Review of Bengal in Global Concept History

8/9/2019 Review of Bengal in Global Concept History

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ReviewsRobert Travers

a , Christian J. Koot

b , Roquinaldo A. Ferreira

c ,

Kenneth J. Andriend , James Krippner

e , John Tutino

f , Davarian

L. Baldwing , Linda Heidenreich

h , Daniel Soyer

i , Paul Slack

j

, Elizabeth T. Hurrenk , Susannah Ottaway

l , Marcus Daniel

m ,

Julia Brüggemannn , Yosuke Nirei

o , Ulrike Wöhr

p , Evelyn S.

Rawskiq & Laura E. Nym Mayhall

r

a Cornell University ,

b Towson University , Maryland

c University of Virginia ,

d Ohio State University ,

e Haverford College , Pennsylvania

f Georgetown University ,

g Trinity College ,h Washington State University ,

i Fordham University , NYj Linacre College , Oxford

k Oxford Brookes University ,

l Carleton College , Minnesotam University of Hawaii at Manoā ,

n DePauw University , Indiana

o Indiana University South Bend ,p Hiroshima City University ,

q University of Pittsburgh ,

r Catholic University of America , Washington, D.C.

Published online: 20 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Robert Travers , Christian J. Koot , Roquinaldo A. Ferreira , Kenneth J.

Andrien , James Krippner , John Tutino , Davarian L. Baldwin , Linda Heidenreich , Daniel Soyer ,

Paul Slack , Elizabeth T. Hurren , Susannah Ottaway , Marcus Daniel , Julia Brüggemann , YosukeNirei , Ulrike Wöhr , Evelyn S. Rawski & Laura E. Nym Mayhall (2009) Reviews, Social History, 34:4,

483-517, DOI: 10.1080/03071020903257075

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Reviews

Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History. Culturalism in the Age of Capital

(2008), ixþ 284 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, $55.00, paperback $22.00).

This riveting book poses serious methodological challenges to the field of history in general, as

well as being a major contribution to the discrete fields of south Asian history, global history

and intellectual history. Readers be warned: this is a difficult and uncompromising work,argued with unremitting rigour, but also with great clarity of thought.

Sartori proposes that, to understand the consistency and globalizing reach of the modern

culture concept, conventional historical emphases on contingency, on instrumentalized speech

acts, or on discrete discursive formations will prove inadequate. Instead, Sartori revives

Raymond Williams’s sense of the priority of the culture concept over its particular lexical

instances and of its referential function over hermeneutic or contingent features. The modern

culture concept, Sartori insists, consistently denotes ‘the fundamental ‘‘underdeterminedness’’

of human subjectivity – the freedom of subjectivity from determinations of objective necessity’

(21). Understanding the widespread intelligibility of this concept requires in turn a sufficiently

capacious notion of the socio-historical context of modernity.Sartori identifies this determining context in ‘the abstract structures of social interdepen-

dence that characterize modern capitalist society’ (22). Drawing on Moishe Postone’s

reinterpretation of ‘Marx’s critical theory’,1 Sartori argues that modern ‘practices of abstract

social mediation’ (48) continuously recreate the problem of subjective agency as an acute and

repetitive preoccupation. The antinomy of subjectivity and objectivity (reflecting the uneasy

relation between labour as a concrete act, and ‘total labour’ as an abstract and uniform measure

of value) becomes the fundamental ground of concept formation. Culture, whether in

Matthew Arnold’s England or in Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Bengal, denoted a consistent yet

ultimately insufficient response to a crisis of subjectivity provoked by apparently objective

forms of social determination unleashed within the sphere of capitalist circulation.Pushing back against both the ‘culturalist and discursive hegemony in the humanistic

disciplines’ (231) and the ‘disaggregative wisdom of contemporary intellectual history’

identified here as ‘Foucauldian or Skinnerian’ (67), Sartori seeks to pursue a more socially

grounded history of concepts rooted in practice. His search for a sufficiently global socio-

historical grounding for the culture concept perhaps inevitably leads to a highly abstract,

schematic rending of modernity. He proposes that in capitalist society, ‘the individual subject

1Moishe Postone, Time, Labour and Social

Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical

Theory (Cambridge, 1996).

Social History Vol. 34 No. 4 November 2009

Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 onlinehttp://www.informaworld.comDOI: 10.1080/03071020903257075


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can assume two very broad but quite distinct ways of construing the significance of practical

activity’: a liberal one centred on ‘the private interests of individuals in civil society’, and a

culturalist one in which ‘practical activity constitutes the very subject of the social whole’ (50 –

1). Sensitive to the varied social forms of capitalist reproduction in different places, Sartori

suggests how the ‘centrality of the peasant household to commodity production’ in Bengalopened up two ways of conceiving rural society: ‘as a society of (male) individuals engaged in

exchange’ or as a space existing ‘below the surface of a superimposed domain of exchange’ and

organized by ‘principles’ different from those of the sphere of circulation (59).

Sartori is fully aware that his methods risk accusations of homogenization or totalization and

that his reading of culturalism as a ‘moment of social reproduction’ (233) within capital may

seem overly mechanistic. But he is willing to run these risks in pursuit of an explanatory

framework able to comprehend the systematic effects of global modernity and the evident

linkages between seemingly quite different life-worlds. He leaves open the possibility of

different levels of analysis in intellectual history, not excluding the ‘constitutive effects of

discourse’. He suggests, however, that his own project of reconstructing ‘the historicalconstitution of the conditions of possibility for the power of specific discursive repertoires’

must be ‘logically prior’ (16).

Sartori’s own rhetorical practice consistently works from the abstract to the particular; that

is, in a series of superb readings of major Bengali thinkers, he prioritizes the essential coherence

of a set of abstract premises underlying their thought over either intellectual biography or the

particular circumstances or media of expression. Rammohun Roy appears then as the

embodiment of the first, liberal answer to the problem of agency and autonomy; and

Bankimchandra – in his later formulation of ‘Hinduism as culture’ – as the avatar of the

culturalist alternative. The pivotal Chapter 4 offers a remarkable account of Bankim’s Hindu

culturalism not as nativist particularism, but as a new mode of subjectivist universalism focusedon anushilan (or culture as objectifying practice). The turn from individual self-interest to

culture is seen to follow the emergence of the westernized Bengali ‘babu’ as a figure of satire,

which itself reflected the growing subordination of Calcutta and indigenous entrepreneurship

by European capital after the financial crisis of 1847 – 8.

Sartori’s bravura handling of diverse sources successfully juxtaposes Bankim’s culturalist

Hinduism with both Sir John Seeley’s idea of a ‘national church’ and also Comtean sociology

as a remedy to the atomism of private interest. Comparing Tantric and Vaishnavite monism

with German idealism goes to show not the strands of ‘influence’ or derivation running from

Europe to Asia or vice versa, but the common predicament of diverse thinkers within a global

structure of transnational exchange. Thus, the spread of global capitalism worked to‘de-Europeanize the concepts that constitute now global thought forms of modernity’ (47).

It is especially hard to do justice to such a rich and complex work in a short review. Suffice

to say that this book deserves to be read and debated very widely. One issue for future debate is

the notion of ‘conditions of possibility’ for a concept, sometimes also rendered as conditions of

‘plausibility’ or ‘intelligibility’. Sartori’s highly abstract sense of general practice in modern

capitalism may leave open the question of how conditions of possibility become actualized, or

when one among a range of plausible or intelligible lines of thought becomes dominant.

Readers may also wonder about the historical significance of forms of thought in which the

kinds of conceptual coherence that Sartori deliberately prioritizes is less evident. Does the

reproduction of a relatively consistent concept across space necessarily require the same or

484 Social History vol. 34 : no. 4


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even similar conditions of plausibility in each place? Is the notion of ‘underdeterminedness’

denoted by culture exclusively modern, as Sartori argues, or are there transhistorical as well as

translingual terms of equivalence?

