominant in the institutionalized historical culture? An analysis of the main developments and influences in the production and reception of such representations in the globalizing postwar world will be presented. This will not only shed light on the national and international frameworks of history writing, but also on the worldwide transformation of popular historical culture in general and the collective memory of WWII in particular.

The beginnings and development of world-telecommunication in 19th century - Transnational qualities of national projects.

The conception and development of telegraph lines and telegraph networks goes back to a 200 years history. The study deals with aspects of globalisation of telecommunication in 19th cen-tury, focussing the transnational quality of national telecommunication projects.
The 19th century encloses the development from early telegraph experiments, the optical tele-graphs (semaphores) since late 18th century, to the invention and world wide diffusion of the Morse technique since the middle of the 19th century, and completed by intercontinental un-dersea wires since the middle of the 1860th. Telecommunication became an important tool of world economy and politics before the First World War.
Transnational qualities of national projects will be demonstrated with examples from three stages of development:
1. The period of early telecommunication (ca. 1800-1850) will be analysed from a global per-spective to point out unknown qualities of early data networks. The technical and national restricted telegraph facilities found already use for the support of international and even inter-continental transaction. Transnational qualities are visible in telegraph plans, codification, and practical use.
2. The integration of electric-magnetic telegraphy in Europe (ca. 1850-1865) was a short and successful process. But it is possible to point out that plans with national or bilateral character caused the essential effects on international and intercontinental integration. The integration in technology, administration and finance was realised in about 15 years.
3. Intercontinental telecommunication became possible with undersea cable connections (ca. 1865-1914) in hand of private national companies (North Atlantic area). Sensitive and com-plex systems of strategic cooperation and aggressive competition among the companies guar-anteed permanent telegram intercourse on a very high standard.

à la recherche d'un primitivisme fédérateur, le peintre Atlan rencontre le groupe Cobra

Venu de Constantine, se réclamant de ses racines judéo-berbères et de son africanité, le peintre Atlan connaît à Paris après 1945 un succès immédiat. Sa peinture sort des canons européens et affirme sa singularité qui le rapproche des peintres novateurs en Europe du groupe Cobra (Copenhague-Bruxelles-Amsterdam) qui prône la recherche d'un primitivisme fédérateur pour renouveler l'expression artistique.

Le particularisme togolais, expression d’une hybridité multidimensionnelle ?

Paper title:
La situation politique au Togo en fait un cas atypique dans la sous-région ouest africaine. Sur l’échiquier politique, les facteurs de différenciation sociale tirent leur fondement des considérations culturelles, qui elles-mêmes sont tout aussi diversifiées que les intérêts socioéconomiques. Sans remonter jusqu’à la mise en place lointaine du peuplement, il est loisible de détecter que, dès le XVIe siècle, période des premiers contacts avec l’Occident, une variété d’influence socioculturelle dont les impacts sont restés pérennes et continuent de marquer la personnalité des Togolais.
Au nombre de ces valeurs, il y a à noter, dès l’ère de la traite négrière, avec les premiers contacts avec les négriers sur la côte un début de métissage précoce qui va se poursuivre avec le retour des Afro-Brésiliens, anciens esclaves revenus sur les côtes africaines à partir du milieu du XIXe siècle. Les influence participant à l’hybridation culturelle se retrouve, en dehors du métissage physique, dans les emprunts linguistiques, les habitudes alimentaires, dans l’architecture, mais également dans les pratiques religieuses et plus généralement dans la pensée et la conception du monde. A tous cela sont venus se surajoutés l’influences d’une triple colonisations : allemande, anglaise, puis française, qui ont laissé des traces très visibles surtout dans les centres urbains. A ces influences très prégnantes dans la zone côte, se sont mêlées celle d’une culture soudanaise, parfois islamique, venues du nord de l’Afrique, dues au commerce interafricains en direction est-ouest, portées par les diaspora haoussas, soninké, etc. D’autres influences sont simplement le fait de l’interférence du voisinage des aires culturelles notamment akan à l’ouest, yoruba, à l’est, gourma au nord.
De ces influences multiformes, il résulte un niveau d’hybridité culturelle qui confère des capacités d’adaptation relativement rapides des Togolais faces aux différentes influences culturelles.

Le cinéma,un véhicule culturel en contexte colonial

Dans les colonies, puis dans les pays indépendants, le cinéma s'offre à la fois comme un vivier d'images dans lequel puiser et comme un scène où se rejouent les relations interpersonnelles. Les images mouvantes permettent d'instaurer un dialogue avec le monde extérieur, d'échanger avec un au-delà inconnu des éléments symboliques qui peuvent être recyclés localement. Circulent des bribes de western, de films hindous, de comédies égyptiennes… et plus récemment de productions de Bollywood qui véhiculent chants, attitudes, dialogues dont l'impact reste à mesurer.

Saint Louis du Senegal: Hybrid Identities and French Colonialism in a Nineteenth Century West African Town

Saint Louis du Senegal emerged in the nineteenth century as a thriving port town located at the intersection of West Africa and the francophone Atlantic World. Founded in 1659 as a fortified trade post for French merchants seeking human and material resources to satisfy a growing demand for slave labor in the Americas and the needs of an expanding capitalist and industrial economy in Western Europe, the island town served a key role in facilitating trade relations between Senegal and France. The viability of the town, however, depended on the autonomy of the local population. The Saint Louis community served as middlemen and translators, builders and food preparers, river boat crews and the wives of European strangers. They came from the Senegalese countryside and various European countries. Marriages between African women and European men produced a distinct “mulatto” class. These individuals provided the trust, cooperation and security needed to carry out across linguistic, national, international and cultural borders. In creating this dynamic trade society, the inhabitants of Saint Louis forged new identities that were uniquely rooted to their place and time. Nineteenth century writings by European travelers and officials reveal inherent biases based on their perception of Africa that obscures the world that local inhabitants created. Intense scholarly focus on Africa’s role in the Atlantic economy has also created lacunae in our knowledge of the social and cultural history of West African port towns.
The paper that I propose for the 21st Congrés International des Sciences Historiques (22-28 Aug 2010), examines the construction of identity in Saint Louis, Senegal during the nineteenth century. I pay particular attention to how notions of Saint Louis identity shifted in response to the expansion of formal French colonialism. Between 1816 and 1895, Saint Louis transformed from a remote outpost for mercantile trade to the capital of the Senegal colony and the temporary capital of French West Africa. I argue that Saint Louis identity neither corresponded directly to African societies of the interior or to that of metropolitan France. Saint Louis identity also did not conform neatly to notions of syncretism or creolization. Rather, this town gave rise to a cosmopolitan society of different national, ethnic, linguistic and religious identities increasingly shaped by their relationship to the states and societies of the Senegal River valley, trans-Atlantic commerce and a discourse around universal citizenship and republican democracy taking shape in nineteenth century France and the French West Indies. The changing environment of French colonialism transformed Saint Louis identity into one united by Republican citizenship but differentiated in new ways by race, class and religion.
My paper offers a re-reading of accounts by European travelers and officials combined with study of archival records, publications such as the Moniteur du Senegal, private papers and portrait photographs. Based on extensive field work, this paper sheds light on an overlooked aspect of African history and casts new light on modern Atlantic and French colonial history by suggesting that these locations were not solely formed by elite European actors but by local inhabitants of the colonies and remote outposts.

Hybridité musicale: Réponse ou défi à la colonisation en Afrique?

Colonialism posed the challenge of coexistence amid almost insurmountable differences. Some French looked to music for help. Seemingly neutral because empowering a notion of race as an imaginative projection beyond the known and the knowable and yet a construct with a purpose, music was expected to infuse energy into the colonial process. In Algeria, those seeking a rationale for French imperialism in the region saw in the Phrygian (Greek) musical mode used by the Kabyles an argument that these people were distantly related to Europeans and thus particularly apt for assimilation. European settlers, hoping that the area could give birth to a new “Mediterranean race” formed of the intermingling of Europeans and locals willing to embrace France, looked to music to provide a sense of the culture that they shared and a means of community-building. Yet, inevitably, the performance of opera, orchestral, and chamber music contributed to their distinction from the colonized. Music was also expected to help address the problem of assimilation among the indigenous people: through songs taught in schools and performance on Western instruments, the colonized would take the moeurs and values of the colonizer literally into their bodies. Performance on Western-style military drums and violins, such as in parades on July 14 in Madagascar and elsewhere, could be understood as suggesting latent respect for French culture.

This paper will examine musical hybridities in Africa created by both colonizers and the colonized, lending new meaning to Homi Bhabha’s concept of “unresolved and unresolvable hybridity.” For example, the “indecision” and “uncertainty” resulting from the juxtaposition and superimposition of timbres, themes, and temperaments associated with Western and Arabic music in Saint-Saëns’s “Rapsodie mauresque,” together with the “compromise” westerners accepted because of the “rational succession of the chords,” is a kind of musical metaphor for the benefits and the costs inherent in colonialism. Elements borrowed from Arab music may infuse French music with new kinds of sounds and musical effects. But by ignoring the effects of displacement and disjunction on the borrowed objects and their meaning, exotic melodies lose their most distinctive characteristics when combined with Western musical procedures and therefore some of their capacity to signify.

Although marches were used by European militaries to symbolize the social order they were imposing, as in Saint-Saëns "Marche militaire française" that follows the "Rapsodie" in his Suite algérienne, in the hands of the colonized their meaning changed in significant ways. One such example, as discussed by T.O. Ranger, is a form of East African music called ngoma, march-like music and dance based on the idea of military drill. This music was an attempt not only to absorb and master what was considered powerful in the life of their conquerors, a way of becoming "modern," they were also a form of resistance, a way to reject the colonizers' emasculinization, recast the expression of their own communal values, find new outlets for artistic innovation, and maintain their own pride and prestige among their peers.

Looking at history through the lens of music, musical instruments, and performances, French understanding of themselves and their colonialism comes across as something less settled than we might have imagined, their tensions mediated by representations whose interpretive outcomes were far from stable.

