Modern European History Research Articles

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNancy Christie teaches history at the University of Western Ontario. Her work centers on the cultural, political, legal, and social history of eighteenth-century Quebec, with a particular emphasis on the impact of British colonialism after the Conquest of 1763. Winner of numerous scholarly awards, in particular for Engendering the State: Family, Work and Welfare in Canada, she is the author of a major forthcoming volume, A Northern Bastille: The Formal and Informal Politics of Colonialism in Post-conquest Quebec, 1760–1837.Jason Dawsey is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he teaches courses in modern European history. Currently, he is completing a monograph on Günther Anders’s critique of technology.Michael Gauvreau teaches history at McMaster University. His research focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and social histories of Canada and Quebec from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He is the author of the prize-winning The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970, and his new research centers on Quebec in the age of revolutions.Aaron G. Jakes is assistant professor of history in the Department of Historical Studies at the New School. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, environmental history, and the historical geography of capitalism. He is the author of “Boom, Bugs, Bust: Egypt’s Ecology of Interest, 1882–1914,” Antipode (2016), and he is currently working on a book manuscript entitled State of the Field: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism in Egypt, 1882–1914.Ahmad Shokr is a junior research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and an assistant professor of history at Swarthmore College. He teaches classes on the history of the modern Middle East, the political economy of empire and decolonization, and the history of capitalism. He is a contributor to several volumes, including Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in Egypt (Verso, 2012).Kristoffer Smemo is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught courses on twentieth-century American social and political history. His dissertation examines how social struggle shaped the rise and fall of the liberal wing of the Republican Party during the mid-twentieth century. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History and Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas.Samir Sonti is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught the history of capitalism and labor studies. His dissertation focuses on the politics of inflation in the twentieth-century United States.Gabriel Winant is a PhD candidate in history at Yale University. He has taught twentieth-century American history, the history of capitalism, and African American history. He is completing a dissertation on the transformation of the labor market and the emergence of the health care economy in Pittsburgh in the second half of the twentieth century. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 4, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691061 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

The Chester Penn Higby Prize for 2016

The Chester Penn Higby Prize for 2016

Alan S. Ross, Daum’s Boys. Schools and Republic of Letters in Early Modern Germany. (Studies in Eary Modern European History.) Manchester/New York, Manchester University Press 2015

Alan S. Ross, Daum’s Boys. Schools and Republic of Letters in Early Modern Germany. (Studies in Eary Modern European History.) Manchester/New York, Manchester University Press 2015

Therapeutic Proofs and Medical Truths: The Enduring Legacy of Early Modern Drug Trials.