Sartori’s final chapter considers the ‘reification, rarification, and radicalization’ of the culture

concept in twentieth-century Bengal. The perceived failure of the Swadeshi movement’sculturalist project of national political economy (exemplified most clearly in the writings of

Aurobindo Ghose) fractured Bengali culture into aestheticized and increasingly communalized

fragments. Whether he is discussing emergent stereotypes of the ‘selfish’ Muslim peasant or the

growth of Bengali communism, Sartori’s range of view is breathtaking right to the end of this

brilliantly achieved account of the meanings of global modernity in Bengal.

Robert Travers

Cornell University

ª 2009, Robert Travers

Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitanism in an Age of Expansion,

1560–1660 (2008), ixþ 381 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, £18.99/

$35.00).

In this important book investigating the origins of the British Empire, Alison Games steers

readers away from the icons of British global power, the Royal Exchange, the decks of Royal

Navy warships, and the cane fields of Barbados and Jamaica, and transports them instead to the

trading stations of the Levant, the Indian Ocean and Japan. Likewise our companions are not

the courtiers, Privy Counsellors or elite merchants of London but rather the trading company

factors, private soldiers, clergy and governors who laboured in far-flung places. Hoping toreshape how scholars understand British imperial development in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, Game stresses that it was these globetrotters who ‘wove the web of

empire’ by collecting information, acquiring new ways of trading and, above all, learning to

‘adapt and to learn from the examples of rivals and predecessors’ (10). In short

‘cosmopolitanism defined English relations with the world’ during the critical century

spanning the coronation of Elizabeth and the Restoration (10). For Games, then, early English

expansion outside Europe was contingent, improvisational and adaptable, not powerful,

centralized and coercive as it would be in later centuries. In making this claim Games joins a

number of scholars, both those writing about the British Atlantic and those looking at British

colonization in the Indian and Pacific basins,1

who have emphasized the weakness of imperialinstitutions and the way that ‘places and people far from Europe defined how the English

experienced the world and the empire’ (11).

Individuals are central to Games’s argument and thus her approach is prosopographic,

focusing on career biographies told through correspondence and published writings. Some of

these accounts are familiar, such as her recounting of the influence that John Smith’s time as a

1See, for example, the essays in David Lambertand Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the BritishEmpire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth

Century (Cambridge, 2006) and Kathleen Wilson

(ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (New York, 2004).

November 2009 Reviews 485


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soldier, adventurer and slave in the Ottoman Empire had on his pursuit of trade and diplomacy

with the Powhatan in Virginia. Others, such as her study of Thomas Roe, are less so. Born to

an influential London family and educated at Oxford, Roe spent most of his life criss-crossing

the globe in service of the crown, individual patrons, trading companies and his own private

interests. An adventurer in Guyana, an investor in the East Indian and Virginia companies anda trade ambassador in India and the Ottoman Empire, Roe learned to adapt varying English

aims to different diplomatic and cultural contexts, transporting lessons and strategies from one

ocean to another to advance English interests. As Roe almost always operated from a position

of weakness, his willingness to accumulate more powerful foreign concerns proved central to

his success, a lesson critical for a weak state like England to succeed abroad.

In her focus on the Levant and East India companies, Games covers familiar ground, but in a

way that focuses on underlying cultural strategies to emphasize that the great trading

companies of this period whose imports stocked the shops in the Royal Exchange in London

were dependent on ‘global merchants’ who travelled to the East and ‘inserted themselves in

foreign communities’ (83). Not a ground-breaking conclusion, perhaps, but one that is key toGames’s argument. These men, and their travels, remind us that empire was not created by

‘inanimate forces’, but was made by the adaptable and improvisational decisions of individuals

and the distinctive commercial culture they developed – one that was neither English nor

foreign but an accommodation (83).

While Roe found success almost everywhere he went, borrowing lessons learned in

previous postings to shape new situations, the lessons of accommodation did not always work.

In Virginia, for example, English colonists deployed strategies garnered from experiences in

the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean – including the use of sexual alliances and cultural

assimilation – when confronted by the power of the Powhatan. Here, though, they found that

‘the terrain ultimately proved too different and the challenges of adaptation too severe torecreate the conditions that sustained trade elsewhere’ (120). It was only after these attempts

failed that the English developed a new kind of plantation-based empire, one that resembled

not Mediterranean models but those of the Spanish. Placing Virginia in this worldwide frame,

as Karen Kupperman and others have recently done, enables Games to show that English

struggles in the Chesapeake were not a product of bravado and ignorance, but rather of their

own cosmopolitanism.2

As much as The Web of Empire is about the impact of non-western endeavours – particularly

those in the eastern Mediterranean – on English colonization in the Atlantic, equally important

to Games’s argument is tracing how Atlantic experiences also influenced efforts elsewhere. For

decades many English merchants hoped to establish a colony in Madagascar to advance trade inthe Indian Ocean, but when their plans finally came to fruition in the 1640s their initial goals

had been transformed by English success in the Atlantic. Taking those permanent settlements

as their model, two successive groups of colonists eschewed establishing modest trading

stations and instead attempted to seize land aggressively for provision grounds. Unlike in the

Americas, however, the military power of the Malagasy, a dense forest, and a disease

environment inhospitable to outsiders doomed these combative attempts at colonization.

2Karen Kupperman, The Jamestown Project

(Cambridge, MA, 2007) and Peter Mancall (ed.),

The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624 (Chapel

Hill, 2007).



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Success in the Atlantic, colonists realized, was not always transportable; trade factories and

accommodation, rather than landed settlements, still mattered more elsewhere.

The major obstacle for a work that aims to offer an interpretation of the origins of an empire

based on individual experiences is that, unlike scholarship that traces the rise of a financial

system, shipbuilding technology or planting techniques, Games’s markers cannot be measuredby interest rates, numbers of ships or hogsheads of tobacco; rather, her argument is cultural.

And here, more fully incorporating evidence from objects such as the curiosity cabinets, prints

and maps she mentions but does not explore would have enabled her to show the extent to

which experiences in distant places shaped both the cultural imagination and the process of

building an empire. On the whole, though, Games succeeds admirably in demonstrating that

English cultural understanding of new places forged before 1660 were central to making

empire possible.

Christian J. Koot

Towson University, Maryland

ª 2009, Christian J. Koot

Ulbe Bosma, Juan Giusti-Cordero and G. Roger Knight (eds), Sugarlandia Revisited:

Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800–1940 (2007), 240 (Berghahn Books,

New York, $75.00).

The introduction of sugar is one of the key watersheds of the Portuguese colonization of

Brazil. Sugar cultivation provided the economic basis that led to the permanent settlement of

Portuguese colonists in the territory in the 1540s and was responsible for the institutionaliza-

tion of indigenous and African slavery in Brazil. As Stuart Schwartz has brilliantlydemonstrated in several articles and books, sugar brought wealth to the planters in the

north-east of the colony in the early seventeenth century. In the first century and a half of

Portuguese colonization, the vast majority of the slaves brought to the colony toiled primarily

on sugar plantations. Brazil was the primary destination for slaves in the Americas and most of

the slaves taken there came from another Portuguese colony – Angola. The tight connection

that sugar engendered between Africa and Brazil is reflected in a seventeenth-century saying:

‘Whoever says sugar says Brazil and whoever says Brazil says Angola.’

Brazilian prominence in sugar production had serious ramifications for the geopolitics of

European colonial powers and their relationship with the Americas and Africa. It was largely

because of sugar that the Dutch invaded and occupied Brazil from 1630 to 1654. Theexpulsion of the Dutch from the colony led to the spread of sugar cultivation to the Caribbean.

This development, in turn, reverberated across the Atlantic and deeply affected Africa as

Europeans began making inroads into the slave trade to guarantee the supply of labour to the

sugar-producing colonies in the Americas. The pre-eminence of sugar in the Atlantic would

only be overshadowed by the rise of gold mining – also in Brazil – in the late seventeenth

century. But, even then, the crop would remain economically important in Brazil and key to

the economy of the Caribbean.

