Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors 

President's Corner | On the Edge of the World | The Greek Age of Heroes | 
African Encounters | Interview with Peter Nabokov | Globalization and Its Critics | Hungary's "Great Generation"
The Pacific War and Civilizational Conflict | The Cambridge Histories | 2002 Conference | Regional Reports | Letters

President’s Corner
by George Huppert

The recent conference we sponsored in Atlanta was successful in a number of ways. Those who were there will remember the pleasant setting and some of the more striking presentations, including those of David Landes and Seymour Drescher, which provoked long bouts of debate. Natalie Davis’s paper was another high point.

Each of us, no doubt, came away with new ideas, but what I found particularly memorable was the congenial and stimulating mood that reigned throughout those three days, when we had so many opportunities for getting to know each other between formal sessions.

This mood is something worth maintaining at our next national conference. There is, elsewhere in this issue, a formal Call for Papers for the 2004 conference. This may seem far away, but proposals are actually due pretty soon, with a final deadline in December. You will note that the ground rules are different this time.

Our past conferences have been focused, more or less successfully, on a single theme. Even so, most of us have hardly been jolted out of our routine, basically doing what we have done at other meetings, that is, presenting the results of our own research in company with two or three others on the panels, whose interests are compatible with our own. The result was predictable: a handful of medievalists, for instance, or specialists in Mesopotamian archeology, attended their own sessions, while others plunged into equally exclusive sessions. However interesting the presentations were, one could hardly argue that there was much of a meeting of minds across the thin walls separating these sessions.

Several of my colleagues commented on this fact. Meanwhile, at a meeting in Chicago, the three historians to whom I entrusted the direction of the 2004 conference had already expressed their desire to overcome the kind of compartmentalization that plagues our profession.

What we hope to see happen when we next meet in BoothbayHarbor is a new kind of conference at which we all learn from each other. We would like to see, for instance, specialists in U.S. colonial history meet with colleagues who study other colonial histories. Another way of shaking loose the rigid boundaries to which we are accustomed would be to devote a general discussion to the concept of the Middle Ages, for instance, or to examine the nature of Western Civilization courses. Could we have economic historians, regardless of their regional or chronological territory, take a look at Africa since independence? Why not venture into controversial or unexamined questions and ask whether historical research can be useful to government policy makers, especially at this juncture, when the West is the target for such concentrated rage? Is there anything wrong with selecting topics for research that are directly related to current preoccupations? Lucien Febvre, the fiery editor of Annales, did not think so. He spoke of a managed history, “une histoire dirigée,” and went about commissioning a series of articles that tried to provide answers to the perplexities of his day—the 1929 Wall Street Crash, for instance.

Within reason, I urge you to connect your own expertise with broader issues. We are not just calling for comparative history. We would like to take stock, to ask where our discipline is heading, by prompting a number of reports from the field. What is going on in your own field, as you see it?

You will have noticed the emphasis on “conversation” and “discussions” in the wording of the Call for Papers. We mean that. We are moving away from the established model of presentation (three 20 minute papers, a commentator, and very little time for meaningful discussion). Instead, we ask for your text in advance, and expect only a brief informal summary before a general discussion begins.

A word about the setting of this conference. The inn is not a convention hotel, even though it provides excellent meeting rooms, accommodations, and meals. No need for suits and ties. High heels would be positively life threatening on the lawns, decks and rocks.

The informal nature of this conference will allow participants a great deal of latitude. We will entertain full-scale presentations in a 300-seat auditorium, as well as brief reports, which will also have their place in the published program. And there is nothing wrong with coming to the conference without putting yourself formally on the program. Join the conversation. I hope to see you all there. 

George Huppert is president of the Historical Society and professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent book is The Style of Paris: Renaissance Origins of the French Enlightenment (Indiana University Press, 1999). 

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On the Edge of the World
by Barry Cunliffe

In a few days time[*] I hope to be excavating at the Iron Age settlement of Le Yaudet on the north coast of Brittany. It is an idyllic place, a granite headland with stunning views out to sea across the estuary of the river Léguer. The air is clear and there are always present the inexorable rhythms of the sea underscoring the timelessness of it all. For the excavation team it’s a welcome contrast to tourist-clogged Oxfordchoking in its Midlands river valley. But our seasonal translation is more than just a change of air; it’s a major shift in our cognitive geography. From Le Yaudet we can begin to share the experience of the hundreds of generations who have used the headland: the sense of being in a liminal place between land and sea—the wooded environment of land behind, difficult and intricate, the open sea in front, deceptively inviting, and the zone of our existence with its reassuring array of resources there for the gathering from the wide littoral, the woodland fringes, the river, and the ocean.

For archaeologists and historians it is important to try to understand the cognitive geographies of people in the past. Greek geographers like Hecataeus and Herodotus held very distinct views of the world. Understandably, the Mediterranean occupied the center. Around it were land masses stretching to the unknown and encircling it all, the Ocean. The Graeco-Roman view was a very simple core-periphery model. And so strong was this view, reinforced by generations of schoolteachers in the 19th and 20th centuries, that it still pervades even today. There is, of course, good reason for this. Much of the Mediterranean littoral was a benign environment where communities could flourish, and the sea itself—Mare Nostrum—provided an easy means of communication. Those favored locations that grew into major ports-of-call, places like Miletus, soon became information nodes where ideas flourished and fermented. FernandBraudel summed it up with his characteristic verve in The Mediterranean in the Ancient World when he wrote: 

The best witness to the Mediterranean’s age-old past is the sea itself. This has to be said again and again: and the sea has to be seen and seen again . . . . So we find that our sea was from the very dawn of its prehistory a witness to those imbalances productive of change which would set the rhythm of its entire life. 

“Imbalances productive of change” lie at the very heart of what prehistory and history are about. Since resources, populations, and ideas are scattered unevenly, there is a constant flow from one region to another. Where there is access to the sea, the intensity of flow is all the greater. And so it was that for a brief period of 2000 years or so the Mediterranean became a hothouse for cultural development.

But to place such emphasis on the Mediterranean is to introduce an imbalance. There were other ocean fringes, rich in resources, with their different rhythms of interaction creating quite distinctive, and often brilliantly inventive, cultures of their own. One of these is the long Atlantic fringe of Europe stretching from Morocco in the south to Iceland in the north. Far from being a raggle-taggle of benighted barbarians deprived by geography from enjoying the benefits of Mediterranean civilization, the Atlantic arc was a world of its own and well able to make a unique contribution to European history.

Until the 15th century A.D., the Atlantic communities conceived of themselves as being on the edge of the world. What was out there in the ocean lay in the realms of myth: the Hesperides, Atlantis, the Isles of the Blessed. Even after the voyages of discovery of the 16th century, mysterious but non-existent islands constantly appeared on charts. Indeed, it was not until as late as 1865 that the mythical island of Hy Brazil, supposed to lie off the west coast of Ireland, was finally removed from official naval charts. 

This sense of being at the very limit, where land and sea met, cannot have failed to create a particular mindset, while the rhythms of the monthly tidal cycles and the inevitability of the daily ebb and flow of the sea would have given those who viewed it an intimate sense of the passage of time and the associated significance of celestial movements. In other words, the cognitive geography of those facing the ocean would have been quite different from that of an inland dweller or those hardly noticing the sluggish movements of the Mediterranean. 

That the coastal communities built oceangoing ships and mastered the essentials of navigation is beyond dispute, but when sea-going first became a way of life is more difficult to say. However, by the 6th millennium B.C. it is evident that Mesolithic foragers occupying the coasts had taken to the sea to fish and were probably following the shoals of fish in the same way that hunters on land would have followed the herds of animals. It was probably at this time that navigation skills were learned, and voyages lasting days or weeks would have brought the fishermen into contact with more distant communities. In this way, through networks of social interaction, ideas and beliefs would have been shared. Some such mechanism would explain the striking similarities seen in Mesolithic burial practice in such disparate places as Denmark, Brittany, and Portugal, where bodies were carefully laid out in graves cut into shell middens and adorned with red ochre and deer antlers. While the distances traveled by individual communities may have been comparatively limited, the overall effect of these networks of interaction, functioning over long periods of time, would have been to create elements of a common maritime culture. 

By the middle of the 5th millennium the concepts and technologies of cereal cultivation and animal husbandry, which originated in the Near East, were beginning to reach the Atlantic coastal zone. Food production, as opposed to gathering, enhanced the stability of the already sedentary coastal populations, and there emerged the remarkable phenomenon of collective burial in large megalithic tombs. Tombs of this kind, called passage graves, where the bones of ancestors were collected together, appear in the Tagus region of Portugal and in Brittany toward the middle of the 5th millennium, and by the end of the 4th millennium the idea had spread to Ireland and Britain as far north as the Orkney Islands. Although there was regional variation, the basic architectural concept is the same throughout the maritime zone. No less impressive is the considerable similarity in the range of symbols carved or painted on the stones, and the fact that some of the tombs are carefully aligned on celestial phenomena such as the rising or setting of the sun on the solstices. What we are seeing here is a vivid reflection of a sharing of beliefs along the length of the entire Atlantic zone growing out of and enhancing the network of contacts established 2000 years earlier. 

Some insight into the actual mechanisms at work is given by the distribution of polished stone axes, many of which have been petrographically identified and can therefore be traced to their source. These, it is believed, were used as gifts in complex cycles of exchange much like the Kula ring of the western Pacific studied by the anthropologist Malinowski. On the island of Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands, 28% of the axes found came from Brittany and 16% from Normandy even though the island had its own source of desirable stone which was widely exported, especially to the neighboring island of Guernsey where 31% of the axes found were from Jersey. None of this makes sense in terms of simple trade but is easily explicable in terms of cycles of exchange in which the axes were prestige gifts constantly being exchanged among elites. One can imagine these social expeditions setting out by ships along prearranged routes, maintaining social harmony with the exchange of symbolic gifts and at the same time indulging in the more normal trade of bulk commodities. 

The Atlantic facade was well-provided with rare resources, those “imbalances productive of change:” tin in Cornwall, Brittany, and Galicia; gold in Galicia and southeast Ireland; copper in southwest Ireland, western Britain, and western Iberia; rare attractive varieties of stone, most particularly amber along the coasts of Jutland; and salt, easily obtainable in many low-lying coastal regions. All these commodities and many others moved through the exchange networks of the Atlantic. As bronze came more widely into use, so the Atlantic zone was drawn more slowly into the continental networks. The great rivers, Tagus, Duro, Garonne, Loire, Seine, and Rhine, provided convenient corridors along which commodities together with knowledge of beliefs and technologies could pass. 

By the end of what is conventionally known as the Late Bronze Age, about 800 B.C., the intensity of maritime movement, reflected in the distribution of bronze weapons and tools, must have been very considerable. Distinctive items—the Irish spearhead found in the sea off Huelva in southwest Spain or the Sicilian axe found near Hengistbury on the Dorset coast—traveled long distances. What is even more impressive is the similarity of the value systems adopted throughout the length of this huge region and expressed in the weapon sets of the elites and the feasting gear—cauldrons, flesh hooks, and roasting spits—they used in their social gatherings. It is difficult to resist the view that by the opening centuries of the 1st millennium B.C. a distinctive Atlantic community had emerged. 

It was about 800 B.C. that the Atlantic system and the Mediterranean system began to interact directly. The moment came when a group of Phoenician merchants from the eastern end of the Mediterranean, mostly modern Lebanon, set up a trading colony on the island of Gadir (now Cadiz) just off the Atlantic coast of southern Spain to trade with the local Tartessians, particularly for the silver the latter produced in great quantity. Gadir was the linchpin that locked the two oceans together, and it was not long before Phoenicians were exploring the Atlantic coasts for themselves, setting up trading colonies down the African coast of Morocco and up the Iberian coasts of Portugal to take over the supply of African gold and ivory and Galician tin. The appearance of these alien vessels in Atlantic waters no doubt introduced many changes, and it is even possible that the indigenous shipbuilding tradition in this way learned the benefits of the sail. 

The Atlantic was a source of fascination for Mediterranean sailors. Phoenicians and Greeks alike began to explore the alien waters. Hanno, a famous Phoenician explorer, may have got as far south as Cameroon in west Africa in the 5th century, and at the end of the 4th century a Greek called Pytheas from the Mediterranean port of Massalia (Marseilles) set out to explore the north Atlantic, quite probably using local shipping. He visited Brittany and tin-producing southwest Britain before circumnavigating the island, visiting en route the amber-bearing coast of Jutland. It is even possible that he got as far as Iceland. These travelers, and no doubt others about whom history is silent, brought back to the Mediterranean stories of the mysterious ocean and its barbarian inhabitants to amuse, excite, and entice. 

The developing contact between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic was slow at first, but after Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in the 1st century B.C. and the conquest of Britain a century later the Atlantic was opened up to Roman shipping. Some Mediterranean vessels undoubtedly faced the fierce Atlantic, as an anchor stock dredged up off north Wales shows, but for the most part the Atlantic seaborne traffic was in the hands of local seamen who used vessels built in a native tradition. The late Roman cargo ships found in the Thames at Blackfriars and in the harbor of St. Peter Port on Guernsey were little different from the ships of the Veneti, a Breton tribe who had confronted Caesar more than three centuries earlier. Though the government had changed, the Atlantic seamen and their ships were the direct inheritors of a seafaring tradition now 6000 years old. The collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century did little to disrupt the Atlantic sea-ways. Mediterranean pottery, possibly trans-shipped in Iberia, was reaching western Britain in the 6th century, and by the 8th century it is clear from the distribution of French pottery in Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, and western Scotland that maritime traffic was brisk. In the 9th and 10th centuries these same routes were used by Norse mariners in their many expeditions to raid, to settle, and to trade. 

The emergence of the western European states as a powerful counterweight to the maritime empires of the Italian cities of Genoa and Venice was, to a large extent, based on the strength of this maritime tradition. The sturdy cogs and sharp caravels able to sail close to the wind were brilliantly adapted to the demands of the Atlantic and infinitely more efficient than the lumbering, overmanned Venetian galleys. And so, when the moment was right and a new confidence prevailed, it was the ships and the sailors of the Atlantic facade—Spain and Portugal and later France, Britain, and the Netherlands—that were to face the ocean and to conquer it. The fury of the Atlantic had honed the skills of their ancestors over hundreds of generations, and now they were its masters. No longer was the Atlantic facade the edge of the world. It had become the center. 

Barry Cunliffe is professor of European archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford (Fellow of Keble College). His most recent book, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples 8000 BC–AD 1500 (Oxford University Press, 2001), won the Wolfson Foundation History Prize. 

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The Greek Age of Heroes: Myth Becomes History
by Carol G. Thomas

In his Sather Lectures of 1984-85, Anthony Snodgrass argued that archaeology be recognized as more than the handmaid of history—while it does illustrate or confirm events known through written sources, its evidence and inferences have an independent scope and value. Archaeology has special significance for periods from which little or no written evidence exists. The Greek “Age of Heroes” is a convincing case in point. 

When Heinrich Schliemann set out to demonstrate the historical reality of the Greek heroic age by digging at a site he judged to be Troy, he was greeted by at least as much skepticism as good will—and probably more. In response to his claim that he had uncovered the site of the Trojan War, the popular German magazine Kladderadatsch published a satirical “telegram from Troy.” It expanded on Schliemann’s own reports by announcing the discovery of Achilles’ grave identified by the ankle bone which, naturally, would reveal the point of Achilles’ vulnerability. The rest of the body was missing. The notice concluded, “Achilles stuck in pocket. All well. Schliemann.” More serious criticism came from contemporary archaeologists like W. J. Stillman who stated in the London Times (January 9, 1889): “I hope before long to put all the evidence . . . in such a shape that no one can doubt reasonable that “Troy” is the Troy of Croesus [i.e. the 6th century B.C.] and Tiryns a Byzantine palace of about 1000 A.D.” That is, the dating would be at least 600 years—and perhaps more than 2000—later than the Bronze Age. 

There were so few known sites, let alone events, to confirm the accuracy of these particular finds that no consensus had emerged by the time of Schliemann’s death in 1891. Walter Leaf’s obituary notice indicated one reason: “Dr. Schliemann was essentially ‘epoch-making’ in his branch of study, and it is not for epoch-making men to see the rounding off and completion of their task.”[1] Indeed, Schliemann was a pioneer in a discipline that has only “come of age” in the last half century. 

Another factor was at work in the criticism of Schliemann’s efforts: many scholars refused to find anything historical in the Age of Heroes. In 1938, nearly half a century after Schliemann’s death, the classical scholar S. E. Bassett could still declare in the Sather Lectures at Berkeley that “[t]he fabulous age of Greece must have no place in history. [Homer] created a life that never was on land or sea.”[2] By contrast, authors can now state boldly, as J. T. Hooker did in his Mycenaean Greece: “I propose . . . to discuss, from a historical point of view, some of the crucial periods in the development of Aegean lands during the Bronze Age.”[3] His principal focus was on Mycenaean culture from ca. 1600 to 1200 B.C. Within these four centuries, major phases, events, and developments were dated with a fair degree of precision.

How did myth become history so suddenly? An early step forward occurred with the expansion of evidence. An early step forward occurred with the expansion of evidence. As at Troy, heroic tales suggested certain sites where Bronze Age remains might be discovered. Thus, to prove the reality of the Trojan War, Schliemann needed not only a site for the war but also another for the home of the Greek leader of that campaign, Agamemnon. He excavated successfully at Hissarlik (now generally acknowledged to be the location of Troy) and Mycenae, which every reader of the Iliad knew as the home of Agamemnon. However, two sites whose dating was initially unclear do not constitute a broadly based or chronologically fixed culture. Evidence from more locations was essential, and the island of Crete presented new data in abundance in the early years of the 20th century. Sir Arthur Evans’s excavation of the palace of the (mythical) labyrinth of the (mythical) Minos at Knossos was followed by a brace of similar discoveries on the island. Work on the mainland, too, increasingly added dots to the map of early Greece. 

