Overseas Empire Research Articles

The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire by George Steinmetz (review)

The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire by George Steinmetz (review)

Portugal, província do Brasil? O policentrismo do império híbrido luso-brasileiro. Especificidades históricas

In 1808, the Portuguese royal family arrived in Brazil, fleeing the Napoleonic invasions of Portugal. From then on, an entire political-administrative structure was created in the colony that transformed Rio de Janeiro into the new capital of the Portuguese overseas empire. This article addresses issues of political identity in this Portuguese empire from 1808 to 1822. It seeks to demonstrate, through sources, historiographical debate and valuing the perspectives of the comparative history of the Iberian kingdoms – mainly Spain, which was also invaded and its domains –, such as certain analytical premises articulated with the concepts of political hybridity and polycentric monarchy, contribute to the understanding of how this empire functioned and the dynamism of its political culture. In the meantime, the specificity of the Luso-Brazilian empire that was established in the tropics is attested as an unprecedented configuration in the history of monarchies in the Modern era.

Review of: George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

Review of: George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

Review of: George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

Review of: George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

Review of: George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

Review of: George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

Book review: The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire

Book review: The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire

Multiplex colonial sociology

This article assesses George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire. Princeton University Press. Princeton and Oxford, 2023. ISBN 9780691237428 (hbk) xvi + 551. Expertly illuminating the neglected constellation of French colonial sociology, Steinmetz emphatically extends recent reconciliatory moves on the question of decolonizing sociology. With and beyond Bourdieu, taxing issues persist concerning the nature of the perspective being rehabilitated and the one being marshalled in analysis.

“A Ceremony of National and Representative Character”: The Four-Nations Politics of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee

AbstractIn June 1887, Britons crowded the streets of London to celebrate Queen Victoria's fiftieth year on the throne. It was an opportunity to publicly revel in the social, political, economic, and imperial progress Britain had made during her historic reign. The Lord Chamberlain was tasked with organizing a formal jubilee ceremony at Westminster Abbey representative of the queen's diverse subjects. But this proved a difficult undertaking for a multinational kingdom with a vast overseas empire. Grievances over seating in Westminster Abbey, jubilee honors, and an absent royal family fostered varying degrees of solidarity and rivalry among the United Kingdom's four constituent nations. The Irish Question and imperial expansion—matters in which Victoria was personally invested—heightened four-nations sensibilities and influenced participation in the festivities. The queen's Golden Jubilee both reflected and inspired four-nations thinking, and it revealed public concerns that the British union might exist as a hierarchy of nations rather than as a collaborative venture among equal members. As the institutional embodiment of tiered society, the Crown became an outlet for subjects to explore questions and modes of belonging within the global British world. A four-nations analysis of Victoria's 1887 jubilee shows that despite its unifying function, the modern British monarchy has struggled to harmonize the United Kingdom's multinational perspectives.

Review of “The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire”

Review of “The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire”

Pieter C. Emmer and Jos J. L. Gommans. The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800.

In the first lines of The Dutch Overseas Empire, the authors Pieter C. Emmer and Jos J. L. Gommans immediately set the tone of the book by boldly stating that the Dutch overseas empire was “very much a peripheral phenomenon” from a global perspective, while the Dutch Republic itself is called “a rather marginal maritime European phenomenon” (1). This probably will not be in line with the reader’s expectations of this topic, but the study succeeds in bringing to life the “rather fluid conglomerate of overseas activities” that constituted this empire (3). The book is a “substantially expanded and adapted translation” (XII) of the earlier Dutch work Rijk aan de rand van de wereld: De geschiedenis van Nederland Overzee, 1600–1800 (2012). Its key contribution is that it brings the complex history of the Dutch overseas empire within reach of an international audience. The book encompasses the whole trading world and all the colonial endeavors of the two major Dutch companies, the West India Company (WIC) and the East India Company (VOC). These companies had been set up by the Dutch States-General in order to monopolize Dutch trade with the Americas and Asia, as well as to act militarily on their own initiative, both in self-defense or aggressively against any foe. In contrast to previous studies of the VOC and WIC focusing on “organizational and maritime aspects of these trading concerns,” the authors want to highlight comparisons with other European empires and the connections between the Dutch Republic and its empire (5). By moving between areas across the globe, the authors skillfully piece together an “immense empire that stretched like a string of pearls along the edges of the continents of Europe, Asia, America and Africa” (1).

Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age ed. by David Prior

Reviewed by: Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age ed. by David Prior Brian Matthew Jordan Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age. Edited by David Prior. Reconstructing America. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 348. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-9865-5; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-9864-8.) Scholars have often regarded Reconstruction and empire building as discrete phenomena. Seeking to remedy this peril of traditional periodization, [End Page 158] David Prior has collected eleven penetrating essays that reveal how “developments stemming from Union victory and abolition anticipated, shaded into, and intersected with the geopolitical rise of the United States” (p. 13). Building connections between historiographies, deftly tracing intellectual lineages, and extending a growing body of scholarship that has situated Reconstruction in a global context, this welcome volume demonstrates how domestic politics and foreign policies were entwined in postbellum America—all while casting into sharp relief the U.S. Civil War’s consequences. “Union victory and abolition,” Prior contends in his thoughtful introduction, “contoured the rise of the United States as a regional hegemon with an overseas empire” (pp. 9–10). The essays—many of which use biography to develop their claims—are uniformly well written and tightly argued. However, several stand out for their interpretive punch. For instance, the first chapter, written by Andre M. Fleche, recalls Cuba’s struggle to achieve independence from Spain in the Ten Years’ War. By studying the participation of two U.S. Civil War veterans in the conflict (one Union veteran and one former Confederate), Fleche not only reveals how “Reconstruction-era debates over race relations, slavery, and citizenship transcended U.S. borders,” but also clarifies “how much the Civil War reoriented American policy toward abolition in the hemisphere” (pp. 47, 29). Gregg French demonstrates how the “threat of racial, political, and sectional instability in the United States” charged the pitched debates over President Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt to annex the Dominican Republic (p. 94). Lawrence B. Glickman convincingly argues that James Redpath’s “emerging anti-imperialism” is a key to making sense of the radical abolitionist’s postbellum sympathy for Jefferson Davis. Redpath’s work in Ireland both “undermined his commitment to Black freedom” and informed his “critique of Reconstruction” (p. 155). Recent scholars have inventoried how the Civil War continued to annex the lives of its participants. Centering the postwar lives of Oliver O. Howard, Julia Ward Howe, Lyman Abbott, and Clara Barton, Mark Elliott’s brilliant essay demonstrates still another way the Civil War generation toiled in the conflict’s shadow. Because many white northerners interpreted Union victory “as a moral triumph” over slavery and secession, the war promoted a unique sense of national mission that animated interventions abroad (p. 15). This “humanitarian nationalism” at once affirmed American exceptionalism and justified military occupation (p. 161). While Julia F. Irwin and other historians have dated this “nationalist construct” to the Great War, Elliott suggests that “it was already influential in the 1890s, and its foundations were laid in the 1860s” (p. 163). Elliott’s conclusions are important, for they invite us to rethink the “humanitarian rationales of the early twentieth century” as something more than “disingenuous covers for colonial ambitions” (p. 183). In a chapter that harmonizes nicely with Elliott’s piece, David V. Holtby finds that the Grand Army of the Republic, the largest fraternal order for U.S. Civil War veterans, “rallied to imperialism largely because its members equated martial valor with national greatness” (p. 191). Precisely because empire entailed military occupation, many white southerners—still recalling Reconstruction as “bayonet misrule”—subscribed to anti-imperialism. Yet as DJ Polite’s essay reminds, “Southern white anti-imperialism was often conditional” (p. 216). Many white southerners were willing to erect an empire, but [End Page 159] they demanded it “extend from a firm white supremacist political foundation at home” (p. 216). A short review can capture neither the full range of topics nor the many questions provoked by these essays. The book has very much to say about Cuba and the Caribbean, though comparatively little to say about...

