Imperial Land Research Articles

What is a territory? Comparative federalism and state formation in North America

ABSTRACT Territories are a common form of subnational government in the United States and Canada, but their jurisdictional purpose within each country’s federal system remains ill-defined. This article presents a new theoretically driven definition for sub-state territories and explains the purposes for their creation within the imperial land systems of both countries. It defines territories as federal possessions with circumscribed self-government and limited pathways to full constitutional membership within their respective federations. It argues that territories were created for two purposes: (1) to provide a mechanism for the orderly absorption of new land and (2) to impose uniform political systems across that land in Canada and the continental United States. This remains the case in Canada, while American territories now serve an administrative tool for the management of overseas empire.

Finding Order in Diversity. Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg

Reviewed by: Finding Order in Diversity. Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848 by Scott Berg Nigel Aston Finding Order in Diversity. Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848. By Scott Berg. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 344. $59.99. ISBN: 9781612496962). In this deeply researched and engaging study, Scott Berg demonstrates conclusively that Austria before and during the Metternich years may have been an international symbol of conservatism but, in terms of the Empire’s confessional policy, it had all the hallmarks of a continuing Enlightened regime. Francis I was not his uncle Joseph’s nephew for nothing. Despite intensive pressure from Catholic activists clerical and lay, the Josephist inheritance founded on the 1781 Edict of Toleration was upheld by the bureaucrats driving policy even to the Revolutions of 1848. A multinational and multi-confessional empire had to function efficiently and that required a qualified throne and altar alliance and respect for the rights of non-Catholics (about 30 per cent of the Empire), including confirmation of citizenship under the Austrian Civil Code of 1811. The principle of toleration was upheld, albeit one that rejected a Josephist drive for uniformity in favour of [End Page 212] respecting difference in a composite monarchy. Censorship was in force and it was impossible for Catholic activists such as Hofbauer to agitate openly agains the Toleration Patent because they risked expulsion from Austria. Under ultramontanist pressure, in his last years as Chancellor before 1848 Metternich pushed for a rapprochement with the papacy that would loosen restrictions on the Church but not much was achieved before the Revolutions transformed the political landscape and brought an end to Josephist policies in religion. Prior to that, as Berg shows in Chapter 3, Protestants in Hungary had been integrated into the life of the Empire under Archduke Joseph, the representative of the Emperor in Budapest for half a century down to 1847. Legal curbs were evn imposed on Protestants who opted to convert and mixed marriages were officially discouraged. Only the Tyrol did not follow the loose interpretation of the Toleration Patent and the few Protestants resident there endured popular repression. The Habsburgs also reckoned with a sizeable Orthodox presence. It was left undisturbed though the price exacted was the discouragement of contacts with foreign governments, notably Russia, whose amity pre-1848 was a priority for Imperial officials. Francis I and his successor, the mentally impaired Emperor Ferdinand, ruled over the second largest Jewish population after Russia in Europe and they were keen, mainly through education, to integrate Jews into Habsburg society. And this despite much anti-semitism among the general population and the opposition of some Jews, especially in Galicia, the largest and poorest community. As Berg neatly expresses it: ‘If Liberalism was the best friend of the Jews in the nineteenth century, then Josephist absolutism was its bodyguard’ (p. 153). But the Revolutions of 1848 brought the end of Josephism. The régime finally made concessions to popular Catholicism and restored the Church’s privileged political status in relation to the state by 1850 as Emperor Franz Josef put in place a counter-revolutionary, neo-absolutist regime with internal order as the priority: competitors to ultramontanism were crushed, and the Concordat of 1855 granted the Catholic Church unprecedented rights in Austria. Scott Berg charts with assurance this half-century of Austrian confessional policy in a volume based on solid archival evidence and he ranges across the whole Empire noting territorial divergences where appropriate. There is a nice opening touch to each chapter by way of reference to a building or a statue in the old Imperial lands that recalls this era. Nigel Aston University of York Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

Emigration of Christians from the Bosnian Eyalet (1683-1718)