Therapeutic Proofs and Medical Truths:The Enduring Legacy of Early Modern Drug Trials Jeremy A. Greene (bio) "It would be a fruitless enterprise," Owsei Temkin wrote in 1964, "to enter upon speculations on the origins of drug therapy. Suffice to say that it is very old."1 All the same, modernists like to think of the practice of clinical trials for drug therapy as a relatively new thing in the world. Many of my clinical colleagues consider the randomized controlled trial (RCT) the central element in modern medical epistemology, a "gold standard" that neatly divides the evidence-based medicine of the present from the evidence-free medicine of the premodern past.2 Coming to terms with the clinical trial as an older form of medical evidence, with roots in princely politics and prisoner pardons, is a more challenging task. Likewise, historians of science often leave medicine out of the broader history of experiment. In spite of the efforts of a number of scholars to locate medicine as a central site for the development of empirical and experimental knowledge in the medieval and early modern period, it has been far too easy for historians to casually refer to the incorporation of experiment into medicine as something that develops only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3 As the editors of this special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine point out, this omission occurs because [End Page 420] drug testing has remained a relatively understudied area among historians of medieval and early modern medicine. In directly challenging both of these assumptions, the articles of this volume constitute a powerful and important intervention that demonstrates the direct relevance of early modern European history of pharmacy and therapeutics to present-day practitioners as well as historians of science, medicine, and technology. True, the methodology of the trials they document might not pass muster with a twenty-first-century Institutional Review Board, a National Institutes of Health study section, or the editorial board of The Lancet, but the forms traced in these essays bear enough genealogical similarities to present-day therapeutic proofs to be sufficiently unsettling. At the very least, they give the lie to the casual assumption that the modern form of therapeutic proof was simply the intellectual accomplishment of Austin Bradford Hill in his MRC offices in 1948. Rather, the reader of this volume finds that the things we do for proof today have roots that stretch back centuries and are as steeped in the social relations of state power, the role of expert knowledge in the bureaucratic systems, and the marketing strategies of drug manufacturers as they are in any purity of method or philosophical principle. One comes away from this collection of articles with a greater awareness of the cracks in the edifice of therapeutic truth-making that twenty-first-century pharmaceutical manufacturers, physicians, and patients have come to inhabit. The period, place, actors, and scope of action in these contributions range widely, from Michael McVaugh's opening article on experimental protocols for drug provings among the fourteenth-century medical faculty of Montpellier to the eighteenth-century attempt to understand and replicate the blood miracle of St. Januarius, chronicled in Francesco Paolo de Ceglia's concluding essay. The drugs tested vary from bath waters to the blood of saints, from pancreatic extracts to whole chickens; the sites of analysis range across French and German courts, learned societies, hospitals, pharmacies, and households; and the actors cross in and out of learned societies, academic institutions, state regulators, and orthodox medical professionals. And yet the contributions of all scholars cohere around several points of continued interest to therapeutic practice and experimental proof today: the relation of reason, rationality, and experiment; the problem of designating on whose bodies such proofs should be tested; and the broader social role that methods for designating legitimate from illegitimate cures play in the relation of the medical profession [End Page 421] and the regulatory state in shaping markets and monopolies for medical practice and pharmaceutical manufacture. ________ For more than two decades, Harry Marks's The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900–1990 has served as a key reference work...

Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914. By Jason D. Hansen. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Edited by Simon Dixon, Mark Mazower, and James Retallack.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+194. $99.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsMapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914. By Jason D. Hansen. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Edited by Simon Dixon, Mark Mazower, and James Retallack.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+194. $99.00.Woodruff D. SmithWoodruff D. SmithUniversity of Massachusetts Boston Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 88, Number 4December 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/688820 Views: 61Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Rethinking the Philosophy of History's Paradigm in Studying Civilization; An analysis of Malek Bennabi's Critical Review

This paper analyzes the philosophy of history's paradigm in studying civilization. It critically reviews the approaches of the progressive school, within this paradigm, developed by the late Algerian thinker and philosopher of civilization’ Malek Bennabi (1905-1973). It discusses the concept of the evolution of the civilization formulated by the pioneers of this paradigm and their main ideas concerning civilization and its course in the history. It tries to find out what Bennabi mainly criticizes and considers the shortcomings of the progressive school, in the philosophy of history, concerning the study of civilization. Bennabi was of the view that this school’s approaches are more theoretical than historical, it is based on Euro-centric worldviews which sees the history of modern Europe as the culmination of the progress of human history without any critical analysis of the various civilized experiences. Therefore, this approach focus on some variables of a historical change while neglecting the complexity of a civilization as a multivariate phenomenon. Although Bennabi acknowledged the care of the Hegelians about the role of ideas in changing the history, and the Marxists’ praise of dialectical analysis, he was of the view that this school was not related to the nature of civilization. Consequently, he criticized this school in terms of the limitations of method, concepts, and perspectives.

