Revolutionary Historiography Research Articles

Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre, by Jonathan Israel

Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from Rights of Man to Robespierre, by Jonathan Israel. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014. 870 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). of his massive four-volume series tracing the Enlightenment from Baruch Spinoza through the end of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Israel offers a characteristically ambitious and original interpretation of the French Revolution certain to spark widespread debate. Israel shows little patience for any preceding school of Revolutionary historiography. Social interpretations and the study of broad political cultures, in his view, only enrich the background (p. 10). Francois Furet's intellectual history-based revisionism viewing the Rousseauianism of Robespierre as the Revolution's purest discourse, which dominated the field in recent decades, he declares, needs rejecting just as comprehensively (p. 28). In their place, Israel--building from some revolutionaries' contemporary interpretations and early nineteenth-century histories of the Revolution--looks to interpret the Revolution as the product of la philosophic, which he interprets to mean the Enlightenment he explores in his preceding 2011 volume. Consciously looking for a single dramatic factor (p. 14) to explain the era's radicalism, Israel--albeit with characters shiftily coming and going in his grand narrative--looks to identify a coterie sponsoring a comprehensive series of drastic changes. The Revolution, Israel argues, above all a process of emancipation, democratization, and fundamental renewal on the basis of human rights (p. 12). Of course, the French Revolution was also many other things besides a movement for Enlightenment, but Israel ably traces his cause's influence through the era. Israel begins his Revolution not with the Parlements or local Cahiers de Doleances, but rather with the Committee of Thirty, a coterie of radical pamphleteers operating out of Paris' Palais Royal which would most famously influence the production of member Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes' What is the Third Estate? Though Israel does not add to the little evidence surviving of the Committee's workings, and the figures involved are not normally described as neither a unified group nor uniformly republican, (p. 35) as Israel calls his protagonists, he sees their influence as predominant. Israel tracks such radical ideas' influence through the early Revolution through their enactment into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Thereafter, Israel takes on the challenge of tracing the role of democratic thinkers and factions in their battles against during the Revolution's first years, and the radical alternative of authoritarian populism (p. 695) he sees Robespierre's faction as embodying. Though not a French Revolutionist by training, Israel gamely approaches Revolutionary debates and infighting--but with an often-excessive polarization matching outlying Revolutionaries' most excessive rhetoric. constitutional monarchism of Revolution's middle years is often neglected in Israel's treatment. Despite virtually all Revolutionaries' desire to end the Revolution and enact a compromise order, Israel remains adamant that so powerful a philosophique republican undercurrent (p. 141) could not remain ignored for long. break with Catholicism is described as wholly certain from the outset, (p. 181) while the push toward the overthrow of the monarchy is primarily attributed to [Jacques-Pierre] Brissot, [the Marquis de] Condorcet and their colleagues (p. 253) in the National Assembly rather than a contingent action of the federe and Parisian popular movements in the final insurrection of August 10, 1792. Israel's culmination of the Radical Enlightenment tendency (p. 348) is the Constitution of February 1793. Curiously, for a movement Israel has traced over a century and a half, he describes its final triumph as one of moderation, which after having vanquished monarchy sought a judicious middle path between the Scylla of direct and the Charybdis of pure representative democracy (p. …

FRENCH CROSSINGS: III. THE SMILE OF THE TIGER

This article continues the theme of 'French Crossings' explored in other Presidential Addresses by focussing on the border zone between the human and the animal. The focus is on the allegedly tiger-like character attributed to Maimilien Robespierre, particularly after his fall from power and his execution in 1794. This theme is explored in terms of Thermidorian propaganda, French Revolutionary historiography and the ancient discipline of physiognomy, which was reactivated by Johann-Caspar Lavater in the late eighteenth century and still influential through much of the nineteenth. Robespierre's animal rather than human status was also held to emerge in his inability to smile or laugh, a significant point also in that the meaning of the smile was changing in the same period.

