DUHS Academic Journal 2019/20

07 | The Legacy of Cuthbert Dr Charlie Rozier discusses his new book, Writing History in the Community of St. Cuthbert.

124 | Gendering the Metropolis Three students debate the connections between gender and urbanisation in modernity.

EDITORIAL JOURNAL TEAM Editors-in-Chief: Joseph Beaden and Alex Hibberts Layup Designers: Alexandra Beste, Maddy Copley, Aime Kirby Editors: Ines Andrade, Thomas Banbury, Matthew Carr, Hazel Laurenson, Phoebe Thomas, Ellie Williams-Brown

IMAGE REFERENCES Cover image by cottonbro 2-3 Editorial and Content page image by pine watt 6 Durham Cathedral tower by Lee Robinson 10 Dublin Library by Giammarco Boscaro 15 Abbaye de Fontenay by Matthieu Staelen 20 Buildings in Sarlat-la-CanĂŠda by Tom Parkes 24 The Forbidden City by Ling Gigi 29 Indian map by Chance Agrella 34 Durham Cathedral arches by Billy Willson 43 Norfolk Island by Jack Cantwell 52 Chureito Pagoda by Manuel Cosentino 58 Budapest by Keszthelyi Timi 66 Cape Town from above by Marcelo Novais 74 1963 Civil Rights March by Library of Congress 82 Kampala skyline by Drew Willson 90 Durham Cathedral ceiling by Gary Campbell-Hall 102 Palette by Kai Dahms 112 St. Petersburg train station by Mehrnaz Taghavishavazi 124 Durham Cathedral benches by dkodigital 127 Eiffel Tower by John Towner 135 London Bridge by Charles Postiaux 142 Big Ben Tower by Henry Be

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CONTENTS 4 Letter from the Editors Joe Beaden & Alex Hibberts 5 Presidential Address Tom Henderson

2,000 WORDS 7 Writing History in the Community of St. Cuthbert Dr Charlie Rozier 10 Anthropology & the Middle Ages Ines Andrade 15 Cistercian Charism Thomas Banbury 20 Gender in Early Modern Europe Jack Snell 24 Cities of Imperial China Karl Omae 29 Britain & India’s History Heidi Januszewski

4,000 WORDS 35 Theatre States Charlie Procter 43 Aboriginal Peoples in the South Pacific Anne Herbert Ortega 52 East Asia & The Environment Francis Braddel 58 Holocaust Cities Alexandra Beste 66 Apartheid & Resistance Dylan Cresswell 74 Memory & The Civil Rights Movement Amy Swain 82 Development Policies in Sudan & Uganda Natasha Livingston

6,000 WORDS 91 Fernand Braudel’s ‘The Mediterranean’ Toby Donnegan-Cross 102 Sexual Violence in Weimar Germany Eleanor Radcliffe 112 The ‘Body’ in Russian History Emily Wall

FEATURED 124 Gendering the Metropolis: A Debate Dr Markian Prokopovych 127 Female Agency in the Modern European Metropolis Georgie E. Caine 135 Fields of Power Artemis Irvine 142 Gender in Modern London Alice McKimm

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EDITORS’ LETTER Dear reader, Welcome to the 2019/20 edition of the Durham University History Society Journal.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to work in a way which we never expected. The quality of this journal, and the many entries we have received are a tribute to the resilience and dedication of the editorial team. Aime Kirby, Hazel Laurenson, Matthew Carr, Thomas Banbury, Phoebe Thomas, Ines Andrade and Ellie Williams-Brown should all be commended for their hard work. Without their help, the high quality of this year’s journal would not have been possible. A special thanks should also be given to Madigan Copley, who designed the cover of this edition, and Alexandra Beste, who designed the journal’s layout.

The theme of this year’s journal is ‘Centring Peripheries’, whether these be geographical, ideological, social or historiographical.

This involves challenging our preconceived intellectual horizons and seeking new areas for exploration. For many, this has required looking beyond a Eurocentric perspective.

Accordingly, this journal incorporates a selection of outstanding essays on a range of subjects which either entirely focus on areas outside Europe or explore the interaction of European peoples with others. Anne Herbert Ortega has produced a piece on attitudes towards indigenous populations in the South Pacifi , whilst Francis Braddell-Dawson has brought environmental perspectives to the study of East Asian states.

Many of our peripheries can be found closer to home. Thomas Banbury, for example, has written on how ideas of love were employed by the Cistercians in the twelfth-century.

Emily Wall has examined the ways sexual violence was treated in Weimar Germany, and Eleanor Radcliffe has discussed our understanding of prostitution in Russian history.

Often, historians have sought to frame their investigations of the past by tapping into alternative disciplinary perspectives. Within this volume, Ines Andrade has questioned how

modern anthropological methods can be used to study Salian Germany (1024-1125). Renegotiating our understanding of gender in the past is also highly important, as demonstrated

by Jack Snell, who has written on the limits to women’s agency in Early Modern England.

Toby Donegan-Cross performs a similar role in his essay, seeking to examine the legacy of the Annales school, and the way historians write about their own profession.

History can also provide perspective on contemporary events, in particular, the struggle against systemic racism currently sweeping across America and Europe. This has seen much soul searching, especially in the USA and UK, over how we should respond to the legacy of the slave trade. In Bristol, for example, recent protests have led to the removal of the statue of Edward Colson, a former slave trader. Amy Swain and Dylan Cresswell have written about other areas of Black History. Swain investigates how memory was utilised and created by the 1960s Civil Rights movement, whilst Cresswell has explored the history of black resistance in the early years of the South African Union.

In our staff essay contribution, Dr. Charlie Rozier discusses his upcoming book, Writing History in the Community of St Cuthbert, c.700-1130: From Bede to Symeon of Durham.

This article argues that the preeminence of Cuthbert’s community stemmed from its knowledge of, and ability to articulate, its own history.

Overall, the journal that follows is one of the most engaging, relevant, and beautifully designed to date. We hope that all readers will find something within that interests them, and that these essays inspire your own historical writing in turbulent times.

Yours sincerely, Joseph Beaden & Alex Hibberts

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PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS Fellow historians, The centring of peripheries is, in some ways, what we all do as historians. Even as undergraduates, in our projects and dissertations, we seek out those parts of the past which have been neglected and pushed to one side. To stay in the centre is to regurgitate other people’s scholarship It is worthwhile, then, to ask why certain subjects or ideas have been pushed to the periphery. As we do this, it becomes obvious that this principle of relegation holds true not only for certain kinds of history, but also for certain kinds of historians.

As well as the worldwide attention paid recently to racial discrimination in the USA and in the UK, there have been several vocal debates about the marginalised experiences of People of Colour at Durham, which have brought further vocal responses. I would like to use this President’s Note to direct my white peers to a couple of facts. Our student body is 67% white; Durham County as a whole is 98.2%. Black students in Durham are not only an extreme minority, but a disproportionate minority: they make up 7% of the UK student population, but only 1% of that in Durham.

Among history students in the UK, the story is similar (only 2% in 2018, according to the Royal Historical Society). This is the context in which our peers of colour have to work; it is hardly surprising to read in the pages of Palatinate that they have had enough.

Part of the project of decolonisation is to address this imbalance; the disproportionate relegation of non-white perspectives to the periphery. There are, of course, moral and ethical justifications for this, which have been better laid out elsewhere; I want to sketch an historical one. One interesting aspect of centres and peripheries is that they are interrelated; you cannot have one without the other.

The centre cannot fully be understood without the periphery, and vice-versa. You cannot fully understand the trouble the Society has attracting speakers to our Tuesday talks by examining Durham University alone; you must also

appreciate that, central as it may be for us, we live in a geographically peripheral city, through which the fast train to Edinburgh runs without stopping. We cannot properly grasp the history of our own university if we do not reckon with its (still little-researched) colonial heritage: its old colleges in Sierra Leone and Barbados; the links to the slave-trade of benefactors such as Douglas Horsfall. Without the periphery, the centre cannot make sense (even if it can, for a time, hold).

Histories told without reference to their peripheries – without ‘decolonisation’ – are not only vulnerable to ethical critiques; they are incomplete as histories.

The Society this year is not immune to critiques of lack of diversity: of our 8 speakers, we hosted only 3 women and 1 Person of Colour; we failed to overcome the demographics of our subject as a whole. We – I – hope that the Society can do better next year. This disappointment aside, we had many successes in other areas: the topics of our talks were reasonably varied and, while we were unfortunately forced to cancel our conference, we successfully supplemented our usual programme with a Teach-Out - ‘Histories of Inequality & Resistance’ – hosting members of the department during the UCU strikes.

I would like to thank all the Society members who crowded on rainy Tuesday evenings into Seminar Room 1, asked questions, and helped move chairs around. Our departmental liaisons – Dr Anne Heffernan and Dr Richard Huzzey – have also been wonderful.

Finally, I must thank the fantastic executive committee this year. The achievements mentioned above, and the journal below, represent their hard work much more than mine. I just get to type it all up.

Yours sincerely, Thomas Henderson

2,000 WORDS

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WRITING HISTORY Writing History in the Community of St Cuthbert, c.700-1130: From Bede to Symeon of Durham Dr Charlie Rozier CHARLIE ROZIER is Lecturer in Medieval European History at Durham University. He specialises in the cultural and intellectual history of western Europe, c.800-1200, and is particularly interested in finding out how communities engaged with their past during this period. He has written articles on Anglo-Norman historians such as Orderic Vitalis, Eadmer of Canterbury and our own Symeon of Durham, and is about to publish a new book on history-writing in St Cuthbert’s community.

For me, this year sees one of the most exciting moments of any historian’s career: the publication of my first full book. My topic relates to the theme ‘centring peripheries’ in several ways as I hope to show here, while also lending some insight into how academic books are written. Although the book appears in 2020, I have been researching some of the topics for over ten years. I am now glad to get it out there and see what my readers can learn from it! A fundamental question that has driven much of my research, is to try and find out how medieval people themselves thought about historical time and previous societies: were they interested in their past, and if so, how did they try to learn more about it?

The community of St Cuthbert offers a helpful context to explore these questions.

Founded on Lindisfarne in 635, the community later moved first to Chester-Le-Street (early 880s) and then Durham (995). The surviving evidence tells us that members of the community wrote or procured at least eighteen original histories and obtained copies of about twenty more pre-existing works between c.700 and 1130, although the actual totals were almost certainly higher. The texts range from lengthy narrative histories like Symeon of Durham’s

account of the Durham church (written c.110415) to tiny tables of short, one-line annals. Several of the medieval manuscripts can be found in Durham’s Cathedral and University Library collections and have never left Durham since the time they were made over 900 years ago.

The main argument of my book proposes that members of Cuthbert’s community were able to maintain a position at the centre of political, ecclesiastical and economic life in the northern limits of England, because they were aware of their history. Writing history helped its authors to explain subjects such as who Cuthbert was and why he was important, what miracles had occurred around his relics, why these relics had been moved from Lindisfarne, and most importantly, how the present generation could claim continuity and legitimacy along a line of descent from the earliest foundations over 400 years before. As Symeon explained in the early twelfth century: Although for various reasons this church no longer stands in the place where Oswald founded it, nevertheless by virtue of the constancy of its faith, the dignity and authority of its episcopal throne, and the status of the dwelling-place of monks established there by himself and Bishop Aidan, it is still the very same church founded by God’s command.1

1 Symeon of Durham, Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius hoc est Dunhelmensis, ecclesie, i.1, ed. and trans. D.W. Rollason (Oxford, 2000), pp. 16-17.

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Symeon aimed to explain the historical circumstances by which his generation had come to inherit property and political influence in the north of England from their predecessors.

The success of his work was based on his ability to compile a narrative that sounded complete (with no gaps in the information provided) and which, as a result, was persuasive.

Although they take a variety of forms, almost all of the histories produced in Cuthbert’s community over the early medieval period shared Symeon’s aims. The early medieval history of Cuthbert’s community is defined by its reaction to change, and turning to the past seems to have been a regular part of their response. In 793, the Lindisfarne monastery was attacked by Vikings. Although he was not present, Alcuin of York provided a vivid contemporary reaction to this attack, describing how: The pagans desecrated the sanctuaries of God and poured out the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste to the house of our hope, trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the street.2

Despite this dramatic scene, Cuthbert’s community survived the disaster. Following a renewed Viking presence in the region during the ninth century, however, Bishop Eardwulf decided that it was now time to leave. Between 875 and the early 880s, Cuthbert’s relics were carried around the north of England. You may be familiar with Fenwick Lawson’s sculpture of this in Millennium Place in Durham. Symeon described this as a period of ever-dwindling fortunes for a community ‘always without any fixed home’, running ‘like sheep fleeing from the jaws of wolves’.3 Modern historians, however, have argued that Eardwulf’s itinerary was in fact a carefully crafted tour of the community’s landholdings.4 Cuthbert’s relics were shown off (including the beautiful late seventh-century wooden coffin still on display in the Cathedral) and sections of the histories recounting his life were recited to audiences, cementing

Cuthbert’s highly visible presence in uncertain times, and perhaps more crucially, assuring that tenants continued to pay their rents!

In the early 880s, Cuthbert’s relics were installed at Chester-Le-Street. By the mid-tenth century, a visit Æthelstan, self-proclaimed king of England, left no doubt of the central role that Cuthbert’s community was now playing in the far north of England. Æthelstan gave a large estate of land at Wearmouth and moveable goods including books, gold and silver plate, cups and ornaments, bells, coins and an elaborate new copy of the Life of St Cuthbert, which included a grand image of Æthelstan giving the book to St Cuthbert.5 Not long after this visit, Cuthbert’s community produced a narrative history titled the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto (History of St Cuthbert) which collected records of property donations from the seventh century down to later continuations made in the early eleventh. This was a confident statement of power from a community that was now in league with kings.

My book examines the story of history-writing in Cuthbert’s community down to c.1130, but many more histories were written after this down to the later Middle Ages. I chose to begin with the earlier works, because they really shaped the narrative of what came after. If we want to understand the evolution of Durham’s medieval historiography, we have to start on Lindisfarne in the later seventh century and work forwards from here. I would very much like to write another book to complete this story, but it may take me another ten years of research!

The process of writing a book has taught me that we almost never really finish learning the whole story of a historical subject or period. I’m sure that anyone who has recently completed a dissertation would agree with this.

The challenge of writing an extended project like this, is to find a narrative thread that you want to tell, and which helps your audience to

2 ‘Letter of Alcuin to Higbald, Bishop of Lindisfarne, and his monks, condoling them for the sack of Lindisfarne (793, after 8 June)’, English Historical Documents I: c.500-1142, ed. D. Whitelock (London, 1968), pp. 778-9.’

3 Symeon, LDE, ii.9 (ed. Rollason, pp. 110-111).

4 W.M. Aird, St Cuthbert and the Normans: the Church of Durham, 1071-1153 (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 34-5; , ed. T. J. South (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 100-1.

5 Recorded in HSC, 26 (ed. South, pp. 64-7)..

ROZIER - WRITING HISTORY understand the source material. In my case, my narrative shows how various authors used the writing of history and their demonstration of past precedent as a means to respond to change, but we could also show evidence that people learned and wrote about history sim-

9 ply because they were interested in their past and their own place within that story. This is of course something that I am always striving to find in my work, and I hope to be able to write about this and find new narratives to understand my topic in the coming years.

ANTHROPOLOGY & THE MIDDLE AGES How useful is modern anthropology to the historian of the Salian era?

Ines Andrade As Geoffrey Koziol satirized, medievalists using anthropological theory have often been portrayed as easily swayed by a dubious source base. By depicting medieval people equally as gullible, they apparently perceived them as easily won over by pomp and ceremony.1 Particularly concerning ritual (the focus of this essay) the application of anthropology has been argued to over-simplify or even distort medieval history. While this criticism is of note, it does not warrant the abandonment of cross-disciplinary studies all together. If we reposition our understanding of anthropology in light of these criticisms, taking into account their own failings, we can come to a deeper understanding. This ‘respects medieval ritual’, not for its

primitiveness, but for what it can reveal about the medieval mentality.2 Owing to the brevity of this essay, I will explore this through a close reading of Wipo’s The Deeds of Conrad II (hereafter Deeds).

Anthropological theory defines ritual as a wordless symbolic language, governed by patterned, repetitive acts.3 These acts represent collective interpretations of political and social institutions. Following the classical paradigm of Émile Durkheim, society is composed of both social realities and their representations.

4 Expressing these representations symbolically, ritual communicates and reaffirms the collective culture of that society.5 As Durkheim summarised “the group periodically renews

1 Geoffrey Koziol, ‘Review article: The dangers of polemic: Is ritual still an interesting topic of historical study?’ Early Medieval Europe, vol 11 (2002).

2 Paraphrasing Christina Pössel, ‘The magic of early medieval ritual’. Early Medieval Europe, vol 17 (2009) p. 113.

3 E.R Leach, ‘Ritualization in Man in Relation to Conceptual and Social Development’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences, vol. 251, no. 772 (1966), pp. 403-408.

4 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, (Cambridge, 1989) p. 50.

5 Ibid, p. 50.

ANDRADE - ANTHROPOLOGY & THE MIDDLE AGES the sentiment to which it has of itself and its unity”.6 These ideas increasingly permeated historical works. Scholars focusing on medieval ritual used anthropological tools to clarify their studies. In particular, early investigations emphasise the function of unification Ritual was not only important, but “the necessary way for achieving group cohesion”.7 Concerning Medieval German history particularly, this cross-disciplinary focus is clearest in the collective works of Gerd Althoff. The ritual ‘rules of the game’ were universally known, wordlessly strengthening the bonds between peoples and institutions.8 This reflects the structuralist view of Claude Lévi-Strauss; such symbols are universally recognisable, composed in subconscious ‘structures’ which determine all of human, or in this case, medieval thought.9 Therefore, especially politically, ritual gave “symbolic expression to the cohesion and aims of the group”.10 This argument has met criticism, particularly from post-modern deconstructionists.

This is best expressed by Philippe Buc’s controversial The Dangers of Ritual. His argument follows two main strands. Historical study of ritual is always dependent on the archive. For Buc, this means that the historian cannot clarify their studies with external evidence. Their interpretations are always distorted along the lines of the medieval author. What the author presents as ‘ritual’ is not ritual as it was widely

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known or recognised, but the chronicler’s partisan view of traditional ceremonies. It is their depiction less than an actuality.11 This debate can be brought into clearer light by analysing Deeds. Wipo places great emphasis on the crowd that “hastened to follow the king (…) to receive the most holy unction”.12 Anointing the king’s body and granting his crown, this traditional ritual drew from the Archbishop of Mainz’s political power.13 According to the traditional application of anthropology, the election becomes a symbolic show, publicly affirming the ‘social reality’ of Conrad’s kingship. Althoff’s work furthers this by examining three petitioners who beg Conrad for help. For Althoff, this allowed Conrad to evidence his kingly qualities.14 Consolidating himself as a worthy medieval king, he reminded his audience of the society they lived in, uniting his people under these collective beliefs.

However, whether the people actually saw this as ‘unifying ritual’ is hard to say. This can be seen more clearly in the deditio of the Ravenese army. Timothy Reuter states that this drew on a well-known religious-ritual dialect.15A ritual surrender, this involved forces appearing before the king in the clothes of the penitent. Althoff similarly emphasises it as a common way of restoring peace in the medieval period.16 Yet Deeds implies this is not entirely the case. Wipo reports that Conrad made sure rebels appeared “as he had ordered – in sackcloth and barefeet with unsheathed swords”.17

6 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary forms of Religious Life, transl. J. W Swain, George Allen & Uwin (London, 1915) p.

375.

7 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge, 1997) p. 4.

8 Gerd Althoff, ‘The Variability of Rituals in the Middle Ages’ in eds. Gerd Althoff, J. Fried and P. Geary, Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, (Cambridge, 2002) pp. 71-73.

9 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning, (Oxfordshire, 2001).

10 Gerd Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social bonds in Medieval Europe, transl. Christopher Carroll, (Cambridge, 2004) p. 139.

11 Phillipe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory, (Princeton, 2001).

12 Wipo, c. 1047, ‘The Deeds of Conrad II’, transl. T. E. Mommsen and K. F. Morrison in Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, (New York, 1962) p. 66.

13 Stefan Weinfurter, The Salian Century: Main Currents in an Age of Transition, (Philadelphia, 1999) p.22.

14 Althoff, ‘The Variability of Rituals’, p. 78.

15 Timothy Reuter, ‘Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance: Violence and peace in the politics of the Salian era’ In J. Nelson (eds) Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, (Cambridge, 2006) p. 381.

16 Althoff, ‘The Variability of Rituals’, p. 75.

17 Wipo, ‘Deeds’, p. 77.

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Conrad’s direct order indicates this ritual was not universally recognised - rather, it had to be manipulated by the king.

More importantly, it also had to be manipulated by the author. Conrad’s direct order is written by Wipo, who gives the ritual meaning in his emphasis. Certainly, this can be seen in narrative devices he utilises throughout. A leitmotif in Deeds is that Conrad will protect “widows and orphans”.18 Here ‘widows and orphans’ signifies ‘the helpless’. This becomes embodied by the petitioners, one of whom is a widow, the other an orphan. Wipo thereby conditions the meaning of the ritual. We can also see this in Conrad’s kindness to the petitioners. Wipo contrasts this to the princes, who wish to hurry him along. This reinforces Althoff’s analysis that the king demonstrated his qualities, but not necessarily through the ritual itself. Ritual meaning instead is constructed throughout the narrative by Wipo.

Historians using anthropological theory can thereby be seen as trying to decipher the medieval world using tools inapplicable to it.

Notions that ‘ritual’ indicates a ‘representation of social reality’ creating ‘unity’ are anachronisms. This pinches the medieval text to fit a reductive anthropological framework. It reduces the medieval period to a mystical time “where rituals worked, in contrast to our modern, disenchanted world”.19 While chroniclers presented ritual in this way, it did not necessarily have this effect on medieval society.

This idea is worth considering, certainly, I have shown it has weight in Wipo’s work.

However, while Buc’s theory problematises the use of certain types of anthropology, it does not justify its conclusion that “ultimately, there can be no anthropological readings of rituals depicted in medieval texts”.20 Buc’s argument separates ‘anthropology’ and ‘textual analysis’ in a way that is not entirely natural. In a rebuttal to criticism of his work, he maintained he

was not criticizing anthropology in itself, only its application to history.21 The anthropologist can validate his research on the field meaning anthropological theory does not account for textual distortion. If the anthropologist could witness a medieval ritual, perhaps he could grapple with applying his theory to it. However, this places an ironically medieval privilege on sight. It implies that there is a self-evident truth in witnessing ritual. As multiple anthropologists have shown, this is not the case. Written field work must be carefully analysed. Tainted by the biases and cultural framework of the anthropologist, even witnessed ritual contains a multitude of possible renderings.

In this, Buc applies postmodern deconstructionism too partially. This was something he admitted: If we deconstruct ‘ritual’, the same applies to any historical category.22 Deconstructive theory defines that all meaning within text is infinitely deferred. When we read a word, it carries a number of associations which overspill each other. Thus to ‘interpret’ something and call it ‘universal’ is trying to make your interpretation authoritative with a so-called stamp of universality.23 Buc tries to apply this theory to medieval ritual exclusively, yet the argument is only consistent if we understand that meaning in all written texts can be obscured. This is why you can look at anthropology from a deconstructive lens, as I have evidenced above. If anthropology must also account for rendering and textual distortion, then it is not as inapplicable to history as Buc implies.

This indicates that we can apply anthropology to history, as long as we carefully consider both historical and anthropological cautions on the possible distortion of ritual accounts. Further, deconstructive theories do not call for an abandonment of all text, as Buc does of ritual. Rather, they encourage close analysis to figure out how dominant ‘meanings’ are be-

18 Ibid, p.68.

19 Pössel, ‘The magic of early medieval ritual’, p. 112.

20 Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, p. 4.

21 Phillipe Buc, ‘The Monster and its critics: a ritual reply’. Early Medieval Europe, vol 15 (2007) p. 441.

22 Ibid, p. 442.

23 See for instance Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (London, 1998).

ANDRADE - ANTHROPOLOGY & THE MIDDLE AGES ing constructed. If Wipo is trying to lean his audience towards a certain view of ritual, how is his interpretation being grounded?

Wipo does appear to be trying to universalise his interpretation of rituals. In his justification for his work, Wipo remarks that a good king’s deeds should be recorded for future generations. He underlines “I have wished to write for the common use of readers something which would (also) be pleasing to hearers”.24 While medieval society was largely illiterate, he makes it clear that he wants his text to be widely known orally. This interacts with modern anthropology. Stephen Lukes particularly opposed ‘social cohesion’ as a function of ritual. Because ritual is inevitably controlled by those in power, its production is unequal. Less than creating social cohesion, ritual thereby ‘mobilizes the biases’ of the elite.25 What Wipo is doing could be described as ‘mobilizing bias’ or, in Christina Pössel’s terms, “publishing (his) version as widely and as ‘authoritatively’ as possible”.26 If we understand Wipo’s account trying to spread his interpretation to both a literate and illiterate audience, his piece would also have to consider how that broad range of people expected ritual to act. For instance, his stress on the public nature of the coronation ceremony implies a socio-cultural need for the king’s ascension to be public and demonstrative. This is not to say the crowd necessarily felt unified under Conrad’s vision of society. It is to say that Wipo felt the need to depict it in this way, implying that this was of importance to his readers and ‘hearers’. This can further be seen in Wipo’s treatment of Duke Ernst’s surrender.

Abandoned by his men, Ernst “therefore rendered himself to the emperor without any negotiated agreement”.27 This ‘agreement’ could refer to deditio, which Reuter highlights was

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often highly politically machinated. Instead of being restored his fief , as surrendering rebels often were, Ernst was exiled.28 His inability to negotiate deditio, and Wipo’s long quotations of speeches from his abandoning men, is of vital importance. It implies that the ability to create ritual relied on a body of men, or at least does in Wipo’s account. This indicates an existing mentality that ritual power required popular support.

This is just one example of how we can use anthropological and textual analysis to understand medieval mentalities. Certainly, as well as stressing what medieval society perceived as important, this can also tell us about the mindset of the chronicler. As David Warner comments of Widukind, Wipo’s stress on various parts of different rituals denotes “how important he thought it was and how worthy of being remembered”.29 Certainly, Buc’s argument in some ways implies a return to the nineteenth century treatment of medieval German texts. This compared volumes for repeated facts and removed any ‘inconsistencies’, things that appeared to be opinion or were not verified in other sources. Studies more recently have shown that such ‘inconsistency’, whether historical fact or not, can tell us about culture and society.30 This belies a fundamental issue in Buc’s work: his argument that no historical fact can be drawn from studying ritual. Anthropological study focuses on mentality, not fact. We do not learn facts from rituals, at least if we define ‘facts’ as things that occur with an evidently logical explanation. Rather they tell us about how a particular culture works and interprets itself. To discover this in a medieval context, understanding how ritual is constructed by the chronicler is critical, and not to be pointed out then dismissed. Certainly, Dušan Zupka points

24 Wipo, ‘Deeds’, p. 56.

25 Steven Lukes, ‘Political Ritual and Social Integration’, Sociology vol 9, no. 2 (1975); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory,

Ritual Practice, (Oxford, 2009) p. 172.

26 Pössel, ‘The magic of early medieval ritual’, p. 119.

27 Wipo, ‘Deeds’, p. 82.

28 Reuter, ‘Peace-breaking, feud, rebellion, resistance’, p. 381.

29 David Warner, ‘Rituals, Kingship and Rebellion in Medieval Germany’, History Compass, vol 8 (2010) p. 1209.

30 Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages c. 800-1056, (London, 1998) pp. 6-16; Warner, ‘Rituals, Kingship and Rebellion’.

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out that an entirely accurate depiction of historical events will not be found in ritual texts, but this is not the point. More crucially, the events depicted indicate how a subset of medieval people saw themselves and their society.31 As Lukes indicates, applying close textual analysis and anthropological theory can allow us some insight into this, without projecting modern ideas onto the past.

Thus, as Buc criticises, seeing ritual along the lines of mere ‘social cohesion’ reads back anthropological theory onto the past. Yet, his complete banishment misunderstands the central goals both of postmodern deconstruc-

tion and anthropology in itself. We must see medieval ritual more along Luke’s lines as a ‘mobilization of biases’, and see medieval texts as an active part in this ‘mobilization’. If we see chronicles as both creating and reflecting what medieval people expected of ritual, we do not come to a simplified picture of primitive people, awed into submission by flas y display. Instead, we can start to demystify how medieval authors viewed their society and what their society expected of them. Understanding mentalities in this way remains useful to the historian of the Salian period.

31 Dušan Zupka, Ritual and Symbolic Communication in Medieval Hungary under the Árpád Dynasty (1000 - 1301) (Leiden, 2016) p. 9.

CISTERCIAN LOVE The Conversion of Love, or the Love of Converts: Caritas and Amor in the Cistercian Charism Thomas Banbury As the Cistercian order expanded out of Burgundy and into much of western Christendom through the middle of the twelfth century, and particularly with their programme of institutional consolidation in the 1160s, the writings of its brothers formed a distinctive genre in the canon of theological and pastoral texts in the high middle ages.1 In work as stylistically diverse as Bernard of Clairvaux’s (1090-1153) letters and sermons, Walter Daniel’s Vita Ailredi, and the ‘primitive’ statues of the Cistercian order, the Carta Caritatis, the multivalent theme of ‘love’, variously expressed and defined is often identified as the key thematic link of Cistercian thought.2 Perhaps the abundance of ‘love’, for God and one’s neighbour, should hardly be surprising in Christian writings; after all, ‘Deus caritas est’ - declares John’s first epistle – ‘God is love’. Consideration of the na-

ture of holy love was not limited to Cistercian circles either, as the work of the Benedictine contemporary of Bernard, William of Saint Thierry, demonstrates. However, the roots of Cistercian discourses on love go deeper than New Testament maxims or a rejection of pagan doctrines of love. Drawing on provocative new images and stylistic topoi which blurred the sexual/chaste and male/female divides, as well as older models of Christian love derived from Saint Augustine and other Church Fathers, Bernard and his brother-monks delineated a new praxis of Christian life for twelfth-century Europe. Beginning with the Carta Caritatis, we will see Cistercian emphasis on love as part of a conscious self-fashioning closely related to the context of their development out of the Cluniac confraternity and the wider Benedictine community, even considering the doubts about

1 C. Berman, The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, 2000),

p. 46.