Colonial Encounters: A Danish Planter in German east Africa, 1888-1906

In 1888, Christian Lautherborn set out to establish a cotton plantation for the German East Africa Company in Pangani, Tanzania. Little did he know that he was heading out at a dramatic moment, and would soon (literally) be caught in the crossfire of a war between the coastal Africans, the Zanzibar government and German imperialist interventions. Lautherborn stayed through the war, during which he saw military action and rebuilt much of war torn Bagamoyo, and stayed on to set up and manage plantations for the Germans until his death in 1906. While in Tanzania, Lauterborn wrote a series of letters , some published in a local Danish newspaper and some written privately to family. He was soon fluent in Swahili, and had unusual access to African, Arab and Indian workers, business people and townsmen. Lautherborn spent eighteen years in Tanzania, with regular visits home. The letters reveal his acceptance of colonial discourses, while at the same time revealing changes to his thinking and writing over time. The paper will use the letters as a means for analysing the relationship between colonial discourse and assumptions and the impact of living in a complex, colonial world which often encouraged hybrid, multiple identities over time.

A substantial number of Chr. Lautherborn’s letters home were printed in a newspaper, Vendsyssel Tidende, as “Letters from our correspondent in German East Africa”. The paper will take its point of departure in an analysis of differences between what may be termed the “public” and the “private” discourses in the letters. Parts of the letters may be read as a contribution to the formation of a colonial discourse in Denmark/Europe. Here one finds a number of familiar stereotypes about Africa and Africans. On the other hand, some of the letters, often eyewitness accounts of incidents that diverge from the common colonial discourse, suggest very different interpretations. These divergences occur more often as time passes and the author becomes more acclimatized to the complex ways colonial societies work on the ground. The letters may thus be read both as a way of negotiating African experiences and European expectations and also as evidence of cultural adaptation and hybridity.

The paper will therefore comment on discrepancies between common stereotypes present in the letters about the African’s childishness, laziness etc. and Chr. Lautherborn’s actions as a plantation manager and member of colonial society. A careful reading of Chr. Lautherborn’s letters also reveals a number of contradictions between what he says and what he does. The contradictions between discourse and actions raise some important questions about established notions about the power of discourse, and suggest a need to adopt a more nuanced view on the relationship between discourse and agency, where the concept of enactment/performativity (Judith Butler) may prove useful.
It is in our view paramount that we leave room for conflicts, nuances and contradictions when we discuss colonial history besides the obvious line of conflict between colonisers and colonised and try to look behind the stereotypes, which abound in colonial discourse, and look for subtexts, contradictions and nuances in the colonial discourse.

Beyond the abuses of history

Beyond the abuses of history
More than 300 scholars of classical Greece recently signed a petition to President Obama asking him to “erase a historical fault” in Southeastern Europe. They urged him to intervene and change the constitutional name of Macedonia on behalf of “historical truth”. Archeologists, philologists and historians, most are people of high reputation and belong to prestigious institutions, in the United States and Europe. The idea expressed in my paper is that political intervention in historical research has also a reverse aspect: the intervention of historians (and academia in general) in politics. As a consequence, and from a broader perspective, there is no single dimension to this confrontation. Of course, the long history of mutual confrontation and interconnectedness between history and politics can hardly be considered a novelty. But is it something new in the last two decades? There are several discourses on how to approach and how to understand these changes, and the paper will explore them, searching for a new understanding beyond the uses and abuses of history and beyond the confrontation between history and memory. The scope of this paper is not to promote a relativist approach, but just to outline the landscape in which critical historians are working.

L'histoire, la mémoire et la loi en France (1990-2008)

La France s'est fait une spécialité pendant quinze ans de l'ingérence du pouvoir politique dans la recherche et l'enseignement de l'histoire : loi Gayssot (1990), destinée à lutter contre le négationnisme ; loi dite Taubira (2001), qui fait de l'esclavage et de la traite atlantique des Noirs un "crime contre l'humanité" ; loi "par laquelle la République française reconnaît le génocide arménien" (2001) ; loi en faveur des "Français rapatriés d'Afriuque du Nord", qui "reconnaît le rôle positif de la présence française outre-mer" (2005). Ce modèle français dit des "lois mémorielles" a été exporté à l'échelle européenne par une décision-cadre, adoptée en novembre 2008, qui aggrave et élargit à l'ensemble de l'Union les dispositions prévues par la loi Gayssot.
Inquiets des risques d'une moralisation rétrospective du passé et d'une censure intellectuelle généralisée, l'association Liberté pour l'Histoire s'est créée en 2005 sous la présidence de René Rémond. Elle obtenu en particulier deux résultats importants : une commision du Parlement français a conclu à la nécessité de renoncer à poursuivre cette dérive législative ; à l'échelle européenne, un mécanisme dit de l'option permet aux Etats de ne reconnaître le crime contre l'humanité que dans les cas où il a été ainsi qualifié par un tribunal pénal international.
Par-delà les risques que font courir aux historiens de telles dispositions criminalisantes, se pose le probème de ce qu'elles signifient en termes philosophiques et historiques dans la cité contemporaine.

'Expert in Truth'. When the Historian Collaborates with the Judge

With the end of World War II has become more and more common to utilize historical studies for the political condemnation of totalitarian regimes, above all the Nazism; nevertheless, the utilization of historians in trials is more recent. At Nuremberg historians did not play any important role; for the Eichmann trial had to be, those who performed the investigation consulted the then available historical studies, and used the archive and the staff of Yad Vashem; however, the only historian who was called (from the Prosecutor) to bear witness was Salo Baron, teaching Jewish History at Columbia University, who witnessed about the Jewish life in Europe before the Shoah.
Just after a few years (1963-1965), in the Frankfurt trial against 22 officers of Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, some historians of the München Institut für Zeitgeschichte (among them Martin Broszat) witnessed as advisers of the Prosecutor. It is only at the end of the 80s that a new historian asserts himself, “who choose to play the role of ‘expert’ in public debates about the past” (Carole Fink quoted by Harriet Jones, Kjell Östberg and Nico Randeraad, Introduction to Contemporary history opn trial. Europe since 1989 and the Role of the Expert Historian, Manchester and new York, Manchester University Press, 2007, p. 1)
Since its foundation as a branch of learning, history – as well the historians - has been utilized to fix the borders of the identity, the belonging to a local or national community, to support “that set of customs and values that constitutes for a people the sense of their identity and their fortunes” (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Riflessioni sull’oblio, in Aa.Vv., Usi dell’oblio, Parma, Pratiche editrici, 1990 [1988], p. 19). However in the utilization of the historian as an expert in a court there is something more than in the past public uses (and abuses) of history: that is, to be convinced that it is possibile to operate according to thuth and justice.
Coming to Italy, I want to observe that in the previous decades I know only one case of a historian utilized as expert in a court: in 1976, in the trial at the Court of Assizes in Trieste against the officers operating in the Risiera of S. Sabba camp, prof. Enzo Collotti witnessed as an adviser of the Court. The new season opened with the trials against Eric Priebke, for the Ardeatine Caves massacre, at the Military Court in Rome (1996-1998), in which prof. Gerhard Schreiber, from the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, operated as a prosecutor’s expert. Since then, about 15 judicial enquiries arrived at the hearing phase, and often historians were called, exclusively by the public Prosecutors, to operate as experts: as a matter of fact, the studies on massacres of italian civilians by German army have had a remarkable development in the last 15 years, and sometimes the historians, also out of a courtroom, has been committed the responsibility of a final verdict on the actual responsibility of facts which divided the communities which suffered because of them: if the material German executioners often have been put into the shade, the memories divided on the partisans’ role, accused by a part of the survivors and relatives of victims to have caused with useless actions the German reprisal and to have not defended the people.
One thing, however, is that the judges read books of history, able to give them the necessary information and to orientate them while performing the role of prosecutor or judge. Completely different it is a situation in which the historical truth has an official character, through the writing of an historian, which has the character of a sworn expert report. To this problem I will devote my paper.

Humanising history by mourning and forgiving – how to deal with traumatic experiences of the past

The paper is divided into three parts. The first one reflects the specific nature of traumatic historical experiences. The Holocaust will be used as a paradigm, and fundamental issues of generating and destroying historical sense will be addressed. The second part gives an overview over the usual treatment of the Holocaust and similar events in present day historical culture with special respect to identity politics. Its main thesis is that in this treatment historical trauma functions as means for identity formation which lead to inadequate ways of historical thinking. The third part discusses the problem of moralizing in history and proposes new modes of historical sense-generation in historical culture: mourning and forgiving. They will be described as factors of humanizing historical thinking in its public function.

The Regional, the National, and the Global: Changing Perceptions of Space in Twentieth -Century Indian Educational Discourse

This paper analyses educational disccourse and practice in twentieth-century India, paying particular attention to notions of of region, nation, and the international, and with a concurrent focus on the gendering of such spaces. We shall examine the (very different) contours of the the village community-based school and a renovated, internationalist ashram-like space found in the educational practice and thought of M.K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, both of whom formulated influential models of education. We shall consider also notions of educational space found in the writing and practice of women educationists such as Rokeya Hossain and Sarala Ray. My principal focus will be 1920-1945, though there will be a concluding section on post-Independence India.

Images of Space in the History of Latin

This paper seeks to discuss the images of space that have been constructed througout the history of education in Latin America. In the historiography of education, the notion of “space” has generally been narrowed to a territorial definition. But space is a much broader and ambiguous category, that includes geopolitical visions and imagined landscapes as much as material ones (following Arjun Appadurai’s work). It is thus important to scrutinize its visual representations, and understand the visual discourses that organize them.
The paper wants to analyse this imagined and material quality of space, through a study of two set of series: images in primary school textbooks, and displays exhibited in International Expositions, from Argentina and Brazil. It will discuss whether “space” was tied to national representations, regional constructions, and/or urban/rural distinctions. It will also trace how “school space” was presented or conceptualized through visual images. The comparison between Argentina and Brazil will help illuminate to what extent similar trends were active and present in the region.

The Invention of 'Japanese': The Change of Space Perception from Local Community to "Great Asia"

In the pre-modern period, Japan took the policy of seclusion for over two hundred years. During the term, paradoxically, the concept of ‘Japanese’ had not yet been established. The space perception of Japanese people was limited to their living local area, or to ‘Han’ (the Clan governed by feudal lord ‘Daimyo’) at the largest. In the viewpoint of culture Chinese classics and Confucianism had predominant power.
After Meiji Era, which had started in 1868, the Japanese government converted their policy to the extreme Westernization. Under this policy the concept of ‘Japanese’ was invented. In order to associate with Western Europe, Japan dissociate itself from East Asian cultural bloc. In this process, what is called ‘Japanese’ was established. For example, ‘Japanese Painting’ was invented in this time both against the ‘Western Painting’ and independent of Chinese Painting. The unique process of development of Japan was enabled by this association and dissociation.
This paper will discuss about the following three points.
(1) The reason why Japan could realize this abrupt turn in space perception.
(2) How did educational discourse influence the invention of ‘Japanese’?
(3) This invention leaded up to the concept of ‘Great Asia’ which was used for defend the invasion of Asian countries.