The end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century was marked by radical changes on the demographic map of the Bosnian Eyalet as a serhat of the Ottoman state. In addition to mass migrations of the Muslim population from the lost Ottoman territories towards the interior of the Bosnian Eyalet, there were also continuous movements of the Christian population in the opposite direction. The paper follows the movements of some groups of Christians, mainly those who respond to the bishop's call to settle the desolate areas around Pécs, Szeged, Baja and the surrounding area, but also the migration of other non-Muslim populations towards the Venetian territory, as well as migrations to the „Imperial lands“ due to various political, economic and other factors. While the Venetian government encouraged, with money and investiture, the people to bring families to Dalmatia, and the Austrian government received petitions from the priests of Bosnian monasteries about the difficult situation of Catholics, the Ottoman government throughout that time undertook activities to stop defections, therefore, the paper describes some of the procedures and the situations themselves. Some authors exaggerate when they say that, for example, between 100 and 200 thousand Catholics left Bosnia. The paper shows that according to some reports, 74 thousand Catholics lived in Bosnia before 1683, and 25 thousand half a century later. This is an acceptable number of emigrant Catholics compared to the exaggerations of some chroniclers. An important part of the work is the knowledge obtained from sources, who actually are the non-Muslims that go across the border from the interior and from the borders of the Bosnian Eyalet. Ottoman sources usually refer to both Catholics and Orthodox by the name „kefere“ (a collective noun denoting the non-Muslim population in general). For the Ottoman administration, the most important thing is that it is a category of non-Muslims in order to tax them according to that category. Due to such a situation, it is difficult to give a definitive number of Catholics or Orthodox in a certain period according to Ottoman sources. In the paper, we provide a limited analysis of the case according to some unpublished sources, so it can be seen how many Christians, heads of the household, remained in a certain area. Often, however, it is not possible to know whether they are Orthodox or Catholics, because there are no priests among them. Names are often a problem, too, because patronymics are rare, and names can be tied to a nomenclature common to both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. From the episcopal and friar reports, it can be seen that in that period, the conversion of Muslims also took place, so among the migrants to the north, for example, there were thousands of new Christians. The cities of Požega, Osijek and Brod also lost their Muslim population and hundreds of Catholics from Sarajevo, Kreševo, Modriča and Vrhbosna are coming to them. Registry books record their origin, especially in the first years of the 18th century. The Orthodox and Catholic population from the Herzegovina Sandžak settles mainly in the Boka Kotorska area. An extensive cadastral census from 1701 shows that among the people there are many who come from places that are not affected by war activities. The Orthodox population from Backa and Baranja goes to Slavonia and Srijem, but also to Ottoman territory. On the territory of the Republic of Dubrovnik, war refugees from the Bosnian ejalet are most often Vlachs, especially during the periods of the Moravian War (1684-1699) and the Venetian-Ottoman War (1714-1718). The Ottoman authorities demanded that these people be delivered to them, and the Dubrovnik authorities formally agreed, but they often helped the people to stay there or to go further by sea.

Between Rebellion and Statesmanship: Attempting a Biography of Ivanko, 1196/1200 (?)

The paper analyses the actions of Ivanko, a Bulgarian nobleman, possibly a member of the ruling family of the Asenides, who in 1196 killed the ruling tsar, Asen, and escaped to Constantinople once his plan to take control of the country failed. Owing to the benevolence of Alexios III Angelos, he joined the Byzantine military and very quickly rose through its ranks until he became the military commander of the region of Philippopolis. In 1198 or 1999 he defected and created an independent dominion on the slopes of the Stara Planina massif, precariously balanced between Bulgaria and the empire, exploiting to his own advantage the constant state of warfare between the two polities. His adventure was short-lived: in 1200 he was captured through deception by the Byzantines, taken prisoner, and presumably executed. While his political career was very short, his importance for the history of medieval Bulgaria is not to be underestimated. It is a testimony of the fluidity of the political situation at the Bulgaro-Byzantine border, whose instability often allowed ambitious and cunning local commanders to carve up autonomous dominions, and of the difficulties experienced by the central power in keeping control of the peripheral areas of the state. It is also proof of the constantly shifting ethnic and cultural allegiances of the citizens of those polities, entangled between different and often conflicting identities, usually regarded as irreconcilable but that were actually the object of a continuous negotiation and adjusting. Ivanko is an interesting case study in regard to all of those factors, especially when considered within the larger phenomenon of provincial separatism in the imperial (and Bulgarian) lands between the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century.

