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History of the Hanse: Construction and deconstruction History Compass Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Louis Sicking
This article explores 150 years of historiography of the Hanse, the premodern trade network of mainly Low German merchants and their towns. It focusses on the construction of its infrastructure (the Hanseatic History Association, its source publications and its journal) and on the deconstruction of viewing the history of the Hanse in terms of its rise, greatness and fall. Instead, it looks at three
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Recent work on indenture in the British World History Compass Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Sascha Auerbach
This article provides an overview of the historiography of indentured labor in the 18th and 19th centuries, along with a brief narrative of the origin and definition of indenture. It traces the evolution of the history of indenture in the “British World” (defined here as the areas under both formal and informal British imperial control) from a neglected field to a major focus of historical study. The
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The historiography of social reproduction and reproductive labor History Compass Pub Date : 2023-12-30 Jacqueline Allain
This article tracks the categories of social reproduction and reproductive labor as they appear in historical scholarship. Both within and beyond the historical discipline, scholars of diverse political, theoretical, and disciplinary persuasions deploy these concepts to denote a wide range of labors and processes in a manner that seems at times to have little coherence. The intentions of this article
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Tools of imperialism or sources of international law? Treaties and diplomatic relations in early modern and colonial Southeast Asia History Compass Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Stefan Eklöf Amirell
The history of treaty-making, diplomacy, and international law has traditionally been written from Eurocentric perspectives, but since the middle of the 20th century, Southeast Asia has attracted relatively much attention because of the region's importance for the 17th-century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. More recently, however, the interest in Southeast Asia's role in the history of international law
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Britain's fiscal-military state in the eighteenth century: Recent trends in historiography History Compass Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Robin Ganev
John Brewer's argument that eighteenth-century Britain developed a centralized and effective fiscal-military state that allowed it to become a great power has been instrumental in making early modern state-building an important field of inquiry for historians. New directions in the field explore conflicting eighteenth-century ideologies, the notion of a ‘naval-military’ state, the non-military dimensions
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The university in modern South Asia: Historiographical framings between the local and the global History Compass Pub Date : 2023-10-14 Meher Ali
This essay traces different historiographical framings of the modern university in South Asia. Although the trajectories of this institution are manifold and complex, the university's deep imbrications with colonial expansion and developmentalist ambitions lend it to both national and global perspectives. Focusing on the late colonial to early postcolonial period, I examine how recent scholarship has
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Moving subjects: Directions and methodological challenges in the historical study of migrant children and youth History Compass Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Ella Fratantuono, Alyssa Martin
Over the last decade and a half, scholars have demonstrated increased interest in studying the history of young people, as signalled by an expanding presence of relevant societies and journals. Though children and young people comprise a significant number of the world's current migrant population, young migrants in the past are not often the central focus of historical research. This article aims
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From colonialism to global health: Frameworks for the history of medicine in Portugal's empire History Compass Pub Date : 2023-10-10 Hugh Cagle
Portugal's empire brought together peoples and pathogens, along with wide-ranging forms of medical expertise and curative practice, into multiethnic and polyglot colonial settlements around the globe. Many aspects of Portuguese imperial policy and much of the work of colonial institutions were fundamentally linked to the challenges of disease, population loss, and the preservation of health. Only in
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History of celebrity branching out History Compass Pub Date : 2023-10-07 Adrian Wesołowski
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the expanding field of celebrity history. While there was once a debate surrounding the application of the concept of celebrity to the past, historians have recently recognised the importance of exploring transient fame and social distinction, solidifying this line of inquiry. However, our understanding of historical celebrity has since evolved, involving
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Medicine in the field: Growing connections between environmental and medical history History Compass Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Vanessa Heggie
