Edge Of Empire Research Articles

Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (review)

Reviewed by: Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World Liam Riordan (bio) Keywords American Revolution, Loyalists, Revolutionary War, Canada, British Empire Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. By Maya Jasanoff. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Pp. 460. Cloth, $ 30.00.) Liberty’s Exiles seems likely to become the most influential work on loyalism since Bernard Bailyn’s landmark The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA, 1974) and adds to an impressive body of recent scholarship that reexamines loyalism and the Revolutionary era as transnational phenomena.1 Maya Jasanoff ’s imperial perspective provides a border-crossing Atlantic view, and looks still further afield to India, [End Page 506] to explain how American loyalists informed and anticipated emergent forces in the nineteenth-century British Empire. The book is necessarily sprawling in its territorial embrace, but Jasanoff contains this reach by engagingly narrating numerous life stories. Most importantly, she offers the “spirit of 1783” as a counterweight to the 1776 bias of most interpretations of the American Revolution and its consequences. Jasanoff returns to this key concept throughout the book as she explores its tenets of imperial expansion, liberty, and authority in far-reaching locales as tested by diverse loyalists. The diasporic experience is paramount here with an emphasis on contingency, coercion, and self-interest among the large cohort of refugees who shared a common empire but lacked a deeply unifying ideology. Jasanoff interweaves the tales of nine principal figures, whose selection shapes the major themes that emerge. Two of the most closely examined individuals, Beverley Robinson and Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, are contextualized within larger family networks that help extend their stunning geographic trajectories—the former with ties to New York, England, New Brunswick, and India; the latter to Georgia, East Florida, Scotland, Jamaica, and Nova Scotia, and other places as well. Jasanoff highlights racial diversity among loyalists with two closely linked black Baptist preachers, David George and George Liele, as well as the Mohawk Joseph Brant. A more authoritarian paternalism is showcased in the British officials Guy Carleton (though he comes off especially well) and John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore (better known to most as Virginia, and Bahamas, Governor Lord Dunmore), while two less familiar adventurers, John Cruden and William Augustus Bowles (who might also be classified as a Native American loyalist) complete the core group. Revealingly, five of this main cast were born in the British mainland colonies, three in the British Isles (none in England), and one in Iroquoia. While the details of individual lives are well told and carry this highly readable book forward, its scholarly impact lies in a careful reconstruction of loyalist emigration figures and in the original presentation of a global loyalist diaspora directly linked to the emergence of a strengthened British Empire: “All told, the 1780s stand out as the most eventful single decade in British imperial history up to the 1940s,” as they “cemented an enduring framework for the principles and practice of British rule” (11). Jasanoff ’s conclusion about the size of the loyalist migration out of the rebel colonies and new United States considerably lowers previous estimates to a conservative total figure of about 60,000 white and black loyalists in addition to some 15,000 enslaved people removed [End Page 507] by loyalists. (For this and below, see “Appendix: Measuring the Exodus,” 351–58.) Of these loyal refugees she documents nearly 38,000 going to the continuing British colonies in North America (some 30,000 to the Canadian Maritimes, including 10 percent who were black loyalists; another 5,500 white loyalists to Quebec; and some 2,000 Indians who settled at Grand River in what would later be part of Upper Canada). Given this demographic dominance some may feel that British North America deserves closer attention: Chapter 6 treats New Brunswick, Quebec, and Grand River in comparative fashion and moves rapidly across their varying circumstances in just 33 pages. Jasanoff acknowledges the importance of Canada as a model for imperial governance and “home rule,” but this is more asserted than demonstrated. Yet in a book with single chapters that also focus on Nova Scotia, Great Britain, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone before a...