The Imperial Policies in Land Reform and the Conditions of Peasants in Highland Gimbi, Western Wallaga, Ethiopia (1941-974): Historical Perspective

Land has been an economic and political basis in the history of Ethiopia.The feudal governments since the time of Minilik II measured, confiscated and redistributed land to those politically important individuals. The objective of this study is to assess the imperial policies in land reform and the conditions of peasants in highland Gimbi, Western Wallaga from 1941 to 1974. This study has used both primary and secondary sources to examine the imperial government land reform and the conditions of peasants in highland Gimbi from 1941 to 1974. Archival sources from Wolde-Mesqal Archival center at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, and oral sources [1] collected through in-depth interview are extremely important in this regard. Under the imperial government in post-liberation period, land reform and its grants to officials and others concentrated land in few hands whereas the number of the landless peasants highly increased. Even though, the 1952 imperial order theoretically enabled the landless farmers to get half gasha of land, in Gimbi no grant was made to the landless peasants. Land privatization was aggravated under the restored government. Above all, with the intensification of coffee cultivation, in highland Gimbi the price of land was exacerbated to the extent that only the well-to-do class members were able to buy land at the expense of the majority of the peasants. Overall, the study of the imperial policies in land reform and its impacts on the population at the grassroot level enable us to have a better historical perspective towards land tenure system and the peasants whose livelihood directly tied to it. Keywords - Land tenure, land reform, land measurement, landless peasants, Gimbi DOI: 10.7176/HRL/52-03 Publication date: December 31 st 2020 1 Informants were willing to share their views on the issues they were interviewed, but some asked for confidentiality of their identities. So, instead of mentioning their name the researcher prefer to indicate them by number in reference

The landscape of Metztitlan, Mexico: Power and control in a sixteenth century Spanish administrative painting

ABSTRACTThe concept of landscape has been studied mostly as the view of a space with particular interest in its aesthetics, originating at the turn of the sixteenth century. However, I argue that in fourteenth century northern Europe, the concept was focused on polity rather than aesthetics. This article examines this lesser-known tradition by analysing the painting of Metztitlan, a sixteenth century town in Mexico, and arguing, first, that unlike all the other representations in the Relaciones Geográficas to which it belongs, it is the only landscape, and second, that this painting is associated with an administrative procedure common in Spain to gain control over imperial lands. I review European practices regarding the representation of towns under the Spanish Crown. Then, I present the results of the fieldwork carried out to locate several heights which probably served as vantage points to paint the landscape. Based on this research, I analyse the intentions of the painter to argue that it should be considered within the same tradition as the paintings made in Spain by Flemish painter Anton van de Wyngaerde, as part of the Spanish Empire's Germanic tradition of describing places with the intention of exerting control over them.

A Guerra do Contestado e a Lei de Terras imperial: um estudo de caso da Fazenda Figueiredo (Lages, 1855-1917)

Parte importante da guerra sertaneja do Contestado nasceu durante o Império, na luta camponesa por acesso à terra, sendo acrescida na República pela continuada resistência de posseiros, sitiantes e agregados contra o mandonismo local de grandes fazendeiros, criadores e comerciantes de gado e a usurpação de terras pelas companhias Brazil Railway e Lumber and Colonization. Este artigo tem como objetivo analisar a questão fundiária no período anterior à Guerra, durante o período Imperial, de modo a identificar a historicidade de experiências como o mandonismo local e a concentração fundiária na região. O método da pesquisa foi baseado na reconstrução de relações e discursos jurídicos de um estudo de caso localizado no município de Lages, segundo dois processos judiciais que envolveram questões de terras da fazenda “Figueiredo”, de 1876 a 1917. Concluiu-se que tanto o coronelismo quanto a concentração fundiária, combatidos pela maioria dos sertanejos do Contestado, são resultados do mesmo processo histórico da execução da Lei de Terras de 1850. O referido estudo de caso demonstrará a importância da política fundiária Imperial às pesquisas que buscam entender a historicidade do Planalto Catarinense durante a Primeira República.