Palaces, grand burial sites, and precious objects are welcome to archaeologists, but another form of archaeology has, in the past three decades, added considerably to our knowledge of the Age of Heroes. Survey archaeology refocuses attention from major centers to the domain of ordinary people with the goal of understanding the relationship between the land and its use. The lens is wide: one of the first major survey projects, the Minnesota Messenia Expedition, studied the habitation pattern in a region of 1,400 square miles in the southwestern Peloponnese for all periods from the Neolithic age to the Roman era. Thus it produced a composite picture of environmental, social, and economic developments of all levels of the region’s population over an extensive period. The relationship between the whole region and its palace center is now much clearer, as it is for other parts of Greece. For instance, a thorough investigation of the road system reaching out from Mycenae reveals that the main roads extended only about four kilometers from the citadel. The earlier notion that the residents of the citadels held sweeping, absolute power must be modified to accommodate sectors in the nearby countryside that were independent of the centers. In other words, it is now possible to examine the political, economic, and social organization of the Age of Heroes (and non-heroes). 

Because the scope of survey archaeology is so broad, it requires a variety of specialists. The team organized for the Messenia project included specialists in ethnology, epigraphy, metallurgy, civil engineering, geology, history, geography, ceramic technology, soils, agricultural economics, and palynology (analysis of pollen and spores), along with archaeologists and para-archaeological personnel. Such cooperation, valuable in itself, is symptomatic of yet another new direction in archaeology, namely the integration of new technologies which began about the middle of the 20th century. The current tool kit of archaeologists includes magnetometers which reveal features beneath the earth’s surface and objects buried in the seafloor; robots for investigating caves inaccessible to humans; tools of aerial reconnaissance; and, of course, computers. Dates can be learned through many techniques from radio carbon and dendrochronology to analysis of charged atoms. Pots are now tested to reveal the composition of their clay. The list of new tools is impressive—overwhelmingly so to non-scientists. And it has made an impression on the discipline of archaeology, for suddenly archaeologists have been presented with not only more data but data of another order. The tools give access to evidence previously unattainable, while the information allows more precise conclusions on such important subjects as dating and the origin of materials and thus patterns of exchange both within the Aegean and beyond. 

Looking beyond Greece has also enhanced our knowledge of Bronze Age Greece. In the early days of archaeology, the study of single sites or regional cultures was sufficiently arduous work. However, that focus produced isolated snapshots, not a broad panorama. The wider perspective of the last three decades or so has set new questions and even provided some reasonable answers. For example, the prevailing consensus until recently was that the Aegean palace systems were somewhat reduced copies of Near Eastern and Egyptian organizations. More careful comparison combined with mounting evidence from Greece—especially the information made available through the decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s—has collapsed the earlier consensus. One recent study proposes that a more apt comparison is with the Hallstatt hill forts in the northern Alps and the warrior aristocracy for whom they were built.[4] Or consider the shift in our understanding of the sudden collapse of the Mycenaean civilization beginning at the end of the 13th century. It was once easily explained by recourse to warlike invaders entering Greece from the north. With the realization that virtually all Bronze Age civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean experienced similar, contemporary difficulties, scholars began to pursue a more inclusive investigation. Did those invaders deal first with Greece, then make their way through Anatolia, the Levant, and into Egypt? Greater precision in dating ruled out this answer. Perhaps a variety of invaders burst upon the scene at the same time. Possible, but an explanation grounded in the larger context is sounder. Evidence from the eastern Mediterranean civilizations shows that the second half of the second millennium witnessed an intense marine-based internationalism —which was not only mercantile but also diplomatic, militaristic, and intellectual in nature. Consequently, problems within that interlocking network most certainly are at least part of the explanation. 

The broader view has lengthened chronological horizons. The roots of the Mycenaean civilization were planted five millennia earlier in the first agricultural villages. And in spite of the devastations of the 13th and 12th centuries—causing a population decline of 90%—life continued in tiny, isolated hamlets, some of which have now been found and explored. The four centuries from 1150 to 750 B.C. saw the transformation of the Mycenaean heritage by survivors hanging on to life in tightly knit communities that would blossom into polis-communities in the late 8th and 7th centuries. This longer view reveals a fuller history of life in Greece. Classical Greece has long belonged to the proper domain of historians; now we can investigate the roots of that civilization. 

In addition to employing new tools, archaeologists have begun to look at physical objects in different ways. Object biography is one of the most exciting of these recent perspectives. Its basic premise is that objects, like people, are transformed over time, not simply in physical ways but also in their uses and value. A clay pot, for example, made for a particular function can become a gift to a friend, valued more for its connection than its function. So great may its value become that it later serves as a prize in a competition. Finally, on the death of the victor of that competition, the pot is perhaps buried with him as a mark of his honor. 

Applying this perspective to early Greece, Susan Langdon tracked two unusual pots dated to the 8th century.[5] One, from Argos, had been used for a burial and, when excavated, contained bones of a woman. Modern scientific dating revealed that her age at burial was about thirty-five. The pot was not made for this burial; it dates twenty years earlier. Langdon recreates the story of the vessel and its owner over the years of their association by placing both in the context of their world. The pot was made when the woman was in her early teens, that is, at the stage of preparing for marriage. The shape and appearance of the pot suggest that it held worked wool of woven textiles; in other words, it was likely to have played a part in the preparation of dowry goods. Scenes on the densely painted surface show figures of men with horses, men wrestling, and women dancing, all known from other evidence to figure in bridal contests. And both the pot and the burial indicate the high family status that would warrant such a contest. At age thirty-five, the woman would belong to the older generation possessed of wisdom as well as status. We should remember that Penelope, after the twenty-year absence of Odysseus and now mother of an adult son, would have been about the same age at the time of her husband’s return. Astute, nobly born, married, and, yes, still lovely, she was courted by many suitors who believed Odysseus to be dead. An Argive vase can locate Penelopes within the culture of their own non-literate time. 

By combining the fruits of research in several fields, we can insert people and their activities into the story of the Heroic Age of Greece. For instance, the developments in archaeology presented above cast new light on the tale of Jason and his Argonauts. More than a myth, the tale reflects certain realities of the Mycenaean Age which have been demonstrated to have historical authenticity. Archaeologists have identified a place known as Iolkos—near modern Volos—with Mycenaean remains. Comparison with other sites suggests that it was the northernmost citadel-centered kingdom in late Bronze Age Greece, a society structured around roughly a dozen major centers. Investigation as recently as the summer of 2000 has produced even more indications of the ancient vitality of the area around Iolkos in the finds at neighboring Dimini. Knowledge of the topography demonstrates that the land in the region was valuable for agricultural production and animal husbandry. It overlooks a bay with a good harbor, still important today. Through archaeological evidence we can narrow the time-frame for the flourishing Mycenaean site to approximately 300 years— ca. 1500–1200 B.C. It is true that Thessaly continued to be prominent in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, but in the Classical period Iolkos itself was unimportant. Moreover, a tie between the Argonautica and Iolkos nicely suits the thesis proposed seventy years ago by Martin P. Nilsson that myth cycles are linked to major Mycenaean sites.[6]

Jason and his adventures were known to bards of the late Dark Age: the Argo was “widely-sung” according to Homer. That the oral tradition of the bards reaches back to Mycenaean times is indicated by linguistic similarities between the Greek of Linear B and that of the Homeric poems. What is more, it is the nature of oral tradition in a culture without literacy to be “conservative;” it is the means, by poetic language, of preserving and passing on important information from one generation to the next. Being poetic, the language may bear closer resemblance to myth or legend or folktale than to history, blurring distinctions between those categories. The decipherment of the Linear B script half a century ago offers evidence from names. A number of the Argo’s crew, in the accounts that have been preserved, bear names akin to heroes whose feats were earlier than those of the Trojan War. Names that end in -eus belong to the pre-Trojan era, and such names are frequent among the Argonauts. The name Jason itself may appear in the form of I-wa-so on a tablet from Pylos. 

The larger context of life in the Bronze Age is another clue. By the late Bronze Age, relatively simple mechanisms of trade had swollen into international ventures throughout the regions of the eastern Mediterranean, and the Aegean cultures were active participants;Mycenaean activity escalated from 1500 B.C. Accumulating artifactual evidence shows that the mainland activity extended beyond the Aegean into the Sea of Marmora and even into the Black Sea. Mycenaean swords have been discovered in modern Georgia, the region in which Jason’s destination, Colchis, was located, and the Linear B word Ko-ki-da can be read as Colchis. 

Mycenaean goods may have been carried in the ships of other peoples. On the other hand, nautical evidence suggests that the kind of ship necessary to move through the treacherous waters of the Bosporus was at hand in the second millennium in the essential form of the Greek penteconter. Further, re-creation of navigational skills in a galley constructed in accord with Bronze Age technology demonstrated that wind and the strength of twenty oarsmen could carry this 1980s Argo from present-day Volos to the eastern end of the Black Sea. 

Finally, dating of the varied evidence by more precise means tends to converge on an earlier part of the Mycenaean Age. Iolkos was an important site during the late Bronze Age, with two successive large buildings. Troy VI, perhaps the port of call for eastward travel by sea, flourished from ca. 1700 to 1250–30 B.C. Mycenaean finds in the Black Sea include several from the earlier part of the period. The Argonauts’ names reflect a generation earlier than those of the Trojan War heroes. Schliemann is said to have exclaimed “I have looked on the face of Agamemnon” when he excavated the shaft graves at Mycenae. He was wrong. With the precision of modern dating techniques we know that the bones he found there date to ca. 1600, while the destruction at Troy associated with the Trojan War must belong to the 13th century B.C. Even today, human bones cannot name themselves without clear, accompanying written evidence, and not always even with that evidence. Yet the picture of the human past that archaeology now provides is remarkable for the depth, breadth, and exactitude it can impute. 

“Troy” neatly exemplifies the transformation. When Schliemann hoped to find concrete proof of a Trojan War, archaeology lacked a rigorous method and possessed few tools beyond shovels and strong arms. Objects uncovered through excavation could be classified by types, but absolute dating was seldom possible. Because Troy was one of the first “heroic” sites to be explored, comparative study was not possible. And there was no written evidence beyond Homer. Thus, by definition, the period lay outside the realm of history. Now, archaeology has come of age; in fact, it has passed through several phases in advancing to its present maturity. Accumulation of an enlarged data base marked one of those phases. Troy can be viewed together with a great many sites in the Aegean, Anatolian, and Mediterranean spheres. The clay tablets found at citadel centers have proven to be written records that scholars can now read. Another phase brought scientific tools and new approaches to the discipline. As a result, the levels of Troy can be dated with a high degree of accuracy, and these dates, in turn, can be compared with those of, say, Mycenae. 

For a time, a search for scientific laws led archaeologists to privilege theory and models at the expense of the putative object of their investigations, namely, human life in the past. Complaints against this trend have become more numerous in the past decade or so: enough of processes, many are urging; let us put people back in the picture. It is unlikely that we will ever be able to describe the last days of Hektor or Achilles. Yet it is entirely possible to understand the kind of fighting that occurred at places like Troy in the late Bronze Age. Recovery of the treasures found by Schliemann more than a century ago which had been “lost” during World War II has made it possible to show that Troy was an important emporium in a trade network by the mid-3rd millennium, a status that continued through most of the 2nd millennium. And, with the discovery during the past decade that Troy’s citadel was surrounded by a densely built lower city with a population of 5,000 to 10,000, its importance to contemporaries—say, those living in Bronze Age Greek citadels—is evident. Myth has become history. 

Carol G. Thomas is professor of history at the University of Washington. Her most recent book is Citadel to City-State: The Transformation of Greece, 1200–700 B.C.E. (Indiana University Press, 1999). 

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African Encounters
by David Northrup 

As I rode in a crowded jitney bus in rural Nigeria in 1966, the old woman sitting next to me wet her fingertip, rubbed it gently on my arm, and then scrutinized it to see if any color had come off my pale skin. That memory came rushing back years later as I read an account of some Africans’ reactions to the first European visitor to the Senegal River in 1455: “some . . . rubbed me with their spittle to discover whether my whiteness was dye or flesh.” A Ugandan colleague who studied in Switzerland tells the story of a bold little girl in that country who performed the same experiment on him and reported to her schoolmates that he was “black but not sooty.”

History is a dialogue between the present and the past, as well as an exercise in cross-cultural understanding. What we bring to the inquiry influences what we discover, and what we discover may reshape our understanding of our own time and place. Sometimes, as in the case of the wet-finger test, we find a common humanity that transcends time and culture, but often it is a struggle to bridge the gap between our expectations and the historical evidence we uncover. 

My decision to become a historian of Africa was very much a product of my own life and times. I had gone to newly-independent Nigeria as a Peace Corps volunteer and my many fascinating experiences there moved me to study it when I returned. I was not alone. The field of African history itself had arisen in tandem with the independence movements in African colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s and in sympathy with their aspirations. Like other Africanists of my generation, I wanted to discover the “real” Africa that lay beyond older narratives’ focus on European explorers, merchants, missionaries, and empire builders. The term “Afrocentric” didn’t yet exist, but it describes our interest in bringing to light the historic antecedents of the proud African achievers of the present. Our enthusiasm may have led to exaggerations, but our desire to dislodge old paradigms forced us to base our studies on solid research and to pursue the implications of Africa-centered history to new levels. Despite blind spots and biases, recent scholars have made solid advances in understanding the African past. 

The new African history has influenced scholars reexamining Atlantic history and added the names of African states and rulers to the textbooks, but it has also had to contend with other revisions of African history coming from historians of Europe and the Americas. Especially in versions intended for popular audiences, these accounts sometimes seemed to turn the old Eurocentric narrative of Africa on its head. In place of European heroes saving Africa, a new generation of anti-colonial historians presented European villains bringing exploitation, underdevelopment, conquest, and cultural imperialism. Even though their new narratives were a much needed corrective, their Eurocentrism tended to relegate Africans to being largely silent, generally hapless victims of the all-powerful Western world. 

Was it possible to construct a more balanced narrative? I struggled with these issues while reexamining the encounters between Africans and Europeans during the four centuries before the imperial conquests of the late 19th century. A better narrative needed to use the new Africanist scholarship to show how Africans understood and shaped these encounters. To make African perspectives vital and valid, I combed the records for historical voices that might be included. As Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450-1850 moved toward completion, these voices from the past reshaped the narrative in unexpected ways. 

For one thing, there proved to be a lot of African voices. One effect of the encounter with Europe was that many Africans learned European languages well enough to voice opinions that were recorded by Europeans, and some Africans wrote down their own views. Though it was not in my initial plan, the longest chapter in the book came to be about the many Africans in 18th- and early 19th-century Europe. But the most significant impact of these African voices was to broaden and deepen the exploration of many topics. African voices took the narrative to places that authorial caution, discretion, and concern for the sensibilities of readers and reviewers might have feared to go on its own. Among these were religion, slavery, and racism, often blended in intriguing ways.

For example, a letter from King Afonso I of the kingdom of Kongo to the king of Portugal in 1526 is commonly quoted for its chilling description of the destructive effects of the slave trade. But Afonso’s request that his kingdom’s trade with Portugal be restricted to “no more than some priests and a few people to teach in the schools, and no other goods except wine and flour for the holy sacrament” is less often noted, for our skeptical and secular age resists the clear implication that contacts with Europe included some Africans’ sincere acceptance of Christianity. Nor is it commonly acknowledged that King Afonso’s opposition to the slave trade centered on the fact that he has unable to stop many of his subordinate chiefs from selling fellow Kongolese in their desire to obtain the goods the Portuguese merchants brought. However, when Afonso himself had a great many captives from foreign wars to sell in 1540, his opposition to the slave trade vanished. He wrote that no ruler in Atlantic Africa “esteems the Portuguese goods so much . . . as we do. We favor their trade, sustain it, open markets [for it].” How widely Afonso deserves to be cited as a spokesman for Africans may justly be debated, but one can hardly defend citing him so selectively that it distorts his views.

Though few wrote it down in so many words, other African rulers were as eager as Afonso for the goods the Atlantic trade brought, and many were more adept than he in reaping the profits of the trade from their equally eager European counterparts. For example, the royal merchants of the kingdom of Benin in 1724 rebuffed Dutch traders who had tried to convince them to pay higher prices for the goods they imported because costs had risen in Europe. The Benin officials asserted that the price in Europe “does not concern them” and insisted that valuations agreed upon in earlier years continue in force. Unable to make a profit, the Dutch eventually withdrew from Benin, but English traders eagerly took their place. One can argue that Europeans’ command of the seas and colonial America gave them the upper hand in the Atlantic economy, but on the African coast they not only had to respect Africans’ perceptions of prices; at Benin as elsewhere in West Africa, every European ship captain who came to trade also had to pay African officials hefty customs charges and fees and bestow rich gifts on local African officials. The European trading forts on the Gold Coast owed local rulers annual ground rents. 

The fact that some coastal Africans participated willingly in the sale of slaves does not alter the injustice to those enslaved, but what should we make of African voices from that era who argued in favor of slavery? Jacob Capitein from the Gold Coast wrote his thesis on the theology of slavery at the University of Leiden in 1742. One of two 18th-century Africans to earn an advanced academic degree in Europe, he argued in elegant Latin that slavery was fully compatible with Christian theology and was often the means through which Africans became Christians. Though his case was based on European sources, Capitein’s defense of slavery would not have seemed odd to many of his countrymen on the Gold Coast. In 1820, for example, King Osie Bonsu of the powerful state of Asante pressed a representative of the British government to explain why his people had turned against the slave trade, asking “if they think it bad now, why did they think it good before? Is not your [Christian] law an old law, the same as the [Islamic] law?” He denied the slave trade was bad for his kingdom, or that it increased the frequency of war. Rather, he argued, he made war for honorable reasons and the gold and prisoners he took were his to keep or sell. 