'Order out of Chaos': Resources, Hazards and the Production of a Tin-Mining Economy in Northern Nigeria in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract This paper examines the development of commercial tin mining in northern Nigeria in the early twentieth century. It recounts how a fundamentally unknown space - an underground zone lying at the edge of Empire - came to be constructed as a mineral rich region, and subsequently integrated with capital and commodity markets in Europe as an extractive economy. From 1902 onwards, the landscape of the Jos Plateau was re-worked to supply tin ores and concentrates to smelters, refineries and fabricators in Europe. At their height, the mines of northern Nigeria provided almost one-tenth of the world's tin. The paper's primary aim is to problematise the processes of ordering and disordering that transformed the Plateau into an extractive economy. To this end, it examines geological science and colonial administration as practices that struggled to differentiate unfamiliar ecologies and invisible geologies into either resources to be exploited or hazards to be overcome. The paper illustrates the economic, political and cultural processes by which some conditions came to be seen as hazards (disease, seasonality of water supply, distance), while others were regarded as resources integral to the commerciality of mining on the Plateau (agricultural labour, land and water courses for sediment disposal, horizontal and vertical variation in ore grades). It shows how commercial exploitation of the Plateau's tin resources radically re-configured both physical landscapes and forms of social organisation on the Plateau, generating novel socio-natural juxtapositions that came to be experienced as poor working conditions, environmental hazards, and conflicts between agriculture and mining over access to land.

On the Edge of Empire: 2008 and 2009 Excavations at Oğlanqala, Azerbaijan

The nature of political complexity in the Caucasus has emerged as a significant research question in Near Eastern archaeology. Until recently, archaeological developments in Azerbaijan have been left out of this discussion. Two seasons of survey and excavation undertaken by the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences and the University of Pennsylvania at the Iron Age site of Oğlanqala in the Naxçıvan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan have begun to clarify the local origins of an Iron Age polity and its relationship to major Near Eastern empires, including Urartu, Achaemenid Persia, and Parthia. Situated in the northern half of the fertile Şərur Plain, Oğlanqala was in a position to control a pass through the Dərələyəz Mountains as well as the agricultural land of the plain. Indeed, in the Iron Age, the Şərur Plain was a complex landscape dominated by Oğlanqala but including at least six other fortresses and many cemeteries. The 2008 survey revealed that Oğlanqala was founded in the Early Iron Age and has extensive Middle and Late Iron Age material. Excavations in 2008 and 2009 in the citadel and domestic buildings uncovered architectural and ceramic differences from contemporaneous Urartian, Achaemenid, and classical sites, while also revealing evidence for interaction among them.

Review: Tories Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War, Liberty's Exiles American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, the Civil War of 1812 American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies

TORIES Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War Thomas B. Alien New York: HarperCollins, 2010. 468pp, $18.99 paper. ISBN 978-0061241802LIBERTY'S EXILES American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World Maya Jasanoff New York: Knopf, 2011. 46opp, $30.00 doth. ISBN 978-1400041688THE CIVIL WAR OF 1812 American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, e[ Indian Allies Alan New York: Knopf, 2010. 62opp, $18.00 paper. ISBN 978-1400042654The adage that everybody loves a winner certainly rings true when one considers the long and mostly one-sided historiography of the American revolution. Since the i8th century the patriots have enjoyed not only the most favourable attention, but most of the attention, period. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that historians have typically depicted the revolution as a mortal struggle between gallant, freedom-loving Americans and sneering, freedom-denying Britons. This distortion has obscured the fundamental truth that it was just as much a civil war, one fought bitterly between American patriots and American loyalists. The losers, the loyalists, have been neglected by historians (except in Canada, to some extent, where they have been recast as winners because of their role in building postwar British North America). Even in Canada, however, the story of the loyalists has hardly been a hot academic topic in recent years.This lack of interest in the loyalists means that many misconceptions remain about who they were, what they stood for, and what their long-term significance was. Fortunately, three new books by American historians, each covering a different chapter of the story, aim to correct the record. Thomas B. Alien's Tones details the extensive civilian and military involvement of loyalists in the revolution itself. Maya JasanofPs Liberty's Exiles traces the divergent paths of the tens of thousands of loyalists who left their homes during and shortly after the revolution and resettled throughout the British empire. Alan Taylor s The Civil War 0/1812 demonstrates that the divided loyalties that characterized the revolutionary era carried over into the next, in a war that helped to define national identities on both sides of the CanadianAmerican border. Each book is well worth reading in its own right. Read collectively, the three works will give even the most knowledgeable reader a refreshing new appreciation of the arduous life stories - and complex, often conflicting views - of the loyalists.It makes sense to read and review the books in chronological order, beginning with Tones. Alien's eclectic body of work spans topics as disparate as The Bonus Army: An American Epic (with Paul Dickson); Possessed, an account of the events that inspired the 19705 book and film The Exorcist; and illustrated works about the natural including The Shark Almanac. His latest effort is, without question, a serious historical study. It is based on archival research, published collections of documents and correspondence, and the immense array of professional and hobbyist websites devoted to the American revolution. Everything has been carefully footnoted and the bibliography is extensive, though he relies perhaps a bit too heavily on the websites.Alien deserves credit for bringing to light the substantial part that the loyalists played in supporting Great Britain during the revolution. This is an important task for two reasons: American authors tend to ignore loyalists, and Canadian authors tend to pick up their story only after their exile to British North America. He tells their story chronologically, starting in 1769 and building dramatic tension as he explains how the political situation deteriorated in the 13 colonies, culminating in the outbreak of hostilities in 1774. Even before the shot heard round the world, Americans were being forced into with-us-or-against-us identities as either patriots or loyalists. Alien clearly sympathizes with the individuals who welcomed political reforms but could not break their ties to the crown, despite threats of violence from their neighbours. …