2 G. Evans, The Mind of St. Bernard Of Clairvaux (Oxford, 1983), p. 119; Geoffrey Webb, “The Cistercian Memoria: William Of Saint Thierry”, New Blackfriars, 47/547 (1966), p. 210.

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sequencing raised by Constance Berman. The works of Bernard and his contemporaries between the 1120s and the 1140s opened up new ways to love God in the rapidly expanding order, which had to contextualise the high-fl wn discourse of patristic love for a new membership.

The English language concept of ‘love’ is vastly inadequate to translate the range of aspects it is used to encompass in renderings of patristic and medieval Christian texts. The division of various types of love found in Greek philosophy (έρως for sexual love, στωργή for familial love, and ἀγάπη for divine or charitable love, etc.) was certainly a factor in medieval discourses. The business of rendering these concepts into a Latin, Christian context was largely undertaken by patristic writers, in particular St. Jerome’s translation and editing of older editions of biblical texts to produce the Vulgate, and St. Augustine’s discussion of caritas and cupiditas as contrasting types of love in the third book of his De Doctrina Christiana (397), to name but two examples. Throughout the Vulgate and Augustine’s writings, specificall , his homilies on John’s first epistle, the Greek concept of ἀγάπη is translated into the Latin caritas, often rendered by its English descendant ‘charity’. The ἀγάπη/caritas equivalence predates both Augustine and Jerome, however, and seems to have been carried over from the Vetus Latinus Bible during Jerome’s preparation of the Vulgate. While linking ἀγάπη and caritas, both expressing a selfles , altruistic and holy love, is fairly straightforward from the textual evidence, the association of έρως, sexual desire, with the Latin amor is far more problematic. As Michael Casey points out ‘amor was used for a strongly-felt affective experience, such as ordinary sexual love, but also mystical love’.3 The tension between the sexual and the chaste in amor and the frequency with which it appears in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, particularly in his sermons on the Song of Songs and in the works of William of St.

Thierry, point to a high medieval Christian discourse on love which is more nuanced than a simple equivalence between ἀγάπη/caritas and έρως/amor. For this study, I will use the terms as they appear in their respective contexts i.e. caritas rather than charity or love, with the understanding that they impute a more specific aspect or practice of love than is implied by the English word alone.

The Summa Carta Caritatis, purportedly one of the foundational statutes of the Cistercian order, is variously translated as the ‘Summary of the charter of Love’ or ‘Charity’. The Exordium Cistercii, a short narrative account of the founding of Cîteaux usual prefixed to the Carta, identifies it as having been drawn up by the second abbot Stephen Harding early in the development of the order, in order to prevent rapid and disorganised expansion from ‘suffocating the fruit of mutual peace’.4 The Carta appears in three versions; the Summa, discussed above, and the Carta Caritatis Prior and Posterior, the latter ostensibly an updated version of the Prior version. Each gives different, but related reasons for the emphasis on caritas in Cistercian thought. The Exordium which prefaces the Summa states that Stephen Harding coined the term ‘Charter of Charity’ ‘for, clearly, its whole content so breathed love that almost nothing else is seen to be treated there than this’.5 The later Carta Caritatis Posterior relates its title to more prosaic demands; ‘They [the monks of Cîteaux] also decided that this decree should be called a Charter of Charity, for its statues, spurning the burden of heavy exaction, related only to charity and the welfare of soul in things human and divine’.6 The bonds of the Cistercian order were thus supposedly founded on the mutual expression caritas between a mother abbey and its filiation Here, the Cistercians use the idea that caritas underscores their organisational structure, setting themselves in contrast to their regional rivals, the Cluniacs.

Cluny certainly retained a tighter economic and organisational grip on its daughter-houses

3 M. Casey, Athirst For God (Kalamazoo, 1987), pp. 90-1.

4 ‘Exordium Cistercii’, trans. B.K. Lackner, in Louis J. Lekai, The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality (Kent, OH., 1977), p. 444; Berman, The Cistercian Evolution, p. 56.

5 Lekai, The Cistercians, p. 444.

6 ‘Carta Caritatis Posterior’, trans. B.K. Lackner, in Lekai, The Cistercians, p. 462.

BRADBURY - CISTERCIAN LOVE than did Cîteaux, particularly under the abbacy of St. Hugh (1049-1109).7 The charters of the Cistercians, therefore, emphasise love between houses as part of a conscious act of self-fashioning in opposition to the Benedictines. This interpretation is supported by more revisionist scholarship which has cast significant doubt on the dating of the primitive documents of the Cistercian order. Constance Berman’s radical re-dating of these foundational documents, purportedly from the 1130s, to the 1160s offers a new context for understanding the Cistercian emphasis on caritas.8 Berman’s contention is that the early texts of the Cistercian community in Burgundy were either fabricated, or at least significantly refashioned, in the 1160s in order to crystallise the history and ontogeny of an ordo cisterciensis in reaction to clashes with the Cluniacs, as well as the growing prominence of the Clairvaux fi iation, which had become the centre of gravity for the reform community during Bernard’s career.9 In as much as the theme of caritas may pervade the ‘primitive’ documents in a more deliberate and politically pointed manner than had previously been thought, we can make direct links between the discourses of love in the cartae and exordia, and the theme as it appears in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, which would have been familiar to the compilers (or authors) of the collected primitive documents presented to Alexander III in 1165.10 Fully explaining the themes of love in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux (and his uses and vocabulary are certainly diverse) is perhaps beyond the scope of this study. However,

17 contextualising Bernard amongst his contemporaries does open up a fruitful line of inquiry within a dense body of scholarship. In order to retain a clearer focus on the question at hand, my discussion of Bernard will be based primarily on his eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, composed between 1135 and 1153, and his Liber De Diligendo Deo, written sometime between 1126 and 1141.11 Beginning with the earlier text, De Diligendo Deo, often translated as ‘On Loving God’, presents Bernard’s philosophy of love in Christian life and worship. Bernard begins with a consideration of the origins of love, in much the same way that his Benedictine friend William of Saint Thierry does in his c.1121 work De natura et dignitate amoris, ‘The nature and dignity of love’. Both begin with the premise that love has been inculcated into human nature by God, in believers and non-believers alike; for William ‘God as rooted love in our very nature’.12 Bernard concurs that ‘an inborn sense of justice in him […] cries out that he ought to love him with all his powers’.13 Bernard and William also describe the highest states of love in strikingly similar terms; according to Bernard, the mind ‘throw[s] itself wholly on God and, clinging to God, become[s] ones with him in spirit’, just as William’s schema leads the soul to ‘cleave perfectly to God’.14 Both, in fact, quote the same verses from the Psalms (73:26). However, while in William’s corpus ‘love’ makes up only one facet of his theology (indeed, caritas is the middle stage of human spiritual development, which moves from amor to caritas to sapientia), Bernard devotes a large part of his preaching to the effic -

7 N. Hunt, Cluny Under Saint Hugh: 1049-1109 (London, 1967), pp. 158-9, 182-4; Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus As Mother (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 62-3.

8 Berman, The Cistercian Evolution, pp. 67,93-4,148-9.

9 Ibid., pp. 148-9, 151-60.

10 Ibid., p. 92; Evans, The Mind of St. Bernard Of Clairvaux, pp.117-9; Constant Mews, “Bernard Of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard and Heloise On the Definition of L ve”, Revista Portuguesa De Filosofia, 60/3 (2004), p. 638.

11 E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved (Philadelphia, 1990), p.124; Evans, The Mind of St. Bernard Of Clairvaux, p.

51.

12 William of St. Thierry, On the Nature and Dignity of Love, trans. Adrian Walker and Geoffrey Webb (London, 2001), p. 11.

13 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘On Loving God’, in Bernard Of Clairvaux - Selected Works, trans. G.R. Evans (New York, 1987), p. 55.

14 Ibid., p. 78; On the Nature and Dignity of Love, p. 59.

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cy of a love for God and his creation.15 It is not enough to say, however, that love (in its various incarnations) was a prominent theme in Bernard’s preaching; the question of why this was the case remains.

De Diligendo Deo offers a praxis of love as worship. Through its four degrees, Bernard shows how man progresses towards God; firs ly, through love of himself, then through love of God for his own sake, and then love of God for God’s sake. The final degree, described in a sort of mystical ecstasy, is the sublimation of one’s entire will into God, just as ‘a drop of water seems to disappear completely in a quantity of wine’.16 Throughout the Latin text of De Diligendo, Bernard uses the nouns caritas and amor, and the verb diligere and their derived terms interchangeably, supporting Casey’s argument that there was not a strict semantic division between these terms.17 The notion that through love, properly structured and channelled according to the degrees of De Diligendo, that the human will could be dissolved into God is key. High medieval writers recognised the powerful and potentially destructive nature of unchecked affections. William of St Thierry identifies love at its inception as being only a potentiality, to be shaped either for good or evil; ‘At its birth, then, love is nothing other than will’.18 In this vain, love needed to be reshaped towards the divine, else it would become destructive.

But why was this a particular theme for the writers of the 1120s onwards? The answer perhaps comes from the distinctive type of monastic recruitment practiced by the Cistercians and the milieu of a militarily mobile youth populace in the context of the Crusades. The road

into the cloister had traditionally been one begun almost in infancy. Child oblates would be offered to a monastery, generally along with a substantial donation for their upkeep, from the age of six. Once they had completed their initial monastic education, they could choose whether they wished to take their vows and become a novice, or leave the monastery. The Cistercians, however, were active in their recruitment of adults, particularly young knights.19 The narrative of the founding of the community at Silvanès by Pons de Léras, who went from knight to hermit to Cistercian, is a highly fashioned but telling example.20 The consequences of a new monastic population with far greater experience of the world than the usual monk has been discussed from a psychological angle

by Jean Leclercq. Leclercq points not only to a new monastic sociology resulting from adult recruitment, but also to the flourishing of a popular and courtly culture of love and chivalry in France during the 1120s, particularly in Champagne.21 For this new milieu of conversi, troubadour lyrics and idioms of courtly love were more familiar to them than Anselm’s complex soteriology or St. Augustine’s division of caritas from cupiditas.22 Consider the anecdote told

by Caesarius of Heisterbach of the Cistercian conversi who fell asleep during the preaching of the Word, but ‘pricked up [their] ears, woke up, and began to listen’ at the mention of ‘a King called Arthur’.23 Bernard’s preaching to these new monks was aimed at instructing them in terms they could comprehend and use practically. So strongly saturated were these conversi in secular cultures of love and desire, and with the recognition of its destructive power as noted by the Church Fathers, that the reshaping of

15 T. Tomasic, “The Three Theological Virtues as Modes of Intersubjectivity in the Thought of William Of Saint-Thi-

erry”, Recherches De Théologie Ancienne Et Médiévale, 38 (1971), p. 110; On the Nature And Dignity Of Love, p. 14.

16 ‘On Loving God’, p. 79.

17 Casey, Athirst For God, p. 91.

18 On the Nature and Dignity of Love, p. 15.

19 Berman, The Cistercian Evolution, pp. 101-2, 110-7.

20 Ibid., pp. 101-2, 110-7; C. Berman, “The Life of Pons De Léras: Knights and Conversion to Religious Life in the

Twelfth Century”, Church History and Religious Culture, 88/2 (2019), pp. 128-9.

21 J. Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France (Oxford, 1979), pp. 9-16.

22 Evans, The Mind of St. Bernard Of Clairvaux, pp. 64-5.

23 J. Strange, Caesarii Heisterbacensis Dialogus Miraculorum (Cologne, 1851), p. 105, cited in Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France, p. 90.

BRADBURY - CISTERCIAN LOVE worldly love into divine love seemed a natural stratagem for Bernard and his contemporaries.

Such a thesis of Bernard’s approach to love is supported by comparison with his amplific tion of martial imagery when addressing his militarily experienced brother-monks, his aim being to turn them from miles into bellatores pacifici.24 This also contextualises Bernard’s extended use of the Song of Songs in De Diligendo and his monumental series of public sermons on the book which continues up to his death in 1153. The Song of Songs is perhaps the closest book in the Old Testament to a secular love narrative, generating a huge body of interpretive scholarship amongst Jewish and Christian writers on the obliquely sexual, yet apparently unconsummated, relationship between the Bride and the Bridegroom.25 That is not to suggest that Bernard’s interest in the Song was only as an ersatz love ballad, rather that it provided for his preaching a source of examples of images of loving and desiring that had both a long exegetical history as metaphors for the love of God for man, or Christ for the Church, as well as a strong resonance with his audiences.

Bernard’s preaching, then, cannot be said to be solely concerned with caritas, but rather with the full panoply of medieval love. Placing his preaching and the reasoning behind it into the larger scope of Cistercian though requires us to return to the issues raised by Berman regarding sequencing. If the collation of founda-

19 tional documents really did occur in the 1160s, after Bernard’s death, rather than in the early 1110s and 20s then we must consider the awareness of these compilers with the Bernardine charism of various ‘loves’ within the wider Cistercian movement. Through consideration of Bernard alongside William of St. Thierry’s philosophical and theological treatment of love, the emphasis on a chaste but intense interpretation of amor as a necessary redirection of worldly love seems more strongly related to the context of the mid-twelfth century in general, rather than a Cistercian preoccupation inherited from the founders of Cîteaux. Extracting a model of caritas (which could be retrospectively applied to an organisational model of the order) from the diverse senses of ‘love’ employed in the mid-twelfth century seems more plausible than for Bernard to develop a vivid praxis of love from the narrow caritas of the primitive documents. Indeed, Berman’s revision of Cistercian chronology, which places the crystallisation of an ordo Cisterciensis only in the second half of the twelfth century, further suggests that the apparent Cistercian preoccupation with love may have developed out of Bernard’s preaching, not the other way around. Bernard may rather have been one of the originators of, and not the heir to, the Cistercian tradition of love, the prominence of which owes much to Bernard’s solutions to the challenges of the mid-twelfth century.

24 Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France, pp. 88-98.

25 Matter, The Voice of My Beloved, pp. 123-33; Shawn M. Krahmer, “The Virile Bride of Bernard of Clairvaux”, Church History, 69/2 (2000), p. 306.

GENDER IN EARLY MODERNITY Were There Limits to Women’s Agency in Early Modern England?

Jack Snell In the historiography of femininity, gender and sexuality in early modern England, as with other periods and places, we see a tendency to interpret inquiry in the terms and language of contemporary understandings. In approaching such a question, we must be careful not to mar conceptions of misogyny and sexism in the period by interpreting them within the discourses of modern social understandings, instead perceiving interpretations from the perspective of historical actors themselves in pursuit of historical truth (if, indeed, there is such a thing). This chasm existing between myth and reality is a prevalent theme in this discussion, involving a reconciliation between conceptual and practical understandings of patriarchy in public and private spaces in the period. Such reconciliation entails a respect for female experiences of “daily life” and the limits of male

hegemony in crossing the boundary between prescription and description. In this way, patriarchy as an ideal must be taken exactly as that.

Although this ideal penetrated the social fabric of early modern society, it cannot be taken as analogous to patriarchal order in practice. This distinction between the world as it seems to be and the world as it is will be the basis upon which this essay will be formed. As we will see, one may find in the female domain evidence of freedom, moral authority, belonging and, fundamentally, “the capacity to […] articulate meanings from within collective discourses and beyond.”1 Thus, although women did indeed face limits to their agency in early modern England, the extent of this limitation in reality did not extend as far as its conceptual basis, and through the interrogation of evidence we may identify in this space an

1 Bronwyn Davies, ‘The Concept of Agency: A Feminist Poststructuralist Analysis’, in Anna Yeatman (ed.), Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology, No. 30, Postmodern Critical Theorising, (December 1991), p. 52.

SNELL - GENDER IN EARLY MODERNITY

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imagined community for which “ocular proof was unattainable.”2 To come to a clearer understanding, this essay will compare two arguments; firstly that women faced limits to agency, and secondly that such interpretation was largely de facto and grossly exaggerated when compared to real female experiences.

As a conceptualisation of male power patriarchy, in a purely gendered interpretation, leaves behind the “base-superstructure” upon which it derives meaning.3 Patriarchy, as an understanding of power relations, exists as a derivative set of interacting concepts (gender, age and class), with its constituents all bound by ideas of male authorship in social space: man and woman, father and son, master and apprentice. Order and chaos are central to this understanding in both public and private space. As a form of the state, the authority of the male in the household derived meaning from the authority of the monarch in the realm. Man is “a priest unto his wife ... he is the highest in the family, and hath both authority over all and the charge of all is committed to his charge; he is as a king in his owne house.” 4To use Weberian terms, the state may be seen as the ‘ideal type’ of which households may, by abstraction from one space to another, base themselves. According to principle, a man who kills his wife would be hanged for murder, whereas a wife who kills her husband would be burned for petty treason. The wife, in murdering her husband, is creating chaos in a perfectly ordered state of affairs whereas the man is not. In this sense, to go against this order is, by reduction, to go against God; as propounded by the Homily on

Obedience, “God hath created and appointed all things in heaven, earth, and waters, in a most excellent and perfect order”.

This naturalisation of patriarchal hierarchy penetrated all aspects of social life. Women were seen as necessarily “less ordered” than men, presenting the masculine as the order to feminine chaos. Theoretically, contemporary ideas of femininity subordinated women to a —for instance, pamphlets often used ‘quietness’ as a descriptor of conjugal marriage; the association of ‘quiet’ with ‘order’ and ‘loudness’ with ‘chaos’ is especially telling of what was expected of the female in the household and the effect of popular culture on conceptions of gender roles. Indeed patriarchy, in many respects, is more an expression of order than social ideal; gossip networks, for instance, were often satirised as “posing a wider threat to social order.”5 And, for many, such order could be achieved only by a limiting of agency, perhaps physically with the Scold’s Bridle and beating, or behaviourally, epitomised in Coriolanus’s referral to his wife as “my gracious silence.”6 Thus, as seen, early modern society was riddled with patriarchal understandings of social order. “The equation of public with male, female with private, was by the sixteenth century an ancient, well established trope” and, crucially, not one to be changed.7 As posited

by Melden, how is it possible “that a right […] can “derive” from one’s status as a parent?”8 To an early modern Englishman, this was no concern; obedience, the “right” of parents, is due because it is, and such is the case with patriarchy.9 The question now is two-fold; did such

2 Louise Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the shaping fantasies of Elizabethan culture: gender, power,

form’, in M. W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan and N. J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: the Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1986), p. 76.

3 Sylvia Walby, ‘Theorising Patriarchy’, in The Journal of the British Sociological Association, Vol. 23, No. 2 (May 1989), p.

1.

4 William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), p. 258, as cited in Andy Wood, The Structures of Everyday Life: Household, Patriarchy and Gender, Lecture 1 (2019).

5 B. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), p. 64.

6 Coriolanus, 2.1.184, as cited in Andy Wood, The Structures of Everyday Life: Household, Patriarchy and Gender, Lecture 1 (2019).

7 L. Gowing, ‘The Freedom of the Streets: Women and Social Space, 1560-1640’, in Paul Griffiths and Mark .R. Jenner (eds.), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London (Manchester, 2000), p. 133.

8 A. I. Melden, Rights and Right Conduct (Oxford, 1959), p. 6, cited in G.J. Schochet, ‘Patriarchalism, politics and mass attitudes in Stuart England,’ Historical Journal, 12, 3, (1969), p. 440.

9 See Dod and Cleaver, ‘Godly Form’, sig. I 2, cited in Schochet, ‘Patriarchalism’, p. 416.

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theory translate in practice, and did women really experience such extreme limits to agency as discussed above?

In short, no. Although patriarchal concepts constituted society, women were still able to articulate meanings and agency. The articulation of this agency can be understood in spatial terms and questions the nature of patriarchy discussed above. In Gramscian understandings of hegemony, it has been argued, “considerable space [was] left for subordinates to develop their own senses of the world,” space for the articulation of new values and norms within the patriarchal superstructure.10 ‘Gossips’, for example, act as evidence of a distinctly female domain, offering an identity and belonging beyond the private household, a community of emotional and material value that had a kind of ‘extra-legal legitimacy’ to their collective action. As an internalisation of patriarchy into female space, ‘gossips’ represented a transgression of female authority into the public.11 Such informal authority manifested, for instance, in the policing of the sexed body that premised itself on the regulation of woman by woman (as with illegitimate pregnancies).12 This has implications for our understandings of patriarchy and female agency. First, this cliqued knowledge of a Hayekian ‘single mind’ that women embodied further confuses gendered interpretations of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ discussed above. Secondly, patriarchy in this sense validated the female domain, a process “in which every member of the community participated in the processes of exclusion that helped define order and belonging.”13 This is suggestive of a patriarchy more accommodating and negotiable to female agency than the one described in the paragraphs above. As

such, in regard to the question at hand, one may see female agency not as something actively limited but as something upon which the patriarchal order passively depended.

Women’s agency may also be empirically identified In the period we see an enormous rise in defamation cases of which a huge majority of litigants were women. For women, it may be said, the use of a gendered ideology of morals was a means of negotiating power in public space. For many, “testifying at court could offer one way of asserting a verbal agency over domestic, sexual, and marital events that had, one way or another, disempowered them.”14 This refusal to bend to patriarchal rhetoric of feminine chaos and inferiority “laid claim to an honourability which was defined by what women did rather than what was done to them.”15 Thus, it is in this intersection between sexuality and honour, that we find evidence of an active female agency. Women in the period also engaged, albeit rather spontaneously, in rioting, the grain riots led by ‘Captain’ Anne Carter in Maldon being an example. This dissent and disorder, it has been suggested, reflected female concerns existing primarily in the female sphere of knowledge (given their household involvement in the buying of, for instance, grain) and asserting their political agency accordingly.16 This agency is further evidenced in religious space, preaching and prophesying in Quaker and Puritan movements and laying claim to their place in the spiritual (perhaps questioning the true nature of the supposedly God given order.) This follows in business, with widows often taking over from husbands as independent business women, for instance in printing. Indeed, one Derbyshire mine, ‘Gentlewoman’s Grove’, was

10 Andy Wood, ‘Deference, Paternalism and Popular Memory in Early Modern England,’ in S. Hindle, A. Shepard, and J. Woodbridge Walker, Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, (Boydell Press, 2013), p. 237.

11 B. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England, (Oxford, 2003).

12 Gowing, ‘Ordering the Body’, pp. 43-62.

13 Ibid., p. 51.

14 Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London, (Oxford, 1996), p. 262.

15 G. Walker, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in Early Modern England’, TRHS, sixth ser. 6 (1996), p.

239.

16 R.A. Houlbrooke, ‘Women’s Social Life and Common Action in England From the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War’, Continuity & Change 1, 2 (1986), p. 172.

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an all-female company. Women, in this way, occupied what can be seen as a “subterranean citizenship,” bound by patriarchy but within which women’s agency could be exercised.17 It is thus the case that agency existed in ways far beyond what one would expect from the descriptions above.

To conclude, we have seen in this essay that descriptions of female agency diverge from its prescription. Despite the insidious nature

of patriarchal order as an ideal, we must be sure to question the nature of this patriarchy and the agency women were able to exercise within it. It is nonetheless important, however, to recognise that there were limits to women’s agency in the period. So although agency certainly existed in women’s lives beyond its prescriptive limits, gender set its boundaries. So, to answer the question, ‘yes.’

17 P. Crawford, ‘”The poorest she”: women and citizenship in early modern England’, in M. Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State, (Cambridge, 2001), p. 218.

CHINA & IMPERIAL CITIES What do cartography, imperial tours, and the spatial organization of cities reveal about the nature of Imperial power during the Qing?

Karl Omae Within the Qing dynasty, distinct Inner Asian and Han models of imperial power were balanced, redefined and fused by the mechanisms of the early modern state. Qing cartography illustrates this fusion. Like France and Russia, it hired Jesuits to employ western cartographic techniques to map and delineate its empire,1 allowing it to compete in the international game of territorialization on equal terms with other early modern states.2 Indeed, Kangxi could and did claim his entire realm to be under his gaze when leafing through the Jesuit atlas.3 Although it may be claimed that territorialization was the same in all early modern states, each manifestation exhibited unique characteristics and models. Mapping the Mongols gave the Qing control over them,4 in addition to their 1 Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography

and Cartography in Early Modern China, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) p. 76-80.

2 Ibid., p. 70-71.

3 Peter Perdue, China Marches West: the Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) p. 449.

4 Ibid., p. 459.

OMAE - CHINA & IMPERIAL CITIES Inner Asian political tools of kinship and personal loyalty. Qianlong reordered Xinjiang according to the Han prefectural administrative system, while giving Confucian-derived Han names to its cities.5 Hence, Urumqi became “Dihua” (to enlighten), alongside older Han and Tang dynasty names for the area6 and its places.7 The Jesuits heeded the example of other official Qing cartographers and portrayed Xinjiang, Tibet and other non-Han areas as part of “China”, to Qianlong’s satisfaction.8 Mapping thus not only aided in implementing the Han administrative model in distant Xinjiang and Guizhou;9 It meant whenever a Han literati scholar saw the map, they would see an area, as “Dihua” literally implied, enlightened under the Han administrative model, whose name qualified it as “Chinese”. In Guizhou too, maps marked the territory under imperial control, expanding as the internal frontier gave way.10 Yet they could also serve the Qing Inner Asian concern for assimilation. On one hand, they made maps depicting China as the centre of the world, but maps could also uphold the separateness of Manchuria and the Manchu identity.

Finalizing their conquest of Ming in the 1690s, the Qing endeavored to map their homeland of Manchuria and the sacred Changbai mountains; the very first Qing Jesuit map was of “Greater Mukden”, the heartland of the Manchurian homeland.11 The Jesuit Atlas’ only man-made structures were the Great Wall and the Willow Palisade, both markers of separation, which arguably served as subtle self-reminders of their origins beyond the

25 wall, and their own unique “Manchu” homeland. By mapping Manchuria and the Changbai mountains, the Qing upheld a separate, uniquely Manchu space, a definite location that was both origin and home.12 Although maps used Han characters for China proper, areas beyond were labeled in Manchu.13 Kangxi specified Manchuria as separate to, but part of, China. Arguably then, China was not synonymous with Han, and through maps “China” was redefined to be greater than China-proper. The Qing saw “China” as encompassing all their territory, and expressed this through maps which simultaneously preserved their own unique identity.14 Maps meant control over the internal and external frontier, allowing the Qing to subjugate and redefine China as desired, while cartographically marking out their own ethnic homeland. One China, with many peoples within it, clearly delineated between Mongols, Manchu and Han, the Qing imperial gaze stretching across all of China’s territories.

Imperial tours to the south were both a typically Inner Asian display of Manchu military power, and an exercise in Han cultural ideas. They reenacted conquest, whilst also mixing with the Han, addressing aspects of Qing rule to both solidify control over China and fuse political models. The form and content of the tours as quasi-military ritual campaigns stressed the Manchu status as a conquest elite whose mastery and ethnic identity depended on their military values. They allowed the Qing to display to Han elites what Perdue calls their “Central Eurasian connections” by bringing along tributary envoys and captives.15

5 Gang Zhao, ‘Reinventing China Imperial Qing Ideology and the Rise of Modern Chinese National Identity in the

Early Twentieth Century’, Modern China, Vol. 32, 2006. p. 18-25.

6 James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) p. 20-21.

7 L. J. Newby, The Empire and the Khanate: A Political History of Qing Relations With Khoqand, (Leiden: Brill, 2005) p. 112.

8 Gang, ‘Reinventing China’, p. 13.

9 Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, p. 36-37.

10 Ibid., p. 104-105.

11 Mark C. Elliott, ‘The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, no. 3, 2000. p. 619-622.

12 Elliott, ‘The Limits of Tartary’, p. 608.

13 Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, p. 33-34.

14 Elliott, ‘The Limits of Tartary’, p. 638.

15 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 422.

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The horseback riding of the tours was one of the Manchu ethnic markers which Qianlong sought to emphasize.16 In his poetry he describes entering cities on horseback, extolled the merits of “ruling from horseback” and suggested that critics objected merely because they themselves were less physically able.17 Yet these symbols also recalled the ancient past of the Han Zhou dynasty, and Qianlong co-opted literati with examinations and titles.18 Indeed, in their declaring function to be “observing the people”, Qianlong drew upon classical Confucian examples to justify himself as a benevolent ruler who recognised his people and led by example.19 He did so, both in person and through poetry, from horseback—that is, as a Manchu Chinese emperor who cared for his people as per Confucian models, and through the Inner Asian tradition of horseback mastery. Qianlong was not only balancing, but indeed fusing the two under a single Qing model, whereby he presented himself and the horseback riding Manchu as equal in ability to a Han civilian administration, whose Manchu strength indeed brought something the Han lacked.