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.

Nimisha Barton. Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945.

In the 2000s, the global turn swept through modern French history, above all among scholars in the United States. In a post-Cold War context where Western Europe was no longer of great strategic interest, France and the French had to be made “global” to retain their relevance in a crowded disciplinary marketplace. Fortunately, it was easy to globalize the history of a nation that had once had a substantial overseas empire, was widely recognized as a “great power,” and seemed to be grappling openly with the politics of racial difference and the legacies of its colonial past. As research agendas in the field quickly changed, a new cohort of graduate students began to rediscover topics that had fallen out of fashion or had been ignored altogether. Nimisha Barton fits squarely within this new generation of French historians, and her book reflects many of the most interesting innovations that have emerged from the global turn. Anyone who knows the field will recognize themes—such as immigration, gender, and the meaning of citizenship—that have been the subject of significant English-language scholarly attention in the past twenty years, but Barton carefully moves the conversation on to more unfamiliar chronological and methodological terrain. For a start, her focus on the Third Republic is a welcome departure from the much more crowded historiography of immigration in postwar France. Just as importantly, her use of the term “reproductive citizens” brings into conversation the histories of women, the family, and republican citizenship. Despite the stimulating work of scholars such as Camille Robcis, Judith Surkis, and Amelia Lyons, the strongly gendered character of republican citizenship in twentieth century France remains a neglected subject of study.

The Environmental Transformation of “Empty Space”: From Desert to Forest in the Landes of Southwestern France

AbstractThis article explores the environmental transformation of the moorland (landes) of southwestern France from a much maligned “wilderness” or “empty space” to a forested landscape coveted for its productive potential as well as its aesthetic beauty. This occurred in two stages from the eighteenth century to the present and was effected by the French state and local landowners. It bears resemblance to processes of environmental change in North America, Central Asia, and Africa, where states and colonial or imperial powers took measures to develop alleged empty spaces through seizure, development, and settlement. Drawing on paradigms of colonial rule and Henri Lefebvre’s theory regarding the production of space, the article examines the eradication of the “wilderness” of the region of the Landes, which led to the displacement of its pastoral populations and the end of their way of life. It explores the role of technology in consolidating the power of territorial states and empires and the significance of the parallels that can be drawn between the Landes and France’s overseas empire. Finally, it attests to the porosity of the boundary between man-made and natural landscapes, while illuminating the process by which the artificial forested landscape of the Landes ironically came to be redefined and revalorized as “natural” national heritage that was ripe for environmental protection by the second half of the twentieth century.

Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch

Reviewed by: Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch William G. Robbins MAKING A MODERN U.S. WEST: THE CONTESTED TERRAIN OF A REGION AND ITS BORDERS, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2022. Bibliography, index, notes. 656 pages. $50.00 cloth. Making a Modern U.S. West, a volume in the University of Nebraska Press History of the American West Series, covers the period from the 1890s to the eve of World War II. The first of the four chronological sections covers the federal government’s organization of its new continental and overseas empire and the lives of people in its territories. The second section treats trans-border movements involving corporate money, organized labor, women’s suffrage, and government and capital suppression during World War I. Part three focuses on speculative investment in natural resources and tourism in the 1920s, and the fourth part involves the deportation of Mexican laborers, New Deal efforts to organize union workers, and John Collier and the Indian Reorganization Act. To slow speculative activity in public lands, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1891, permitting the president to withdraw federal forests from the public domain. The problem, Sarah Deutsch writes, was that forests were “under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, which had no foresters. The Department of the Interior had foresters but no reserves” (p. 41). In fact, the opposite was true, the forest reserves were under the Interior Department and foresters were in the Department of Agriculture. President Theodore Roosevelt transferred the forests to the Department of Agriculture in 1905 under Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot and the Forest Service. Deutsch misidentifies the Homestead Act (1862) with the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, the legislation designed to settle the arid West. The act doubled land grants to 320 acres, attracting an inrush of homesteaders to arid regions. A period of extended drought “forced three-quarters of those who had arrived since 1916 to leave” (p. 133). The great American dilemma, race, functioned differently depending on location. Deutsch identifies conflicting and inconsistent accounts in federal commissions involving the classification of Mexicans. An Industrial Commission report in 1901 grouped Mexicans and Indians as “foreign whites,” while most of its commentary focused on Chinese and Japanese immigrants who dominated the news. When commissioners learned that Mexicans composed one-third of maintenance workers on Southwest railroads, they devoted one paragraph in the 800-page report to “Mexican peon labor.” The Dillingham Commission in 1911 complained about the lack of data on Mexicans in the United States but still devoted a few pages to Mexicans as an unprogressive race but intelligent enough for common jobs. Deusch devotes considerable attention to cross-border revolutions, giving greater attention to the Southwest than insurgencies north of the forty-ninth parallel. She offers an important reality about the southern border: “The Mexican Revolution laid bare that the history of the Mexican North and the U.S. Southwest were inseparable” (p. 132). Radical democratic movements existed across both southern and northern borders. Women’s movements followed similar trajectories, Montana electing the first woman to Congress in 1916, Canadians electing the first woman to sit in a legislature in the British Empire, and two Mexican states sponsoring Mexico’s first women’s congresses. The federal government joined with western corporations in suppressing the Industrial Workers of America and the Non-Partisan League when the United States entered World War I. To tell the story of the Northwest lumber industry, the government’s organization of the Loyal [End Page 404] Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, and the suppression of unions, the author relies on Harold Hyman’s nearly sixty-year-old book, Soldiers and Spruce (1963). Making a Modern U.S. West explains the conflicted state and federal efforts to marginalize Indians’ and other minorities’ rights to land ownership. Deutsch cites John Collier’s importance as a forceful proponent of fighting for the integrity of Pueblo lands. During the 1920s, fears about Japanese land ownership among White landowners along the West Coast prompted California to worry that the state was becoming a Japanese colony. Legislatures in...

Race, Melancholia, Midsommar

Race, Melancholia, Midsommar Monica L. Miller (bio) I hardly know where to look, where to rest my gaze, whom to follow, and how to do so in this blinding sunlight. I've been here before; this is like my first midsommar (summer solstice), in what I thought was a fantasy of Sweden but turned out in some ways to be real or at least a curious affekt (affect) of the people and the place. I remember being in a field adjacent to a series of red summerhouses, everyone was dressed in white, their summer finest. We sang and drank and sang again during a lunch of pickled herring, smoked salmon, fresh potatoes, elderflower juice, and Swedish snaps, all served family style on long tables decorated with fresh flowers. The herring and snaps were new to me, the fish both slimy and oily despite the delicious mustard sauce and the snaps so full of alcohol that they combined purification and inebriation. We ran to the maypole and danced, pretending to be, as I learned later, little frogs and pigs. The blinding light softened to a beautiful glow as the sun did not set and we kept dancing, drinking, and eating strawberries and whipped cream. I was far away from home, a stranger in a strange land, celebrating midsommar with my Swedish partner and his friends. It was beautiful and strange. In Ari Aster's film Midsommar when the car carrying Dani, Christian, Josh, Mark, and Pelle drives into the Swedish countryside toward Hårga and the camera's perspective slowly, gently, definitively flips upside down, I feel a sharp pang of (mis)recognition, of having felt on the precipice of a similar summer scene. And yet as I stare at the screen at the [End Page 362] beginning of this fictional filmic midsommar celebration, I hardly know where to look because I am (over)identifying with nearly everyone, American and Swede alike. I don't know where to look when the Americans arrive in Hårga because all I see is white—white people in white clothing, all in blinding sunlight—so I decide to fixate on Josh. Like me, he's African American and a scholar, continually analyzing and taking notes; he's traveled to Sweden to have fun and to do fieldwork for his thesis. His is a scenario that is familiar to me. Though I am not an anthropologist like Josh, I am a literary and cultural historian; more importantly, I've seen enough horror films to know that people like us, Black and too curious, will likely not survive these two and a half hours, even and maybe especially in Sweden. I wonder how he will navigate this situation, where he will end up, what his presence and the manner and timing of his death can or will tell us about how to read race in the fictional place of this film or Sweden, as metaphor. I'm thinking about affekt again and belonging and remembering that at the end of Midsommar during the ritual burning of the nine offerings, the Hårgans are said to purge oheliga affekter (unholy affects) out of their society. I'm thinking also about the fact that Sweden is officially and in public discourse a "place without race" with a strong sense of itself as a color-blind social democracy that is exceptional in Europe because it had little to no colonial enterprise or overseas empire. Historically, the homogeny of the population and the overwhelming nature of whiteness as a sociocultural norm has meant that instead of identifying as "people of color," racialized Swedes have identified as icke-vit (nonwhite) instead of, for example, in the case of people of African descent, Black or Afro-Swedish, terms of self-identification more in use today. I wonder if or how a place for Blackness will or can be made in this film. When thinking about how to apprehend difference and Black people at midsommar celebrations or in Sweden more generally, I think of my own experiences, lovely long days that became even richer as I learned the language, songs, and traditions over the years. Early on I bonded with the other foreigners...