Edge of Empire: The British Political Officer and Tribal Administration on the North-West Frontier, 1877–1947. By Christian Tripodi. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 253 pp. $124.95 (cloth).

Edge of Empire: The British Political Officer and Tribal Administration on the North-West Frontier, 1877–1947. By Christian Tripodi. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 253 pp. $124.95 (cloth).

Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

Transforming (Private) Rights through (Public) International Law: Readings on a ‘Strange and Painful Odyssey’ in the PCIJ Mavrommatis Case

AbstractStraddling both the centres of (European) power and the shifting dynamics of the post-Ottoman world in a quest to guarantee private rights through public international legal redress, the PCIJ Mavrommatis case provides a rich resource for interrogating the extent to which international law during the League period could speak for voices on the edge of empire. In this article, historical consideration of the regimes of empire and Mandate form the backdrop to an exploration into how international legal discourse (re)configured the relationship between the core and the periphery, especially for those peoples awaiting the promise of self-determination and sovereignty. The figure of a lone Greek investor and his dashed hopes in the newly created Palestine Mandate is the backdrop to this tail of ever-shifting interpretations of public and private rights, of speech as well as silence before and beyond the Peace Palace.

Liberty's exiles: American loyalists in the revolutionary world

Liberty's exiles: American loyalists in the revolutionary world

Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (review)

Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (review)

Empire’s Mastheads: Rewriting the “Correspondents’ War” from the Edge of Empire

This essay recovers a forgotten moment in the print culture history of US empire by examining a handful of newspapers and periodicals—American Soldier, Manila Outpost, Soldier’s Letter, Co. F Enterprise, and Volunteer—that were founded and written by and for US soldiers in the Philippines and Cuba. Unlike their more famous stateside counterparts who produced the “correspondents’ war” and trafficked in national culture’s romantic sensationalism, soldier-correspondents mapped the everyday culture of their imperial community, reporting on ordinary, everyday events of daily life in the imperial outpost like baseball games, debate clubs, popular barbers, robberies, sanitation violations, mail deliveries, and local advertisements. Such publications revise and remediate the dominant romantic ideology of empire at the turn of the century, creating an imagined community of empire far different from that produced by the “correspondents’ war.” Revising the romantic paradigm into an alternative narrative of everyday habit, ordinary routine, and mundane desire, soldier-newspapers produce a flat account of empire that endows the project of empire-building with a sense of the mundane and the nonheroic. This quotidianizing of empire not only conceals the violent realities of imperial encounter behind the dull shimmer of newsprint, but also remodels the romantic spaces of the public’s imperial imagination into the familiar spaces of everyday life, a process that normalizes empire as a way of life for soldiers.