Given such a tight connection between Brazilian history and sugar production, the absence

of a chapter on Brazil in the book organized by Ulbe Bosma, Juan Giusti-Cordero and G.

Roger Knight is somewhat perplexing. It might be argued that such a chapter would fall



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outside the chronological focus of the book, which deals primarily with the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, but the fact is that Brazilian sugar production was not restricted to the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, the country is still the largest producer of sugar

worldwide.

In Sugarlandia Revisited , very ambitious arguments are articulated in the introduction. Theauthors correctly claim that too much attention has been given to plantation as an essentially

archaic locus of mono-production to the detriment of analyses of social relations engendered

by sugar production. They pursue a logical extension of the argument by debunking the

conventional wisdom that equates plantations with technological backwardness. It was not

only slaves who could learn new techniques; Sugarlandia was also conducive to technological

innovation. Arguing for a comparative, indeed global, analysis of sugar production the authors

state that the scholarship on this subject ‘will not much advance further until such a

comparative perspective gains foothold’. They also argue that most of social relations produced

by colonialism in and out of the context of sugar production were enmeshed in hybridity – a

somewhat contentious claim as the close connection between hybridity and more hierarchicalforms of colonialism, fully demonstrated in the chapter by Barcia, was also present at early

phases of colonialism.

The problem is that the book falls short of the goals set in the introduction. For example,

although the authors establish comparative history as the main frame of analysis of the work,

most of the chapters deal in reality with Dutch Indonesia and only three chapters centre on the

Caribbean. Seriously undermining the original premise of the work, only one of the chapters is

framed in comparative terms. The book is at its best when labour force and peasant resistance

are discussed in the chapter authored by Sri Margana. A truly comprehensive, even if

sometimes circuitous, analysis takes the reader into the heart of the different types of labour

regimes in Java. However, even here there is no attempt whatsoever to establish anycomparative framework. The chapter by Manuel Barcia argues that David Eltis’s mega-project

about the quantitative dimensions of the slave trade underestimates the number of slaves

brought to Cuba between 1790 and 1820. This statement is not accurate. Indeed, Barcia’s

analysis would have been strengthened had he taken advantage of the online version of the

Slave Trade Dataset.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, Sugarlandia Revisited is a major contribution to

the history of sugar production and colonial studies.

Roquinaldo A. Ferreira

University of Virginia

ª 2009, Roquinaldo A. Ferreira

Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru and

its Long Aftermath (2008), xiiiþ 260 (Duke University Press, Durham, $79.95,

paperback $22.95).

Charles F. Walker has written a carefully researched and well-written account of a ruinous

earthquake that struck the Pacific coast of South America in 1746. The quake devastated the

vice-regal capital of Lima; it was followed by a massive tsunami that obliterated its port city,

Callao, killing virtually all of the inhabitants. Walker’s book complements a 2001 study of this



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earthquake/tsunami by Pablo Emilio Pérez-Mallaina Bueno, which provides a largely political

narrative of the disaster and subsequent reconstruction of Lima.1 Walker, however, uses the

earthquake/tsunami to examine the complex social, religious and ethnic fault lines of the

capital city. Shaky Colonialism offers insights into popular understandings of race, ethnicity,

gender and Baroque religiosity in Lima during the early Bourbon Reform period.According to Walker, most religious Limeños believed that the natural disaster that had

befallen Lima was God’s punishment for the immorality of the city’s population. As a result,

efforts to rebuild Lima led to contentious struggles over how to reform the city’s social life and

morals. Amid the horror and chaos, some religious mystics predicted further divine

punishment, such as additional earthquakes or fire, which only caused panic and unrest in the

devastated city. The physical reconstruction of Lima also prompted squabbles between colonial

authorities and local elites over how to rebuild the city’s houses. Residents favoured traditional

ornate Baroque facades and multi-storey dwellings, while crown officials unsuccessfully

advocated wider streets and simpler, one-storey structures more likely to withstand another

quake. The Peruvian viceroy, Josef Manso de Velásco (later named the Conde de Superunda)used the rebuilding of the city as the occasion to curb Baroque religiosity by restricting the

wealth of the regular orders and limiting the numbers of clergy living in the city. Moreover,

both clerical and state leaders tried to reform Lima’s morals by prohibiting the suggestive dress

and behaviour of the city’s veiled women (tapadas). Finally, Walker examines how social and

ethnic tensions in the city led to an aborted indigenous rebellion in 1750, followed by a bloody

but unsuccessful uprising in Huarochirı́ , a province that linked Lima with the rich Andean

highlands. In short, Shaky Colonialism provides not only the portrait of a city in crisis; it also

demonstrates a range of political, social, economic and religious problems endemic to Limeño

society during the first half of the eighteenth century.

The viceroy of Peru, Josef Manso de Velásco, emerges as the central figure in ShakyColonialism. A self-confident military man from modest hidalgo origins, Manso de Velásco was a

protégé of King Ferdinand VI’s most influential minister, the Marqués de la Ensenada. The

viceroy took credit for rebuilding Lima and constructing the Real Felipe fortress and a new

port city further inland at Bellavista. Manso de Velásco and his political allies were the author

or source for much of the extant archival documentation sent to Spain dealing with the natural

disaster of 1746. As a result, the historical issues covered in Shaky Colonialism quite often reflect

either the hierarchical views of this strong-willed viceroy or other key historical actors – even

those among Manso de Velásco’s enemies, who challenged his actions in Lima. The voices of

the Amerindian rebels in Lima and Huarochirı́ , the mystics predicting doom for the city or

women accused of immorality all appear in the archival documentation largely fromthe perspective of the viceroy and Limeño elites.

Shaky Colonialism is a fascinating and forcefully argued book that fills a major gap in the

scholarly literature on the early Bourbon period in the viceroyalty of Peru. By focusing on the

natural disaster of 1746, Walker presents a rich mosaic of race, ethnicity, gender, Baroque piety

and the beginnings of Enlightenment-inspired Bourbon regalism in a major urban centre

during this largely under-studied period. Despite these accomplishments, Shaky Colonialism

focuses so closely on the earthquake/tsunami and its aftermath that it sometimes fails to

1Pablo Emilio Pérez-Mallaina Bueno, Retrato de

una ciudad en crisis: La sociedad limeña ante el

movimiento sı́smico de 1746 (Sevilla, Consejo Super-

ior de Investigaciones Cientı́ficas, 2001).



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connect events surrounding this natural disaster more directly to the overall reform of the

Spanish Atlantic Empire under the early Bourbons. Placing conflicts between the viceroy and

the church (especially Archbishop Barroeta and the religious orders) and between reformers,

local elites and rebellious Amerindians within the framework of Bourbon regalist policies

might have clarified the nature of political squabbles and the apparent contradictions in crownpolicy during the period. These relatively modest criticisms do not detract from the substantial

contributions of Shaky Colonialism, which is an important addition to the slim number of

volumes on early eighteenth-century Peru.

Kenneth J. Andrien

Ohio State University

ª 2009, Kenneth J. Andrien

Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

(2004), xvþ 299 (Duke University Press, Durham and London, $79.95/£45.28,paperback $22.95/£13.00).

Irene Silverblatt has provided us with a theoretically sophisticated and empirically sound study

of interest to anthropologists, historians and scholars of colonial literature. Modern Inquisitions is

a work of mature scholarship that successfully argues for the ‘modern’ qualities of the

Inquisition in colonial Peru, especially in the areas of ‘race-thinking’ and bureaucratic

procedure (5, 16). As such, it is a substantial intervention into debates concerning the nature of

empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the continuities as well as differences

between the late medieval, early modern and contemporary worlds, and the emergence and

transformation of Baroque contexts, categories and practices in the Americas. Perhaps mostprovocatively, Silverblatt argues that the origins of ‘modernity’ and ‘the subterranean stream of

western history’ can be traced to the types of hierarchical thinking, bureaucratic procedures

and repressive measures evident in the records of the Peruvian Inquisition (4). That she does so

while simultaneously calling into question the image of the Inquisition as the ‘opposite of

Anglo-dominated modernity’ indicates the subtlety of her argument, despite its extensive

reach (226). Modern Inquisitions engages with theoretical questions of the highest importance

for contemporary scholarship, while also revealing intriguing aspects of personal experience

and daily life in the early modern Andean world.