The Transnational Space in Modern History

The spatial turn has introduced into historiographical debates a lot of new categories among them also the term transnational space borrowed from research in the field of contemporary migration where people moving forth and back seem to create a space overlapping with traditional spaces of cultural belonging and political order. Obviously this is not a totally new phenomenon, but it might not to be enough to add historical evidence to the often dominating “discourse of newness”. Instead, we think it necessary to develop an approach that historicises the whole complex of spatialisations of social interaction. The paper proposes a couple of categories such as regimes of territorialisation, transnational spaces, critical junctures of globalisation and portals of globalisation and will explain how they can relate to each other and how concrete research can be organised around such categories.

The Space Called Europe: Historical Configurations

The paper aims at looking at configuration of Europe in processes of self-definition against the others. Starting with the 16th century where Europe fought to put itself on the map of the (now by Europeans) discovered new world by elaborating the specificities differentiating them from other people, we follow the lines of that process until the 20th century where Europe had to legitimate its position as imperial centre in a globalising world. From the debate on the question if Indios are human beings to the discussion of Orientalism and Africanism there is a rich material to be explored at the search for an answer to the long lasting problem of how to draw the borderlines of Europe.

The Slavic World and the Yugoslav Child: Constructing a Transnational Slavic Educational Space, 1918-1938

This paper examines the significance that Slavic affinities and allegiances had for Yugoslav education in the inter-war period. My emphasis is not on the "Slavic" as a fixed ethnic descriptor (or an a-priori category of analysis), but rather on the ways that notions of "Slavicness" were deployed within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia – both with regard to modeling progressive, desired futures and to envisioning the proper education of children as future citizens. Borrowing Arjun Appadurai's terms, I argue that the "Slavic" can be seen as a "context-generating", "world-generating optic" through which certain populations could imagine themselves as areas and as people(s) linked to others across place and time. In the period under examination, Russia rarely appeared as the principal Slavic reference society, and Yugoslavs instead emphasized their coevalness with Slavic countries such as Czechoslovakia and, to a lesser extent, Poland. Teacher study tours, academic exchanges, and the circulation and translation of pedagogic material all hastened the construction of a Slavic world that became a key touchstone for Yugoslav projections of modernity (in the sphere of education, in particular). This paper focuses on Yugoslav-Czechoslovak circuits of interaction in the inter-war period and argues that they can be seen as a constructing transnational social space that played a key role both in the circulation of educational reforms and in negotiating the ideal dispositions and behaviors of "modern", "Slavic" individuals.

Japan in the Global Gender Order: Recent Patterns of Labour Migration

Since the latter decades of the twentieth century, Japan has gained prominence as a receiving country for labour migration, due to its economic dominance in the region. The patterns of labour migration have undergone several changes according to the gender and nationality of migrants and the occupations engaged in on migration to Japan. These changing patterns depend on demand for particular forms of work within Japan, border control policies in Japan, and conditions in sending countries. In this paper I will consider changing patterns of labour migration to Japan as a way of consideration the place of Japan in what Raewyn Connell refers to as the 'global gender order'. In other words, the gendered patterns of labour migration can only be understood by considering the interaction of local gender orders in sending and receiving countries and situating these patterns in the context of a global gender order.

From Cantonese Domestic Servants to Indonesian Maids: A Comparative Study in the Context of Malaysia, 1930s-1990s

Described as domestic servants par excellence, the Cantonese domestic amah-chieh literally “ruled” most upper class households in Malaya from the late 1930s to the early 1970s. Attired in their signature white tunic tops and loose black pants and neatly coiffure hair in back buns, these domestic servants were adept at all household tasks, from shopping for groceries and other necessities to cooking, laundry, ironing and cleaning as well as serving as nursemaid/nannies to infants and young children. They also served as caregivers to the aged and infirm. Most of them were regarded as part of the family and some were even accepted as honorary family “members”. This generation of domestic servants died off by the 1970s and early 1980s. By then as Malaysia gradually became more affluent, female domestic workers were recruited from neighboring Indonesia and the Philippines to take their place. Employment of domestic workers became an acceptable lifestyle choice popular among urban, upper middle class households where the mistress of the house often had a career or ran a business. Owing to linguistic convenience and cost, Indonesian maids are preferred by most Malaysian households. Comparing and contrasting the Cantonese domestic servant and the Indonesian maid/domestic worker forms the thrust of this study that focuses on these themes: genesis of migration, work ethics, employer-employee relations, support group and “safety-net” of migrant workers, and government legislation. This comparative study also evaluates the impact of imported domestic help from without on the domestic Malayan/Malaysian household.

Indonesian Domestic Workers Overseas: Their Position and Protection in the Global Labour Market

Indonesian labor migration to other countries began during the Dutch colonial period, when the Dutch colonial government sent Javanese workers as contract coolies to the newly opened plantation areas in Sumatera and Kalimantan (Borneo) as well as to the Dutch colony of Suriname. This labor flows involved men and women, the latter undertaking specific tasks on the plantations. However, records show that some Javanese women were selected from among the coolies to work as housekeepers (baboe) and also combined domestic and sexual service to European staff on the plantations.
During the colonial period and until Indonesian independence, there were fluctuations in the volume and direction of Indonesian labor flows overseas. The involvement of women in this movement has been largely neglected since female migration was considered as something ‘associational’, occurring purely as a passive migration with women accompanying male household heads. However, since the 1980s, the numbers of female international labor migrants from Indonesia increased substantially and those who are employed as domestic workers/caregivers in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia have dominated the official migrant outflows.
Indonesia provides about 30 per cent of the international demand for domestic workers. The involvement of Indonesian women in domestic work has attracted considerable controversy. While there are success stories, it is clear that these women migrant workers are exposed to considerable risks of exploitation and discrimination, not only on the basis of race and class but also gender since domestic workers are outside the protection of labor legislation, both in Indonesia as well as in some destination countries. However, despite their bad experiences, the flow of international female labor migrants as domestic workers overseas continues.
This paper examines the phenomenon of Indonesian female migrants working as domestic workers overseas, focusing on their position and meaning in the context of the global labor market and protections provided for them at the local, national and international levels. It also includes an historical analysis of women’s migration to show the similarities between the present situation and the situation during the colonial period. The study reviews the literature on women as domestic workers/caregivers and is also based on primary data analysis of fieldwork studies conducted in Indonesia.
Aswatini Raharto
Research Centre for Population
Indonesian Institute of Sciences (PPK-LIPI)
10th Floor, Widya Graha Building
Jl. Gatot Subroto 10
Jakarta, 12710
Indonesia

Tel: 62 (21) 5207205
Fax: 62 (21) 5207205
Email: tinias28@rad.net.id; aswa001@lipi.go.id

Migration into Thailand: Change and Continuity from a Gender Perspective

This paper investigates the diverse migratory flows into Thailand during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and since the 1970s, tracking the shifting gendered patterns of migration. The study shows that migratory movements into the Thai state in the earlier period were male-dominated, and included both free and coerced flows. The migrant workers’ main occupations in the first period were consistent with the three main “male” dominated job categories: manual labor, trade and court/regal services. The majority of the female migrants went as dependents, rather than as primary breadwinners. The situation changed in the twentieth century with women migrating as primary migrants and a distinct pattern of women engaging in the sex trade also became obvious. Since the second half of the twentieth century, both male and female migrant workers have been employed in an expanded range of activities. Male migrant workers are largely employed in manual jobs, including construction, manufacturing, and in the agricultural and fishery sectors. Women migrant workers’ occupations currently include labor-intensive manufacturing production (textiles, garments and footwear), and agricultural and fishery-related processing activities. Apart from sex-work, migrant women are also concentrated in care-giving activities, like their counterparts in other Southeast Asian states.

A Prize for Grumpy Old Men

In this paper, I will reveal what can be learned about women and learned culture by taking a closer look at some of the women who have received a Nobel Prize. For over a hundred years, being awarded a Nobel Prize has been regarded as one of the world’s great honours. Only the very best achievers in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine (and from 1969, economic sciences), the most distinguished authors and the most diligent peace activists are considered for this honour. Or so it is often claimed.

The story of the Nobel Prizes might not be that straightforward. A number of factors besides excellence – politics, eurocentrism, scientific and literary fads – have all played a part in explaining some of the Prizes awarded in the past. But perhaps one of the most significant factors seem to be gender: out of the total 816 Nobel Laureates, a meagre 35 have been women. Why?

One simple answer could of course be that women simply haven’t achieved as well as men, neither as scientists, authors nor as crusaders for peace. But that would be an easy way out of a much more complicated issue. The history of the Nobel Prizes tell us a different story.

"Speaking Together Honestly, Openly, and Profoundly: Men and Women as Public Intellectuals in France

My paper explores women's participation in learned culture by analyzing the interactions between women and men at the Union for Moral Action, a diverse group of academics, activists, journalists, novelists, and philanthropists that came together in 1892, initiated an influential public series of Open Conversations in 1904, and continued its critical inquiries as the Union for Truth until 1939. I am particularly interested in how the Open Conversations created a new space for women to speak publicly with men about matters of particularly pressing political concern - topics including feminism, socialism, nationalism and internationalism, the reform of judicial institutions, the separation of church and state, and the relationship between the state, its citizens, and their civil servants. Many historians have observed that the iconic figure of the intellectual is more likely to appear as male than as female. By comparing the intellectual formations, institutional affiliations, and political opinions of Union members, I shed new light on the settings in which members of both sexes have claimed the right to speak, on the dynamics of their participation in the public sphere, and on the reasons why it has often been so much easier to remember public intellectual men than public intellectual women.

Umeko Tsuda and Women’s Higher Education in Meiji Japan

My paper will focus on Umeko Tsuda who was one of the first women students sent by the Japanese government to study in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century. Particularly the main point concerns Tsuda’s efforts to create a scholarship committee for Japanese women to have an opportunity to study at Bryn Mawr College as well as to found an institution of higher education for women in Meiji Japan in collaboration with the women she met during her college years in the U.S. The questions concern the following: How had Tsuda tried to gain stature for her institution in the male-dominated academic world? What kinds of students had she tried to recruit and how had she perceived their future goals with her own curricula?