The Edge of Empire or the Center of the Self: Endpoints and Itineraries in Nineteenth‐Century Russian Travel

The Edge of Empire or the Center of the Self: Endpoints and Itineraries in Nineteenth‐Century Russian Travel

Thinking in a ‘worldly’ way: mobility, knowledge, power and geography

In order to enhance understandings of the international mobility of researchers and the implications of their mobility for knowledge production and circulation, we need to develop more sophisticated conceptual resources. Here we draw on and seek to develop ideas generated from literary theory and geography in order to highlight the links between internationally mobile researchers, knowledge, geography and power. In particular, we develop three interrelated concepts: ‘geographies of power/knowledge’, ‘empires of knowledge’, and ‘edges of empires’. We also turn to Edward Said's notion of the ‘exilic intellectual’ because it speaks to the manner in which some mobile individuals navigate this terrain, as well as to issues of their links to place, positionality and the academy. The paper puts these concepts to work as we ask ‘What do they look like through the lens of an individual's intellectual biography?’ and ‘How can a biography add nuance to the concepts?’ Overall we adopt what Said calls a ‘worldly’ perspective that involves considering the time and place of ideas.

From Site to Text: Australian Aborigines and The Origin of the Family

Missions were not simply sites of modernity, they were also the source of key data for the modernist theories of human progress. The idea that so called “primitive peoples” provided a window to the origins of human institutions seemed axiomatic to nineteenth-century theorists of human society who sought evidence for these ideas from settlers, administrators and particularly missionaries. The 1870s and 1880s were the high point of missionary engagement with study-bound anthropologists, as questionnaires and letters were sent from the centres to the edges of empires. Missionary responses, augmented with settler and explorer observations, became the footnotes in early anthropological texts on “primitive” societies. These analyses were then mined for the foundation texts of the other social sciences in the late nineteenth century. Along with many other scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read the anthropology of the period and slotted the findings into their analyses of human society.

The Empire of Women: Transient Entrepreneurs in the Southern Caribbean, 1790–1820

This article uses the details of those who fled to Trinidad from the violence of the Venezuelan war of independence in 1814, 1815 and 1816 as a prism through which to view female agency in the southern Caribbean during first two decades of the nineteenth century. In particular it focuses on free coloured women as being able to exploit the poorly controlled edges of empire for their own advantage. Characterised by a self-reliant independence these women were at once highly mobile, independent and influential. These women have been marginalised in the histories of the region and yet this research suggests that they had a far more prevalent and powerful role in shaping its character and history than has been recognised to date.

The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (review)

Reviewed by: The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 Karen Dubinsky (bio) Sarah Carter . The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915. University of Alberta Press. xvi, 384. $34.95 Sarah Carter starts her magnificent new book by taking aim at right-wing Alberta journalist Ted Byfield, one of many contemporary conservatives who extol the timeless stability of marriage as a 'fortress' that guards a way of life. Her meticulously researched response stands this argument on its head. Marriage is, historically, complex, convoluted, and all over the map. It defies definition, generalization, and thus sentimentalization. Anxiety-prone defenders of marriage, on the other hand, seem to be made of stone, timeless and unchanged. In the nineteenth century, argues Carter, Canada was awash in anxieties about marriage. The nation was thought to be under threat, from the 'pernicious, corrupt and immoral' influence of - wait for it - the United States. Relatively liberal divorce laws in the United States (relative to Canada's mate-for-life philosophy) made the United States a particularly sinister neighbour, but the bulk of this book is about a variety of domestic dissenters. The intimate life of nineteenth-century Canadians ranged dramatically. First Nations communities practised monogamy, polygamy, same-sex marriage, and divorce. Mormons practised polygamy, Doukhobors thought the state had no place in their bedrooms, Chinese immigrant women were discouraged by the head tax, and some socialists even set up free love communities. This is not your grandmother's Western Canadian history. Western Canada - the geographical focus of this book - features heavily in marital anxieties because it was a colonial outpost, on the 'edge of Empire,' as historian Adele Perry has described it. Remoteness from imperial centres of power often creates an especially jittery ruling class, but what was it about marriage customs that made some people so worried and so insistent on imposing a recognizable form of monogamy? Here Carter relies on some of the best of contemporary postcolonial theorizations about the intimacies of empire to show how the imposition of a single standard of gender and family life was a key feature of imperial expansion. As in other imperial contexts, this was a racialized process, but Carter has told a complicated story here that both highlights and de-centres race as the motor of the story. The imposition of the monogamous model on the First Nations of the prairies was, she argues, but one part of a broader program for the diverse peoples of Western Canada. 'The same cluster of laws, attitudes, and expectations . . . similarly applied to everyone else.' The difference, she suggests, was one of force, not kind; the colonial Canadian state was able to 'invade the domestic affairs of First Nations societies and impose these laws, attitudes, and expectations to [End Page 582] a much greater extent than was possible with other communities.' In places this could use more thought; it's more than 'ironic' - Carter's term - that the only person to be convicted under a Criminal Code amendment designed to prohibit Mormon polygamy was an Aboriginal man. However, that feminists and missionaries argued that Ukrainian girls should also be sent to residential schools is just one example of a detail that, though it has dropped off the historian's radar, contains important, potentially paradigm-altering insights about the relationships among race, ethnicity, and power in Canada's past. Also fascinating is Carter's exploration of how the famous 'Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' scandal in London resonated in Western Canada on the heels of the Riel Rebellion. The book is full of such untold stories, making it a must-read beyond the confines of 'regional' Canadian history. [End Page 583] Karen Dubinsky Karen Dubinsky, Department of Global Development Studies and Department of History, Queen's University Copyright © 2010 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

