Lost Colony Research Articles

The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History by Tonio Andrade

Reviewed by: The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History by Tonio Andrade Edward L. Farmer The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History by Tonio Andrade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 432. $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book. The academic historical profession came of age in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the first industrialized powers exercised an economic and military hegemony on a global scale. It was quite natural, perhaps inevitable, that historical discourses adopted Eurocentric perspectives that valorized what has been called the rise of the West at the expense of other regions.1 This paradigm is a particular burden for Chinese studies. Following the Second World War and the subsequent dismantling of colonial empires, many historians felt the need to adopt less parochial perspectives. Teachers working in the field of world history attempt to frame more balanced views of the past, but they are often handicapped by the limited availability of articles and monographs. Most graduate students are still trained to work in a single region of the world. Due to the demands of language study and the time required to carry out research, the number of scholars willing to undertake inquiries on a comparative or global scale remains regrettably small; for this reason, their contributions are especially valuable. One fruitful strategy is the study of a commodity in the world system—for example, S. A. M. Adshead's study of salt, Sucheta Mazumdar's book about sugar, and most recently Sven Beckert's masterful treatment of cotton.2 Another approach entails cross-regional [End Page 265] comparison as a check on claims of European superiority or uniqueness—examples of this genre include the economic studies by Mark Elvin, Kenneth Pomeranz, and R. Bin Wong—although the questions these authors raise similarly grew out of claims for the unique character of European economic modernization.3 Tonio Andrade's bold and imaginative study of the gunpowder age, which shares elements of both strategies, promises to make a major contribution to rebalancing our understanding of China vis-à-vis the West. Gunpowder is neither a consumer product nor an economic system; "gunpowder age" stands for a period in the evolution of warfare. Andrade frames his topic in a world-history context, but the bulk of the book compares historical materials on Europe and China with only incidental references to other areas such as Korea, Japan, and the Islamic empires. He offers us a binary framework that transcends a narrowly Eurocentric view and takes a big step toward understanding military history on a global scale. In two earlier books about Taiwan, Andrade signals his interest in bringing balanced perspectives to European–East Asian interactions in the early modern period. The first book, How Taiwan Became Chinese (2007), puts Dutch, Spanish, and Han Chinese colonization on an even footing.4 In Lost Colony (2011), an account of the Sino-Dutch War (1661–1668), Andrade briefly reviews the respective claims of military revolution theory, its revisionists, and counterrevisionists before settling on a formulation that acknowledges the strengths and weaknesses of each position.5 He remarks in passing that when the conflicting claims of theory threaten this balance of voices, his solution is to plunge back into the sources.6 In The Gunpowder Age, Andrade brings this mindset to a comparative examination of military achievements on a truly heroic scale. Andrade's gunpowder age extends for a millennium, from the invention of gunpowder in China to the development [End Page 266] of smokeless powder in the nineteenth century. His argument is a complex one: it combines carefully reasoned assessments of gunpowder's developments at both ends of the Eurasian landmass with particular attention to a number of common misunderstandings. By structuring a long historical narrative, Andrade makes a sequence of Europe-China comparisons without making one side superior to the other. The comparisons are facilitated by a nuanced historical chronology. Andrade reasons that military innovation, in this case the adoption and improvement of gunpowder weaponry, was the greatest during periods of prolonged conflict and was less likely to occur during periods of peace. This...

The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke Andrew Lawler Doubleday, 2018. 410 pp.

This week on the Science podcast, Andrew Lawler recounts the mystery of Roanoke, the Lost Colony, and shares stories of those who've devoted their lives to finding it.

Top stories: toxic toads, three-parent babies in Singapore, and the hunt for the Lost Colony

Top stories: toxic toads, three-parent babies in Singapore, and the hunt for the Lost Colony