Frary, Lucien J. Russia and the Making of Modern Greek Identity, 1821–1844 (review)

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 746 how the urbanization of the later nineteenth century complicated the ‘Little Russian’ issue. Because Poles and Jews contributed massively to urbanization in right-bank Ukraine, Ukrainians and Russians no longer had the field of play to themselves (or, to be precise, once again did not have the field of play to themselves). Whatever the racial predispositions of the tsarist government, in the context of urbanization St Petersburg was unlikely to take the dim view of non-Ukrainian inhabitants of Ukraine that it might have done if they had nothing to offer the economic well-being of the empire. Thus adherents of ‘Little Russianism’ among Ukrainians felt they were being sidelined. The effect was to sharpen their views. Some responded by becoming outright Ukrainian nationalists, some by becoming outright Russian nationalists. The latter turned into the Ukrainian variant of that well-known historical phenomenon, the centrist from the borderlands, the ‘outsider nationalist’ who was more royalist than the king. These were the unattractive ‘Russian’ nationalists (of Ukrainian provenance) who so disfigured the last years of the imperial Duma. Professor Hillis has made their ostensibly puzzling origins comprehensible. Perhaps it was always likely that some proponents of the Little Russian idea would turn into men of the right, for, with benefit of hindsight, one can see that Little Russianism was never likely to be more than a vehicle, a tactic, a transitional device. Confronted by the socio-economic changes of the later nineteenth century, it fragmented, turning those who had toyed with it into either lumpers (Russophiles) or splitters (Ukrainophiles). The splitters had the best tunes, but the lumpers — the integrationists, the Ukrainian Russophiles — seem a little less disappointing now that they have found their analyst. Newcastle University David Saunders Frary, Lucien J. Russia and the Making of Modern Greek Identity, 1821–1844. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2015. xv + 296 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. The early birth of the Greek nation, in 1830, is a major milestone in the history of nation-building in general, and in the history of nation-states in particular. To illustrate, this case of nation-building is one of the only three cases of nation-building taught in some educational systems, prominently in Israel (alongside the German and Italian unifications). In many of the narratives and analyses taught and published about this process, Odessa and the Russian Empire serves, at best, as one of the scenes. That is why, I believe, the book under review is so important: it does not only illuminate the role REVIEWS 747 of the Russian Empire in the creation of the modern Greek identity, nation and state, but uses this case as an example to a wider range of issues which keep historians busy, such as the tension between tradition and modernity, the history of the Orthodox world and church and the relationship between Russia and the Middle East/Islamic World. Chapter one, ‘Russia and the Movement for Greek Independence’, surveys the history of the Greek revolutionary movement and Russia’s relations with the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire from its first contacts in the 1770s to the outbreak of the first rebellion in 1821. Frary successfully demonstrates the ‘strong links’ the Russian Empire had with the revolutionary movement, starting with its initial ‘intellectual stirrings’ (p. 53). Counting on varied sources and a good proficiency in the historiography, he shows how the empire, especially under Nicholas I, was involved in all aspects of Greek nation-building, including ‘government’, ‘church’ and ‘public education’ (p. 53). In analysing the post-1821 period, Frary, again supported by strong archival evidence, concludes that the Russian-Ottoman War of 1828–29, clearly sparked by the Greek War of Independence, was eventually what tipped the scales and allowed the Greek state to be formed (along with other major achievements on the Russian side, such as their sovereignty over Georgia and some areas of modern-day Armenia and the autonomy of Serbia). The second chapter looks at the creation of social and political institutions in the young state, focusing on Russia’s involvement in their formation. Even though during...

The Agonies of Liberalism

It is striking the extent to which many liberals have seen themselves as figures on the margins of politics. This is partly an ideological issue. Of all the great ‘isms’ of the modern age, liberalism has had neither the historical certainty of the two great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, nor the reassuring hierarchical logic of conservatism. Most liberals have agonised about how much humans can achieve and have repeatedly stressed the fallibility of rational or democratic solutions, at least in comparison with more revolutionary ideologies like communism. But liberals’ sense of living on the margins is also a consequence of the context in which liberalism was born. In Europe, the spectre of the French Revolution – and, later, the Bolshevik Revolution – gave liberalism a specific flavour. Liberals were often keen on reform, but they always feared social upheaval. Time and again, liberals found themselves in power only to lose control of the pace of social change. In the worst cases – 1815, 1848 or 1917 spring to mind – this put the liberal cause back by generations. For much of modern European history, to be a liberal was to be in a perpetual state of siege.