NEO-HITTITES IN THE "LAND OF PALISTIN": Renewed Investigations at Tell Taʿyinat on the Plain of Antioch

Previous articleNext article No AccessNEO-HITTITES IN THE "LAND OF PALISTIN": Renewed Investigations at Tell Taʿyinat on the Plain of AntiochTimothy P. HarrisonTimothy P. Harrison Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Near Eastern Archaeology Volume 72, Number 4December 2009 A journal of ASOR Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/NEA25754026 Views: 53Total views on this site Citations: 8Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2010 American Schools of Oriental ResearchPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Nathan Lovejoy Ambiguity of Divine and Royal Portraiture and the Hiyawan Image of Kingship: Political Identity through the Monuments of ÇİNEKÖY and KARATEPE, Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research 387 (Feb 2022): 113–138.https://doi.org/10.1086/719049Aren M. Maeir Decorated Pottery in Cyprus and Philistia in the 12th Century BC, Cypriot IIIC and Philistine IIIC, Volumes I–II, by Penelope Mountjoy, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 80, no.11 (Apr 2021): 211–213.https://doi.org/10.1086/712947James F. Osborne, Timothy P. Harrison, Stephen Batiuk, Lynn Welton, J. P. Dessel, Elif Denel, and Özge Demirci Urban Built Environments in Early 1st Millennium b.c.e. Syro-Anatolia: Results of the Tayinat Archaeological Project, 2004–2016, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 382 (Oct 2019): 261–312.https://doi.org/10.1086/705728 Lynn Welton , Timothy Harrison , Stephen Batiuk , Elif Ünlü , Brian Janeway , Doǧa Karakaya , David Lipovitch , David Lumb , and James Roames Shifting Networks and Community Identity at Tell Tayinat in the Iron I (ca. 12th to Mid 10th Century B.C.E.), American Journal of Archaeology 123, no.22 (Oct 2021): 291–333.https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.123.2.0291 Louise A. Hitchcock and Aren M. Maeir New Insights into the Philistines in Light of Excavations at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Near Eastern Archaeology 81, no.11 (Nov 2018): 6–14.https://doi.org/10.5615/neareastarch.81.1.0006A. Bernard Knapp and Sturt W. Manning Crisis in Context: The End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean, American Journal of Archaeology 120, no.11 (Dec 2021): 99–149.https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.120.1.0099 Rudolph H. Dornemann THE QARQUR CHALLENGE: Middle Islamic through Iron Age, Near Eastern Archaeology 75, no.33 (Nov 2018): 162–176.https://doi.org/10.5615/neareastarch.75.3.0162Lauren Ristvet, Hilary Gopnik, Veli Bakhshaliyev, Hannah Lau, Safar Ashurov, and Robert Bryant On the Edge of Empire: 2008 and 2009 Excavations at Oğlanqala, Azerbaijan, American Journal of Archaeology 116, no.22 (Dec 2021): 321–362.https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.116.2.0321