Revolutionary violence and Irish historiography

Revolutionary violence and Irish historiography

The Sense of the Past in Reformation Germany: Part 1

This two-part article is a study of the Lower Saxon Lutheran pastor-historian Johannes Letzner (1531–1613) and his efforts to write a history of the lands of Braunschweig-Lüneburg entitled the Chronicle of Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Göttingen. Although the work itself remained, and remains, in manuscript form, it is a valuable resource for modern historians, for not only does it demonstrate how early modern scholars began to piece together and conceptualize German history, it also reveals the extent to which the writing of that past relied on the efforts of local historians and regional antiquarians – the so-called ‘lovers of antiquities’ – whose collective efforts to recover and preserve the German past laid the factual and narrative foundations for the historiographical revolution that came with the Enlightenment. The study of Letzner and his Chronicle serves as a mirror of this process. In Part 1, the article investigates Letzner and his working environment, beginning with the vocational and the intellectual framework that facilitated his research. It then examines his approach to the German past and the blend of Melanchthonian humanism, confessionalized historiography, and tireless curiosity that made up his methodology. In a final discussion, it turns to the types of works that Letzner produced within this three-fold scheme, the main strand being the local histories and genealogies that imparted a moral message.

How could Hannah Arendt glorify the American Revolution and revile the French? Placing On Revolution in the historiography of the French and American Revolutions

This article situates Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution in the traditions of French and American revolutionary historiography to demonstrate that Arendt’s ‘fable’ of the American Revolution was at odds with her argument about the council form. I argue that had Arendt really wanted to inspire a resurrection of the council form in the present, she would have done better to orient her readers to the French Revolution, specifically to the experiments in democratic republicanism of the group known as the Girondins.

Forum on Mona Ozouf

Mona Ozouf is one of the most respected French historians alive today. In humble recognition of her outstanding insights into modern French politics and culture, French History here publishes an extended forum on her memoir Composition française. The distinguished participants in this forum, to whom we are extremely grateful for their wisdom and insight, have felt a sense almost of nervous pride as we have come together to share our views of this book. This I think stems less from Mona Ozouf's (unquestioned) mastery of some of the great themes of modern historiography – it has less to do with the exceptional elegance of her reading as well as her writing – less to do with her subtlety as she considers quintessentially French problems with an original eye. The collective feeling, expressed by all the eminent contributors to our forum, has been that the book has touched each of us as we think about the ways in which we attempt to go about our métier as historians. In our discussions as this forum was prepared, and as the contributors have read each others’ reflections in draft, a personal, indeed private perspective on our own qualities as historians has emerged, more so certainly than is usual in criticism. The contributors have expressed this unexpectedly in emails. We have shared a strange and surprising degree of personal views about Brittany, about French culture, about the revision of French revolutionary historiography, about the place of intellectuals in French life and of women within French historical and intellectual circles. Our shared discussions about Ozouf have led us all to express something privately felt about our own aspirations as historians, and perhaps to hint at what we hope for in the study of French history.

FROM REVOLUTION TO MODERNIZATION: THE PARADIGMATIC TRANSITION IN CHINESE HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE REFORM ERA

ABSTRACTChinese historiography of modern China in the 1980s and 1990s underwent a paradigmatic transition: in place of the traditional revolutionary historiography that bases its analyses on Marxist methodologies and highlights rebellions and revolutions as the overarching themes in modern Chinese history, the emerging modernization paradigm builds its conceptual framework on borrowed modernization theory and foregrounds top‐down, incremental reforms as the main force propelling China's evolution to modernity. This article scrutinizes the origins of the new paradigm in the context of a burgeoning modernization discourse in reform‐era China. It further examines the fundamental divides between the two types of historiography in their respective constructions of master narratives and their different approaches to representing historical events in modern China. Behind the prevalence of the modernization paradigm in Chinese historiography is Chinese historians' unchanged commitment to serving present political needs by interpreting the past.

Messenger Writers: Anna Seghers and Alejo Carpentier in the Cold War

In the early 1960s, the East German Anna Seghers and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier published historical narratives of the slave uprisings that had rocked French and British colonies in the Caribbean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In both Seghers's “Das Licht auf dem Galgen” (“Light on the Gallows”) and Carpentier's El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral), revolutionary agents of the French government face the question of whether to prioritize official policy or solidarity with the oppressed in their work to advance emancipatory ideas. In light of the historical situation of Seghers and Carpentier as authors aligned with new, revolutionary states in the middle of the twentieth century, these stories about revolutionary messengers can be understood as contemporaneous, critical reflections on the particular author position of being a “messenger writer.” In contrast with prior studies that evaluate the historical realism of these works, I draw on Walter Benjamin's notions of revolutionary historiography in order to show how both the content and circumstances of publication of Seghers's and Carpentier's fiction illuminate their struggles with the role of messenger writer. This in turn contributes to a more thorough historicization of the texts and the concerns of iconic leftist writers in the Cold War.

