Imperial State Research Articles

The ‘Everyday’ in the Context of Japanese Cultural Anti-Modernism: A Case Study of Isao Takahata’s Anime My Neighbors the Yamadas

The post-World War II years in the history of Modern Japan were vital in deciding the fate of the Japanese archipelago in terms of its ambitions of regaining what Emperor Hirohito of Japan in the ‘Jewel Voice Broadcast’ on 15 August 1945 called “the innateglory of the imperial state.” While there is a note of surrender in Hirohito’s speech, urging his subjects to march forward to a globalised and modern Japan by “enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable,” attempts at modernising Japan, at an incredibly rapid pace, had already begun during the Meiji period in the nineteenth century. What Hirohito’s speech critically points to is the final, official reassertion of, as well as yielding to, the temperament and paraphernalia of modernity, an issue that was vastly in contention in the first half of the twentieth century. The issue of incorporating Western modernisation within Japanese society, as the Japanese sought to construct an identity for themselves after their devastating defeat in the war, had divided the country. Japan had already gone through a period of almost two hundred years of self-isolation from the world to its West, albeit with limited trade relations with the Dutch. The Meiji government, which came to power in 1868, attempted to incorporate Western modernisation within the folds of the state of Japan and thereby fill in the gap that had been created between a ‘traditional’ Japan and an industrialised, modernised West as a result of such isolation. In the nineteenth century, the government took it upon itself to invite various scholarly and military experts from the West to boost the Japanese project of modernisation. As Dani Cavallaro writes: “grand edifices in the West’s neoclassical style were erected, its vogues were superimposed onto traditional vestimentary codes, its cuisine was incorporated into the national diet, and its artistic techniques were taught in many schools, sometimes to the disadvantage of time-honoured indigenous methods” (7-8). Such an account of how the Meiji government attempted to modernise Japan by reorienting how the average Japanese built their homes, what clothes they wore or the food they ate, and how their children were being educated in schools alert us unambiguously to the condition of the ‘everyday’ that served as a platform for such transformations. Such transformations not only established themselves by altering the ‘everyday’, but also inscribed their legitimacy and normalcy upon it. As Henri Lefebvre states in his essay “The Everyday and Everydayness:” “A condition stipulated for the legibility of forms, ordained by means of functions, inscribed within structures, the everyday constitutes the platform upon which the bureaucratic society of controlled consumerism is erected” (9).

Gratian as optimus princeps – the Literary Image of “an Ideal Emperor” in Gratiarum actio ad Gratianum Imperatorem by D.M. Ausonius and the Laudatio in Gratianum Augustum of Q.A. Symmachus

Ausonius and Symmachus addressed their speeches to the emperor Gratian, the son of Valentinian I. Ausonius included in his gratiarum actio two praises of the young emperor in order to express his gratitude for the consulate he received; Symmachus delivered his laudatio in honour of the ruler at a meeting of the Roman senate. In their speeches both authors showed not so much a real image of Gratian as an individual but rather a literary creation of optimus princeps. Gratian is presented as an ideal that is artificial in its perfection: he loses his individual and true characteristics and appears to be pasted into a panegyric-propaganda scheme based on literary convention as well as the slogans of imperial state ideology. In this article we aim to present the literary image of Gratian as “an ideal emperor”, which emerges from both laudatory speeches, as well as to point out the literary devices, motifs, panegyrical techniques and ideological topoi used in its creation.

Poetry and Legitimacy at the Mughal Court

The present paper proposes to take a new look at the imperial Mughal court’s pattern of patronage of arts and letters as a vital and indispensable component of the imperial state machinery on the one hand and an instrument of historical change on the other. It focuses on, and draws from, Čahār čaman, a mid-17th-c. work by Chandar Bhan Brahman, one of the prominent figures among poets, writers, scribes and secretaries in Mughal service; a person involved in the never-ending, and aesthetically intricate, ceremonial exchange of goods, honors, acts of refined praise and proofs of recognition that not only made up the rich and variegated courtly milieu of the period but also gave form and actively shaped the ethos of the Mughal state’s pattern of self-representation—all in the service of legitimating the imperial power and its expanding claim over increasingly vaster stretches of the Indian subcontinent and its regional rulers and their riches. The same was done in the garb of sophisticated aesthetics of imperial power that demanded rulers, princes, prominent chiefs and officers, executive clerks, accountants and administrative professionals to communicate and ever prove anew their status and position in the language and manners recognized as aesthetically pleasing and in the form requiring literary, if not poetical, skills and competence based on knowledge of recognized expressive forms and appropriate genres as well as individual talent and personal ambition.

