Imperial Context Research Articles

Esparto crafting under empire: Local technology and imperial industry in Roman Iberia

Drawing on scholarship in postcolonial archaeology that emphasizes the place of indigenous technology in colonial and imperial contexts, this article explores the role of local communities in esparto grass weaving and basketry in the southeast Iberian Peninsula in antiquity. Esparto crafting became essential to Phoenician and Carthaginian colonial economies of the 1st millennium BCE and, later, to the production equipment for mining and other industries under Roman imperial rule. This paper uses ethnographic studies alongside archaeological evidence of esparto objects, particularly esparto mining equipment, to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire of ancient esparto crafting. It argues that local communities developed landscape learning and tactile technical knowledge surrounding esparto crafting over many generations. In supplying equipment essential to Roman mining, these communities used their technical knowledge to maintain agency and construct their identities under imperial rule. Ultimately, understanding esparto crafting helps elucidate the relationship between resources, technology, and imperial or colonial encounters.

Constructing global missionary families: Absence, memory, and belonging before World War I

The separation of parents and children was a quite common imperial family constellation before World War I. Many children left the respective colonial or mission territories at the beginning of their seventh year. They were sent to their parents’ regions of origin in Europe to spend their childhood and youth in the households of relatives or in missionary boarding schools specially set up for them. This article examines German-speaking missionary families in the imperial context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and focuses on letter communications between parents and children as an expression of family construction at a distance. I will mainly focus on two families (Kaundinya, Nommensen) in order to examine from a micro-historical perspective, the construction of missionary families in a transimperial framework. Rooted in the pietistic milieu of German-speaking missionaries from the Basel Mission and the Rhenish Mission, these families enable us to compare the results of imperial and missionary family historiography, which has developed over the last 20 years within the British context, with empirical material from other national and imperial contexts.

Letture proibite e parole in codice: Storia dell’Ala Occidentale , un’opera drammaturgica nel romanzo cinese Il Sogno della Camera Rossa

The 18 th -century novel The Dream of the Red Chamber ( Honglou meng ) is one of the most important narrative masterpieces of Chinese literature. Despite the numerous studies on this work − that is an encyclopedic summa of an entire culture − the role of the theatre in the novel has not been sufficiently deepened. This paper explores how the young protagonists of Honglou meng use The Story of the Western Wing , a comedy that is still fundamental to the Chinese artistic heritage today. The two teenagers in the novel secretly admire the drama characters and their courageous way of living passions. These characters have the subversive and maieutic function of providing essential words for a dialogue that allows the adolescents to emotionally overcome the conditioning of an environment characterized by a rigid and oppressive Neo-Confucian education. Some issues about the consideration suffered by sentimental dramaturgy − in an imperial context where the theatre was the centre of debates on which themes and behaviours should be censored as corrupting costumes − emerge in the background of this analysis.

“The Catholic Mahdi of the North West”: Louis Riel and the Metis Resistance in Transatlantic and Imperial Context

The authors examine the transatlantic press coverage of the Metis resistance in Saskatchewan in 1885. The article documents that there was extensive international coverage of this ostensibly Canadian conflict and traces the evolution of narratives about it from their origins in French and English Canada to the United States, Great Britain, and France. The article resituates Riel and the Metis resistance within this international framework, demonstrating how the story of Riel and the Metis was reshaped by commentators in the transatlantic world to suit local, national, and imperial contexts.

Reflecting on the History of Sociology in Nigeria: Strategies to Enhance Endogenous Theory within a Global Dialogue

We present a history of Sociology in Nigeria, within the context of intellectual imperialism and the problems of the colonial library. The development of the discipline in Nigeria took place with a great deal of dependence on Western intellectual and financial resources, which led to what some critics have termed the “captive mind.” This is an intellectual posture whereby Western theory is uncritically embraced, while concepts developed internally are harshly judged or ignored. After reviewing these challenges, we turn to consider some of the most promising and innovative contributions to emerge from within Nigerian sociology, providing for “endogenous theory” that has much to offer a wider global sociological dialogue. We note that such theories can take root from pre-colonial indigenous sources, as well as finding inspiration in the current post-colonial realities that mark these times. Building on these cases, we follow Adesina’s call for a “sociology beyond despair,” arguing for the intellectual and moral imperative of building theories inside of Nigeria and outside of the mold of Western assumptions, while still using and contributing productively to global sociology. To help build on this worthy goal, we consider delimiting the role of Western theories rather than eliminating them, while utilizing the rich potential of “abductive analysis” as a route to furthering endogenous sociological knowledge.