The American West and the World: Transnational and comparative perspectives by Janne Lahti

Reviewed by: The American West and the World: Transnational and comparative perspectives by Janne Lahti Andrew Offenburger The American West and the World: Transnational and comparative perspectives By Janne Lahti. New York; London: Routledge, 2019. In October 2000 at the Western History Association annual conference, then-president Patricia Limerick spoke on the connections between the American West and global history. Limerick described the deep tradition of finding commonalities in pasts of empire, colonialism and environmentalism. “One can… begin as a western American historian,” she said, “and end up attending closely to global processes, from international patterns of colonialism to planetary implications of climate change. The American West affords the historian a key of admission to some of the best and most thought-provoking conversations going on in the world today.”1 This was nothing new for an organization—and a broader network of scholars—who had been comparing American expansion to other European and Indigenous histories in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s; a comparative thrust had linked the West often to locations affected by the British Empire, and if the general public was not yet versed in this American un-exceptionalism, scholars sure were. Since then, a robust and growing field of transnational works has arisen, one that connects the history of the American West with other trans-imperial regions. Readers of this journal and others with an international view of colonialism will be very familiar with this corpus, which has made inroads with scholars of the American West most forcefully over the past twenty years. In The American West and the World, Janne Lahti gives shape and structure to this expansive yet inchoate field, offering a narrative synthesis on the West’s shared history with the world. He draws connections between older comparative work and newer transnational ties. “In some ways,” he writes in the introduction, “transnational history stands as the newest manifestation of an approach that has successively been branded as international, world, or, simply, comparative history. What all these conceptualizations share are attempts of interpretative and methodological realignments contradicting insular narratives” (6). Through examples drawn from previous studies, and through historiographical categorization, Lahti’s work admirably defines a sprawling field. What follows the introduction is a synthesis of secondary works, finding a pattern among the myriad contributions spread across global geographies. Five chapters organize the historiography by chronology and theme, each followed by a full bibliography. “Shared Worlds” (Chapter 1) begins with a story of the Makahs, relying upon Joshua Reid’s The Sea Is My Country, to present a globally entangled world, sustained and caught by imperial and Indigenous interests from Europe to the Americas and Asia, from contact to the early nineteenth century. This “early West,” the author writes, was “international before it became national, and it became known and placed in a global context of empires, markets, epidemics, and knowledge before it was claimed by the United States and its brand of settler colonialism” (17). “Settler Revolutions” (Chapter 2) invokes the paradigm of James Belich to characterize the United States from 1830 to 1900 and beyond, with strong parallels discussed in Indigenous, British, French, Russian, and Spanish imperial lands. The remaining chapters—“Violence,” “Intimacies of Empires” and “Imperial Eyes”—arrange a conversation among scholars of diverse specialties, framed by foundational texts in American transnationalism. This all results in a field-shaping work on the global West and its borderlands. The handling of the historiography is deft and thorough, and this study will be cited often for its ability to articulate the contours of a field still forming in many minds. Scholars of settler colonialism, empire, Indigenous societies, conquest/resistance and postcolonialism will likely nod in agreement in several sections while being pleasantly surprised by unfamiliar connections in others. One simply cannot set down this book and retain any sense of American parochialism, much less triumphalism. Lahti is at his best when attacking exceptionalism by discussing transnational circuits and shared actors along multinational frontiers and borderlands. By virtue of its successes, then, The American West and the World implicitly raises one question (among many) pertaining to comparative and transnational modes of analysis: have previous comparative studies, by allowing for national differences, unwittingly run the...