Archaeologists start a new hunt for the fabled Lost Colony of the New World

Archaeologists start a new hunt for the fabled Lost Colony of the New World

The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama by Cecelia Moore

Reviewed by: The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Dramaby Cecelia Moore Elizabeth A. Osborne The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama. By Cecelia Moore. New Studies in Southern History. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. x, 221. $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4985-2682-1.) At the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deployed the Works Progress Administration with the intent of providing relief to the unemployed by putting them to work in their fields of expertise. One arena was the Federal Theatre Project (FTP, 1935–1939), a nationwide network of theaters linked by goals, ideology, and resources but centered on the regional and local needs of their communities. Cecelia Moore's The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama focuseson the FTP in North Carolina, using clear and comprehensive archival labor to demonstrate the connections between the FTP and local and educational theater work already in place, as well as the conflict between national political forces and regionalism. Moore introduces the FTP through national director Hallie Flanagan's oft-quoted description of the different regions, highlighting Flanagan's assertion that the FTP's work in the South would be "'a folk play'" (p. 5). This description serves as inciting incident to Moore's explication and leads her to consider amateur, educational, and professional theater. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the history of the Carolina Playmakers, an outgrowth of the little theatre movement and spearheaded by Frederick Henry Koch (no relation to Koch Industries) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapter 2 builds on this discussion, offering a more focused interrogation of the role of race in community dramas and the various complications that confronted the FTP in the state. The third chapter concentrates on The Lost Colony, a hit historical pageant staged in Manteo, on Roanoke Island, as a case study for regional success. Chapter 4 highlights playwrights such as Zora Neale Hurston and two virtually unknown women writers, Loretto Carroll Bailey and Betty Smith, as one way of uncovering the vital work of largely unknown individuals. The final chapter traces the regional repercussions of national politics when the arts strive for local relevance, focusing on the FTP's downfall and the shortcomings of a regional model for a national theater. Moore's strength is her ability to dig deeply into the archival record and to flesh out the politics, social norms, and impacts of competing objectives and personalities. Her chapter on The Lost Colonyshowcases this skill. In it, she considers the "Manteo pageant venture [as] an attempt at people's theatre. . . . It would put the working-class people of Manteo onstage in a dramatization of their history and draw similar kinds of people to see it" (p. 85). In this effort, The Lost Colonyserved as a way to integrate theater and U.S. history, "to use the past to promote an inclusive, democratic future for the nation" (p. 85). Moore's detailed case study reveals intriguing information about how and why The Lost Colonywas created, the stakes of its success, and the troubling link between that success and the promotion of Roanoke as "the cradle of Anglo-Saxon civilization" in the United States, at the expense of Native and minority populations (p. 107). Moore's research is compelling and thorough, incorporating the major FTP archives at the Library of Congress and the National Archives, as well as [End Page 1048]numerous local collections that contribute to a deep understanding of North Carolina activities during this period. Yet there is a notable absence of secondary scholarship on theater history in general and the FTP specifically; works by Barry B. Witham, Amy Brady, Ann Folino White, and myself would have offered helpful insights into the many ways that theater intersects with issues of regionalism, censorship, American identity, race, and gender. Nevertheless, Moore's work should appeal to historians and students looking to learn more about this exciting moment in North Carolina and theater history. Elizabeth A...

The Impossible Ancien Régime colonial: Postcolonial Haiti and the Perils of the French Restoration

The Impossible Ancien Régime colonial: Postcolonial Haiti and the Perils of the French Restoration This article discusses the consequences of Napoleon's downfall for the world's first modern post-slavery state, Haiti. It focuses on the interplay between the French colonial office's diplomatic missions that were lobbied by dispossessed planters to recover the lost colony and the Haitian propaganda to guarantee national independence. These relations ultimately contributed to a shift in French colonial politics towards Haiti, from military conquest and re-enslavement to financial indemnification. Taking the rhetoric of pacification beyond Europe, French diplomacy presented racial hierarchies as an extension of the 1814 compromise between old and new elites in metropolitan France. The Haitian side, however, insisted on the sharp contradiction between the supposed reconciliation in France and a quasi-restoration of the Ancien Régime colonial. Drawing on Haitian, French and British source material, this article analyses how Haitian propaganda attacked the precarious political legitimacy of Restoration France from an extra-European viewpoint to exert pressure on European colonial politics. Relying on Haiti as a model for slave emancipation, British abolitionists significantly contributed to excluding the option of the Ancien Régime colonial. The debate on Haiti's future forced Louis XVIII's government to ponder the political risks of colonial restoration. In the outcome, financial indemnification became France's primary condition for recognising Haitian independence in 1825.