This article argues that Environmental History and History of Medicine are disciplines that are natural allies and productive partners; successfully working across the sub-disciplines will be essential to understanding current and future crises, including climate change and pandemics. While it is relatively easy to find acknowledged intersections between histories of science and/or technology and of
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Archaeology in Botswana's history History Compass Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Phenyo Churchill Thebe, Boga Thura Manatsha
In this paper, we argue that archaeology plays a significant role in promoting history, and the two disciplines complement each other. The study uses archaeological monuments and sites to assess how these can be used to effectively enhance the transmission of history to the public. This paper demonstrates the tremendous value of historical archaeology beyond colonial records as a source of data for
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Slave voices and experiences in the later medieval Europe History Compass Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Hannah Skoda
Late medieval slavery was profoundly entangled in urban life in particular. Cities all around the Mediterranean coast were implicated in the trade—although this article focuses on the Christian Mediterranean which was bound together by a general reliance on Roman law (alongside local customary laws and the canon law of the Church). Recently, scholarship on late medieval slavery has proliferated, offering
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Teaching women's work and thought in undergraduate history of science courses History Compass Pub Date : 2023-08-10 Elizabeth Yale
As a rich field of scholarship now demonstrates, from at least the early modern period, women have consistently contributed to natural philosophy, science, and medicine in Europe and the Anglo-American world. Their participation in these fields, like men's, has been shaped by gendered social and cultural expectations. It has risen and fallen on cyclical waves of effort to exclude them or minimize their
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Horse racing: Unnatural selection in the renaissance History Compass Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Mackenzie Cooley
This article uses the renaissance culture of horse racing as a window into the practices and language of breeding, artifice, and race. The popular palio racing circuit brought local and foreign horses into Italian city centers to test their speed. Racing culture, and other formal and informal competitions related to animals incentivized the development of specialized horse breeds called razze in Italian;
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From objects of study to worldmaking beings: The history of botany at the corner of the plant turn History Compass Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez
The “plant turn” of recent years has surfaced as an interdisciplinary position that sees plants as more than inert, passive objects subject to the whims of humans and of more charismatic animal life. Recent research in STEM, the social sciences, and the humanities, alongside scholarly publishing pursuits, have opened a field in which a small yet expanding community of scholars are proposing the worldmaking
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The contentious Ghanaian: An historical appraisal of social movements in Ghana History Compass Pub Date : 2023-05-25 Nana Yaw Boampong Sapong
Ideas of freedom, liberty, and social justice are germane to most societies, including African societies. The quest for these values also often involves contentions, dialog, and compromise. Sadly, the often-told stories of political and social change in Africa are brush-stroked with bloodshed, tears, and anguish. This Africa of pessimism, unfulfilled dreams, state-sponsored violence, and civil wars
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Revisiting space and emotion: New ways to study buildings and feelings History Compass Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Maja Hultman, Sophie Cooper
In her 2014 History Compass article, Margrit Pernau issued a call for scholars to consider entanglements between history of emotion methodologies and space. She argued that ‘bodies are necessarily situated in space, and they bear the imprint of the spaces they are moving through and have moved through.’ Nine years after the publication of Pernau's article, this study engages with developments in the
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Notes on historiography of photographs from India History Compass Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Ranu Roychoudhuri
Despite its long and layered histories, critical analyses of photography in India began rather late and remain comparatively limited in number. However, the burgeoining scholarship in the field illuminates photography's role in conditioning modern South Asian experiences, while also highlighting the global character of the medium that complicate the unmarked history of photography. Three intertwined
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The science of talismans today History Compass Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Benjamin Anderson
The science of talismans was cultivated in Arabic, Greek, and Latin in the first millennium AD and entered European vernaculars in the seventeenth century. Its primary concern is the ability of images to produce effects in the world, even at a distance. In the eighteenth century, European intellectual discourse rejected the talisman on physical, moral, and aesthetic grounds. Today, it has returned
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Migration and innovation in early modern Islamic societies. The case for firearms History Compass Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Rémi Dewière