Parallel to these displays were the northern tours. Although the Qing court journeyed to the sacred mountains to bind the Mongols to the Manchu Qing, the most important northern-focused tours were arguably to Manchuria and Changbai and were meant to provide a physical link to the Manchu ethno-myth in addition to the spatial symbolism of mapping.20 Unlike the southern tours, the tours of Manchuria and Changbai affirmed the separate origins, traditions and self-legitimacy of the Manchu within the homeland. The Qing

emperors offered sacrifices to the ancestors at the focus point of Manchu ethno-genesis— Changbai, their mythical home, the story of which parallels other Inner Asian foundation myths.21 Qianlong praised the region as he passed through, noting that it had united lands “within” and “without”; the sacred homeland surpassed all others, like its Manchu progeny.22 Thus, through the emperor, apex of the Qing state, was linked the “imperial place” and its “imperial people”.23 They were a Manchu people, with a definite home and origin, anchored in a sacred physical space, to which they could point on a map and which was reciprocally sanctified by the rituals of the emperors on tour. The Han and Inner Asian models thus came together in the south through Qing imperial tours, whilst northern tours upheld the sacred imperial homeland in Manchuria.

Urban planning in the form of segregated garrison cities reveals the Manchu need to rule and yet not be assimilated. Garrisons were symbols of Qing power whose physical separation was meant to preserve militarized ethnic Manchu identity, intended to avoid the fate of their assimilated Jin and Yuan ancestors.24 The garrisoning of the Banners—the societal institution which included Mongols and Han loyalists—in separate walled enclaves anchored the Manchu presence,25 shows how urban planning became a tool of Qing imperial power. Beijing, as the capital and center of Qing China, epitomized the Banner-Han segregated residence pattern, with the former even replacing the city’s neighborhoods as the basis for urban planning.26 Common Han were barred from entering the Banner Inner city, and Ban-

16 Michael G. Chang, ‘The Emperor Qianlong’s Tours of Southern China: Painting, Poetry, and the Politics of Spectacle’, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, no. 3, 2015. p. 13.

17 Ibid, p. 360.

18 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 414-415.

19 Chang, ‘The Emperor Qianlong’s Tours of Southern China’, p. 15-16.

20 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 423.

21 Elliott, ‘The Limits of Tartary’, p. 608.

22 Ibid, p. 615.

23 Ibid, p. 617.

24 Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: the Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) p. 130-131.

25 Ibid, p. 94.

26 Ibid, p. 98-101.

OMAE - CHINA & IMPERIAL CITIES ners were barred from settling in the Outer Han city. Though Banner placement in Beijing has sometimes been depicted as conforming to Han geomantic ideas, the imperfect geomantic correlation and proximity of the Manchu and Mongol banners to the palace vis-à -vis the Han Banners point more to Inner Asian values and concerns.27 This does not mean the Qing ignored Han geomantic ideas, but rather that in the greater Qing perspective, they could overlap, and were not necessarily the main perspective employed. Empire-wide, every city that received a garrison saw partition, and even as its execution changed, the need for a separate garrison city remained, despite high costs.28 Although Crossley claims the garrisons were a haphazard, gradual process,29 judging by their strategic location, founding dates, disposition of land and crucially, urban population transfers, Elliott convincingly suggests it was conscious policy from the beginning to establish Manchu rule throughout China’s cities through the garrisons.30 The only unwalled garrisons were the Han Banner-staffed Guangzhou and Fuzhou, but they still had different layouts for the Banner areas compared to Han areas. Indeed, all the garrisons were separate cities in themselves, with their own temples and urban layout. Thus, the Qing marked its people as different from common Han through urban spatial differentiation.31 This even extended to a ban on cemeteries, since all the Bannermen were to be buried in Beijing (except if they died in Manchuria it-

27 self). The garrison cities and their Banners were to watch the Han territory, but not be tied to Han land. When people petitioned for garrison burials, the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors both objected because it would lead to assimilation, emphasizing Manchu separateness and burial in Beijing.32 Even when the Manchu stopped moving from their birth garrisons and became increasingly acculturated,33 the Qing court continually strove to promote Manchu identity there.34 The ban on garrison burial only faded in the 1750s, yet the Bannermen remained separate.35 Even when moving into Han urban areas, they kept to themselves.36 However physically close they might be to the Han, they had grown into and were marked by an innate difference, arguably shaped in part by their historically separate residence. Their garrisons remained cities within cities, and the Banners they housed remained an anchor of Qing power. They constantly reminded common Han of their presence, ready to defend their empire; those garrisoned in China were considered to be in constant mobilization.37 Emperors themselves spoke of how they showed military readiness whilst pacifying unruly areas, allowing control while avoiding assimilation.38 Both Elliott and Crossley agree that the garrisons, despite extensive Han acculturation, helped create and perpetuate a separate identity among the Manchu Bannermen,39 which remained and even increased despite later imperial troubles.40 The garrison cities physically imposed onto Han and Manchu alike a persisting image

27 Ibid, p. 102-104.

28 Ibid, p. 112.

29 Pamela Crossley, Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) p. 48.

30 Elliott, The Manchu Way, p. 124-126.

31 Ibid., p. 110-115.

32 Ibid., p. 261-26.

33 Crossley, Orphan Warriors, p. 6.

34 Ibid., p. 24-26.

35 Elliott, The Manchu Way, p. 267-268.

36 Ibid., p. 116-121.

37 Crossley, Orphan Warriors, p. 51.

38 Elliott, The Manchu Way, p. 128-132.

39 Crossley, Orphan Warriors, p. 77-78.

40 Ibid., p. 115.

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of separateness, composed of Manchu identity and dynastic loyalty, a pillar in a united empire, through the expression of their militarized Manchu identity.

The Qing had to manage being Manchus, whilst ruling over the Han, and each instance of this management played out differently. What unified them was how they united (sometimes forcibly) their subjects, whilst being mindful of their own position. Multiple audiences were to be gathered under the Manchu-Qing ethno-dynastic umbrella, through which the Qing balanced and redefined both China and its many traditions, actively and dynamically bringing their peoples under cartographic and ideological ritual control. They stayed up-todate, bringing in Jesuits and modern technology. They carried a Han model of administration across a redefined “China�, whilst expressing an Inner Asian concern to uphold the sacred

ethnic homeland. Their imperial tours both blended and accentuated Inner Asian military values and Han cultural ideas, reenacting their conquest as they mixed with their Han subjects, while ritually upholding and linking to a separate ethnic identity in the north. Their urban planning further reveals their desire to rule China while upholding a separate Banner identity centered on Manchus but incorporating loyalist Mongols and Han. The nature of Qing imperial power, then, saw a dynamic and interconnected effort by an ethnic minority within an early modern state to use multiple ethnic models of rule as appropriate, balancing, redefinin , and even fusing them, whilst maintaining the uniqueness of its own ethnic foundation against assimilation—Qing Manchu emperors on horseback, master of both brush and bow.

BRITAIN & INDIA How did the British set about constructing a new history of India? What, if anything, was their agenda in doing so?

Heidi Januszewski

As post-war revisionists have become perceptive to the nuances of historiography and Eurocentric prejudice, historians have increasingly questioned the way in which we interpret the colonial past, using differing methodologies.

Within this myriad of possible research areas, this analysis will focus particularly on the religious lens through which the British portrayed Indian history. Moreover, whilst the British were not a singular entity (with each individual having their own beliefs) the emphasis of this essay will be on contemporary scholars.

Whilst historiography is arguably more nuanced at the time of this essay, the traditional belief that there was a methodological ‘progression’ of understanding concerning the ‘Orient’ – that is, a whiggish, uniform path to more refined thinking – is naïve. As the term ‘agenda’ implies, all historians are inextricably linked to the socio-political conditions of their day, and it is due to such changing circumstances that historians’ methodologies and

views will vary. Concerning the ‘construction’ of a new history, moreover, it implies a passivity on the part of the Indians, who were supposedly ‘subjugated’ by British values. This Eurocentrism is criticised by revisionist historian Said, who observes that British scholarship is in itself a form of colonisation in which prejudice and the desire to impose Western values permeate the historian’s work.1 Each of the following scholar’s arguments will be analysed in relation to this conceptualisation: not only will their methodologies and agendas be assessed, but also the extent to which they purposefully ‘construct’ a new history of India itself.

Firstly, we will analyse this ‘constructive’ thesis in relation to the contentious figure of Sir William Jones, who wrote during the Company’s rule. His writing at the end of the eighteenth century is reflecti e of the ‘orientalist’ theory that would later be criticised by Said.

Throughout his works, he imposes Western values on India in an imperialist narrative. Ad-

1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 1-10.

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ducing the words of the god Varuna to his son – whereby Varuna affirms that the being from which ‘created beings proceed […] is the Great One’ – Jones proclaims that this figure is actually God.2 As such, he projects his monotheist faith on to a religion that was decidedly on the contrary: in actuality, Varuna was believed to be the god of the sky and supreme leader of many other gods, according to Āryan doctrine.3 We therefore observe the Western ‘construction’ of Indian religion and history. This colonialist narrative becomes more prominent as Jones claims throughout his writing that ‘we [the British]’ require further translations and evidence in order to acquire a reliable account of Indian religion’.4 Not only does his use of ‘we’ establish a distancing framework between the East and West, emphasising their differences; but Jones also elucidates that a Western perspective is mandatory in order to achieve historical truth. As he elaborates throughout his writing, Jones’ preoccupation with ‘human reason’ in conceptualising truth was reflecti e of prevailing Enlightenment scholarship.5 Furthermore, having been active amidst the conservative resurgence of the eighteenth century – which witnessed increased public demand for a civilising mission in India, later taking place in 1813 – Jones’ theories are symptomatic of the conditions in which he was active.6 Thus it is probable that, combined with his concern with truth, Jones wished to ‘construct’ a narrative that legitimised Christian doctrine, and thereby British presence, in India.

Concerning methodology in relation to historical fluctuation , the scholarship of a contemporary of Jones, William Robertson, is

particularly intriguing. Initially, Robertson’s An Historical Disquisition may be viewed on a scale towards increasingly progressive historiography. Despite his role as minister of the Church of England, he does not insist on a Christian civilising mission and even expresses concern towards European superiority and colonisation.7 Moreover, he does not demand a Western interpretation of history in order to establish a true account – a contrast from Jones’ scholarship, and the later works of James Mill.8 Robertson even garnered hostility from a Company official in Bengal, Charles Grant, who opposed his favourable depiction and demanded that Indians be ‘Christianised’.9 We see, therefore, shifting historical methodology in favour of increased tolerance; yet Robertson’s account does remain somewhat fl wed. Like Jones, Robertson’s religious beliefs do inform his writing, as he declares that the connection between sexuality and religion was displayed with ‘avowed indecency’ in India.10 Whilst he does not impose his own terminology, the connotations of repulsion make his opinion clear, revealing his account to be increasingly in line with Said’s understanding of Eurocentrism.

Robertson’s methodological limitations, however, stem more so from the content that he excludes than from what he actually projects, contrasting with Jones. Concerning the phallic symbol of ‘lingam’, for instance, he abruptly ends his discussion, deeming it ‘too gross to be explained’.11 Whilst Robertson does not largely ‘construct’ a new Indian history, his methodology is fl wed due to the intrusion of his beliefs, which contribute to his reluctance to discuss some religious aspects. However, despite being

2 Sir William Jones, The Works of Sir William Jones, Vol. 3 (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, Pater-Noster-Row, and R. H. Evans, 1799), pp. 251-52.

3 A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India: A survey of the history and culture of the Indian sub-continent before the coming of the Muslims (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1967), p. 239.

4 The Works of Sir William Jones, pp. 229-252.

5 Ibid., p. 230.

6 Stewart J. Brown ‘William Robertson, Early Orientalism and the “Historical Disquisition” on India of 1791’, The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 88, No. 226, Part 2 (October 2009), pp.289-312 (p. 309).

7 William Robertson, An Historical Disquisition (Philadelphia: William Young, 1792), p. 332.

8 Ibid., pp. 287-9.

9 ‘‘William Robertson, Early Orientalism and the “Historical Disquisition” on India of 1791’, p. 309.

10 An Historical Disquisition, pp. 312-13.

11 Ibid., pp. 312-13.

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JANUSZEWSKI - BRITAIN & INDIA retrospectively ‘orientalist’ due to omitting information, his overall tolerance towards Indian religion (largely driven by his own anxieties about colonialism) should be noted, particularly given the increasing conservatism reflec ed by Grant’s outrage, as well as the works of later Romantic scholars. We can observe, therefore, a fluctuation in historical methodology that dismantles not only the concept of progression, but also the idea that the British always ‘constructed’ a new Indian history.

We will further analyse the argument concerning the ‘construction’ of a new Indian history in the early 1800s with respect to James Mill. As expressed in his preface to The History of India, Mill was aware of the implications surrounding the selection of information, which would be echoed by the much later desire of Said to avoid convolution.12 Yet, in contrast to Said, who distinguishes information based on theme, Mill wishes for ‘real facts […] to be separated from such as were the contrary’.13 This would, theoretically, render a more objective account, as was the Enlightenment ideal. However, this was not the result. Whilst it is understandable that Mill had access to few Indian texts, given the Mughal focus on oral communication that predated the Company’s focus on written documents, he does little to remedy his predicament.14 Instead, his disdainful attitude towards Indian religion only serves to ‘construct’ a new history, undermining the very notion of truth that he wishes to replicate.

Rather than allowing natives the opportunity to express their own voice, he dismisses their ‘Hindu legends’ as the product of a ‘wild and ungoverned imagination’, resulting in a fl wed, Eurocentric perspective.15 Despite being similarly concerned with the conceptualisation of truth, Mill’s dismissive connotations are arguably less tolerant than those of Jones, dispelling

any sense of a ‘methodological progression’ of scholarly knowledge. Such linguistics mirror the emerging theory promulgated by Enlightenment scholars that India fell into a ‘vile and exceedingly depraved state’, as professed

by Charles Grant, and required a civilising mission.16 Mill likewise elucidates that Indian history cannot be recalled without Western intervention, and that only the British are capable of ‘constructing’ an apparently truthful account. He further expresses his dismay that the Hindus have no written record of the ‘recent and remarkable’ first contact between the East and West through Alexander the Great’s endeavours, and his positive linguistics connote a sense of European superiority whereby the Western significance of certain ‘facts’ is imposed on the East.17 Thus, through a desire for ‘Christianisation’ and its historical legitimation in Indian history, we observe a Eurocentric ‘construction’ of a new Indian history which largely contrasts with Robertson’s previous argument, creating a methodological fluctuation We will next assess the extent to which the British ‘constructed’ a new Indian history through the post-colonial James Fergusson, who was active during the British Raj, following the Company’s collapse in the nineteenth century. Fergusson’s views are propounded in his lecture ‘On the Study of Indian Architecture’ in 1867, wherein he proposes the importance of studying Indian buildings as a means of understanding Indian religion and history.

Initially, Fergusson can be viewed as attempting to understand India on its own terms: he wishes to expand his views ‘to a style wholly different’ from that of his own, and also suggests that Indian buildings are as great a significance as Western medieval cathedrals.18 Upon further analysis, however, Fergusson’s perspective corroborates Said’s later thesis of an Euro-

12 Orientalism, pp. 16-17.

13 James Mill, The History of British India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 6.

14 John Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (London: Simon and Schuster, 2016), pp. 121-

157.

15 The History of British India, p. 33.

16 ed. Harald Fischer-Tiné and Michael Mann, Colonialism as Civilising Mission (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp.1011.

17 Ibid, pp.10-11 18 James Fergusson, On the Study of Indian Architecture (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1867), p. 22.

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centric bias. His comparison between the East and West, for instance, echoes a methodology that observes Indian tradition through a European lens. This Eurocentrism becomes more apparent as Fergusson proposes that by integrating the different styles, ‘we [the West] shall have an architecture of our own’, indicating that he wishes to commodify Indian tradition for Western gain.19 In doing so, Fergusson’s interpretation becomes reminiscent of Jones, who similarly expressed his desire for further translations in order to create an institutionalised and Europeanised collection of Indian knowledge. Likewise, Fergusson’s views about Indian religion fall towards a more ‘constructive’ historical interpretation. His interest in knowing ‘what effect our civilisation has had on the natives of India’ implies that Indian history can only be studied through a European ‘cause-and-effect’ narrative.20 This view mirrors the general mode of thought at the time of Fergusson’s writing that, before the supposed civilising influence of the Company, India was a barren land devoid of technology and seeping with barbarians, as expressed by both Mill and Charles Grant.21 With the waning British infl ence following the dissolution of the Company in 1858, there is a case to be made that Fergusson sought to offset British insecurities by justifying colonialism. Whilst he ‘constructs’ his own narrative, much like earlier Romantic scholars, he did this to compensate for the empire’s decline, rather than to advocate for its growing expansion and legitimation via a civilising mission.

Like Fergusson, the revisionist historian A. L. Basham also writes from a post-colonial perspective; yet, his account is more nuanced as he attempts to avoid the ‘orientalist’ discourse criticised by Said. Initially, Basham’s account 19 Ibid., p. 15.

20 Ibid, p. 13.

21 Colonialism as Civilising Mission, pp.10-11.

22 The Wonder That Was India, pp. viii-x.

23 Ibid., pp. 8-9.

24 Ibid., p. 234.

25 Ibid., p. vii.

26 Ibid., p. vii.

27 Ibid., p. 235.

can be viewed as a move towards more progressive texts, a product of post-war revisionism and enhanced technology in discovering further evidence.22 His depiction of ancient Indian civilisation, for instance, is respectful: he advances on the more tolerant position held by Robertson as he describes India’s religious benefit , including the harmony that it brought.23 He is also comfortable in portraying the practices of India, noting in a straightforward manner that earlier civilisations ‘worshipped a Mother Goddess and a horned fertility god’ and had ‘sacred trees and animals’, marking a discrepancy between Robertson’s reluctance to elaborate and Jones’ direct projection of Western doctrine.24 Basham’s well-mannered linguistic form is linked to his agenda, which is to inform people of India’s history out of ‘respect’ for its culture, implying a reverential mentality.25 His use of sources further serves this purpose: in contrast to Jones’ affirmation of Western enlightenment in revealing historical truth, Basham is perceptive to methodological limitations, stating that despite his translations, he has not been able to replicate the ‘untamable incantation of the originals’.26 It could be suggested that Basham maintains some of the ‘orientalist’ tropes outlined by Said, such as the comparison between East and West which proliferated the earlier scholarship that we have already discussed.

For example, he depicts the ‘great father god of the Indo-European peoples’ as being Zeus in Greek; yet, Basham is sensitive to the differences as he states that he merely ‘appears as Zeus’.27 As such, whilst Basham uses methodological similarities to earlier scholars by comparing the two geographical areas, he makes an effort to dispel the notion of a British ‘construction’ of Indian history through his refusal to project his own terminology and reverence

JANUSZEWSKI - BRITAIN & INDIA for the country.

As discussed, historiography concerning Indian history and its religious practices is by no means uniform, nor wholly reflecti e of the notion that the British ‘constructed’ a new history. Despite scholars such as Basham being generally more nuanced at the time of this essay, whether it be due to increased evidence or twentieth-century revisionism concerning methodology and Eurocentrism, the path has not been one of simple progression.

Despite Robertson making an effort to dispel the ‘orientalist’ demeanour of his predecessors due to his fears for European superiority, later

33 Romantic scholars would be largely dismissive of Indian religion. Whilst they echo the earlier scholarship put forth by Jones, who likewise sought to establish a European notion of historical accuracy, they most definiti ely sought to ‘construct’ their own narrative of Indian history through the resurgence of conservatism and the demand for a civilising mission. As we have observed, therefore, historiographical accounts and methodology will always be subject to the scholar’s own beliefs and, on a wider scope, the ever-fluctuating nature of history itself.

4,000 WORDS

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THE THEATRE STATE How useful is it to view the Field of Cloth of Gold as an expression of a ‘Theatre State’?

Charlie Procter In his monumental study of nineteenth-century Balinese politics, Clifford Geertz describes a state in which ceremony, ritual and pageantry constituted political reality.1 Authority, status and legitimacy were drawn from the negara: a complex political sphere that existed within every principality and centralised on its ruler and the space around him.2 Rituals of the court were attended by great masses of the population as a day of national holiday. In particular, funerals, that sacralised and celebrated sacrifices through processions, music and symbolic liturgy, were heavily attended. An audience of above 40,000 was present at one such occasion in 1847 to witness the procession of their Rajah’s body into the cremation flames along with three young women, sacrificed to be principal wives in the afterlife.3 These theatrical events established, consolidated and made a reality of kings as the bridge between the mystical world of the gods and the actuality of the kingdom.4 Court performances acted out the Balinese ‘social reality’ as a hierarchy that was strongly asserted through spatial categorisation in palaces and pageants, linking proximity to the ‘exemplary centre’ of the court and king with status.5 Provincial rulers competed to hold exemplary centres, constantly battling to mobilise men

and resources: ‘rivalry [was] the driving force of Balinese life’.6 In short, the Balinese state was a device through which to perform spectacles. These spectacles powered court politics through staging and performing the divinity of the exemplary centre.7 Performance was not a representation of authority and the affairs of state, but the affairs themselves: ‘Power served pomp, not pomp power’.8 This is the ‘Theatre State’, a phenomenon typically limited to Geertz’s study of Bali.

There is little precedent in applying this anthropological and metaphorical assessment of politics and ceremony to western political systems. Typically, western courts are seen to subordinate the latter as working for the former; ceremony represents political power but does not create it.9 However, a theatre state with rulers at the centre of a performance which generates political progression from spectacle, is not a concept entirely incompatible to the increasingly theatrical courts of early modern Europe. One event in particular, as the zenith of early sixteenth-century pageantry, shares similarities in scale, opulence, theatricality and importance to that of Balinese ceremonies.

The Field of Cloth of Gold in June 1520 was an amplification of late medieval spectacle as

1 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (New Jersey, 1980), pp. 98-121.

2 Ibid., pp. 109-113.

3 Ibid., pp. 99-100.

4 Ibid., pp. 107-8.

5 Ibid., p. 13.

6 Ibid., p. 120 7 Ibid., p. 13.

8 Geertz, Negara, p. 13.

9 John Matusiak, Henry VIII: The Life and rule of England’s Nero (Gloucestershire, 2013), pp. 107-9.

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magnificent tournaments and architecture exalted kingship and made diplomacy honourable. Rarely had two kings previously expressed their power through spectacle in such an exceptional way, both demonstrating their ability to wage war.10 The two protagonists and their courts, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, met for a fortnight in the Pale of Calais with the aim to consolidate the Universal Peace of 1518. Politics and discussions however, were marginalised in favour of tournaments, banquets and ceremonies, and the kings themselves focused on grandiose displays of regality and strength. Thus, with this theatricality of politics, the Field offers a viable route to assessing whether anything of a theatre state can be located in early modern Europe. The Field has typically been seen within historiography as a frivolous ‘charade’ of chivalry.11 Any contemporary desires for peace are treated as weak and unsubstantial, with any commitments made disregarded as trivial formalities due to the fact that Europe was at war within two years of the event.12 But to describe the Field as simple ‘vain posturing’ and ‘Renaissance folly’ in the manner of J. J. Scarisbrick, is to subordinate ceremony to spectacle without meaning beyond the intended display.13 Instead, the Field can and should be investigated within the context of Geertz’s theatre state. Were politics and diplomacy advanced through performances at the Field? Was there an exemplary centre from which the social hierarchy radiated outwards?

To investigate this, the overall point of the enterprise must be analysed to see why a spectacle of friendship was substituted in place of an assertive, prestigious war between two traditional enemies. Was this spectacle intended as a mere presentation of a new alliance: an excuse for frivolity and entertainment? Or did it have a meaningful purpose to consolidate the brotherhood of the two kings and build their personal prestige through the performance of

peace-making? Secondly, an assessment of the component parts of the Field will piece together the extent of its theatricality. Did the state act as a device for meaningful pomp and pageantry, played out on various stages and spaces? Or was court magnificence an insignificant by-product of two vain monarchs meeting?

Finally, to understand the utility of analysing the Field in the context of a theatre state fully, its lasting importance and consequences must be studied to contextualise the importance of theatre to European politics in the early Sixteenth-century.

The enterprise of warfare in the early sixteenth-century was an assertion of military prowess, patriotism and the chivalric virtues of the victorious monarch, as it had been in the late medieval period. As the leaders of their kingdom’s knights, monarchs were expected to display the chivalric qualities of ‘loyalty, courtesy, hardiness, prowess and largess’.14 Importantly, as John Lydgate’s wrote in The Governance of Kings (1511), ‘chivalry conserveth the memory’ of a king’s power and ability.15 Henry VIII’s triumphal entry into Tournai in September 1513 was the climax to his magnificent French campaign, pursued to demonstrate his chivalric virtues. The subsequent painting of The Battle of the Spurs, commissioned by Henry after the campaign, aggrandised the English king and army fighting on horseback at its foreground.

Intended as a piece for Whitehall Palace, the painting reflects Henry’s desire to present his military capabilities and personal bravery.

It is within this desire for honour and prestige across the courts of European monarchs, that the origins of the Field of Cloth of Gold can be seen. Pope Leo X’s call for an international alliance against the Turks to ‘take measures for the safety of Christendom’, resulted not in another crusade against the Holy Lands, but in an alliance of European states with Henry

10 Glenn Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold (New Haven, 2013), p. 9.

11 Neville Williams, Henry VIII and His Court (London, 1971), p. 80.

12 Matusiak, Henry VIII, p. 108.

13 J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (New Haven, 1997), p. 79.

14 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 27.

15 Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 2009), p.

158.

PROCTER - THE THEATRE STATE VIII at its centre.16 The Treaty of London (1518), or ‘Universal Peace’, successfully ended Henry’s political isolation from the continent as Wolsey manufactured England a role as arbiter between France and the Holy Roman Empire.

Henry was to police the relations between the two from a neutral position until intervention was required in the event of hostility.17 In meeting the humanist demand for peace, vocalised

by Erasmus in Institutio principis Christiani (1516) and Thomas More’s Utopia (1516),18 Henry acquired international prestige as the ‘prince of peace; a new Solomon’.19 As these sentiments were expressed by Henry’s Royal secretary at the inauguration of the Treaty of London at St Paul’s, they are useful to see the English government’s approach to Henry’s presentation.

Instead of the magnificence of war, Wolsey saw the Treaty of London as a route to magnificent kingship through peace-making. A meeting between the newly allied Henry and Francis was consequently decided upon in the Anglo-French Treaty to consolidate the peace made in 1518 through a manner as honourable and advantageous as a successful military campaign.

The Field of Cloth of Gold was designed

by Wolsey to strengthen and build upon the French alliance through a spectacle of friendship in which Francis accepted Henry’s raised status in European affairs. The Field was thus intended to have a meaningful, political purpose above a presentation and celebration of both courts’ grandiosity. For this to work, both kings needed to believe that they would gain honour from the event that would enhance their kingship above the other.20 Henry’s attitude to the Field is evident in his letters sent out

37 to English nobles asking for their attendance.

One such letter to Sir Adrian Fortescue, in addition to praising Henry’s ‘honour and dignitie royall’, asserted Fortescue’s role as part of the king’s impressive entourage to demonstrate regal power against Francis.21 The Field, in Henry’s mind, was to hold both a physical tournament in which the two courts were to joust, tilt,wrestle, with a tournament of display and magnificence where chivalric honour was the victor’s gain. Francis’s attitude to the Field was similarly competitive and focused on display.

In the first discussion between the two kings in the Val d’Or pavilion, Henry was reluctant to accept the title of ‘the king of France’ as he was addressed.22 Francis’s response masques an assertion of his authority over the English crown with a gesture of goodwill: My brother, now that you are my friend you are the King of France… but without friendship I acknowledge no other king of France than myself.23

Francis viewed Henry’s status in Europe as dependent on his charity and alliance, asserting his dominance over the English king in this casual display of oral skill.

It is from this rivalry that politics became a performance articulated in the creation and assertion of two exemplary centres of chivalry and wealth, radiating from the kings’ bodies and the space around them. Negotiations beforehand between Wolsey and his French equivalent Gaspard de Coligny, agreed upon strict measures to ensure neither court had a physical advantage above the other. The entourage of Henry was matched by Francis in numbers, roughly totalling around six thousand each.24 The Val d’Or meeting place itself was reshaped so that neither side had the

16 Letters and Papers foreign and domestic: Henry VIII: Vol 3 Pt. I, 1519-1523 (London, 1867), J. S. Brewer (ed.), p. 45.

17 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 81.

18 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 4.

19 Glenn Richardson, Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (London, 2002), p. 74.

20 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 8.

21 Chronicle of Calais, In the Reigns of Henry VII. And Henry VIII. To the year 1540. (London, 1846), John Gough Nichols (ed.), p. 79.

22 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 118.

23 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, Vol. III (London, 1869), R. Brown (ed.), p. 60.

24 Ibid., p. 21.

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height to see the other’s approaching retinue.25 At the Field, the equal worth of both courts was stressed continuously to emphasise the brotherhood being formed, made visually evident in the Tree of Honour on which the two kings’ shields were hung at equal height.26 Despite these measures, the Field was still a space for war through grandiosity. Nowhere was this more evident than in the temporary architectural landscape created for Henry and his court to inhabit. ‘A Memoriall of such things as be requisite’ details the preparations of the English court in the ‘garnishing of his [nobles] lodgings, tents, pavilions… requisite to so great an act and triumph’.27 The accommodation of Henry and his court was thus designed to reflect the ‘triumph’ of the occasion for the English. This it did so with great magnitude in the palace built at Guînes.28 The Palace venerated English craftsmanship in its scale, with four brick towers of thirty feet, three bedchambers comparable to those of Whitehall, a dining hall and a chapel, amongst a multitude of other features and rooms.29 The magnificence of its exterior craftsmanship however, was dwarfed by the ostentatious display of English wealth in the furnishings of its interior. Jacques Dubois, a member of the French court, noted that the ‘walls are everywhere cloaked with golden hangings, or else with every variety of embroidery’.30 Dubois’s descriptions are accurate in their lavish detail. Queen Catherine’s chambers were hung with ‘tapestry of silk and gold’ at a worth of seven ducats per yard, in addition to the allegorical paintings of John Rastell that also adorned the dining hall and chapel.31 One particularly heraldic example depicted St

George smiting the dragon, affixed to the king’s oratory on the altar in the chapel.32 To complete the performance of the English crown’s resplendence, a gilt fountain was built, spouting free wine for all passers-by. Francis’s four-hundred tents were not met with the same awe in contemporary accounts. The destruction of many French tents in storms preceding the Field is a more common theme within chronicles than descriptions of grandeur.33 However, displays of competitive magnificence from the French king came from another source: his personal appearance. Through his desire to present himself as a ‘philosopher king’, Francis’s costumes on days of tournament expressed triumph through passion, in contrast to the coarse nationalistic symbolism of Henry’s armour, decorated with eglantine fl wers of gold.34 He achieved this intellectual, purifying presentation of his chivalry by embroidering words onto his costumes, spelling out across multiple days: ‘heart fastened in pain endless/ when she/ delivereth me not of bonds’.35 The pains of love evoked in these words, and his ability to endure them, were Francis’s chivalric triumph.36 The two kings, who fought each other for the honour bestowed through chivalry, did so in symbolic performances of wealth or intelligence as much as on the tournament field That being said, tournaments, as the pastime of any day on the Field not subjected to poor weather, were highly important assertions of authority on the battlefield of peace-making.