Frontiere in movimento della storia dell’infanzia, oggi

The essay addresses issues of methodology and historiography. The research on the history of children are growing, pluralistic and articulated. The author insists that this historiographical revolution is still ongoing and emphasizes on the intricate identity of childhood. This paper focuses on two specific paradigms: “childhood itself” and “the long duration” and provides an important reflection on the current state of research on childhood.

Cobbsian Historiography Takes on the Revolutionary State

Cobbsian Historiography Takes on the Revolutionary State Julia Douthwaite Howard G. Brown , Ending the Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). Pp. xii, 461. $45.00. Joseph Clarke , Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution and Remembrance, 1789–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Pp. x, 306. $99.00. Richard Cobb—long considered the lone wolf of revolutionary historiography—is back with a vengeance. Although Cobb passed away in 1996, his legacy continues in two recent books by Howard Brown (State University of New York, Binghamton) and Joseph Clarke (Trinity College, Dublin). Like their forebear, Clarke and Brown have spent years mining the riches of archives; and both focus systematically on le menu peuple and profess to reveal how politics touched their lives. Or, more precisely, how it accidentally battered their lives. Neither Clarke nor Brown has much patience for revolutionary enthusiasts, rather they emphasize the devastating toll the tumult took on the families and communities left in its wake. Both downplay the long-term advances wrought by the Revolution in the domains of education, jurisprudence, or human rights, and instead stress the hypocrisy and failings of the First Republic and its various post-Thermidorian successors. [End Page 468] By ending the Revolution in 1802 or 1799 instead of 1794, they demonstrate the powerful way that periodization molds history. Educators should take care to balance the harsh appraisals provided here with the more equitable assessment of the period by scholars such as James Livesey or Martyn Lyons. Although the erudition of Clarke and Brown is laudable, the bitterness expressed in these books is cause for caution. Clarke's Commemorating the Dead is a feisty tome. The topic—bereavement and memory—is of perennial human import, and the approach is promising. Focusing on the rituals, commodities, and oratory associated with the victims of the turmoil and warfare that marked the years 1789–1799, Clarke proposes to explain why those practices and objects emerged in their historical moment and what ends they served. Although his claims to originality are sometimes exaggerated—one need only conjure up John McManners's writings on funereal practices or Carol Blum on revolutionary virtue—Clarke nevertheless affects an independence of spirit that is invigorating. Emphasizing the importance of Catholicism in the lives of French people even under the Terror, Clarke refuses to believe that words like saint, martyr, or sacrilege were irrelevant or could be reinvented to serve the ends of revolutionary ideology as readily as historians such as Lynn Hunt and Mona Ozouf have claimed. Like Cobb, who famously debunked republican populism by studying the tax records of wealthy sans-culottes, Clarke has a keen eye for the telling detail. This attentiveness to the hidden meanings of words and ritual allows for some surprising interpretations, including the deconstruction of the Marat cult (185–209). Citing French sources in the original makes the claims persuasive, as demonstrated in his analysis of the artful use of pronouns tu, vous, and especially nous in Abbé Fauchet's sermons (54–86). These passages do a masterful job of revealing the mixed motives—of worshipful sorrow as well as fear and opportunism—that drew crowds to memorials, parades, and other public shows of remembrance. Commemorating has some rough patches. The introduction will raise hackles by dismissing contemporary cultural history as the work of historians who "prefer the firm and reassuringly familiar ground of ideological engagement to the shifting sands of individual emotion" (6). Clarke claims to reintroduce agency into history by eschewing the "fashionable effusions of sentimental literature" in favor of "real tears shed by real families" (6). This assertion shocks by its naive assumption that some forms of textual evidence are more "real" than others. Just as the funerary practices so beautifully described by Clarke are rooted in a specific sense of time, place, and the sacred, so the memoirs of widows and common folk he relies on to tell this story are rooted in literary genres of almanac, breviary, and saints' lives, not to mention local legend. Clarke's impatience with literature seems hard to reconcile with his dedication to nuance. But there is much to admire in Commemorating. Clarke...