Becoming Pastors: The Russian Orthodox Parish Clergy and Civil Society in the Last Decades of the Russian Empire

The American scholar Daniel Scarborough has written a monograph dedicated to the history of the Russian Orthodox clergy in the late imperial regime. This work both encapsulates recent developments in the historiography of the imperial Russian Orthodox Church and contributes fresh archival research, principally using documents held in repositories in Moscow and Tver. His main focus is the mutual aid networks in which the clergy participated. Created over the course of the nineteenth century, these mutual aid networks were initially aimed at distributing resources among poor members of the clerical estate: the development of these networks was facilitated by the freedom of association granted to the clergy by the imperial state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scarborough argues, these networks began to lose their estate focus, both supporting and including members of the laity: this was partially a response to the fact that the material position of the clergy was heavily dependent on the material condition of the laity and partially due to the fact that the clergy slowly began to lose their estate focus and transform into a profession focused on the spiritual and material wellbeing of the Orthodox flock. Scarborough emphasises several key moments (such as the famine of 1891–1892) and institutions (the seminary, for example) to demonstrate the extent to which clerical support networks included members of the laity and the forces that either facilitated or blocked this development. He concludes that while the clerical mutual aid networks did succeed, to some extent, in incorporating members of the laity, they were hampered by the imperial state’s attempts to strictly control the clergy and use them as cheap civil servants, police officials, and propagandists: equally, while sometimes supporting the expansion of clerical aid networks, the episcopate and the Synod was often concerned to ensure that the Church’s thinly-spread resources were mostly used to support the members and institutions of the clerical estate. All of this damaged the prestige of the clergy in the eyes of their parishioners and made them less willing to transfer scarce resources to clerical networks. Only with the all-Russia local church council of 1917–1918 did the Russian Orthodox Church fully incorporate the laity, a step which allowed the institution to survive Bolshevik rule.

“It is ticklish meddling with the navy”: The British navy and Caribbean contraband trade, c. 1713–1750

In the early eighteenth century, slow communications between the metropole and the margins of empire combined with fuzzy relationships among the various institutions of the composite imperial state to enable British naval officers to act with relative impunity. Facing little oversight and scant consequences for misbehavior, many captains took advantage of the entanglement of European empires in the Caribbean to pursue personal profit. They both protected local merchants engaged in illicit inter-imperial trade and themselves transported enslaved Africans across imperial lines. This article explores the extent of those activities and the intra- and inter-imperial conflicts they generated, emphasizing how naval officers’ behavior mirrored that of other public and quasi-public officials at the periphery. It also evaluates the conditions that allowed naval trading to persist despite its violation of longstanding laws and regulations, arguing that there was no powerful political stakeholder who clearly suffered by the naval officers’ actions.

A “questão penitenciária” no Rio Grande do Sul como arma política contra o Império (1884-1889)

This article analyzes how the Partido Republicano Rio-Grandense (PRR), founded on February 23, 1882, politically instrumentalized the deleterious and negligent penal-prison population in the Rio Grande do Sulfrom 1884 to 1889, according to the pages of the newspaper A Federação, against the Imperial State. It seeks to elucidate how province penitentiary management incited attacks, not only tocrown representatives but also on the monarchic regime itself, based on reports, denunciations, complaints, memoranda, testimonies from different institutions and individuals about hygienic, security conditions, administration, order and morality experienced by theRio Grande do Sul prisons. Through an exhaustive search of these written texts, some transcribed from provincial and publican newspapers from PRR’s official organ, it was possible to notice how PRR leaders skillfully built a critical discourse rather than attention received or not from the provincial executive’s responsible authorities.