Placing Women in Learned Cultures

Women in 18th Century Chinese Learned Culture

Eighteenth century Chinese learned culture was diverse, rich in content, and sophisticated in methodology. The Qing state supported scholarly enterprise through the endowment of academies and schools, and the sponsorship of massive printing projects. An important focus of scholarly endeavor was the search for philological and historical evidence to verify and to authenticate ancient texts. This “textual research” movement revived intellectuals’ interest in works long neglected in Chinese scholarship, including studies on astronomy, mathematics, and geography, and drew attention to the role of prominent female intellectuals in times past. For some 18th century male scholars this re-discovery of female erudition accentuated what was then a dominant trend, i.e. the presence of women writers who articulated their talents in various genres, including poetry, travel writing, and critical discourse about female-authored poetry. Among these literate women were also those who, with the support of male relatives, wrote commentaries and scholarly studies of classical ancient texts.

In recent years I have focused my research on the life and accomplishments of one such woman writer, Wang Zhaoyuan (1763-1851) who in her lifetime was recognized by the Chinese learned world as an outstanding scholar, especially for her linguistic and epigraphic studies of the Chinese language. She wrote several commentaries on ancient works, of which the best known is her annotated edition to the ancient classic compilation Biographies of Women. Her remarks and explanations to this collection reveal her affinity with contemporary linguistic controversies and her superior knowledge of early Chinese scholarship. Although she lived in a relatively isolated location, her intellectual prowess became known all over the empire, and helped further the advancement of learned women’s talents in the public domain.

Transylvania’s Population From 11th Century to 20th Century: Intercultural Opportunities and Vulnerabilities

The diversity of traditions and cultures has been one of the major assets of both Europe and Romania, and that during the past decades the principle of tolerance has become the guarantee of a European open society aware of the importance of its cultural diversity. Transylvania is one of the major provinces of today’s Romania and, starting with the dawn of the Middle Ages a thousand years ago, the Romanians were joined here by several other peoples which would later influence to varying degrees the history of this land. Among the peoples in question we find the Hungarians, the Germans, the Jews, the Armenians, the Serbs, the Slovaks, etc. Since the Middle Ages, Transylvania has had a population structure dominated by three main nations (Romanians, Hungarians, and Germans) and six major denominations (Orthodox, Roman-Catholic, Greek-Catholic, Calvinist or Evangelical Reformed, Lutheran or Evangelical CA – Confessio Augustana, and Unitarian), accompanied by other nations and denominations which, taken together, never accounted for more than 2 or 3% of the population. Transylvania was gradually conquered by the Kingdom of Hungary starting with the 11th and the 12 centuries, partially came under Turkish control after 1541, and ended up under Austrian rule after 1699. Until the First World War, Transylvania’s central and regional authorities remained almost exclusively in Hungarian, Saxon, and Szekler hands. This because, beginning with the 14th century, the Romanian majority was gradually denied any participation in the political, economic, or cultural life of their native province. Until the 1918 union between Transylvania and Romania, the Hungarian kings, the Habsburg emperors, and the various governments in Budapest tried to alter its dominantly Orthodox and Romanian character. They partially succeeded, as in the Middle Ages a sizable part of the Romanian noble elites embraced first the Roman-Catholic and then the Reformed Calvinist faiths; after 1700, when some of the Romanian Orthodox united with the Church of Rome, the denominational composition of Transylvania became even more complex. The settlement of colonists, from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era, failed to eliminate the Romanian ethnic majority, but managed to decrease the percentage of Romanians in the province—never, however, under 53%. Indeed, what occurred on 1 December 1918 in Alba Iulia, namely, the democratic implementation of the right to national self-determination by the majority population in Transylvania, rendered this union stable and legitimate.
Over more than a thousand years of living together, this ethnic and denominational diversity most likely shaped certain types of demographic behavior typical for these peoples and denominations and led to mutual contacts and influences. Along the centuries, relations between the native Romanians and the other peoples that inhabited the Transylvanian space were neither pure or immaculate, nor horrible and disastrous. Despite the occasional conflicts, the local Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, and others also shared moments of cooperation and mutual struggle, of kinship and of unity of purpose. In what concerns the interethnic relations in Transylvania after 1918, their tortuous fate was also affected by the presence in the previous century of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and by the Second World War, which meant a step backwards in terms of the Romanian-Hungarian relations. The violence and the destruction of those years negatively affected the collective memory, and it took decades and a return to democracy before the two nations recovered their mutual trust and went back to peacefully living together. Today, things are moving in a positive direction, as indicated by the gradual increase in the number of mixed marriages in Transylvania. We believe that this historical-demographic study should offer both politicians and regular citizens information and solutions for the present day. In this 21st century, in Romania and elsewhere, we need to shift the focus of tolerance from the social and political realm towards the field of human relations, because in the 21st century the concept of tolerance seems to be insufficient and limited. Thus, we need to move from a tolerant co-existence to an active collaboration (the most significant mutation should involve the replacement of “I tolerate” by “I respect”). First and foremost, this requires a knowledge of the past, and only then concrete practical and pragmatic actions. Of course, under these circumstances the education of both young people and adults plays a crucial role, as the majority must truly understand the problems of the minorities and accept and support the manifestation of their ethnic identity, by protecting their culture, religion, education, and languages. Therefore, both the authorities and the civil society must become involved in fighting discrimination and in the elimination of any form of extremism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism or territorial separatism, in supporting cultural diversity and in encouraging interethnic dialogue, in the development of civic multiculturalism as a part of the European identity.

Forced labour and rising fertility in colonial Indonesia

This paper presents empirical evidence to support the labour demand theory of rising reproductive fertility in colonial Indonesia. According to this theory, birth rates in 19th-century Java rose as a direct result of the labour burden imposed upon women and their children by the Cultivation System of compulsory labour services. The theory was conceived in the 1970s as a reaction against the assumption that rapid population growth in colonial Indonesia must have reflected improvements in economic and health conditions under Dutch rule. The difficulty of testing it empirically, together with its counterintuitive quality and its ideological origins, led it to be sceptically received. However, newly assembled statistical data from Minahasa, one of the few areas outside Java where compulsory cultivation services were introduced in the 19th century, indicate that it is in fact correct.

People, War and Conquest; The case of the Dutch East India Company

An inquiry into the short- and long term effects of the wars of conquest of the Dutch East India Company on the demography of the Spice Islands, Taiwan, Sri Langka and Java (see broder abstract in upload file).

The repercussions of the siege of cities on the life of their inhabitants in the Balkans and Asia Minor (7th-10th century): a comparative approach

Balkans and Asia Minor was the battlefield among Slavs, Bulgars and Arabs in the one hand (acting as invaders) and the Byzantines in the other (acting as defenders of their Empire, striving for the re-establishing of their suzerainty) during the major part of the Middle Byzantine Period. The siege and capture of towns by both sides occurred quite often, while the repeated fall of the same place in the hands of the above mentioned rivals alternatively, was not a rare phaenomenon. There are examined and compared the various repercussions on the economic life and the demographic evolution of those cities and their countryside - together with the measures taken by the Byzantine administration in order to restore the population and economy in the above mentioned areas, which were quite vital for the survive and prosperity of the Empire.

Structure of the Serbian family in the late Middle Ages

Historical circumstances,as well as specific social, demographical
and cultural models which existed in the Serbian medieval society, made an impact
to the special characteristics of the families. One of the major issues is
quantitive size of the family and predominant type: nucleus or joint family. This
paper is based on the research of relevant primary sources: Serbian diplomatic
sources and the first Ottoman census books, which make possible not only to
establish family types and its quantitive size, but also to point out to demographic
changes caused by the Ottoman conquest in South Eastern Europe.

Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines

The paper examines the impact of Spanish conquest in the early colonial Philippines. It is often argued that compared to the Americas its impact was relatively mild because Filipinos had acquired immunity to Old World diseases prior to Spanish arrival and because the Philippines were conquered at a later date when Philip II pursued more enlightened colonial policies. It is also suggested that large scale immigration was limited because the islands lacked desirable natural resources, especially minerals, and was too far from Spain. However, this study argues that the sparse population of the islands, related among other things to low fertility, inter-community conflict and slave raiding, meant that Filipinos had acquired only limited immunity to Old World diseases in pre-Spanish times. Also, the initial conquest of the Philippines was a more bloody affair than often supposed with Spanish demands for tribute, labour and in some regions the lands, resulting in economic and social transformations and significant depopulation. It suggests that a population 1.57 million in Luzon and the Visayas in 1565 may have fallen by about two-thirds by the mid-seventeenth century.

The Slavery of Gypsies in the Romanian Principalities (14th Century-1856). An Overview

This paper deals with a topic less known to those unfamiliar with the history of South East Europe, and which was not taken into consideration in the studies concerning slavery, made in the West in the last decades, namely the slavery of Gypsies in the Romanian principalities of Walachia and Moldavia.

The slavery was part of the social system in these countries from their foundation in the 14th century until 1855/56, when this institution here was abolished. Most of the slaves were Gypsies, a population of Indian origin, which arrived in Europe in early 14th century, so that the term ţigan (“Gypsy”) became synonymous with that of “slave”. It was a relative numerous population. In the mid-19th century, when the emancipation took place, the Gypsies (slaves) accounted for approximately 7% of the total population of the country.

Aspects of the Gypsy slavery are addressed, among which: the status of slaves; the categories of slaves (there were three categories: the princely slaves or in the 19th century “Gypsies of the State”, slaves belonging to a monastery and slaves belonging to a landowner); the position of the Gypsies in the economy of the country (many of them were craftsmen); the nomadic way of life and the itinerant economy which characterized for many centuries the Gypsies.

The presentation focuses on the 19th century, and especially on the last three decades of the slavery, when, since 1830, the data of the Gypsy population changed significantly. These transformations made the slavery in the Romanian principalities, in a certain way, not very different from what was slavery in the U.S.A. A parallel is made not only with slavery in Americas, but also with slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

The fall and the attenuated rise of manufactures in India

In 1750, India contributed about a quarter of the world manufactures. By 1913, that share had declined to less than 2 per cent. After independence of South Asia, both GDP and industrial output recorded positive rates of growth. But since the period up to early 1970s was the Golden Age of capitalism both in the North Atlantic seaboard and in Japan, and the period 1970s to mid-1990s witnessed the spectacular rise of the smaller industrializing nations of East Asia, the proportion of Indian GDP and manufactures in global GDP and manufactures only inched upwards. The latest growth of Indian manufactures is still of short duration and overshadowed by that of China. India has still to travel a long distance to re-capture its place in global manufactures. With worries mounting up about the consequences of resource-intensive manufacturing that catching up may never take place.