Lost colonies found in a data mine: Global honey trade but not pests or pesticides as a major cause of regional honeybee colony declines

Recent losses of honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies have been linked to several non-exclusive factors; such as pests, parasites, pesticides (e.g., neonicotinoids) and other toxins. Whereas these losses pose a threat to apiculture, the number of globally managed colonies appeared to be less affected because beekeepers replace lost colonies. From a socioeconomic and ecological perspective the number of managed colonies is arguably more relevant when addressing the issue of apiculture and pollination services provided by honeybees. We here use the FAO data base to dissect the interactions between the global honey market and the number of colonies. Global scale analyses do not show a general colony decline. Whereas Western Europe and the US show suffer colony declines, other regions show considerable increase. We could not find any link between the colony dynamics and the occurrence of specific pathogens or the use of pesticides. In contrast, changes in the political and socioeconomic system show strong effects on apiculture. In addition, many countries show a tight negative correlation between honey import and the number of managed colonies. For some countries, the amount of honey produced per colony is highly positively correlated with the amount of honey imports, and we cannot exclude large scale relabeling of imported to nationally produced honey. It is very clear that honey trade is a dominating factor for the number of managed colonies since countries with a strong import and export ratio are those suffering most strongly from colony declines.

Finding the Balance: European Military Power in Early Modern Asia

AbstractThis article assesses recent developments in the debate over European military superiority in early modern Asia. It does so by focusing on Tonio Andrade's groundbreaking 2011 study, Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West, which stakes out a valuable middle ground between two clashing positions by suggesting that while Europeans did possess a genuine technological advantage it was not nearly as expansive as is sometimes assumed by supporters of the military revolution thesis. The goal of this article is to summarize Andrade's findings and to consider whether his limited advantage template can be applied to East Asia's second great military power, Tokugawa Japan.

Colonial Memories: Anxieties, Environment and Cultural Encounter in Paul Green’s The Lost Colony

This paper examines colonial anxiety in Roanoke Island as represented in Paul Green’s The Lost Colony, a symphony drama first performed in 1937. Roanoke colony can be referred to 1583 when the British attempted settlement which resulted in the abandonment of the colony. The second expedition to Roanoke was designed by Sir Walter Raleigh and launched in 1587 by one hundred and seventeen people headed by John White and Captain Ananias Dare; this group of colonists established the first British colony in America; in need of supplies, John White and his several followers went back to Britain and were detained for the war against Spain. When John White came back after three years, he failed tracing the colonists and the whereabouts of the colonists have been a mystery. Paul Green’s symphony drama ends with the abandonment of the colony instead of the parish of the colonists. As a cultural memory of the colonial history, Green looks into colonial anxieties over severe weather, environment and conflicts with the local tribes. This paper looks into the discourses of early migrants and brings to light Paul Green’s concern of early settlers’ management of environment in late sixteenth century on Roanoke Island.

Glimpses of Roanoke, Visions of New Mexico, and Dreams of Empire in the Mixed-Up Memories of Gerónimo de la Cruz

In 1588 a Spanish expedition set out from Havana, Cuba, to find and destroy the English colony on Roanoke Island. Twenty-three years later, Geronimo de la Cruz wrote a memoir of his experiences as a soldier on the expedition. The translation of this newly discovered memoir offers new details about the Lost Colony and the American Indian peoples the Spaniards met while exploring the Chesapeake Bay. It reveals more, though, about the Spanish Empire. Cruz, a native of central Spain and resident of Puebla, New Spain, addressed his account to Juan de Onate, the first governor of New Mexico, because he thought that Indians in the Chesapeake Bay possessed gold that could save Onate’s struggling colony. Officials in New Mexico and Spain read the account because they, like Cruz, believed that New Mexico’s rivers flowed directly into the Chesapeake. The journeys of both Cruz and his memoir reveal how one common man participated in the larger Spanish Empire as a soldier and writer. They also demonstrate that Cruz and his more illustrious readers believed that the Atlantic world linked Spain not only to Havana and the Chesapeake Bay but also to central Mexico and New Mexico.

Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West, by Tonio Andrade

Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West, by Tonio Andrade

Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West by Tonio Andrade (review)

Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West by Tonio Andrade (review)

Book Review: Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West

Book Review: Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West

Lost colony: the untold story of China's first great victory over the West

本 書探討 17 世紀所發生過的中荷之戰,是美國愛 默爾大學(Emory University) 副教授 Tonio Andrade (歐陽泰 ) 的第三本歷史專著。Tonio Andrade 為年輕有 潛力的歷史學家,目前在愛默爾大學擔任歷史教學外, 他的主要研究領域在於中國史、臺灣史、海權殖民史方 面。他於西元 2000 年畢業於耶魯大學,博士論文題目 為“ Commerce, Culture, and Conflict: Taiwan under European Rule,1624-1662(《歐洲人治下臺灣的商業、文化與衝 突,1624-1662》),該論文於 2002 年獲頒美國歷史學會 古騰堡論文獎。作者的第二本專著為 How Taiwan Became Chinese (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007),其中 譯本為《福爾摩沙如何變成臺灣府?》(臺北:遠流出 版公司,2007)。本書為其第三本專著,中譯本暫名《鄭 成功收服臺灣》,遠流出版公司預計在 2012 年內問世。 作者第四本專著 The Age of Expansion 正撰寫中。 本書敘述鴉片戰爭以前中西之間的首次戰爭――鄭 成功與荷蘭之戰。與鴉片戰爭不同的是這場戰役勝利者 為中國,正如本書副書名所顯示的一樣,這場戰爭鮮少 為人知,但卻是中國首次戰勝西方的一場戰役,是至今 尚未透露的故事,本書訴說著這個引人入勝的故事,比 較交戰雙方之科技、領導力等面向,透露勝敗之原因。 本書除前言與結論外,主要分成三部分。第一部分 敘述鄭芝龍、鄭成功父子興起的歷史,其主要標題為海 盜戰爭、武士、將軍、海上王。第二部分描寫鄭成功攻 臺之戰,從外交上的欺敵至海上戰役、陸上戰役到攻下 普羅民遮城。第三部分為巴達維亞艦隊海上救援、圍攻 熱蘭遮城的經過,海陸的攻防、勸降經過以及荷鄭雙方 所遭遇的問題。本書作者參考、運用大量中外史料與研 究,僅其附圖即有 25 種,各來自於荷蘭國家檔案館、 奧地利國家圖書館、哈佛大學燕京圖書館、牛津大學圖 書館、義大利佛羅倫斯 Laurenziana 圖書館等,作者蒐羅 之勤與廣,由此可見。 軍事革命理論者認為,在工業革命以前,歐洲因有 火藥、槍炮等革命性的戰爭科技,比世界其他地區擁有 關鍵的優勢,故能控制世界 35% 的土地。但修正主義 論者認為 17 世紀至 1800 年以前,東方在很多地方和歐 洲是並駕齊驅的,歐洲在戰爭技術上只比其他地區有些 許優勢,且很容易被抵銷。本書作者屬於後者,他試圖 藉這場中西之間的首次戰爭,來證明其論點。17 世紀時 荷蘭是遠超過英國與葡萄牙的世界上最有宰制力的殖民 帝國,然而在 1661 年之中荷戰爭中,擁有世界最先進 之加農炮、毛瑟槍、船艦之荷蘭卻敗於鄭成功的軍隊, 拱手讓出其最大且最富裕的殖民地。鄭成功是如何戰勝 的?本書試圖提供答案。 作者持歐洲在戰爭技術上比世界其他地區只有少 許優勢的看法,東西雙方在軍事、政治等方面之發展差 距不大。他在本書結語中認為荷蘭之長在船艦與堅固城 堡,中國之長在於軍事領導力與訓練有素,彌補了科技 Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory Over the West

Celebrating the Nation: Kurt Weill, Paul Green, and the Federal Theatre Project (1937)