Translating the ‘Other’ for the Western World for more than a decade: Incredible India! campaigns

When we analyse and translate tourist texts promoting or dealing with nonWestern destinations we certainly have to take into account the weight of postcolonial discourses in the representation of these places in the tourist field. Many ex-colonies have become popular tourist destinations, while the detritus of post-colonialism have been transformed into tourist sights, including exotic peoples and customs; artefacts; indigenous lifestyles and cultural heritage (Craik). Therefore, if tourism reinforces postcolonial relationships, tourist texts are deeply embedded in colonial discourses. Some scholars have argued that tourism is a form of “leisure imperialism” and represents “the hedonistic face of neocolonialism” (Crick 322). Hall and Tucker have dedicated a volume to the relation between postcolonial thought and tourism referring back to Edward Said’s seminal work on Orientalism (1978) and to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989), both works which outline the ontological and epistemological distinction that has been made between the Western world and the ‘Other’. Encounters with the non-Western have always provided fuel for myths and mythical language and tourism has developed its own promotional lexicon and repertoire of myths (Selwyn), and as a matter of fact, otherness can be an element that makes a destination worth a visit. Studies have demonstrated how the representation of the ‘Other’ is closely linked to the popularization of accounts of travels and explorations in imperial lands (Pratt; Spurr), and sadly this representation is still part of tourist place promotion (Hall and Page). It is a fact that tourism plays a central role in transforming collective and individual values through ideas of commoditization (Cohen), which implies that what were once cultural displays of living traditions or cultural texts of lived authenticity become cultural products that meet the needs of commercial tourism, as well as the construction of a supposed heritage. Such a situation leads to the invention of traditions and heritage for external consumption that meet visitors’ conceptions of the other (Helu-Thaman; Cronin et al.). A good example of representing a non-Western destination at an international level is the Indian campaign Incredible India launched in 2002 for the European, Asian Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays N. 21 – 05/2019 125 and Middle East markets (Kant). Undertaken by the Government of India to promote India Tourism all over the world, the campaign was released by Ogilvy and Mather India in media print, internet and television. My analysis wants to outline how the main themes of the campaign (yoga, Ayurveda and other spirituality-related concepts, Indian cultures and culinary traditions and festivals all around the country, the cultural heritage and the natural resources) have been developed through time in order to ‘translate’ the uniqueness of India for the Western tourist in the last 15 years. The campaign Incredible India has been developed and renewed over the past few years and is still ongoing. My analysis will follow two stages: in the first I will deal with linguistic and visual techniques that create a determinate idea of India as a tourist destination, in the second I will compare texts in English with their translation into Italian, and specifically the creation of a campaign aimed at Italian tourists.

Sepharadim/conversos and premodern Global Hispanism

ABSTRACTSepharadim participated in the Hispanic vernacular culture of the Iberian Peninsula. Even in the time of al-Andalus many spoke Hispano-Romance, and their Hebrew literature belies a deep familiarity with, and love of, their native Hispano-Romance languages. However, since the early sixteenth century, the vast majority of Sepharadim have never lived in the Hispanic world. Sepharadim lived not in Spanish colonies defined by Spanish conquest, but in a network of Mediterranean Jewish communities defined by diasporic values and institutions. By contrast, conversos, those Sepharadim who converted to Catholicism, whether in Spain or later in Portugal, Italy or the New World, lived mostly in Spanish imperial lands, were officially Catholic and spoke normative Castilian. Their connections, both real and imagined, with Sephardic cultural practice put them at risk of social marginalization, incarceration, even death. Some were devout Catholics whose heritage and family history doomed them to these outcomes. Not surprisingly, many Spanish and Portugese conversos sought refuge in lands outside of Spanish control where they might live openly as Jews. This exodus (in the 1600s) from the lands formerly known as Sefarad by a generation of conversos trained in Spanish universities led to a parallel Sephardic community of conversos who re-embraced Judaism in Amsterdam and Italy. The Sephardic/converso cultural complex exceeds the boundaries of Spanish imperial geography, confuses Spanish, Portuguese, Catholic and Jewish subjectivities and defies traditional categories practiced in Hispanic studies; it is a unique example of the Global Hispanophone.