Entangled migration states: mobility and state-building in France and Algeria

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of ‘entangled migration states’ as a means of highlighting the centrality of migration governance to state-building processes, the constitution of state sovereignty, and interstate relations. Drawing on the example of France and Algeria, it demonstrates the key role that migration played in three phases of state-building: the colonial period of Algérie française; the Algerian nationalist independence movement; and postcolonial state-building. In the case of France and Algeria, at least three actors constructed and instrumentalised migration and mobility regimes as sources of power and control – the French imperial state; the non-state Algerian independence movement; and the newly sovereign postcolonial Algerian state. A focus on the entangled nature of migration management allows for a deeper historicisation of contemporary migration regimes and draws attention to the central role played by migration diplomacy and transnational governmentality in contemporary migration management regimes, thus calling into question some of the spatial assumptions undergirding the ‘migration state’ concept. The article traces the evolution of mobility patterns and control in the Franco-Algerian case; their relationship to state-building processes; and the implications for rethinking the ‘migration state’.

Modestus at Edessa. Imperial officials in the ecclesiastical histories of Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret

Abstract This article considers the depictions of imperial officials and their interactions with Christian communities in the genre of ecclesiastical history. It focuses on one particular episode where the emperor Valens ordered his praetorian prefect Domitius Modestus to disperse an assembly of Nicene Christians at the martyrium of Thomas at Edessa. The four fifth-century Nicene ecclesiastical historians Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret offer the same basic narrative of the events which led to the prefect’s abandonment of his mission. Yet they construe the causes and implications of his reluctance to persecute in strikingly different ways. These adaptations reveal their differing views of the role of imperial officials in matters concerning the church and, more broadly, of what Christian communities might expect from the imperial state in a Christian empire.

Kang Youwei and Italy in the beginning of the 20th century: comprehension of the politics of the west by the traditional confucian thinker

The article deals with the theoretical treatises written by Kang Youwei (1858 — 1927) in exile and devoted to the understanding of Western social and political reality from the standpoint of a bearer of traditional Chinese culture and Neo-Confucian philosophy. First of all, these are “Travelogue to Italy” (Yidali youji, 1904) and “Impartial Words on Republicanism” (Gonghe pingyi, 1918). Kang Yuwei’s thinking is characterized by attention to the Confucian binary opposition si — gong (private — general), which he transferred to both civilizational development and international politics. In other words, the Western path of development, which consist national imperialist states based on economic, social and foreign policy competition and individualism (“private”), was opposed to the monolithic ancient China, whose society and politics are based on the principles of “community” and unity. Kang Youwei perceived the political reality of Western countries from the standpoint of traditional Chinese historiography, which was intended to serve as a base of positive and negative precedents for use by the ruler in the name of the common good and the harmonization of society. In Kang Youwei’s system of historical views, modern Italy and Germany were very important for illustrating the principle of consolidation of political entities and the merging of small and weak states into large empires. Methodologically, this was formalized as the assignment of Germany, Italy and China to the same ontological category (tong lei).

Sufism A Peace-building and Resilient Strategy to Curb Violent Extremism in Pakistan

This paper aims to emphasize the need to develop a counter-narrative strategy by the state of Pakistan in order to dismantle and deconstruct Taliban’s proliferating ideology that is currently challenging the writ of the state. The mindset and ideology of Taliban legitimize the use of violence or cause terror by harming or endangering people’s life and security and promote legal impunity against them. The phenomenon of global terrorism was surfaced after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on US and Pakistan had to confront the long-term consequences of its unconditional support as a frontline ally of US to fight the global war against terrorism. On the other hand, the ideological contours of Taliban focus on two key agendas that are abhorrence towards the anti-Islamic and imperialist states and to entice and recruit new supporters to the cause. On the other hand, the state and society are failed to construct an effective counter-narrative. The state’s approach to tackle the issue by using hard power and military strength led towards the birth, growth and proliferation of terrorist outfits. However, the use of traditional kinetic approach to curb violent religious extremism has been proved unsuccessful. Resultantly, the US after spending several billion dollars and tons of state of the art military weapons, had to withdraw its forces for the second time by terminating the longest physical and military mission in Afghanistan after two decades without achieving success. The paper tries to explore that Sufi approach instead of traditional hard military power can prevent and counter violent religious extremism (P/CVRE) in Pakistan and can bring peace and stability.