Silverblatt’s analysis is based on church records, evangelizing sermons and missionary guides

found in Peruvian and Spanish archives. Possibly the most compelling sentence is the final onein the text, where Silverblatt asserts: ‘We owe it to those who are central to our lives –

including those people whose lives are crucial for our scholarship – not just to recognize the

limitations of knowledge but to explore its possibilities’ (233). She does precisely this in the

preceding pages, developing insights that make intelligible the complexities of ‘race thinking’,

religious belief and practice, and identity construction, as well as physical repression, including

torture, in this time and place. Silverblatt, drawing upon Hannah Arendt but extending her

claims back to the era of Iberian expansion, argues that ‘race-thinking’ allows us to move

beyond nineteenth-century definitions of race (predicated, as we now know, on faulty

understandings of biology) to understand the ‘interpenetrating’ realities of ethnicity, caste,



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nationalism and early modern racialism at a time when ‘Iberia was simultaneously building a

state and an empire’ (17). This dynamic and contingent definition of identity construction

provides the theoretical fuel for a nuanced investigation into ‘colonial cultural politics’ (115).

As Silverblatt notes, ‘The world of the seventeenth century was a religious world, and native

Peruvians constructed an array of religious stances’ (26). Indeed, the unravelling of thecomplexities of conversion and the multiple directions of colonial cultural flows, all in an

increasingly repressive era when authorities tried to force heterogeneous realities into

increasingly irrelevant categories of purity and authenticity, is one of the most fascinating areas

of this study. Thus, the author spends considerable time on Lima’s ‘Great Jewish Conspiracy’

of 1635 – 9, retelling the poignant stories of the torture and execution of the alleged ‘hidden

Jews’ Doña Mencia de Luna, Mañuel Henrı́quez and Manuel Bautista Pérez. Silverblatt

convincingly demonstrates that Inquisition practices, including torture, though horrific, must

be considered an integral part of the early modern world, including ‘nations we are most likely

to call civilized (like England, France, and Holland)’ (75). She also shows how the old wine of

Christian anti-Semitism and fear of Muslims – on the Iberian peninsula focused for centurieson ‘limpieza de sangre ’ – was repackaged in the new bottle of the Iberian colonial world, where

imperial anxieties led to increasing suspicion and ultimately paranoia concerning ‘New

Christians,’ but also heretical ‘Indians,’ ‘negros’, mixed racial peoples, women and com-

binations of all of the above.

That the Peruvian Inquisition considered merchants to be increasingly suspicious in part

refers to the expanding commercial possibilities of the early modern world. The equation

of ‘Portuguese’ with ‘likely hidden Jew’ reveals something about migration and the

tensions of a ‘Spanish’ identity in formation (60), and the magnification of these fears after

the Dutch takeover of Portuguese Brazil demonstrates the cultural politics of colonial

competition (149). Another interesting response to the colonial context came with thecomplex process by which ‘Andeans came to see themselves as Indian’ (193). The making of an

‘Indian’ identity out of the diverse ethnicities of the indigenous world and the spread of the

myth of the Inka’s benevolence are well-known processes. Perhaps Silverblatt’s most

important contribution here is to remind us that ‘swings from noble savage to murderous

savage, from shattered victim to heroic resister, from the socialist empire of the Incas to

Cuzco’s totalitarian tyranny have drained the life and lessons from ‘‘Indian’’ ’ (212). Her

example of historically specific, rigorously contextual yet theoretically informed analysis is

most welcome.

The best scholarship points towards future research agendas. Silverblatt’s alignment with

those who see the early Iberian presence in the Americas as ‘colonial’ and as a fundamentalbuilding block of our contemporary ‘global’ world raises important comparative issues, across

time as well as in terms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Surely all empires have their

‘subterranean streams’? How does the emergence of ‘the West’ from the late fifteenth through

to the mid-twentieth century compare with earlier (Han China, the Roman and Mongol

Empires, etc.) and later (the United States-dominated global order of the mid- to late

twentieth century) imperial systems? If, as Silverblatt convincingly argues, ‘race-thinking’,

violence, the abuse of power and torture have all been constituent parts of what we define as

civilization and modernity, what then becomes the basis for opposing these practices, should

one choose to do so? Finally, as Silverblatt herself notes, ‘In spite of the familiarities, the early



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modern world was indeed strange, and analyses with an eye toward its distinctiveness would be

a welcome complement to this study’ (280). We are indebted to Irene Silverblatt for bringing

us to the point where we can contemplate these issues.

James Krippner

Haverford College, Pennsylvaniaª 2009, James Krippner

Francie R. Chassen-Lopez, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the

South, Mexico 1867–1911 (2004), xvþ 608 (Penn State University Press, University

Park, PA, $85.00, paperback $30.00).

Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive

Landscapes (2004), xxþ 300 (Duke University Press, Durham, $79.95, paperback

$22.95).

In Mexico, the decades from the end of Maximilian’s imperial experiment in 1867 to the

outbreak of revolution in 1911 brought regime consolidation, export-oriented commercial

development and complex social changes. Too often, however, that era appears as a prelude to

revolution, with the regime of Porfirio Dı́az demonized as the dictatorial root of all problems.

The books reviewed here make significant contributions to analysing Mexico’s first era of

authoritarian liberalism as a historical period with its own complex and often contradictory

characteristics. As a result, we gain new understandings of nineteenth-century history – and

the revolution that followed.

The two books are similar in important ways. Both focus on the late nineteenth century,while looking back to earlier times of contested nation-building and forward to revolution;

both focus on states in south-eastern Mexico that were subject to new and often disruptive

export development after 1880; both place provincial details in national context, building upon

regional understandings to contribute to national history. They are also very different – in

thematic emphases, historiographic orientations and analytical styles.

Craib’s Cartographic Mexico is better crafted as a book. It focuses clearly and persistently

on state-making and the challenge of generating maps that would allow the emerging and

long-contested national regime to know, and thus to rule more effectively, its diverse

territories. He begins with a brief analysis of post-independence cartography, emphasizing

the limits of making new maps based on accumulations of old maps. He focuses onPorfirian efforts to use military surveyors to map the territory between the capital and the

Gulf coast, detailing the challenges of exploring rugged sections of the state of Veracruz,

then rapidly opening to coffee and vanilla export production. A key concern of the

military mapmakers – and Craib – was the necessity of clear surveys to the liberal policy of

privatizing community lands – and the difficulty of gaining such locally grounded

knowledge, which explains in part the persistent problems and conflicts of privatization.

He concludes by revealing how parallel local knowledge remained essential to the post-

revolutionary problem of reconstituting communal lands as state-granted ejidos (co-

operative farms) – a process that often remained dependent on pre-revolutionary maps and

surveyors.



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Craib’s conclusions emphasize the challenges faced by a state seeking to map and codify

local knowledge. After decades of effort crossing rugged, sometimes impenetrable terrain,

military mapmakers barely approximated local knowledge. They produced maps that were

impositions as much as revelations. For a scholar who has spent some effort exploring

archives in search of local knowledge of nineteenth-century Mexico, reading Craibbrought a sense of comradeship. His explanation of the difficulties of the state seeking such

knowledge regularized and codified my frustrations. There was a moment when I

responded: of course, why did I not see this? But I did not see the problem so clearly

until Craib led me to a more analytical understanding of a lingering uncertainty. That is a

sign of very good history. In many ways, Craib offers a model of how to choose a

dissertation topic that is clearly focused – analytically, regionally and in archival resources –

and to turn it into a book that matters to our understanding of the larger trajectory

of Mexican history. His vision of the limits of the Porfirian state must inform further

analyses.