Patrimonio real y conflictos sucesorios en el reino vándalo

La instalación del exercitus wandalorum en el norte de Africa y el acceso de la nobleza vándala a la propiedad del suelo (429-442), acontecimientos que en última instancia conducirían a la ruptura de la unidad política del mundo Mediterráneo, se materializaron a costa de un importante sector de la aristocracia senatorial romana y de la curia de Cartago, despojados de sus bienes en beneficio de la élite germana. Por su parte, el linaje real de los asdingos se reservó los más ricos y extensos fundos particulares, entregados a los príncipes en forma de lotes hereditarios, así como los dominios imperiales, hasta entonces destinados a subvenir los gastos de la domus divina o casa de los emperadores y Occidente, y que a partir de este momento pasarían a constituir el patrimonio de la corona vándala. Cada uno de los príncipes asdingos dispuso además de su propia clientela, integrada tanto por elementos romanos como germánicos. Estos grupos de dependientes, concentrados en torno a las distintas casas del linaje real, a menudo entraban en confrontación durante las etapas de luchas sucesorias que periódicamente asolaron el reino, como resultado del mantenimiento del sistema de líneas transversales para regular el acceso al trono. Sería uno de estos conflictos el que en 533 brindase al emperador Justiniano la oportunidad de intervenir militarmente en el norte de Africa y restablecer así la autoridad imperial sobre la región.

Territory, enclosure, and state territorial mode of production in the Russian imperial periphery

Abstract. After the imperial land consolidation acts of 1906, the Russian land commune became a center of territorial struggle where complex alliances of actors, strategies, and representations of territory enacted land enclosure beyond the exclusive control of the state. Using original documentation of Russian imperial land deals obtained in the federal and municipal archives, this study explores how the Russian imperial state and territories in the periphery were dialectically co-produced not only through institutional manipulations, educational programs, and resettlement plans but also through political and public discourses. This paper examines how coalitions of landed nobility and land surveyors, landless serfs, and peasant proprietors used enclosure as conduits for property violence, accumulation of capital, or, in contrast, as a means of territorial autonomy. Through this example, I bring a territorial dimension into Russian agrarian scholarship by positioning the rural politics of the late imperial period within the global context of capitalist land enclosure. At the same time, by focusing on the reading of territory from the Russian historical perspective, I introduce complexity into the modern territory discourse often found in Western political geographic interpretations.

Clearing, “Wasting,” and Regreening: An Environmental History of Bare Hills in Central Vietnam

A recent trend of regreening formerly bare hills in central Vietnam is often described in the media as a form of recovery from 1960s wartime destruction. However, this modern framework of wartime “wasting” and regreening obscures a longer history of bare hills. Colonial explorers noted eroded slopes in 1877, and imperial land surveyors described stretches of “idle, fallow land” decades earlier. This article describes a longer history of a “wasteland” not only to challenge a presentist framing of environmental decline but also to recognize the historic roles people played in producing these spaces, often in response or resistance to state policies. Colonial engagements with land clearing and customary uses of “open” lands gave shape to colonial visions of “wasteland” and later spurred colonial environmentalist critiques, even calls for a new form of green colonialism via exotic tree plantations. Writing the history of such a “wasteland” is one way to decenter imperial, colonial, and nationalist teleologies that tend to emphasize the environmental “footprints” of state actions but not the reverse. This history of “bare hills” draws from a mix of historical sources to show how people produced this “wasteland” and why, at times, they maintained it despite state efforts at reclamation.