Searching for Ancient Samʾal: New Excavations at Zincirli in Turkey

Previous articleNext article No AccessSearching for Ancient Samʾal: New Excavations at Zincirli in TurkeyJ. David Schloen and Amir S. FinkJ. David Schloen Search for more articles by this author and Amir S. Fink Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Near Eastern Archaeology Volume 72, Number 4December 2009 A journal of ASOR Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/NEA25754028 Views: 29Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2010 American Schools of Oriental ResearchPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Virginia R. Herrmann and David Schloen Middle Bronze Age Zincirli: The Date of “Hilani I” and the End of Middle Bronze II, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 385 (Dec 2020): 33–51.https://doi.org/10.1086/711911Virginia R. Herrmann Appropriation and Emulation in the Earliest Sculptures from Zincirli (Iron Age Samʾal), American Journal of Archaeology 121, no.22 (Dec 2021): 237–274.https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.121.2.0237C. Brian Rose Fieldwork at Phrygian Gordion, 2013–2015, American Journal of Archaeology 121, no.11 (Dec 2021): 135–178.https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.121.1.0135Lauren Ristvet, Hilary Gopnik, Veli Bakhshaliyev, Hannah Lau, Safar Ashurov, and Robert Bryant On the Edge of Empire: 2008 and 2009 Excavations at Oğlanqala, Azerbaijan, American Journal of Archaeology 116, no.22 (Dec 2021): 321–362.https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.116.2.0321

THE COLONIAL POSTCARD: THE SPECTRAL/TELEPATHIC MODE IN CONAN DOYLE AND KIPLING

Such Enlightenment, the narrator tellsus facetiously, is effected by an elastic religion known as the Simla Creed, alive at the edges of the British Empire where he, an unnamed Englishman, is stationed. An amalgam of occult practices, the creed stretched itself and embraced pieces of everything that the medicine-men of all ages have manufactured (63). So Rudyard Kipling mockingly observes in this satire of British Victorian forays into the marginal sciences of occultism, Spiritualism, and Mesmerism. An early Kipling tale, “The Sending of Dana Da” (1888) is one of Kiplings first engagements with the religions and philosophies of the East; it was published in theCivil and Military Gazette, a provincial newspaper for which Kipling regularly wrote. The infamous Dana Da – whose name, we are told, escapes every ethnological inscription, and who came from nowhere, with nothing in his hands (62) – dispatches a sending on the behalf of (and through) the Englishman. The recipient of this letter, (again) a Lone Sahib, is characteristically armed with scientific naturalism and Christian faith, and therefore refutes the possibilities of ectoplasmic infestation, unseen currents, and the fecund times of reincarnation. Kiplings eloquent exposition on a sending, despite his final rational explanation of this unseemly act, betrays his fascination with such forbidden epistemologies multiplying at the edges of Empire:

The art of being in-between: native intermediaries, Indian identity, and local rule in colonial Oaxaca

In The Art of Being In-between Yanna Yannakakis rethinks processes of cultural change and indigenous resistance and accommodation to colonial rule through a focus on the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, a rugged, mountainous, ethnically diverse, and overwhelmingly indigenous region of colonial Mexico. Her rich social and cultural history tells the story of the making of colonialism at the edge of empire through the eyes of native intermediary figures: indigenous governors clothed in Spanish silks, priests’ assistants, interpreters, economic middlemen, legal agents, landed nobility, and “Indian conquistadors.” Through political negotiation, cultural brokerage, and the exercise of violence, these fascinating intercultural figures redefined native leadership, sparked indigenous rebellions, and helped forge an ambivalent political culture that distinguished the hinterlands from the centers of Spanish empire. Through interpretation of a wide array of historical sources—including descriptions of public rituals, accounts of indigenous rebellions, idolatry trials, legal petitions, court cases, land disputes, and indigenous pictorial histories—Yannakakis weaves together an elegant narrative that illuminates political and cultural struggles over the terms of local rule. As cultural brokers, native intermediaries at times reconciled conflicting interests, and at other times positioned themselves in opposing camps over the outcome of municipal elections, the provision of goods and labor, landholding, community ritual, the meaning of indigenous “custom” in relation to Spanish law, and representations of the past. In the process, they shaped an emergent “Indian” identity in tension with other forms of indigenous identity and a political order characterized by a persistent conflict between local autonomy and colonial control. This innovative study provides fresh insight into colonialism’s disparate cultures and the making of race, ethnicity, and the colonial state and legal system in Spanish America.