The objective of this article is to review the historiography of the relationship between migration and firearms technologies in the early modern Islamic World. By examining historiographical debates on the role of firearms in early modern Islamic societies, we will look at the place of migrants in the historical literature of firearms. During the colonial period, debates shifted from the alleged conservatism
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Charity and philanthropy in Middle East history History Compass Pub Date : 2023-02-22 Amy Fallas
Until the late 20th century, few studies focused on the history of charity and philanthropy in the Middle East from the medieval to modern periods. The work that explored this subject largely concentrated on the ideals of charitable practices, such as the faith-based tenets of social welfare as an Islamic communal practice and the religiously mandated form of almsgiving (zakat). But during the late
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Conceptualising the ‘Administration of the Dead’: Cadavers, war and public health in the early 20th century History Compass Pub Date : 2023-01-15 Romain Fathi
This article examines the relative absence of historical literature pertaining to the battlefield disposal of military corpses during and shortly after the First World War. It posits that while First World War Studies constitute an enormously rich field of research, scholars are yet to consider corpses and their disposal as a central topic of investigation, as is the case with other disciplines and
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Debating Latin America's Cold War: A vision from the south History Compass Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Rafael R. Ioris, Vanni Pettina
The historiography on Latin America's Cold War has grown significantly in the last few years. But though the field has expanded in ways that include new perspectives, much could be gained by engaging more closely with voices from the South or works produced by scholars based in Latin America. Similarly, more nuanced analytical framings that pay closer attention to post-World War II development, particularly
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Early modern parliamentary studies: Overview and new perspectives History Compass Pub Date : 2022-12-28 Paulina Kewes, Steven Gunn, Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves, Paul Seaward, Tracey Sowerby, Jim van der Meulen
In this essay, we call for a new approach to representative assemblies of early modern Europe and beyond. While there are vast national historiographies on their legal constitutional structure, little effort has been made to reconstruct the cultural and transnational dimension of such bodies, a phenomenon we describe as ‘parliamentary culture’. We argue that there is much to be gained from an investigation
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The administration of justice in Wales during the long eighteenth century History Compass Pub Date : 2022-11-29 John Walliss
While the last four-and-a-half decades has seen a growing body of historical scholarship on the administration of justice in England during the long eighteenth century, the administration of justice in Wales is a relatively neglected topic. This article reviews the relatively small historiography on the administration of justice in Georgian Wales, highlighting the ways in which patterns of indictments
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Teaching & learning guide for: The crisis of the postcolonial nation-state and the emergence of alternative forms of statehood in the Horn of Africa History Compass Pub Date : 2022-11-02 Namhla Thando Matshanda
1 AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION The African postcolonial state is in crisis, and it has been for a while. The sources and forms of this crisis are multiple in nature. My focus on this article is on the political aspects of this crisis. The idea of the African postcolonial state became a reality when the majority of former colonies in Africa gained independence from European colonial rule. What these former
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Gender and madness in nineteenth-century Britain History Compass Pub Date : 2022-10-29 Amy Milne-Smith
For decades, the history of gender and madness was a story about women. Individuals deemed lunatics were universally treated as passive victims of medio-legal forces beyond their control. New generations of scholars have looked beyond power binaries to interrogate the complex network of gender, class, family, and culture to place ‘the mad’ as historical actors in a complex and often contradictory story
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National indifference and dynastic loyalty in comparative perspective: The demise of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires revisited History Compass Pub Date : 2022-10-28 Mario Maritan
The demise of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War marked the end of centuries of multi-ethnic coexistence. To this day, outside the field of history, the perception of both empires is rooted in the idea of the inevitability of their demise, which, as the story goes, was due to the strength of nationalist movements and the intensity of inter-ethnic strife
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Toxic remedies: Poisons and medicine in Eurasian history History Compass Pub Date : 2022-10-07 David Arnold
Histories of medicine are conventionally confined to one geographical region and assume a sharp distinction between medicines and poisons. Recent scholarship, however, has created very different perspectives. Medico-toxic substances were highly mobile commodities that often breached any clear distinction between what kills and what heals. The investigation of poisons could be innovative and integral