Imperialism, Buddhism and Islam in Siam: Exploring the Buddhist secular in the Nangsue Sadaeng Kitchanukit, 1867

This article argues for understanding the reform of the Buddhist tradition in nineteenth-century Siam as a shift towards a secular conceptual grammar, and positions this shift within the dual imperial context of Siam. The binary conceptual structure that can be traced in the Nangsue Sadaeng Kitchanukit (Elaboration on major and minor matters, 1867) also included an opposition between Buddhism and Islam, documenting not only the epistemic marks of the Christian missionary encounter, but also the inner-political imperial context of Siam's hegemony over the Islamic sultanate of Patani.

Getting Jesus off the altar: Undoing atonement readings in Revelation

The interpretive history of Revelation is overrun with descriptions of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb. Yet, John never uses the popular phrase to describe him. By drawing attention to four significant omissions in the text, I argue against atonement readings of “the Lamb” in Revelation. Revelation is not a theological treatise on the meaning of the cross. It feeds questions about power and violence and admonishes the seven churches against participation in their imperial context. John’s slaughtered lamb, therefore, does not evoke a paschal sacrifice; it points to Rome’s penchant for violence. Joining the other bloodied bodies in Revelation, the lamb’s blood further incriminates Rome. Everywhere one looks in John’s depiction of empire, violence lurks. Finally, the only altar in Revelation is the heavenly altar, and this altar is not a place for sacrifice. The heavenly altar is a place where the laments of the suffering are heard, a place for worshipping God, and a place where Rome will meet its judgment. John’s Jesus is not a self-sacrificing spiritual savior; he bears witness to the bloodthirsty, massacre-loving beast-of-all-beasts. Churches must choose their allegiance.

Civic Identity and Public Space: Belfast since 1780, by Dominic Bryan and S. J. Connolly, with John Nagle, Literacy, Language, and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O’Cinneide

Reviewed by: Civic identity and public space: Belfast since 1780 by Dominic Bryan, S. J. Connolly, and John Nagle, and: Literacy, Language, and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ed. by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O’Cinneide Sean O'Toole (bio) Civic identity and public space: Belfast since 1780, by Dominic Bryan and S. J. Connolly, with John Nagle; pp. ix + 238. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019, $120.00, £80.00. Literacy, Language, and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O'Cinneide; pp. xiii + 213. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019, $120.00, £90.00. As talk of a hard border loomed, the tragic death of journalist Lyra McKee in a Derry/Londonderry street in April 2019 served as a stark reminder of the lethal potential at the contested sites of language and public space in Northern Ireland. The presence at McKee's funeral of Prime Minister Theresa May, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, and Irish president Michael D. Higgins, among thousands of mourners at St. Anne's Cathedral in Belfast, spoke equally of the desire to uphold the ideals of good relations and shared space declared under the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. Two recent studies skillfully illuminate the long history of these conflicting currents in Irish civic life and political culture. Civic identity and public space: Belfast since 1780, by Dominic Bryan and [End Page 123] S. J. Connolly, with John Nagle, offers a detailed account of the development of new ideas of collective identity and public space in an urban industrial society, ideas that prevailed elsewhere in Victorian Britain but whose flawed adoption in Ulster reverberates to this day. Literacy, Language, and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Rebecca Anne Barr, Sarah-Anne Buckley, and Muireann O'Cinneide engages with the politics of Irish literacy, defined not simply as a set of statistics or skillsets but as a "contested and politically charged prism through which to read Ireland's history," with some of its most intriguing chapters exploring the reading communities established by Irish periodicals, the imperial mapping of Ireland and India, and the late-century vogue for palmistry (2). As Civic identity and public space shows, the public debate on parades and other expressions of identity and allegiance in Northern Ireland has been "passionate yet superficial," with both unionists and nationalists asserting long-standing "rights" and "exclusive claims to space" (2). The book adds a historical dimension to the debate by demonstrating that the modern concept of public space and the conventions for regulating its use are themselves products of specific historical developments. Belfast, the industrial metropolis of Ulster, provides a useful case study. The first six of nine chapters offer a lucid historical narrative of the origins of public space in the town's shift from eighteenth-century aristocratic proprietorship and the "polite space" of urban elites residing in the city center to the nineteenth-century commercialization of the center and rapid expansion of residential districts outward in every direction, segregated by social class, religion, and political allegiance (30). The resulting spirit of exclusiveness and discrimination, along with a corrupt one-party rule and the sectional monopoly of public space, became mutually reinforcing calcifications. In the decades leading up the 1921 partition of Ireland, Ulster looked increasingly like "a potentially separate political unit, with Belfast as its capital in waiting" (130). The book's final three chapters offer a social-scientific analysis of the renegotiation of public space in the city in the past sixty years, no less interesting but perhaps necessarily more crowded with an accumulation of acronyms. Fortunately, the book's main interest lies in its meticulous historical detail and in its cogent argument: the problems of access to and control of public space in Belfast are fundamentally rooted in the limitations of nineteenth-century liberalism within the imperial context of religious and political sectionalism. Only against this background can Belfast's more recent history be properly understood. There are several other fascinating historiographic insights as well. First, discussion of Belfast's distinctive pattern of sectarian violence has tended to focus on the armed conflicts of the early 1920s and again from 1969...