Capitein’s thesis contains a second argument that, on first reading, seems even more surprising. Far from trying to curry favor with his hosts, Capitein was concerned that his thesis would upset his Dutch readers. He writes, “It is clear beyond doubt that most Netherlanders [believe] that Christian freedom cannot walk in step with slavery.”[1] Although the enslavement of Africans had rich and powerful supporters in Europe, Capitein’s words are a reminder that slavery had been banned in northern Europe for centuries and was unlikely to have much support among those not dependent on its profits. Before long the abolitionist movement would begin to tap popular anti-slavery sentiments, and some Africans were part of that movement in Europe. Fortyfive years after Capitein issued his thesis, a dozen “sons of Africa” in Britain with a different view of Christian morality wrote a letter praising the British abolitionist Granville Sharp for his “long, valuable, and indefatigable labours . . . to rescue our suffering brethren in slavery” and to curb “the vicious violators of God’s holy law.”[2]

If African Christians could hold quite different positions on the morality of slavery, the presence of free, literate Africans—even advanced students and professors—in 18thcentury Europe brings into question the common assumption that racial prejudices there were monolithic. Ignatius Sancho, one of the most notable of these African intellectuals, was well aware of the range of treatment an African might experience at European hands. Sancho was born on a slave ship in 1729 and lost his mother in infancy in Colombia. Yet when, in 1766, he wrote to the English novelist Lawrence Sterne that “the early part of my life was rather unlucky,” he was referring not to these hardships, but to the lack of intellectually stimulating books. He had been brought to England at the age of two, where his own wit and good luck in time gained him employment and patronage from the Montagues, who had his portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough. When he died in 1780, he was the first son of Africa to have an obituary in an English newspaper and the only one whose life was recorded in the Dictionary of National Biography. Sancho’s fame was due less to his patrons, whose employment he left to become a humble shopkeeper, than to his literary achievements as a poet, playwright, musical theorist, and correspondent. His letters, published in two volumes after his death, are still in print. 

Sancho’s letters also attest to his awareness of the thin line that separated the social milieu where a black man of talent, manners, and morality might find honors and the one where racism reared its ugly head. He wrote to his fellow Afro-Briton, Julius Soubise, who had been raised as a gentleman by the Duchess of Queensbury, contrasting their fortunate place in good society with “the miserable fate of almost all of our unfortunate colour” in slavery and warning of the contempt and “heart-racking abuse of the foolish vulgar” Soubise would face if he persisted in a life of debauchery.[3] Sancho’s words might imply that the line between good treatment and bad was based on class, but the life story of another West African, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, who made a humble living in England and the Netherlands after escaping slavery in Barbados, is full of the kindness and acceptance he received from both the working poor and his middle-class benefactors. [4]

Sancho was exceptional in that his wife was of African stock, but the many free African men who resided in 18th-century Europe were more likely to find brides from among the majority population. Gronniosaw married a poor English weaver named Betty, while other Africans married European women from higher social strata. The fact that such unions were tolerated does not imply that racist opposition did not exist. A letter signed by “Gustavus Vassa, the Ethiopian,” printed in an English newspaper in 1788, was predicated on the notion that intermarriage was a prickly issue: “If the mind of a black man conceives the passion of love for a fair female, [is] he . . . to pine, languish, and even die, sooner than an intermarriage be allowed[?]”[5] The author, better known as Olaudah Equiano, the name he used in his autobiography, wedded the Englishwoman Susanna Cullen a few years later— without apparent incident. There is an interesting parallel between these marriages in Europe and those in coastal Africa in this era. Many European men resident there entered into long-term unions that seem as full of mutual love, mutual financial considerations, advantageous family ties, and beloved offspring as are common to the institution everywhere. 

This brief overview can only hint at the value of looking at these early modern encounters through the eyes of contemporary Africans, even though the accounts that survive cannot be expected to represent the full range of experiences. Europeans and West Africans began their encounters with mutual curiosity about each other and an openness to the possibilities of continued relationships. African leaders were as capable as European ones of assessing what they might gain and were as eager to do so. To note that quite a number of coastal Africans found opportunities in the Atlantic trade for new wealth and power does not diminish the calamity of millions of other Africans being robbed of their freedom. Some Africans were also open to the cultural options made available by these encounters, including Christianity, literacy, and occasionally literary distinction in European languages. Appreciating the full range of the encounters enhances understanding not just of those pre-colonial centuries but also of the commercial and cultural exchanges that have continued long after the slave trade ended. If Africans are to appear on the stage of history as full human beings, then they must strut the boards as powerful partners as well as victims, as open to the opportunities the Atlantic brought as they were capable of suffering under its inequities. 

David Northrup is professor of history at Boston College and president-elect of the World History Association. His latest book is Africa’s Discovery of Europe 1450–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2002). 

[1] Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, The Agony of Asar: A Thesis on Slavery by the Former Slave, trans. Grant Parker (Markus Wiener, 2001), 103. 

[2] In Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Penguin Books, 1995), 326-27. 

[3] Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, ed. Vincent Carretta (Penguin Books, 1998), ix, xiv-xv, 46, 73. 

[4] A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, Related by Himself (London, 1774). 

[5] Equiano, Narrative, 329. 

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An Interview with Peter Nabokov

In an important new book, Peter Nabokov explores the complexity of American Indian approaches to the past. Nabokov, a professor of American Indian studies and world arts and cultures at UCLA, has drawn on decades of his own research and recent findings in ethnohistory, anthropology, folklore, and Indian studies to write A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History (Cambridge University Press, 2000). The result is an impressive work of transdisciplinary scholarship. His exploration of the complex and varied ways that American Indian societies make sense of the past opens up the subject of American Indian historical imagination to the general reader. In the process, Nabokov raises a number of important questions, especially regarding the ways historians approach the history of non-Western peoples. Readers of Historically Speaking may well find some of his claims challenging, perhaps even problematic, but there can be little doubt that Nabokov has focused attention on matters that prompt historians to reflect on the nature, practice, and limitations of historical inquiry.

To provide readers of Historically Speaking with an opportunity to encounter Nabokov’s provocative work and evaluate it on their own, we have secured permission from Cambridge University Press to excerpt the concluding pages of A Forest of Time. Following the excerpt, we provide an interview with Nabokov, that Donald Yerxa conducted on May 9, 2002.

An Excerpt from A Forest in Time† by Peter Nabokov 

Casting a final glance over these chapters, let me highlight a few ideas and themes that have threaded through them. 

First, like the original Cambridge essay that launched it, this lengthier prolegomenon to American Indian ways of history has joined with the late historian H. Stuart Hughes’s “vision of history,” which stresses “the central importance of symbols in establishing common values of a given culture . . . . The symbol conveys the implicit principles by which the society lives, the shared understanding of assumptions which require no formal proof” (History as Art and as Science: Twin Vistas of the Past [University of Chicago Press, 1975], 80). 

The different Indian senses of the past that stand as separate trees with their respective branches in this American Indian forest are not assemblages of existential happenings that lack organic connection. Usually structured in ways that may reflect different combinations of socio-economic, political, religious, and hence historical determinants, they all stress selected cultural meanings, common aspirations, and preferable social processes through the media of well-worn multivocal “condensed” symbols that have swelled in content and stood the test of time. Such symbols and the ritualistic actions they empower serve to “naturalize” history, to retrospectively reify the contingent so that, for instance, ethnic communities come to accept their origins, commemorations, and destinies as foreordained by higher powers. 

Second, in the articulation of any Native society’s historical consciousness, we must also remember that these master symbols and root metaphors have almost certainly undergone transformations, the “plasticity” of which Hughes also speaks in his book and whose inventive presence has been evinced throughout this work. Within these Native philosophies of history, moreover, high value is usually placed upon the maintenance of Indian conceptual autonomy over time, in as outwardly consistent and inwardly reassuring a fashion as possible. Sometimes this requires adjusting the facts and calls for retroactive enhancement in order for history to make sense in Indian terms, to integrate older claims into new sociopolitical climates, and to pass on essential meanings distilled from collective experience. 

Suspecting that labels such as “tradition” or “sacred” are employed as “a flag of convenience to legitimate a position held on other grounds” (Jan Vansima, “On History and Tradition,” in Paths in the Rainforests: Towards a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa [University of Wisconsin Press, 1990], 258), or to exempt subject matter from empirical scrutiny, should not make us turn our backs on either the persistence of certain social phenomena or the inherently dynamic nature of culture itself. Uncovering the synthesized nature of indigenous claims does not mean that they are composed of thin air. Study of their components and adhesive compounds identifies cultural processes that can also be upstreamed to identify their presence and consistency over earlier eras. True, a few “traditions” may be unmasked as individually perpetrated frauds, public relations strategies, or examples of collective self-delusion. But the fact remains that “history is not given and tradition is not static,” as James Collins puts it, and modulations or recombination of traditions do not make tribal agency and social identity “unreal or fictive, as terms such as ‘constructed’ or ‘invented’ can imply, but [they do] make them profoundly historical” (Understanding Tolowa Histories: Western Hegemonies and Native American Responses [Routledge, 1998], 50–51). The trick lies in simultaneously tracking down hard facts and their cultural and historical contexts and nuances, without which they don’t mean much. 

Third, former times may be considered foreign countries by non-Indian historians, but to Native peoples they usually constitute familiar, contiguous, and ever-present terrain, whose deceased occupants may even put in their two cents’ worth. Despite my aversion to simplistic dichotomies, a pervasive distinction between Indian and non-Indian forms of history is the one between their “presentist” and “pastist” orientations, respectively. Sometimes the Native stories of earlier times swing between neighborhood gossip and lofty vision in order to personalize the past, to bring it in tune with inherited world views, or to warn about moral consequences so as to have maximum impact on the “history of the future.” For Indian history is about nothing if not cultural survival, employing what the writer Gerald Vizenor likes to call the uniquely Indian skills of “trickster survivance.” 

While unusual permissions to “make history” may seem extended in American Indian practices for conceptualizing and representing the past, that does not necessarily mean that the academic sense of historical accuracy [or chronology], as we have seen, is altogether jettisoned in the process. Indians have coexisted in many conceptual domains; their historical traditions have rarely seen any incompatibilities between the world of facts and that of dreams. Generally, what remains of utmost importance to Indian historians has been psychological persistence, social congruence, group self-esteem, spiritual independence, cultural distinctiveness, and perpetuation of core values—in short, the continuing Native American acculturation of time and space. For outsiders who complain that this is not playing fair, Indians might well ask to be shown the historicity—often bearing catch phrases such as Iron, Bronze, Silver, or Gold Ages, “force majeure,” “Third Reich,” “the divine right of kings,” “manifest destiny,” “Frontier Thesis,” the “Monroe Doctrine,” or a fledgling president’s first “Hundred Days”— which is not underwritten by similar vested interests and cultural claims. One could even argue that the transparent didacticism of Indian narratives and histories simply makes them more up front about it. 

Fourth, the study of Indian-white relations from a Native perspective reveals it less as separate and inviolate entities striking sparks off each other than as an essentially relational field of interacting and cross-borrowing cultural identities—often within contexts, to be sure, of unequal power relations, racial prejudice, gross injustice, and cross-cultural misreadings. Even so, today’s tillers in historical fields must consider their work equally relational. Bestcase scenario: they must invite Indians as full partners into their investigations. 

When they do so, as ethnohistorian Ernest S. Burch, Jr. discovered, they can tap into fresh historical wells. Upon interviewing Inupiaq people in northwestern Alaska, for example, Burch uncovered a technology for wholesale intertribal warfare and the existence of early 19th-century battles that refuted everything he’d learned from Arctic scholars. “The really upsetting thing about this,” he writes, “is that if I had been willing from the beginning to pay attention to what elders were telling me, I would have known all of this ten or twenty years sooner. As it was, I missed an entire generation of people who probably knew more than my own informants did” (“From Skeptic to Believer: The Making of an Oral Historian,” Alaska History [Spring 1991]: 11). Updating this sense of urgency, Vine Deloria, Jr. asks historians “to look into the controversies of this century and record from those people still living their recollections of incidents of a half century ago. Rather than attempting to rebuild the memories of the Pueblos regarding Coronado and the revolt of 1688, people should right now be doing extensive writing and interviews of the elder Pueblo people concerning how they organized and eventually won their lands in 1924” (“The Twentieth Century,” in Daniel Tyler, ed., Red Men and Hat-Wearers: Viewpoints in Indian History [Pruett Publishing Co., 1976], 163). 

And even if academic historians remain disinclined to conduct fieldwork, for their works on Indian-white relations to be anything but culturally cosmetic they must apprentice themselves to the sorts of social, symbolic, economic, political, and folkloristic data that are the meat and potatoes of anthropology. “Only an anthropologist familiar with Indian culture and social process,” argue Mildred M. Wedel and Raymond J. DeMallie, “can discern the clouded facts, correctly analyze the misleading commentary, or extract significant cultural information that appears incidentally in documents written for quite different purposes” (“The Ethnohistorical Approach in Plains Area Studies,” in W. Raymond Wood and Margot Liberty, eds., Anthropology on the Great Plains [University of Nebraska Press, 1980], 110). And, “If nothing else,” adds Donald B. Smith, “from a good ethnological monograph, one can obtain a ‘feel’ for a native group, and an idea of what white society looks like, viewed within a native community” (Le Sauvage: The Native People in Quebec, Historical Writing on the Heroic Period of New France [National Museums of Canada, 1974], 91). 

Fifth, this book represents one generalist’s dawning regard for the rich and scantily addressed history of American Indian intellectual life. It takes issue with the late Wilcomb E. Washburn’s implication of Native silence, impotence, ignorance, or compliance when he argues that “Indian history is, for good or ill, shaped by the white presence. Whether physically in terms of European immigrants, or intellectually, in terms of Western historical and anthropological theories” (“Distinguishing History from Moral Philosophy and Public Advocacy,” in Calvin Martin, ed., The American Indian and the Problem of History [Oxford University Press, 1987], 92). It takes seriously the proposition that, in their own ways, Indian communities and individuals have been thoughtfully preoccupied with their movements through time. It endorses efforts to transcend old characterizations of Indians as victims or stereotypes and their traditions as monolithic and intractable. 

The many Indian pasts, I argue, are as much stories of philosophical, ideological, and symbolic creativity and synthesis, inevitably processed through definitions of self, community, and destiny, as they are beads of discrete incidents hung on narrative strings. No less than the ‘“contexts of assumption’ which exist through time in complex interrelation with each other” that anthropologist George W. Stocking, Jr. holds up as a far more productive subject for non-Indian historians than determining their intellectual inheritance by citing an endless begetting of academic elders (what he terms the “forerunner syndrome”), a new breed of Indian historians must identify and investigate their own successive contexts of assumption, whose complexity may have intensified since first contact, literacy, and modernity, but that certainly possess their own developmental histories well before then. As I observed earlier, however, in this effort scholars of American Indian ancestry can find themselves in a bind. For a precondition of this academic approach is that one should accept the past on its own terms, while the presentist bias of the traditions they study—and possibly those they have personally inherited—is instead to formulate it as a collection of “natural” precedents for our times. 

Sixth, and last, scholars, writers, and publishers should innovate new formats for representing on page or screen the multiple genres and mixed voices that are the warp and woof of Indian historicity and Indian-white relations. How to do conceptual, textual, illustrative, and typographic justice to the host of Indian ways of history that offer alternative, parallel, or altogether Other viewpoints can be a liberating challenge for future orchestators of historical representations, especially where multiple interest groups and their memories, interpretations, and aesthetics are concerned. To this end, I concur with Claude Levi- Strauss’s earlier comment that the homespun range of tribally produced histories may one day be seen as pioneers. These experiments exemplify the insistently incomplete and evolving nature of these materials, which conform with James Clifford’s rhetorical questions concerning the processual nature of our subject:

Is it possible that historical reality is not something independent of these differently centered perspectives, nor their sum total, and not the result of a critical sifting of different viewpoints by independent experts “at the end of the day”? Can we conceive of historical reality as an overlay of contextual stories whose ultimate meanings are open-ended because the contact relations that produced them are discrepant, unfinished? (“Fort Ross Meditation” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century [Harvard University Press, 1997], 319).

On a few occasions, I’ve used the verb bequeathed” to characterize how traditionalist historians and others preoccupied with ensuring historical continuity often frame their responsibilities. Perhaps this analogy to material inheritance also has heuristic value in communicating the senses of property and duty that are often found in Indian notions of history. Conceiving of the past as a collective dowry, which subsequent generations must maintain in high repair and to which they must even contribute, as a sort of cultural capital from which they can draw ideological, spiritual, and psychological interest, may help us understand why Indian history must stay receptive to synthesis, accretion, and refurbishment. 

This book proposes that devising ways to revisit the uniquely American Indian blends of spiritual, documentary, and opportunistic contemplations of the past offers American intellectual history a new frontier. When they are explored, as illustrated by Robert Allen Warrior’s pioneering comparison of the writings of John Joseph Matthews (Osage) and Vine Deloria, Jr. (Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions [University of Minnesota Press, 1995]), Ruth J. Heflin’s comparative study of five generally contemporaneous Lakota writers (“I Remain Alive:” The Sioux Literary Renaissance [Syracuse University Press, 2000]), or more informally, as with Deloria’s memoir of lively brainstorming at the University of Arizona during Bob Thomas’s tenure (“Bob Thomas as Colleague,” in Steve Pavlik, ed., A Good Cherokee, a Good Anthropologist: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Thomas [American Indian Studies Center, 1998]), we find ourselves within subaltern American discourses. We feel freer to question whether we should ever be speaking of indigenous senses of the past as alternative histories or alternatives to history. Instead of cramming them into familiar paradigms, might we not temper the hegemony of Western historiography by interpreting it into them every now and then? 

Without the opportunity for Indian peoples to tell their historical experiences in their many different ways, and without the burden upon non-Indian American historians to somehow weave Native ways of history into the research methodologies and narrative bedrock of their accounts, the fullness of the North American experience will remain unwitnessed and alternative visions for its future unrevealed. Just as there is nothing new about my book’s opening premise that historical practices are culture-specific, this broader challenge has also been expressed before. Historian Patricia Limerick followed up her insistence that her professional colleagues position cultural competition at the center of their narratives of the American West with her half-humorous proposal that America be dotted with “Managed Contention Sites” where multiple points of view and modes of interpretation might have at each other, thereby honoring the complexity of competing notions of “truth” and ways of getting at it (The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West [Norton, 1987], 27; “The Battlefield of History,” New York Times, 28 August 1997, A19). 

But if we listen carefully, we hear Indians themselves calling for a historical discourse that doesn’t quarantine their pasts and their intellectual life from the broader American experience and its modes of recollection. When an elder stood up in 1954 to tell the nation’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs that “We have a hard trail ahead of us in trying to Americanize you and your white brothers. But we are not afraid of hard trails,” he could have been talking about American Indian ways of history (Felix S. Cohen, “Americanizing the White Man,” The American Scholar [Spring 1952]: 178). When the Lakota author Luther Standing Bear wistfully imagined an alternative to his own indoctrination by the dominant society’s educational system, he offered a prospectus we might well resurrect: 

So we went to school to copy, to imitate; not to exchange language and ideas, and not to develop the best traits that had come out of uncountable experiences of hundreds of thousands of years living upon this continent. Our annals, all-happenings of human import, were stored in our song and dance rituals, our history differing in that it was not stored in books, but in the living memory. So, while the white people had much to teach us, we had much to teach them, and what a school could have been established upon that idea! (Land of the Spotted Eagle [University of Nebraska Press, 1933, 1978], 236). 