Through jousting at the tilt, open field tournament and combat on foot at the barriers, the two kings and their entourages demonstrated

25 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 77.

26 CSP: Venice, p. 22.

27 Glenn Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 38.

28 Ibid., p. 38.

29 Ibid., p. 54.

30 Ibid., pp. 63-4.

31 CSP: Venice, p. 20.

32 Ibid., p. 20.

33 Chronicle of Calais, pp. 82-5.

34 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, pp. 135-6.

35 Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of York and Lancastre (1542), p. 614.

36 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 136.

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PROCTER - THE THEATRE STATE their ability to wage war through a medium of sport. As the ‘antidote to idleness’, it may be assumed that the tournaments at the Field were purely entertaining pastimes with infantile displays of strength.37 But all displays at the Field were politically charged through performance, driven by the rivalry between the English and French kings. As discussed, costumes were used by both men and their entourages to display their chivalric valour. Tournaments however, had significance beyond the kings’ intended presentations of themselves. As both kings joined the lists of competitors, the tiltyard and open fields saw a competition of princely masculinity and beauty.38 Physical beauty and strength in the bodies of the monarchs, especially in this short era of young, physically fit kings ruling Europe’s largest nations, equated to legitimacy and virtue as princes.39 Clément Marot’s poem about the Field stressed that ‘in the political arena, beauty is a sign of power’.40 Beyond this literary commendation of Francis through metaphor, the value of beauty can be seen in other, less embellished sources on the Field. A letter from the French court describes the similar abilities of the two kings in jousting, though ‘the king of France appears to me rather the taller; and the English king rather the handsomer face’41. Tournaments were seen to legitimise the kings through displays of their personal beauty and strength. With this in mind, politics at the Field of Cloth of Gold was a performance, with rivalry the plot and the two kings and their entourages both actors and audience.

Theatrical display, whether in the ar-

chitecture of Henry’s Palace, Francis’s costumes or tournaments, were also parts of this rivalry through performance. Both kings attempted to assert themselves as the centre of chivalry, strength and legitimacy, from which their courts radiated. However, with the outward assertion of friendship at every meeting, done through reciprocal lavish gift-giving and praise, neither exemplary centre fully bested the other. Instead, on the Field, two exemplary centres of chivalry and strength coexisted around Henry and Francis individually, driven by state-generated pomp. There were some occasions at which one king briefly exalted his centre above the other. Though disputed on its exact details, the entry of Francis into the space of the English court on the 17 June, entering either the Palace’s grounds or Henry’s bedchamber, and his gift of a jewelled bracelet to the English king, is one such occasion.42 Up to this point, the exchange of gifts had been equal in generosity, including horses, collars and relics that all exhibited the craftsmanship of their respective countrymen.43 Francis’s unplanned entry into the English court’s space threatened Henry’s honour as he was reduced to a position of spectator whilst the French king demonstrated his bravery and generosity.44 This imbalance was rectified with a hastily organised gift for Francis in return, and by gifts of equal worth given at the departure from the Field.45 This balance enabled both kings to protect the illusion that they met on their own terms, granted by their supremacy. Though the two exemplary centres fluctuated somewhat in their battle against each other, both existed

37 Ramon LLull, Book of the Order of Chivalry (1276), quoted in Glenn Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold (New

Haven, 2013), p. 122.

38 CSP: Venice, p. 25.

39 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 139.

40 Phyllis Mack, ‘Political Rhetoric and Poetic Meaning in Renaissance Culture: Clément Marot and the Field of Cloth of Gold’, in P. Mack and M. C. Jacob (eds.), Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 59-83.

41 CSP: Venice, p. 61.

42 Glenn Richardson, ‘‘As presence did present them’: Personal Gift-giving at the Field of Cloth of Gold’, in Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds.), Henry VIII and the Court: Art Politics and Performance (London, 2013), p.

62.

43 Richardson, ‘Personal Gift-giving at the Field of Cloth of Gold’, pp. 53-57.

44 Ibid., p. 62.

45 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 8.

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throughout the Field, and were kept relatively equal through this mutual generosity between the kings.

Furthermore, tournaments, banqueting halls and meetings, amongst other locations, offered various stages for both kings to perform for the two courts and each other. Peace with prestige was attained by both monarchs as the Field itself became a microcosm of chivalry and honour as a place of peace-making.

Charles V’s exclusion clearly weighed heavily on the Emperor. His quickly arranged meetings with Henry before and after the Field denote a ruler fearing an alliance against him, further suggesting that the meeting of Henry and Francis held weight beyond entertainment and display. From Henry’s exemplary centre in particular, the social reality of hierarchy was actualised. This is evident in the provision of accommodation. As Henry’s first minister, Wolsey had constant access to the king’s apartments through a gallery in Guînes Palace. Nobles of a high status slept within the palace, and the rest with their servants slept in the two hundred tents outside.46 The dining halls of the palace further presented the strict application of status, with multiple banqueting rooms increasingly further away from the space of the king, ranked from ‘grade to grade’.47 The Palace’s architecture mirrored reality, using spatial categorisation to assert status.

Thus, the Field shared great similarities with the Balinese theatrical politics of the nineteenth-century. The former was a microcosm of chivalry that enforced legitimacy through pomp, the latter a microcosm of divinity that did the same. Both additionally radiated the social hierarchy from exemplary centres. However, the Balinese negara was a continuous ceremonialisation of politics from its conception after the Majapahit Conquest; society en masse was involved at graded levels. The same cannot be said for the Field as a 46 Williams, Henry VIII and his Court, p. 77.

47 CSP: Venice, p. 23.

48 Matusiak, Henry VIII, p. 108.

49 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 193.

Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 305.

51 Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold, p. 12.

singular event, exclusive to elite courtiers and their attendants. Therefore, the actual importance of the Field must be analysed through contextualisation to understand the utility of locating a theatre state within this event. The intentions of the Field, as discussed, were not trivial. The Field was an attempt to banish long-standing distrust between the two nations to raise the status of each court. Though the two kings sought to gain prestige through competitive grandiosity, the Field itself was intended to prove the reality of their friendship and alliance. This was achieved with lasting effects. Though no chapel was built to ‘Our Lady of Friendship’ on the site of the closing ceremonial, nor any other physical monument, the Field left a lasting legacy.48 A precedent between the two monarchs was set to physically express the hopes of princely peace through performance. The Peace of the More between Henry and Francis was upgraded to Wolsey’s ‘Eternal peace’ in 1527 through similarly theatrical circumstances. Both the banqueting hall built at Greenwich and the pageants that championed Henry’s magnanimity to Francis mirror the methodology of peace-making in 1520.49 The tournaments, banquets and resplendence of a meeting between the pair in 1532 again asserted friendship and alliance through mediums of performance, this time to gain French backing of Henry’s annulment.50 The Field of Cloth of Gold enabled honourable peace to be made through performance as two ancient enemies continued their alliance through grandiose displays of friendship. Furthermore, the consolidation of the Treaty of London (1518) at the Field justifies why Henry was involved in European conflict throughout the 1520s. After the Field, Henry held the balance of European power and had secured a higher European status as peace-maker.51 It was this role as arbiter that forced Henry to back Charles in his war against Francis in 1522,

41

PROCTER - THE THEATRE STATE after much delay through an attempted peace conference at Calais.52 English involvement in the anti-Hapsburg alliance of 1525 with France maintained Henry’s neutral position. His policing of Europe had peace in mind against antagonistic states, in this case the increasingly powerful and aggressive Empire. Contrary to Bishop Fisher’s sermons that commented on the emptiness of display as princes’ ‘wylles dyd change and nat abyde’ to peace, war two years after the Field does not devalue the event’s political and diplomatic advancements.53 Instead it was a consequence of the strengthening of the Universal Peace, done so at the Field through performance.

The painting of the Field of Cloth of Gold is a worthy source to summarise the importance of the field and its politics through state-sponsored performance. Commissioned

by Henry twenty years after the Field, and again intended for Whitehall Palace, the painting both evokes the spirit and the magnitude of the meeting. It also acts as a detailed depiction from which the king could recollect, with three separate events depicted: the king riding with his entourage into the Palace, the two kings meeting and a tournament. The Holbeinesque portrayal of Henry’s face as an older king suggests that Henry wanted to tie the Field into the rest of his reign as an important event, eliciting comparisons to both the painting of The Battle of the Spurs and later portraits of the monarch. The painting, at its most basic level, asserts that the Field was a theatrical display in its depictions of the magnificent architectural landscape, the dragon from the St John’s Day celebrations and the waves of resplendently dressed figures participating. From this display came a consolidated peace with a role for England in Europe, and from that came a precedent of theatricality in peace-making politics between Henry and Francis.

The Field cannot be limited to ‘nothing but an affair of empty speeches and galli-

vanting’ as the Duke of Buckingham expressed in his anger at the personal expense of the occasion.54 For two weeks in June 1520, ‘ceremony and state [were] the same reality’, to use Geertz’s assertion on Bali.55 Peace-making was used as a device instead of war to assert princely prestige and chivalric honour through ostentatious displays of wealth and strength.

The rivalry between the two kings manifested itself as a competition through performance, with multiple stages in magnificent architecture, the tournament field and in meetings.

Military strength, intelligence and legitimacy existed not in physical war or court politics, but in displays of jousting ability, costumes and lavish decorations, all sponsored by the state. Though Henry and Francis tried to create competing exemplary centres of chivalry around themselves, both centres existed simultaneously as the two kings met on the grounds of friendship and alliance, bolstered by reciprocal gift-giving. From these centres, the social hierarchy radiated and was made actual in accommodation provisions that graded the space around the kings, particularly Henry. The Field was clearly an expression of a theatre state, with politics done through pomp and performance that made a reality of kingly legitimacy and brotherhood, in this case through chivalric virtues as opposed to the divinity expressed in Balinese ceremonies. The utility of this conclusion is attested in the legacy of the Field.

Peace-making with prestige through grandiose display was repeated throughout the relationship between Henry and Francis. Previous historiographical dismissals of the Field as empty frivolity are contradicted by the evidence of Henry’s consolidated role as arbiter. Due to the strengthened Universal Peace, war with France, as the aggressor in 1521, was necessary to meet the terms of the treaty. The Field of Cloth of Gold, as an expression of a Geertzian Theatre State, emphasises the importance of ceremony and display in early modern European politics.

52 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 83.

53 Here after ensueth two fruytfull sermons, made [and] compiled by the right reverende father in God John Fyssher, Doctour of dyvynyte and Bysshop of Rochester (1532), reprinted in Early History of Religion: Early English Books Online (Milton Keynes, 2013), Biv. 54 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 120.

55 Geertz, Negara, p. 108.

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To ignore the factor of performance in court politics is to ignore an abundance of evidence that reveals the intentions, the methodology

and the successes of Renaissance princes in their attempts to skilfully and admirably rule.

ABORIGINAL PEOPLES IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC In what ways did attitudes to the indigenous populations of Australia and the Pacific Islands change during this period?

Anne Herbert Ortega The attitudes of non-indigenous persons to the indigenous populations of Australia and the Pacific Islands changed in a variety of ways from the early exploration of the 1760s to the settlement and government of the 1880s. Many early encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples were friendly, yet during this period outsiders came to view and treat these indigenous populations increasingly as inferior humans—with rights to land and cultures that could be appreciated. These hardening attitudes became enmeshed with scientific ideas around evolution, and a more negative racialist view of indigenous peoples emerged.

Although Grace Karskens and Glyndr Williams have suggested these negative attitudes were present from the earliest encounters, it is clear that there was a hardening of representations of and relations with indigenous peoples from the 1790s. These attitudes were expressed through the treatment of indigenous populations (such as the legislation forced on them), intellectual and travellers’ writings, missionar-

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ies’ propaganda and artwork.

Perhaps the most dramatic way in which attitudes towards indigenous populations of the Pacific changed in this period was in regard to their rights to the land they inhabited.

As Alan Frost has shown, the attitudes towards indigenous territorial sovereignty in the late nineteenth century were broadly sympathetic, requiring negotiation or purchase of land for colonial use. This respect for indigenous populations’ possession of their lands is reflected in Cook’s instructions prior to his first voyage and John Call’s recommendation that Norfolk Island should be colonised because it was uninhabited.1 Yet the resulting respect seemed to disappear entirely. In Australia, the indiscriminate application of terra nullius and annexation of the entire subcontinent by the British Crown ignored any Aboriginal right to land ownership. In New Zealand, the recognition of Māori land ownership in the Treaty of Waitangi disappeared by the 1860s, with the colonial government seizing land aggressively through confiscation and the Nati e Land Court.

Before setting out on his journey in 1768 Cook was given a list of advice on how to interact with the indigenous peoples he encountered by Lord Morton, President of the Royal Society. Amongst these was the assertion that they were the legal owners of the lands they inhabited and should not be deprived of them.2 He also received instruction from the Admiralty that he was only to take possession of land ‘with the Consent of the natives’.3 Cook claimed the eastern coast of Australia for the Crown only in consideration of the eighteenth-century convention of acquiring overseas territory that if an indigenous population had not cultivated the land they inhabited, it could be considered

terra nullius, which a state could acquire by first “discovery” and occupation.4 Cook viewed the Aboriginal people he encountered as completely nomadic, observed that they had not mixed their labour with the land by cultivating or enclosing it and were few in number – leading to the assumption that the interior of Australia was uninhabited. Cook and Banks used John Locke’s accepted ideas on the law of nature and nations to conclude the Aboriginal people did not have the right to possess the land, and therefore the eastern coast of Australia was terra nullius.5 Frost has posited that if the Pitt administration had understood that the Aboriginal peoples mixed their labour with the land they would not have dispatched Captain Phillips to secure Britain’s claim to New South Wales as terra nullius, instead negotiating for the right to settle land.6 This argument that at the beginning of the period British attitudes supported indigenous peoples’ rights to land in the Pacific seems convincing in light of contemporary land negotiations in Gambia and Madagascar.7 This respect was not expressed fifty years later however, when the colonial governor designated Australian territory ‘Lands of the Crown’ and stripped Aboriginal peoples of all agency to sell their land in his 1835 Proclamation.8 This dispossession of land took on legitimacy in the form of rulings by the New South Wales Supreme Court in 1836 (R v Murrell), and 1847 (Attorney-General (New South Wales) v Brown). In Murrell it was upheld that indigenous people had no law of their own and no sovereignty. This stripped their right to property, including land. In Brown the Court held in 1788 the British Crown had become the absolute owner of all Australian land, and so

1 Alan Frost, “New South Wales as Terra Nullius: the British denial of Aboriginal land rights”, Historical Studies, vol.

19, (1981), p. 522.

2 Glyndwr Williams, “The Pacific Exploration and Exploitation”, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998).

3 Admiralty Lords, Additional Instructions for L’James Cook, 30 July 1768, The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. J. C. Beaglehole, Cambridge 1968, vol. I, p. cclxxxiii, in Frost, “New South Wales as Terra Nullius”, p. 518.

4 Frost, “New South Wales as Terra Nullius”, p. 515.

5 Ibid., p. 519.

6 Ibid., p. 522.

7 Ibid., p. 523.

8 Richard Bourke, Governor of New South Wales, Proclamation, 26 August 1835.

ORTEGA - ABORIGINAL PEOPLES IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC the colonial government possessed the right to regulate land distribution.9 This rapid stripping of sovereignty and land rights from the indigenous population of Australia was a distinct change from the 1780s, when Cook’s claim of terra nullius applied only to eastern Australia, an area Cook assumed was barely inhabited.

Similarly, in New Zealand a significant change took place during the period. Statutes in 1817, 1823, and 1828 recognised New Zealand as an independent territory, and the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi expressed the ‘anxious’ wish to protect the Māori people’s ‘just rights and property’ and recognised ‘exclusive, and undisturbed possession of their lands’.10 But following the creation of New Zealand’s new colonial government in 1854 political power was transferred to the less humanitarian settlers who wanted to clear Māori land for farming, regardless of the Treaty’s terms.

The 1850s to 1870s therefore saw a distinct change from the attitudes which determined the 1840 Treaty. The colonial government ignored protests over purchases of supposedly protected Māori land: such as Governor Gore Brown’s wrongful purchase of the Pekapeka block at Waitara in disregard of Māori opposition.11 Indigenous land rights were ignored on the premise, as stated by Governor Brown, that the Māori had been made British subjects, and as such could not be unjustly dispossessed of land by the British Crown.12 John Eldon Gorst’s description of a group of Māori attempting to dispute government possession of land as ‘rash’, and their subsequent defeat by British

45

troops, typifies how such incidents were met with dismissal and violence – contrasting with sentiments expressed in the Treaty of Waitangi.13 The New Zealand Wars over land, continuing into the 1870s, saw thousands of British military troops used by the colonial government to suppress the Māori King movement.14 In addition to violence, legislation was created to facilitate the alienation of Māori land to the settler government. The colonial parliament introduced the New Zealand Settlements Act in 1863, allowing land to be confiscated for public purposes; and the Native Land Court in 1865.

This terminated the land rights granted to the Māori by the Native Land Acts of 1862 and 1865, and often seized Māori land through economic coercion. Through it, 8 million acres were purchased from 1865 to 1890.15 As the government did not provide safeguards or controls on the sale of Māori land, Māori land ownership decreased dramatically.16 This denial of land rights through legislation —in particular in Australia from the 1830s and New Zealand from the 1850s—reflected broader contemporary attitudes towards the land rights of the indigenous populations of the Pacifi . Charles Dilke in his Greater Britain conveyed frustration that land was purchased from the Māori people ‘at enormous prices’, claiming that they had no right to it as they had not made ‘the smallest use’ of ‘one-hundredth part’ of it.17 Froude, in Oceana, expressed a similar sentiment, portraying the Māori he encountered at Ohinemutu as neglecting the land the government rented from

9 Lisa Ford, “Indigenous Policy and its Historical Occlusions: The North American and Global Contexts of Australian Settlement”, Australian Indigenous Law Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008, p. 70.

10 Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington, 1997), p. 8; Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention

in New Zealand 1830-1847 (Auckland, 1977), p. 175; William Hobson, James Freeman, and James Busby, The Treaty of Waitangi, (6 February 1840), in Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand 1830-1847 (Auckland, 1977), p. 258.

11 Philippa Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand (Cambridge, 2011), p. 73.

12 Ibid., p. 71.

13 J. E. Gorst, The Maori King: Or, The Story of Our Quarrel with the Natives of New Zealand (Cambridge, 2011), p.

391.

14 Ibid., p. 391.

15 Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand, p. 75.

16 Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, p. 186.

17 Charles Dilke, Greater Britain: a record of travel in English-speaking countries during 1866 and 1867 (Philadelphia, 1869), p. 332.

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them, preferring to ‘live on their income, like ladies and gentlemen’. This opinion that indigenous populations should not be granted land ownership shows a radical change in metropolitan British views from the late eighteenth century and the respect for indigenous land rights held by Pitt, Call, and their contemporaries.

Attitudes towards indigenous populations of the Pacific also changed significantly in the respect held for their lives and freedom in this period. Violence against them became increasingly common and was often sanctioned by colonial governors. This change was not as clear in attitudes to land rights, as these were often split between those held by humanitarians and the Colonial Offic , and those of settlers and racialists. There was a clear respect for the lives of indigenous populations at the start of the period. The exact instructions given by Lord Morton to Cook prior to his first journey stated that ‘shedding the blood’ of any indigenous people they encountered would be ‘a crime of the highest nature’.18 Cook’s actions on his subsequent journeys demonstrate the strength of this high regard for the lives of indigenous peoples. His determination to act as an ‘enlightened leader’ led him to respect even the life of Kahura, the man principally responsible for the killing of a number of Cook’s men, despite other Maori groups and his own men urging him to kill him.19 Like Cook, Phillip was instructed to treat the indigenous people he encountered well, and protect them from the convicts and sailors.20 These instructions were taken seriously, reflecting the British colonialists’ belief in these at the start of the period:

Phillip forbade anyone from harming Aboriginal warriors, despite the violence they visited on settlers who travelled into Aboriginal lands.21 Governors of New South Wales continued this role as protectors of indigenous populations: In 1813 Governor Davey condemned violence towards Aboriginal people and Governor King of New South Wales ordered ships from Sydney not to ill-treat Māori workers in 1805.22 It should be noted however that a split in attitudes became evident even from early in the period – unlike the more sympathetic Cook and Phillip their men often ignored the instructions to respect indigenous lives. In 1799, after two settlers were killed by Aboriginal warriors, other settlers killed two young Aboriginal men in retribution.23 The settlers responsible were arrested and tried for murder, indicating a clear split in attitudes between settlers and the colonial government.24 This split became more evident by the 1830s. While the paternalistic humanitarian involvement of movements such as the Aborigines Protection Society (APS) in the Pacific region grew, settlers continued violence and the colonial government began to show less respect for the lives of indigenous peoples. The APS was formed in 1837 at a time of metropolitan humanitarian concern around the treatment of indigenous populations under the British Empire.25 It expressed concern for their lives and wellbeing, comparing ‘modern colonization’ to the slave trade and wishing to prevent future suffering in light of past oppression.26 It expressed a similar approach to Lord Morton in terms of the equality of indigenous popula-

18 J.C. Beaglehole (ed.), Voyage of the Endeavour, p. 514, in Williams, “The Pacific” pp. 558-59.

19 Anne Salmond, The trial of cannibal dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London, 2004), p. 4.

20 Governor Phillip’s Instructions, 27 April 1787, in Watson 1914-1925, Historical Records of Australia, series 1, vol

1:1,13-14, in Grace Karskens, “Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin: Aboriginal Men and Clothing in Early New South Wales.” Aboriginal History, vol. 35, (2011), p. 11.

21 Grace Karskens, “Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin: Aboriginal Men and Clothing in Early New South Wales”, Aboriginal History, vol. 35, (2011), p. 15.

22 Ann McGrath, “Tasmania: 1”, in Ann McGrath, (ed.), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, (St Leonards, 1995), p. 317; Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, p. 8.

23 Karskens, “Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin”, p. 17.

24 Ibid., p. 18.

25 Aborigines Protection Society (Great Britain), The First Annual Report of the Aborigines Protection Society: Presented at the Meeting in Exeter Hall, May 16th, 1838: with List of Officers, Subscribers and Benefactors, (1838), p. 9.

26 Ibid., pp. 7, 23.

ORTEGA - ABORIGINAL PEOPLES IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC tions, speaking of ‘eternal…rectitude between man and man’.27 The Colonial Office also continued to express humanitarian attitudes towards the populations of the Pacifi . Their formal promise in the Treaty of Waitangi that the Māori people would be granted ‘all the rights and privileges of British subjects’ was unusual in contemporary British colonial policy.28 The anti-slavery movement also pressured colonial governors into maintaining an appearance of acting humanely towards indigenous peoples.29 Some began to condone violence however—Governor Stirling in Western Australia led a group of settlers in the Pinjarra massacre of 1834, where they killed a number of Binjareb people. The split in attitudes between the British and colonial governments is exemplified here—Secretary of State Glenelg reprimanded Stirling, making it clear the government did not want acts of violence or injustice against the Aboriginal peoples, and that Stirling had acted against the position of the British government.30 The colonial government’s involvement in allowing the killing and capturing of indigenous people became especially prominent in Van Diemen’s Land. Lieutenant Governor Arthur authorised a mission led by ex-soldier Nicholas Fortosa, and that Fortosa would receive a reward in return for Aboriginal people killed in the process of capture, thus sanctioning the killing of Aboriginal people – an act of genocide.31 Despite the humanitarian concern nominally expressed by the Colonial Office—a charade of ‘voluntary removal’ was maintained in the removal of survivors to Flinders Island—hundreds of Aboriginal people were killed through colonial violence during the key

47

years of the Vandemonian war.32 By this point in the period the colonial government had actively chosen to remove all Aboriginal people from Van Diemen’s Land, and to continue this policy despite fatalities so high that they recognised it could lead to extinction.33 Again, the colonial government chose to exile survivors to Flinders Island, where children were severely mistreated by official , showing consistent disregard for the lives of Aboriginal people that differed greatly from the attitudes of the late eighteenth century.34 In addition to the great questions of whether indigenous peoples should be treated equally in terms of rights to land, life and freedom, European attitudes towards the treatment of indigenous people when there was no interracial or land conflict also changed. Early interactions between Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Pacific had occurred on fairly equal terms, involving positive social interaction and cultural exchange—eating together, admiring music, even friendship. Over the course of the period however this attitude of friendly and equal cooperation gave way to ideas of European cultural superiority which governed interactions with indigenous populations.

Early explorations of the Pacific yielded many positive accounts of interactions with indigenous populations. This period saw a ‘springtime of trust’, where explorers and colonists actively sought to socialise and trade.35 Numerous expeditions shared meals at sea or on the shore with the people they encountered, expressing a willingness to place themselves at an equal level with them, and recog-

27 Ibid., p. 9.

28 Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, p. 32; Hobson, The Treaty of Waitangi, p. 258.

29 McGrath, “Tasmania”, p. 317.

30 A. G. L. Shaw, “British policy towards the Australian Aborigines 1830 1850”, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 25, (1992), p. 271.

31 Nicholas Dean Brodie, “The Vandemonian War as Genocidal Moment: Historiographical Refrains and Archival Secrets”, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 20:3, (2018), p. 473; McGrath, “Tasmania”, p. 306.

32 Ibid., p. 480.

33 James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne, 2009), p. 296.

34 Gaye Sculthorpe and Leonie Stevens, Aboriginal History, vol. 42, (2018), pp. 187-88.

35 Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with strangers: Europeans and Australians at first contact (New York, 2005), p. 285.

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nising a common humanity.36 Cook’s voyages saw him associate closely with various chiefs, and his attempts to impress his Tongan hosts with fir works suggests an eagerness to put on a cultural display of his own and that he saw them as worthy of entertaining.37 This initial interest and rapport is also evident in reports of sailors from D’Entrecasteaux’s 1793 expedition and Aboriginal men linking arms, and one young man playing a joke on the sailors, with diarists referring to the Aboriginal people as ‘our good friends’.38 This positive and equalist attitude towards interacting with Aboriginal people was also reflected in official British policy to include them in the town of Sydney, and by receiving important figure , such as Bennelong and his wife Barangaroo, at Government House.39 But these attitudes shifted over time, and with greater settlement social relations changed dramatically. Colonists became the superiors in a new hierarchy which privileged European customs and culture, leading to their imposition, and the segregation of indigenous and non-indigenous populations. Unlike in interactions with early expeditions, where both groups mixed freely with each other, ate at the same table and danced together, towns in Australia were marked with boundary posts which Aboriginal people could cross into only when clothed and in daylight.40 Segregation in Van Diemen’s land was imposed by Lieutenant Governor Arthur’s April 1828 Proclamation of Demarcation. This separated settlers and Aboriginal people by expelling the latter (on threat of force) from “settled districts”, the demarca-

tion of which was enforced with military posts.41 Aboriginal people were further distinguished by the requirement for Aboriginal leaders to possess a passport signed by the Governor in order to travel, marking them as aliens who could not move freely through settled areas.42 Segregation was entrenched in settler-indigenous relations not only through physical barriers—mid-eighteenth-century artwork featuring Aboriginal people almost never depicted them as part of the European settler world.

In an 1838 watercolour (‘Feast given to the natives by Governor Gawler’) the group of Aboriginal people are depicted as standing clearly separate from the Europeans. The appearance of one Aboriginal man adorned with feathers and body paint, chained and excluded in the background, reinforces their subordination.

It also displays the forfeit for not assimilating to European culture—even in pictorial representation Aboriginal people were forced to comply with European cultural norms in order for their very presence to be accepted.43 European practices such as those of time, space and clothing seen in the prohibition of Aboriginal people entering certain areas unclothed or at night encoded differences which underpinned European social and cultural supremacy.44 The demarcation of space in particular underlined the segregation and inequality of settlers and Aboriginal peoples. As McGuire has shown through her analysis of gender in this period the spatial opposition of inside and outside the sacred homestead separated settlers not only from the “wild” environment in which Aboriginal peoples lived, but from the people them-

36 McGrath, “Tasmania”, pp. 311-12.

37 Salmond, The trial of cannibal dog, p. 431; John Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific in the Age of Enlightenment, (Cam-

bridge, 2014), p. 466.

38 Stephanie Anderson, “French Anthropology in Australia, a Prelude: the Encounters between Aboriginal Tasmanians and the Expedition of Bruny D’Entrecasteaux, 1793”, Aboriginal History, vol. 24, (2000), p. 216.