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U.S. citizenships and American identities: Examining methods of belonging in North America History Compass Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Kris Klein Hernández
This historiographical essay examines methods of belonging within two adjacent intellectual fields: formations of American identity and the history of U.S. citizenship. By studying recent monographs from these subfields, this essay underlines how belonging makes visible conceptions of citizenship for minoritized populations who may not have held U.S. citizenship, but whose existence and lives help
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Patricia Crone and the “secular tradition” of early Islamic historiography: An exegesis History Compass Pub Date : 2022-09-21 J. J. Little
Patricia Crone famously identified three distinct sub-traditions within early Islamic historiography: a “religious tradition”, a “tribal tradition”, and a “secular tradition”. Whereas the first is extremely unreliable and the second is partially unreliable regarding early Islamic history in general (c. 600–750 CE), Crone argued that the third provides “a coherent historical account”, at least as far
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Liberalism's distinctive policy for governing Muslim populations: Human rights, religious reform, and counter-terrorism from the colonial era until the present History Compass Pub Date : 2022-09-19 Aria Nakissa
During the colonial era, liberal Western states established vast empires which came to encompass almost all of the world's Muslims. Western states worked out specific methods for governing Muslims, which were often referred to as “Muslim policy”. Recent scholarship on Muslim policy exhibits several key trends. One is expansion of geographical scope, leading scholars to produce more comprehensive global
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The Gujarati archive in Tanzania History Compass Pub Date : 2022-07-02 Iqbal S. Akhtar
The South Asian presence in East Africa has roots in antiquity through oceanic trade routes linking the Subcontinent to Africa. Existing paper archives date to the colonial period, held both by the government and various communities. Only the most recent sliver of more than two millennia of history is therefore recorded on paper. Of that, most of the academic (Hofmeyr) work done on the Asian minority
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A political turn? New developments in Indian constitutional histories History Compass Pub Date : 2022-07-01 Arvind Elangovan
In 2019, the Indian constitution suddenly exploded into the public sphere in ways that were never seen in the life of the postcolonial republic. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister openly bowed before an original copy of the Indian constitution after his reelection in 2019. Later in the year, however, large groups of people used the text and images of the constitution to protest controversial legislations
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India's democracy before the democratic discontent, 1940s–1970s History Compass Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Ornit Shani
The last decade and a half saw what we can call a historical turn in the study of India's democracy. By drawing on some of these new works and on archival materials, this article offers a new way of thinking about the rooting and workings of democracy in India and its endurance. The article explores how India and Indians produced a concrete and convincing notion of a shared functioning purpose, a common
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Towards a trans-regional approach to early medieval Iberia History Compass Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Álvaro Carvajal Castro, André Evangelista Marques, Graham Barrett, Leticia Agúndez San Miguel, Ainoa Castro Correa, Marcos Fernández Ferreiro, Jonathan Jarrett, David Peterson, Rosa Quetglas Munar, José Carlos Sánchez Pardo, Igor Santos Salazar, Guillermo Tomás Faci
The past few decades have witnessed great change in the study of the early Middle Ages in the Northern Iberian Peninsula. Spanish and Portuguese historiographies have moved away from older grand narratives such as ‘Reconquest and Repopulation’, which traced a centuries-long process encompassing the ultimate victory of Christianity over Islam and the construction of distinct nations or national societies
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Arabic and Sindhi manuscript collections in Sindh, Pakistan: Resources and perspectives from the Indian Ocean History Compass Pub Date : 2022-05-11 Sohaib Baig
This article presents an introduction to an array of historical sources from Sindh (in modern-day Pakistan) in the Arabic and Sindhi languages. It highlights the sizeable number of Arabic manuscripts in Sindhi institutions and discusses some of the larger historical forces that shaped their collection in the colonial and pre-colonial periods. In addition, it reflects on the significance these sources
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Giovanni Battista Montini (Paul VI): From the legacy of Christian Democracy to the encounter with fascism, 1925–33 History Compass Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Jorge Dagnino
This article seeks to address Giovanni Battista Montini's attitude towards the Christian Democrat party of the day-the PPI- and his reactions to the Fascist movement and regime between 1925 and 33. Contrary to most observers, the article argues that the future Paul VI was not a Christian Democrat at heart. With regard to his anti-Fascism, the article aims to qualify his attitudes and concludes that