An Interview with Peter Nabokov

Donald Yerxa:What are you trying to accomplish with A Forest of Time? 

Peter Nabokov: I’m trying to open up a subject that I feel has been neglected if not suppressed. On a most general level, A Forest of Time is about the multiple American Indian interpretations, selections, and uses of the past, depending on which community is telling the story and how it wants to make constructive use of it. After spending forty years studying American Indians, I want to pluralize and democratize notions, not only of what happened, but of how different native traditions transmit, interpret, and reinterpret what happened for their own purposes and devices. As a student of oral narratives and of symbolic actions, I am interested in how this all works. So if I look at a ritual, or if I examine the material culture which accompanies story telling or which are commemorations of things that happened in the past, or if I explore geography and what Indian people have to say about how that anchors the past—all of these are modes of historical representation. And I like to track those down and follow through on interpreting and contextualizing them. 

A Forest of Time is only an introduction. I would like to see other people go into detail as I did, for instance, in my dissertation on the Crow Indian Tobacco Society, in which I took one simple example of a ritual that a scholar some eighty years ago had said was very interesting and had recorded in minute detail. But he concluded that it didn’t add up to much more than a collection of disparate elements from around the Plains. The sum was not greater than the parts in his view. So armed with readings that I had done as a graduate student, I went back to the Crow Indian reservation and began to ask questions, and also to look in the field notes of the very anthropologist I was trying to refute. And I found evidence everywhere to support my contention that this ritual was the way the Crow people had created their own identity as a separate group on the Plains, having broken off from another group, a farming people. The Crow Indians quickly became a hunting people, and in the attempt to create a new birth of themselves as a separate ethnicity—and to perpetuate and renew that identity—they concocted a ritual out of old and new elements that was a coded reenactment of their version of their migratory origins. That was an eye-opener to me. Once their glossary of symbolic actions was decipherable, a whole story emerged. I would want my book to encourage others to go in deep that way. I would like academic historians to become a little more modest when they talk about histories that involve non- European peoples. But in all candor, I think that most of them will respond to these case studies and provocations by ignoring them. 

Part of this attitude has to do with the fact that Indian persistence remains a lump in the Anglo-American craw. These folks did not die out, which was the wishful thinking of the “Vanishing Indian” theme around the turn of the last century. They persist; they continue to endure; they continue to perpetuate separate histories; and they continue to run rings around the dominant society in the most intriguing ways while insisting on their diversity. Many non-Indians, I truly believe, sense this as a threat: it’s a threat territorially, and I think it’s a threat philosophically on some level. It’s got to be a threat to a lot of basic tenets of modern American life, whether it be consumerism, American individualism, Christian fundamentalism, territorial integrity, or what have you. And the way Indians sometimes do this; the way they do their capitalism, which is kind of a collectivist free enterprise; the way they work at maintaining their families; the ways they overcome the consequences of forced assimilation, of territorial dispossession, of internalized racism, etc.—are rather marvelous. In my view this astonishing persistence stands as something of a counterweight to—and a moral comment on—the rest of America. And I suspect that some non- Indians can only take so much of that. 

Yerxa: Could you explain your title? 

Nabokov: When I was at the Newberry Library as a pre-doctoral fellow, I came across a quote from David Beaulieu, who was dissatisfied with the European model of history. He said the European approach to history may be likened to a tree with many branches; the trunk contains the common themes of Western history. Instead, Beaulieu suggested the image of a forest with many different and varied trees. Then I stumbled upon a number of quotes from different Indian peoples in which a botanical analogy was utilized to talk about diversity, whether it be diversity of myths within the tribe or diversity of notions of what temporality and the purposes of people’s movements through time were all about. Originally my sub-title was American Indian Concepts of History, but that suggested that Indians had intellectual traditions that were conceptualized along the same lines as those of Europeans. So remembering how Indians would describe in a gentle and non-judgmental form that “we do it this way, and you do it that way,” I opted for American Indian Ways of History. 

Yerxa: As your title suggests, you stress that there is no singular Indian viewpoint regarding the past or history; nevertheless, you have had to structure a book around certain themes. So there are some commonalities to Indian ways of history. Would you speak to these? 

Nabokov: There is always a tension in being true to the diversity that one is describing, and then creating chapter headings in the classic way that one organizes a book of this nature. When it came time to write A Forest of Time, I realized that I wanted to break up my treatment of the narrative material into the classic trio of legends, myths, and folktales. Now legends are usually the only genre that is considered to contain historical data, at least that is what folklorists, anthropologists, and even historians have said. But in my exposure to myths, and the literature about myths, I began to see that they were more plastic, malleable, and adjustable in terms of reflecting temporal change than I would have thought. So I devoted a chapter to discussing the ways myths reflect history. And I was also very impressed by a sparse but persuasive literature that talked about folktales as subversive commentaries on breaking events. While they seem to be entertaining stories about speaking animals, in point of fact some of them can be deciphered as editorials on the historical experiences that Indians were going through, and as ways by which they develop a kind of psychological strength and reinforcement, you might say, in the face of what was otherwise political and territorial powerlessness. I was excited about the folktales chapter; it is probably my favorite in the book. 

Yerxa: Beyond the trio of legends, myths, and folktales, what are some of the other American Indian ways of knowing history? 

Nabokov: Another theme is how American Indians anchored the past in place. There is material on Indian geographical sensibilities, and about special places that relate the nonbuilt environment to the past. Material culture provides another angle on Indian ways of history. I am also interested in the inter-relationship between the things that Indian peoples made and their role in their history, either as mnemonic or memory-triggering devices, or as things that had an almost iconic status. And fortunately, I was able to build on work I had done for a series of lectures, “The Blood of Things,” at Chicago’s Newberry Library on this theme of material culture and history. Then there are those rituals; I emphasize the present tense because rituals remain a repository of historical knowledge and meaning. I had already written two books on this, including Indian Running, an account of Indians creating a kind of concocted ritual in 1980 that mixed symbolic elements of the past and the present. They reenacted a runner mission that in 1680 had enabled them to rise up against the Spanish in the Southwest, the most successful Indian uprising in American history. Beyond these ways of knowing history, I also wanted to deal with the troublesome issue of the impact of literacy on Indians and how Indians tried to turn writing to their own advantage, especially through the production of hybrid genres of documentary and legendary, multi-vocal prose. People today are much more receptive to literary experimentation in non-fiction, but I think Indians were attempting this early on because they had no choice if they did not want to submit completely to non-Indian notions of prose and what history is about, much of which is embedded in our notions of narrative. And then finally, I wanted to devote a chapter to the role of prophecy in Indian historical consciousness —especially to its function of maintaining Indian conceptual control and autonomy over incomprehensible events and the happenstance of time. 

Yerxa: You state that “thinking about history, especially about the historical discourses of non-Western societies, is too important to be left to historians alone.” Why is this the case, and how do you think historians have failed to understand the American Indian past? 

Nabokov: Let me tackle the second part of the question first. I don’t think historians have entirely failed to understand the American Indian past. People go with what’s familiar. You only have so many hours in a day. You’re schooled in a particular approach. There are an awful lot of books to read. But reading becomes the primary method of acquiring information; the archives are considered the historian’s major primary resource. There’s little schooling in how to interpret the other “primary resources” I’ve been talking about, such as material culture, unless a historian is willing to jump the fence and go learn from archaeologists. I think the balkanization of academia makes it difficult for historians to be multi-talented, in ritual and symbolic studies, for instance, which would mean they would have to learn something about anthropology, not just cosmetically—which was the case when anthropology became the rage among historians about fifteen or twenty years ago. In addition, you must know something about the land. I try to make an argument that you have to visit the places—not only on weekends with your family pushing the stroller, but actually steep yourself in them. Then things will happen; you will learn things you will not otherwise know; answers will become apparent as to why people moved around and behaved in the ways they did. You have to be aware that history is a stream that everybody swims in—everybody. You have to realize that nobody is stupid when it comes to history and that there are all kinds of different historical voices and values. It seems to me that you have to develop a nose for the persistence of the past and the present in the oddest corners—in street signs, in place names, and in the changes of topography and plants and animals that are in a region. And I don’t think that those skills are really taught. Environmental history, which fortunately the new Western historians have made a key element in their training, is a relatively recent academic frontier. Because of all this, I think it would be better for historians to open up a little bit to these other disciplines—to folklore, to the study of material culture, to history of religions, to cultural geography. 

Yerxa: Are there particular historians whom you think do a good job examining the American Indian past? 

Nabokov: With your permission I’d rather trespass disciplinary boundaries and ask which scholars—let’s just say “narrators”—of what I also prefer to call “American Indian culture history” have inspired me. I don’t want to trivialize this fairly eccentric list into some sort of Greatest Hits, so let me free-associate, and begin with what I still feel is one of the most powerful condensations of Indian-white relations ever put on paper—the twenty-nine-page personal narrative of a Cheyenne woman, Iron Teeth, transcribed by Thomas B. Marquis and included in his compilation, The Cheyennes of Montana (1978). Other remarkable pieces of precious historical-cultural testimony about or from Indian women include Sage Birchwater’s interviews published as Chewid (1995) about the mysterious presence of a Chilcotin Indian woman in her early 20th-century western Canadian context, and Delphina Cuero (1991), Florence Shipek’s edited life history of a longsuffering Southern California Indian woman. Those tributes paid, and looking at longitudinal studies from three North American regions, I would say that from Lewis Henry Morgan’s League of the Iroquois (1851) to Anthony F.C. Wallace’s Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (1970), or from James Mooney’s The Ghost Dance and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896) to Alexander Lesser’s The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game (1933), Raymond J. Demallie’s The Sixth Grandfather (1984), and Michael Hittman’s Wovoka and the Ghost Dance (1990), and from Albert S. Gatschet’s Migration Legend of the Creek Indians (1884) to Theda Perdue’s magnificent collection of southeastern Indian oral histories, Nations Remembered (1980), it is mostly historically- aware anthropologists who interest me, rather than a minority of culturally-oriented historians who I feel have produced the threedimensional, micro/macro histories, which in James Axtell’s words “feature strong chronological narratives endowed with sensitive and sweeping analysis of cultural patterns and functions.” Historian Theda Perdue is an exception, as is Frederick E. Hoxie’s Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805–1935 (1995). Having spent nearly twenty years on an anthology of Indian-white relations as seen through Indian eyes, I also especially relish regional historical anthologies with multiple voices, like the Perdue collection I just cited, Gerald Vizenor’s little-known Escorts to White Earth, 1868 to 1968: 100 Year Reservation (1968), Malcolm Margolin’s collection on the California Indian experience, The Way We Lived (1993), and a host of lesserknown, often locally-published, often anonymous, idiosyncratic “tribal histories” authored by Indian communities which sometimes break new compositional ground in blending native and non-native modes of historicity. I shouldn’t end before citing some personal favorites of Indian history: Joe Sando’s Nee Hemish: A History of Jemez Pueblo (1987), Terry Glavin’s A Death Feast in Dimlahamid (1990), and Carolyn Gilman and Mary Jane Schneider’s absolutely magnificent The Way to Independence: Memories of a Hidatsa Indian Family, 1840–1920 (1987). 

Yerxa: You consider Western historical consciousness to be hegemonic, perhaps even a form of intellectual colonization of the past. Yet there are those, such as John Lukacs and V. S. Naipaul, who suggest that Western historical consciousness might well be seen as a gift to non-Western peoples giving them greater access to their own history. How do you respond to this notion? 

Nabokov: Given the opportunity to learn, absorb, make positive use of, and monitor the meaningful integration of Western forms of history into their forms of history, Indian peoples definitely benefit from Western notions of history. What is so moving to me are the accounts of Indian people who worked with anthropologists and historians. These were often curious and intellectually gifted people in their own traditions, who once they encountered books and non-Indian ideas, were excited to document the histories of their own cultures. They spent countless hours, lived multiple lives, devoting themselves to the intellectual study—sometimes in self-taught ways—of their own peoples from what they thought was the Anglo-European perspective: to create archives, to record, to learn. And the unrequited nature of their contributions is heartbreaking. They suffered insults while they were on these lonely quests that generated a degree of suspicion and alienation within their own society. And they never achieved full acceptance in the non-Indian society. Not uncommonly, their works were published under other people’s names. So in a spontaneous response to your question, I would say that we do have a lot of examples of Indians trying to create new historical genres. But very little sympathy or attention has been given to those folks and those attempts. I also describe in A Forest of Time the predicament of American Indian intellectuals who are in the academic system and the difficulties they encounter with their peers as well as among their own people when they go home. Sportswriters have observed a similar problem that Indian athletes often experience when they try to participate in white men’s sports. They are left trapped between worlds, between the value systems of private individual gain and collective scrutinized good. And these American Indian intellectuals would be the ones who would be accomplishing, under the best of all possible conditions, what you were describing—that is, converting the benefits of Western tradition for their own peoples. But I’m not sure Indians want that. They are often looking for a third way, whether it be in literature, in the arts, or in the processes of pedagogical thinking and education. They are looking for a third way and, before casinos, without a lot of resources. And I really must add that one of those things that critics use to vilify Indians today is, of course, the fact that there are these garish casinos on the borders of so many Indian communities. But, ironically, those casinos are using the very greed that had dispossessed Indians against the people who had dispossessed them, in order to use those proceeds—not to buy Cadillacs or travel to Vegas—but to create old peoples’ homes, daycare centers, and tribal institutions of higher learning in which the kinds of hybrid experimentations in education I’m referring to can take place. 

Yerxa: One might conclude that Indian ways of knowing the past are contaminated or tamed by their contact with the universitytrained academics. And yet you mention in your chapter on material culture how archaeological work in Washington State unearthed a gill net fragment that corroborated the oral histories of the Makah people. Is this not a model for how multiple approaches to the past—both Western and Indian—could work together constructively? 

Nabokov: That is a wonderfully dramatic example, but it doesn’t happen every day. It also seems to me that looking at practical ends as the raison d’etre for exploring Indian concepts focusing on history is treating Indians as less intellectually curious and less capable of having delight in the world than non-Indians. I think that on the level of one’s spiritual and intellectual growth, as well as for excavating forgotten values regarding how to live conscientiously on the planet, the study of Indian culture and history has much to offer. 

Yerxa: Are you optimistic that Indian ways of history can be woven into American academic life? 

Nabokov: I have no idea. 

Yerxa: I’d like to press you a bit on the implications of advocating pluralism in historical thinking. Would this not open up, for example, providential ways of looking at the past utilizing sympathetic interpretations of Christian stories of healing, miracles, and that sort of thing? Respectful listening, I gather, must be granted to all peoples and traditions, and to the extent we do so, the past will become radically pluralized. 

Nabokov: In the best of circumstances what I hope would happen with my book and its arguments is that some scholars will see the potential for their research projects to be enhanced and expanded and made more complex by looking at Indian perspectives on the past. And just maybe they’ll try to get a grant to go to Georgia, let’s say, and investigate the Indian side to their topics because some of their work overlaps the period of Indian preand post-removal from that area. Maybe these scholars might learn something of the consciousness of the Creek Indians of the 1800s from visiting Creeks today and talking with them about their views and listening to their folktales—something which they might never have considered attempting otherwise. And I do endorse the sort of “radical pluralization” you describe, and relish your example of respecting and analyzing in good scholarly fashion stories of Christian miracles, say, from multiple perspectives, 

Yerxa: Might a distinction between history and the past be useful in this discussion? History is the approach to the past developed in the West using an evidentiary methodology. It provides “answers” to a wide range of questions about the past, but history does not exhaust what can be said meaningfully about the past or how it can be approached. 

Nabokov: Well said. There don’t have to be lines drawn in the sand here, but of course such distinctions are useful, even critical, so long as they come under periodic review themselves. I only get aroused when people refuse to dignify other ways of looking at and thinking about the past, particularly when those ways are underlaid with an absolutely desperate concern to keep meanings in life, to salvage meanings that have stood the test of time, and to celebrate and remember. And when those are denied or trivialized, then I get irritated, not that my irritation means anything. But I begin to think, “Wait a minute; after looking at American Indian stuff for forty years or more, there are some themes of repression and denial that are continuing here.” I think that if history is offered to Indian kids who go to Stanford or here at UCLA in the more temperate, less arrogant, less privileged way in which you’ve just described it, they will be more eager to pore over the books, burn the midnight oil, and enhance the ways that its study can both expose the complexities of the past and enrich our own lives.

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Globalization and Its Critics
by Jay R. Mandle

Today’s economic globalization means that no country is so remote that firms will be dissuaded from setting up production facilities in it because of location considerations alone. Advances in communications technology now allow corporations to make investment decisions with little attention accorded to distance as a limiting constraint. This, together with advances in education in poor countries, means that today modern production increasingly is undertaken in nations that previously were bypassed by the process of economic development. 

The resulting change in the structure of global production is profound. In 1970, 3% of manufactured goods originated in developing countries. Twenty years later that share was 18%, and today it is even higher. The image of poor countries as confined to supplying agricultural goods or raw materials no longer corresponds to reality. With this shift has come an acceleration of economic growth. Between 1990 and 1998 economic growth in the thirteen largest poor countries averaged 7.3% per year, higher than in any prior corresponding period—rapid growth by any standard.

The United States, far more than any other country, has had a decisive voice in determining the content of the policies and procedures that have accompanied globalization. It has been and still is dominant in multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the United States was the most powerful influence in shaping the content of the rules that the World Trade Organization (WTO) today enforces. The position of the United States has been remarkably consistent over the years: remove controls over domestic markets as part of a process of minimizing the role of government in the economy, reduce barriers to imports, and welcome foreign investment. The transition from Republican administrations in the 1980s to Democratic ones in the 1990s produced no change in fundamentals, and the same is likely to be true of the administration of George W. Bush. 

This policy orientation has been responsible for important successes. The acceleration in growth rates has occurred at least in part because policies to free foreign direct investment have assisted some countries in increasing their productive capacity more rapidly than if such flows were less available. And the liberalization of trade has advanced the interests of consumers throughout the world. Increased imports and exports have allowed for greater choice and lower prices. 