Species, size, and location of “giant trees” in Tokyo’s urban area and western suburbs

ABSTRACTThe Japanese landscape has been characterised by the occurrence of ancient, massive trees described here as “giant trees”, and many of these have had major historic, cultural, and religious significance. However, modern Japan has experienced significant and rapid urbanisation and in relation to ancient woods and trees, “cultural severance” too. This study identified the species, size, and locations of the giant trees growing in Tokyo’s urban centre and its western suburbs, by conducting field surveys and collecting data from published studies. Classification of sites according to tree girth, with giant trees, revealed six broad locations: (1) forest and agricultural lands of managed secondary and later abandoned woodland with deciduous, broad-leaved trees; (2) public gardens, comprising useful and ornamental plants introduced from southern Japan; (3) parks, including mostly exotic species; (4) shrine sites, including Zelkova serrata, conifers, and evergreen broad-leaved trees; (5) temple sites, including many Torreya nucifera; and (6) Imperial lands, with rare species of trees in low numbers. The highest percentage of giant trees (36%) were found in parks, followed by temple and shrine sites (32%), whereas only 10% were found in other historical places. This study highlights the importance of studying giant tree habitats and history and identifying the relationships between human activities and living trees.

Utilization of Inô's Maps at the Japanese Imperial Land Survey

Utilization of Inô's Maps at the Japanese Imperial Land Survey

The rise and rise of agricultural wage labour: evidence from Ethiopia's south, c.1950–2000

AbstractThis article seeks to examine the dynamic transformation in the system of labour mobilization and the consequent intermingling of peoples of diverse cultural background in northern Sidama, Ethiopia. It investigates the different labour recruitment strategies deployed in the study area at different times, ranging from traditional to hired labour. In the former case, the household plays a major role in the recruitment and supply of agricultural labour, whereas in the latter case, ‘trans-locality’ reinforced by migration becomes central to the labour history of the region. In the 1940s and 1950s, Emperor Haile Selassie I granted large estates of land in the study area to absentee landowners who started schemes of commercial coffee farming. The subsequent expansion of commercialized coffee farming in a locality called Wondo Gänät (northern Sidama) from the 1950s onwards was responsible for the introduction of agricultural wage labour into the wider region. There was no local surplus labour to satisfy the labour needs of the new coffee farms. This void was later filled by Kembata, Hadiya and Wolayita migrant labourers who flocked into the study area from regions widely noted for their scarcity of arable land. This translocal movement of workers paved the way for the beginning of wage employment and eventually the commodification of farm labour in line with capitalist agriculture. Although commercial coffee plantations provided the initial stimulus for labour commodification in the study area, sugar cane-based cash cropping has helped it flourish even further. I argue in this article that the imperial land grants of the late 1940s and 1950s were an important milestone both for the agricultural history of the study area and for the organization of farm labour. Most importantly, I also argue that some of the social tensions and conflicts that often haunt contemporary northern Sidama are legacies inherited from the labour migrations of the 1950s and 1960s and the demographic heterogeneity that ensued.

“With & alongside his housewife”: Claiming Ground in New Netherland and the Early Modern Dutch Empire

Gender relationships fundamentally supported the Dutch seaborne mercantile empire. In the seventeenth-century Netherlands, housewives and households anchored the civic world on which commerce depended. As Dutch traders, planners, and merchants sought to build profitable footholds around the world, they repeatedly turned to the idea that colonial outposts needed female inhabitants; transatlantic migrants similarly sought to further their own interests through family settlement and individual territorial claims. On the mid-Atlantic coast of North America, these ideas created an early and consistent emphasis on female migration and the creation of homes and villages along contested frontiers. The consequent creation of New Netherland’s physical “gender frontier” gave martial significance to women’s presence and family homes. Indigenous women’s agricultural fields became principal targets of Dutch forces as the colony expanded by relying on the establishment of immigrant households and villages. The women of New Netherland thus provide the opportunity to assess the key role of gender in the establishment of early modern settler colonies and the extension of imperial land claims.