The cornerstone of the economic modernization of China: China’s national market in the nineteenth century

The major driving force behind early modern economic growth is the “Smithian Dynamics” which is based on the market development and integration. One of the key differences in economic modernization between China, India and Japan is that China had a huge and well integrated national market which was formed in its “early modern times.” It is this market which made China experienced unprecedented economic boom and took it right to the largest economy in the world in the “long eighteenth century”, while the collapse of the market led to a century-long economic decline that China suffered after the mid-nineteenth. This great change made the path of modernization of China different from those of Japan and India.
In this paper, three issues will be focused on: (1) the size of China’s national market in the early nineteenth century, (2) the structure of China’s national market in the early nineteenth century, (3) the collapse of China’s national market after the mid-nineteenth century.

The two streams of the Japanese Economic Modernization: Westernism or Asianism?

This paper examines the Japanese political history that led the economic modernization and expansion. It deals with Japanese history from the end of the Tokugawa Era, the second half of the nineteenth century, to the 1990s.
There were two streams of ideas how to defend Japan's independence against Western imperialism, how to build Japan's nation state and how to catch up the economy and military power with the Western countries. Thw two straems were Westernism and Asianism.
The two streams sometimes competed against each other, somtimes joined together, but both of them had their own ideas to make the country richer and stronger and to rebuild the Asian order. Adding to that, both of them used their own pre-modern social systems and ideas to modernize Japan and tried to reorganize the Asian political economy in their own way. They had some common aspects with China and India, but, of course, had many different points.
This paper mainly deals with the origins of the two streams of 1860s, their development of 1930s and the economic development of 1960s of Japan. It will present some points to discuss and to compare the system of the nations, the social sub systems and the view of Asia and the world.

Epidemiologic changes and the development of health policy in modern Japan

If we take ‘modernization’ in a broad sense, its relationship with the prevalence of infectious diseases is complex. Modern knowledge, technology and institutions derived from ‘modernization’ have certainly been devised for the prevention of infectious diseases. There are, however, other aspects of modernization which have facilitated the prevalence. Hence the struggle protracted. This paper aims to survey the rise and fall of major infectious diseases in modern Japan, especially in Tokyo. Those diseases present different epidemiological patterns during the period under consideration. Examination of the historical epidemiology of them reveals a complex interplay between pathogens, natural and man-made environment, and human attempt to control the diseases. Neither a simplistic triumphalism of, nor an excessive pessimism about, modernization over those diseases would help understanding.

Economic Change in Early Colonial South India

This paper uses a firm grounding in the nature of economic life in late pre-colonial South India to analyze the colonial impact. It focuses on change in agriculture, particularly in the rice growing regions of the south.

Company Law Reforms and Business Modernization in China and Japan in the Early 20th Century

This paper examines the relationship between company law development and business modernization in China and Japan from 1890s to 1930s. Focus will be put on the corporation model and related legislations and mental patterns. It aims at comparing the divergent trajectories of this crucial dimension of economic modernization in the two countries in their initial phase of business and legal transplant and exploring the complicity of cross-cultural migration of buisness and legal ideas.

Socio-economic Transformation in the 19th Century Qing: A Comparative Study

Socio-economic Transformation in the 19th Century Qing: A Comparative Study

The Comparison between China's and Japan's Early Modernization from 1860's to 1890's

Prof. Zhang Haipeng
According to the statistics of some scholars, Westernization Group established approximately 60 modern enterprises altogether, all the investment of which was about 53,000,000 taels, generally from 1860's to 1890's. As the materials possessed by the scholars were quite different, the assession was not completely same, which was in fact a very small number. That's why someone did not agree with the use of the phrase “Modernization Movement”, because it did not become a movement, and the enterprises were not established all over the country under the unified instructions of the Central Government.
It will be very clear to compare China's Westernization Reform and Japan's Meiji Reformation. Japan's Meiji Reformation, which was declared in 1868, the 1st Year of Meiji, was several years later than China's Modernization Movement, which was initiated from 1861. However, the character of the capitalistic reform of Japan's Meiji Reformation, reflected in the western capitalistic enterprises, mode of production, and political system imported by Japan, was quite clear. According to someone's statistics, they established more than 5600 enterprise, the total investment of which was 289,000,000 Japanese Yen. Every year they established 225 enterprises on the average, the investment of which was nearly 11,000,000 Japanese Yen, which approximately amounts to more than 7,000,000 taels.Therefore,China was outshone comparing to the Japan's achievement of western enterprises before 1892 during Janpa's Meiji Reformation.
What was the greatest difference? I think it should be that in Japan the Tenno actively pushed it all over the country, while in China only several local senior officials, including Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang, and the other Governo-Generals or Governors interested in western modernization pushed it.Furthermore, there were a great number of conservatives in China, who opposed the importation of the the foreign machine and equipment, and the study of western sciences.Just like Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang, they presented many memorials to the Emperor, suggesting to do this or that, while the other ministers did not agree with them. Empress Dowager possessed the controlling position, but she listened to and supported both of them, “managing between them”. Therefor in China western modernization did not become a national action pushed by the Central Government, and the Central Strength.
In the other hand, Japan introduced the western mode of production, and tried its best to encourage and push the common people to establish enterprises during Meiji Reformation. There was no commercial enterprises under the official supervision, and no official enterprises, or very few official enterpries.If the folk capital was not enough, the Tenno and the Central Government took money to support the common people to establish all types of enterprises. Therefore, the enterprises grew very quickly just like the spring bamboo shoot after the rain. In China there were a great deal of official enterprieses. The next type was the commercial enterprises under the official supervision. The merchants had money, but they did not dare to establish enterprises, so they established some enterprises under the official name, or the name of commercial operation under the official supervision, or the name of commerial and official cooperation, whoes strenth were very small. The nameber of pure commercial enterprises was very small, and their capital was very little.Therefore, they were very weak. The pure commercial enterprises faced the competation from several respects: the competation of the foreign enterprises, the competation of the official enterprises, and the competation of the commercial enterprises under the official supervision. It was very difficult for them to grow up. And the investment of them were very little.
The Japanese ministers in charge of Meiji Reformation, such as Ito Hirobumi, all had studied abroad, had western education qualification, and quite understood the life style and production mode of the western capitalism. However, among the Chinese ministers, no one understood foreign languages, and no one went abroad. Therefore, they hardly understood the production of the western capitalism. Although, they established enterprises, their managing means were the ones of the official enterprises in the traditional feaudal society, which quite limited the achievement of the activities of the westernization.

The Role of National Archives in National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe

This paper will start off by tracing the formation of national archives in Europe. Whilst some of Europe’s national archives were already established in the early modern period, most opened their doors to the public in the classic age of nationalism – the long nineteenth century. The paper will compare strategies of different states in founding national archives and developing ground rules for their use. In particular access policies of national archives are to be compared across Europe. The paper will proceed to ask how important national archives were for the construction of national master narratives. It is noticeable that some of the most important national master narratives of the nineteenth century, from Jules Michelet to Thomas Babington Macaulay were written with scant recourse to the national archives or primary sources for that matter. By contrast, later histories of thoroughly scientific historians, from Nicolae Jorgae to Karl Lamprecht, prided themselves in their supreme knowledge of the sources and archives, which gave their national histories increased status and standing not just in the academic world but also among the wider public they sought to influence. However, it is noticeable that some of the key national histories even in the second half of the twentieth century, from Fernand Braudel to Norman Davies were produced without much work in the national archives (although it would be fair to say that they sought to base their national master narrative on other work which had made extensive use of national archives). Nevertheless the paper will explore the question whether it has not been characteristic of many historical national master narratives that they retained their distance from national archives. To some extent then the paper will explore whether there existed a certain hiatus between the alleged importance of national archives to the construction of national master narratives (a claim often made by the founders and those seeking to maintain and develop national archives) and the reality of the construction of national master narratives. In other words: the hypothesis to be tested is: the grand stories which came to structure many people’s understanding of the nation’s historical development were not constructed out of prolonged engagement with national archives, but were told in a particular historical-political situation and out of particular sets of ideological-normative commitments of the national historians in question. In addition, the paper will also seek to examine in which way hierarchies of archives emerged in the nineteenth century – with national archives at the top and other archives, e.g. local/ regional archives or transnational archives, such as archives of empire etc., being accorded at best second place. Of course, many organisers of historical science, such as the French historian and minister for education, François Guizot, recognised the importance of the local and regional archives for the national storyline and therefore proposed a stricly centralised system of archives which would culminate in the central national archive in Paris, from where all necessary information for the construction of national master histories could be gauged. Such visions of an all-powerful and empowering central archive stood next to the reality of a multitude of differen archives for different purposes and thematic/ chronological concerns. The paper will try and shed some light on the precise interrelationship of such different types of archives in different parts of Europe. Finally, the paper will conclude by asking what role national archives can play in contemporary Europe, where, one the one hand, processes of Europeanisation and regionalisation have seriously undermined national master narratives, whilst, on the other hand, fears of Europeanisation and globalisation have paradoxically strengthened the public’s ties to their respective national histories. Are national archives increasingly an anachronism of a previous age (as the Habsburg Imperial archives in Vienna seemed an anachronism to many national(ist) historians in the nineteenth-century Habsburg empire)? Are they reforming themselves to undertake new tasks (e.g. the National Archives in London now spending a good proportion of their time and resources on helping individuals trace their family trees)? Or is there still a meaningful function to be fulfilled in being the main repository for the collective national memory?