Turning the Tide: The Problem of Popular Insurgency in Haitian Revolutionary Historiography

This article explores the conceptual problem of popular insurgency in Haitian revolutionary historiography. Framed by fundamental questions of legitimate versus illegitimate insurgency, of the relationship between the elites and the people, and of the process of democratization and the rule of law, the article argues that the problem of popular insurgency is one way to link together analysis of past and present Haitian history and to focus on the role of the Haitian people in making that history.

Turning the Tide: The Problem of Popular Insurgency in Haitian Revolutionary Historiography

Turning the Tide: The Problem of Popular Insurgency in Haitian Revolutionary Historiography

You Can Teach An Old Revolutionary Historiography New Tricks: Regions, Popular Movements, Culture, and Gender in Mexico, 1820–1940

You Can Teach An Old Revolutionary Historiography New TricksRegions, Popular Movements, Culture, and Gender in Mexico, 1820–1940 Mark Wasserman (bio) Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution. By Jürgen Buchenau. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Pp. 275. $34.95 paper. Bandit Nation: A History of Outlaws and Cultural Struggle in Mexico, 1810–1920. By Chris Frazer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. 243. $45.00. Bitter Harvest: The Social Transformation of Morelos, Mexico, and the Origins of the Zapatista Revolution, 1840–1910. By Paul Hart. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Pp. 328. $42.50 cloth. Sons of the Sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855– 1920. By Patrick J. McNamara. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 296. $24.95 paper. The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise and Meat in Mexico City, 1890–1917. By Jeffrey M. Pilcher. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Pp. 245. $29.95 paper. The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940. Edited by Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 363. $23.95 paper. The major innovations in the historiography of the Mexican Revolution over the past three decades lie in four linked areas. First, historians concluded—perhaps following the advice given by Luis González y González in his famous Invitación a la microhistoria (1972)—that we can understand the revolution only if we explore what occurred at the state and local levels. Patrick McNamara deftly expresses this idea in his Sons of the Sierra: "Like the narrow dirt road that connects Ixtlán with Oaxaca City . . . the interconnection between local and national history in Mexico has always moved in two directions" (4). Second, and this is an outgrowth of the first, historians discovered that the clases populares not only were the cannon fodder of the conflict but shaped it as well. For all the revisionism that swept the landscape of Mexican history after the sinister and tragic [End Page 260] events of 1968, and for all the wrong turns that the postrevolutionary regime took toward authoritarianism (in the form of a one-party state) in 1929 and toward corruption and trickle-down development after 1946, the revolution itself was very much the work of subaltern classes. The more that historians investigated the revolution at the local level, the clearer it became that, whether it succeeded or not, it was the product of workers and peasants. Third, as historians looked more closely at the grassroots revolution, it became apparent that the initial protests and subsequent long period of violence did not arise from strictly economic and political factors; instead, there was a strong cultural element. Culture was also crucial in the long period of reconstruction that comprised the second stage of the revolution, from 1920 to 1940. Issues of local autonomy, for example, had as much to do with maintaining custom and tradition as with politics. Finally, local and state researchers revealed the crucial role of gender in shaping the discourse and structure, if not the events, of the revolution. Women, these studies made clear, were fervent revolutionaries, died in the names of various causes, and helped to formulate the outcome of decades of upheaval. Underlying the various reexaminations of the revolution was also the drive to revisit the periodization of all of Mexican history. In the 1960s, Richard Morse recommended a new chronological framework for Latin America.1 Most pertinent to our discussion, he suggested that we look at the era from 1760 through 1920 that he labels the colonial period, which runs from the Bourbon reforms through the end of the modern export boom in agricultural commodities and minerals. Dozens of dissertations and first books employing this breakdown followed. By the 1990s, however, periodization again came under review as regional and local historians (of Mexico, at least) questioned the notion that the origins of the revolution lay only as far back as the Porfiriato (1876–1911). The new historiography looked to the early postindependence era, 1821 to the 1860s, or even further back, to the mid-eighteenth century, for...