39 Karskens, “Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin”, p. 15.

40 H. Ling Roth (ed.), Julien Marie Crozet, and James R. Boosé, Crozet’s Voyage to Tasmania, New Zealand, the Ladrone Islands, and the Philippines in the Years 1771–1772 (1891; Cambridge 2011), p. 25; Fiona Paisley, The American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 2, (2006), p. 456.; Margaret E. McGuire, “The Legend of the Good Fella Missus”, Aboriginal History, vol. 14, no. 1/2, (1990), p. 126.

41 McGrath, “Tasmania”, p. 319.

42 Ibid., p. 320.

43 McGuire, “The Legend of the Good Fella Missus”, p. 127.

44 Ibid., p. 126.

ORTEGA - ABORIGINAL PEOPLES IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC selves.45 The establishment of this hierarchy was accompanied by increasing paternalistic interest in “civilising” indigenous peoples, assuming European culture and practice to be superior, and its distribution to indigenous peoples to be an act of charity. Many of these attempts were through missionaries’ efforts, such as George Augustus Robinson’s attempt to civilise and convert the indigenous population of Bruny Island in 1829.46 The APS too expressed a wish to ‘civilise’ and to ‘rescue and elevate the coloured races at large’, allocating Europeans the role of saviours able to lift indigenous peoples from their inferior social and cultural situation.47 The organisation supported efforts in New South Wales to do this by ‘instructing’ the Aboriginal population, teaching them ‘habits of industry’, and building ‘asylums’ for them.48 This attitude was echoed in New Zealand as well. Gorst’s view that the Māori needed ‘to be managed’ suggests he saw them as inferiors who should be subservient to the colonists.49 His belief the Māori should be ‘civilised’—by European standards – privileged British law and order above Māori identity, and he worked actively against Māori nationalism in editing the newspaper Pitroihoi Mokemoke, which aimed to combat the Māori King movement’s newspaper Te Hokioi.50 In close relation to the changes in attitudes as to how indigenous peoples should be treated beliefs about their character also changed. Attitudes underwent a notable trans-

49

formation in ideas of the “savage” and indigenous people’s natural characteristics during the late eighteenth century. Understanding shifted away from positive ideas about the “noble savage” that were used in reference to populations of the Pacific in the wake of discoveries from the 1760s. By the 1790s, in the wake of the death of Cook, were replaced by an understanding of the violent “ignoble savage”.

Accounts of early encounters from the 1770s emphasised the positive qualities of indigenous peoples and their lifestyles. Tahiti was imagined as a utopian ‘new Garden of Eden’ in Europe, and peoples encountered in the South Pacific were repeatedly associated with ‘joy’.51 French naturalist Labillardiere described the people he encountered on Van Diemen’s Land as peaceable, and the d’Entrecasteaux expedition similarly were impressed by their ‘innate goodness’.52 ‘Wistful’ suggestions were made that earlier stages of existence, similar to that of the peoples encountered in the Pacifi , were better, and that European man had degenerated from this state.53 Europeans also displayed appreciation for indigenous culture: on Cook’s third voyage he and his men lauded the singing they heard in Tonga, asserting it would impress an audience in Europe.54 They also recognised similarities between themselves and indigenous peoples: in Peron’s account of the 1802 Baudin expedition he noted the vanity and maternal care expressed by Aboriginal women as being the same as of any race.55 Following the deaths of famous naviga-

45 Ibid., p. 125.

46 Robert Clarke and Anna Johnston, “Travelling the sequestered Isle: Tasmania as penitentiary, laboratory and sanctuary”, Studies in Travel Writing, vol. 20:1, (2016).

47 First Annual Report of the Aborigines Protection Society, pp. 7-8.

48 Ibid., p. 23.

49 Gorst, The Maori King, p. 390.

50 E. J. Feuchtwanger, “Gorst, Sir John Eldon (1835–1916), politician and lawyer”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2011).

51 John Gascoigne, “Motives for European Exploration of the Pacific in the Age of the Enlightenment”, Pacific Science, vol. 54, no. 3, (2000), p. 229; Anderson, “French Anthropology in Australia”, p. 215.

52 McGrath, “Tasmania”, p. 311.; Anderson, “French Anthropology in Australia”, p. 216.

53 Glyndwr Williams, “‘Enlarging the sphere of contemplation’: The exploration of the Pacific 1760-1800” in P.J. Marshall and G. Williams (eds.), The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment, (London, 1982), p. 258.

54 Gascoigne, Encountering the Pacific, p. 466.

55 McGrath, “Tasmania”, p. 311.

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tors such as Cook and Marion du Fresne, public attitudes shifted towards blaming the ‘native character’ and a less friendly stance towards the indigenous peoples of the Pacific developed.56 Accounts began to stress negative characteristics, such as warfare, over characteristics such as peaceability, and pictorial representations in particular changed to reflect these attitudes.

W. Fitzgerald’s poem ‘Ode to the Memory of the late Captain James Cook (1780)’ portrayed ‘th’inglorious native’ as plagued by misery and violence resulting directly from the ‘savage life’, and Julien Crozet’s ‘Nouveau voyage à la mer du Sud’ condemned the ‘savage character’.

Crozet’s view on emotional volatility in particular showed a distinct change in attitudes towards indigenous peoples. This had previously been interpreted as evidence of virtue amongst champions of the benefits of the more natural ‘primitive’ state, but he perceived it as dangerous. Smith argues this indicated a significant turning point in European attitudes, changing from the popular concept of the ‘noble savage’ to that of the ‘ignoble savage’.57 There was a harshening of views on the character of indigenous peoples from this point onwards. The portrayal of indigenous peoples as violent and depraved gained strength with the increase in popularity of the missionary movement in the 1830s and 1840s. Missionaries returning from overseas missions became public heroes in the way explorers such as Cook had been.58 But, whereas explorers had been credited for their scientific discoveries and gathering of knowledge, missionaries were applauded for braving encounters with violent heathens. This shift in recipients of hero-wor-

ship indicates a change in public perception, as does the public support for attempts at “civilisation” and conversion. Interest was in indigenous peoples’ heathenism, rather than their customs and culture.

Pictorial depictions often focussed on practices such as cannibalism or depicted indigenous peoples as inhuman. For example, the 1837 publication of the woodcut Human Sacrifice at Tahiti (1784) in the LMS pamphlet Missionary Sketches differed from the original voyage illustration it was based on. It portrayed the Tahitians as ‘a squat, very swarthy… people’, and placed the illustrated skulls closer to the fore for emphasis.59 Moral degeneration through drunkenness was also commonly associated with indigenous peoples, as in a caricature from 1838 depicting Aboriginal people drinking and fightin .60 An accompanying poem describes the drunk men as ‘stupefied and infused with ‘basest passion’, emphasising their drunken state.61 This understanding of indigenous ‘savage’ peoples as naturally disposed to violence continued to be widely circulated during the nineteenth century. Contemporary sources painted their history as one of war, infanticide and cannibalism, using vivid cautionary tales to illustrate this.62 Darwin, in his Descent of Man, recounted the story of a man in Australia who would not rest after the death of his wife until he had killed another woman, stressing the deadly nature of Aboriginal practices.63 Similarly, both Dilke and Froude emphasised the Māori’s proclivity for war and cannibalism, telling of a chief who ‘boiled and ate an ambassador…The ambassador’s master…boiled the

56 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, (New Haven, 1985), p. 122.

57 Ibid., pp. 121-23.

58 Anna Johnston, “George Augustus Robinson, the ‘Great Conciliator’: colonial celebrity and

its postcolonial aftermath”, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 12:2, (2009), p. 160.

59 Smith, European Vision, pp. 317-18.

60 Artist unknown, ‘Real life in Sydney’, lithograph, c1838, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales,

B1106, in Karskens, “Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin”, p. 3.

61 Saunders Rev John (attrib) cc1838, poem accompanying ‘Real life in Sydney’, lithograph, with letterbook 18341847, Mitchell Library, Sydney, in Karskens, “Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin”, p. 1.

62 James Anthony Froude, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies (1886; Cambridge, 2010), p. 271.; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; London, 1890), p. 46.

63Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 115.

ORTEGA - ABORIGINAL PEOPLES IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC other in the same pool, and dined on him in return’.64 Attitudes towards indigenous peoples of the Pacific also became increasingly negative in the scientific understanding of their place on the ladder of civilisation. This was accompanied by the idea that indigenous populations were “dying races” on the verge of extinction, something that was not suggested by explorers’ accounts of the previous centu-ry. By the 1840s the ethnologist Robert Knox claimed that extinction of indigenous peoples was ‘sure’, pointing to Australia and New Zea-land as places where the population would be ‘cleared’ as it had been in Van Diemen’s Land.65 Darwin too suggested that Aboriginal peoples were being ‘supplanted’ by ‘civilised nations’ in the process of survival of the fittest. His claim that ‘civilised nations’ had intellects ‘perfected through natural selection’ implied indigenous peoples were biologically inferior, lacking the ‘arts’ to survive.66 Popular newspa-per poems and texts such as Charles Bonwick’s The Last of the Tasmanians (1870) expressed pity towards these “dying races”.67 By the sec-ond half of the nineteenth century Aboriginal peoples in particular were commonly held to be at a more primitive stage of human development.68 Froude’s one encounter with Aborigi-nal people at Corranderrk in Oceana

51

expresses no curiosity or admiration for their ingenuity, only pity: ‘we turned aside to see a native set-tlement…very hopeless, but the best that could be done for a dying race.’69 This period saw change in how Europe-ans perceived the indigenous populations of the Pacific in relation not only to their place within the imperial project of settlement and colonisation, but also their scientific nature and stage of development.

Attitudes became increasingly negative, and a shift in opinion, beginning in the 1790s and having taken hold by the 1830s, led to the formation of long-last-ing and negative racial stereotypes.

Anthropo-logical and ethnological ideas of development underlined their difference from Europeans, and attitudes became more fatalistic with the birth of new scientific theories. As inferior beings, indigenous peoples were stripped of their rights; as they were perceived to have no laws they had no right to land, as subjects to British law they had no right to contest land owner-ship policy. They were massacred or captured and imprisoned where tensions were present, a far cry from the respect for life insisted upon in Cook’s instructions.

Their inferiority was enforced through segregation and the imposi-tion of British culture in attempts to “civilise” them, another sharp contrast from the cultural exchange and friendship demonstrated in ear-ly encounters.

64 Froude, Oceana, pp. 275-6; see also the story of Hangi massacring the Mokoia Islanders, Ibid., p. 273.

65 Robert Knox, The races of men: a philosophical enquiry into the influence of race over the destinies of nations (1850; Lon-

don, 1862), p. 230; Clare L. Taylor, “Knox, Robert (1791–1862), anatomist and ethnologist”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (2004).

66 Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 128.

67 McGuire, “The Legend of the Good Fella Missus”, p. 126.

68 Anne Maxwell, “‘Oceana’ Revisited: J. A. Froude’s 1884 Journey to New Zealand and the Pink and White Terraces”, Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 37, no. 2, (2009), p. 384.

69 Froude, Oceana, p. 148.

EAST ASIA & THE ENVIRONMENT How have insights from environmental history developed and/or demystified the role of the state in East Asian history?

Francis Braddell-Dawson This essay will demonstrate how in the expansion of the East Asian state towards its frontiers, it continually adapted the nature of its administration and presence to local culture-nature relations. With a specific focus on the state’s response to the changing natural environment of different frontier regions, this essay will seek to demonstrate how the East Asian state was composed of an evolving state structure, that at times concentrated power, whilst at others it dissolved political power and relied on the support of local communities. Firstly it will look at Qing expansion westwards into Xinjiang during the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796), where mass state-sponsored migration was part of the reclamation of agricultural settlements. The extreme aridity of the land meant that the success of such settlements was based on crucial local Turkestani assistance, especially in the maintenance of regional water systems. The frontier province of Yunnan proved even more environmentally challenging than Xinjiang, which resulted in an even greater decentralization of the

Qing administration there. Qing approaches to Yunnan evolved over time, from indirect rule through the native chieftainship system under Emperor Kangxi’s reign (1661-1722), to a more aggressive military interventionist policy of Qing administration under Emperor Yongzheng (1722-1735). Lastly we will turn towards Japanese expansion into the northern Ainu inhabited island of Sakhalin, where Matsumae lords promoted trading with Ainu hunters, and established a fishery near Shiranushi. Whilst the introduction of commerce allowed Ainu hunters to purchase goods from a pastoral and agricultural economy through trade networks, over-hunting saw a disruption in the local culture-nature balance. In this instance the East Asian state again demonstrated its ability to overcome issues related to environmental degradation as it re-opened trade routes through its own Tokugawan channels. As shall be seen in this essay, this frontier culture presents an alternative perspective on the East Asian state, as neither one of Oriental despotism, nor one of a ´laissez-faire` approach as argued by Per-

BRADDELL-DAWSON - EAST ASIA AND THE ENVIRONMENT due, but instead structures continually changing and adapting.

The environment has been a source of new understandings of the nature of the East Asian state, and more recent scholarship has laid particular emphasis on the close relationship between environmental and frontier history, as argued by Perdue.1 However, we must firstly contextualize western scholarship on the relationship between the state and the environment in East Asia. Witffogel´s hydraulic despotism theory understood the East Asian state as controlling the country’s water resources, and being capable of coercing the required labour force to maintain this ‘hydraulic state’.2 On frontiers, however, state power was often limited and coercion was often replaced with incentives to increase productivity. The state often found itself in a position of negotiation with local peoples, in the creation of sub-bureaucratic structures of indirect rule. In departing from Wittfogel, Owen Lattimore introduced the agency of environmental factors, through a perspective of ´ecological determinism`, in which China´s lack of a consistent ecological regime meant it did not experience the same industrial development as the west.3 Lattimore´s writings on the influence of natural boundaries associated with terrain and climate shaping the political boundaries of the state can be seen in the writings of Perdue, who argued that the uniformity of the ecological zones in Eurasia, where most of the land is flat and surrounded by mountains, meant it was difficult to draw cultural or politically motivated boundaries.4 Thus, in Eurasia, both empires and their borders were constantly shifting and

53

being negotiated.

Qing expansion into Xinjiang revealed how the state was not in complete control over the direction of its expansion on the frontier, and instead was continually changing and adapting in both its presence and administration.5 Contrary to the nationalist perspective, in which Qing expansion into Xinjiang was part of a premeditated state plan focused on advancing social and economic development, it seems the real Qing motivations for westward expansion were related to security and self-sufficienc .6 Furthermore, the ruling Qing elite that oversaw the process of expansion into Xinjiang neither claimed the region was historically Chinese, nor did they conceive of expansion into Xinjiang as part of a wider process of ideological unification 7The conquest of the western regions was part of no long term state vision, but was actually a reactionary occurrence due to the betrayals of certain state allies.8 Three interlocked projects that brought together a large quantity of data on the new western territories would provide a basis for the ideological conception of the Qing state in central Asia.9 These were: the Qianlong Atlas, an imperial gazette commissioned to provide information about the newly conquered lands of Zungharia and Altishahr, and another gazette called the ´Unified language gazetteer of the Western Regions`, that sought to standardize Chinese and Manchu transcriptions of all the local regional names.10 Such scientifi , cultural and geographic gathering of information was similar to that collected by European expansionist states, used to assert their own national and imperial control.11 Thus, although it

1 Perdue, Peter C., China Marches West, (Cambridge, MA, 2005), p. 17.

2 Wittfogel, Karl August, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, (New Haven, 1967), p. 47.

3 Rowe, William T. “Owen Lattimore, Asia, and Comparative History.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 66.3 (2007), p. 764.

4 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 333.

5 Ibid., p. 540.

6 Ibid., p. 336.

7 Ibid., p. 334 8 Millward, James A. “Coming onto the Map: “Western Regions” Geography and Cartographic Nomenclature in the Making of Chinese Empire in Xinjiang.”, Late Imperial China 20.2 (1999), p. 65.

9 Ibid., p. 64.

10 Ibid., p. 70.

11 Ibid., p. 76.

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had never been the intention of the Qing state to expand westwards, the process resulted in a reconfiguration of the state itself, and contrary to Wittfogel´s perspective, Xinjiang´s environment would distinctly shape the construction of state presence there.

Xinjiang´s low natural and agricultural productivity posed distinct challenges to the success of imperial settlement schemes, and saw a major intervention on the part of the Qing state to try and maintain the military and eventually civilian settlements it established.

The crisis that emerged in Turfan during the early Qing expansion westwards illustrates how such environmental limitations created distinct problems for the security of livelihood there. For instance, after the community could no longer produce enough grain to sustain its population due to continuous Zunghar raids, it was left to local chieftain Imin Kwaja to lead a mass migration of 10,000 people across 700 kilometres of desert until they reached Xin Guazhou.12 In order to resolve the lack of grain supplies, the Qing state sought a massive investment into the primary resource productivity of Turkestan, so that it could sustain a civilian population and military presence.13 One of the ways in which the Qing accomplished this was through state sponsored migration.

In an article titled ´A proposal to establish the western regions as a province`, Gong Zizheng promoted the agricultural settlement and reclamation of Xinjiang through an influx of Han and Manchu workers from the interior, in order to ramp up agricultural productivity and extraction of mineral resources.14 In 1761, the poor Han peasantry of Gansu were sponsored by the state to migrate to Urumchi, and the state paid for their transport costs, agricultural tools, seed and even housing.15 Although such

state sponsored migration reflected the power of the Qing, there were also limitations to the effectiveness of such a state-led programme of agricultural reclamation. Certain cultivators soon began to neglect what they considered ´state-land`, and in 1804 Governor Song Yu of Huining turned collective holdings into private property, and established state granaries to purchase any surplus grain.16 This resulted in a greater incentive for cultivators to grow beyond subsistence requirements, and thus increased local agricultural productivity.

State-sponsored migration and settlement of Xinjiang was not enough to guarantee the success of the colonies there, as the Qing increasingly relied on a decentralized administration of begs (local landlords) alongside the assistance of local communities and local practice in the context of harsh environmental conditions. Aside from being given an official status and land, local begs also received tax exemptions in return for their collaboration with Qing official .17 They were also crucial intermediaries between Qing officials and the large population of Turkestani´s, who inhabited many of the oases in Xinjiang.18 The beg system demonstrated how the nature of Qing rule on the frontier was increasingly shaped by central Asian customs and was progressively less similar to that of the Han dominated civil administration in the interior.19 However, such adaptations in local administration in Xinjiang were necessary, particularly regarding the management of water supplies in a region that was extremely arid and where the paucity in rainfall placed even more pressure on agricultural productivity. The reconstruction bureaus set up around Xinjiang were established to increase local grain production, which included conducting land surveys, measuring soil

12 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 332.

13 Ibid., p. 333.

14 Millward, “Coming onto the Map”, p. 83.

15 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 344.

16 Ibid., p. 347.

17 Lavelle, Peter, The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China, (New York, 2020), p. 124.

18 Ibid., p. 125.

19 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 340.

BRADDELL-DAWSON - EAST ASIA AND THE ENVIRONMENT fertility and assessing water supplies.20 These surveys were conducted by local headmen, who reported on the condition of local water supplies to Qing official , as well as recruiting local Turkestani civilians for repairing the hydraulic infrastructure.21 Turkestani inhabitants proved they were far more adept at managing local water supplies, as their villages were composed of ´elaborate canal networks` fed by diverted water from nearby rivers to irrigate the crops, as demonstrated by the inhabitants of both the Niya and Keriya oases of the southern Tarim basin.22 In its attempt to adapt to the environmental circumstances in Xinjiang, the Qing state depended on a significant amount of local support.

In the case of the Yunnan frontier region, the mountainous environment there was considerably less adaptable to the lowland arable cultivation that had been promoted in Xinjiang, and ecological circumstances became the prominent limiting factor to Qing control.

David Bello has described Yunnan as having proved ´the greatest environmental challenge to Qing borderland formation`.23 In 1682 Governor General of Guizhou and Yunnan, Cai Yurong, in his ´Ten measures for providing for Yunan` argued that too few fields and too many mountains meant that Yunnan couldn´t produce enough crops to sustain itself.24 The problem of establishing self-sustaining settlements was similar in Yunnan, where Qing officials could not rely on local cultivation as it had done with the Turkestani´s. Tribal cultivation was of no use to imperial arable cultivation, as it produced small quantities and was limited to ´slash and burn agriculture`.25 Furthermore, there was also a limited potential in

55

state-sponsored migration of Han peasants due to the widespread existence of malaria which had only a very short non-infectious season.

26 Such environmental conditions meant that if Qing officials wanted to maintain any form of consistent presence in Yunnan, it had to be through an even more decentralized mode of administration than that of Xinjiang. On the frontier, the exportation of a monocultural or anthropocentric approach was clearly not effective, as the state adapted to both variations in human culture as well as the non-human aspect of the changing ecology of borderland areas.27 In Yunnan the cultural element of such border relations would take precedence due to the difficulties posed by the region’s environmental conditions. Contrary to the beg system in Xinjiang, chieftains retained considerably more autonomy and resembled allies rather than subjects. Bello argues that these constituted an ´inner frontier`, of a ´direct state presence on one side and a vacuum of state authority on the other`.28 The extent of state decentralization can be understood through Charles Patterson´s position that the tusi system of native officials never really became a native official system tusi zhidu, as demonstrated by the fact that the term doesn’t appear in Qing documents of the time.29 Instead, it seems Qing officials constantly had to adapt their relations with native chieftains, to the local, individual indigenous context. The attempt to introduce a more standardized policy of administration in Yunnan can be seen through the introduction of educational programmes that bore a distinctly ideological undertone. From 1702 to 1722, seventy-four Chinese public schools had

20 Lavelle, The Profits of Nature, p. 121.

21 Ibid., p. 122.

22 Ibid., p.124.

23 Bello, David, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China’s Borderlands, (Cambridge, 2016), p. 14.

24 Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain, p. 178.

25 Ibid., p. 180.

26 Ibid., p. 202.

27 Walker, Brett, The Conquest of Ainu lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800, (Berkely, 2001), p. 2.

28 Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain, p. 173.

29 Giersch, Charles, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier, (Cambridge, MA, 2006), p.

11.

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been set up in Yunnan, and by 1705, Beijing had notified native chieftains that legitimate successors to the position of chieftain, not only had to be direct male descendants, but also had to attend Chinese school and prove they had ´learnt their lessons well`.30 Such educational programmes were reversed under Emperor Yongzheng, and Governor General Ortai of Guizhou and Yunnan led more than one thousand troops against what he called ´the great scourge`.31 The policy of aggressive Qing military intervention and forced conversion of Yunnan´s indigenous communities to an imperial administration focused on arable cultivation ultimately failed. In a rescript to a memorial by Governor Chen Shen in 1707, he stated the need for a careful balance in Qing imperial presence in Yunnan, that was neither too strict, nor too lax ´for if we interfere too much in native chieftain affairs, we will only end up with an uncontrollable situation`.32 In the same way that Qing frontier expansion differed from its interior civil administration, Matsumae policy in northern Ainu lands differed substantially in its geographic and commercial vision to that of the Tokugawa imperial polity. Japanese Matsumae of cials developed a strong commercial interest in Ainu lands, as demonstrated at the Island of Sakhalin where the first permanent Japanese fishery was set up in 1790 near Shiranushi.33 As expansionists on the periphery, Matsumae traders dealt with a variety of different groups at Sakhalin, including Manchu´s, Tungu´s, Satan, Ugan and Sakhalin Ainu´s.34 To use Perdue´s expression, they developed a ´frontier culture` that evidenced the mobilization of commerce and culture, which could be seen across different frontier regions in East Asia.35 At the Shiranushi post, local Ainu profited in

trading Chinese textiles with the Japanese, and in 1786 one Ainu elder Yaen Koroaino reportedly traded ´one approximately six-yard length of crimson silk for several bales of rice, yeast, barrels of sake, and used clothing`.36 However, prior to this trade, the Ainu, who were hunters of fur-bearing animals, had already traded their own animal pelts with the Chinese, to get the silk that they need to trade with the Japanese.

In order to meet the required number of horses for their military campaigns in Xinjiang, Qing officials equally relied on trade with Kazakhs who controlled large pastures of horses, and in exchange offered them Chinese brocades, tea, cloth, medicine, metal utensils and porcelain.

37 Contrary to the ecological determinism of the environment shaping the human community, the hunting economy of the Ainu allowed them to engage in a trade that provided them with the resources they wouldn’t otherwise have had as a pastoral or agricultural economy.38 However, though the arrival of Japanese trade enabled local Ainu to work above subsistence levels and no longer be conditioned by their natural context, the growing pressures of Japanese commercial markets resulted in the over-hunting of fur-bearing animals by the Sakhalin Ainu. By the late 18th century Sakhalin was unable to sustain the hunting of such animals at the level required by commercial Japanese and Qing.39 Returning to Governor Chen Shen´s commentary on a limited state intervention that was neither too interventionist nor too relaxed, it seems particularly apt in this course of commercial expansion in Sakhalin, before the culture-nature balance was disrupted. Indeed the state would continue to demonstrate its power in managing the economic strain on communities of the frontier, inflicted by both human disturbances and eco-

30 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 353.

31 Bello, Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain, p. 187.

32 Herman, John E. “Empire in the southwest: Early Qing reforms to the native chieftain system.” The Journal of Asian Studies 56.1 (1997), p. 68.

33 Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands, p. 141.

34 Ibid., p. 143.

35 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 15.

36 Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands, p. 144.

37 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 355.

38 Lattimore, Owen. “The geographical factor in Mongol history.” The Geographical Journal 91.1 (1938), p. 6.

39 Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands, p. 147.

BRADDELL-DAWSON - EAST ASIA AND THE ENVIRONMENT logical limitations. As we have seen, Zunghar raiding in Xinjiang meant that the community inhabiting Turfan, struggled to sustain grain production in an environment where cultivation was already precarious. Just the same way the Qing state set out a massive campaign to reclaim the agricultural settlements of Turfan, the Edo Shogunate took over the northern Santan trade in Sakhalin and Ezo. Through the restructuring of the trade, the Shogunate also repaid the 5,456 pelts to Chinese traders between 1809-1812, after the Ainu had over-hunted the fur-bearing animals.40 In years of over-hunting, the Shogunate maintained a warehouse outside Shiranhushi, in which stocks of iron kettles and other items could be used as substitutes for the animal skins.41 Though Shogunate policy, which banned Sakhlain Ainu from trading with the continent and replaced them with Shogunal official , severed long-standing commercial and maritime ties between the Ainu and the continent, the state had demonstrated its power to solve the crisis of over-hunting amongst the Sakhalin Ainu. By the 1810´s, the Sakhalin Ainu had been fully immersed in both the political as well as commercial orbit of Tokugawa Japan.42 In conclusion, through looking at the expansion of two East Asian states into their frontier regions, it seems that it was largely a 40 Ibid., p. 151.

41 Ibid., p. 152.

42 Ibid., p. 153.

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case of the state shaping the environment as much as the environment shaping the state.

This essay has also sought to demonstrate that, building on the Eurasian similarity thesis, the expansion of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan on the frontier, shared similarities with the expansion of western states, although retaining their own individuality in the process.

In both Xinjiang and Yunnan, as well as in Ainu Sakhalin, the state adapted the nature of its administration to the environment and more specifically the culture-nature relations that existed there. Whilst the state could demonstrate its full power on the frontier, it equally depended on locally existing political structures, creating sub-bureaucratic structures that relied on local assistance and expertise. The frontier was thus a site of continual state negotiation with local people, and state adaptation to the local environment.

Distinct environmental conditions, whether the aridity of Xinjiang, the mountainous and malaria ridden nature of Yunnan, or the cap on fur-bearing animals in Sakhalin, sought a careful balance between human-nature relations. As demonstrated through the case studies in this essay, the East Asian state continually proved its fl xibility in working towards attaining such a balance during its expansion in the early modern period.

HOLOCAUST CITIES What do spatial practices of the ‘Holocaust city’ reveal about the nature of World War II regimes?

Alexandra Beste Recalling her experiences during World War II, Judit Kinszki from Budapest stated, I have never been back to the house on Akacfa Street where the ghetto was. When I walk on that corner, I stop – to enter the yard where we stayed, where they separated us; the Arrow-Cross men were shouting that they would give us fi e minutes, and we heard the gunshots upstairs […] I can’t go in there.1

Judit’s memory reveals the reality for millions of Jews who underwent systematic persecution by the Nazi regime and its allies during the Holocaust.2 In cities, this systematic persecution took the form of ghettoisation, a spatial practice aimed at segregating and concentrating Jews. While historians used to engage in an ‘intentionalist’ versus ‘functionalist’ debate about the reasons behind ghettoisation policy,3 the recent ‘spatial turn’ in history has led scholars to consider the

1 ‘Judit Kinszki’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020

<https://www.centropa.org/biography/judit-kinszki>.

2 ‘Introduction to the Holocaust’, Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed 10 March 2020 <https:// encyclopedia.ushmm. org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust>.

3 Christopher R. Browning, ‘Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland: 1939-41’, Central European History, 19.4 (December 1986), particularly pp. 343-345; Tim Cole and Graham Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust: Budapest 1944’, Journal of Historical Geography 21.3 (1995), pp. 300-302; Tim Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (New York and London, 2003), pp. 29-35.

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BESTE - HOLOCAUST CITIES physical nature of ghettos themselves.4 This essay seeks to go beyond Cole’s work on Budapest, firstl , by offering comparative analysis of different ghettoised cities and, secondly, by taking a closer look at the people impacted by ghettoisation.5 It contends that the Hungarian capital was not the only ‘Holocaust city’, but one of several ‘Holocaust cities’, in which World War II regimes employed spatial practices in an effort to exercise power through territoriality. This territoriality, however, was constantly renegotiated through local and international actors. In this context, the term ‘spatial practices’ shall be understood in reference to Lefebvre as the production and reproduction of social relations,6 and shall be applied to the reproduction of relations between the state, Jews, and ‘non-Jews’. Meanwhile, territoriality shall be understood in reference to Cole as ‘the exercise of power through the control of space’.7 Focusing on three Nazi-occupied and allied cities – Vienna, Warsaw, and Budapest – I will first examine how authorities tried to separate urban landscapes into ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ spaces, before addressing the limitations of ghettoisation and the agency of local and international figure .