World War I on the Eastern Front

Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918. 340 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0521195539. $98.00. Annemarie H. Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and East, 1914-1922. 248 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0801448638. $39.95. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Gocek, and Norman Naimark, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at End of Ottoman Empire. 464 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0195393743. $34.95. The vast historiography of World War I in Europe can be divided in two. Much better documented is history of Western Front, involving huge armies bogged down in trench warfare; unprecedented carnage that disproportionately eliminated men from upper classes, left millions dead, and transformed human landscape by sending home millions more wounded and disfigured veterans; and a flu pandemic that killed more than half a million people in France and Britain alone. Less studied by historians, Eastern Front was very different. Here war contributed to collapse of empires and set off mass waves of human migration, both forced and voluntary. It also resulted in creation of new nation-states, transformation of 25-30 million people from imperial subjects to national minorities, and genocide. Recent studies of experiences and effects of World War I in East, many of them by historians of Russia, are helping to right this imbalance in historiography. (1) The three books under review here further this work, using new sources, methodologies, and conceptual frameworks to explore how war and imperial collapse transformed lives of people living in German, Ottoman, and Russian imperial lands before, during, and just after World War I. Overlapping in chronology and geography, these three books offer new insights into role of nationalism in wartime conflicts and postwar nation building, causes of ethnic conflict in imperial borderlands, and reasons for genocide. They also offer models for reframing history of these regions in ways that better get at wartime and postwar human mobility, overlapping populations, and imperial entanglements. Of three books, The Impossible Border directly tackles subject of wartime and postwar migrations, specifically various migratory waves moving across Germany's open eastern between 1914 and 1922 (the year that its eastern with Poland was finally set). During this period, millions of Europeans were uprooted from their homes due to war, postwar settlements, and revolution. Germany, Sammartino reminds us in this book, lay at center of these migrations. Between 1914 and 1922, Germany received some one million German citizens from France and Poland, tens of thousands of ethnic Germans and Jews from east, and hundreds of thousands of Russians (2). By focusing on migration--each of book's eight chapters focuses on a particular wave moving into or out of Germany--Sammartino seeks to do two things. First, to put human migrations, and anxieties about Germany's impossible border in east, at center of of sovereignty that Germany experienced in this period; she describes this crisis as a result of collapse of multinational empires and characterized by widespread German anxiety and questioning about relationship among nation, state, and territory (1-5). Her second goal is to interrogate Hannah Arendt's charge, made in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that the failure of postwar states to protect migrants contributed to rise of totalitarianism. (2) Sammartino asks, Does totalitarianism of 1930s have its origins in migration crisis of war and postwar decade? (2). This framing is unsatisfying for three reasons. First, Sammartino does not situate her study within broader debates about continuities between Weimar and Nazi Germany, or historiography of totalitarianism, nor does she explain continued relevance of Arendt's 40-year-old book in pursuing these questions. …

Organised chaos as diplomatic ruse and demographic weapon. The expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks (Rum) from Foça, 1914

TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis

Geopolitics, insecurity and neocolonial exceptionalism: A critical appraisal of the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon

The UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which was set up through UN Security Council Resolution 1757 to investigate, indict and prosecute those responsible for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, is advancing a series of regional and global geopolitical interests. We focus on the structure of the tribunal and its exceptional nature within international law, examining the extent to which the STL’s so-called unique features and the process through which it emerged expose its role in representing the interests of regional and global geopolitical actors, effectively internationalizing both the prosecution of the assassination and the issue of Hezbollah’s disarmament within the discourse of the ‘war on terror’. We also take up the question of Lebanese sovereignty and the extent to which the STL shifts between challenging and altogether disregarding this issue in a manner not unusual in the context of historical trends within international law justifying the colonial tendencies of great powers. We contextualize the STL within broader trajectories in international law, with specific reference to Carl Schmitt’s ‘challenge of imperial conquest and land acquisition’, such as exceptionalism and the colonial genealogy of international law. We then discuss the extent to which the STL enunciates the geopolitical interests of powerful regional and global actors, unpacking the so-called unique features of the STL that reflect its exceptional character. Throughout our analysis, we argue that the STL and its manifestation of contemporary discourses of insecurity play a highly significant role in the international disregard for Lebanese sovereignty and the delegitimization of most domestic political actors, including Hezbollah.