Darwin's bulbuls: South Asian cultures of bird fighting and Darwin's theory of sexual selection

AbstractThe article explores the extent and nature of the relationship between Darwinian science and the British Empire. It does so by unpicking Darwin's British Indian examples of avian combat in constructing his ‘law of battle’. The article shows how Darwin's interpretation of these reports was simultaneously enabled, shaped and limited by the imperial context within which the reports were generated. Particularly important was Darwin's inability to see the enormous investment of human labour and complex knowledge in sculpting and curating these avian fights through a culture ofshauq. Partly this oversight followed from the South Asian birds having already been saturated by Romantic poetic associations, even before Darwin began considering them. Somewhat surprisingly, I note, Clifford Geertz shared Darwin's blindness towards the ‘cultural’ sculpting of ‘nature’ during avian combat.

Sprawozdanie z konferencji „English Law and Colonial Connections: Histories, Parallels, and Influences”. On-line Conference

Report of the “English Law and Colonial Connections: Histories, Parallels, and Influences”. On-line Conference The: “English Law and Colonial Connections: Histories, Parallels, and Influences conference” was held over the course of two afternoons, on January 26–27, 2020. It was organized by the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Łódź and Northumbria University in Newcastle. The symposium’s goal was to bring together researchers with interests in the history of English law and its influences on other parts of the world, particularly within an imperial context. An additional topic of the conference was the meaning of legacies and continuing influences of the empire and colonial influences of the law back to the Metropole. Nine lectures were delivered over the course of four sessions.

Terrae Motu Conlapsum: A Post-Earthquake Rebuilding Inscription at Pompeii in Imperial and Local Contexts

Terrae Motu Conlapsum: A Post-Earthquake Rebuilding Inscription at Pompeii in Imperial and Local Contexts

The Spanish Ship Affair: Wreck, Salvage, and Contested Legal Authority in Colonial Connecticut

In 1752, a wounded Spanish ship—laden with gold, silver, indigo, and other valuable goods—wrecked along the Connecticut coast. This episode initially appeared to be a tale of Samaritans rescuing the crew and safekeeping their payload. Such hospitality yielded to avarice as the loosely guarded cargo was plundered. This article looks closely at the county court in New London, Connecticut, to examine how judges, jurors, and local legal officials shouldered the burdens of securing some sense of justice for Spanish officials and British colonists ensnared in what became known as “The Spanish Ship Affair.” It highlights the importance of local colonial courts in maintaining peace, not only in their respective communities, but also in greater imperial contexts. This was especially important in the wake of ineffective responses from the governor, colonial assembly, and vice-admiralty court—institutions purportedly designed to handle inter-imperial conflicts. Emphasis on this county court reveals a flexible judiciary creatively punishing unredeemable criminals, merciful jurors willing to forgive repentant neighbors, and the resultant long-term changes in Connecticut’s political landscape and its legal approaches to shipwrecks.

Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel by Matthew Carey Salyer

Reviewed by: Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel by Matthew Carey Salyer Ruth M. McAdams (bio) Matthew Carey Salyer, Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel (New York: Lexington Books, 2020), pp. xii + 227, $95/£73 hardcover. Matthew Carey Salyer’s Brokering Culture in Britain’s Empire and the Historical Novel traces connections between nineteenth-century British and American historical novels and eighteenth-century imperial figures who mediated and brokered value between the metropole and the periphery. These imperial interlocutors were a motley crew of individuals excluded from or resistant to the Whig account of historical progress, including “High Tories, Catholics, (‘crypto-’) Jacobites, and other malcontents . . . displaced, whether directly or indirectly, by Britain’s eighteenth-century nation-building—whose peripheral status in the dominant national narrative meant that the terms of their ‘Britishness’ were more fraught at ‘home’ and more easily renegotiated abroad” (3). Salyer argues that the stories of these eighteenth-century imperial agents or “factors,” and the various texts they produced in their negotiations for power, influenced the development of the historical novel in the nineteenth century (4). In this way, he contests Georg Lukács’s influential understanding of the genre as forged by the mass experiences of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, pointing instead to earlier contexts. This argument, promised in the introduction, best encapsulates the claims made in the first three chapters. Each traces the way that eighteenth-century imperial contexts or events in Scotland, Ireland, and North America reverberate in early nineteenth-century historical novels. Chapter 1 observes striking parallels between the early life of the fictional protagonist of Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) and that of Edmund Burke, who was raised in a Jacobite milieu in the west of Ireland. Salyer charts prismatic connections among the 1745 uprising, Jacobite literary culture more broadly, Burke’s writing, and Scott’s novel. The second chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) alongside the famous mid-eighteenth-century Irish case of James Annesley, who claimed that his baron father had sold him into indentured servitude in North America. Chapter 3 analyzes James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41) in the context of the quasi-legal concept of locum tenens, meaning a person who holds the place or substitutes for another. From the fourth chapter onward, the relationship between the individual chapters and the book’s overall argument becomes more gestural. Additional synthetic commentary, cross-references, or explanatory sign-posting would have been valuable. One subtle thread relates to metaphors of imperial community. Chapter 4 suggests that Frederick Marryat’s The [End Page 383] Phantom Ship (1839) figures the ship’s multi-ethnic community as a microcosm of the empire, though the chapter also discusses the novel’s refraction of the Lower Canada Rebellion (1837–38). The fifth chapter explores two real-life, failed attempts to bolster modern claims for power by drawing upon historical myths: Emperor Téwodros II of Ethiopia’s use of the “Prester John” myth in diplomatic negotiations, and the North American adventurer William Augustus Bowles’s use of the Madoc myth in efforts to establish a sovereign British–Native American state on the Gulf Coast. Readers of Victorian Periodicals Review might be drawn to chapter 6, which focuses on Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Salyer argues that Blackwood’s conceived of the collaborative, polyphonic nature of periodical writing as a metaphor for heterogeneous inherited traditions that resist the dominant metropolitan worldview. He suggests briefly that the magazine’s model of “Greater Britain” may have accorded with the way that the “service classes” conceived of their place in the empire (168). The seventh chapter, the coda, analyzes Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) as anachronistic historical fiction that refigures the political adventurism of young British men in central Asia in the 1830s through the 1850s. The book’s relative disengagement with the racist violence of British imperialism is troubling. Salyer might reasonably observe that his analysis concerns a particular kind of misfit British man (always a man) whose perceived exclusion from dominant historical narratives led him to find personal and professional fulfillment in the empire, resulting in a...