Over the course of the war, municipal and state governments across different European countries developed similar approaches to racially segregated cities. Cole argues in regards to Budapest that authorities wanted to develop a system of inclusion and exclusion

predicated upon spaces of ‘Jewish presence’ and ‘Jewish absence’.8 This process, however, was not unique to the Hungarian capital.

In fact, it was based on international precedent. After the Anschluss in 1938, the Viennese City Council pursued a negative social policy of ‘Aryanisation’, which dictated that Jewish businesses and homes should be expropriated and given to ‘Aryans’. While the Austrian Property Control Office and Schutzstaffel-authorities (SS) oversaw the forced evictions, the Jewish Kultusgemeinde was tasked with keeping files on all Jewish property.9 By the end of the year, 44,000 Jewish properties had been confiscated 10 Lilli Tauber witnessed the effect of this spatial practice on her father, who lost his shop, and her mother’s friend, who lost her house.11 People were relocated into ‘Jewish houses’, ‘Jewish districts’, and ‘Jewish ghettos’ dispersed throughout the capital, particularly in Leopoldstadt.12 Ghettoisation was therefore, according to Botz, ‘partly a side-effect’ of ‘Aryanisation’ and ‘partly a deliberate policy’ of the Nazi Party in Vienna.13 Similarities appear when we compare the course pursued in Vienna with the one pursued in Budapest. Following the German occupation of Hungary on 19th March 1944, the SS and the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior directed the concentration and deportation of Jews across the country. In the capital, the mayor and the city council were the ones to pass decrees on the relocation of Jews

4 Erika Szívós, ‘Introduction: Historic Jewish Spaces in Central and Eastern European Cities’, East Central Europe

42 (2015), pp. 139-162; Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, transl.

Emma Harris (New Haven, 2009); Cole, Holocaust City; Markian Prokopovych, ‘Introduction’, Urban History 40.1 (February 2013), pp. 30-31.

5 Cole, Holocaust City, particularly pp. 25-48. Reviewers have noted Cole’s lack of comparison between Budapest and other ghettoized cities as well as his focus on the administrative aspects of ghettoization as opposed to its human victims. See Yehuda Bauer, ‘Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto Tim Cole’, The American Historical Review, 109.3 (June 2004), p. 999.

6 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), pp. 50, 116, 288.

7 Cole’s rewording of Robert Sack’s definition in Col , Holocaust City, pp. 39-40.

8 Ibid., p. 37.

9 Gerhard Botz, ‘The Jews of Vienna from the Anschluss to the Holocaust’ in Ivar Oxall, Michael Pollak and Gerhard Botz (eds.), Jews, Antisemitism and Culture in Vienna (London, 1987), pp. 195-197; Doron Rabinovici, Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938-1945, transl. Nick Somers (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 30-32, 59.

10 Botz, ‘The Jews of Vienna from the Anschluss to the Holocaust’, pp. 195-197.

11 ‘Lilli Tauber’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020 < https://www.centropa.org/biography/lilli-tauber>.

12 Rabinovici, Eichmann’s Jews, p. 59; Botz, ‘The Jews of Vienna from the Anschluss to the Holocaust’, pp. 195-197.

13 Botz, ‘The Jews of Vienna from the Anschluss to the Holocaust’, pp. 195-197.

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in Budapest, while the Jewish Council took on administrative responsibilities.14 Jews were forced to move into ‘yellow-star houses’, tenement buildings designated for Jewish occupancy.15 Though somewhat dispersed,16 the majority of these buildings were located in Pest.17 Thus, ghettoisation in Budapest was emblematic of ghettoisation in Vienna in three ways.

Firstly, municipal, national and international authorities played a role in the development of anti-Semitic spatial practices in both capitals. Secondly, expropriation and displacement was not only done to concentrate Jews, but to move non-Jews into better housing.18 Ibi Krausz from Budapest recalls that at the time ‘the Christians […] got the Jewish houses from downtown, while the Jews moved into their houses.’19 Finally, Vienna and Budapest both experienced ‘dispersed ghettoisation’.20 In light of these similarities, we cannot claim that the spatial practices of ‘Holocaust cities’ emerged in a vacuum. Instead, they developed in relation to each other.

This is not to say that all Jewish ghettos were exactly alike. Some cities created open ghettos, which were unwalled but had restrictions on entering and leaving. Other municipalities established closed ghettos surrounded by physical barriers. The third kind was the destruction ghetto, a sealed-off, temporary structure used to concentrate Jews either to deport or murder them.21 In Vienna, Jewish districts

functioned as open ghettos. In Budapest, however, the situation was slightly more complex.

Here, the yellow star houses were scattered across the city and only became a part of one closed ghetto in November 1955 when the Arrow Cross ordered the construction of a ghetto wall.22 The situation was even more volatile in Warsaw. Although the Jewish district was allegedly intended as an open ghetto, a month after its inception in October 1940, authorities built a wall, creating ‘an area artificially separated, closed off and isolated’ from the German and Polish districts of the city. We may stipulate that by the time of the ‘great liquidation Aktion’ in the summer of 1942 – or, at the very latest, by the time of the Ghetto Uprising in April and May 1943 – Warsaw had become the site of a destruction ghetto.23 If we were to apply Browning’s contention that ‘ghettoisation was in fact carried out at different times in different ways for different reasons on the initiative of local authorities’,24 we might simply conclude that the ghettos in Vienna, Budapest and Warsaw were inherently different due to the influence of local circumstances. Yet the social and physical dimensions of these urban spaces suggest otherwise: in each case, spatial practices aimed to reproduce the relationship – or rather, produce an absence of relationship – between Jews and non-Jews by separating them. Moreover, Botz notes that the Third Reich viewed the procedures developed

14 Randolp L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (Detroit, MI, 2000), pp. 156-157; Máté Rigó,

‘Ordinary Women and Men: Superintendents and Jews in the Budapest Yellow-Star Houses in 1944–1945’, Urban History 40.1 (February 2013), pp. 71, 75-78; Cole, Holocaust City, pp. 169-90.

15 Rigó, ‘Ordinary Women and Men’, pp. 75-78; Prokopovych, ‘Introduction’, pp. 30-31; Cole and Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, p. 312.

16 Braham has argued that dispersed ghettoization was performed because urban planners believed it would protect non-Jews from Allied bombing if Jews were scattered throughout the city. For a discussion of Braham’s argument, see Cole and Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, p. 304.

17 Rigó, ‘Ordinary Women and Men’, pp. 75-78; Prokopovych, ‘Introduction’, pp. 30-31; Cole and Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, p. 312.

18 Cole and Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, pp. 304-306.

19 ‘Ibi Krausz’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020 < https://www.centropa.org/biography/ibi-krausz>.

20 Cole and Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, pp. 300, 304-308; Rabinovici, Eichmann’s Jews, p. 146.

21 ‘Types of Ghettos’, Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed 10 March 2020 <https://encyclopedia. ushmm.org/content/en/ article/types-of-ghettos>.

22 ‘Budapest’, Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed 10 March 2020 <https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/ content/en/article/ budapest>.

23 For dates and events related to the Warsaw ghetto, see Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 65-101.

24 Cole, Holocaust City, p. 32.

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BESTE - HOLOCAUST CITIES in Vienna as a solution that could be extended to other places in its sphere of power. 25Thus, the involvement of Nazi authorities in the formation of the Warsaw and Budapest ghettos evinces that communication about the segregation and concentration of Jews occurred not only at the local and national level, but also at the supranational level. Warsaw certainly differed from Vienna, and Budapest from Warsaw, but the capitals were connected as part of a network of ‘Holocaust cities’.

Ultimately, authorities experienced certain limitations in their ability to create urban spaces of exclusively ‘Jewish presence’ and ‘Jewish absence’. To understand this better, we must ask who was being ‘ghettoised’.

In Budapest, Christians frequently ended up residing in yellow-star houses. This was partially due to the authorities’ stance on mixed marriage. Whereas Christians were allowed to live with their Jewish partners or children in a Jewish household, Jews were not allowed in Christian dwellings.26 The idea of Jewish space was therefore obfuscated. Instead, as Cole and Smith state, these spaces were ‘mixed’. While the two historians claim that this ‘was tolerated’ by authorities, there may be more to it27 – authorities may have ‘had’ to tolerate the fact that Christians and Jews existed together in spaces of ‘Jewish presence’ because, logistically, there was no way around it.

The boundaries between ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ spaces were similarly blurred in other cities during World War II. According to Rabinovici, due to the nature of dispersed ghettoisation in Vienna, many Jews lived throughout the city and continued to have contact with non-Jewish neighbours.28 In fact, members and affiliates of the Nazi Party affected by ghettoisation complained about the continued presence of Jews in their districts.29

Even in cities with closed ghettos, such as Warsaw, ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish presence’ could overlap. Apolonia Starzec remembers that after the ghetto burned down, her sister, along with several other Jews, were placed in an apartment in Praga. The person that took them in was a non-Jewish janitor, who had previously worked and lived in the closed-off camp before being relocated.30 Accounts such as these reveal that the ‘Jewish’ district contained people with different ethnic backgrounds.

It also serves to consider the age and gender dimensions of Jewish ghettos. Since young men were usually conscripted into forced labour or the army, they spent less time in the ghetto. This is reflected in the first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors from Budapest. As a girl, Edit Deutsch lived in a yellow-star apartment with her mother, siblings, and grandmother. Her father was in forced labour and could only visit once a week.31 Miklos Braun, meanwhile, was one of the young men drafted to work in the motorised-unit of the Hungarian army. His parents, wife and children lived in the Pest ghetto.32 It was therefore primarily children, women, and the elderly that stayed in the ‘Jewish’ buildings. Overall, these ethnic, gender, and age topographies tell us two important things. For one, ghettos did not exclusively contain Jews, raising questions about the efficacy of demarcating places of ‘Jewish presence’. For another, ghettos did not confine all Jews. It therefore follows that Jews could inhabit spaces outside of the ghetto, raising questions about places of ‘Jewish absence’.

These topographies gain further signi cance when we consider how everyday people were able to renegotiate space within Nazi-occupied and allied cities. Hilberg contends that after centuries of persecution, Jews had learned to refrain from resistance and hence primarily

25 Botz, ‘The Jews of Vienna from the Anschluss to the Holocaust’, pp. 195-197.

26 Tim Cole and Graham Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, pp. 304-309.

27 Ibid., p. 309.

28 Rabinovici, Eichmann’s Jews, p. 146.

29 Botz, ‘The Jews of Vienna from the Anschluss to the Holocaust’, pp. 195-197.

30 ‘Apolonia Starzec’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020< https://www.centropa.org/biography/ apolonia-starzec>.

31 ‘Edit Deutsch’, Centropa, accessed 11 December 2019 <https://www.centropa.org/biography/edit-deutsch>.

32 ‘Miklos Braun’, Centropa, accessed 11 December 2019 <https://www.centropa.org/biography/ miklos-braun>.

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responded to the Holocaust with compliance.33 Rabinovici, however, has contested this position, claiming that it rests on ‘anti-Semitic clichés’. Instead, he argues that in places such as Warsaw, where Jews were more concentrated, people could gather together and resist; in Vienna, this was not possible because Jews were more dispersed.34 This essay seeks to counter Hilberg’s position and reconsider the argument made by Rabinovici. If we understand resistance as any act that challenged or defied – either in secret or in public – the territoriality of the Nazi regime, then we can identify resistance efforts across all three cities examined here.

Within the ghetto, people countered the power of authorities by setting up communal help initiatives. For one, men that were ghettoised often formed guard units. Living in the Warsaw Jewish district, Izaak Warcek Kornblum remembers how his dad set up a ‘backyard self-defence’: ‘People helped one another, it was done both for social reasons and for the sake of maintaining order.35 Here, the self-defence was formed to ensure a degree of peace among residents of the ghetto. In comparison, male Jews living in Budapest yellow-star houses guarded major entrances in order to protect the building dwellers against surprise raids.36 Ironically, therefore, non-Jewish police officers and Jewish ghetto residents guarded the ghetto against each other. Inhabitants of

the Warsaw district also protected themselves by creating hiding places. In autumn of 1942, people started digging bunkers, fitting them with mattresses, and stocking them with food and medicine. Izaak tells us that some of the bunkers were even hooked up to the municipal sewage and electricity system.37 To survive the day-to-day, members of the Warsaw district developed the Aleynhilf, or ‘Self Help’, a network of soup kitchens, children’s day care centers, and more that provided support to Jewish families. 38Similar communal initiatives were taken up in Pest Ghetto. Edit Deutsch reports that she and her family sometimes went to a kitchen on Sip Street where they occasionally received cooked meals.39 Most efforts on the inside depended on contact with the outside world. Cole states that the ghetto wall, though built as a border, functioned as a ‘liminal space’, allowing for subversive trespassing and covert transactions. 40It should be noted that the bunkers described above were also a type of ‘liminal space’, since they redefined the layout of ghettos and sometimes even connected to the rest of a city. Both in Warsaw and in Budapest, smuggling across the wall became the key to survival and helped to develop an internal economy.41 Engelking and Leociak explain that smuggling was the primary method of compensating for food shortages in the Warsaw Jewish district.42 Consequently, we may presume that the Aleynhilf

33 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edn, vol. 3 (New Haven, 2003), p. 1112; Rabinovici, Eich-

mann’s Jews, pp. 196-199.

34 Rabinovici, Eichmann’s Jews, pp. 146, 196-199.

35 ‘Izaak Warcek Kornblum’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020 < https://www.centropa.org/ biography/ izaak-wacek-kornblum>.

36 Braham, The Politics of Genocide, p. 157.

37 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 480, 736-737, 781-786; ‘Izaak Warcek Kornblum’, Centropa; ‘January - April 1943: Preparing for the Uprising and Building Bunkers’, Voices from the Inferno: Holocaust Survivors Describe the Last Months in the Warsaw Ghetto, accessed 10 March 2020 <https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/warsaw_ ghetto_testimonies/preparing_ uprising.asp>.

38 Samuel Kassow, ‘The Warsaw Ghetto in the Writings of Rachel Auerbach’, in Glenn Dynner and Francois Guesnet (eds.), Warsaw: The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2015), pp. 509-514.

39 ‘Edit Deutsch’, Centropa.

40 Cole, Holocaust City, p. 44.

41 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, pp. 446-459; Cole and Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, p. 313; Cole, Holocaust City, pp. 43-44.

42 Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, p. 446.

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BESTE - HOLOCAUST CITIES soup kitchens distributed food brought in from the ‘Aryan’ side of the city.43 Other things, such as news, could also be passed on over the wall.

The Polish Home Army newspaper, Biuletyn Informacyjny, for instance, was notable because one of its reporters and later editors, Jerzy Grasberg, was a resident in the Warsaw ghetto.44 Non-Jews could use the ghetto border to their advantage as well. Rigó’s study of Budapest yellow-star houses examines how superintendents, charged with policing the Jewish residents, could negotiate racial discrimination and segregation ‘on the micro level’.45 To a certain extent, people also had agency to either avoid or leave the ghetto. One wealthy Jewish lawyer in Budapest was able to get false papers as a Christian wine-dealer and thus dodged living in one of the yellow-star buildings.46 Lucia Heilman from Vienna managed to evade ghettoisation because her father’s non-Jewish friend hid her and her mother in his metal workshop.47 In Warsaw, Hanna We escaped from the ghetto by hiring smugglers who helped her climb over the wall,48 and Anna Lanota escaped by paying off a guard49. In all of these cases, the people trying to escape the ghetto had help – whether voluntary or bought – from people ‘on the Aryan side’ of Holocaust cities, thereby demonstrating how both Jewish and non-Jewish local actors mediated the territoriality of the Nazi regime.

Another way for Jews to cross the boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish spaces was work. As a labourer for the army stationed in Budapest, Miklos Braun spent

a lot of time in the city’s streets, which, after the closing of the Pest Ghetto, were technically spaces of ‘Jewish absence’.50 Jewish women were also employed throughout the Hungarian capital. Olga Banyai, for example, laboured at the Csepel brick factory during the German occupation,51 while Zsuzsanna G. worked at the Jewish hospital at Bethlen Square.52 Although both women were employed in primarily Jewish workforces, the fact that they had to travel to get to their respective places of work demonstrates they maintained a degree of mobility throughout the city despite ghettoisation.

The situation was slightly different in Warsaw, where several factories were set up inside the ghetto. Jews that were capable of doing labour, such as Hanna We, Izaak Warcek Kornblum, and Apolonia Starzec, were forced to work at these ‘shops’.53 However, those who managed to escape the Jewish district were sometimes able to find employment on the outside. The aforementioned Apolonia Starzec got a job delivering wool, which required her to walk and ride streetcars around different Warsaw neighbourhoods. She was nearly caught on a few occasions, but managed to get away.54 Certainly Apolonia’s was an exceptional case; nevertheless, her story illustrates that people found ways to resist the spatial demarcations enforced by authorities. Once someone broke out of the ghetto, they did not always hide somewhere on the ‘Aryan side’ – sometimes, they traversed the urban space.

Lastly, local inhabitants received assistance from international actors to evade fascist

43 Kassow, ‘The Warsaw Ghetto in the Writings of Rachel Auerbach’, pp. 509-514.

44 Joshua Zimmerman, ‘The Polish Underground Press and the Jews’, in Glenn Dynner and Francois Guesnet (eds.), Warsaw: The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2015), p. 451.

45 Máté Rigó, ‘Ordinary Women and Men’, p. 91.

46 The case is discussed in Máté Rigó, ‘Ordinary Women and Men’, p. 89.

47 ‘Lucia Heilman’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020 < https://www.centropa.org/node/83045>.

48 ‘Hanna We’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020 < https://www.centropa.org/biography/hanna-we>.

49 ‘Anna Lanota’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020 < https://www.centropa.org/biography/anna-lanota>.

50 ‘Miklos Braun’, Centropa.

51 ‘Olga Banyai’, Centropa, accessed 11 December 2019 <https://www.centropa.org/biography/olga-banyai>.

52 ‘Zsuzsanna G.’, centropa, accessed 11 December 2019 <https://www.centropa.org/biography/ zsuzsanna-g>.

53 ‘Hanna We’, Centropa; ‘Izaak Warcek Kornblum’, Centropa; ‘Apolonia Starzec’, Centropa.

54 ‘Apolonia Starzec’, Centropa.

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urban practices. For instance, although British policy towards Jewish refugees was mixed,55 some British organizations were able to arrange Kindertransporte to help Jewish children emigrate (though without their parents) from continental Europe to England. Lilli Tauber managed to flee Vienna this way because her uncle had connections to the Bnei Brit lodge.56 In Budapest, the International Red Cross placed certain buildings under protection to provide safety to Jews.57 Furthermore, diplomats from other countries, such as the Swiss vice-consul Carl Lutz and the Swedish representative Raoul Wallenberg, started issuing ‘protective letters’ to Jews in the Hungarian capital.58 Erika Izaak’s grandmother and nephew were two recipients of such letters.59 This ultimately led to the creation of the ‘International Ghetto’, where Jews with foreign protection passes were allowed to reside.60 Indubitably there were severe restrictions on peoples’ ability to negotiate territoriality. Between November 1944 and January 1945, far-right Nyila gangs raided the ghettos, hospitals and streets of Budapest to kill Jews.61 Hundreds, such as Gyula Foldes’ father and uncle as well as Miklos Braun’s uncle were shot into the Danube (the latter fortunately managed to swim away).62 Violence against Jews was committed in other ghettos, too. After a series of daily searches and raids in the Warsaw ghetto during 1941, the Biuletyn reported escalations to the ‘German liquidation Aktion’, which reached

its peak when, after the Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the Warsaw ghetto was destroyed.63 One eyewitness remembers, ‘I saw the ghetto burning.’64 Yet in spite of these repressive measures, Jews and other locals exhibited agency to undermine anti-Semitic spatial practices. Indeed, the fact that municipal and state authorities resorted to violence reflects the very fragility of their territorial power. Thus, any act that blurred the lines between spaces of ‘Jewish absence’ and ‘Jewish presence’ functioned as a form of resistance against ghettoisation.

Contrary to Cole, Budapest was not the only ‘Holocaust city’ during World War II. As the foregoing case studies of Vienna, Warsaw, and the Hungarian capital have shown, several cities in Nazi-occupied or allied states employed spatial practices to segregate, persecute, and concentrate Jews. While there existed a degree of local variability in the implementation of these practices, the foundation of any urban ghetto ultimately reflected the Third Reich’s attempt to exert territoriality. This is not to say that ghettoisation was met without resistance. Both local inhabitants as well as international actors found ways to undermine, renegotiate, or directly challenge the imposed urban boundaries between spaces of ‘Jewish presence’ and ‘Jewish absence’. The spatial practices of ‘Holocaust cities’ therefore reveal the internal contradictions and instabilities of municipal governments, states, and regimes during World War II. In order to further ex-

55 Anthony Grenville, ‘Introduction’, in Andrea Hammel and Bea Lewkowicz (eds.), The Kindertransport to Britain, 1938/1939: New Perspectives (Amsterdam, 2012), p. 2.

56 ‘Lilli Tauber’, Centropa. For more information, see Andrea Hammel and Bea Lewkowicz (eds.), The Kindertransport to Britain.

57 ‘Chronology’, Yellow Star Houses, accessed 10 March 2020 <http://www.yellowstarhouses.org/ chronology>.

58 ‘Chronology’, Yellow Star Houses; ‘Budapest’, Holocaust Encyclopedia; Cole and Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, pp. 310-311.

59 ‘Erika Izaak’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020 < https://www.centropa.org/biography/erika-izsak>.

60 ‘Chronology’, Yellow Star Houses; ‘Budapest’, Holocaust Encyclopedia; Cole and Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, pp. 310-311.

61 Cole and Smith, ‘Ghettoization and the Holocaust’, p. 312. In one particularly brutal case on December 23, Nyila gangs stormed the Jewish hospital on Bethlen Square, occupied it for twenty-four hours, and massacred twenty-eight Jews. See Braham, The Politics of Genocide, p. 196.

62 ‘Gyula Foldes’, Centropa, accessed 10 March 2020 < https://www.centropa.org/biography/gyula-foldes>; ‘Miklos Braun’, Centropa.

63 Zimmerman, ‘The Polish Underground Press and the Jews’, pp. 451-459.

64 Anna Lanota’, Centropa.

BESTE - HOLOCAUST CITIES pand our awareness of this topic, we need to investigate on a larger scale the links between

65 the vast numbers of towns and cities impacted by the Holocaust.

APARTHEID & RESISTANCE How did black political agitation develop in the early years of the Union of South Africa?

Dylan Cresswell

In 1916, six years after the inauguration of the Union of South Africa, Solomon Plaatje wrote that ‘the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth’.1 While Apartheid was not formalised until 1948, the preceding decades played host to a raft of racial legislation which limited the rights of black Africans, enacted colour-bars across society and laid the groundwork for severe segregation. Increasing repression was opposed by nascent African political movements, whose methodology and influence fluctuated in response to government measures, changing membership and ideological variance. Prior to the wartime emergence of mass movements, organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC) eschewed revolution and advocated for the gradual expansion of European rights to South Africa’s black majority. Writ-

ers during the later Apartheid years, reflecting upon the increasingly violent contemporary struggle for equality, disparaged the efforts of ‘the pre-war African proletariat-in-the-making… [as] barely more than brave beginnings’ which ‘at no time posed any credible threat to the total political and economic hegemony of whites’.2 Since the end of Apartheid, a growing revisionist literature for the period has emerged, allowing for a fair reappraisal of the early struggle against discrimination. This revision hinges upon an understanding that before the Hertzog Government’s reforms in the late 1930s, which finally excluded blacks completely from white political and legal institutions and subjected them to the direct rule of baasskap (Afrikaans, denoting a model of ‘boss-ship’ instead of white trusteeship), ‘the full implications of segregation were not yet clear’.3

1 S. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion, https://www.sahistory. org.za/sites/default/files/Nati e%20Life%20in%20South%20Africa_0.pdf (accessed February 6, 2020), p. 16.

2 G.M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa (Los Angeles: 1978), pp. 30-31.

3 S. Dubow, The African National Congress (Stroud: 2000), p. 7.

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CRESSWELL - APARTHEID & RESISTANCE This essay analyses black activism between 1910 and 1930, while attempting to avoid the condescension of posterity which inevitably clouds the period’s presentation in broader teleological histories of the struggle against Apartheid. Significant attention must be given to groups other than the ANC, which remained small and conservative until its postwar growth. The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union and the Communist Party of South Africa vied with the ANC to become the recognised voice of the oppressed black majority, each with their own ideology and methods for reversing segregation. Meanwhile, the proliferation of spontaneous action in localised strikes and rural millenarian movements is evidence of a serious black political consciousness which existed outside the confines of official organisations. Obstacles to effective action were high and activists were frequently forced to adjust their stances, but these hardships were a necessary challenge in the development of a defined post-war African nationalism which could combine liberal equality, racial identity and united proletarian strength.

The Union of 1910 provided stimulus for the first emergence of nationwide black political activism in South Africa. The 1909 South Africa Act which created the Union flagrantly ignored the non-racial liberal tradition of the Cape, including sections prohibiting ‘The sale of intoxicating liquor to natives’ and making separate dispensations for the alienation and administration of African-owned land.4 Section 35 of the Act contained an especially menacing threat to black political rights: in Cape Colony, the largest constituent part of the Union, the historic inclusion of blacks in a multiracial qualified franchise could be overturned by a simple two-thirds majority in the new national legislature.5

The tone of black political activism in the first decade of Union was heavily determined by the nature of its constitutional settlement. Only a small section of property-owning Africans who met the Cape’s franchise quali cation were eligible to vote, and thus agitators were drawn heavily from their ranks. This was clearly reflected in the founding membership of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, later renamed the ANC in 1923), which was formed in 1912 to protest the marginalisation of blacks in the new Union. The Congress was dominated by middle class, European-educated, Christianised Africans who stood to lose heavily from the loss of political rights. Due to their social status, men such as John Dube, Solomon Plaatje and Pixley ka Isaka Seme were not political outsiders. Plaatje, for example, had held positions in the colonial civil service, and his correspondence reveals personal relationships with several notable white politicians.6 The SANNC therefore held a moderate stance: its leaders had benefited from the educational and occupational opportunities provided by British colonial rule, and hoped that the principles of liberty and justice, which were preached at the imperial metropole and in their Anglicised education, would prevail over the alarming segregationist solutions to the ‘Native problem’ which were being propagated by the South African Government.7 In later years, the founders of the SANNC would be criticised as aloof ‘tea drinkers’ by radical sections of the African nationalist movement.8 In retrospect, their deference to official institutions had achieved little, allowing segregation to encroach seemingly unchallenged. This, though, is not a fair reflection of the efforts of early activists. The unified African nationalism which would allow the ANC to evolve into a mass movement in the 1940s

4 South Africa Act 1909, cs. 15, 147. Available at https://media.law.wisc.edu/s/c_8/jzhy2/cbsa1.pdf (accessed March 10,

2020).

5 Ibid., cs. 35.

6 Sol Plaatje, Letter to Henry Burton, Minister for Native Affairs, November 8, 1910. Available at https://duo.dur.ac.uk/ bbcswebdav/pid-5515360-dt-content-rid-20406418_2/courses/HIST1561_2019/Plaatje%20letter%20to%20Burton_ Nov1910.pdf (accessed March 10, 2020).

7 H.M. Feinberg, ‘The 1913 Natives Land Act in South Africa: Politics, Race, and Segregation in the Early 20th Century’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1993), p. 86.

8 Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, p. 30.

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was in its infancy in first decade of Union. Although Union had created a single South African state, its identity was clearly European and did not belong to its black majority. The anti-African character of the new South African state forced black activists to search for a new identity, which they found in their rights and responsibilities as citizens of the British Empire.9 This is starkly evident in Sol Plaatje’s 1916 book Native Life in South Africa, written during the voyage of the 1914 SANNC deputation to Britain. In Native Life, Plaatje remonstrated directly to the British public, hoping to generate the momentum required to force the imperial government to protect the ‘fi e million loyal British subjects who shoulder “the black man’s burden”’ in South Africa.10 The British identity of the early SANNC was firmly embedded in the traditional liberal style of its activism, with persuasion, petitioning and formal writing assuming particular importance.11 As the following photograph from the 1914 deputation shows, the SANNC’s conceptualisation of themselves as British citizens even manifested itself in their dress. There is therefore abundant evidence for Khwezi Mkhize’s claim that these activists were ‘black Victorians’, an identity which superseded their increasingly abject status as ‘Natives’ in South Africa.12 SANNC deputations to Britain in 1914 and 1919 were unsuccessful in their aim of overturning the 1913 Natives Land Act, but still managed to access key figures of authority such as Lewis Harcourt, Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who was moved to discuss the matter with Jan Smuts.13 The ultimate failure of

the deputation cannot therefore be attributed to any lack of commitment from its members.

Firstly, recent precedent had demonstrated the power of the British public to influence imperial politics on moral grounds. In 1906, public outcry against the working conditions of Chinese indentured labourers imported to South African gold mines had resulted in intensive Parliamentary scrutiny, the end of the programme and a landslide general election which brought the collapse of the Balfour Government.14 Unfortunately for the SANNC, the arrival of the 1914 deputation in London was immediately followed by the outbreak of war in Europe, which distracted the British political establishment from their cause. An Afrikaner rebellion in the Transvaal further diminished any chance of imperial intervention which might spark unrest amongst a community only recently subdued after the war of 1899-1902.