That vision acknowledges analytical limits that must also still be surmounted. Craib, likePorfirian mapmakers, sees the state and its agents very clearly. Like them, he knows that he

cannot see the complex and contested local knowledge of socially constructed landscapes that

organized life in diverse communities and shaped their relations with the state. His work makes

it clear that the more detailed local knowledge existed, and that the regime’s inability to enter

and codify its complexity limited state powers. Thus Craib demonstrates, once again, that

history must proceed as analysis of encounters between national and provincial powers and

diverse, often assertive communities. The challenge is that such communities can only be

engaged one (or a few) at a time. But if scholars are to escape the limits of seeing like a state,

we must take up the challenge of surmounting the difficulties that frustrated Porfirian

mapmakers – we must seek and analyse local knowledge. For nineteenth-century Veracruz,that process has begun in Emilio Kourı́ ’s deep local study of Papantla, which Craib consulted

in early dissertation form, and is now published as A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and

Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford, 2004). Reading Craib and Kourı́ in tandem provides

a superb perspective on nineteenth-century Mexican state-making in Veracruz, with Craib

emphasizing the state’s inability to penetrate local communities and Kourı́ detailing how the

state engaged diverse local groups in Papantla, provoking change that was sometimes

conflictive, and always locally mediated.

In From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, Chassen-Lopez takes on the challenges that Porfirian

mapmakers and Craib found daunting. She has committed decades of research and analysis to

exploring the regional complexities and local communities of late nineteenth-century Oaxaca,and to placing them in the context of internationally linked economic developments and state

and national political dynamics. She differentiates the Zapotec and Mixtec uplands, where

commercial prospects remained limited and indigenous communities held strong, from the

regions nearer the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, where coffee and other crops provided export

opportunities and change proved more disruptive. She calls the latter regions of Porfirian

development and details the ways that entrepreneurs and indigenous communities sometimes

sought parallel opportunities, and sometimes faced deep conflicts.

There is a sense of Oaxacan pride throughout. That commitment clearly drove the

deep research that marks the book. It also leads to analyses that want to take Oaxaca’s

great liberal leaders, Benito Juárez and Porfirio Dı́az, at their word as proponents of



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popular welfare, local political and economic elites as promoters of modernization for the

common good, and diverse indigenous communities as defenders of deep yet changing

traditions of community rights. Chassen-López details contradictions between these many

Oaxacans, but rarely engages them analytically. Oaxaca’s history of limited conflict during

the nineteenth century and into the era of revolution facilitates that perspective. Ironically,she reacts against analysts who, she believes, denigrate Oaxacan communities as lacking

revolutionary commitments. (I, for one, always found the limited mobilizations of Oaxacan

villagers after 1910 as evidence of their long and uniquely effective struggles to defend

community lands and autonomies during centuries of colonial rule and early national state-

making. Having fended off the worst expropriations and exploitations, they had good reasons

to stand back from the deadly conflicts of revolution). Yet the absence of widespread and

persistent violent conflicts allows the author to analyse power holders and communities as

engaged in constant jostling, while negotiating different but not incompatible visions of the

good.

In a work that attempts so much, there are inevitable limits. I find the survey of regionalpolitical economy useful, but not deeply analytical. There is too much acceptance that

entrepreneurs sought progress, not primarily their own profits. There are repeated references

to a mining boom that was perhaps significant in local contex, but paled before the silver,

copper and petroleum booms elsewhere in Mexico. Chassen-López eagerly debates other

scholars whom she sees as having misperceived Oaxaca and Mexico in the nineteenth century.

But too often she sets up straw analysts; too often she sees debates between scholars who also

converge; sometimes she mischaracterizes; and sometimes she offers as innovative conclusions

understandings that authors she cites have developed in earlier works (that she does not cite). If

a scholar is going to debate her colleagues, it is essential to characterize carefully and read

widely.Still, there is far more innovation that problem here. Chassen-Lopez offers one of the first

and most penetrating investigations of the emergence of Mexico’s nineteenth-century coffee

export economy, and its complex consequences for state politics and indigenous communities.

She is especially effective in exploring the histories of indigenous communities in the context

of state and national political economies. From Juchitán and its history of conflicts beginning

in the 1840s, through the complex adaptations and sporadic tumults of villagers across the state

later in the century, Chassen-López combines effective readings of other scholars with her

own new research and analysis to offer a model for historians to come. Unlike her explorations

of political economy, which remain largely descriptive, in detailing Oaxaca’s diverse

indigenous communities she integrates new perspectives on gender, ethnicity and culture toproduce very complex understandings.

In the latter, she demonstrates that what Porfirian mapmakers found daunting, a scholar

committed to the long and hard work of engaging local documentation can accomplish with

real success. Ultimately, Chassen-Lopez has provided the more ambitious, if less neatly crafted

book. Students, scholars and others seeking a more sophisticated introduction to state-making

in nineteenth-century Mexico will read Craib’s Cartographic Mexico, which will become and

long remain one of the foundational works with which scholars must engage to understand the

complex relations between state-making, political economy and local communities of diverse

cultures during the same pivotal era. Chassen-López’s study joins Allen Wells and Gilbert

Joseph’s Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatán,



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1876–1915 (Stanford, 1996) as a pivotal regional analysis of the Porfirian project and the

emergence of limited revolution in south-eastern Mexico.

John Tutino

Georgetown University

ª 2009, John Tutino

Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in

American Theater and Film Before World War II (2007), 456 (University of North

Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, $65.00, paperback $22.50).

One of the most underrated social critics of our time has done it again. In Forgeries of Memory

and Meaning Cedric J. Robinson most centrally examines the fledgling media industrial sphere

of film in antebellum America as a key site in the racial production of a reconstructed national

identity, with the collapse of the slave system and the rise of ‘free labor’. In 1983, Robinson’smagnum opus Black Marxism transformed studies of capitalist social relations. He literally

‘changed the game’ with his paradigm-shifting knowledge system of ‘racial capitalism’ – racial

difference is a key mode through which capitalist social relations assign value to the

commodity form, produce the meaning of markets and facilitate the conduct of

accumulation.1 In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning , Robinson sets his sights on the prominent

paradigm of our times, the ‘Neo-Marxist’ discourse theory of Michel Foucault. Foucault

defines discourse as a set of ideas and practices that, when taken together within a specific time

and place, organize the way a society defines certain truths about itself. This discursive

approach to archival data alongside his power/knowledge analytic ‘regimes of truth’ offers

important insights – namely, that power operates precisely in the ways society determines whatcan and cannot be discussed, knowable or even imagined as possible.

Some scholars are just plain dismissive of what is now pejoratively shorthanded as the

‘cultural turn’ in historical studies. Yet power/knowledge requires honest engagement for

scholars of the African diaspora who seek to interrogate ‘the West’, with the Haitian

Revolution as perhaps one of the first historical episodes that comes to mind. The

‘unthinkable’ nature of Haiti’s possibility within the ‘regimes of truth’ established by

Enlightenment theories of race, nation and Republican citizenship may help us understand

how power operates, but it tells us little about the world of the slaves from which power was

overturned, or what Foucault called ‘subjugated knowledge’. Therefore it is both from within

the profound pervasiveness and Beyond the Boundary of Foucault’s ‘regimes of truth’ whereRobinson begins to work.2

The true beauty of Forgeries of Memory and Meaning is that it tackles the mass cultural realm of

filmmaking to cut against the grain of a seemingly all-encompassing panoptical grid of power/

knowledge. In the gap between the cinematic construction of national mythmaking and the

‘subjugated’ practices of black (not to be confused with black face ) minstrelsy and race film

1Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London, 1983).

2See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘An unthinkable

history’ in Silencing the Past: Power and the

Production of History (Boston, 1997) and C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London, 1963).



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production, Robinson explores a world of relative chaos, thoughtful improvisation, seized-

upon chances and reactionary synthesis, provisionally framed by ‘forgeries’, or what he terms

racial regimes – fragmented formulations of ‘natural history’ woven together by narratives of

racial knowledge.