Born in War

Born in War Benjamin L. Carp (bio) John Resch and Walter Sargent, eds. War and Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. viii + 318 pp. Figures, maps, tables, graphs, notes, and index. $48.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper). John Adams committed the original sin of Revolutionary historiography. The Quincy statesman famously asked in 1818, "But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war?" Adams, who was obsessed with his place in history and annoyed that war heroes had eclipsed his fame, answered no. "The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people. . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution."1 The former president was right in an important sense, but he also maddeningly skewed the narrative of the developments that led to American independence. With this stirring statement, Adams launched a generation of great historians who picked apart these principles and sentiments and lavished attention on the prewar politics of the colonies and the postwar nation-building and constitution-making of the United States. In doing so, historians of the last forty years have taken Adams's erudition too much to heart and thereby left mountains of wartime evidence to rot in the archives. Still, it is time for academic historians of the Revolutionary War to stop beating their breasts about the neglect of military history. As this volume of essays makes clear, scholars are indeed doing excellent work on this subject. Perhaps the problem is that early American military historians have done too little to promote their work, among their colleagues or the general public. In the past, it was easier to blame the rest of the academy for military history's lonely state of exile. Practitioners could complain that early Americanists (like the academy more generally) turned up their noses at military history. "Everyone knew" that it was distasteful to muck around with bayonets, camp fever, and flanking moves, and so for explanations of the Revolutionary War, scholars ceded the field to esteemed practitioners like Don Higginbotham, John W. Shy, and a handful of others per decade: a Richard Buel here, a Charles Royster there. Historians of the war have also been reluctant to "go trade," lest they [End Page 351] complete their tumble into the presumed untouchability of studying "maps and chaps" along with the myriad writers who feed the public's insatiable appetite for learning about the Revolution. David Hackett Fischer and John Ferling are the most visible exceptions to this rule, along with a few others. As a result, the period 1775–83 is not as well understood as the periods immediately preceding and succeeding it. Colonialists and early nationalists now vastly outnumber historians who look at the war years. Historians of the Revolutionary War are lagging behind historians of the American Civil War, and even King Philip's War has received a blessing from the Bancroft committee. The long and searing Revolutionary War certainly deserves better than a cursory treatment in the prefaces and epilogues of other scholars' work. Through it all, Shy has bravely tried his best to integrate scholarship of the war with wider work on the Revolutionary period. He must be a humble man, since scholars (rightly) continue to laud his importance even as he has repeatedly lamented, over a span of more than thirty years, the unimportance—and even revulsion—with which other academics regard his chosen specialization (p. 4).2 This refrain, however, is starting to seem anachronistic. The editors of War and Society, John Resch and Walter Sargent, have assembled a good team of eleven essayists (including Shy and the editors themselves) to highlight a selection of these new approaches. Historians are indeed doing important work on the war—especially in their linking of war, society, and culture. Almost all of this volume's contributors, such as Wayne E. Lee, Holly A. Mayer, Michael A. McDonnell, Charles Neimeyer, and Judith L. Van Buskirk, plus Resch himself (Sargent seems sure to follow), have already begun making important advances in this area in recent monographs...

Cuban Historiography in the 1960s: Revisionists, Revolutionaries and the Nationalist Past

This article examines nationalist historiography in revolutionary Cuba, focusing in particular on the relationship between pre‐revolutionary ‘revisionist’ histories and the revolutionary historiography produced after 1959. Despite agreement among the revolutionaries on the need for new histories to respond to the needs of the revolutionary age, the dominant nationalist historiography of the Revolution repeated many of the myths of the ‘bourgeois’ histories of the past. In the 1960s, however, several historians working at the margins of academia emerged to challenge the nationalist myths perpetuated by both their republican counterparts and by their Marxist adversaries in the University School of History. Yet despite many significant historical re‐interpretations undertaken during the Revolution, many of the sacred cows of Cuban nationalism remained firmly on their plinth.

Olwen Hufton's 'Poor', Richard Cobb's 'People', and the Notions of the longue duree in French Revolutionary Historiography

Olwen Hufton's 'Poor', Richard Cobb's 'People', and the Notions of the longue duree in French Revolutionary Historiography

Developments in Contemporary Spanish Historiography: From Social History to the New Cultural History

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleDevelopments in Contemporary Spanish Historiography: From Social History to the New Cultural History*Miguel A. Cabrera Miguel A. CabreraUniversidad de La Laguna Search for more articles by this author Universidad de La LagunaPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 77, Number 4December 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/499832 Views: 140Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref ©2005 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: WORKS CITED, (May 2017): 314–335.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119406853.biblioGemma Rubí i Casals Coaliciones de turno: corrupción electoral y política competitiva en la Cataluña de la Restauración, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez , no.43-143-1 (Apr 2013): 273–293.https://doi.org/10.4000/mcv.4984GABRIEL PAQUETTE THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SPANISH ATLANTIC MONARCHY, The Historical Journal 52, no.11 (Feb 2009): 175–212.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X0800736XRoger Hillman Trueba's La niña de tus ojos ( The Girl of Your Dreams ) (1998): the German connection, Studies in European Cinema 5, no.11 (Sep 2008): 67–76.https://doi.org/10.1386/seci.5.1.67_1