Alan S. Ross, Daum’s Boys: Schools and the Republic of Letters in Early Modern Germany. Studies in Early Modern European History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+236 pp. £70.00.

Alan S. Ross, <i>Daum’s Boys: Schools and the Republic of Letters in Early Modern Germany</i>. Studies in Early Modern European History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+236 pp. £70.00.

Werth, Paul W. The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (review)

REVIEWS 545 Geographers should concentrate on understanding the laws involved in solar radiation, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere in this view. While Grigor´ev explicitly saw his project as developing physical geography in a Marxist direction, he ended up being displaced by rivals from his position at the top of the disciplinary hierarchy in 1951. His ouster belonged to a larger set of ideological battles that shook Soviet scientific communities in the final years of Stalin’s reign. The final innovative concept of Soviet geographers came from Vsevelod Anuchin, who proposed the idea of a geographical environment. Anuchin was responding to a long-standing question about the relationship between nature andsocietyamongSovietgeographersandproposed‘geographicalenvironment’ asawaytounifyphysicalandeconomicgeography.Ageographicalenvironment entailed the increasingly large portion of the physical-geographical envelope that had been modified by humans. Though this idea was controversial when it was first suggested, initial opponents such as the Innokentii Gerasimov, who directed the Institute of Geography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1951 to 1985, came around to the cause of a unified geography and offered their own avenues for achieving this aim. Oldfield and Shaw have done a great service by parsing out these geographical concepts, explaining their distinctions and elaborating their relationship to broader trends in the country’s history. The volume is indispensible for scholars of Russian environmental thought. Department of History Andy Bruno Northern Illinois University Werth, Paul W. The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. xv + 288 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £65.00. In this erudite and deeply-researched book, Paul Werth explores the curious paradoxofastatethatidentifieditselfalmostentirelywithonereligion—Russian Orthodoxy — and yet not only tolerated other faiths, but provided them with a measure of protection and state recognition. This can be partly explained as a pragmatic adjustment of state policy to the reality of the empire’s diversity, what Jane Burbank has described as an ‘Imperial Rights Regime’. However, tsarist toleration of ‘foreign faiths’ was based on more than just grudging necessity: religious toleration was seen as a positive and laudable characteristic of Russian statecraft. In this book Werth is engaging with a growing literature on SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 546 the interaction between non-Orthodox religious hierarchies and communities and the Russian Imperial State, most notably weighty monographs by Robert Crews and Mikhail Dolbilov, but his agenda is at once more comprehensive and more cautious than theirs. Werth’s study is organized both thematically and chronologically, but his approach is comparative throughout, looking at how shifts in official policy might simultaneously affect the Armenian and the Catholic Churches, or the repercussions of an event such as the Polish Revolt not just for the Empire’s Catholics, but for its Muslims. While, as he modestly says, he does not analyse Central Asia, the Grand Duchy of Finland or the Kingdom of Poland in as much depth as he would have liked, Werth’s attempt to see tsarist religious policy ‘in the round’, and to chart changes over a very long nineteenth century (c.1760–1917) largely succeeds, and allows him to make connections, see patterns and draw conclusions in ways that studies focused on a single region or confession could not. Werth is not pursuing a grand thesis — he uses Crews’s concept of the ‘confessional state’, but carefully differentiates Russian policy towards Islam in time and place. He also draws telling comparisons with other Imperial and European States, notably the equally multi-confessional Habsburg and Ottoman domains, showing that it was change in this wider sphere, and in particular the evolution of the concept of ‘freedom of conscience’, which transformed perceptions of Russia’s regime of ‘religious toleration’. When initiated by Catherine the Great this had stood up well to comparison with Europe’s other religious regimes (Catholics, for instance, were in many ways better off in Russia than they were in Britain until emancipation in 1829), but by the early 1900s contextual change made it seem like another aspect of tsarist Russia’s backwardness and oppressiveness (pp. 122–27). What provides the book with a focus...