The book is organized into five chapters with a preface. In the preface, Robinson offers anengaging theoretical discussion to concede that Foucault in fact does account for ‘autonomous

ways of knowing and being’ in the world ‘not dependent on the approval of the established

regimes of thought’. Foucault argues that power operates by burying, disguising or subjugating

this ‘local character of criticism’ within a ‘functionalist coherence or formal systemization’

(81).3 Yet Robinson examines the manifestation of racial regimes of thought, expressed

through theatre and film production, to remind us that the reading of subjugated knowledge as

buried or disguised leads to a kind of ‘Unitarianism’. The ‘coexistence of alternative,

oppositional, or simply different relations of power’ is not fully examined (xi). He concludes

that we must interrogate racial regimes from within their own ‘discernible origins and

mechanisms of assembly’ and outside of their utility function for tracking the genealogies of dominant regimes of truth. It is not simply the rupture between knowledge systems that is vital

to historical work, but the ‘archeological imprint of human agency’ which ‘radically alienates

the histories of racial regimes from their own claims of naturalism’ (xiii).

In the first chapter, Robinson unpacks the ‘invention of the Negro’ by tracing the imperial logic

of Shakespearean England. The chapter ends by treading the well-covered ground of Chicago’s

1893 Columbian Exposition as a modern US racial forgery of social order sutured together out

of the long shadow cast from post-Civil War ‘chaos’. The next chapter, ‘In the year 1915’, uses

Birth of a Nation to track how previously disparate financial, industrial and commercial interests

converged on the fledgling film industry. Such efforts helped to consolidate capital through

monopolies on film technology patents and investments. At the same time this cultural-economic convergence constructed the ‘plantation genre’ as a cinematic narrative of nostalgia

for the ‘Old South’, that repressed immigrant dissidence, the anarchy of American empire and

cross-racial solidarities against Jim Crow capitalism, all under the hegemony of whiteness.

Chapters three and four follow the lead of the best scholarship in black cinema studies,

finding moments of resistance or at least critique in the black minstrelsy of Broadway icons like

Bob Cole, Bert Williams and Aida Overton Walker at the turn of the twentieth century, and

in the race film productions of figures including Oscar Micheaux. What is relatively novel

about Robinson’s insights here is that he routes these alternative knowledges through the black

capital and race conscious networks generated by trans-regional theatre circuits, dramatic stock

companies and inter-collegiate dramatic associations situated within the New Negro politics of a post-migration/race riots America. The final chapter posits the legacy of the ‘mulatto genre’

that responds to New Negroes by disseminating cinematic images of black social and sexual

miscegenation (mobility) as allegories for national chaos. As film moved to sound and America

expanded its empire, the ‘jungle film genre’ gained prominence, where the Tarzan series and

Trader Horn posit that for the savages ‘dehumanizing work was freedom, forced labor the

passage to civilization’ (305).

3Michel Foucault, ‘Two lectures’ in Power/

Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings

(New York, 1980).



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Through his notion of ‘racial regimes’ Robinson confronts us with operations of power that

are not simply expressed through the Foucauldian formation of new subjects, but a power that

is possessed. Here there are identifiable actors, reactions, decisions and consequences . . . and

even systemic disruptions that require responses (as compared to momentary ruptures that

seem inevitably incorporated). But still Robinson finds substantial use-value in the power/knowledge framework. Unlike any other work that I have read, Forgeries of Memory and

Meaning powerfully brings together a close reading of film texts and the film industry situated

within the appropriate webs of capitalist economic development, imperial encroachments and,

most importantly, the social and cultural discontents that require a cultural response – a racial

forgery of natural history. We see here the continual importance of history in constructing the

present.

Perhaps the first chapter covers too wide a swath of history, from Victorian England to the

late nineteenth-century US. Theoretically we end up with less of an engagement with

‘regimes of truth’ and more of a Gramscian analysis of cultural ‘hegemony’ in discursive

clothing. I see here much more a story of historic blocks, cross-racial and cross-class consent,and dissident masses than one about the constitution of subjects, normalization or descriptions

of expressive over repressive power.4 But this does not in any way undermine my appreciation

for Robinson’s desire to thematize the fact that many invoke Foucault without fully engag-

ing with his work. It could have proven methodologically beneficial to offer a more

comprehensive mapping of the theoretical landscape deployed here. There is no question that

Forgeries of Memory and Meaning is already a classic in studies of film as a media, industry and

social experience, but it is my hope that ‘racial regimes’ becomes one of the most important

methods for examining the relations of power in our ‘post-modern’ times.

Davarian L. Baldwin

Trinity College ª 2009, Davarian L. Baldwin

Raúl A. Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861

(2008), xiiiþ 297 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, $35.00).

Not since David Montejanos’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (Austin, 1987) have

we seen such a thorough treatment of Tejano ethnic identity and race relations in a single text.

Placing Tejano society in a larger historical and transnational context, Ramos maps the many

layers of social, political and cultural forces that shaped Tejano identity and status from 1821 to1861. Tejanos – specifically Bejareños (residents of the town of Villa de Béxar) formed their

identities in relation to indigenous peoples and Anglo immigrants, but also these larger local,

national and transnational factors. Mapping shifts in Bexareño identity, Ramos is able to

challenge Montejano’s theory of a ‘peace structure’, demonstrating that any peace structure

that might have existed between Anglo immigrants and Bejareños had collapsed long before

the US–Mexican War.

4See Antonio Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison

Notebooks (New York, 1971) and Stuart Hall,

‘Notes on deconstructing the popular’ in Raphael

Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory(London, 1981).



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Ramos chooses the 1718 founding of the mission of San Antonio de Valero and its town,

Villa de Béxar, as his starting point. While the focus of the text is 1821 – 61, the century of

frontier living that precedes this focus is critical for establishing the context of his argument.

From 1718 to 1821, the colonists of Béxar struggled to establish a Spanish presence in the

region. With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Spanish government became concerned withUS aggression and sent more troops to the area, thus increasing the military presence in a town

already identified, in part, by its wars against indigenous peoples. Once Ramos turns his gaze

to 1821, the impact of this early colonial history becomes clear. Like other settler-colonizers on

the Spanish-Mexican frontier, Bejareños struggled against the elements, against the central

government and against the indigenous people who had preceded them to the area. Like other

Spanish-Mexican frontier societies as well, the distance of the community from the metropol

meant that racial categories were important yet fluid – people sometimes moved from mestizo

to Spanish standing in a single generation.

In discussing ethnic identity, one of Ramos’s most important contributions is his complex

read of Bexareños in relation to the indigenous peoples of Texas. Drawing on reports thatlocal officials sent to Mexico, he is able to map the different relationships that Spanish and then

Mexican colonists established with indigenous peoples; with some nations they traded and

made alliances, with others they made war. Indigenous nations that resisted Mexican

occupation were met with full military force and, in government reports, were depicted as

sub-human. Those who did not resist were either incorporated into the mission system or

became trade partners. To complicate the ethnic landscape of Béxar, the anti-Indian campaigns

of Anglo-Americans to the east pushed some American peoples into Texas. For example,

Cherokee peoples moved into the region and brokered treaties with Mexican government

officials.

Throughout the 1820s, then, as Anglo-Americans began to immigrate west to Texas, so didindigenous peoples. Bexareños welcomed both, traded with both, but acted as cultural brokers

between the Bexareño community and the Mexican government, and immigrating Anglo-

Americans. According to Ramos, ‘marriages, commercial ties, and social friendships between

leading Anglos and Tejano elites allowed Tejanos to act as cultural brokers between the recent

immigrants and the nascent Mexican government’ (85). And so Ramos tells the familiar story

of Tejanos welcoming Anglo-Americans into Texas, but he also complicates the narrative.