Posthumous Privacy

The ownership of history and the command of information sources cannot be the province of historians alone. This is so because the international human rights covenants tell us that the right to free expression and exchange of views, including historical views, can be legitimately limited for various purposes. One of these purposes is the right to privacy and reputation (article 12 Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Hence, under certain conditions, the free expression of historians can be restricted if it invades the privacy of their subjects or defames them. In this contribution, I limit myself to privacy (excluding reputation), to the privacy of the dead (excluding privacy questions of the living), to the types of privacy invasion called disclosure of information and false light (excluding other invasion types such as intrusion and appropriation), and within this domain to cases against historians. I analyze a set of eight legal cases against historians (from Canada, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United States) in which posthumous privacy played a primary or substantial role.
I tentatively argue that posthumous privacy of the nondisclosure type exists; that legally it fades away after two generations; and that morally it may last much longer (like other invasion types such as intrusion under the form of the excavation of graves by archaeologists). I then identify the types of sensitive information that invade posthumous privacy. I further ask whether posthumous privacy is a purpose that can legitimately limit the free expression of historians. I explore the key notion of balance to find out whether the interests of the dead (if indeed the dead can have interests at all) and their surviving family in nondisclosure of private information and the public interest in its disclosure are of equal importance and whether public and private deceased historical figures should be weighed differently. I also look into the roles of heirs, third parties, judges, and historians. I investigate when heirs impose a reasonable privacy control; when judges impose a duty of silence on historians and in whose name (of the deceased, the heirs, or both); if historians, in the absence of a legal case, should be able to exercise a right to silence. I argue that balancing interests sometimes leads to restricted or regulated access to sources and that, rather than censorship, it is an essential part of the freedom of historical research. Historians have to reckon with some carefully delineated privacy-inspired zones of silence.

Oral History and the victims of repression in Spanish Civil War

The Memory of the victims of july 1936 military and fascist Coup d’Etat contrast with Francoist Memory of the war. Along the Francoist Dictatorship was constructed an official memory and a History complete different of victims memory. Seventy years after the war the reconstruction and rescue of these victims’ memories have just start and is a new way for the construction of a new History that revised francoist topics. The construction of a found of 400 interviews in a research project of Galician universities can allow to show a new way for this new History. The revision of all military records, including military judgments is the second way for this aim. The third way is the recovery of private founds, memories and records.
Some conclusions of this research about the beginning of Spanish Civil war in Galicia can be presented to contrast the official memory, even during the last Democracy 30 years, and victims’ memory.

The Everyday Life of History in the English Eighteenth Century

Neither `History' nor the idea of ownership are particularly useful for considering the social uses and effects of historical knowledge in the English eighteenth century. Following the protocols of the new history of material culture/social history of materialthings, this paper will consider the wide use of History in the everyday practice of the law.

By way of introduction, it includes a brief history of answers to the question `Who Owns History' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Fashion and "Europeanized" Excesses: Consumption and Class in Late Ottoman Beirut

A consumer culture emerged in turn of the century Beirut, structured by increasing European economic penetration of the Ottoman Empire as well as by local efforts to produce a localized modernity. Souks began to displace the markets in the old city and the building of a new port turned Beirut into the funnel through which goods moving in and out of the region had to pass before reaching their final destination. As a cultural hub, there were also intellectual currents intersecting in the city alongside the economic ones. Intellectuals and public figures writing in the press responded in different ways to these material changes pervading in their city.

This paper argues that far from advocating mimicry and imitation of "ifranji," or European, cultural products, "Europeanized" (mostly Christian) intellectuals in Beirut found in fashion a common source of anxiety. Fearing the loss of particularity, both male and female intellectuals advocated a localized sense of consumption that preserved a sense of being "oriental" or "Syrian." This was accompanied by calls for consuming local and by small industries advertising themselves in the press in patriotic terminology. Furthermore, particularly in relation to women, the home was posited as the location of real "virtue" and a life revolving around domesticity was advocated as a remedy to women's fashion excesses in public places. Through the articles and advertisements in the local press, this paper explores these different responses to a novel consumer culture and links them to the emergence of a middle class struggling to find a place for itself in the social hierarchy.

The Material Renaissance. Comparative perspectives on consumer changes and economic development in the long sixteenth century

In this paper the relationship between economic development and consumer changes will be reserached for late medieval and sixteenth-century Northwestern Europe. Building on the rich historiography for the Italian pensinsula, the question will be raised whether -or not- sixteenth-century material culture changes outside Italy enhanced economic transformations.

Rethinking the Material Renaissance: Consumers and Consumption in Italy, 1400-1600

This paper proposes an overview of recent consumption theories and their application to the Italian Renaissance. It will present a historiographical perspective by considering literature on this topic alongside a variety of research projects and curatorial initiatives developed over the last two decades.
Ever since the terms Renaissance and conspicuous consumption were coined during the second half of the nineteenth century, they have frequently been closely associated with each another. Over the last two decades, however, consumer practices in early modern Italy have been researched in unprecedented detail. Interest has moved away from simply charting the excessive expenditure of the Italian courts, on public festivities, magnificent palazzi, and lavish clothing, to a range of responses that have both idealised and demonised the notion of consumption. Historians from very diverse fields have sought to pinpoint the beginnings of a ‘consumer society’, or even a ‘consumer revolution’. Richard Goldthwaite made a powerful argument for a marked proliferation of objects and typologies during the fifteenth century, suggesting that the artistic outpouring witnessed in Florence was significantly motivated by economic factors. Over fifteen years on, this thesis has been revisited and reassessed in a countless variety of ways. Some scholars have outlined similar phenomena as early as the fourteenth century; others have contested Italy’s privileged position and transposed the geographical epicentre of these developments to the Middle East. Still others have questioned the basis of such a positivistic narrative, underlining the fact that the majority of Italians owned exceedingly few material possessions. While the very concept of a Renaissance consumer continues to provoke a lively debate, it has nevertheless been instrumental in opening up new channels of research and approaches to the material culture of the period. It has enabled us to move beyond ultimately unsatisfactory theories of emulation and the view that engagement with fashionable goods was predominantly a frivolous, female-dominated activity. These have increasingly been overturned by more balanced examinations of the many social and cultural meanings invested in the purchase, exchange, recycling and eventual disposal of objects.

The Formation of the Finnish Model of Consumer Society between the East and the West, the 1950s and 1960s

The structural change and a transition towards a modern consumer society has been a significant feature of the modernisation of societies during the first half of the 20th century in the western hemisphere and later around the turn of the millennium over all caused by the advancing globalization process. Many scholars (Cohen 2003; Cross 2000; Strasser et al. 1998 e.g.) have analyzed the transition process to a modern consumer society and taken the model of the United States as a starting point. Many times it has been taken as granted that the ‘late-comers’ in the consumer society development automatically follow the path of US development. However, lately it has been shown that there is a variety of possible paths to a consumer society (see for example Brewer & Trentmann, eds. 2006; Loehlin 1999; Ross 1996; Trentmann, ed. 2006).

In this paper the Finnish experience of a consumer society development is examined. After the Second World War, Finland experienced a very fast structural change and urbanisation especially during the 1960s. In everyday living modern conveniences like a water pipe, an indoor toilet and a sewer became everyday necessities to an increasing number of homes. An increase in leisure time was an additional factor behind the development of the modern consumer society.

The standard of living rose fast among the Finns during the 1960s. Following the international trend the increasing individualism proceeded slowly and was related to the rising commercial culture. Especially during the 1960s, phenomena like advertising and fashion became important arenas, where the popular culture flourished. After 1965 a five-day working week was gradually adapted in Finland. This together with rising salaries and a larger supply of consumer goods gave new possibilities to consume. During 1955-1966 the share of leisure-time consumption from total household expenditures increased from 10 to 20 per cent. Traveling abroad started to turn from luxury to a possibility for a common consumer. Furthermore, during the 1960s the consumer movement started when the first consumer organization was founded in Finland. As an official organ the Consumer council was founded following the Swedish model. These developments led later during the 1970s to the beginning of consumer policy in national level.

For the Finns born between 1945 and 1955 the 1960s was the era of their youth. This generation, often called the numerous generation, had some money of its own. They found new lifestyles and started to use consumer goods like cloths, records and motorcycles, e.g., as symbols of rebellion against older generations. Young radicals belonging to this generation found themselves as representatives of their generation. During the 1970s, some members of the numerous generation became representatives of the left-wing political movement. However, most youngsters became members of the consumer society. They bought records, they were dressed in blue jeans and they adapted the fashion, lifestyle and models of consumption of the western consumer societies.

Consumer Societies and Economic Change in the Long Run. Reconsidering Concepts for the History of Consumption

The paper is going to discuss consumer societies and economic change with a long term perspective trying to find links between the research on modern and early modern consumer societies. Reconsidering current historical research on consumer societies from the late Middle Ages to modern industrial societies, the question will be discussed if it is possible to define repertoires of social interaction constituting an analytical approach to “consumers” and “consumption” which could serve as an element to a more comprehensive approach for analysing economic practices in history. An analytical approach for the research on consumption not a priori tied to a specific culture would be a precondition for transcultural studies without too many premises. If there are such repertoires through different cultures and historical change, what does this mean for the categories and concepts of economic change in the research of consumption? Is consumption a practice situated in specific figurations of a society or does it make sense to consider a whole society as a “consumer society”? The discussion of these issues will be theoretically based on current economic sociology, especially on the economies of quality.

"Consumer Culture" in Global Historical Perspective: New Research, New Perspectives

Studies of consumption have generally followed two models. One has looked to a sharp break in the affluent years after World War Two when an increasingly pluralistic, flexible, and life-style oriented “consumer society” is said to have replaced a class-based, work-oriented “industrial society”. The second model takes a longer view, taking into account patterns of consumption in the early modern period, and offers a quasi-Weberian stage theory: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, consumption here switches from an “archaic” to a “proto” to a “modern” type of globalization (Bayly). According to this model, this switch makes itself manifest in a switch from diversity to the standardisation of products and tastes.

Drawing on recent research, this presentation will offer a critique of these models which presume a linear unfolding of a single type of consumer culture over time, mainly associated with Americanization. Instead, it will point to the on-going diversity of consuming cultures, its uneven advance, and to the influence of local forces in shaping how people desire, acquire and use things.