Unfortunately, this policy orientation has had its downside as well. This is particularly true with regard to international financial markets. The hypermobility of portfolio funds (the purchase of bonds, stocks and other financial instruments) has been the source of global economic instability. The Asian financial crisis of 1997-8 was only the most dramatic of a series of setbacks that has resulted in damaging, though temporary, economic reversals. Similarly, because the public sector has been reduced, governments have not provided adequate cushioning against the personal dislocations that globalization causes. Though economic globalization has generally raised income levels, it does not provide protection to those caught in and damaged by the whirlwind of change unleashed by the global economic restructuring it causes. 

It is not too late to reform globalization to make it more just. Its institutions are still under construction, and it is therefore possible to reduce their one-sided emphasis on the mobility of products and capital. The rules and structures that govern the emerging international economic system remain embryonic and could be adjusted to ameliorate the costs inflicted on the innocent victims of economic progress. Globalization, like all market systems, requires extra-market systems of support and protection. 

What is needed is a politics to make globalization both more equitable and stable. The problem is that while the United States has been consistent and clear—if one-sided—in its vision of what globalization should look like, the critics and potential agents of global reform have been anything but. Generally, it is fair to say that there is more agreement among anti-globalization activists over what they do not like than on what they positively advocate.

In part this failing results from the fact that many who oppose globalization are hostile not simply to it, but rather to market economies altogether. In the past, these individuals would have advocated an internationalist socialism. But such an appeal is of course no longer politically tenable. In the light of the experience of the Soviet bloc, it is not credible to maintain that globalization could flourish with the means of production publicly owned. Such critics, therefore, are deprived of the positive vision that animated radicals in the past: an international commonwealth of cooperating economies in which decisions are motivated not by private interests but by the goal of advancing the public’s well-being. With the socialist project abandoned, antiglobalization thought, at least in the United States, tends to cluster around two sets of approaches. Activists argue that the United States should take on the responsibility of making globalization more fair, or, alternatively, globalization should be rejected altogether. Advocates of the former argue that globalization can be made just only if the United States imposes trade sanctions on nations that fail to agree and adhere to labor, environmental, and human rights standards. The intention is to use American power to encourage the formation of unions, to avoid environmental degradation, and to advance human rights. Defenders of the second approach tend to be skeptical of the benefits of modern technology and believe that global market integration is damaging economically and culturally. They would substitute an economics of local self-sufficiency, reversing the trend toward global interdependence that occurs with modern economic growth. 

Neither of these two strategies is viable. Not even the United States, as rich and powerful as it is, possesses the resources to monitor the world economy. It is one thing to watch a country deregulate its markets and reduce the size of its government. It is quite another to observe and enforce market regulations, labor rights, environmental controls, and support mechanisms. Even more to the point, to a large extent the United States has been the author of the very policies that the critics wish to change. At the very least, a dramatic and very unlikely change in domestic American politics would have to occur for the United States to enforce the kind of market interventions that these reformers advocate. 

At the same time, those who would abandon development—and with it global economic integration—have little to offer the world’s poor. Localism rejects precisely the benefits that advances in technology permit. In favoring small producers confined to local markets, the advocates of localization would limit production to lower amounts of a smaller range of goods at higher prices than would be the case in an integrated international economy. The upshot would be a decline in living standards. There can be little doubt that localization would put downward pressure on the standard of living of the poor in both wealthy nations and the underdeveloped world. 

The student anti-sweatshop movement is illustrative of the inability of the global reform movement to offer a viable strategy of change. The apparel industry is nothing if not global. Between 1980 and 1992 the total number of employees in this industry was roughly stable, a stability that masks the fact that the growth of 850,000 jobs in poor countries was matched by a loss of employment of an equal number in the developed nations. The search by employers for cheaper labor fueled this remarkable relocation of jobs. And, indeed, wages in the industry were very low. According to the trade newspaper Women’s Wear Daily, the mean wage in Asia during the mid-1990s was about $0.44 per hour while that in Latin America was about $1.14. 

The fundamental problem here is that workers are accepting these low wages because they represent the best of the limited alternatives available to them. It is particularly noticeable that wages are lowest in countries where agriculture provides the bulk of jobs. Almost everywhere, labor productivity in agriculture is low compared to manufacturing sectors such as apparel. It is easy for textile employers to satisfy their labor requirements at low costs. All they have to do is offer a wage somewhat higher than the one that prevails in agriculture, but which is still profitable for themselves. 

Because of these circumstances, an effective strategy to raise the wages of apparel workers will have to contain two elements. Higher paying jobs will have to be created in order to put upward pressure on wages in clothing. At the same time, the bargaining power of the clothing workers themselves will have to be increased. If jobs with relatively high pay were available, apparel employers would have to compete for their labor, a process that would entail bidding up the wages they offer. Further, if textile workers were able to bargain collectively, they would be able to secure higher wages. What the low income workers in the textile industry need to advance their position is economic development—the creation of competing job opportunities—and collective bargaining. 

Unfortunately, the students who participate in the anti-sweatshop movement draw next to no attention to the need for economic development. At the same time, their focus on making cross-border alliances with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are sympathetic to workers is almost certainly inadequate to the task at hand. Students neglect the role that an enforceable international code protecting workers’ rights to form unions and engage in collective bargaining might play in advancing their goals. The movement could argue that what is needed is a labor counterpart to the WTO—a global organization promoting workers’ rights as the WTO promotes global trade. The obvious candidate among existing international organizations to administer such a labor and union rights regime would be a much enhanced and empowered International Labor Organization (ILO). 

The goal of strengthening the ILO on behalf of Third World workers could provide the student movement with a platform to do politics in this country, something that is all but denied to it with its current emphasis on making alliances with overseas NGOs. The reason that there is potential in this direction is that the United States has been only a very tepid supporter of the ILO, failing to ratify a very high proportion of ILO conventions, most notably those that protect the right to organize and bargain collectively. It is not difficult to imagine a student movement organizing to pressure the United States government to support the ILO in protecting workers’ rights in poor countries. 

Over and above the question of labor rights lie the problems of economic development itself and the creation of jobs. The students have recognized the importance of export sales in raising incomes. They are reluctant to endorse boycotting the products of the firms they are trying to change. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that the student movement is fully aware that globalization is an ally to its cause. The fact that United Students Against Sweatshops actively participated in the 1999 Seattle demonstrations against the WTO suggests that the students are a long way from acknowledging that globalization can and has been a vehicle by which poverty has been reduced. 

In fact, there probably is no more important contribution that the United States could make to raise global living standards than to adhere to its widely proclaimed belief in open markets. Today, not only in the United States, but in the European Union and Japan as well, non-tariff barriers to imports remain critical in restricting the growth of poor nations. But persuading Americans to open their markets to Third World imports will not be easy. Doing so will inflict injuries on workers who in effect will be placed in competition with their lower paid counterparts elsewhere. To make its position politically tenable, the movement will have to defend the reduction in trade barriers in the name of making an increased diversity of low priced goods available to United States consumers, as well as reducing global poverty. But in addition, it will have to explain that dislocations are inevitable in a dynamic economy. The most reasonable response to the resulting problems is not to back away from the consequences of economic integration, but to respond to them with programs that allow the workers in this country to benefit from the new opportunities associated with globalization with income support, portable health insurance, job training, and job search assistance. 

It is possible to envision a politics to make globalization more equitable. But for this to become a reality, those who identify with the interests of the poor will have to overcome their antagonism to globalization on the one hand and their propensity to believe that the United States should police international trade in the name of justice on the other hand. A long and difficult domestic campaign is needed to induce the United States to abandon its neoliberal advocacy of governmental retrenchment while endorsing a social and labor counterpart to the trade promoting policies it currently endorses. 

Jay R. Mandle is W. Bradford Wiley Professor of Economics at Colgate University. His book Globalization and the Poor will be published this fall by Cambridge University Press.

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Missions: Remembering Hungary’s “Great Generation” 
byLee Congdon

Not long ago, the newsreader for a major television network published a best-selling book in celebration of America’s “greatest generation,” the members of which suffered through the Great Depression and fought total wars in Europe and the Pacific. I know of nothing to suggest that readers of the book questioned the concept of a “generation,” though as the late Noel Annan pointed out in a portrait of his generation of English intellectuals, many professional historians do.  In a study of the “generation of 1914,” for example, Robert Wohl concluded that generational interpretations of the past or present obscured more than they revealed. He was therefore critical of José Ortega y Gasset’s El tema de nuestro tiempo, the first notable attempt to formulate a theory of generations. 

Ortega’s reflections were inspired in part by Spain ’s “generation of ‘98,” which numbered among its members such luminaries as Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz), Pío Baroja, and Miguel de Unamuno. Shaken by the Spanish-American War, these and other writers dedicated themselves to Spain ’s national regeneration; they possessed, that is, a sense of mission. “If,” Ortega wrote, “the essence of each generation is a particular type of sensibility, an organic repertoire of innermost predispositions, it follows that each generation possesses its own vocation, its historical mission.”

Karl Mannheim recognized the importance of Ortega’s work, but as a sociologist he chose to adopt a more scientific approach to what he called “the problem of generations.” Nevertheless, he too believed that they were summoned to solve social, political, and intellectual problems presented by “destiny,” a term he freighted with Heideggerian meaning. Although he wrote his essay on generations in WeimarGermany, Mannheim was born in Hungary in 1893 and was always conscious of his own generational identity; he belonged to what Hungarians call the “second reform generation” (the first prepared the 1848 Revolution) or the “great generation.” Its members were born between 1875 and 1905 and initially they, like the Spaniards of ‘98, believed that they had a mission to regenerate the nation.

It was Endre Ady (b. 1877), a member of the déclassé gentry, who, with his electrifying New Verses of 1906, awakened Mannheim ’s generation to consciousness. When the poet died in 1919, one of his friends praised him for that service: “With his new cadences, symbols, and accents, [Ady] forged a spiritual unity out of all those who [wanted a new Hungary but who] would never have been able to unite on the basis of economic interest, class affinity, or political conviction.” Thanks to Ady, who (mistakenly) believed fin de siècleHungary to be a “wasteland” of backwardness and injustice, Mannheim was more aware of belonging to a generation than to a social class. Indeed, he came to believe that he and other intellectuals were socially “unattached,” that they “floated freely” above classes. Such a view, he knew, pitted him against his first mentor, Georg Lukács.

Seven years Mannheim’s senior, Lukács joined the Communist Party in 1918 and escaped to Austria the following year, after the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed. In 1923 he published History and Class Consciousness, his brilliant study of Marxist dialectics. Mannheim found much to ponder in Lukács’s work, but he could not accept the claim that proletarian class consciousness was the key to history’s advance. In his judgment, classes demonstrated little willingness to compromise, while generations remained in a state of continuous reciprocity. The latter were therefore more likely to achieve the synthesis of competing interests and worldviews that Mannheim regarded as preferable to the revolutionary victory of a single class. 

For Mannheim, then, generational analysis was an alternative to class analysis, a less one-sided means of understanding the past and giving direction to the present. At the same time, it was a declaration of intellectual independence from Lukács, whose wartime “Sunday Circle” he continued to regard as one of the formative experiences of his and his generation’s life. 

In 1915, Lukács and the poetdramatist Béla Balázs (b. 1884) began to invite carefully-screened men and women, almost all of whom were assimilated Jews, to withdraw from a world at war in order to discuss the Permanent Things; Mannheim was among the first to accept. He was soon joined by others, including four who subsequently enriched the field of art history: Arnold Hauser (b. 1892), author of a magisterial social history of art; Frederick Antal (b. 1887), connoisseur and Marxist historian; Johannes Wilde (b. 1891), authority on Venetian painting and Michelangelo at the Courtauld Institute; and Charles de Tolnay (b. 1899), director of Florence’s Casa Buonarroti. 

In the hope of discovering a path to genuine human community, these and other young Hungarians explored various approaches to ethics, aesthetics, and religion (broadly defined). As philosophic idealists, they were cognizant of their participation in what H. Stuart Hughes called “the revolt against positivism.” 

For that reason, they distanced themselves from the circle that had gathered around Oscar Jászi (b. 1875), later a professor at Oberlin College and author of the classic Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. On January 1, 1900, Jászi had launched Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), a journal devoted to the “scientific” study and reform of society. Beginning with the publication, in the first issue, of a letter of greeting from Herbert Spencer, Jászi and his co-workers identified themselves with positivism, a doctrine that they hoped would uncover delegitimizing truths about official Hungary. Thus they constituted the core of what Mannheim later called a “generation unit,” one that responded to his generation’s shared experiences in a distinctive manner. 

A third generation unit appeared on the cultural scene at about the time the Sunday Circle began to meet—the avant-garde circle around Lajos Kassák (b. 1887), an autodidact who had made a life-transforming journey (on foot!) to Paris in 1909. In the French capital he learned of Apollinaire, Rodin, Picasso, and Henri Rousseau; as a result, he embraced cultural internationalism and later became a vocal critic of the war. Dissatisfied with existing forums, including Huszadik Század, he created a journal of his own, A Tett (Action), late in 1915. When, a year later, the government shut it down, he quickly founded another, Ma (Today), which was to become the center of a movement that made a lasting contribution to European culture. 

“We do not,” Kassák wrote of his movement, “want to remain in the sphere of the printed word.” He therefore promised drama matinées, art exhibitions, and collaborations with modernist composers such as Béla Bartók (b. 1881). In 1917, Ma published the score of Bartók’s setting of an Ady poem, and it devoted its entire February 1, 1918 issue to the composer, who, together with Zoltán Kodály (b. 1882), sought to free Hungarian music from German influence. Determined to create a genuinely national music, Bartók began to collect folk songs that inspired his radically modern compositions. 

When the war ended, Hungarians experimented with democratic and Soviet republics before Admiral Miklós Horthy’s counterrevolutionary government established its authority. For a variety of political and career reasons, many Hungarian intellectuals, particularly those of Jewish origin, chose to emigrate. Austria was their initial destination, but some continued on to Germany, where they all but created “Weimar culture.” Among those who had served the Soviet Republic, Lukács was the most important. As he saw it, his mission in exile was to breathe new life into Marxist theory after the virtual collapse of the Second International. Before he knew of Marx’s economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844, he discerned Marxism’s Hegelian core and, in History and Class Consciousness, produced the most seductive apology for tyranny ever written. If the rulers of Soviet Russia were not impressed, it was because Lukács criticized Engels (and by implication, Lenin) and challenged Moscow’s right to decide what was and what was not orthodox Marxism. 

Unlike Lukács, who lived on the outskirts of Vienna during most of the 1920s, Balázs, who had also converted to communism, moved on to Berlin in 1926. Having recognized the consciousness- raising potential of film, he published the first comprehensive theory of the new art and later translated it into practice as a scenarist for G. W. Pabst (The Threepenny Opera) and Leni Riefenstahl (The Blue Light). Had he not answered a call to the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s, he might have completed his mission of fomenting revolution. 

As communists, Lukács and Balázs despised the avant-garde for its refusal to submit to Party discipline. They therefore waged ideological war against Kassák, who had fled to Vienna in 1920. There he revived the Ma Circle, out of which soon emerged a number of Hungarians who joined the staff at the Bauhaus, the famous art and design school with a socio-political mission. Chief among them was László Moholy-Nagy (b. 1895), a war veteran possessed of multiple talents. A painter, photographer, filmmaker, and sculptor, he was the Bauhaus’s commanding figure during its heyday; in some ways, indeed, he eclipsed director Walter Gropius. 

A utopian, Moholy believed that art could work indirectly to produce a new social order and a “new man.” By teaching men and women to see in different ways, he could help them to visualize and then create a new and more rational society. To varying degrees, this notion appealed to Moholy’s countrymen at the Bauhaus: the stage designer Farkas Molnár, the furniture designer Marcel Breuer, and the architect Fréd Forbát. 

Mannheim could never join an organization as exclusive as the Communist Party, and he had little interest in the avant-garde. Nevertheless, he believed he had a mission to synthesize conservatism, liberalism, and socialism by training the younger generation in the sociology of knowledge, a discipline that promised to uncover the ideological and hence the “relational” character of all thinking. In 1925, he secured a position as Privatdozent in Heidelberg and, after the publication of his widelydiscussed Ideology and Utopia (1929), won appointment as professor of sociology at Frankfurt’s Goethe University. He had no desire, however, to retreat into an ivory tower; he was determined to help society navigate the troubled waters of the 20th century. 

When Hitler came to power, the Hungarians packed their bags once again. Most of the communists gathered in the Soviet Union, where, they convinced themselves, they would participate in a colossal human “experiment.” Instead, many of them fell victim to Stalin’s purges, while those who managed to survive sacrificed their intellects and consciences. It did not take long, for example, for Gyula Háy (b. 1900), who exploded on the Weimar scene in 1932 with God, Emperor and Peasant, a sophisticated Marxist dramatization of John Huss’s martyrdom, to recognize that whenever he put pen to paper he was placing himself at risk. By the time the Moscow Trials opened in 1936, he had arrived at a chilling conclusion: “Any one of us could disappear at any time, never to be seen again.” 

Not all Hungarian communists headed east in the early 1930s. Frederick Antal and the former avant-garde artist Peter Peri chose England, where they participated in the debate over communism that divided the Hungarian emigration. Although not a Party member, Karl Polanyi (b. 1886), who in Vienna had worked as a lead writer for Der Österreichische Volkswirt, turned sharply to the left after reaching England’s shores. He co-edited and contributed to Christianity and the Social Revolution, a volume of essays that labored to make the case that Christianity, rightly understood, was communism. And in his influential performance of 1944, The Great Transformation, he savaged market economies and praised Stalin for his progressive economic policies. 

At the same time that Karl Polanyi was carrying out his self-assigned mission to defend Soviet communism, his brother Michael (b. 1891) was doing everything in his power to refute the claim, advanced by J. D. Bernal and others, that science was communism, and to lay a more solid foundation for a liberalism under siege. As a member of Fritz Haber’s Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrical Chemistry in Weimar Germany, the younger Polanyi had maintained cordial and sometimes working relations with other illustrious Hungarian scientists: Eugene Wigner (b. 1902), winner of the Nobel Prize for physics; Leo Szilard (b. 1898), who conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction and, through Einstein, alerted President Roosevelt to the possibility of an atomic bomb; and John von Neumann (b. 1903), the mathematical genius, formulator of game theory, and pioneer of computer science. 