Qing Reconstruction in the Southern Shaanxi Highlands: State Perceptions and Plans, 1799–1820

Qing Reconstruction in the Southern Shaanxi Highlands:State Perceptions and Plans, 1799–1820 Daniel McMahon (bio) Qing dynasty (1644–1911) decline began at the edges of empire. Borderland conflicts with Taiwan Han settlers, Jinchuan Qiang, Hunan Miao, southern Shaanxi sectarians, Guangdong pirates, and Kashgarian Khwajas all indicated that the Qing's grip on its "remote regions" had loosened.1 Qing officialdom feared a fractured realm and its actions to avoid one—open to the lessons of frontier rule, fixated on resources and polity—set the stage for China's nineteenth-century crisis management.2 This essay considers the logic and measures of late Qing policy as seen in one important early project: reconstruction in southern Shaanxi in the wake of the 1796–1804 White Lotus revolt. The paper addresses two general questions. First, how did early-nineteenth-century Qing planners see this highland region? And second, what manner of plans arose in response to their perception? In considering these questions, a range of views will be discussed, albeit with the greatest focus upon leading southern Shaanxi field officials such as Yan Ruyi (1759–1826).3 [End Page 85] The reports of concerned officials of the Jiaqing reign (1796–1820) reveal that Shaannan (southern Shaanxi) was understood as a distinctive settlement frontier.4 These mountains were a site of defining events of imperial history, at the center of the Qing realm, and peopled by Han Chinese, albeit infamous for cycles of cultural degeneration, heretical dissent, and violent revolt. The White Lotus rebellion seemed the latest case of cyclical deterioration in the region, a concern that connected directly with an emerging project of imperial reforms advanced under the Jiaqing emperor from 1799. Official views of polity and place framed the possibilities of postwar reconstruction. Confucian-defined ills of rootlessness and revolt underlay conventional bureaucratic measures for order, settlement, livelihood, and education. The proximity of the hills and cultural sophistication of the local Han people oriented these plans toward greater integration with the Qing heartland—pursued via revitalized infrastructure, production, commercial circulation, inculcation, and state oversight. Frontier-like conditions of harsh environment and "confused" people yielded a concurrent (and somewhat contradictory) focus on security, seen in administrative restructuring, empowered officials, military redeployment, and transformative education. The reordering of the Shaannan highlands was a state priority and regional officials drew flexibly from both frontier and heartland precedent for solutions. The results were discernable but uneven.5 The Southern Shaanxi Highlands In a study of Burma, E.R. Leach observed that Burmese land existed not as a smooth contiguous expanse, but as a patchwork of controlled territories interspersed by obstructing "non-state spaces." Within the realm lay highlands that, in intensity proportionate to elevation, resisted agricultural production and governmental intervention.6 The southern Shaanxi highlands were a similar non-state space. The Hubei-Shaanxi-Sichuan border region, part of the vast Central Mountain Belt, was classic hostile terrain. One regional official, Yan Ruyi, likened it to a "vile beast" (e shou). Its head lay in northeastern Sichuan's Kuizhou prefecture and Taiping subprefecture: a land of "steep cliffs and treacherous, winding paths" in which bandits hid and the worst gangs formed. Its belly lay [End Page 86] in western Hubei's Yunyang prefecture: a poorly-controlled region of "high mountains and deep valleys that stretched for thousands of li." Its back lay in southern Shaanxi's Hanzhong and Xing'an prefectures: a "land of celestial peril (tian xian)" with mountains that "jut like teeth into the air," deep valleys, and inaccessible peaks.7 The heights of this borderland loomed seven thousand feet above sea level, blanketed by a dense "Old Forest" (laolin) of bamboo and timber: a mat of highland wilderness more than ten thousand square miles in extent that sheltered bandits, migrants, fugitives, and rebels.8 This discussion examines the "back of the beast": southern Shaanxi's Shaan'an circuit (Hanzhong and Xing'an prefectures). Here lay a "sea" of dense mountains divided between the Qinling Range, to the north of the east-running Han River, and the Daba Shan Range9, to its south. These highlands were largely inimical to intensive agriculture, although by Qing times had proved adaptable to maize, Irish potato...