Jason D. Hansen, Mapping the Germans. Statistical Science, Cartography, &amp; the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914. (Oxford Studies in Modern European History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2015

Jason D. Hansen, Mapping the Germans. Statistical Science, Cartography, &amp; the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914. (Oxford Studies in Modern European History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2015

The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950. By Mark Lewis. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Edited by Simon Dixon, Mark Mazower, and James Retallack.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii+346. $110.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950. By Mark Lewis. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Edited by Simon Dixon, Mark Mazower, and James Retallack.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii+346. $110.00.Isabel V. HullIsabel V. HullCornell University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 88, Number 2June 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686105 Views: 130Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Comparison, Transfer and Entanglement, or: How to WriteModern European History today?

Comparison, Transfer and Entanglement, or: How to Write Modern European History Today?Contemporaries referring to Europe and European history often have European unity in mind as an objective based...

Sagi Schaefer, States of Division. Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany. (Oxford Studies in Modern European History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2014

Sagi Schaefer, States of Division. Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany. (Oxford Studies in Modern European History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2014

Smith, Mark B. Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (review)

REVIEWS 371 Smith, Mark B. Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2010. xii + 240 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00. In July 1957 the Soviet state began an ambitious mass housing campaign, pledging to end the housing shortage in the USSR within twelve years. In part the result of Nikita Khrushchev’s longstanding personal involvement in the Sovietbuildingindustry,thehousingcampaignwasfar-reachinginitseffects.In every year of this campaign, millions of Soviet citizens received separate family apartments in new standardized microdistricts that radically transformed cityscapes across the USSR. During the mass housing campaign, more housing was built per capita in the USSR than anywhere else in Europe. In Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev, Mark B. Smith examines the development of Soviet urban housing policy in the two decades after 1945. In these years between the end of the Great Patriotic War and the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, the USSR engaged in what Smith calls ‘one of the great social reforms of modern European history’ (p. 183). In five chapters, Smith examines the origins and implementation of the Soviet Union’s mass urban housing programme. The three chapters that make up part one of the book offer a chronological account of the housing programme from 1944 to 1964. Here, Smith convincingly begins his account in the last years of the war, drawing continuities across the late-Stalin and post-Stalin divide and arguing that the reorientation of urban housing policy in 1957 was the result not merely of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization platform, but also of the war. Smith discards the ‘thaw’ as an organizing concept from the outset, arguing that the 1957 housing campaign was the result of both Stalinism and de-Stalinization. Drawing on archival materials at the USSR, RSFSR and Moscow levels, Smith shows that it was during the late-Stalin period that the policy, bureaucracy and technology necessary for the 1957 campaign were first developed. Chapter one charts the policies adopted between 1944 and 1950 when architects and leaders coped with the massive task of post-war reconstruction. Chapter two follows Soviet leaders, Khrushchev among them, as they confronted the inadequacies of earlier policies and paved the way to a new approach enshrined in the housing campaign of 1957. And chapter three examines real achievements in housing construction alongside the problems created by policy-makers who measured their programme’s success primarily on the basis of how many square meters of living space were constructed. In part two, Smith makes a major contribution to our understanding of property relations in the Soviet Union. Chapter four offers a comparative discussion of the concept of individual ownership, showing that the Soviet case SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 372 fits squarely within the European tradition of property. Chapter five examines the implications of Soviet notions of ownership—in particular, the right of occupancy — on the housing policies of the late-Stalin and Khrushchev eras. At the core of Khrushchev’s urban housing programme, Smith argues, was a unique ‘nexus of property and welfare’. As Smith shows, individual forms of ownership did not disappear with the abolition of private property. In the 1920s, property was transformed by the new Soviet state from a ‘profit-generating commodity into a welfare good’ (p. 169). Personal property, a category of tenure that became more widespread during post-war reconstruction, made up one-third of the Soviet urban housing stock by the late 1950s (p. 144). The mass housing campaign built on this Stalinist foundation, shifting towards housing cooperatives rather than individual construction that had formed the basis of housing policy during late Stalinism. Smith frames his discussion of Soviet housing policy with three ideological motifs — sacrifice, beneficence and paradise — each of which came to the fore at different moments to inform policy-making. The dogma of sacrifice dominated in the 1930s, as Soviet citizens were asked to forego decent living standards for the sake of rapid industrialization. During the war, this sacrificial ideology gave way to beneficence, which underlay the state’s determination to raise living standards as a goal unto itself. During the Khrushchev era...