In England, Michael Polanyi devoted ever more of his time to economic and philosophical issues, and to confrontations with communist sympathizers, including his brother. This brought him into contact with Arthur Koestler, a younger member (b. 1905) of the “great generation.” Koestler had been a Party member, but he became Europe’s leading anticommunist when, in 1941, he published Darkness at Noon, a novel about the Moscow Trials and, at a deeper level, about freedom and responsibility. While Koestler was an obsessive womanizer and a hard-drinking, do-gooding activist, Polanyi was a quiet family man, a highly dignified scholar and thinker; yet the two men forged what Polanyi called an intellectual “partnership.” 

They did so because they shared ambitions that went beyond the discrediting of communism. Although both men believed that a return to orthodox Christianity was neither possible nor desirable, they recognized that the loss of religious faith had led to a brave new world of philosophical nihilism and political totalitarianism. Thus they set out together on a spiritual quest that produced at least two major works of the postwar period: Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge and Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers. 

Polanyi’s religious interests brought him into renewed contact with Mannheim, who also chose England as his final destination. A professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, he accepted a wartime invitation to join the “Moot,” the purpose of which was to examine existing social institutions in the light of the Christian faith and to assist, at war’s end, in bringing about the changes such an examination seemed to dictate. Mannheim made no Christian profession, but he recognized the social utility of the historic faith; thus he quickly became, along with T. S. Eliot, the most influential member of the Moot. In that group, his first real home since Sunday Circle days, he developed his ideas about planning, the championing of which was to become his final mission. 

How does one account for such a generational record of achievement? (This is not the same thing as asking how it happened that so many talented people were born in one time and place—that must remain a mystery.) The Hungarian historian Tibor Frank has argued persuasively that “networking, cohorting, and personal friendship [particularly in exile] did certainly contribute to what Laura Fermi [in Illustrious Immigrants] called ‘the mystery of Hungarian talent.’” In Budapest 1900, the Hungarian- born John Lukacs focused on distinguished members of the great generation who did not emigrate and pointed to the quality of Budapest’s schools—especially its gymnasia. One might mention in that regard the “Model” school founded by Mór Kármán, father of the famous aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán (b. 1881). The Polanyi brothers matriculated there, as did “Father of the H-bomb” Edward Teller (b. 1908). The Lutheran Gymnasium could boast that it prepared John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner. One may doubt that any American university can match the education these schools offered. 

Many of the best students came from assimilated Jewish homes that placed a high value on education and culture. Edward Teller’s earliest memories of his mother, for example, are “intertwined with Beethoven’s sonatas.” Von Neumann’s father, a prominent banker, insisted that his son learn German and French. The Polanyi brothers grew up bilingually in German and Hungarian, and their parents saw to it that they were tutored in French and English. Georg Lukács’s father, another successful banker, provided his son with a first-class education which included visits to the family home by Bartók and Thomas Mann. Without ignoring Hungarian culture, families such as the Tellers, Lukácses, and Polanyis created a environment. Lukács was only twenty-si European when he published, in Hungarian, a two-volume History of the Evolution of the Modern Drama, a work in which he displayed a command of virtually every major European literature. 

Members of the great generation also drew upon the kinetic energy of what, at the turn of the century, was the fastest growing metropolis in Europe. Everywhere they looked, they could see new thoroughfares, new bridges linking Buda and Pest (“I remember the bridges, the beautiful bridges,” Teller recently wrote), and new edifices such as the splendid Opera House—where, for a time, Gustav Mahler conducted—and imposing Parliament. They could take pride in the continent’s first subway and share in the excitement generated by the modern culture taking shape in the city’s democratizing coffeehouses and bustling editorial offices—its “workshops,” as the Hungarian cultural historian Péter Hanák used to say. “You heard a great deal more erudite conversation than you hear in the United States,” Wigner recalled. “People talked more about culture, about art, about literature.” 

Most important, perhaps, was the sense of mission that almost all members of the great generation felt; as early as 1918, Mannheim had spoken of “our particular historic mission as a generation.” For them, life was public, not private. Or perhaps it would be better to say that their public life was inextricably intertwined with their private life. Hence they were never content to withdraw into their own worlds or to view the outer world in a detached manner; they looked for ways to fulfill what they understood to be their civic responsibilities. This commitment to the public sphere could, and sometimes did, lead in dangerous directions—to Lukács’s submission to the Communist Party or Mannheim’s call for social engineering. 

But it could also lead to a genuine and active concern for the preservation of civilization. Here one could cite numerous examples. When communist scientists attempted to hijack science, Michael Polanyi took time out from his laboratory work to make the case for freedom in science. As most know, Arthur Koestler was almost obsessed with the danger communism presented to Western civilization. Although less well known, the thoughtful moral philosopher Aurel Kolnai (b. 1900) devoted much of his time to a careful analysis and critique of communism and nazism— sworn enemies of civilization. Szilard, Teller, and von Neumann helped to develop the atomic bomb (though Szilard later campaigned against its use). They did so because they knew that such a weapon, in Hitler’s hands, would pose the gravest of threats. In the same spirit, Sir Alexander Korda (b. 1893), the film director/ producer, offered his World War II services to British intelligence. It was he, incidentally, who liked to say of his and his countrymen’s successes: “Being Hungarian is not enough, but it certainly helps.” 

Lee Congdon is professor of history at James Madison University. His most recent book is Seeing Red: Hungarian Intellectuals in Exile and the Challenge of Communism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2001).

The Pacific War as a Civilizational Conflict
by Genzo Yamamoto

The concept of “civilizational conflict” has recently received both scholarly and public attention. Samuel Huntington’s provocative thesis, which argues among other things that the world is made up of competing cultural and religious civilizational groupings, has generated responses by Edward Said and others decrying the use of such broad analytical categories. Such analysis, they argue, places insufficient weight on the complexities within societies and encourages the reification of static and mistaken stereotypes. Moreover, Huntington’s critics note that the attempt to understand conflict along civilizational boundaries does not adequately account for the global interactions that have increased the exchange of ideas and values among civilizations. Despite their marked differences, the views of both Huntington and his critics, I contend, are useful for revisiting the historical significance of the Pacific theater in World War II. Civilizational conflict was indeed a central issue; at the same time, it is critical to understand the complex developments within Japan prior to the war, as well as the exchange of ideas taking place across civilizational boundaries.

Many key Japanese leaders viewed the Pacific War as a civilizational conflict. The rationale given for Japan’s foreign policy at the start of the China War in 1937—the war that would lead directly into the Pacific War—shows how important the defense of Japan ’s civilization was to Japanese leaders. For example, the Showa Research Association, the think tank affiliated with Prince Konoe Fumimaro (prime minister when Japan began the war with China and in the period immediately prior to the outbreak of war with the U.S.), carefully sought to locate Japan’s civilizational role in world history vis-à-vis other civilizations. Prominent philosophers such as Nishida Kitaro and Watsuji Tetsuro did the same.

An official document published by the Ministry of Education in 1937, the Kokutai no hongi (“Cardinal Essence of the National Polity”), illustrates the fact that Western civilization was perceived as antithetical to Japanese civilization. Defining Japan ’s enemy also clarified Japan’s identity. The Kokutai no hongi criticized “Europeanization” and the “ideologies of the Enlightenment” and the “rationalism” and “individualism” that arose from them. The document called for Japanese to

return to the standpoint peculiar to our country, clarify our immortal national entity, sweep aside everything in the way of adulation, bring into being our original condition . . . . This means that the present conflict seen in our people’s ideas, the unrest in their modes of life, the confused state of their civilization, can be put right only by a thorough investigation by us of the intrinsic nature of Occidental ideologies and by grasping the true meaning of our national entity.

The Kokutai no hongi reiterated the qualities essential to Japanese civilization, particularly loyalty to the emperor, which entailed rejecting the notion that individual self-fulfillment arose from the demand for one’s rights in favor of submitting one’s life to the emperor. These were only surface reflections of a much deeper and sophisticated philosophical disagreement with Enlightenment philosophy regarding the nature of the human individual, culture, society, state, and nature. To the extent that Enlightenment philosophy was understood as characterizing Western civilization, it was indeed a civilization built upon values antithetical to the values upon which modern Japanese civilization had been built.  This was a “war between civilizations.”

The ideas expressed in the Kokutai no hongi were not new. The drafter of the 1889 Meiji Constitution upon which the modern Japanese nation-state was based, Prince Ito Hirobumi, had explicitly sought to shape the document so as to oppose the ideas of the European Enlightenment. Ito drew from German Romantic legal and political philosophers, who were explicit in their antagonism toward Enlightenment ideas. They extolled the importance of the “volk” in the formation of communities and states. These conservative thinkers viewed as fundamentally flawed the Enlightenment principles that gave ontological, legal, and political priority to the individual over larger social and cultural entities. Rather, they believed that the proper development of state and community required a more organic understanding of the particularities of a people—their history, traditions, customs, and their land. These larger entities, not the individual, should form the basis of the state’s legal and political structures. After studying constitutional systems in various European states, Ito wrote: “The situation in our country is characterized by the erroneous belief that the words of English, American, and French liberals and radicals are eternal verities . . . .  I have acquired arguments and principles to rectify the situation.”

Not all Japanese, however, shared Ito’s views, especially after the turn of the century and victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Recent work by Frederick Dickinson has shown that World War I-era domestic politics involved a struggle over what constituted the proper definition of Japan ’s polity. On one side were the “German admirers”—led by the oligarch Yamagata Aritomo—who sought domestic hegemony by the military and bureaucratic elites at home and continental expansion abroad. On the other side were the “advocates of Anglo-Saxon civilization,” who were critical of oligarchic rule and favored parliamentary politics along with a state devoted to alleviating domestic social and economic ills.During World War I, under the skillful maneuvering of Foreign Minister Kato Takaaki, liberals began to make inroads into the formulation of domestic and foreign policies, widening the gap between the two groups. 

Changes wrought by World War I also challenged traditional notions of how Japan’s civilization and mission should be defined, defended, and furthered. Domestically, the national economy boomed with a trade surplus, which gave rise to a new, urban middle class and an urban culture of leisure and entertainment, as well as a labor movement and calls for an expansion of suffrage. Internationally, the rise of the United States as a political power and Woodrow Wilson’s proclamations challenged the legitimacy of monarchies and the imperialism of the old order. 

In the 1920s, well-known liberals, such as Wakatsuki Reijiro, Shidehara Kijuro, and Kato Takaaki, retained the notion of Japan’s unique civilization and mission; yet they infused it with more liberal values. In foreign affairs, they embraced the pursuit of international agreements for peace. They distanced themselves from German militarism and embraced postwar internationalism under the League of Nations and the International Labor Organization. They reinterpreted the civilizing mission to mean “spiritual colonization,” or the spreading of the virtues of Japanese culture to Asia, rather than outright territorial expansion. The retention of Japan’s empire and the right to hold the newlyacquired Pacific islands as mandates under the League of Nations satisfied this new definition. Convinced that this new order achieved a modicum of national security, they focused on the domestic socio-economic problems besetting the country and called for factory legislation, legal recognition of labor unions, the expansion of suffrage, educational reforms, and the establishment of a politics in which parliament would play a central role. In so doing, they sought to move Japan toward a constitutional monarchy. 

Conservatives viewed the accommodation of liberal trends in the formulation of domestic and international policy as unpatriotic and harmful to Japan’s national essence. Advocates of the illiberal definition of Japanese civilization pictured Japan’s more liberal foreign policy of the 1920s as flaccid and retreating, and in the 1930s they successfully moved Japan away from international cooperation and toward a unilateral policy intended to achieve the empire’s “destiny.” This shift expressed itself in domestic politics as well, as the conservatives ousted Minobe Tatsukichi (an important scholar who advocated a constitutional monarchy), squelched social legislation that had been pursued by the Minseito party, and criticized parliamentary politics as intrinsically divisive, corrupt, and selfish. The militaristic conservatism of the 1930s, then, was not simply a matter of the rising power of the military, though no doubt that played a part. It was also the return to power of a certain understanding of what Japan stood for—a certain way of defining Japanese civilization and its civilizing mission. 

The U.S. had long been a threat to the conservative vision of Japanese civilization. Conservatives were not pleased by Woodrow Wilson’s unilateral proclamation during the war that the world was to be made “safe for democracy.” Neither did they find comfort in the idea of an international organization led by the U.S. to guarantee peace. In 1919, an imperial nominee in the Japanese House of Peers responded to comments made by an American senator who referred to the Japanese as “international sea pirates” by noting that, given America’s expansion into the continent and beyond to Panama, Hawaii, Philippines, and Guam, the senator was indulging in “truly insolent speech and behavior.” But the problem was bigger than international relations. The U.S. also embodied a system of values that embraced the rights-based language of the Anglo-American Enlightenment. In the wake of the rapid influx of American culture into Japanese urban life, conservatives spoke of how American influence had made the people’s thinking “unstable,” creating “an individualism of the bad sort, egotism.” In 1920, agreeing with conservatives, Home Minister Tokonami Takejiro pinpointed the crux of the problem: “All humans are not born equal . . . .” America constituted a threat to the philosophical foundations of the Japanese empire. 

This insidious American threat to Japanese civilization became even clearer for conservatives when liberal leaders successfully pushed a universal manhood suffrage bill through in 1925. In the end, even moderate conservatives were willing to pass the bill, seeing it as preemptive social legislation. (They would be proven correct.) But they, and especially their more staunch conservative colleagues, made clear the potential dangers of such offensive legislation. Hijikata Yasushi, president of Tokyo Imperial University, noted, “[r]ecently people have begun to speak about ‘rights.’ But concerned only about their own rights, they ignore public rights, which is the same thing as ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility.’ There is no sense of responsibility, and thus moral education is lacking.” “Universal suffrage,” he intoned, was

something that came out of Europe and America’s specific cultural experience. If their experience is the ideal endpoint and if their progress is linear, then we must follow. But from before the war, I have felt that theirs is neither an ideal endpoint nor the path that we must follow . . . . Because our civilization has a different spirit from theirs, we ought not to import this. It is nothing more than the consequences of a mistaken civilization.

In the late 1920s conservatives went on the offensive in earnest. Pinpointing what they perceived as the failure of Japan’s China policy, conservatives argued that this stemmed from the corruption that existed at the heart of Japan’s empire—its parliamentary politics and politicians. The focus on the parliament had led to “political conflict” and “broken the Japanese empire’s traditional spirit,” bringing “conflict even into the homes” (a reference to universal manhood suffrage that allowed sons to counter the political vote of the father). In 1930, a conservative noted that the current government advocated a parliament-centered politics and retorted “I am one who considers the Throne to be the center of politics . . . . [O]ur argument is an anti-parliament argument.” By then, conservatives had successfully painted parliamentary politics as both corrupt at home and unable to defend the empire abroad. For them, parliamentary politics was a tangible embodiment of liberal political philosophy which had seeped into the country in the years following World War I and corrupted —in their view—the “proper” vision of Japanese civilization. 

The events of the 1930s which signify the rise of militaristic conservatism are familiar to us: the London Naval Conference of 1930, which established a tonnage ratio on supplementary warships and led to a domestic attack on the Hamaguchi Minseito government and on parliamentary politics in general; the assassination of prime ministers Hamaguchi Osachi and Inukai Tsuyoshi, both of whom sought to retain a semblance of parliamentary politics but failed; the Manchurian Incident of 1931; the return to cabinets chosen by oligarchs and to militarily-oriented prime ministers; Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, effective in 1934; the Marco Polo Bridge Incident; the beginning of the war with China in 1937; and the attack on Pearl Harbor. But these events must be seen as a result of a long struggle undertaken throughout the 1920s against liberals and their vision for Japan’s future, and as such involved a discussion of Japan’s civilization. The Kokutai no hongi signified not only the government’s aim to direct the thinking of the people, but also the proclamation of the end of the decades-long liberal/illiberal struggle to define Japanese civilization. The conservative vision had won. 

Yet the Pacific War was not a true civilizational conflict. To be sure, for many Japanese leaders it was indeed a defense of Japanese civilization against the encroachments of Enlightenment values—values which, among other things, placed higher ontological status on the individual than on larger social, cultural, and political entities; which asserted “Western,” “universal” norms; and which ultimately repudiated the values upon which the Japanese state and society had been based since its inception. But from the beginning, the official philosophical foundation had borrowed much from German romanticist cultural and political philosophy. Shapers of Japan’s modern state such as Ito Hirobumi had brilliantly utilized one side of a 19th-century European debate to establish the legal, political, and philosophical foundations for an aristocratic and monarchical state. The modern nation’s early leaders had, of course, incorporated things particular to Japan’s historical and cultural experience— but this was completely in line with German and other romanticist advocates of cultural particularism. Moreover, after the Russo- Japanese War, there was increasing domestic debate over how Japanese civilization ought to be defined. Here again, liberals looked at notions current in the world regarding domestic and international relations, and sought to incorporate them into their understanding of the Japanese polity. Then, in the late 1930s with the Kokutai no hongi, the Konoe Cabinet called the people back to the principles upon which their constitution was founded, understandably construing an attack on these principles as an attack on all that Japan stood for as a nation-state in modern history. But the call to return to the particularities of their nation was a call to return to the traditions and values invented and made official at the time of the Meiji Restoration, not necessarily to something intrinsically traditional. Calls to reject “Europeanization” and the “Occident” might suggest racial and rather inflexible, geographical boundaries, but critical references to the Enlightenment show that only some aspects of European civilization were to be rejected. The Pacific War, then, is best understood as a war brought about by those who had won the domestic struggle over the definition of Japan’s civilization and mission, not by civilizational conflict itself. 

What difference might this understanding of World War II make? A number of possibilities come to mind. First, this presents the Japanese as participating in the same process undergone by most non-Western independence movements of the 19th and 20th centuries —what Partha Chatterjee has called a people’s assertion of their “spiritual” independence against the encroachments of Enlightenment universalism. Such a perspective invites further comparisons between Japan and postcolonial states. Second, the case study of interwar Japan invites more serious consideration of how domestic debates over social, cultural, and political values play enormous roles in, and are intrinsically connected to, international relations. Understanding the domestic conflict over differing visions of civilization helps to explain the prevalence of the rhetoric of civilizational conflict in the international arena. Finally, to the extent that Japanese national leaders incorporated European criticisms of the Enlightenment and its concomitant “flaws,” the Pacific War and the civilizational debate leading up to it show how useful ideas had crossed civilizational boundaries. Consequently, we should view the war not as one that pitted “Western” vs. “Japanese” civilization (Japanese conservative beliefs at the time notwithstanding), but as emblematic of a debate over the definition of civilization that occurred in Japan, in the West, and in other parts of the world. 