Imaginative links: Islam and dreams of a Saharan French empire

ABSTRACT French colonial expansion across North and West Africa brought contact with varied political and religious groups, particularly along the Saharan rim and in the western Sahel. Numerous French metropolitan politicians and colonial administrators alike saw the Sahara as a great connecting medium, a new-age mare nostrum that would serve as the centerpiece of an expansive overseas empire. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Xavier Coppolani and Robert Arnaud (or Randau) served as the leaders working across this seemingly impassable divide to invent a political, demographic, religious, and vividly Romantic homogeneity for the area and its people, one based almost entirely in the power of Sufi Islam. Such unifying concepts built on older Saharan traditions of politico-religious linkage while thriving in a moment of changing French metropolitan colonial theory. Ultimately beset on all sides by local, metropolitan, and imperial resistance, these attempts failed over time as they hardened stereotypes and overlooked important realities of human connection throughout the region. The complex and contradictory forces involved in the joining of disparate social and political entities in the Sahara offer substantial insight into the reality of colonial expansion and political formation.

The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing by Jens Temmen

Reviewed by: The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing by Jens Temmen Katrina Phillips (bio) The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s): Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing Jens Temmen Universitätsverlag Winter, 2020, x +259 pp. ISBN 9783825347130, $56 hardcover. Settlers in what is now known as the United States dreamed of expansion before they even reached the westernmost part of the continent. According to Roberta Conner, Joseph J. Ellis identified a "fully continental vision of an American empire" in George Washington's 1783 annual message—and James P. Ronda contends that Thomas Jefferson was "determined to make the United States an imperial contender" (qtd. in Conner 108). It would not be as easy as these men hoped, though, particularly as American settlers, surveyors, and soldiers continually encountered hundreds of sovereign Native nations who had called these lands homes since time immemorial. America's burgeoning legal system—and its stumbling implementation of often contradictory federal Indian policies—regularly required what Jens Temmen considers "the terminology of aberration, exception, or simply extinction" in order to marginalize Native nations within US legal discourses (39). The federal government, along with American citizens, businessmen, and military officials, turned their attentions overseas toward the end of the nineteenth century, gleefully embracing the spoils of imperialism. For Temmen, though, this shift is not as neatly defined or differentiated as some scholars may hope (39). In The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s), Temmen traces the trajectory of US imperial expansion from the continent to overseas, focusing on what he considers "the moments and spaces that connect or disconnect these phases" (2). For Temmen, the US nation-state became conterminous with the North American continent as early as the American Revolution, projecting sovereignty over the continent while simultaneously nullifying Native and Indigenous sovereignties (3). Temmen argues that the study of US imperialism seems to be in a holding pattern, one that maintains an ongoing dialogue over how to analyze the differences in the two phases of American expansion without simply reverting to what Amy Kaplan calls "the central geographic bifurcation between continental expansion [End Page 104] and overseas empire" (10). The book is rooted in what he describes as "nodes of connection and narratives of disconnection between these U.S. imperialism(s)," centering 1898 as an alleged watershed moment for US imperialism (8). Temmen's addition of the plural "s" in parentheses is deliberate, underscoring his focus on this "multitude of imperial strategies, while still emphasizing their fundamental connectedness" (11–12). The notion of "the trinity of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territory" serves as what Temmen calls "the core vocabulary" of the book (3). By analyzing works that were either written or cowritten by Indigenous authors alongside US legal texts, Temmen highlights the myriad ways Indigenous people have long pushed back against the notions of US imperialism. At first glance, Temmen's choice of works may seem incongruous or too dissimilar or disparate to support his argument: Temmen places John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) and Queen Lili'uokalani's Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (1898) alongside Geronimo and Stephen M. Barrett's Geronimo's Story of His Life (1905). One might argue that there are few similarities among the histories of these three Indigenous nations—the Cherokee, the Kānaka Maoli, and the Apache—not to mention the differences among their engagements with and methods of resistance to American imperialism. However, Temmen's careful reading of these literary texts against legal and government-written texts balances out what he calls the consideration of the two, particularly by legal scholars, as "unequal partners" divided between robust enforcement and emotional education (45). The Indigenous authors of these texts wanted justice for their communities, and they deliberately put the US legal system on trial through their writings (48). These texts, for Temmen, become a means of "haunting" the system that has long sought to erase and eradicate Indigenous sovereignty. Temmen begins with Ridge's dime novel...

Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin by Eugene M. Avrutin

Reviewed by: Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin by Eugene M. Avrutin Kimberly St. Julian Varnon (bio) Eugene M. Avrutin, Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). 140 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 978-1-350-09728-5. Eugene M. Avrutin's Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin is a new release in Bloomsbury's Russian Shorts series. The brief, easy-to-read monograph is a timely and excellent addition to the literature on race and racism in Russia and the Soviet Union. The volume begins with the 2013 Biryulevo protests, which remain a frightening reminder of the power of racism in driving violence against Central Asians in contemporary Russia. Avrutin uses Biryulevo to underscore how Central Asian migrants in Russia are racialized as Black and how the Russian crowds use inflammatory, white supremacist language to mark Central Asians and Caucasians as others (P. 3). From these scenes, the reader learns that "Russia for Russians" and other racist sentiments are not new but a continuation of racialization and othering of ethnic minorities dating back to the tsarist period of Russian history. The introduction also provides readers with a cursory but helpful overview of the treatment of race in the secondary literature in Russian [End Page 377] and Soviet history. Avrutin argues that due to Russia's lack of an overseas empire, its absence in both the African slave trade and the Scramble for Africa, and the international image of the anti-racist Soviet Union, racism and racial thinking in Russia have often been overlooked in academic discourse. He correctly points out that race has often been portrayed as a nonissue in Soviet historiography. He asks: What factors account for this silence (dismissing race-based thought and practices)? Why have scholars shown so little interest in historical and theoretical discussions of race? (P. 4). Avrutin powerfully demonstrates that racial ideologies and racial hierarchies have been part of Russian cultural and social history throughout the 150 years that his book covers. From the premise of the "messy" color line – one in which the ideas and process of racialization are not fixed nor stable – Avrutin diagrams for readers the forms and functions of race in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He argues that race did not dictate citizenship or social position in Russia or the Soviet Union, "but by rejecting the premise that an individual could belong to multiple identities, the state's classification system primed people to see the world in unambiguous racial terms" (P. 7). Thus, the classification and ordering of groups within the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union according to nationality or ethnicity can be better contextualized in a paradigm of race. The book is organized chronologically into four chapters. Chapter 1, "The Empire's Races," relates the development of anthropological and "scientific" thinking on race in the ethnically and culturally diverse Russian Empire. The chapter also places Russia within Western European discourses on race and racial differences in the nienteenth century. One of the most interesting sections of this chapter examines how Russian anthropologists and race ideologues approached Jews and other ethnic minorities within the empire. Race scientists such as the anthropologist Aleksei Arsen'evich Ivanovskii were confounded by Russia's Jewish population and categorized them as a distinct, non-Russian, race. Imperial expansion merged with the development of social sciences making the myriad of ethnic groups within the empire's borders a boon for Russian anthropologists and reified the idea that Russia was unique relative to its European imperial counterparts. Chapter 2, "Boundaries of Exclusion," builds on the previous chapter's explanation of how race and racial difference were discussed and applied in academics and research. It explores the execution of racialization through how Russianness was defined and utilized by the [End Page 378] tsar and the imperial government to engender public support, maintain political order, and oppress minority nationalities. This chapter draws on Avrutin's expertise in Jewish history with a fascinating discussion of the 1913 Beilis trial that ties the Russian reaction to the case to similar racist attitudes in the United States toward African Americans in the post–Reconstruction Era. Another...