Occidentalism and Historiography in Modern Iran: Fereydun Adamiyat, One of Twentieth-Century Iran's Foremost Historians, and His Assessment of the Rise of National Socialism in Germany and the Fall of the Weimar Republic

Turning away from the stance initially adopted by scholars of Iran who had been inspired by Said's Orientalism-thesis, a line of academic enquiry that one might call “Iranian occidentalism”, i.e. the study of Iranian perceptions—or perhaps, (re)constructions—of the West, has been gathering considerable momentum in the last decade or so. While work has been done on several different facets of this “Iranian occidentalism”—e.g. its manifestations in travelogues, poetry and prose literature, the arts, or academic philosophy—no attention has so far been paid by scholars to the question, how, if at all, historians working in Iran have studied the history of the Occident in their academic writings. This essay addresses this question and breaks new ground by analysing the rare instance of one of twentieth-century Iran's most venerated historians—the “father of modern Iranian history”, Fereydun Adamiyat (1920–2008)—writing on a completely non-Iran related, major topic within modern European history—the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the fall of the Weimar Republic. This analysis begins by explaining Adamiyat's account of the destruction of Germany's democracy in the 1930s in its unexpected context—a book on social democratic thought in Iran at the time of the Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911) published in Tehran for the first time in 1975. It then proceeds to assess Adamiyat's account of the triumph of National Socialism in 1930s Germany in terms of its merits as a contribution to scholarship, before enquiring into the potential of a present-day political agenda on the part of Adamiyat, who chose to write on this particular topic at a specific time, during the mid-1970s, when Iran seemed to have reached a level of stability and (sudden) wealth that could not have been more different from the troubled final years of the Weimar Republic. In so doing, this essay does not only open up an entirely new chapter in the study of Iranian occidentalism, but also makes an original contribution to another burgeoning field, the study of the development of history as an academic discipline and as a politically contested body of knowledge in twentieth-century Iran.