The lack of further discriminatory legislation during the First World War is misleading. If one instead focuses upon the increased virulence with which African landowners were pursued under existing laws, it becomes clear that the South African Government was determined to continue the process of alienation licenced by the Natives Land Act. A letter from Pixley ka Isaka Seme to Silas Molema in February 1918 particularly exemplifies the rapid wartime encroachment upon African land and property rights. It describes events following the failure of Paramount Chief John Montsioa, a large Barolong landowner, to pay back a loan. Despite the loan being a private matter, Seme claimed that ‘people here [in Johannesburg] are pressing all their worth to make him

9 P. Limb, ‘Early ANC Leaders and the British World: Ambiguities and Identities’, Historia, Vol. 47, No. 1 (2002), p.

61.

10 Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, p. 14.

11 B. Willan, ‘Native Life in South Africa: Writing, publication, reception’, in J. Remmington, B. Willan & B. Peterson (eds.), Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present (Johannesburg: 2016), p. 2.

12 K. Mkhize, ‘To See Us As We See Ourselves’: John Tengo Jabavu and the Politics of the Black Periodical’, Journal of South African Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2018), pp. 413, 417.

13 ‘Early Resistance, the 1913 Land Act and deputations to London’. Available at https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/ early-resistance-1913-land-act-and-deputations-london (accessed March 10, 2020).

14 ‘Treatment of the Witwatersrand Coolies’, Hansard, HC Deb 22 February 1906 vol 152 c500. Available at https://api. parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1906/feb/22/treatment-of-the-witwatersrand-coolies (accessed March 11, 2020).

69

CRESSWELL - APARTHEID & RESISTANCE pay this amount and to disgrace him and the nation’.15 The vigorous mobilisation of white public opinion against black landowners undermined the SANNC’s vision of racial cooperation in South Africa, auguring the decline of the organisation in the 1920s.

The Congress of the 1920s suffered greatly due to its wartime stance. Officiall , the organisation staunchly supported the imperial war effort, with ‘the Bantu people… prepared to offer every assistance’, including the temporary cessation of all protest against the South African Government.16 This was a calculated political move. As a 1918 memorial to King George V shows, SANNC activists hoped that wartime loyalty would be rewarded with the end of ‘discrimination on account of colour and creed’, and African inclusion in ‘the right[s] of citizenship, freedom and liberty’.17 However, this stance proved futile. In the aftermath of a ruinous conflict Britain was unwilling to interfere in South African politics. Furthermore, it appears that the SANNC underestimated the entrenchment of segregationist ideology amongst South Africa’s European community, which had come into increasing conflict with black workers as they migrated into towns and cities to fulfil the industrial demand for wartime labour.

After the War, the SANNC (renamed the ANC in 1923) entered a period of rapid decline in membership and resources. Limb proposes that this was the result of a significant undermining of the organisation’s faith in Britain and its traditional Anglocentric protest methods.18 South African blacks, in contrast with their rebellious Boer compatriots, had pro-

vided valuable services to the war effort, with 21,000 men serving in the South African Native Labour Corps on the Western Front.19 However, after much enthusiastic African service in the British causes of justice and liberty, imperial authorities still refused to extend those principles to South Africa. At that point, men such as Saul Msane, who remained doggedly attached to their British identity, came into conflict with the growing Garvey-inspired Africanist wing of Congress, led by Josiah Gumede.20 The exigencies of war drove a wedge between those who were willing to wait for British action and those who were compelled to action, and it was perhaps for that reason that Silas Molema identified opposing ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ camps within the African nation in 1920.21 After Pixley Seme was severely cautioned by the Union Government for publishing an uncensored war report in Zulu, subversive action began to carry a serious risk of reprisal which would threaten the status and property of the traditional grandees. Limb argues that this crucially changed the character of activism in the post-war years, which began to develop along distinctly anti-imperialist and black nationalist lines. His work brings forward evidence of the advance of increasingly radical men, such as James Thaele and Josiah Gumede, in the ANC leadership, which corresponded with the withdrawal of conservatives, such as John Dube, who lost the presidency in 1917, having been judged as overly compromising on the issue of segregation.22 This, though, is hardly sufficient evidence that the First World War caused the ANC to transition from its traditional British imperial approach to new African nationalism.

15 Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Letter to Silas Molema, February 1, 1918. ‘Silas T Molema and Solomon T Plaatje Papers,

1874-1932’, A979.Aa4. Available at http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/index.php?inventory_enhanced/U/Collections&c=199519/R/A979-Aa4 (accessed March 11, 2020).

16 SANNC, Memorial to King George V, December 16, 1918. ‘Silas T Molema and Solomon T Plaatje Papers, 18741932’, A979.Cc9. Available at http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/index.php?inventory_enhanced/U/Collections&c=199665/R/A979-Cc9 (accessed March 11, 2020).

17 Ibid.

18 Limb, ‘Early ANC Leaders and the British World: Ambiguities and Identities’, pp. 72-79.

19 B. Willan, ‘The South African Native Labour Contingent’, The Journal of African History, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1978), pp. 6186.

20 Limb, ‘Early ANC Leaders and the British World: Ambiguities and Identities’, p. 73.

21 S.M. Molema, The Bantu - Past and Present (Edinburgh: 1920), p. 348.

22 Limb, ‘Early ANC Leaders and the British World: Ambiguities and Identities’, p. 79.

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The dominant focus of the organisation remained firmly upon winning political rights for Africans within the existing European South African state, not upon Garveyite ideas of African self-determination. When agitators attempted to shift the movement towards a nationalist path, as Elliot Tonjeni and Bransby Ndobe did in the Western Cape in the mid1920s, they were firmly rebuked; Tonjeni and Ndobe were expelled from the ANC in 1927 and forced to channel their ideology into a splinter group, the ‘Independent ANC’.23 Their failure to redirect the ANC’s ideology might be explained by the lack of a grassroots nationalist movement in the 1920s.

As late as 1938, a leading social worker in Johannesburg asserted that there were ‘few signs of the development as yet of a race consciousness among urban Africans’.24 In towns, declared to be a ‘European area in which there is no place for the redundant Native’ by the Native Affairs Commission in 1921, black workers were usually migrants whose lives were too transient to allow the consolidation of communities necessary for a national or racial identity to develop.25 Furthermore, works on the attitudes of urban Africans share a consensus that the development of race consciousness was stifled by the complete reliance of unskilled migrant workers on European industry for employment: it was difficult to conceptualise a South Africa run exclusively by Africans when the existing fabric of society was fundamentally based upon European constructions.26 Meanwhile, urban Africans shared little more than a common oppressor with their rural counterparts. Black farmers faced significantly different problems, notably in fencing and dipping regulations, which were commonly viewed as ‘part of a more general white invasion whose

object was to dispossess Africans of their livestock’.27 Pass laws preventing rural blacks from leaving their homeland engendered a tribal parochialism which prevented the emergence of nationalism in the countryside.

Localised challenges to authority, though, should not be written off due to their lack of success. It is more appropriate to consider the widespread but unfocused protests of the 1920s as evidence that Africans were already beginning to protest racial discrimination with great energy, but lacked a movement with the organisational and ideological strength necessary to unite their localised struggles. In the Eastern Cape, Wellington Buthelezi led a highly popular Africanist movement, preaching a millenarian message that African Americans would arrive in aeroplanes to liberate South Africa from European rule. The widespread belief in this fantastic claim indicates a low level of education amongst the black peasantry, but the enthusiasm for Buthelezi’s other messages reveals a serious political engagement in increasingly oppressed rural African communities. Thousands of students were drawn away from mission schools by Buthelezi’s teaching, which focused on challenging European schools which were ‘imposing alien cultural values and ideologies on African children, divorcing them from traditional beliefs and conditioning them to accept subservient positions in the church dominated system’.28 These ideas were heavily influenced by the work of African American black nationalists. Buthelezi, as later remembered by Walter Sisulu, referred to himself and his followers as ‘Americans’, and his promotion of an independent African culture which did not seek European influence indicates a keen familiarity with the contemporary beliefs of Marcus Garvey.29 The African-

23 Dubow, The African National Congress, p. 16.

24 R. Philips, The Bantu in the City (Alice, Eastern Cape: 1938), p. 381.

25 Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, pp. 23, 28.

26 I.D. MacCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa (Johannesburg: 1965).

27 I. Hofmeyr, “We spend our years as a tale that is told”: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (Ports-

mouth: 1993), p. 71.

28 C. Millar, S. Raynham & A. Schaffer (eds.), Breaking the Formal Frame: Readings in South African Education in the Eighties (Cape Town: 1991), p. 246.

29 R.T. Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens, Ohio: 2012), 103-19.

CRESSWELL - APARTHEID & RESISTANCE ist ideology promoted by Buthelezi was beyond consideration to the moderate agitators of the ANC, who held fundamentally opposed views about the role of European institutions and culture in South African society. As a result, the ANC became increasingly out of touch with the Africans whom it claimed to represent, and black political activism began to develop in a new style.

In the absence of a unifying national identity, growing class consciousness played a crucial role in the growth of a popular African political conscience in the 1920s. In a process which was accelerated by the demands of the First World War, the early twentieth century had been marked by rapid industrialisation in South Africa. Mining and manufacturing operations expanded, bringing a growing number of black migrant workers to urban areas to provide labour for these industries. This process heightened the racialised fears of Europeans, who successfully forestalled the emergence of a racial or national conscience amongst urban Africans by preventing them from settling permanently in towns.30 Through the collection of four hundred personal histories, the Institute of Race Relations estimated that African migrant workers would frequently serve in as many as ten industries in different locations during their lifetime.31 With many jobs lasting a year or less, - hardly time to learn a new trade - Africans were unable to develop personal bonds with their colleagues. However, the migrant labour system failed to stop the rise of class consciousness among urban blacks, who were united by the oppressive economic conditions which they faced.

The high incidence of strikes in the post-war years could be viewed as evidence of

71 a growing working class identity amongst urban black South Africans. There had been little public involvement in the predominantly intellectual activism of the pre-war years, and thus the large strikes of 1918-19 marked the first serious coordinated popular protest against segregation. These strikes are pivotal to understanding the development of black political activism. When sanitary workers in Johannesburg struck over issues of pay, they were joined in solidarity action by African miners on the Rand and stevedores in Cape Town, leading one to question whether this solidarity was based on race, class or a mixture of common identities. Race did, of course, play a significant role which is insufficiently covered by Garson in his analysis of the period.32 The exploitation which drove sanitary workers, miners and stevedores to strike was fundamentally based on racial labour legislation, and the post-war African proletariat was essentially defined by colour-bars which relegated all blacks to the ranks of low-pay, unskilled labour. However, in spite of the wide proliferation of Garveyite messages of racial independence, black labour organisers frequently strove for cooperation with their white working class colleagues. In 1928, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) - the largest black trade union in South Africa - applied (albeit unsuccessfully) for affiliation with the white-dominated South African Trades Union Congress.33 Meanwhile, the Communist Party, which became increasingly Africanised after the 1924 National-Labour electoral pact brought white labour within the segregationist establishment, always remained committed to a two-stage revolution, where the end of segregation was viewed as only the first step towards the elimination of capitalism, the

30 Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, p. 27. Until the 1940s, European measures such as the 1923 Natives (Urban Ar-

eas) Act were successful in preventing blacks from laying down roots in urban areas. By 1936, women made up only 36 percent of blacks living in urban areas, indicating that most African families remained in rural areas while their men migrated to towns in search of work.

31 Desmond Hobart-Houghton, Evidence given to the South African Institute of Race Relations, Pretoria: May 12, 1952, ‘Commission on the Socio-Economic Development of the Native Areas within the Union of South Africa’, AD1783.A1.066. Available at http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory_enhanced/U/Collections&c=124960/R/ AD1783-A1 (accessed March 21, 2020).

32 N.G. Garson, ‘South Africa and World War I’, in N. Hillmer & P. Wigley (eds.), The First British Commonwealth (London: 1980), pp. 74-75.

33 P.L. Wickens, The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of South Africa (Cape Town: 1973), p. 470.

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true enemy of all workers.34 These examples indicate that for black workers, a strong non-racialised proletarian conscience coexisted with their identity as a marginalised race.

The popularity of Marxist messaging even compelled new ANC President Josiah Gumede to suggest that the Congress co-operate with the Communists in 1927. In recent travels around Europe, Gumede had attended the first conference of the League Against Imperialism and visited the Soviet Union. He had been constantly surrounded by international agitators who propagated dogmatic Marxist interpretations of the struggle of South African blacks, which may well have detached him from the true demands of his countrymen. Gumede’s new sympathies led to his removal as ANC President in 1930. This, though, could easily be said to reflect the underlying conservatism of the ANC, which elected Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a stalwart of traditional pre-war SANNC politics, to replace Gumede.35 Following the decision to reject Marxism in favour of nationalism, the Congress entered a period of severe weakness, with membership in both urban and rural areas reaching a new low. This suggests that Gumede’s ideological conversion was not merely the result of Soviet indoctrination or pressure from Comintern, but based on a shrewd analysis of the increasingly proletarian tone of domestic protests against South Africa’s white government.

Garson’s argument that economic conditions, and not racism, drove black workers to strike is compelling.36 Insufficient wages guaranteed that rather than protesting structural issues, most black workers were concerned primarily with their own subsistence. When strikes achieved a rise in wages, interest in further action rapidly dissipated. For example, in Cape Town in 1919, striking stevedores who

were granted an additional daily four pence quickly returned to work at the cost of their less fortunate colleagues who gained nothing.37 If black workers across South Africa were simply striking in order to ameliorate their own personal working conditions, claims of a growing class consciousness may be undermined. However, the popularity of organised working class movements demonstrates that this was not the case. The ICU was founded by Clements Kadalie in 1919, and represented an important progression in the development of black political activism. Primarily a trade unionist movement, the ICU was the dominant force in black politics throughout the 1920s, rising prolifically as the ANC’s liberal ideology dwindled in popularity. It was the first organisation to mobilise South Africa’s black population en masse, accumulating 100,000 members by 1927.38 Unlike the local strike movements of 1918-19, this growth was not based on industrial workers’ economic grievances. In fact, the ICU drew the majority of its membership from rural areas, where independent African farmers stood to lose their autonomy and culture if successfully forced into wage labour on white farms.39 Rural members faced a very different set of socio-economic problems to their urban counterparts, and thus the great enthusiasm for the ICU amongst both groups suggests the existence of a latent desire for unity in the black South African community which surpassed trade unionism.

Comments made by Lord Brockway in a 1927 panegyric, including that Kadalie and the ICU ‘brought South Africa nearer to a nonwhite revolution than it has ever been’, do not bear truth.40 Claims that the ICU had revolutionary credentials may have been based on its huge membership in both rural and urban African communities. The ICU, though, was

34 Dubow, The African National Congress, pp. 12-13.

35 C. Saunders, ‘The Founder: An Ambiguous Figure’. Available at https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/founder-ambiguous-figure- hris-saunders (accessed March 25, 2020).

36 Garson, ‘South Africa and World War I’, pp. 74-75.

37 Wickens, The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of South Africa, p. 36.

38 Ibid., p. 598.

39 ‘Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU)’. Available at https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/industrial-and-commercial-workers-union-icu (accessed March 23, 2020).

40 Tribune, May 15, 1970 (London), p. 7.

CRESSWELL - APARTHEID & RESISTANCE at heart a syndicalist organisation, which encouraged local labour organisation but never developed a national platform for strikes in the same mould as post-war British labour movements. As Wickens points out in a comprehensive study, the movement’s leadership was not especially radical or proletarian: Kadalie was mission-educated, with a social background more consistent with earlier SANNC activists than the working class which he claimed to represent.41 Despite this, the growth of the ICU remains of crucial importance to understanding the development of black political agitation in the 1920s. While the movement lacked a clear message, this ambiguity allowed a plethora of oppressed groups across black South African society to flourish under one umbrella organisation. One common interpretation of the ICU acronym highlights what the movement, the first to present a truly popular united front against oppression, meant to many marginalised blacks: ‘I see you, white man’.42 In the first two decades following Union, black political agitation in South Africa was dominated by the issue of defining a national identity. The explicitly racist Union settlement of 1910 did create a unified South African state, although this state was the preserve of the white South African nation. Excluded from their own governance, blacks within the new Union were forced to search for unifying bonds of common experience in order to build up imagined communities where they could attain some level of self-determination. Until 1918, these efforts, centred on the SANNC, focused on the common rights of South African blacks as British imperial citizens. Early activists were optimistic, finding hope for legal equality in the Cape’s only recently discontinued non-ra-

73 cial constitution. Their optimism was reflected in peaceful methods of protest centred around literary and oratory appeals to the Victorian liberal sensitivities of the British elite.

After the First World War, changing socioeconomic conditions wrought by industrialisation shattered any optimism which still remained in the black community and gave rise to two newly emboldened identities of race and of class which drove political agitation down an increasingly radical path. Both identities have been addressed at length, although the question of which assumed primary importance to the African community in the 1920s is extremely difficult to quantify. While ideas of a ‘Native’ South African populace featured heavily in European thinking, it is impossible to pinpoint the moment at which tribal identities were superseded by the notion of a common racial experience in black political conscience.

Furthermore, race and class were inextricably linked in South African society, in a matrix which exists to this day. The emergence of a black working class was itself the result of racialised policy-making which conceived blacks as a reserve of cheap industrial and agricultural labour. Africans who engaged in political agitation in the 1920s, whether it was with the ANC, ICU, Communists, or spontaneous local protest, were all subject to both racism and proletarianisation, the balance between the two varying in each individual case. The agitation of the 1920s, which largely centred around industrial action and the trade unionist ICU, suggests that while there was a predominantly racial motivation for policies which marginalised blacks, their effects manifested themselves through a proletarian framework of low wages and cultural detachment.

41 C. Kadalie, My Life and the ICU: the autobiography of a black trade unionist in South Africa (London: 1970), p. 31.

42 C.R.D. Halisi, Black Political Thought in the Making of South African Democracy (Bloomington, Indiana: 1999), p. 34.

MEMORY & CIVIL RIGHTS ‘The petty contentions of the day’? The implication and politicisation of memory in the civil rights movement: 1960 and beyond Amy Swain

Although activists did not directly use memory as a political tool to gain Civil Rights, the concept was heavily implicated in the Civil Rights Movement. Memory functioned both as an outgrowth of the movement and a tool used by it.

Whilst African American social memory was always in existence, it had been denied mainstream cultural authority since the end of the American Civil War.1 The dominant narrative in the American South was the white supremacist ideology of the ‘Lost Cause’, that persisted long past its origins in the nineteenth century. By the 1960s, as a direct result of the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans gained a formal political voice as well as social and cultural confidence that allowed them to challenge the ‘Lost Cause’, asserting their own social memory. Memory was also mobilised within the Civil Rights Movement through the use of Freedom

Songs. Freedom Songs established continuity between the struggles of slavery and segregation, as well as providing an integral source of unity and perseverance for activists.

In order to answer the question of how memory was implicated in the Civil Rights Movement, this essay must first define the broader concepts of memory. Pierre Nora has shown that the modern development of professional history has meant that collective memory no longer holds a natural, organic or spontaneous form. Instead, memory has become a social construction.2 The dwindling of milieu de memoire, or ‘real environments of memory’ have given way to lieux de mémoire or constructed and curated ‘sites of memory.’3 In lieux de mémoire, monuments, anniversaries and archives serve as a deliberate construction of a social memory that is tied to a place, group and

1 William F. Brundage, The Southern past: A Clash of Race and Memory, (Cambridge, MA, 2005) p.10 2 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire’ Representations, no. 26 (1989.) p.12 3 Ibid., pp. 7

SWAIN - MEMORY & CIVIL RIGHTS collective identity.4 Modern social memory as a construction, is inherently unstable and something that must be reproduced and maintained through lieux de memoire in order to survive.5 For the American South, this has been the reproduction and maintenance of the ‘Lost Cause’. As with all constructions of social memory, this was a process of selectively remembering and selectively forgetting.6 The ‘Lost Cause’ glorified slaveholders as compassionate paternalists, playing on the trope of the loyal, happy slave. It created a sense of sectional brotherhood by asserting that Union and Confederate soldiers were both committed to noble, but seperate causes of freedom, omitting both the horrors of slavery and its integral role in causing the Civil War.7 In doing so, this narrative could be used for the political purpose of enabling sectional reconciliation, but it also laid the foundations of Jim Crow.8 The ability to create a dominant social memory is dependent on the power of the group constructing it, as power determines access to the political and civic institutions necessary to create monuments, anniversaries and commemorations.9 White Southern memory formed the dominant popular understanding of history. African American social memory at the time had no mainstream public face or strong coherence.10 Nonetheless, by the 1960s, African Americans were able to gain a platform. The celebration of public anniversaries is a memory practice in which its architects and audience are met with the opportunity to renegotiate and alter the significance of a social memory to the present day.11 The occurrence of the Civil War Centennial in 1957 provided this

75 opportunity. Architects favoured the reproduction of the ‘Lost Cause’. However, with the Civil Rights Movement at its height, African Americans and their allies were able to challenge dominant white constructions of memory by mobilising the autonomous construction of an African American social memory.

The Civil War Centennial celebrations saw two dominant influences direct decision making. First was the underlying need to maintain and reproduce the ‘Lost Cause’, which supported Southern regional identity and Jim Crow. Second was the overriding foreign policy issue of the day, the Cold War.12 From the outset, the Civil War Centennial Commission (CWCC) headed by Major General Ulysses Grant III and Karl Betts, promoted ‘Lost Cause’ narrative by encouraging dedications to Confederate soldiers in the form of marking graves and battles sites, as well as building memorials to them, such as the Texas Monument at Vicksburg. This reproduced an image of the Civil War which was by this point was already deeply ingrained in popular memory.13 The ‘Lost Cause’ was well suited to the problem of the Cold War. Racial strife in the United States had become a focal point of Russian propaganda, as civil rights conflicts undermined the United States’ claim as a bastion of freedom in the world. By ensuring that the Centennial narrative showed a face of unity to the international community, the government could attempt to deflect international criticism.14 As a result, celebrations were as far divorced from domestic racial strife as possible. Alan Nevins, a CWCC leader and historian commented: ‘My own feeling is that we

4 Ibid., pp. 7-12.

5 Robert J. Cook, Troubled Commemoration: American Civil War Centennial 1961-1965 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2011) p. 3.

6 William F. Brundage, Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Durham, NC, 2000) p. 3.

7 David W. Blight, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Cambridge, MA, 2011) p. 4.

8 Cook, Troubled Commemoration, pp. 4-5.

9 David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century, (Durham, NC, 1990) p. 2.

10 Brundage, Where These Memories Grow, pp.10-11.

11 Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, p. 1.

12 Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (Oxford, 1999) p. 77.

13 Cook, Troubled Commemoration, p.160 and United States, 1958, Guide for the Observance of the Centennial of the Civil War, Washington D.C.: Civil War Centennial Commission pp. 7-11.

14 Fried, The Russians Are Coming!, pp. 100-105.

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ought to lift this particular commemoration far above the immediate and temporary political or social contentions...we can elevate our commemorations far above the petty contentions of the day’.15 He also commented that CWCC must ‘discourage observances that are cheap and tawdry or divisive’.16 Through thinly veiled language, it is clear that the CWCC recognised the potential instability of the Centennial, and actively chose to distance the memory of the Civil War from the Civil Rights Movement.

Similarly, the CWCC pamphlet, ‘Facts About the Civil War’ was published with no acknowledgement of slavery.17 The equivalent pamphlet produced by the Texas chapter, followed suit.

18 The tone of the National handbook and the celebrations were set by an address from President Eisenhower, whose reference to emancipation was tacit. He wrote, ‘In this context we may derive inspiration from their deeds to renew our dedication to the task which yet confronts us- the furtherance, together with other free nations of the world, of the freedom and dignity of man and the building of a just and lasting peace’.19 From this we see that both the pamphlet and the Centennial were intended to be an exercise in promoting a distinct type of patriotism in the context of the Cold War, that prized unity as the most important legacy of the Civil War and largely ignored the legacies of slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation.20 This appeared to take hold of the public. The South Carolinian Newspaper the Daily Tar Heel in 1961 advertised a showing of the Gone with the Wind with the intent of “SALUTING THE

CIVIL WAR CENTENNIAL!.”21 The equation of the Civil War with a heavily romanticised version of the antebellum South is demonstrative of the role of non-governmental authorities in memory constructions, as the reception of the public to memory practices is also open to negotiation. This obscured African American perspectives on the Civil War. Although the practice of writing African American academic history had existed in the early twentieth century, its impacts were largely unseen.22 By the 1960s, African American academic journals such as The Negro History Bulletin, introduced the idea of using African American memory as a political tool.23 White supremacist attacks on Freedom Rides and the desegregation of schools and sitins triggered a backlash against the Civil War Centennial celebrations that ensued in the assertion of African American social memory.

24 The Baltimore Afro-American demonstrated a direct opposition to the ‘Lost Cause’ in writing that the CWCC ‘thought it would be dandy if colored Americans were restricting with the old plantation pattern of singing and dancing’.

25 The North Carolinian University Newspaper the Campus Echo published a disapproving quote from John Hope Franklin commenting that Centennial celebrations ‘resembled a national circus’.26 The Pittsburgh Courier wrote that ‘right now enemies of the Negro, the Ku Klux Klan and others, are feeling especially cocky. They are celebrating the Civil War Centennial, when for two years the South defeated the North shamefully...[giving] a big boost to Southern pride’ . He went on to publish his

15 Cook, Troubled Commemoration, pp. 170-172.

16 Fried, The Russians Are Coming!, p. 110.

17 Ibid., p. 107.

18 United States Texas, 1961, Texas Civil War Centennial Program: 1961-1965 for 1861-1865.

19 United States. 1960. Facts about the Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Civil War Centennial Commission. p.2.

20 Cook, Troubled Commemoration, pp. 9-15.

21 Advertisement for a showing of ‘Gone with the Wind’ in The Daily Tar Heel, July 06 1961, p. 5.

22 Lary May, Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago, 1989) p. 249.

23 Cook, Troubled Commemoration, pp. 155-157.

24 John Weiner, ‘Civil War, Cold War, Civil Rights: The Civil War Centennial in Contest 1960-1965’ in Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Durham, NC, 2004) p. 208.

25 Cook, Troubled Commemoration, p. 178.

26 ‘John Hope Frankin Deplores Civil War ‘Circus’ The Campus Echo, October 27, 1961, p. 1.

SWAIN - MEMORY & CIVIL RIGHTS own pamphlet acknowledging the contributions of African American troops for the Union which he distributed in order to ‘supplement the splendid work of the Freedom Riders’.27 References to Freedom Riders demonstrates the importance of Civil Rights in prompting the assertion of an African American social memory. Criticisms made their way into the mainstream press. The New York Times called the Centennial a ‘blasphemy and disgrace.’ 28 For the first time, African American social memory had a public face and had gained enough cultural authority to challenge the dominant narrative of the Lost Cause. Because of this, attempts from the CWCC to divorce the celebrations from racial strife were not successful. The Centennial was unable to be celebrated without many of its decisions attracting significant controversy. When the CWCC travelled to South Carolina for the Charleston celebrations, an African American member of the committee was denied lodgings at the segregated host hotel.29 Under the pressure of public outrage from activists, President John F. Kennedy reluctantly took action, announcing that the CWCC should ‘assure equal access to all its activities’.30 This saw the event hosted at a desegregated U.S. naval base.31 In addition to this, activists received some federal endorsement for their cause. In 1962, during the Emancipation Ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial, Kennedy acknowledged that, ‘much remains to be done to eradicate the vestiges of discrimination and segregation, to make equal rights a reality for all of our people, to fulfil finally the promises of the declaration of independence.’32 The Centennial was not a linear or dichotomic progression from the dominance of white social memory to mainstream acknowledgement of African American social memo27 Blight, American Oracle, pp.15-16.

28 Weiner, ‘Civil War, Cold War, Civil Rights’ p. 212.

29 Ibid., p. 211.

30 Fried, The Russians Are Coming!, p. 108.

31 Ibid., p. 108.

32 Cook, Troubled Commemoration, pp. 176-177.

33 Fried, The Russians Are Coming!, p. 111.

34 Weiner, ‘Civil War, Cold War, Civil Rights’ pp. 219-220.

35 Blight, American Oracle, pp. 18-19.

77 ries. In fact, the victories of assertions of African American were largely underwhelming.

The speech from Kennedy came only as a pre-recorded message, and thus the cause of desegregation lacked the earnest, widely public endorsement from the federal government that it hoped for.33 Despite being warned that a lack of real-life presence would be unwise, Kennedy valued political expediency, cautious not to alienate Southern Democrats.34 Additionally, the lack of African American Civil Rights Leaders actually speaking at the Centennial prompted calls for a boycott, leading last-minute invitations to be hurriedly addressed to Thurgood Marshall and Mahalia Jackson.35 Regardless, the significance of the Civil War Centennial lies not in the ‘wins’ or ‘losses’ but in the development of public memory practices. The political changes and development of a stronger social and cultural confidence caused by the Civil Rights Movement, African American newspapers and academics enabled the thrust of an autonomous African American social memory into the public sphere. African Americans came to recognise the power of memory or popular history as a political tool, and their newfound leverage made some limited, but significant hange.

The assertion of the African American social memory and history as an outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement was not confined to national anniversaries. In the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, the dominance of the Lost Cause narrative was also fought in Southern Schools. The teaching of history in schools is often omitted in favour of national celebrations and anniversaries in histories of memory. However, the school curriculum remains a valid form of production of social memory as they formed the basic understandings of re-

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gional history that most children would bring to adulthood without graduate-level study.

In addition to what schools taught, the schools themselves acted as ‘sites of memory’.