Religion, Difference, and the Limits of British Imperial History

The following books are under consideration in this review: Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market, by Mary Wilson Carpenter; pp. xxii + 206. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003, $39.95. Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission, by Rhonda Anne Semple; pp. xvii + 285. Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2003, £60.00, $110.00. The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914, edited by Andrew Porter; pp. x + 264. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2003, $45.00, £32.99. Missions, Nationalism and the End of Empire, edited by Brian Stanley; pp. x + 313. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 2003, $45.00, £32.99. Religion versus Empire?: British Protestantism, Missionaries, and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914, by Andrew Porter; pp. xviii + 373. Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave, 2004, £60.00, $74.95, £18.99 paper, $29.95 paper. Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940, by Jeffrey Cox; pp. ix + 357. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, $55.00. Critical reflections on the connections between religion and empire building have been central to the rekindling of interest in the history of the British Empire over the past two decades. In the early 1980s, the study of empire was in crisis. Imperial history, an approach that took the Empire as a whole as its analytical field and that was generally seen as both distinct and distant from British history, labored under three significant impediments. First, the growth of [End Page 427] national historiographies in each of the former colonies threatened the viability, and even desirability, of imperial history. In a landmark 1984 essay, David Fieldhouse stressed the impossibility of any imperial historian being able to keep up with all the significant research being produced about each colony, making it increasingly necessary for future research to be grounded in a single colonial site that could be used as a vantage point on the Empire as a whole. Certainly given the growing volume and vitality of these national historiographies, the broad history of the Empire and the perspective of imperial history were less likely to appeal to historians based in these former colonies. Second, and following from this, in the early 1980s imperial history as a teaching field often had limited appeal outside British universities. Generally the Empire was not made central in the teaching of British history in colleges in the United States, and imperial history had largely been displaced in other former British colonies, where, as Ann Curthoys has pointed out, national history had become the staple of undergraduate classrooms and where graduate students and academic historians labored to build up detailed pictures of the national past. Third, and to my mind most importantly, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson's work from the 1950s on the economics of the Empire had come not only to dominate imperial history but also threatened to smother it. Robin Winks suggests that Gallagher and Robinson initiated a "historiographical revolution" that not only set the key grounds for academic debate about the imperial past but also dictated the essential approach of two generations of imperial historians (653). Historians following in their wake repeatedly asked the same questions Gallagher and Robinson had—albeit very significant ones about "informal" imperial influence, the role of indigenous "collaborators," and the dynamics of both expansion and decolonization. Graduate students pursued very similar questions whether they were working on Punjab or Rhodesia, and historians used the same kind of sources in the same ways. As a result, imperial historians followed narrow channels of research, testing the Gallagher–Robinson thesis—which had seen imperial expansion as emerging out of local crises in the periphery rather than being driven by any metropolitan ideology—for its applicability to various locales and at various points in time. This focus in turn pushed a range of other important research areas—including...

Northern History and the History of The North: Forty Years on

This article traces the emergence, development, and current state of the journal, Northern History. It locates its origins, both generally in the historiographical revolution of the 1950s and 1960s and in particular, institutional departures within the School of History at the University of Leeds. It considers the extent to which the idea of a specifically northern history was, and is, coherent within a broader British context; and by extension, which significant contributions the journal has made to our understanding of that phenomenon during the past forty years. Finally, it offers some tentative suggestions for further work in the field.

Revolutionary Historiography after the Cold War: Arno Mayer's “Furies” in the French Context

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview Articles: Arno Mayer on Revolutionary Violence—Two Views*Revolutionary Historiography after the Cold War: Arno Mayer's “Furies” in the French ContextCarla HesseCarla HesseUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author University of California, BerkeleyPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 73, Number 4December 2001 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/340149 Views: 167Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref ©2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Isaac Ariail Reed Power and the French Revolution: Toward a Sociology of Sovereignty, HISTORICKÁ SOCIOLOGIE 2018, no.11 (Jun 2018): 47–70.https://doi.org/10.14712/23363525.2018.38