The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800 by Pieter C. Emmer and Jos J. L. Gommans

This book is the English translation, and slightly updated version, of Rijk aan de Rand van de Wereld (Amsterdam, 2012), the greatest accomplishment of which is its integrated treatment of the Dutch activities in the Americas, Africa, and Asia; the last monograph that presented a global overview of the Dutch overseas was Charles Boxer’s The Dutch Seaborne Empire (New York, 1965). Several studies of the Dutch activity in either the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean, and of the organizational and maritime aspects of individual Dutch state-chartered companies, have appeared since Boxer’s book, but no global overview.The book’s approach “highlights comparison with other European empires as well as the interaction between the Dutch Republic and its overseas territories in both the metropolis and the different contact zones” (5). It is comprised of three parts. The first focuses mainly on the cultural, economic, religious, social, scientific, and artistic exchanges between the Dutch and “the World.” The second and third focus, respectively, on the Dutch operations in the Atlantic and those in the Indian Ocean world. The authors include no references to primary archival sources, instead basing their book on secondary literature. Since many Dutch historians write about Dutch history in English, the added benefit of this English version is marginal, but some readers who cannot read Dutch might benefit from its review of the literature.The third part of the book is successful and innovative in its emphasis on the Dutch in (present-day) India and Sri Lanka over the more traditional treatment of (present-day) Indonesia. The parts of the book that discuss the Dutch in the Atlantic, however, rely on outdated literature, are often repetitive, and contain several falsehoods. The most surprising reference is to C. M. Schulten, Alles over Nederlandse expansie in Latijns Amerika: Brazilië: 1624–1654 (Bussum,1968), a book that has failed to make any historiographical impression and is hardly academic (191, n. 4). The section about the Americas has only one reference to a publication within the last twenty-five years, despite a surge in writings about the Dutch in the Atlantic since 1999.1 The repetitiveness, such as that the Dutch did not want their slaves to convert to Protestantism, was already noted in a review of the Dutch version of book, but it remains in the English version (159 and 163).2 The most egregious mistake is the description of the tenure of Johan Maurits as Governor-General of Dutch Brazil as “a one-man administration” (44); in reality, he was but one vote in a council of five (and a tie-breaking vote at that). Moreover, the council continued to govern during the months that he was on military missions. Without the second part, the book would have probably been better (but evidently less global).The first part of the book is the most ambitious, successfully combining findings from economic, intellectual, cultural, and social history to tell how the Dutch related to the world and the world to the Dutch. The conclusion that the effects of these global exchanges “were much more limited than is generally assumed,” however, is underwhelming (120). It would not do interdisciplinarity justice to describe (this part of) the book as interdisciplinary. The book is a literature review that draws from different historical sub-disciplines. The parts of the book about the Dutch in the Atlantic have serious shortcomings, but if we ignore them, the rest of the book is a welcome and interesting overview of the Dutch in Asia and the influence of the world on the Netherlands.