The Vitruvian Middle Ages and Beyond

The Vitruvian Middle Ages and Beyond Wim Verbaal What do we mean when we speak of the Vitruvian Middle Ages? Does the history of Vitruvius in the west not start around 1415 when three humanists dug up the manuscript of the de Architectura from the graveyard that was the monastic library of St. Gallen? Are the Middle Ages not primarily, then, the prehistory of Vitruvius? Are they not likewise the post-histoire of classical thought and knowledge in general? Even when a broad scholarly public knows that questions such as those above are no longer founded upon any reality, the beliefs behind them still remain decisive in shaping the image and presentation of European cultural history and identity. One need only open at random any book on reception history or the classical heritage and the table of contents will invariably show the same leap from classical or late antiquity to the era of the early humanists—the period from which every history of modern Europe takes its departure. Even those scholars who realize that our knowledge of antiquity is largely determined by medieval textual transmission are hardly ever willing to take the Middle Ages into consideration when discussing the afterlife of classical culture or literature.1 Nonetheless, the Vitruvian Middle Ages do exist. The history of Vitruvius does not start in 1416/1417. The manuscript Poggio and his colleagues discovered in the monastery of St. Gallen was not the sole survivor from the age of antiquity. And Vitruvius had not stayed buried for almost a thousand years in the obscurity of ignorance and monastic [End Page 215] indifference.2 Already in 1967, Carol Krinsky had published an article in which she enumerated seventy-eight Vitruvius manuscripts dating from the eight or ninth to the fifteenth century. More recently, the voluminous study by Stefan Schuler (1999) offers an even more thorough range of manuscripts reaching into the nineteenth century, as well as an exhaustive list of references to Vitruvius during the Middle Ages: quotations, rewritings, mentions, and listings in catalogues. Actually, Edgar de Bruyne had already done part of this work in 1946 in his still fundamental Études d’esthétique médiévale (1946.244–61). His work remains unmentioned, however, by both Krinsky and Schuler. Yet in spite of this accumulated knowledge about the transmission of Vitruvius during the period known as the Middle Ages; in spite of all the quotations and references to his work by writers of this period; and in spite of his appearances in medieval libraries all over Europe, the question still has to be asked whether one is allowed to speak of a Vitruvian Middle Ages. How must the tag “Vitruvian” be understood for the period between the fall of the Roman empire and the discovery of the manuscript in St. Gallen? How Vitruvian were the Middle Ages? In what sense can Vitruvius be considered a formative force in this period? Does he in any way add to the understanding of these thousand years of western European history? These are the questions I wish to tackle. I will not pay much attention to the contents of Vitruvius, nor to his transposition into the practical field of architecture. Mine is the contribution of a literary scholar, not of a historian of architecture. Nor is it necessary to redo the work of Stefan Schuler and trace the reception story of the Vitruvian treatise. Rather, Schuler’s exhaustive work forms the starting point for my contribution. I offer an attempt to understand the reception of Vitruvius during the Middle Ages. This is not an easy task, because in spite of the widespread knowledge of cultural differences from either a global or a historical point of view, the Middle Ages remain the blankest space on many people’s personal map of knowledge, both for the general public and for most specialists. They offer the widest opportunity for the most abstruse prejudices and romanticisms, and very few, especially among classicists and literary scholars, dare to venture into these so-called dark ages.3 [End Page 216] As a result, these two categories of scholars remain the victims of one of the greatest and most admirable deceptions in history: the...

The Industrious Revolution: A Concept Too Many?

AbstractMuch of the recent debate in early modern European labor and economic history has centered on Jan de Vries’s concept of the industrious revolution. Briefly, he claimed that workers during the period 1650-1800 chose to labor longer hours, often at greater intensity, in order to consume novel manufactured goods and imported commodities. Moreover, plebeian families increasingly pursued new employments beyond the household to pay for these objects. As a result, men, women, and children spent ever more hours in waged labor, and their growing purchasing power proved decisive in stimulating large-scale European industrialization. My work on the history of French and English papermaking raises fundamental challenges to this model. First, paperworkers already labored exhausting hours at the outset of de Vries’s period of newfound industriousness. Second, masters and workers alike knew that they had to both “speed up” and “take their time” to turn out quality paper at the expected rate. Third, women and adolescent workers toiled for wages in paper mills long before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the eve of large-scale mechanization, enduring shopfloor realities, skills, and quotas prevented a surge of productivity beyond papermaking’s familiar standards. With the demand for paper rising rapidly, it was the absence of an industrious revolution in papermaking that turned the manufacturers’ attention first to enlarged mills and small technological shifts, and finally, to the development of a papermaking machine.

Daum’s Boys: Schools and the Republic of Letters in Early Modern Germany. Alan S. Ross. Studies in Early Modern European History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. xiv + 236 pp. £70.

Daum’s Boys: Schools and the Republic of Letters in Early Modern Germany. Alan S. Ross. Studies in Early Modern European History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. xiv + 236 pp. £70. - Volume 69 Issue 3