AbstractIn summer 1937, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) commissioned from playwright Paul Green and composer Kurt Weill a work to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Green had provided the text for Weill's first American musical play, Johnny Johnson (1936), which the FTP took up with some enthusiasm, and he had scored some success with his outdoor historical drama The Lost Colony (1937). He was also interested in music on the stage following his encounters with Russian director Alexei Granowski in Berlin in 1928–29. Weill, in turn, was involved in various spectacle-driven projects in 1937, not least with fellow émigré Max Reinhardt. Green's first scenario for the new drama focused on the constitutional implications of recent labor disputes in the U.S. South. However, the controversy of summer 1937 surrounding the overt agit-prop of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock—sponsored but then dropped by the FTP—put an end to such political aspirations. Green rewrote his outline in favor of a more conventional treatment of the American Revolutionary War, to be called The Common Glory. Although he produced a rough script, and Weill started composing the score, the project collapsed, in part because of their incompatible visions for the play and its music. Nevertheless, newly uncovered sources reveal them attempting to grapple with the potentials of nationalistic subject matter in the theater, and with the search for U.S. cultural identities in changing times.

Lewis and Clarks’ Tempest: The ‘perfect storm’ of November 1805, Oregon, USA

Three weeks after arriving near the Pacific Northwest (PNW) coast in November 1805, Lewis and Clarks’ Corps of Discovery experienced a two-day windstorm that may have rivaled the strongest historically documented storms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Based on the Corps’ detailed historical accounts describing the event as the perfect storm, we characterized the severity of the 1805 windstorm using tree-ring growth anomalies from windsnapped Sitka spruce collected at three sites along the northern Oregon Coast. We compared the 1805 gale to eight other documented events with comparable storm tracks and exceptional magnitude including the 1880 and 1951 events that each caused more than a billion board feet ( c. 2.4 million m3) of windthrow. Statistical comparison of tree-growth responses revealed that the 1805 windstorm was the only event to differ significantly (χ2; test, p < 0.05, d.f. = 1) from all other storms. Our findings demonstrate the potential application of tree-ring data and historical documents to understand previously obscure climatic events similar to the extreme droughts that led to the demise of the Roanoke Colony during the sixteenth century and adversity experienced by the Jamestown Colony during the seventeenth century. Specifically, we identify the Lewis and Clark tempest of 1805 as being among the most severe PNW windstorms during the past two centuries, and may have contributed to the Corps’ dismal view of coastal Pacific Northwest weather.

A kingdom strange: the brief and tragic history of the lost colony of Roanoke

In 1587, John White led 117 English men, women, and children to Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. They hoped to establish a British foothold in North America, but soon found themselves struggling to survive. White returned to England for help, but when he returned to Roanoke in 1590, the colonists were nowhere to be found: White never saw his friends or family again. But as James Horn reveals in A Kingdom Strange, some from the party survived; their descendants were discovered a century later, a living testament to America's remarkable origins.

Surviving in the Metropole: The Struggle for Work and Belonging amongst African Colonial Migrants in Weimar Germany

This paper looks at the fate of the Africans in Germany during the Weimar Republic in terms of their search for belonging and struggle to find work. In doing so it allows for a discussion of the day-to-day experiences and survival strategies of Germany's African Diaspora, their struggle for political recognition and self-definition as well as economic survival. Their presence was tolerated by German officials only as long as it served the purpose of a German colonial propaganda which sought to regain the lost colonies. In the wider context of economic hardship in Germany and rising racial prejudice, particularly in the late 1920s, many of these migrants faced a continual struggle for economic survival. Increasingly, one of the means of carving out an existence remaining for members of the African Diaspora was to turn to the stage. Here they were asked to ‘perform’ their blackness – to take on roles of a constrictive nature, reflecting and reinforcing stereotypes of the Black as primitive or exotic.

Time's Arrow: Violence and Ethnohistorical Surrealism in the Lost Colony

SUMMARYStandard ethnohistorical accounts of colonial encounters downplay violence and genocide in the interest of holistic ethnographic accounts. In particular, “upstreaming” is a technique that attempts to sublimate violence into interpretations of ethnological understanding. An argument is made for “ethnohistorical surrealism” as a methodology for preserving the ruptures of colonial contact. The principle of incommensurability is an important driver for the transformation of contact zone exchange systems into structures of violence. Drawing on Bataille's reading of the potlatch, exchange systems based on unreturnable gifts produce abjection in the recipient, which results in cycles of violence and ultimately subjection.

The Promise of Democracy: Imagining National Community in Paul Green's The Lost Colony

The Promise of Democracy: Imagining National Community in Paul Green's The Lost Colony