New England Tales: Revisiting a Region's Past in Unfamiliar Places

New England TalesRevisiting a Region's Past in Unfamiliar Places Eric J. Morser (bio) Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution j. patrick mullins University Press of Kansas, 2017 255 pp. American Intelligence: Small-Town News and Political Culture in Federalist New Hampshire ben p. lafferty University of Massachusetts Press, 2020 269 pp. Forgotten Voices: The Hidden History of a New England Meetinghouse carolyn wakeman Wesleyan University Press, 2019 288 pp. More than a generation ago, the historian Jack P. Greene published an article on the state of colonial New England history. Greene provided a kaleidoscopic survey of the field and noted an interesting trend: although his colleagues continued to focus on such familiar topics as puritanism and the religious character of the region, their work had taken a social turn (143). Rather than focus solely on familiar civic and religious leaders like John Winthrop and Jonathan Edwards or the overarching influence of the Puritan mindset on New England, historians were now asking questions about what drove settlers to migrate to a strange new world, how they worked the land and made a living, and the choices they made that shaped the region and its early history. What, in other words, made them tick. The result of this new emphasis on the social worlds of colonial New [End Page 247] Englanders was a fresh flow of scholarship that explored a wide range of historical issues from the region's shifting demographics to its commercialization to the rise of new towns and cities. Greene did not address every relevant topic. He said little, for example, about slavery in colonial New England or the presence of American Indians in the region. The implication seemed to be, however, that historians were increasingly interested in mining the New England terrain for new voices, for people whose stories were not always shared by professional scholars. In the more than three decades since Greene penned his piece, interest in these untold or unconsidered New England tales has continued to thrive. In just the past few years, in fact, a host of creative scholars have revisited New England's history and crafted intriguing narratives that force us constantly to reconsider its past. Some have included the voices of previously overlooked New Englanders. Wendy Warren, for example, has situated slavery at the heart of the colonial New England past in ways both revealing and unsettling. Others have set American Indians at the center of the region's story. David J. Silverman has rewritten the history of Plymouth with the Wampanoag Indians as lead characters, while Jean M. O'Brien has investigated how New Englanders consciously removed Indians from their local histories in an effort to justify their claims to indigenous lands. Some have taken signature New England events like the Salem witch trials and cast them in entirely new light. Emerson Baker, for instance, has expanded beyond Massachusetts and located the witch trials in a larger imperial context. Picking up this transatlantic thread, Margaret Ellen Newell has highlighted the heartrending saga of Indian bondage and linked colonial New England to the slave economies of the Caribbean. These are just a few examples of how historians are uncovering fresh early New England tales and challenging us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about the region and its peoples. Apparently, even the most thoroughly trodden places still have alluring secrets to share. The three books under review are very different from each other. They focus on people in a variety of New England places and times. They deploy distinct methodologies and have diverse audiences in mind. Ultimately, though, what each of these books shares in common is a healthy willingness to take up the call of recent historians and demonstrate how looking beyond a familiar set of names and listening for overlooked voices can help us understand New England's past in exciting new ways. In Father [End Page 248] of Liberty: Jonathan Mayhew and the Principles of the American Revolution, historian J. Patrick Mullins, for example, reveals the enticing story of a Congregational minister whose fiery sermons and pamphlets antagonized British officials and inspired soon-to-be Boston patriots like John Adams and Paul Revere...

The Limits and Possibilities of a Cosmopolitics of Friendship: The Cosmopolitan Thought Zones of S.K. Datta 1900—1942

This paper explores the cosmopolitan thought zones that informed the life and work of S.K. Datta, an Indian Christian, nationalist and internationalist from 1900 to 1942. I draw on Priyamvada Gopal's use of the dialogical to grasp the contingency of friendship in imperial contexts to reveal the possibilities of a cosmopolitan shared ground as well as its limits within imperial and post-imperial Christian internationalisms. The term cosmopolitics best describes how Datta, as an anti-colonial subject, negotiates friendships within a continuum of relational struggle shaped by structural racism and hegemonic whiteness.

Making the Best of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the Second World War ed. by Sarah Glassford and Amy Shaw