Inculcating loyalty in the Highlands and beyond, c.1745–1784

ABSTRACT The Jacobite rising of 1745–1746 saw several thousand Scots rebel against the British crown. Yet it also provided opportunities for Scots to demonstrate their loyalty to the crown. After the rising was over, a brutal pacification was accompanied by significant legislative and institutional changes which sought to inculcate long-term loyalty in the Highlands. Once again, numerous Scots participated in the framing and implementation of these changes, which eventually also provided an opportunity for the disloyal to enter the imperial fold. This article examines the roles of loyalist Scots during and after the rising. In doing so it demonstrates understandings of loyalty, neutrality, and disloyalty during this transformative period and illustrates the important role of Scots in inculcating loyalty in the Highlands. It argues that the experiences of Scots, and the British more generally, in this domestic setting influenced the British imperial state's attempts to actively craft loyalty elsewhere in the British Atlantic World, particularly in North America.

The War at Home: Photography, Political Violence, and Spectacle in the Russian Revolution of 1905

Abstract In early twentieth-century Russia, a disastrous war and social revolution shook the foundations of the imperial state, unleashing the press from censorship and demanding innovation in media coverage. At this very moment, new photographic technology was democratizing access and making high-quality reproductions affordable. This article explores how photography responded to and visualized the unprecedented political violence that engulfed Russia during the Revolution of 1905. Situating this “war at home” in a global context of early commercial and humanitarian photography of violence, it charts the emergence of distinctive visual regimes and spectatorial practices. As photographs made political violence visible within an unruly public sphere, they spotlighted some forms of violence and occluded others. Visual frames and narratives shaped new modes of representation and spectatorship, including regimes of commemoration, documentation, sensationalism, and forensics. This article opens with the most conventional photographic form, the studio portrait, and shows how it became imbricated with the political struggle and a forum for contesting the status of victim and martyr. The second section considers how the illustrated press crafted the terrorist bombing as a visual spectacle, using images with paratext to tell different kinds of stories. Shifting focus from the event to the body, the final section analyzes explicit photographs of the corpse. By exposing the violated body to the public gaze, these photographs posed a question fundamental to modernity, capitalism, and photography: who counts as fully human? This case study concludes with reflections on the categories of proximity and distance in the photography of violence. While the revolution was suppressed by 1907, it inaugurated a vibrant era of mass culture, capitalist consumption, and cultural pessimism, in which photography and film would play increasingly dominant roles.

Побежденные перед судом победителей: процессы над мятежниками в период кризиса Монгольской империи (2-я половина XIII в.)

Introduction. The aim of the paper is a study of the evolution of legal relations on the territory of the Mongol Empire in the second half of the 13th century. The subjects of analysis are trials over the members of the ruling imperial family who were defeated during their rebellions and intestine wars. Methods and materials. The sources of the study are medieval oriental sources, including Persian chronicles (by Rashid ad-Din, Mu’in ad-Din Natanzi, Mirza Ulugbek), Chinese dynastic history (“Yuan Shih”), etc. The methods used in the paper are critical analysis of textual sources, historical legal study, formal legal approach, and comparative historical analysis. Analysis. Four judicial processes are analyzed: the trial of Arigh Buqa, defeated by his brother Kubilai in 1264; the trial of Chinggisids over Boraq, head of Chaghatai Ulus, in 1269; the trial of Khubilai over prince Nayan in 1287; and the trial of Ilkhan Gazan over usurper Baydu in 1295. Information from the sources gives a reason to state that trials of defeated nobles reflected the process of decline of the imperial state system and misuse of principles established by Chinggis Khan and his proximate successors. Results. The analyzed information contains valuable additions to our idea of the judicial process in the Mongol Empire, specifically in cases of mutineers compared to other types of cases judged in the Empire and Chinggisid states. It also highlights the evolution of this process during the crisis of imperial power and its differences with the Chinggisid imperial law’s declared observance in the Empire and its uluses.

The Song Dynasty’s Fiscal and Economic Policy and Its Social Economy

The fact that industrial and commercial taxation in the Song dynasty greatly exceeded agricultural taxation was unprecedented in previous dynasties. This is mainly explained by the Song government’s financial and economic policy which was dominated by industrial and commercial taxation, made good use of the laws and characteristics of market relations and the commodity economy in business operations, actively stimulated consumption and was clearly utilitarian. Under this policy, the rulers, in pursuit of huge profits, used state power and mobilized various resources to implement a monopolies system and a commercial tax system, which, in turn, helped develop the commodity money economy, expanded the scale of market exchange and promoted the high degree of development of the commodity economy of the time. The financial and economic policy of the Song dynasty showed the unique advantages of the imperial state’s intervention in the economy. It was this that distinguished the Song dynasty from other dynasties in terms of the prosperity of the commodity and monetary economy.