Genzo Yamamoto is an assistant professor of history at Boston University. He is currently writing a book on the worldview of the members of the Japanese House of Peers during the 1920s. 
 
 

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A Century of the Cambridge Histories
by Jeremy Black

A century ago, in November 1902, the first volume of The Cambridge Modern History was published. My purpose is to draw attention to the continued value of this powerful ongoing format. I do not do so to celebrate a British achievement for, like so much associated with (I immediately think of the Economist) the Cambridge Histories are an international effort with heavy American participation, both as volume editors and as contributors. This is especially apparent with the series on East Asia, for example the six-volume Cambridge History of Japan in which Delmer Brown, Peter Duus, John Whitney Hall, William H. McCullough, and Donald Shively took prominent roles, and the Cambridge History of China in which twelve volumes have so far appeared. John Fairbank of Harvard and Denis Twitchett of Princeton are the co-editors of this series.

The Cambridge Histories are often characterized as “tombstone” history: dead and impenetrable. In fact, this is far from the case. The Cambridge Histories are not simply arcane works of scholarship of value only to the initiate; they fulfill one of the goals of teaching, expanding the imaginative and interpretive grasp of students.

I have recommended them for many years while teaching, first at Durham and now at Exeter, and I also used them extensively as a student. The serried and continually growing ranks of the Cambridge Histories have a number of advantages: availability, range, analysis, and ease-of-use are all important.

There are many copies of the Cambridge Histories in the libraries of educational institutions. Accessibility has been increased by the paperbacking of some of the volumes. For Southeast Asia since 1500, I recommend not the two-volume 1992 hardback edition but the easier to use four-volume 1999 edition. This makes what is an outstanding attempt to move beyond European attitudes and sources more readily available. Similarly, the Cambridge History of Islam, first published in 1970, appeared in paperback in 1977. Some other Cambridge Histories have been paperbacked, including some of the volumes of the New Cambridge Modern History, but there are still many volumes that await this treatment and the accompanying opportunity, seen in the Southeast Asia series, to make necessary revisions. 

Range is very important. In the case of the Cambridge Histories, this is regional, chronological, and thematic. In the first, there is not only the treatment of Europe, but also the eight-volume History of Africa, the four-volume History of American Foreign Relations, the histories of China and Japan, the History of Early Inner Asia, the two-volume History of Egypt, the eight-volume History of Iran, the eleven-volume History of Latin America, the two-volume History of Southeast Asia, and the twenty-one-volume History of India. This gives students valuable access to continents outside Europe, most of which are poorly covered in more conventional textbooks, and also makes it possible to refer them to comparable works dealing with different areas in the same period. 

The range is also chronological. Although the best-known series is the New Cambridge Modern History, which tackles European history from the late 15th century, there is also an excellent range of material for earlier periods. One of the most exciting developments in recent years has been the appearance of the New Cambridge Medieval History. Intended to replace the Cambridge Medieval History, which was published between 1911 and 1936, books in the new seven-volume series have been appearing since 1995. For the period before that there is the eighteen-volume Cambridge Ancient History (with five supplementary volumes of plates), a series supported by the eleven-volume History of Classical Literature, as well as by volumes on Greek and Roman Political Thought and Hellenistic Philosophy. Pre-history is insufficiently represented, but everything later is abundantly covered. 

In thematic terms, there is for example the eight-volume Cambridge Economic History of Europe, as well as the three-volume Cambridge Economic History of the United States. Some of the thematic volumes are easier to use than others. Students trying to find their way around the more than 1250 pages of The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies (1989), volume eight of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, are definitely not helped by the absence of both introduction and conclusion, while the treatment of politics in the Timurid and Safavid periods in volume six of the Cambridge History of Iran (1986) can only be described as impenetrable. 

In contrast, P.M. Holt’s introduction to the first volume of the Cambridge History of Islam is both clear and useful, and that series amply fulfills its objective of presenting the history of Islam as a cultural whole. Furthermore, it is explicitly written with the student in mind, including “students in other fields of history.” The latter point has not been taken on board by most of the economic historians, but the “area specialists” are on the whole first-rate in this respect. Thus, Denis Twitchett and Frederick Mote in their editorial introduction to The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, part two, volume eight of the Cambridge History of China (1998), ably highlight the need to describe specific phenomena in their regional setting. They also mention lacunae and draw attention to the way in which scholarship changes. 

While many scholars are unwilling to write conventional textbooks, they are clearly prepared to produce and edit essays for the Cambridge Histories, which have the reputation of books of record. Furthermore, the essay format provides an opportunity to offer work by leading foreign scholars, including those whose first language is not English. So, for example, volume seven of the New Cambridge Medieval History, covering ca. 1414 to ca. 1500, includes essays not only by the leading British scholars but also by others from American, French, Hungarian, Dutch, Irish, Italian, Polish, Canadian, German, Swiss, Portuguese, and Greek universities. The foreign contributions help provide a wider coverage of regions and topics. Thus, in volume seven, Janos Bak covers Hungary while in volume six there is a chapter on the Holy Roman Empire, the first half of which is by Peter Herde at Würzburg and the second half by Ivan Hlavacek at Prague. In fifty-four pages, they provide an effective account not only of the domestic and international politics of the Empire, but also of ecclesiastical developments, the foundation of universities, urban dynamism, the establishment of a flourishing literature in the vernacular, and the role of religious themes in the arts. Aside from description, there is also analysis. The period is seen as important for the way in which firm foundations were laid for the development of territorial states within the structure of the Empire. 

The recently published volume fourteen of the Cambridge Ancient History, Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, A.D. 425–600 (2000), is a valuable bridging book that reflects the vitality of the Cambridge Histories. Whereas the first edition of 1938 closed in 324 A.D., the new series makes a determined effort to address late Antiquity, providing students and their teachers with an effective bridge from ancient to medieval history. Like other books in the Cambridge Histories, this shows the value of multiple authorship, which makes it possible to cover both geographical and thematic range. Indeed, the latter is particularly impressive, encompassing, for example, monasticism, building and architecture, government, law, and education. The twenty-three maps, sixty-three figures, chronological table, and a five-part bibliography all make the volume more user-friendly. This volume also has a theme: the specifically eastern polity that was shaped from the Roman empire. In place of subjective categories and moral terms, such as decline and fall, readers are introduced to a more varied model, with a stress on new developments and multiculturalism. Again, in place of an account largely devoted to war, politics, and religion, there is a valuable use of other material, and readers are encouraged to question traditional aesthetic judgments, for example about the differences between Classical and Byzantine art and the reasons for the supposed transition from the former to the latter. 

Despite the concern that these “tombstone” books will scare off students, in fact they are easy to use. The chapters are ably sectionalized and, more particularly, each has a very thorough index. When I tell my students to look at the books, I stress the value of both the tables of contents and the indexes. The very size of the Cambridge Histories makes it easier to underline the extent to which students need to learn to understand how to use books, and that that does not necessarily mean reading them cover to cover. Indeed, part of the attraction of the Cambridge Histories is that there is no need to do so. To that extent they are an information system more in keeping with the age of the Internet than the conventional textbook. 

There are naturally problems with any collective volume, and I am told that the delays attendant upon any collaborative project have taken away the cutting-edge novelty from several volumes. However, powerful introductions provide coherence within individual volumes. Many, for example those of J. P. Cooper in volume four of the New Cambridge Modern History and J. S. Bromley in volume six, are important works of insight and analysis in their own right. There is nothing, however, to provide comparable coherence for individual series. The Modern History series unfortunately tails off in the later volumes, although the Companion Volume, edited by Peter Burke, provides superb longue durée essays, such as those of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie on peasants, G. E. Aylmer on bureaucracy, and Geoffrey Parker on warfare, while the atlas volume is, for its precision, the best historical atlas to tackle European history. The coverage of the rest of the world is less good. It would be very useful to have similar companion and atlas volumes for other series. 

For students, the volumes are goldmines of information and analysis, while for teachers who want to provide comparison and context for, say, the debate on absolutism, they offer effective scholarly summaries of the histories of much of the world. Naturally, there are gaps and weaknesses. Much of the Modern History needs replacing, while the reprinting of other books serves as a sorry substitute for new editions: volume five of the Cambridge History of Africa, covering ca. 1790 to ca. 1870, first published in 1976, has been reprinted five times in the last decade. It would also be very helpful to have the editors of individual volumes look out for comparisons with other regions of the world. Nevertheless, as a dynamic format in which important new series and volumes continue to appear, the Cambridge Histories cannot be bettered. As an alternative to conventional textbooks, they have much to offer. All we need to do is overcome our resistance to what appears large and forbidding. 

Jeremy Black has recently published The World in the Twentieth Century (Longman, 2002).

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REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY'S 2002 ATLANTA CONFERENCE

Donald A. Yerxa
The Historical Society’s plan for third national conference in Atlanta was ambitious. Scholars working in a wide variety of geographical and chronological settings would examine historical reconstructions in comparative fashion, possibly as a first step toward a new research agenda. In an academic climate decidedly receptive to comparative and transnational approaches to historical topics—one need look no further than the recently published Rethinking American History in a Global Age—the topic of historical reconstructions certainly seems to be an appropriate, even ripe, subject for comparative rethinking. After all, reconstructions have received virtually no comparative attention since Eric L. McKitrick’s preliminary stab in Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (1960). So it was a very helpful exercise to bring—for the first time—scholars from such diverse fields as the ancient Near East, postwar Europe, and classical Greece together with those of the American Reconstruction to talk about historical reconstructions in comparative perspective.

Conference attendees were treated to many interesting panels, made more stimulating by the structural dynamics of the conference whereby those presenting papers could assume that many, if not most, in the audience would be from outside their field. This often led to lively discussions, as was definitely the case in the session I happened to moderate on reconstructions in classical Greece. Here four prominent classicists—John Hale, Victor David Hanson, Barry Strauss, and Loren Samons—gave superb papers both in content and delivery that generated discussion well past the scheduled time for the session to end.

As informative as many of the papers were, it is one thing to present a number of papers on reconstructions from different times and places and quite another to wrench from them anything like conceptual clarity. As the conference progressed, it was clear that there was much work to be done. For one thing, the inescapable question of definition needed to be addressed. This was obvious when in the concluding plenary session Elizabeth Fox-Genovese voiced concern that the very term reconstruction may have little more than metaphorical meaning for the pre-modern world. To apply it liberally to Athens after the Peloponnesian War or to France in the aftermath of the Hundred Years’ War, she suggested, risks conceptual dilution. David Moltke-Hansen, on the other hand, did not think it necessary to link reconstructions to modernity. He adopted a definition of reconstruction (essentially, rebuilding after large-scale destruction) flexible enough to be exported to any number of historical settings. His more expansive definition is clearly congenial to the agenda—only begun in Atlanta—of exploring the commonalities of past reconstructions.

Predictably, the reconstruction of the American South loomed as large in the conference halls as it did outside the doors of the beautiful Atlanta hotel where it was held. Perhaps it loomed too large. And this gets to the heart of the matter. It is fair to say that for most American historians, including many present at the Atlanta conference, the American Reconstruction really is paradigmatic. If so, doesn’t that, as Fox-Genovese rightly noted, presume some sort of comparative analysis?  One would think so, but paradoxically American historians have not done this. So there was an unresolved tension in Atlanta: the comparative impulse responsible for the conference was continually in danger of being overwhelmed by what Molke-Hansen called “our preoccupation with American Reconstruction.”

It would be naive to expect that one conference by itself would yield conceptual precision. And while the jury is still out as to whether historical reconstructions can sustain a robust research program, the conference did reveal the broad contours of a possible research agenda. We already have, of course, many studies on Athens after the Peloponnesian War or France after the Hundred Years’ War; what we now need are new investigations that look at these familiar episodes with a new set of questions and concerns. The Atlanta conference began this task because many presenters implicitly agreed with Moltke-Hansen and prepared their papers with the assumption that the new set of questions should focus on the dynamics of rebuilding not just structures, but institutions and even whole societies after the crisis of large-scale destruction. That was certainly the case in the session on classical Greece.

Obviously, the comparative study of historical reconstructions needs more case study analysis than one conference can provide. Still, caution is in order here. Since ours is an evidentiary craft, the local and particular are safe places for most historians. But nothing terribly creative is likely to happen if, say, historians of the American South talk only to and write only for other historians of the American South. If we are ever going to explore historical reconstructions in comparative contexts, historians have to take risks. In Atlanta, a few of the plenary speakers—particularly those already mentioned—were forced to do this, and even in those difficult circumstances, they began to clarify some of the issues. Together with the presenters of papers on fairly specific topics, these colleagues modeled what must happen to go beyond the preliminary work of the Atlanta conference. Whether Atlanta provided the inspiration to do this remains to be seen, but the success of the conference hinges on whether historians can combine careful research in particular contexts with an eye toward discerning commonalities and patterns that may emerge.

Historical inquiry proceeds simultaneously at multiple levels. As always, there is need for both the specialist and the integrator. We can take heart that the membership of The Historical Society includes both and that THS provides multiple venues—such as the Atlanta conference and our publications—for the specialist to be in dialogue with the integrator. Without these important conversations, history can easily descend to the antiquarian or become so breezy as to evaporate upon close inspection. 

Donald A. Yerxa is assistant director of The Historical Society, co-editor of Historically Speaking, and professor of history at EasternNazareneCollege. He is co-author of Species of Origins: America’s Search for a Creation Story (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
 
 

Joseph S. Lucas
The Historical Society conference’s opening plenary session, “Global Perspectives on Economic Development,” featured Seymour Drescher and David Landes, both of whom lived up to the session’s bold title. Landes, following his argument in Wealth and Poverty of Nations, located the origins of the West’s economic superiority in the 16th century. Habits of mind and action which originated then, he claimed, are still in force today and account for the gap between “the West and the Rest.” For his part, Drescher asked why it was that Europeans chose to buy and enslave Africans—not other Europeans—to do the hard work on the New World’s sugar plantations. He suggested that a boundary existed between humane and inhumane treatment which early modern Europeans, when it came to other Europeans, were reluctant to cross. 

Taken together, the talks evoked one of the most profound differences between the contemporary West and the West prior to World War I: the changed attitudes of Westerners toward the rest of the world’s peoples and cultures. Drescher’s questions—why Africans? why slavery?—would have struck 19th-century Western scholars as decidedly strange. But in the second half of the 20th century, with the fall of Europe’s African empires and the rise of race as a central issue in the United States, tracing the origins of both New World slavery and Western racism became scholarly projects of paramount importance. Landes’s argument, on the other hand, was widespread in the 19th-century West, albeit in cruder form. Today, though, it is rarely expressed; to say that the West is culturally superior to the Rest is to offend contemporary sensibilities. 

One of the most popular ideas to have appeared in the West in the second half of the 20th century is that Westerners’ attitudes toward non-Western peoples have historically been very bad, particularly since 1500. At that time, Europeans began expanding, both territorially and commercially, and this brought them into contact with more and more of the world’s peoples. The problem, it is argued, was that Europeans refused to see these peoples as equals. The idea of European superiority, according to this view, fed European imperialism, which did great, perhaps irreparable damage to Africans, American Indians, Asians, Arabs, and others. The implicit hope behind much of the policy, commentary, and scholarship that have emerged from this perspective is that Westerners will (if they haven’t already done so) radically adjust their attitudes toward the rest of the world’s peoples.

Radical adjustments have indeed occurred. Elites and intellectuals in the West and elsewhere now appear to share a Wilsonian vision of the world, one in which democratically self-determined nations cooperate peacefully and as equals. No one would claim that such a vision reflects reality, but many endorse it as an ideal and, further, link it to the notion that no one culture is better than another. Western imperial armies and administrations no longer preside over the Rest. Just as important, neither do they explicitly tell the Rest they must change their ways in order to resemble the West. Instead the West tells the Rest: “You’ve been wonderful all along. We were wrong in the past. Do as you’ve always done; stick to your customs, your rituals, your beliefs. We live in a multicultural world now.” 

How to account for this dramatic shift in perspective? Drescher’s notion of a boundary suggests one answer. 19th-century Westerners celebrated the humanity of their culture. For them, the West was defined not only by its wealth and power, but also by the humane civility with which its inhabitants treated one another—even across national and ethnic boundaries and even during wartime. They believed that savages, on the other hand, treated their enemies with vicious cruelty. But by 1950 this moral boundary had collapsed. Europeans had treated other Europeans in brutal ways. The worst kind of savagery had been unleashed in the heart of civilization. Not only were European empires rapidly becoming things of the past; so, too, was the belief that the West was morally superior to the Rest. 

Since World War II, intellectuals have looked at the West and its history with new eyes. Many feel that Western arrogance has done great damage to the rest of the world’s peoples. So now the situation is very delicate. Ostensibly neutral terms like developed and underdeveloped have replaced the concepts of savagery and civilization which 19th-century Westerners used to distinguish themselves from the Rest. But just as 19th-century Westerners believed that savage peoples should do their best to become civilized, many today think underdeveloped nations should hurry up and develop. Development, however, is most often conceived as a product of the right kind of political institutions and economic policies, not as a phenomenon unique to Western culture. 

In this climate David Landes’s views, which would have seemed very familiar to a 19th-century audience, are extraordinarily controversial. Landes believes that 16th-century Europeans created a dynamic culture driven by unfettered reason in the service of profit and progress. The cultural peculiarities of the early modern West, Landes argues, account even today for the West’s economic superiority. This notion was widespread before World War I. Max Weber famously linked the emergence of modern capitalism to the Calvinist Reformation. And earlier 19th-century—and even 18th-century—thinkers connected in a more general way Western wealth and power to Western culture, what they called simply “civilization.” 

Echoing the conventional wisdom of the 19th century, Landes is out of step with his own time. During the session, he scoffed at the notion that China was on the verge of becoming the world’s economic superpower. He audaciously claimed that nothing of value was made in the Muslim world. Landes understands the tensions—the bad feelings—aroused by such views. But he doesn’t seem to care. Near the session’s end, a man in the audience accused Landes—after praising the bulk of both his and Drescher’s talks—of falling prey to Eurocentric stereotypes of the Islamic world. Landes replied with something to the effect of: “I’m not here to make you feel good, but to tell you the truth.”