He introduces stories of insurgencies, mapping federalist revolts against the Mexican centralist

government where Anglo-Americans and Tejanos fought side by side. His mapping of familial

and masonic ties, cultural brokering and political alliances makes the decision of so many

Tejanos to side with the insurrectionists of 1836 understandable.By 1836, Ramos argues, the political, national and ethnic map of Béxar was layered and

complex. Bexareños who allied themselves with Anglo-American insurrectionists fought for

federalism and the Mexican Constitution of 1824. For a Bexareño such as Juan Seguı́n,

challenging the centralist government would not have made him any less of a patriot than

those who fought by the side of Santa Anna. Yet, for Tejanos, the close of the war and the

declaration of Texan independence brought with it a new government and a new identity.

Still cultural brokers, a gradual shift began to take place. Tejanos no longer brokered

relationships to gain support for immigrating Anglo-Americans; instead they brokered

relationships to garner resources for their home communities – resources which the Anglo-

Americans now held.



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By 1842, Ramos argues, there was no ‘peace structure’. For all the cultural brokering in

which Juan Seguı́n had engaged, he became suspect in an attempted reconquest of San

Antonio, and few Anglo-Americans came to his defence. Seguı́n fled to Mexico.

Intermarriages continued between Anglo-Americans and Tejanas, but now served as part of

the Anglo conquest. By the 1850s, the Know-Nothing party emerged strongly in San Antonio,winning several city council seats, including the mayor’s seat. Tejanos were clearly on the

defensive. In this context, Ramos argues, the affiliation of Tejanos with the Democratic party

becomes understandable, for during this time of repression it was the Democratic party that

moved to provide a voice to Tejanos. When Know-Nothings pushed through legislation

eliminating Spanish translations of new laws, Democrats founded a newspaper to print

translations. They sponsored political meetings for Tejanos, and eventually provided translators

at Democratic meetings. By the time of the Civil War the Democratic party had a strong

record of supporting the Tejanos of the greater San Antonio area.

Beyond the Alamo reminds us of the complex interactions between culture, nation and

history that shape and reshape ethnic identities. Out of context, a Tejano such as Juan Seguı́nsiding with the insurrectionists of 1836 makes no sense. But in context, stripped of all

essentialist assumptions of what it means to be Mexican, Tejano or Bexareño, such a decision is

perfectly understandable. This is the kind of history, Ramos argues, that we all need to be

writing –‘To understand the context and shifting ground where identity takes root requires

historians to move beyond their comfort zones and training specialties into multiple languages,

national histories, and historiographies’ (234). In Beyond the Alamo, Ramos does just that. His

text will be a great aid for those teaching histories of the American south-west, and a good fit

as a required text for upper division and graduate seminars in Chicana/o history and the history

of the West. Because of his challenge to Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans, it would also make a

perfect companion text for this earlier work.Linda Heidenreich

Washington State University

ª 2009, Linda Heidenreich

Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar

Politics (2007), xiiiþ 278 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, $65.00,

paperback $24.95).

Joshua Zeitz’s primary argument in White Ethnic New York is that ethnic and religiousdifferences among whites, specifically between Jews, on the one hand, and Irish and Italian

Catholics on the other, determined the political fault lines in New York into the 1970s

more than did racial differences. Moreover, he contends, the Roosevelt coalition began to

fray as early as the 1940s, well before race became a central political concern. Zeitz thus

takes issue with those historians who see the 1960s as a pivotal time in the coming apart of

the New Deal majority largely because of the creation by Jews and Catholic ethnics of a

white bloc in opposition to black demands for social equality and political power. His book

is a valuable and convincing reminder that divisions other than those now commonly

viewed as racial ones motivated political actors in New York through most of the twentieth

century.



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Zeitz makes the case that Jews and Catholics held dramatically differing worldviews based

on religious teachings, historical memory and personal experience. While New York Jews

were mainly secular and valued ‘political dissent’, ‘intellectual freedom’ and individualism,

Catholics held to a religious and communitarian outlook that prized ‘obedience to authority’

(2). These divergent philosophies were born of historical experiences in the nineteenthcentury, but were continually reinforced by family and school: Jews attended public school

and practised a ‘child-centric’ style of parenting that encouraged children to think

independently. Catholic families and parochial schools, on the other hand, instilled respect

for authority and a sense of hierarchy in which all authority figures ultimately ‘derived their

power from the same source’ (83). Zeitz certainly recognizes the importance of class in the

formation of political attitudes, but he sees religious/ethnic distinctions as primary.

As early as the 1930s, these differing worldviews had political repercussions. To put it

simply, Jews tended to be more afraid of fascism, and Catholics of communism. Thus the two

communities lined up on opposite sides of the Spanish Civil War and, later, took opposing

stances on McCarthyism. Jews tended to split their votes between the Democratic party andtwo local parties – the American Labor party, and the Liberal party – that pushed for an

extension of the New Deal. By the 1940s, however, Catholics, suspicious of critiques of

capitalism, were beginning their move away from the Democrats toward the Republicans.

One implication of this analysis that Zeitz never quite carries through is that the New Deal

coalition never really existed at all at the local level. He does, however, point out that New

York’s peculiar system of multi-party endorsements meant that even when they voted for the

same candidate, Catholics and Jews often voted for different parties and programmes.

Zeitz stresses the continuity of ethnic/religious political attitudes in the 1960s. Even in

relation to issues that arose to challenge old attitudes and alignments, he downplays the salience

of race. Jewish continuity was especially apparent, as Jews voted liberal well into the 1970s.Catholics, meanwhile, continued their rightward drift. Perhaps the most important challenge

to the New Deal coalition came from the campus left, which attracted support not only from

Jewish students, but even from their parents. Most Catholics were outraged at the disregard for

authority that the New Left represented. But the rise of a small but vocal Catholic left among

students and clergy put Catholic conservatives in the ironic position of rejecting clerical

authority and disrespecting priests and nuns. Under this pressure, the cohesive Catholic

subculture began to unravel. Conflicts over such issues as rising crime, the 1968 teachers’

strikes, and opposition to scatter-site public housing that others see as fundamentally racial in

nature, Zeitz takes at face value as a real concern for actually rising crime rates, a conflict over

labour rights and the wisdom of decentralization, and a middle-class worry about propertyvalues.

There is much to debate in White Ethnic New York. Chief among debatable points is Zeitz’s

tendency to downplay the depth of racism and racial discrimination in New York, both as it

informed black calls for decentralization and as it motivated white ‘backlash’ politics. Indeed,

Zeitz comes close to denying that backlash existed at all. By classifying 1969 Democratic

mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino as a moderate liberal, he is able to show that liberals

(Liberal party candidate John Lindsay and Procaccino) outpolled the one conservative

candidate (Republican-Conservative John Marchi) by nearly four to one. (I have to admit that

my own scepticism about this analysis is based not only on my reading of other historians’

descriptions of events, but also my memories of the mood in the largely Catholic Queens



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neighbourhood in which I grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s.) As sociologist Jonathan

Rieder showed long ago, the complexity of ethnic and racial politics was such that ‘crime’ was

both a real and reasonable concern and a racist codeword.

Other objections amount to quibbles. Zeitz, for example, uses rabbis’ sermons as the main

body of evidence for the liberal attitudes of a group that he describes as largely secular andunlikely to attend synagogue. In discussing the historical sources of Jewish anti-authoritarianism,

Zeitz cites the Hasidic movement of the eighteenth century but ignores the Haskalah (Jewish

Enlightenment) of the nineteenth, in reaction to whose critique of tradition the Hasidim aligned

with their erstwhile traditionalist opponents. Some might also object to his characterization of

the New Left as an infantile response to permissive Jewish parenting styles.

In any case, Zeitz does not deny that a white voting bloc eventually came into existence in

response to changing demographics and resulting political and cultural challenges. He simply

implies that this came about some time in the 1980s, perhaps with the rise of the Koch and

Giuliani coalitions. His narrative, however, leaves that story for another time.