Edukacja kobiet w kontekście imperialnej polityki narodowej (na przykładzie ziem byłego Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego w latach 1830–1860)

The article traces the process of elaboration of education policies in women’s education in the Northwest of the Russian Empire by different agents of the imperial state on the central and local levels in the 1830s–1860s. The principal goal is not the history of education in a gendered perspective but rather the history of female social roles and national differences in this troubling imperial borderland. The ethnic and confessional markers of difference in the analysis aimed at producing a complex and dynamic picture of conjuncture of social, national, and gender discourses as well as idiosyncratic local considerations in contradictory efforts of imperial social engineering are complicated by the gender marker.

A Dance of Crown and Parliament: Empire and Reform in the Age of Liverpool

Abstract The apparent contradictions of British politics in the early nineteenth century have long confounded historians. Lord Liverpool’s ministry (1812–27) vehemently, and often violently, rejected constitutional change. Yet it simultaneously implemented a raft of improvements in governance. We argue here that empire is key to resolving this conundrum. Particularly from 1822, the Liverpool ministry launched a constitutional overhaul of empire through one of the most ambitious information-gathering efforts undertaken by the British imperial state: commissions of inquiry. Creatures of the royal prerogative, these investigations amassed ‘on the spot’ information to underpin genuine conservative interventions into colonial law and governance. At the same time, they curated colonial controversy in order to subvert hostile parliamentary interference at a time when Liverpool’s hold on power was particularly tenuous. Inquiry and reform were profoundly shaped by the delicate dance of Crown and parliament. By exploring three moments of controversy in New South Wales, Jamaica and the Cape Colony between 1819 and 1826, we argue that colonial royal commissions showcase the workings of Tory innovation by laying bare the mix of reformism, conservatism and pragmatism that undergirded this unstable regime.

Homeland, magnet, and refuge: Mecca in the travels and imaginaries of Chinese Muslims

AbstractMecca is often conceptualized as a destination for the ḥajj or a source of leverage for both western and Ottoman imperial states, and in the twentieth century, for Saudi national foreign policy and Islamist movements. While building on such transnational angles, this article views the city as a convergence point for diaspora populations, an intermediary site that has received and redirected the mobilities of sojourners, refugees, and exiles from different parts of Asia throughout the manifold turnovers of the twentieth century. The article focuses on a community of first- to third-generation settlers in the Hejaz who trace their other homes to different places in China proper. Using archival documents, travelogues, and ethnographic interviews, the article argues that the routes to Mecca, coupled with imaginaries of the city as a home place for Muslims worldwide, served as a rare constant orienting force that sustained two-directional mobilities of Chinese Muslim diasporas through the wars and revolutions of modern times.

Some Observations on Koina and Monetary Economy in Hellenistic Asia Minor

The koina of pre-Roman Asia Minor, comprising several major organisations along its western and southern coasts like the koina of Athena Ilias, the Lesbians, the Ionians, the Chrysaorians, and the Lykians, present a collection of federal states less well understood than better documented koina in mainland Greece. This paper highlights the regional characteristics of these Anatolian koina by examining their monetary and political economies. It first suggests that federalising behaviour in Hellenistic western Asia Minor tended to be centred on regional sanctuaries and festivals, and less involved in the formation of cohesive political institutions through federal law-making or military mobilisation. This also had the effect that they present the impression of being monetarily ‘light’, as is explained in the second section, because they were not by and large fiscally cohesive, or had close oversight of monetary supply, with the notable exception of the Lykian league – taxation was not hugely intrusive or extensive, and little federal coinage was produced. The last two sections consider this ‘lightness’ as a function of the regional specificities of political and economic power in the region, suggesting that koina functioned parasitically as organisations ensconced between imperial states and civic communities, both reflecting and shaping the dominant role in the region of these two types of polity in the Hellenistic period.