Exploring Modern Italy. The Changing Culture of Grand Tour During the Eighteenth Century

The cultural shock produced by the ‘discovery’ of Italy was a well-known change from the late fifteenth to the early sixteenth century. But the goals and manners of the ruling classes changed in Europe during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The accelerating circulation of men and ideas as well as the role of technical, political and cultural changes were connected to numerous modifications relating to the Grand Tour.
This essay seeks to devote attention to some travel experiences (in particular British aristocrats') outsides the parameters set by Roman and Greek revival. Not only arts - music, painting, architecture as Paolo Cornaglia shows in this session -, but also politics and diplomacy were the object of reflection for many gentlemen.
In the eighteenth century, has been written, English travel literature became more sympathetic to some European countries. This phenomenon is evident not only in printed material, but also in unprinted memoirs and in public and private correspondence. The essay analyses the traces of some Ritterakademien's students who travelled in Europe and lived a few years in Italy.
Gentlemen were often young students. Many aristocrats were partly educated abroad, in some famous academies as those of Lunéville, Paris, Angers, Besançon, Blois, Brunswick, Caen, Colmar, Hamburg. And so they did in universities as Leipzig, Leyden, Utrecht, Göttingen. Among the Italian academies attended in the eighteenth century there was the Royal Academy of Turin, where many British, German, Polish and Russian nobles were received.
During the Grand Tour young gentlemen and students were part of a well-connected society, in which they would be received by the monarchs, would dine often at court, would be permitted to attend public functions, would mix with ministers and diplomats. Letters of introduction served to present these gentlemen to the highest ranks of European society, providing ample opportunity to broaden political understanding and to acquire social skills. Attendance at courts, theatres, salons, scientific societies was an important way to know modern models of Continental life.
During the eighteenth century, in the Continent Italy changed its role and its image. Travel literature and archival sources devoted to travellers in this century offer an interesting key for reading the image of modernity joined to a country traditionally connected with its past.

Renouvellement du goût, échanges et commanditaires dans la culture européenne artistique et architecturale dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle

Les voyages des membres des élites et des aristocrates qui se déroulent pendant le XVIIIe siècle marquent le développement de la culture de l’art et de l’architecture. Grâce aux contes de voyage, aux volumes des correspondances, aux lettres, publiés au retour, des nouvelles idées sur les quelles réfléchir prennent la scène, et des opinion quelques fois féroces concernant mœurs, nouvelles modes et styles causent un débat riche qui trouve plusieurs endroits pour se manifester, des lettres aux livres, des journaux aux académies. L’abbé Le Blanc, à Londres entre 1737 et 1744 donne des fortes critiques à l’architecture intérieure anglaise (il parle de « mauvais goût ») e déclanche la grande vague anti-rococo, suivit par Charles Nicolas Cochin qui publie des articles fameux sur le Mercure de France en 1754 et 1755. C’est le Grand Tour en Italie en 1749, avec Marigny, Soufflot et Le Blanc qui ouvre les yeux à Cochin : la beauté de l’antiquité contre la folie du rococo, de Borromini, de Juvarra à Stupinigi (une décoration à la Meissonnier !). Selon Cochin, le retour de Marigny en France, après le voyage d’Italie, c’est un moment capitale qui change le goût : c’est la naissance du Goût Grec. Un Grand Tour important, encore, à cause des dix volumes publié, c’est celui de Joseph Jérôme de Lalande, en 1765. Mais entre ces voyages il y en a un qui mêle relations dynastiques, liens politiques et curiosité pur l’art et l’architecture dans une façon très particulière : c’est le voyages des Comtes du Nord, les héritiers au trône de Russie, les grands-ducs Paolo et Maria Fedorowna, en 1782 en incognito. Ils passent à Venise, à Turin, à Paris, à Stuttgart. Ils visitent les châteaux, les palais et les cours : c’est l’occasion pour connaître les nouveaux formes des arts, le néoclassicisme, désormais répandu, dans toutes ses manifestations, c’est l’occasion pour fêtes et concerts, qui quelques fois deviennent le sujet des peintres à la mode. A Venise gravures, peintures et dessins par Francesco Guardi et Gabriel Bella et autres nous montrent les concerts et les banquets donnés en l’honneur des héritiers du trône russe au Casino dei Filarmonoci, al Teatro di San Benedetto, in piazza San Marco. A Paris le grand-duc est accueilli à la séance privée de l’Académie, un privilège très rare. A Turin la grande-duchesse, après la visite des nouveaux appartements du château de Moncalieri, elle en demande la copie des projets à l’architecte, à Stuttgart ils visitent la nouvelle grande salle néoclassique du palais juste achevée, à Chantilly le dessinateur Chambé prépare un relevé complet du parc cet surtout de la nouvelle partie à l’anglaise. Le voyage des Comtes du Nord c’est un vrai miroir de la signification et des conséquences des voyages dans le contexte de la circulation européenne de l’art et des ses nouveauté au XVIIIe siècle: revenus en Russie Paolo et Maria Fedorowna demandent œuvres d’arts aux peintres et aux sculpteurs qu’ils ont connu pendant leurs visites pour décorer leur villa « palladienne » près Saint Petersbourg: les statues executées par les frères Collino de Turin à Pavlovsk et les peintures par Jean Baptiste Le Paon à Gatchina sont un témoignage de ce réseau de personnes, voyages, idée, cultures et œuvres d’art qui a caractérisé la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle.

British Travellers in North Africa: Travelling for the Empire

Nineteenth century British travel and travel writing were so embedded in a desire to capture ‘other’ non-European people, lands and geographies. In this respect, this paper seeks to explore the ways in which British travellers to the Regency of Tunis were driven by an insatiable appetite for different forms of knowledge: geographical, ethnographic, historical and scientific. They were also woven into the fabric of a set of information-garnering apparatuses such as the Royal Geographical Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Museum and the Foreign Office. Drawing on colonial discourse theory, this paper aims to suggest that the Regency of Tunis was entangled in an imperialist economy of information-gathering. The first part highlights some travelogues that particularly come under the rubric of the antiquarian travel writing modality concerned with the ruin-strewn site of Carthage so as to bring to bear the ways whereby travel led to the collection and appropriation of antiquities. The second part considers the descriptive manners-customs portrait of the indigenous whereby British travellers reaped ethnographic information and thus acted as ‘spontaneous ethnographers.’ Nineteenth century British travel writing was an instrumental knowledge-producing apparatus as it was greatly predicated on observation, classification, collection, description and appropriation.

Keywords: apparatus, discourse, imperialism, knowledge, North Africa, travelogues, travel

L’énonciation des temps historiques de la Nouvelle-France

La période de l’histoire des voyages des Découvertes est en même temps celle où l’historiographie ne cesse, par le discours qu’elle tient sur son propre temps, de créer et de recréer son propre présent. Le récit de voyage n’échappe pas à ce nouveau cadre épistémologique, lui qui se fonde souvent sur un exercice comparatif dont le champ se compose d’expériences très récentes. Aussi, s’il est commun d’y chercher l’altérité du côté de la description des habitants des terres parcourues, puis occupées – les Sauvages –, il l’est moins de la trouver dans l’objectivation que le récit produit des temps historiques, faisant du passé l’Autre absolu de l’avenir, dressant entre eux un présent souvent de loin plus accompli dans les textes que dans la réalité. À partir d’un échantillon composé de deux fictions, les Amours de Pistion et de Fortunie d’Antoine Du Périer (1601 et 1606) et La coppie d’une lettre envoyée de la Nouvelle France ou Canada signée par un certain Des Combes (1609), ainsi que de l’Histoire de la Nouvelle France de Marc Lescarbot (1609, 1611 et 1618), des Voyages de Samuel Champlain (1613) et de la Relation de la Nouvelle France de Pierre Biard (1616), cette communication s’attardera aux lieux de ces textes où le « temps configuré » crée ses « caractères temporels propres » (Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, 1983). Il s’agira à terme de mieux cerner comment, au moment où les efforts de colonisation de la France en Amérique se font plus cohérents, la Nouvelle-France accède à l’histoire à travers différents dispositifs aux fins essentiellement persuasives.

The concept of globalization in contemporary travel and tourism

Contemporary travel and tourism are bound up with the realities of a globalized world, and many forms of travel writing are consequently making use of and contributing to discourses around globalization. In my research I take an interest in the significance of travel in contemporary society, especially with a focus on how travel journalism makes use of globalization discourses. With a focus on popular travel magazines I study how globalization and cosmopolitanism becomes what Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski refer to as an “identity resource” (2006). As an example, the Swedish travel magazine RES (Travel) uses the idea of a globalized world to create a cosmopolitan elite identity for their readers. In RES travel becomes a quest for status and an important tool for creating an ideal identity that the readers are invited to share. This quest for privilege and status even overshadows the well-known search for authenticity that is often central to popular travel narratives.

In addition, the issue of globalization as it is dealt with in RES is very much a question of the relation between Europe and Asia. The writers of RES express amazement at the economic success of nations such as Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Furthermore, the writers are arguing that this economic success is the basis of a new relation between East and West since a growing number of Asians are participating in a global consumer culture.

In sum, I wish to explore how contemporary travel journalism makes use of, as well as contributes to, definitions of globalization. My focus will be on the creation of privilege in popular travel narratives and how this is connected to the notion of a new relation between Europe and Asia, based on consumption and status.

Visiting Granada and the Alhambra in the XIXth and XXth centuries: From travellers to tourists

L’Espagne est à l’heure actuelle un pays à forte vocation touristique. Le tourisme est devenu le principal moteur de l’économie. Les villes monumentales attirent chaque année des milliers de visiteurs, chiffre en progression constante quelle que soit la situation économique des pays émetteurs.
Grenade est l’une des villes espagnoles possédant le plus fort potentiel touristique.
L’héritage musulman est présent dans la vie de la cité, l’Alhambra et le Généralife attirent les touristes venus du monde entier, désireux de retrouver toute la splendeur de l’Orient lors de la visite des palais nasrides.
A Grenade, nature et passé monumental se conjuguent à la perfection, pour le plus grand plaisir des touristes.