Daniel Soyer Fordham University, NY

ª 2009, Daniel Soyer

Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons. Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City 1550–1660 (2008),

xviiþ 544 (Cambridge University Press, London and New York, £50.00/$99.00).

This densely documented book is a work of meticulous scholarship and striking historical ima-

gination. Its prime sources are the records of Bridewell, describing the 40,000 or so offenders

presented to its courts in the early seventeenth century and the many other offenderscommitted there between court meetings. Griffiths has supplemented these with material from

wards and parishes and a host of other City institutions in the century after 1550. From this

evidence, full of character and incident, he creates a picture of criminal behaviour and the

texture of street life, and of the mental maps and contemporary perceptions of the ‘lost’

Londons (in the plural) of his title. His treatment combines a range of historical skills, each

with its own opportunities and hazards, and the result is a work which will appeal to all

historians of crime and policing, local government and public information, and urban society

and culture.

Those interested in crime and policing should turn to the back of the book first. The

offenders and offences before the Bridewell courts are tabulated in detail and carefully mappedin an Appendix. The numbers underline points made in the text, sometimes confirming

suggestions made by previous historians, often adding fresh material. Offences were

concentrated in the two wards of Farringdon, where the old City and the growing West

End met in a social mix presenting rich opportunities. Vagrancy continued its rise among

presented offences, replacing the sexual misdemeanours prominent in the early Elizabethan

period; and ‘street’ offences of all kinds multiplied from the 1620s, underscoring Griffiths’s

central argument about the impact of London’s growth on the attitudes of constables,

magistrates and the public in general. Single women became more prominent, making up 40

per cent of vagrants by the 1630s, one among many indicators of the changing sex ratio of the

City’s population (69, 204, 207 – 8). This material usefully fills the chronological gap between



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the earlier studies of Archer and of Shoemaker and Beattie,1 so that we now have a more or

less complete picture of petty crime in London from 1560 through to the eighteenth century.

Griffiths also has some important material on the nature of criminal processes and policing in

the early modern capital. Bridewell’s governors are shown to have been cautious in the use of

their summary jurisdiction, and fully conscious that their charter, with its discretionary powers,was open to challenge. The penalties they imposed were numerous, most commonly a

whipping (sometimes used to extort a confession), often work (usually for very short periods),

sometimes transportation to the plantations (though only with the consent of the offenders).

The court’s officers were never wholly reliable, and might – like some alleged relations of the

governors themselves – end up as offenders. But Griffiths is concerned to stress the importance

and general efficiency of public policing in this period. By 1643 there were 800 men in wards

and parishes policing the square mile of the City, and their identities, status, energy and

activities are documented in often colourful detail. By 1642 marshals and constables were

bringing 600 or more suspects to Bridewell every year. London was better policed, Griffiths

concludes, than earlier historians have supposed.The offenders quite properly receive even fuller treatment than the police. Griffiths rehearses

their life stories, their identifying marks and nicknames, their practices and their associates. His

technique might be described as pointillist, building a coherent image from a vast multitude of

carefully arranged individual instances. He is consistently attentive to language and its uses, to the

repetition of terms like ‘swarms’ to describe and communicate new senses of threat, and to the

ways in which contemporary rogue literature and other kinds of labelling sought to impose

definition and margins on shifting social realities. There are particularly successful chapters on

‘streets’, how they looked, sounded and smelt, and on ‘night battles’, about how the same streets

appeared after dusk and curfew, how they were lit and populated (or not). These are certainly

‘lost’ Londons, which Griffiths and other recent historians are usefully illuminating.In his conclusion Griffiths explains that his aim has been to show ‘what London meant for

people at the time’, and he achieves it at length and with ease. He allows us to imagine the

City through the ‘emotional states or moods, now frozen in perceptions written down in

records’ of its citizens (437). Admirable as it is, however, that inevitably leaves some questions

open, at any rate for more empirically inclined historians. How large in reality were the

problems of petty crime and vagrancy which loomed so large in the perceptions of Bridewell’s

governors and officers and other contemporary Londoners? Is it relevant to point out that the

number of offenders brought to Bridewell in most years probably amounted to little more than

10 per cent of the City’s population?2 How should we balance the evidence for an unstable,

anonymous and threatening London, so amply documented in the public records used here,against the evidence – equally amply provided in this book – of relatively effective policing,

well-informed parish and city officials, and the face-to-face familiarity of many urban

neighbourhoods?

Griffiths’s answer to that last question is deliberately ambivalent. Londoners were

resourceful as well as anxious, looking forwards as well as backwards, ready to pride

1Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability. Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991);Robert B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment.Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural

Middlesex c. 1660–1755 (Cambridge, 1991); J. M.

Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660– 1750 (Oxford, 2001).

2Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘Summary justice in

early modern London’, English Historical Review ,CXXI (2006), 805.



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themselves on the size of their city as well as to resent the symptoms of its rapid demographic

growth. ‘Ambivalence; London existed as ambivalence or ambiguity’ (434). At the end of this

rich and enthralling book, readers are left to choose, and to think for themselves.

Paul Slack

Linacre College, Oxford ª 2009, Paul Slack

Keith Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales,

c. 1700–1950 (2006), xivþ 504 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New

York, £55.00/$129.00).

In every scholar’s career there is one keynote publication that represents the culmination of

their archive work and mature reflection on the bigger themes in their field. This is one such

book. For over twenty years, its author has brought students of social history closer to theexperience of the labouring poor – rediscovering their lost voices, makeshift economies and

poor law strategies. In the process, the importance of a sense of belonging has been a significant

and recurrent theme. In an erudite and thought-provoking introduction, the book asks how

those living on the margins of relative to absolute poverty constructed a sense of belonging in

the past and whether that same sense of belonging still resonates in local communities in the era

of globalization. How, in other words, ‘belonging’ was constructed legally, by welfare

agencies, employers, social expectations, death customs and topography. Themes such as

change over time, the impact of urbanization and industrialization, cultures of xenophobia, the

changing landscape of the poor law in England and Wales, are all confronted. It is rare for an

author to have the scholarly credentials and intellectual breadth to pose questions of suchcomplexity about community identity across time. But, as the author points out, ‘There is no

reason why one should not belong and communicate widely’ (11). The aim of the book is to

‘press the case for the social history of the parish . . . to underline its prominence and

continued significance for people’s lives and to inspire more historians to study it’ ( 14). By the

conclusion, stimulating answers to the monograph’s larger themes present a revisionist

historical perspective that beyond academic life a sense of belonging still has ‘connectivity’ for

many people today. One of the strengths of this book is the way that it drills down to the local

and then stands back to bring together the mosaic of its rich research material. What emerges is

a first-rate, fascinating configuration of the parish and a sense of belonging from the human

perspective between 1700 and 1950.The book, in more detail, shows that cultures of local xenophobia could be deeply rooted.

Likewise, settlement laws, parochial belonging and entitlement to poor relief were high

hurdles for the outsider seeking welfare assistance. Yet these cultures of exclusion created a

strong sense of belonging, too, encouraging ‘pride of place, strong local loyalty and a firm sense

of ‘‘home’’ and belonging’ (160). Those communities that turned away strangers, in turn

welcomed their own. Establishing one’s rightful place could be difficult, but once accepted

into a community its welfare structure was often caring, flexible and responsive for life. Today

some of those rural societies, their marriage cultures, with high endogamy patterns that

plummet dramatically from the 1880s, might seem ‘an historico-anthropological curiosity’

(201). But we are reminded that rural exodus, urban dislocation and employment mobility still



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structure our lives. Escalating house prices have shaped a new sense of belonging in households

containing adult children who for economic reasons must identify strongly with their parental

community.

Moving on to chapters 5 and 6, two of the best in the book, we are reminded of the central

role that poor relief played in the lives of the poor – broadly defined – and that the position of overseer for the poor was pivotal to the operation of regional cultures of welfare provision

from the sixteenth until the twentieth centuries. This is an important finding, and one that

some historians of the nineteenth-century poor law

Review of Bengal in Global Concept History

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