It is striking that attitudes, opinions, even feelings are now accorded so much importance with regard to the relationship between the West and the Rest. Perhaps this reflects the relationship’s recent transformation. If the 19th-century West sternly lectured its colonial subjects on the glories of civilization and the discipline required to achieve them, the 21st-century West welcomes the descendants of these colonized peoples into its capitals. Millions of non-white, non-Protestant immigrants and their sons and daughters live in the U.S. And while some clearly have to face bigotry and prejudice, these immigrants and their progeny have enjoyed a much friendlier welcome than their 19th- and early 20th-century forebears. The ideas of multiculturalism—all cultures are valuable and worth understanding, and many can cohabit in a single nation—serve important functions in the U.S. and in other Western nations. These ideas reflect an unprecedented mixing of peoples, cultures, and faiths which would have been difficult for 19^th-century Westerners to imagine. 

Yet, in the context of contemporary academic culture, Landes’s disregard for the feelings of others is refreshing. He believes that an obsession with making people feel good has blurred reality. To locate Western economic superiority in the late 19th century and link it to Western imperialism may be comforting to some. In Landes’s view, though, this argument not only contradicts historical evidence, but also ignores those facets of Western culture—tolerance, freedom, openness to new ideas—that continue to draw non-Western immigrants to places like Amsterdam, London, Toronto, and Atlanta. 

Joseph Lucas is assistant director of The Historical Society and co-editor of Historically Speaking. He is the author of “The Course of Empire and the Long Road to Civilization: North American Indians and Scottish Enlightenment Historians,” Explorations in Early American Culture 4 (2000): 166-190.

 

David J. Ulbrich
At The Historical Society’s conference in Atlanta, graduate students honed their interviewing skills in a supportive environment as the Student Affairs Committee sponsored its second mock interview program. On behalf of the Student Affairs Committee, I wish to thank interviewees, interviewers, and observers for their participation in the interview process and for the feedback they provided in their evaluations. Professors Alexander M. Bielakowski and Chris Beneke deserve special thanks for their help in arranging this year’s program.

Several “search committees” conducted the simulated interviews with “job candidates.” Faculty interviewers asked candidates a variety of questions. What is your philosophy of teaching? What is your research agenda? How many survey courses can you teach? What books might you assign for a particular course? What seminars could you offer? My own set of faculty interviewers played their roles well; the formality and realism added much to the value of the experience for me.

After the mock interviews, the faculty interviewers offered constructive criticism and helpful advice to the interviewees. Topics included the proper way to construct a c.v. and possible answers to hard questions about teaching philosophy. As one interviewee wrote on his evaluation form, “getting feedback” from “very encouraging” faculty interviewers was the most helpful part of the process. My faculty interviewers made some good suggestions about the phrasing of some of my answers; they emphasized how misspeaking one or two sentences can make a big difference at an interview. One faculty interviewer focused on less tangible aspects of the interview process by “observing the interviewee’s facial expressions, tone, concerns and questions from the interviewee . . .  I wish that I had had a mock interview before I went job-hunting.”

Several participants made recommendations for future mock interview programs. One faculty interviewer wished to see sample letters of application and recommendation, as well as the c.v. Another interviewer suggested that field specialties be more clearly related between interviewers and interviewees; for example, “An Americanist interviewee should be matched with a search ‘chair’ in his/her field, plus another member with comparable interests.” 

Interviewees and interviewers alike believed that the mock interview program provided substantive benefits to all participants. Some interviewers plan to stay in touch with the graduate students they interviewed to see how they fare on the real job market. 

David J. Ulbrich is currently a doctoral student in military history at TempleUniversity and chair of The Historical Society’s Student Affairs Committee. He is the author of “Clarifying the Origins and Strategic Mission of the U.S. Marine Corps Defense Battalion, 1898-1941,” War and Society 17 (1999): 81-109. 

REGIONAL REPORTS
New York City
Martin Burke, LehmanCollege, CUNY
Joseph Skelly, College of MountSaint Vincent

On May 10, 2002, David Gordon, professor of history at Bronx Community College (CUNY) delivered an address entitled “France, 1940: The Uses of Defeat” to a combined meeting of the New York City chapter of The Historical Society and the New York Military Affairs Symposium. 

In 1940 France was defeated and overrun by the German army in less than six weeks. Of all the surprises of the Second World War, this was arguably the most startling. The defeat was the result of flawed French strategic and tactical planning and the inadequate training of several key divisions. However, one of the most remarkable results of the defeat was the decision of political leaders and commentators, both in France and the rest of the world, to ignore the technical aspects of the defeat in favor of much broader (and politically mores useful) social, economic, and political explanations. For some, the rapid French collapse was proof of the unwillingness of the military leadership and parts of the French political establishment to fight Hitler. For others, defeat was an indictment of the socialist experiments that had been enacted by the Popular Front government of 1936. What is most striking about the post-armistice period was the universal desire to mythologize the reasons for the defeat rather than analyze its purely military causes. 

The end of the Vichy regime and the defeat of Nazi Germany produced new French myths, including that of widespread French opposition to German and Vichy rule. The belief that fascism was a natural product of capitalism, already strong before the war, was given new life by the period of Vichy collaboration and would continue to inform French political discourse for decades. 

* * *

On May 29, 2002, Joseph Morrison Skelly, assistant professor of history at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City, delivered a paper entitled “The End of the Affair: Ireland, the European Union, and the Rejection of the Nice Treaty” to a joint meeting of the New York City chapter of The Historical Society and the American Irish Historical Society. 

Last year, the Irish electorate shocked the Irish and European establishments by rejecting the Nice Treaty (which expands the power of the EU over against that of member states) by a solid margin of 54% to 46%. This marks the end of Ireland ’s love affair with the European Union. It also signals the end of the European political elite’s fascination with Ireland, which had previously been considered a loyal member of the EU. The end of this affair came swiftly, abruptly and, to many uninformed observers, without warning. Divorce papers have not been served, however, and this relationship is unlikely to make its way to court for a final settlement: Ireland is not about to exit the EU. Still, a chill has settled upon the relationship, one which is quite unexpected in the context of Ireland ’s commitment to Europe over the past forty years. 

In the early 1960s Ireland eagerly sought entry into the EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Commission (EEC). Sean Lemass, then the Irish prime minister, asserted that Ireland “looked forward with a sense of deep responsibility to making a great contribution to the health and success of the European Economic Community.” On an economic level, membership in the EEC was viewed with great promise: it was envisioned as a means of fostering Irish enterprise, of expanding Irish markets, and of diluting the Irish economy’s dependency on the United Kingdom. 

These economic aims have largely been achieved. In 1960, nearly 70% of Irish exports were sent to Great Britain; today this figure has dwindled to 22%. Even more impressive, in 2001 Irish exports totaled 92.5 billion euros, the highest ever recorded and an increase of 10% over the previous year. Ireland is the world’s largest exporter of computer software, a fact made possible, in part, by its access to the European market. The country has been the beneficiary of billions of dollars in financial support from the EU, including farm subsidies, trade preferences, and infrastructure grants. In 1992, after an all-night negotiating session with EU officials, Albert Reynolds, Ireland’s prime minister at the time, boasted that more than 1.2 billion Irish pounds in EU funding “was in the bag.” Indeed, throughout the 1990s EU monetary assistance to Ireland accounted for more than 2% of its annual GDP. Since it joined the EEC in 1973, Ireland ’s standard of living has improved dramatically, increasing from under 80% of the European average to being equal today, and it is soon set to surpass the European standard. 

In this context, Ireland’s rejection of the Nice Treaty was truly surprising. Did Ireland literally bite the hand that feeds it? The Irish media elite thinks so: they scolded the Irish electorate, claiming that the result was “inexusable and unacceptable,” and “it sent entirely the wrong message to Brussels.” These journalistic strictures evoke the authoritarian image of William Butler Yeats, who aristocratically responded to the famous riots that greeted the premier of John Millington Synge’s famous drama The Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theater in 1907 by admonishing the  audience: “You have shamed yourselves!” But the Irish have not shamed themselves. Pace the Irish Times and other newspapers, Irish citizens have distinguished themselves. They have reasserted the basic principles of Irish democracy in the face of a strong centralizing undertow that is dragging the EU out to sea, far from its democratic moorings. 

This sea-change in Irish politics and reassertion of Irish democracy, has been best encapsulated by Mary Harney, Ireland’s deputy prime minister. In a speech to the American Bar Association in July, 2000, Ms. Harney opposed further European integration, asserting that it would be against the interests of Ireland, which, in her now memorable phrase, “is spiritually a lot closer to Boston than Berlin.” Ms. Harney envisioned “a Europe of independent states, not a United States of Europe.” The majority of Irish citizens seem to share her point of view, but the measure of their affinity for Boston or Berlin will be tested again in the autumn of 2002 when they vote in a second referendum on the Nice Treaty. If the Irish electorate reject it once more, the political elite in Brussels—and in Berlin—will certainly have to consider the implications of the message being broadcast to them from Ireland. Sile de Valera, the Irish minister for culture and granddaughter of Eamon de Valera, forthrightly expressed this sentiment in a September 2000 speech, ironically, in Boston: “Participation in the European Union has been good for Ireland. The Union has worked well. But it is not the cornerstone of what our nation is and should be.”

LETTERS

To the Editors,

Warren Treadgold’s “Late Ancient and Byzantine History Today” (April 2002) presents a distorted picture of Peter Brown, PrincetonUniversity’s Rollins Professor of History. Treadgold’s representation of Brown’s scholarship is disturbingly marred by factual inaccuracies. This article therefore does a disservice to The Historical Society and readers of Historically Speaking.

Treadgold would like us to believe that Peter Brown is a purveyor of Foucauldianpoststructuralism. He would like us to attribute Brown’s success and popularity to his alleged adoption of trendy postmodern fashions rather than to erudition and solid scholarship. Like some pied piper of poststructuralism, according to Treadgold, Brown casts his spell, luring scholars and graduate students away from traditional Byzantine studies to the enchanted “New Age” of Late Antiquity. This picture is highly misleading.

In the first place, Brown’s scholarship is much more traditional than Treadgold indicates. It is firmly grounded in primary sources, and consists of detailed, thoughtful analysis of texts, authors and their societies, and specific historical conditions. Brown is much more interested in texts and social realities than in abstractions. He refers to Foucault in the bibliography of The Body and Society (1988), but otherwise doesn’t seem to engage directly with Foucault or discuss Foucault’s work in his other ten books. Brown has even less to say about other poststructural theorists such as Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, etc. He does discuss late antique sources, and does engage with the main traditional scholars of the period. Brown is far from being a name-dropping, jargon-spouting, theorizing postmodernist.

His thorough mastery of the sources and the high quality of his scholarship have earned Brown the recognition and admiration of leading traditional scholars in his field, despite what Treadgold says. Brown’s insight and brilliant creativity, displayed in his eleven books and numerous articles, opened a rich field for further exploration. His scholarship covers a wide range of important aspects of late antique society and culture, from Augustine of Hippo (1967), Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine (1972), The Cult of the Saints (1981), Power and Persuasion (1992), Authority and the Sacred (1995) to Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (2002). There is no foundation for Treadgold’s charge that Brown’s work is narrowly focused on “private behavior and beliefs.” When Brown examines private behavior and beliefs it is in relation to public culture, social function, and the ordering of society as a whole, or in connection with the sources of authority or the acquisition and use of power in late antique society. Brown’s work is not narrowly focused; his works are acknowledged as major contributions in precisely the areas Treadgold considers important: “late Roman cities, government, culture, religon, and society in general.”

Treadgold asserts that Brown’s “work won acclaim chiefly from historians outside the field, who found its depiction of Late Antiquity intriguing even if they rejected poststructuralism in their own scholarship.” To say that Brown’s popularity comes “chiefly from historians outside the field” is simply not true, as the following evidence proves. 

· Robin Lane Fox, in Pagans and Christians: Religion and the Religious Life from the Second to the Fourth Century A.D. (1986), cites and praises Brown many times. And in a review of Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom (1996), which Fox calls “an essential guide for those interested in late Antiquity”(The New York Review of Books, April 24, 1997), he notes that “since 1967, Brown’s books, articles and lectures have spoken inspiringly to those who wished to find more in late antiquity than the exploitation of the ‘humble’ and the in-jokes of unidentified senators.”

·Averil Cameron, in The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity (1993), cites The Cult of the Saints (1981), Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982), and  several other of Brown’s works.

·Henry Chadwick, in his review of Brown’s Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (1992), says: “Peter Brown combines a witty and ironic prose style with the gifts of a first-class historian of late antiquity possessing an exhaustive knowledge of the sources. His latest book will certainly win him new admirers and delight old friends.” (New York Times Book Review, November 15, 1992).

· In The Rise of Christianity (1984) W.H.C. Frend refers to Brown’s works throughout. In the bibliography for his chapter on “The North African Church and Augustine,” Frend notes that there are some excellent books on the subject: “Of these I regard Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo (1967), with its erudition and sensitive handling of Augustine, as the best.” He also praises “the wealth of knowledge” in The World of Late Antiquity (1972).

· Robert Markus in The End of Ancient Christianity (1990), calls Peter Brown’s “Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy,” Journal of Roman Studies 51 (1961) “a pioneering study to which I owe much.” He refers to Brown’s books and articles often.

· In The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R.A. Markus, eds. William E. Klingshirn and Mark Vessey (1999), Brown is cited more frequently than any other scholar except for Markus himself.

These are all leading traditional scholars in the field of Late Antiquity, not “chiefly . . . historians outside the field.” They cite Brown as an authority and an expert because of the depth of his scholarship and his mastery of the sources, not for any faddish application of poststructuralism or postmodernism. The popularity Brown has won reflects appreciation of his knowledge and his gift for inspiring others. 

Here is evidence of the respect which Brown’s scholarship has rightfully earned. Readers of Historically Speaking should expect more balanced and accurate reporting than Treadgold’s. 

Jeannie Rutenburg
University of Maryland
 
 

Warren Treadgold replies: 

Far from refuting anything I wrote in my article, Jeannie Rutenburg's letter reflects the intellectual climate I described, which “permits Brown's views to stand as an unquestioned orthodoxy in their own sphere.” Although limits of space and subject restricted my remarks on Brown's work, I have treated it elsewhere in two review articles, “Imaginary Early Christianity,” International History Review 15 (1993): 535-45, and “Taking Sources on their own Terms and on Ours: Peter Brown’s Late Antiquity” AntiquitéTardive 2 (1994): 153-59, as well as a review of his Rise of Western Christendom (American Historical Review 102 [1997]: 1462-63; cf. the exchange of letters in American Historical Review 103 [1998]: 664-65). But let me clarify a few points here.

First, as I hoped the context would make clear, my comments applied to Brown's work from the 1970s on. As I wrote in my review of 1997, “Years of scarcely any criticism have taken a toll on the author of the rigorous and well-documented Augustine of Hippo (1967).”

Second, when I wrote, “Insofar as Brown referred to religion, it was something vaguely New Age that he called ‘the holy,’” I meant that he reinterpreted both Christianity and paganism to make them somewhat resemble the sort of psycho-socio-sexual-inspirational mush often known today as “New Age.” Whenever possible, Brown sees religious motives as political, cultural, psychological, or sexual. One of the most striking differences between late ancient writers and Brown's picture of them is that they constantly refer to God and he almost never does. This is probably the main reason Brown’s work appeals to readers who are bored by talk about God but interested in sociology, anthropology, psychology, and sexuality.

Third, while Brown has made no secret of his debt to Michel Foucault, I didn’t mean to imply that Brown’s work is merely derivative of Foucault’s, because Brown also influenced Foucault, and both are part of a larger postmodernist movement. As Averil Cameron wrote in a review article in the 1986 Journal of Roman Studies, “the personal connections between F[oucault] and Peter Brown, as well as being based on place (Berkeley, Paris), have been documented by F[oucault] himself . . . . [T]his seems to have been one of those cases where a number of scholars found, rather suddenly, that their thoughts were converging.” For example, she notes, “In 1981 F[oucault] wrote, in the course of an instructive dialogue . . . in which he devotes much space to the discussion by Augustine on erection and orgasm more recently expounded by Peter Brown . . . . ‘Recently, Professor Peter Brown stated to me that what we have to understand is why it is that sexuality became, in Christian cultures, the seismograph of our subjectivity.’” Though I’m encouraged to see that Foucault has become so passé that Brown’s admirers want to disown him, Brown’s work remains characterized by his own sort of jargon, by a selective and inaccurate (though prominent) use of primary sources, and by an anachronistic emphasis on the “relevance” of Late Antiquity to the modern world. His real interest is in private behavior and beliefs, which are his points of reference in his discussions of other aspects of Late Antiquity.

Finally, that Brown’s admirers are “chiefly” non-specialists should be obvious from the fact that he is the only historian of Late Antiquity most non-specialists have heard of and may even have read. To take a recent example, in the February 15, 2002 Times Literary Supplement a historian of medicine dismisses most of “the current fashionable historical genre of ‘the body’” but exempts Brown (without considering his accuracy) because he “makes the early Christian era come alive.” Of course, Brown’s work couldn’t have attained the status of a stultifying orthodoxy if it hadn’t been endorsed by some specialists who should know better. While the scholars cited by Rutenberg include none of the historians of Late Antiquity I mentioned in my article as particularly outstanding (admittedly not an exhaustive list), note that her quotations from W. H. C. Frend and Robert Markus refer only to Brown’s work up to 1972. Averil Cameron does cite Brown’s later work in her Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, but with important reservations. On page six, she observes that his approach is “very different” from that of earlier scholars, and that under his influence “‘late antiquity’ is in danger of having become an exotic territory, populated by wild monks and excitable virgins and dominated by the clash of religions, mentalities, and lifestyles.” Robin Lane Fox, no specialist on the later part of Late Antiquity, did what non-specialists usually do in reviewing books by famous scholars, and swallowed whole the errors and distortions in Brown’s Rise of Western Christendom. Brown’s celebrity is such that a number of specialists will not express in print the unfavorable opinions of his work that they voice in private. But most of them hardly ever cite him, and he hardly ever cites them.

I find no inaccuracies in my article, though its treatment was inevitably simplified.

Warren Treadgold
St. LouisUniversity

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