Reviewed by: Making the Best of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the Second World War ed. by Sarah Glassford and Amy Shaw Charlotte Bennett Making the Best of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the Second World War. Edited by Sarah Glassford and Amy Shaw. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020. xii + 293 pp. Cloth $89.95, paper $35.95. Making the Best of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the Second World War is a fitting sequel to Sarah Glassford and Amy Shaw's equally impressive edited collection on the First World War (A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service, UBC Press, 2012). Here, Glassford and Shaw aim "to do justice to the diversity in the female populations of Canada and Newfoundland," bringing [End Page 474] together essays by twelve historians who have used a "granular approach" to explore specific wartime communities and/or facets of collective experience (5). These contributions are grouped into four sections prefaced by brief introductions that signal common themes. Essays in "Part 1: Women, Children, and the War" emphasize the importance of age in shaping girls' identities and experiences (Barbara Lorenzkowski; Claire L. Halstead; Lisa Moore) as well as how conceptions of childhood determined the support available for working mothers (Lisa Pasolli). In "Part 2: Women and the War at Home," essays highlight how religion, class, and race contributed to gendered tensions inherent within Jewish women's work activities (Jennifer Shaw) and wider consumer culture (Graham Broad; Joseph Tohill). In "Part 3: Women and Overseas Humanitarian Work," Marlene Epp and Sarah Glassford reveal the practical and emotional difficulties faced by Mennonite relief workers and Red Cross workers who traveled to Europe. Finally, "Part 4: Women in Wartime Nursing, Paid War Work, and the Armed Forces" illuminates nursing experiences in northern Newfoundland and Labrador (Heidi Coombs), portrayals of female military dead (Sarah Hogenbirk), and perceptions of beauty and the female body in industrial workplaces (Sarah Van Vugt). Glassford and Shaw more than deliver on their aspirations for Making the Best of It, "mov[ing] the historiographical conversation into new territory, while also drawing attention to the many topics that await scholarly study" (17). This collection brings new research questions and analytical frameworks to the fore, transcending simple assessments as to whether the war was "good" or "bad" for women and/or liberated them in some way. Historians of children and youth will be particularly enthused to see girlhood treated as a "distinct subset of female experience," especially scholars of regions that have not yet witnessed the same "steady growth in the children's history subfield" apparent in North America (16). Lorenzkowski's chapter on emotional geographies and practices of feeling in Atlantic Canada "render[s] legible a history written in invisible ink," using recent insights from the history of emotions to scrutinize the oral histories of women who grew up in wartime Halifax and Saint John (36). Halstead meticulously situates the experiences of British evacuees within their transnational imperial context, uncovering personal ties of friendship that emerged between these "didactic symbols of the war" and their Canadian hosts (59). Moore applies a comparative framework to records from three private girls' schools in Montreal, illuminating divergences in francophone and anglophone expressions of agency and civic identity. These child-centered explorations of female experience greatly enrich the collection as a whole, substantiating the inclusion of "girls" as a key subject in its subtitle. [End Page 475] Due to its remarkable breadth and depth, Making the Best of It will likely become a core reference book for undergraduates and researchers studying Second-World-War Canada and Newfoundland. That said, it is unlikely to have the final word on the subject, a state of affairs refreshingly recognized by the editors themselves (17). Making the Best of It was limited by the responses received to a call for papers; few submissions explored francophone experiences in Quebec, only one related to Newfoundland, and none explicitly addressed Indigenous women. Glassford and Shaw also confirm up front that members of only a limited number of ethnic and religious minorities appear in the volume, presumably for similar reasons. It is hoped that Making the Best of It...

The Secret of the Kingdom of God: The Literary and Theological Achievement of the Evangelist Mark by Hugh Humphrey