Filosofi in viaggio. Riflessioni, luoghi, esperienze

In may 1748 David Hume the philosopher received an invitation from Lieut.-General St Clair to attend him as secretary and aide-de-camp in a military embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin. They stayed in Turin about six months. Hume wrote a ‘sort of Journal’ of his travels and accounted for the ‘Appearances of things’. He thought that a direct knowledge of ‘Courts & Camps’ could be useful to a man of letters who has the intention of ‘composing some History’. The journal contains several observations that are closely connected with the philosophical literature on travel (rules, utility and meaning), from Montaigne and Bacon to the Encyclopédie and Rousseau: ‘There are great Advantages, in travelling, – Hume writes – & nothing serves more to remove Prejudices’. Yet, Diderot remarks, the traveller ought to avoid all undistinguished rash judgements (‘à Orléans toutes les aubergistes sont acariâtres et rousses’). Sterne and Goldoni ironically represented the supposed advantages of travelling and their related traditional topics: the age of the traveller and the necessity of a tutor, the learning of the traveller and his acquaintance with the foreign language, the things worthy to be seen and the experience of different manners, the improvement of knowledge and the enlargement of views. Before Turin Hume had published ‘Of national characters’, where he also reflects on national prejudices; after Turin he composed ‘A Dialogue’, where the ‘great rambler’ and (moral) sceptic Palamedes mostly insists on the difference of manners and customs, and denies the existence of ‘universal standard of morals’. The ‘Dialogue’ echoes Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and is echoed by Charlemont’s Essay towards a new Method of Travel writing. Hume first met Lord Charlemont, then a young aristocrat from Ireland at the beginning of his grand tour, in Turin. Charlemont’s Travel essays will underline, when written down later in the century, the importance of this encounter, and more generally of the ‘philosophical’ journey – that is, a journey whose main aim is to experience the variety of nature and of human customs, superstitions, and behaviour – as a way to understand, and measure, the distance between the modern, enlightened élites, and their subjects. In this sense, the maps drawn by Charlemont’s voyages offer much more than a new possible topography of antiquity (Charlemont did play a role in art patronage and in the evolution of taste, and his travels in Greece and Turkey are usually read in respect to this role): they trace a geography of different experiences, such as catastrophes (the plague in Messina, a storm at sea), natural marvels (volcanoes and grottos), philosophers’ habits (Montesquieu and Hume), and ‘catholick’, or ‘turk’ rites and legends. From Naples to Antiparos and Malta, and back to London, Charlemont’s European journey probably developed as a quite random and complicated way; but it is later written down as a lesson, whose scope goes well beyond the celebration of modern ‘taste’. In the recollections of the Lord, tragedy in Messina, debauchery in Malta, and encounters with philosophers become all equally important. The relationship between the Philosopher and the Lord is especially celebrated by Charlemont’s Anecdotes of Hume: but the philosopher’s considerations and behaviours – as observed in the particular setting of a foreign country – are examined, in the aristocrat’s (and politician’s) view, as a way to understand and minimize, not to accelerate, ‘change’.

The Mirror that is impossible to go through. European Travellers and Places of the Aristocratic Sociability in Eighteenth Century Italy

During the eighteenth century there were thousands of travellers crossing Italy to complete the grand tour. The Peninsula cities were forming the main destination of the important European aristocracies in their educational route. The travellers had left detailed proofs of their trips in diaries and correspondence. Historians have often used them in order to reconstruct the history of the Italian society during the ancient regime. Actually such references are source, both attractive and dangerous. The short time of the stays and the scarce knowledge of the political and social context in which they were about to find themselves were the reasons why travellers often were not able to formulate their own opinions and were reflecting those from the people they had been in contact with. A clear example of this attitude is the text dedicated to Turin by Montesquieu who stayed at the capital of the dynasty of Savoy in 1728. Many travellers, especially the English, were coming then to the Italian cities animated by the prejudices and common places upon which they were modelling their interpretations of what they were noticing. This attitude was emerging mostly by the contact in lounges, «conversations» and other forms of aristocratic sociability. Such places were often, within the theatres, the only real place of confront between travellers and citizens. It is about a mirror that was impossible to go through: on one side the necessarily partial images of the society were returning, on the other it was representing to the travellers exactly what they were expecting to see. A distorted mirror that few were willing to and even less were able to go through.

Filosofi in viaggio. Riflessioni, luoghi, esperienze

In may 1748 David Hume the philosopher received an invitation from Lieut.-General St Clair to attend him as secretary and aide-de-camp in a military embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin. They stayed in Turin about six months. Hume wrote a ‘sort of Journal’ of his travels and accounted for the ‘Appearances of things’. He thought that a direct knowledge of ‘Courts & Camps’ could be useful to a man of letters who has the intention of ‘composing some History’. The journal contains several observations that are closely connected with the philosophical literature on travel (rules, utility and meaning), from Montaigne and Bacon to the Encyclopédie and Rousseau: ‘There are great Advantages, in travelling, – Hume writes – & nothing serves more to remove Prejudices’. Yet, Diderot remarks, the traveller ought to avoid all undistinguished rash judgements (‘à Orléans toutes les aubergistes sont acariâtres et rousses’). Sterne and Goldoni ironically represented the supposed advantages of travelling and their related traditional topics: the age of the traveller and the necessity of a tutor, the learning of the traveller and his acquaintance with the foreign language, the things worthy to be seen and the experience of different manners, the improvement of knowledge and the enlargement of views. Before Turin Hume had published ‘Of national characters’, where he also reflects on national prejudices; after Turin he composed ‘A Dialogue’, where the ‘great rambler’ and (moral) sceptic Palamedes mostly insists on the difference of manners and customs, and denies the existence of ‘universal standard of morals’. The ‘Dialogue’ echoes Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and is echoed by Charlemont’s Essay towards a new Method of Travel writing. Hume first met Lord Charlemont, then a young aristocrat from Ireland at the beginning of his grand tour, in Turin. Charlemont’s Travel essays will underline, when written down later in the century, the importance of this encounter, and more generally of the ‘philosophical’ journey – that is, a journey whose main aim is to experience the variety of nature and of human customs, superstitions, and behaviour – as a way to understand, and measure, the distance between the modern, enlightened élites, and their subjects. In this sense, the maps drawn by Charlemont’s voyages offer much more than a new possible topography of antiquity (Charlemont did play a role in art patronage and in the evolution of taste, and his travels in Greece and Turkey are usually read in respect to this role): they trace a geography of different experiences, such as catastrophes (the plague in Messina, a storm at sea), natural marvels (volcanoes and grottos), philosophers’ habits (Montesquieu and Hume), and ‘catholick’, or ‘turk’ rites and legends. From Naples to Antiparos and Malta, and back to London, Charlemont’s European journey probably developed as a quite random and complicated way; but it is later written down as a lesson, whose scope goes well beyond the celebration of modern ‘taste’. In the recollections of the Lord, tragedy in Messina, debauchery in Malta, and encounters with philosophers become all equally important. The relationship between the Philosopher and the Lord is especially celebrated by Charlemont’s Anecdotes of Hume: but the philosopher’s considerations and behaviours – as observed in the particular setting of a foreign country – are examined, in the aristocrat’s (and politician’s) view, as a way to understand and minimize, not to accelerate, ‘change’.

Queens of the Desert? British Women Travellers to the Middle East

From the late 19th century onwards, more and more women became actively engaged in colonial explorations, thus putting the heavily gendered assumptions about oriental geographies, colonial subjects and imperialism into question. A geographical space that evoked particular notions of masculinity was the desert: it was constructed as a male and masculinist sphere, where women had little presence. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, European women not only claimed the desert as a space for female explorers, but increasingly challenged the ruling assumption of the desert as a masculine zone. Travellers like Isabella Eberhardt, Amelia Edwards, Lucy Duff Gordon, Gertrude Bell, Vita Sackville West and Freya Stark all dealt distinctively with the social, political, cultural, geographical and ideological notions of the desert, transgressing the boundaries of femininity performatively as well as in their texts. This paper will explore the forms and modes in which women travellers brought about changes in the established discourses of the desert and will also address the question of how the cultural presence of an increasing numbers of female tourists to the Middle East contributed to a destabilisation of the gender order of the desert. The analysis of guidebooks (Cook’s, Baedeker’s and John Murray’s) will support the argument that, as soon as female tourists became a major economic factor in the tourist industry, the landscapes of the Middle East were reconstructed according to the needs and tastes of respectable middle class women.

British travellers' contribution to the Italian Unification: travelling while making history

As next year will be the 150th anniversary of the Italian Unification, I would like to focus on some travellers, such as Charles Mac Farlane (author of "A Glance at revolutionized Italy", 1849), William Senior Nassau, Sir George Mundy, Sir Charles Forbes (author of "The Campaign of Garibaldi in the Two Sicilies. A Personal Narrative", 1861), Algernon Bicknell (writer of "In the Tracks of the Garibaldians through Italy and Sicily", 1861), Alexandre Dumas père (author of "Les Garibaldiens", 1861), Gigault de la Bedollière (a reporter following the Garibaldians), Ulric de Fonvielle (a combatant who wrote "Souvenirs d'une Chemise Rouge", 1861), Alfred d'Aunay (author of "Mémoires authentiques sur Garibaldi", 1864), Edouard Lockroy (L'ile révoltée", 1877), Jean Baptiste Durand-Brager ("Quatre mois de l'expédition de Garibaldi en Sicile et en Italie", 1861), Clément Caraguel ("Souvenirs et aventures d'un volontaire garibaldien", 1861), Maxime Du Camp, Emile Maison, and many others who came to Italy either as witnesses and reporters of Garibaldi's expedition or as active volunteers.
Even women took part in these events, such as Mary Charlton Pasqualino, who wrote "Letters from Sicily, containing some accounts of the political events in that island, during the spring of 1849", or Jessie White Mario, who travelled as a journalist throughout Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century and wrote many sociological essays (some of them in Italian, such as "Le miniere di zolfo in Sicilia", 1894).
The questions I would like to raise during discussion are:
- How much did travellers contribute to the spreading of certain images, now stereotyped, about Italy all over Europe? (Remember that in those years the Italian identity was still in formation.)
- To what extent did they actively participate in the riots?
- Can these foreigners still be defined travellers?

The Fall of the Grand Tour. Dutch and Brabantine elites and the dawn of a anovel travel culture (1650-1759)

For a long time, the cliché of young English noblemen embarking on a lengthy Grand Tour to Italy and France, clouded our understanding of ‘tourism’ in the early modern era. Only recently, its pre-eminence was challenged. Preliminary work seems to suggest that by the close of the eighteenth century the Grand Tour had become a rather conspicuous but fairly petite aspect in the colourful pallet of elite travelling. Noblemen and bourgeois seemed to prefer short outings in the countryside, to neighbouring countries, or to Paris, Brussels or Berlin above a long classical journey to Italy. Educational aims gave way for cultural interest, sublime observations, and recreation. Moreover, a democratisation of the travel public was in the making. Noblemen had to share their seats in coaches and taverns more often with common travellers and middling-sorts. Women and children were slowly but surely allowed to participate in short domestic trips. An overview which ties these various evolutions together is still missing. Using a large corpus of Dutch and Brabantine travel journals my paper aims to gather quantitative ammunition to test this hypothesis. Long-term evolutions in the topography of travel, in motivations and in the travel public will be discussed. Finally the paper will in short address some potential causes, ranging from political, socio-economical to cultural aspects.