Judenschutz in gemischt-herrschaftlichen Kleinterritorien der fränkischen Reichsritterschaft

Abstract The article deals with the general conditions of Jewish life in two Franconian noble territories in the 17th and 18th centuries. The two market villages of Küps and Mitwitz were divided between different lords. Their population included Jewish inhabitants as well as representatives of both Christian denominations. These villages are thus characteristic of the settlement structure of Jews in the pre-modern period. The settlement of Jewish families was, on the one hand, a privilege of the imperial nobility, with which they demonstrated their imperial status to the outside world. On the other hand, the spatial and lordly fragmentation offered opportunities for settlement among different rulers – a circumstance that Jewish actors deliberately incorporated into their actions. They were well informed about the ruling conditions and knew how to make effective use of the existing competitive situation in order to expand their scope of action.

Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 by M. K. Beauchamp

Reviewed by: Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 by M. K. Beauchamp Aaron R. Hall Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815. By M. K. Beauchamp. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 314. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7428-9.) In 1803 the United States became the latest empire striving to govern the complex world encompassed by the territory of Orleans. Native nations, enslaved Africans, free people of color, Creole slave owners, and Anglo-American settlers populated the region, and each group pursued competing desires for autonomy and freedom, power and security, and health and wealth. This internal heterogeneity was compounded by delicate geopolitical relations with imperial rivals and indigenous neighbors. If eventual statehood and affluence through expropriated labor and land was the common aim of Anglo-American arrivals, then it was the daily work of U.S. administrators to steer the territory toward these ends. That meant maintaining order while producing a new one. A cohort of local officials made the orderly administration of Louisiana their business with varying degrees of diligence and faithfulness. In Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815, M. K. Beauchamp shows that the problems these officials encountered, the resources they accessed, and the policies they adopted “rendered Louisiana’s territorial experience republican in theory but imperial in practice” (p. 3). Taking an administrator’s-eye view of early national Louisiana, Beauchamp delivers a fine-grained analysis of how officials cultivated and exercised authority during Louisiana’s formative decade under the jurisdiction of (but not yet within) the United States. In ways that were unique to Louisiana but that also resonated with other zones of territorial rule, officials deployed techniques of imperial governance: accommodating local elites, moderating the metropole’s directives, arbitrating between factions, tailoring racial exclusions to suit strategic concerns, displaying military capacity, and modifying institutions in response to discontent. Through a careful reading of state papers and administrative correspondence, Beauchamp delivers a sophisticated account of the reorganization of Louisiana, a process that appears at once abrupt or gradual and shallow, depending on subject and vantage point. Instruments of Empire is a clarifying contribution to Louisiana political history and a valuable [End Page 347] addition to a field of scholarship on the early federal government in which continuities of political practice loom large (see Gautham Rao, “The New Historiography of the Early Federal Government: Institutions, Contexts, and the Imperial State,” William and Mary Quarterly 77 [January 2020]: 97–128). Instruments of Empire unfolds in six thematic chapters addressing different facets of official concern. It opens with a chapter analyzing external challenges to American sovereignty, introducing territorial officials’ abiding anxiety about Creole loyalties. As Spanish power receded, however, American officials came to trust the Francophone “ancient Louisianans” with greater authority (p. 183). Next, Beauchamp draws out administrators’ multipronged approach to Native American relations before the post-statehood arrival of enfranchised, land-hungry settlers. Their initiatives included efforts to maintain peaceable relations with the Comanche, counter Spanish influence among the Caddo and the Wichita, incorporate the Native communities around New Orleans known as petites nations, and court Choctaw allies. A significant third chapter illustrates how the violence of racial enslavement was foundational to governance. Slavery was the subject of extensive regulation by new elected bodies, and it created a shared interest through which American order could be appreciated by new and old slaveholders. At no time was the centrality of slavery more evident than during the suppression of the German Coast uprising, when U.S. troops provided critical support. This bloodshed confirmed slaveholders belonged to “a common planter class, since the rebels did not distinguish between Anglo and Francophone plantations” (p. 104). Given this evidence, one is left to wonder whether concerns about Creole loyalty were exaggerated. When Anglo-Americans took charge, free Black Louisianans hoped to gain rights by being the most loyal of allies; but in chapter 4, Beauchamp shows that they held little leverage to move territorial officials. The arrival of statehood in 1812 would only empower white Louisianans to make that racial order...