Reviewed by: The Secret of the Kingdom of God: The Literary and Theological Achievement of the Evangelist Mark by Hugh Humphrey Susan M. (Elli) Elliott hugh humphrey, The Secret of the Kingdom of God: The Literary and Theological Achievement of the Evangelist Mark (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019). Pp. xiv + 179. $100. Hugh Humphrey offers a literary analysis of the Gospel of Mark, presenting the Gospel writer as a well-educated creative author trained in the literary conventions of his day. H. intends to elucidate what the “secret” or “mystery” of the kingdom of God is in Mark’s Gospel and to show that this expression does not refer to “‘heaven’ or ‘something after death’” (p. vii). [End Page 146] In his introduction, H. provides a concise view of what he considers a “new paradigm” of interpretation of Mark. He locates the beginning of this paradigm in the sociorhetorical methods that Vernon K. Robbins advanced starting in the 1980s and in the work of the Markan Literary Sources Seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature begun in 2010 (pp. x–xi). H. identifies this paradigm as “new” in distinction, first, from previous scholarly focus on Mark as a source of evidence for the historical Jesus based on the consensus source theory of Marcan priority and, second, from assumptions of form and redaction criticism that reduce Mark to what H. describes as “a cut-and-paste compiler of oral traditions” (p. x) rather than a skilled and creative author. H.’s discernment of this “new paradigm” omits mention of decades of other major work on Mark’s Gospel, including performance critics’ work on its narrative unity and authorial creativity and other scholars’ work on Roman imperial contexts that provide background for its core terminology and concepts. Following the introduction, H. presents several elements of his literary analysis in a series of readable short chapters. In chap. 1, he explains his theory of layers of development in Mark. The second chapter discusses the chreia as a rhetorical convention and lists chreiai in Mark with a comment on and full translation of each passage. The next three chapters discuss specific literary sources for Mark, starting with H.’s own exposition of Mark’s use of the Wisdom of Solomon to portray Jesus as the “righteous man” in the image found there. Evaluative reviews follow, first of Adam Winn’s work on Mark’s use of the Elijah/Elisha narratives and then of Dennis MacDonald’s work on the Gospel’s reliance on Homer (Adam Winn, Mark and the Elijah-Elisha Narrative: Considering the Practice of Greco-Roman Imitation in the Search for Markan Source Material [Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010]; Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000]). Another chapter details Mark’s use of other sources, including Jewish Scriptures, a passion narrative, some sayings from Q, and Plato’s Timaeus. Overall H.’s presentation effectively demonstrates that Mark drew on more than one source and on Greek as well as Jewish sources. He avoids the pitfalls of claiming any single source as “the” explanatory source for the Gospel. H. shows that Mark used literary conventions of his time, pointing especially to chreia and mimesis. In chap. 7, H. provides a detailed summary of the entire Gospel detailing its literary sources and construction passage by passage. Before a brief epilogue and an appendix that includes a full translation of the Gospel with indications of the literary sources, H.’s final full chapter offers what could be a stand-alone exposition on the theme introduced in his title, The Secret of the Kingdom of God. He focuses on the teachings assembled in Mark 4, especially the parable of the sower (vv. 3–9) and its explanation (vv. 13–20) along with the key message from Jesus to the disciples in v. 11 that the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to them. H. sees this “secret” as the image of authentic discipleship as bearing good fruit offered in the explanation of the parable. H.’s analysis points most constructively to a shift of focus in the interpretation of Mark. H. redirects...

Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible

Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible

Excavating the Modern Self: Haggard’s Egyptological Romances

Henry Rider Haggard’s Egyptomania took many shapes, from regular journeys to Egypt to extensive collections of ancient Egyptian artefacts. This article looks more particularly at Haggard’s representation of ancient Egypt in his literary works and at the implications of his narrative choices in the scientific and imperial context in which he wrote his Egyptological romances. By establishing genealogical links between ancient Egypt and modern Britain through the literary form of archaeological fiction, Haggard constructs a palimpsestic vision of individual and collective history that can be read both in psychoanalytical and in imperial terms. This paper examines the place Egypt occupies in Haggard’s imagination by considering some of the narrative and narratological elements shared by his Egyptological romances, with a particular focus on The Ancient Allan and “Smith and the Pharaohs”. The depiction of Egypt as an oneiric place located within the Victorian mind and as the origin of a layered modern identity suggests an ambivalent interpretation of Haggard’s imperialist stance at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Convict Peace: The Imperial Context of the 1833 Convict Revolt at Castle Forbes

ABSTRACT This paper places a well-known controversy about the jurisdiction of nineteenth-century magistrates in its imperial context. In particular it shows how and why conversations about convict management and the jurisdiction of magistrates in New South Wales were interwoven with contemporary conversations about the law and government of slavery. In 1833 in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt, convicts, administrators and magistrates in New South Wales borrowed the language of disorder and good governance from debates about the amelioration of slavery because those languages made sense of an experience that was both deeply local and shared. Convicts were not slaves; but masters, magistrates, convicts and slaves all experienced substantial shifts in the relations among empire, colonial states and local institutions of governance that redefined their privileges and obligations in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The contest between magistrate-masters and convicts in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt thus demonstrates the importance of exploring the legal transformation of empire through interconnected histories of everyday order.