During the mid-twentieth century, the ‘threats’ of communism, desegregation and post-war industrialisation were bound up in the fear of a threat to the ‘Southern way of life’.36 This resulted in the hardening of the Lost Cause narrative through the revision of school textbooks, acting as another opportunity for the renegotiation of social memory. In 1964 Journalist Benjamin Muse commented that: ‘the idea that the movement to end racial segregation was part of a Communist conspiracy took hold among a vast number of white Southerners. Many were ready to believe that Communists dominated not only the NAACP but the federal government and the Supreme Court’.37 His speculations were founded, as the Southern States Industrial Council warned Virginians against ‘Civil Rights propaganda’ that may ‘infiltrate schools.38 Fears of communism within the Federal Government and the ongoing Civil Rights Movement in the South saw the creation of a State Commission to oversee the creation of new textbooks that were ‘suitable texts on Virginia history, government and geography.’39 In examining the content of revised textbooks, it is clear that the ‘suitable texts’ were only those that propagated the ‘Lost Cause’. Sections of text written by historians who did not support this idea were removed from the textbooks.40 Sympathetic Historians like Dr. Francis B. Simkins were carefully selected. Simkins wrote that slavery was ‘an educational process which

transformed the black man from a primitive to a civilised person’.41 Students learnt that “slavery made it possible for negroes to come to America and make contact with civilized life.”

42 The ‘Lost Cause’ provided a universal solution to the fears of white Virginians. By teaching young Virginians that the greatest legacy of the Civil War was sectional reconciliation, and that slaves were loyal to their compassionate masters, it was reasoned that they would be less susceptible to Communist and Civil Rights propaganda.43 The hardening of the Lost Cause narrative in response to threats of Communism to the South presented another arena in which the history of the South could be contested.

In recognising the processes taken by the Virginian government to harden the ‘Lost Cause’, African Americans began to rally attacks on government textbooks. The Association for the Study of Negro Life wrote that, ‘with the beginning of public-school integration...some people may presume that emphasis upon Negro history should be unnecessary.

Nothing could be further from the truth!’.44 In 1961 the NAACP expressed similar sentiments alongside the Urban League in 1963 and Congress of Racial Equality in 1965.45 Much like the assertion of African American social memory during the Civil War Centennial, battles over textbooks were not a linear process. Many schools did not change their textbooks, citing that due to freedom of choice, local schools could not be forced to adopt new textbooks.

The memory battles that took place in schools continued into the 1970s and beyond.

In Portsmouth the cancellation of Black History week led to fiery protests. Police dogs had

36 Fred R. Eichelman, ‘The Government as Textbook Writer: A Case History’ The Phi Delta Kappan 57, no. 7 (1976.) p.

456.

37 Benjamin Muse, Ten Years of Prelude: The Story of Integration since the Supreme Courts 1954 Decision (Viking Press, 1964) quoted in Adam Wesley Dean, ‘“Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”: The Virginia History Textbook Controversy’ The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 117, no. 4 (2009) p. 322.

38 Brundage, The Southern Past, p. 282.

39 Dean ‘“Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”’ p. 324.

40 Eichelman, ‘The Government as Textbook Writer’ p. 457.

41 Ibid., pp. 326-328.

42 Brundage, The Southern Past, p. 282.

43 Dean, ‘“Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”’p. 322.

44 Brundage, The Southern Past, p. 281.

45 Ibid., p. 281.

SWAIN - MEMORY & CIVIL RIGHTS to be called and hundreds of students were arrested. Similar protests in James Island, South Carolina, led to the closure of the school for a short period.46 Criticisms of textbooks mounted. The Roanoke Star Magazine published ‘Your Child is Getting a Sugar-Coated Version of Virginia History’47 criticising the romanticisation of slavery, and the Virginia Journal of Education published multiple articles taking the same position. In some cases, texts went as far to ask whether Virginian history should be studied at all.48 By 1972, faced with the enfranchisement of African Americans as a result of the Civil Rights Movement and mounting critiques of Virginian textbooks in newspapers as African American history was more widely acknowledged, old texts were voted into disuse.49 Contests over textbooks were not merely in response to the hardening of the Lost Cause, but also the loss of sites of African American memory as a result of the desegregation of schools. It was clear to African American students that their social memory, previously attached to all-black schools, was at stake with integration. African American children moved from schools named after black leaders like Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglas, to schools named after Confederate heroes Nathan Bedford Forrest and Robert E. Lee.50 Professor of Political Science, James Bolner found in his studies that African American students overwhelmingly favoured integration as an ‘abstract principle.’51 However, once integrated, all simultaneously demonstrated an attachment to segregated schools as integration could mean a loss of pride and identity, especially through the loss of black teachers.52 Other contemporary studies by Thomas F. Pettigrew, Nancy

79 Hoyt and Robert L. Williams came to the same conclusion.53 The testimonies of children also confirmed these assertions. Brenda Tapia was an African American student in a newly integrated school noting that ‘one of the differences that I saw in being educated in segregated schools as opposed to an integrated school is that black teachers taught you not only the academics but taught us about life...you were constantly being given your history in informal ways’.54 Another student commented that ‘it wasn’t really our school. Like we had lost our own school, you know, and all we had was the whites’ school’.55 The loss of all-black schools and black teachers saw the loss of African American sites of memory, as African American students moved to predominantly white schools. Here it is clear that despite the success of the Brown decision, the Civil Rights Movement remained heavily implicated in ongoing contests over memory in schools. The Virginia Textbook controversy remained into the 1970s, and the expiry of misinformed and racist textbooks was not an inevitable victory, as the Virginian government invoked the principle of freedom of choice regarding textbooks. Even once textbooks were voted into disuse, African American students were left feeling a loss of collective identity as they moved into integrated schools.

Memory was not only implicated in the Civil Rights Movement as a political outgrowth, but was used as a means of creating unity, fuelling perseverance and restoring this lost sense of identity. The singing of Freedom Songs was an inherent form of mobilizing memory, as they were fashioned on slave spirituals. ‘We Shall Overcome’’ was based upon the slave spirituals

46 Ibid., pp. 280-282.

47 Eichelman, Fredric, A Study of the Virginia History and Government Textbook Controversy, 1946-1972, p. 106.

48 Ibid., p. 113.

49 Brundage, The Southern Past, pp. 282-284.

50 Ibid., p. 279.

51 Bolner, James, and Arnold Vedlitz, ‘The Affinity of Negro Pupils or Segregated Schools: Obstacle to Desegregation’ The Journal of Negro Education 40, no. 4 (1971) p. 320.

52 Ibid., pp. 314- 32.

53 Ibid., pp. 315-318.

54 Brundage, The Southern Past, p. 280.

55 Ibid., p. 279.

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‘Many Thousands Gone’ and ‘No More Auction Block.’56 The mobilisation of memory through the singing of Freedom Songs had multiple purposes. Firstly, they brought forth African American social memory by bringing the history of slavery into the public sphere. They did so in an explicit sense as they were performed virtually unchanged from slave spirituals, usually with only some alteration of lyrics, to befit the current situation. “Come En Go Wid Me” was a slave spiritual that had its lyrics altered from “if you want to go to heaven, come and go wid me” to “if you want your freedom, stay off King Street”.57 Secondly, Freedom Songs served to provide unity and identity to African Americans in the Civil Rights movement. This was because they evoked a popular social memory of slavery that provided activists with common social memory, aiding them in their collective action.58 As the ‘Lost Cause’ constituted a deliberate construction, the construction of public and unified African American social memory was not a result of a ‘natural historical truth’ prevailing but was a result of conscious agency.

Although a long held African tradition, singing did not emerge naturally from the Civil Rights Movement. Many African Americans had come to reject freedom singing as an unwanted reminder of the subjugation of slaves, associating it with over-emotional rural ‘backwardness’.59 Others simply did not see any use in singing. William “Bill” Saunders argued ‘why waste time with something that you aren’t gonna get anything out of at all?’60 Impetus from Guy Carawan was pivotal in the propagation of freedom songs and their use as a political tool for the Civil Rights Movement. Carawan

campaigned for the use of Freedom Songs through his “Sing for Freedom” workshops at the Highlander Centre in 1960.61 Ultimately, Carawan’s efforts to revive Slave Spirituals as Freedom Songs was successful: as an invocation of memory, Freedom Songs proved to be a source of unity and motivation for activists.

According to Carawan, members of the SNCC found singing Freedom Songs to be a “revelation” because they sang “songs from the days of slavery that sang of freedom in their own way.

They began to realize how much of their heritage had not been passed onto them’.62 Bessie Jones said that Freedom Songs were “the only place where we could say that we did not like slavery, say it for ourselves to hear”.63 Freedom Songs acted as a source of unity as African activists collectively related to the past of slavery.

Thirdly, the mobilisation of memory through Freedom Songs had a strong psychological purpose for the Civil Rights Movement.

Activists saw Freedom Songs as a connection to the spirit, heart and soul to motivate them and give them strength to continue the movement, which had many useful purposes.64 Freedom Songs were sung at the beginning of meetings to help and ‘break the ice’ between individual activists to create a sense of unity and remind them of their cause.65 The style in which Freedom Songs were performed made them especially apt for the purpose of building unity and identity through which activists could find strength. The call and response style of songs, swaying, clapping and marching encouraged unity, as the performance of songs depended on the involvement of all.66 The Journalist Robert Shelton attended the ‘Salute

56 Ethan J. Kytle, and Blain Roberts. Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of Confederacy (New York, 2018.) p. 260.

57 Ibid., p. 260.

58 Sanger, “When the Spirit Says Sing!” p. 22.

59 Peter J. Ling, “Spirituals, Freedom Songs, and Lieux De Mémoire: African-American Music and the Routes of Memory.” Prospects 24 (1999.) p. 224.

60 Kytle, Denmark Vesey’s Garden, p. 268.

61 David Spener, We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán: Biography of a Song of Struggle (Philadelphia, 2016). pp. 64.

62 Kytle, Denmark Vesey’s Garden, p. 265.

63 Ibid., p. 270.

64 Spener, We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán, p. 29.

65 Ibid., pp. 66-68.

66 Sanger, ‘“When the Spirit Says Sing!”’ p. 18.

SWAIN - MEMORY & CIVIL RIGHTS to Southern Freedom’ concert at Carnegie Hall and demonstrated the psychological impact of Freedom Songs in his subsequent article. He was moved by the ‘rhythmic drive’ and ‘sense of conviction’67 of singers. He also noted that ‘[Mahalia Jackson]…consistently swayed her audience eliciting hand-clapping during and cheers after each number’. The way that Shelton draws attention to these rhythmic movements demonstrates the distinctness of this inclusive form of singing.

The deep spiritual connection felt by Freedom Singers encouraged them to conquer their fears in pursuing activism against the very real threats to their lives.68 Testimonies from Freedom Singers show this. “Singing is the backbone and the balm of this movement”, ‘[Singing] is like an angel watching over you’ ‘This song represented the coming together ...

You felt uplifted and involved in a great battle and a great struggle’.69 In this way freedom singing was both a product of and producer of the Civil Rights Movement. The use of freedom songs allowed African American Civil Rights activists to find an autonomous past, reminding them of fellow African Americans who had struggled through slavery with spirituals at their side to help them survive. Activists also found a sense of unity through the collective memory practice of Freedom Singing. The deep spiritual emotions evoked by Freedom Songs helped activists muster the strength to continue fighting for their cause. Further, whilst Freedom Songs had many uses, their occurrence did not constitute a natural or inevitable feature of the Civil Rights Movement, but was a deliberate, negotiated assertion of African American social memory.

The Civil Rights Movement led to African American political empowerment and social and cultural confidence which enabled the assertion of an African American social

81 memory that challenged the long dominant ‘Lost Cause’. Memory processes between the advocates of the ‘Lost Cause’ and asserters of African American social memory played out in arenas for the negotiation of social memories, such as the Civil War Centennial and the republishing of Virginian school textbooks.

Collective memory practices were not simply a result of the Civil Rights Movement but were used within it. Freedom Songs provided an integral source of unity and perseverance for activists, as well as creating an autonomous African American historical consciousness by linking the struggles of slavery to those of the 1960s. Due to the brevity of this essay, a number of other arenas in which social memory was contested as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, have been neglected, but are just as significant For example, the constructions of historical tourism in the South during the mid-twentieth century that ignored slavery or propelled the trope of the loyal slave, saw contests from African American organisations.70 Additionally, this essay raises multiple questions. What was the role of peripheral white figures like Guy Carawan in the shaping of African American social memory? What was the specific content and dynamic workings of African American Social Memory? Similarly, there is a longer history of African American academic historians before the 1960s, that goes unconsidered in this essay, but could be linked to the battles of social memory.71 The history of the implication of memory during the Civil Rights Era should continue to be pursued by historians as processes of memory remain highly relevant to contemporary political debates. The Civil War Centennial gave birth to its own memory practice in the use of the Confederate Flag as a symbol of ‘white resistance’ and ‘states’ rights’, often cited alongside the ‘Lost Cause’ narrative today.72

67 Robert Shelton, ‘Negro Songs Here Aid Rights Drive’ New York Times Jun 22, 1963 p. 15.

68 Spener, We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán, p. 70.

69 Sanger, ‘“When the Spirit Says Sing!”’ pp. 16-17.

70 Kytle, Denmark Vesey’s Garden, pp. 292-230.

71 See V.P. Franklin, ‘Introduction: Symposium on African American Historiography’ The Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007) pp. 214-17.

72 Weiner, ‘Civil War, Cold War, Civil Rights’ p. 221.

SUDAN & UGANDA Have national and international development policies exacerbated conflicts in Sudan and Uganda?

Natasha Livingstone

From the colonial period to the early twenty-first century, the development machine was not only anti-politics, but also anti-gender. National and international development policies, directed towards gender or not, exacerbated conflicts in Sudan and Uganda by perpetuating a toxic, militarised masculinity. Most of the literature has accepted that development aggravated conflict in the region, but gender has been overlooked. This essay seeks to rectify that by adapting Ferguson’s ‘anti-politics machine’, which argues that development institutions generate their own discourse to construct countries as objects of knowledge, creating a structure of knowledge around that object. Interventions are organised on this basis, which, while failing on their own terms, have regular effects, including the expansion of bureaucratic state power alongside a representation of economic and social life which denies ‘politics’ and suspends its effects.1 This essay contends

that, from the colonial period to recent conflict , development policies depoliticised and degendered conflicts in Uganda and Sudan.

This negatively impacted masculinity, aggravating conflict and xacerbating gender violence.

This essay is split into two sections, firs ly assessing development policies not focused on gender, followed by policies that explicitly aimed to improve gender equality. In both contexts, international development ‘experts’ were blind to how national governments deliberately used gender to evoke conflict The first half will outline how the colonial government undermined traditional masculinities and modelled a violent male identity which, unintentionally promoted by the development industry’s anti-politics and anti-gender machine in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, continued to exacerbate conflict Drawing largely on Dolan’s work in Uganda, the second section will analyse how female empowerment

1 James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, (Minneapolis, 1994), p. xiv.

83

LIVINGSTONE - SUDAN & UGANDA policies exacerbated conflict by focussing exclusively on women, failing to tackle toxic masculinity, and thus how the policies themselves promoted this masculinity through development agency staffers who modelled the behaviour. This essay defines national development policies as those constructed by the Ugandan and Sudanese governments and international policies as those articulated by outside actors, including non-governmental organisations, the United Nations and foreign governments.

Development policies are understood using Cowen and Shenton’s idea of intentional development, meaning the deliberate attempt to use policy to construct desired change.2 Some of the primary sources refer to ‘aid’ rather than ‘development’, but the actors mentioned are, or operate in the same sphere as, development agents. Conflict is defined on a micro and macro level, considering how intra and intergender relations contributed to macro-level conflicts in Sudan (1963-72), (1986-2005), Uganda (19862006), and South Sudan (2013-2018).

In both countries, development policies not focussed on female empowerment have exacerbated conflict by causing gender instability since the colonial period. Colonial governments, like modern development agencies, created their own form of discourse to make their colonies objects of knowledge.3 Development policies undermined traditional masculine identities while the state, in their efforts to impose their projects, simultaneously modelled a violent masculinity.4 Most historians have overlooked this analysis. Rolandsen and Leonardi described how development pro-

jects, such as the Gezira and Zande schemes, were efforts to impose social engineering,5 and Bernal similarly argued the Gezira scheme ‘represent[ed] the triumph of modern civilisation over… ignorant tradition’.6 While both articles chose not to explore how this imposition undermined Sudanese masculine identity, primary sources highlight the consequences.

Government correspondences regarding the Gezira Irrigation Project (1924) reveal how the British altered patriarchal land settlement practices. Traditionally, ‘a man’s property [was] divided equally among his heirs’, but colonial officials decided ‘that the odd shapes and boundaries of the individual holdings were totally unsuitable to laying out an irrigation scheme’ and rented the area from its registered owners.7 Rolandsen and Leonardi demonstrate how the Gezira scheme influenced the Zande cotton-growing project, implying the latter had similar features in the south.

Having undermined men’s lived experiences of their own masculinity, the British promulgated a violent male identity to impose development and colonial rule.8 Rolandsen and Leonardi have explained how the justific tion of state violence following the Torit Mutiny (1955) fed the rhetoric of violent opposition that ultimately escalated into civil war from 1963.9 This militant definition of masculine power filtered into the 1970s post-colonial era, epitomised by the President of the High Executive Council of Southern Sudan’s declaration ‘if we have to drive our people to paradise with sticks we will do so for their own good’.10 Dolan similarly highlighted how the

2 M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton, Doctrines of Development (Routledge, 1996), p. 50.

3 Ibid., p. xiv.

4 Margrethe Silberschmidt, ‘What Would Make Men Interested in Gender Equality’, in Andrea Cornwall, Jerker

Edström and Alan Greig (eds), Men and Development: Politicising Masculinities (Zed Books, 2011), p. 103.

5 Øystein H. Rolandsen and Cherry Leonardi, ‘Discourses of violence in the transition from colonialism to independence in southern Sudan, 1955–1960’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 8:4 (2014), p. 611.

6 Victoria Bernal, ‘Colonial Moral Economy and the Discipline of Development: The Gezira Scheme and “Modern” Sudan’, Cultural Anthropology, 12, (1997), p. 451.

7 Cd, 2171 Gezira irrigation project, 1924, p. 42.

8 Chris Dolan, Understanding War and Its Continuation: The Case of Northern Uganda (London, 2005), p. 279.

9 Rolandsen and Leonardi, ‘Discourses of violence’, p. 622.

10 Ibid, p. 623.

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colonial period undermined Ugandan men’s sense of self.11 The 1925 Report of the East Africa Commission documented colonial intervention in gender relations: ‘One of the root problems we have to face is… the Bantu custom whereby the bulk of the agricultural work was done by women and not by the men. It should be clearly part of the universal native policy to encourage male labour on the land and to discourage female labour’.12 Authoritarian development projects continued, including a hydro-electric station near Jinja in 1946.

13 Historians have failed to link colonial authoritarian developmental rhetoric to violence in post-colonial Uganda. However, like in Sudan, it is plausible that the state’s undermining of traditional masculinity and offering of a modern, violent masculinity set in motion a process that contributed to post-colonial conflict In the late twentieth century, national and international development actors continued to exacerbate conflict by perpetuating the anti-politics and anti-gender machine, curating a culture of toxic masculinity. This section will first address literature discussing the depoliticization of conflict before adding gender analysis. Finnström has criticised international development schemes in Uganda for allowing conflict to continue by shunning political analysis and licensing the status quo.14 Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), established in 1989, is a prime example of the anti-politics machine.15

Macrae argued that OLS failed to address the political framework which precipitated conflict and, by mixing aid and developing in the ‘relief-to-development continuum’, signalled donor support for the government of Sudan’s (GOS) development agenda.16 The OLS review problematised this: ‘One cannot work with the government as a development partner and… relate to it as a warring party for humanitarian purposes… when… the actually existing development process in Sudan is linked to the war aims of the GOS.’17 OLS was endorsing warring parties by depoliticising the conflict s actors and causes, corroborating Riehl’s argument that NGO’s prolonged the war in South Sudan.18 Duffield labels OLS’s exacerbation of conflict as one the many ‘unplanned and contradictory consequences’ of development.19 This fits with Ferguson’s anti-politics machine, where ‘outcomes that first appear as mere side effects… become legible… as unintended yet instrumental elements’ that expand ‘state power, while simultaneously exerting a powerful depoliticising effect’.20 Ferguson’s focus on state power must be adapted for this context. While accurate in the colonial era, Hulme demonstrated the role of NGOs in undermining the state in northern Uganda, arguing that voluntary aid agencies operated as local administrations.21 Tvedt similarly argues that, after the Addis Ababa agreement (1972),

11 Chris Dolan, ‘Militarised, Religious and Neo-Colonial: The Triple Bind Confronting Men in Contemporary Ugan-

da’, in Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström and Alan Greig (eds), Men and Development: Politicising Masculinities (Zed Books, 2011), p. 128.

12 Cmd. 2387 Report of the East Africa Commission, 1925, p. 32.

13 Will Kaberuka, ‘Uganda’s 1964 Colonial Development Plan: An Appraisal’, Transafrican Journal of History, 16 (1987), p. 201.

14 Sverker Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda (Duke University Press, 2008), p. 134.

15 Joanna Macrae, et al, ‘Conflict the Continuum and Chronic Emergencies: A Critical Analysis of the Scope for Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development Planning in Sudan’, Disasters, 21:3 (1997), p. 224.

16 Ibid., pp. 225, 227, 240.

17 Operation Lifeline Sudan: A Review (1996), p. 3.

18 Volker Reihl, ‘Who is ruling in South Sudan? The role of NGOs in rebuilding socio-political order’, Studies on Emergencies and Disaster Relief, 9 (2001), p. 10.

19 Mark Duffield ‘Aid and Complicity: The Case of War-Displaced Southerners in the Northern Sudan’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 40 (2002), p. 84.

20 Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, pp. 20-21.

21 Reihl, ‘Who is ruling?’, p. 4.

LIVINGSTONE - SUDAN & UGANDA NGOs extended their bureaucratic structures in southern Sudan and unintentionally eroded the state’s weak authority, increasing the likelihood of civil war.22 By the early 1990s, the Sudanese and Ugandan governments were using the anti-politics machine to their advantage.23 International agents were increasingly concerned about securitisation and began investing in external state security forces. Fisher argues that from the early 2000s, Kampala had been persuading Washington that military assistance to fight the LRA was beneficial for America’s national security. This culminated in 2011, when Obama dispatched 100 military advisers to Uganda.24 South Sudan also showed signs of attempting a similar tactic by hijacking a donor-funded disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programme from 2009 to fund its military patronage network.25 The historiography therefore offers a persuasive argument that international development agencies depoliticised and exacerbated conflict by eroding state structures, mixing aid and development to endorse those responsible, as well as funding Ugandan and Sudanese military security interests. This understanding is incomplete without considering gender. Dolan sheds light on how the international development community overlooked the Ugandan government and Lord’s Resistance Army’s use of toxic masculinity as a conflict weapon. Writing in 2005, he proposed that ‘the situation is not primarily one of war between the LRA and the Government of Uganda, but instead a form of mass torture, which I call Social Tor-

85 ture’. Dolan added that the state promoted a militarised masculinity to handle the LRA and belittled attempts to model non-violent forms of masculinity based on negotiation and reconciliation.26 The government used the conflict to consolidate expectations of hegemonic masculinity and undermine men’s lived experiences of their own masculinity, aggravating a process set in motion by colonialism. The state thus played a central role in thwarting men’s ability to live up to the masculine model, which involved particular relationships of power over women and youth and offered no acceptable alternative.27 The state’s creation of internal displacement camps also made this masculine model less and less possible to achieve.28 This effectively genders Finnström’s analysis of how the internally displaced person (IDP) identity, propagated by the Ugandan state and international development actors between 1986 and 2006, destroyed the Acholi people’s sense of self.29 Dolan further argues that, responding to the collapse of their own masculinity, some men resorted to acts of violence against themselves, including alcohol abuse and suicide, but also against others, through domestic violence and joining the armed forces, government or rebels.30 This assessment of toxic masculinity can be strengthened by including Turshen’s analysis of how government and rebel forces systematically raped women as a deliberate policy decision.31 Therefore, while the government and LRA were the most visible perpetrators in this period, donor governments, multilateral organisations, and NGOs were complicit

22 Terje Tvedt, ‘The Collapse of the State in Southern Sudan after the Addis Ababa Agreement: A Study of Internal

Causes and the Role of the NGOs’ in Sharif Harir and Terje Tvedt (eds), Short-Cut to Decay: The Case of Sudan (The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1994) p. 91.

23 Jonathan Fisher and David M Anderson, ‘Authoritarianism and the securitisation of development in Africa’, International Affairs, 91:1 (2015), p. 138.

24 Ibid., p. 149.

25 Ibid., p. 137.

26 Dolan, Understanding War, p. 311.

27 Ibid., p. 279.

28 Ibid., p. 311.

29 Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings, p. 240.

30 Dolan, Understanding War, p. 279.

31 Meredeth Turshen, ‘The Political Economy of Violence against Women During Armed Conflict in Uganda’ Social Research, 67 (2000), p. 805.

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bystanders in exacerbating a militarised, toxic masculinity by perpetuating policies that were blind to politics and gender, including funding the Ugandan government.32 The same process applies to Sudan.

Duffield outlines how OLS failed to acknowledge Dinka displacement as a political act, ignoring the negative psychological consequences of the IDP identity that benefited the state.33 Applying Dolan’s analysis, this IDP identity perpetuated a violent masculinity, exacerbating conflict between men and towards women.

Hale curated the term ‘gendercide’ to discuss the prolific violence against women in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains in early 2000s. While focussing on a separate conflict in western Sudan, it has parallels to Dolan’s understanding of ‘social torture’. Reconceptualising genocidal rape in terms of culture, Hale argues women were intensely targeted as a pathway to destruct culture and society.34 Primary sources indicate that similar violence, resulting from a toxic, violent masculinity, was seen in the South Sudanese civil war from 2013. A UN report stated in 2016 that ‘credible sources indicate groups allied to the state are being allowed to rape women in lieu of wages’, adding that ‘the prevalence of rape suggests its use in the conflict has become an acceptable practice by SPLA soldiers and affiliated armed militias’.35 An Amnesty International report similarly attributed prolific violence against women to ‘South Sudanese authorities [who] have repeatedly failed to carry out decent investigations into crimes of sexual violence… mainly due to lack of resources and unwillingness to address the issue.’36 In-

ternational development policies thus aggravated conflict in southern Sudan and northern Uganda at the macro-level by supporting the national governments who, by perpetuating a violent masculinity set in motion in the colonial era, exacerbated inter and intragender violence throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and made a peaceful resolution unappealing.

Having established the damaging role of development policies not focussed on gender, the next section will analyse how depoliticised and degendered female empowerment policies exacerbated conflict a factor ignored by most historians.37 The UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG) included the ambition ‘to promote gender equality and empower women’ by 2015.38 This represented a shift in the 1980s from ‘women in development’ (WID) to ‘gender and development’ (GAD). Woodburn argues that gender development practices still followed the WID model, focusing on female empowerment rather than a more sophisticated understanding of gendered relations including men.39 Silberschmidt furthers this argument, explaining how gender initiatives that undermined men’s income-earning power only perpetuated a masculinity identity that prioritised female control.40 While largely agreeing with Silberschmidt, Dolan emphasises that female empowerment policies also led to violence between men. He argues that the Ugandan government deliberately used female empowerment initiatives to exacerbate violence, receiving blind support from the international community.

Dolan highlights an example from 1989, where

32 Dolan, Understanding War, p. 2.

33 Duffield ‘Aid and Complicity’, pp. 93-4.

34 Sondra Hale, ‘Rape as a Marker and Eraser of Difference: Darfur and the Nuba Mountains’ in Laura Sjobery, Sandra Via, Cynthia Enloe (eds), Gender, War and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives (Westport, 2010), p. 109.

35 United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissione , ‘South Sudan: UN report contains ‘searing’ account of killings, rapes and destruction’, 2016.

36 Amnesty International UK, ‘Report: Sexual Violence in South Sudan, 2018.

37 Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström and Alan Greig (eds), Men and Development: Politicising Masculinities (Zed Books, 2011), p. 1.

38 World Health Organisation, Millennium Development Goals.

39 Ursula Woodburn, ‘IDPs and the reconstruction of northern Uganda: Gender and social transformations in Gulu town’, L’Afrique des Grands Lacs (2008), pp. 445 – 6.

40 Silberschmidt, ‘What Would Make Men Interested in Gender Equality’, pp. 99- 100.

LIVINGSTONE - SUDAN & UGANDA key government figures were involved in programmes distributing cattle to women to anger Acholi men.41 Kyomuhendo similarly emphasises that the 1995 Ugandan Constitution, which guaranteed formal equality between the sexes, failed to bring improvements because gender equality was used to undermine traditional power blocks and exacerbate social tensions.42 NGOs were aware that their own gender-equality programmes, including distributing food to women in camps and female-targeted credit schemes, heightened gender tensions. Several NGOs and officials working in the Gulu district even indicated that programmes targeting women led to an increase in gender-based violence (GBV).43 This issue continues into recent history. A UN report on a scheme to reduce GBV in northern Uganda between 2011 and 2013 noted that ‘resistance to the programme was noted from men who “felt their power base was being challenged”. Overall progress in reducing social tolerance of GBV was therefore reported as limited.’44 Similarly, the 2015 Uganda MDG report lamented the failure to ‘promote gender equality and empower women’,45 but, the same year, Porter highlighted how gender development projects in the Acholi community still failed to dedicate attention to violent expressions of masculinity.46 In Sudan, development policies for gender equality similarly exacerbated conflict by ignoring the role of men. The 1994 OLS Southern Sector Needs Assessment had a short paragraph explaining ‘it is essential to understand the impact of gender of programme interven-

87 tions, and of programmes on gender’.47 However, they clearly focussed on women, later stating ‘it is increasingly apparent that gender differences… will play a large role… particularly as women are more frequently left without their male representative in the traditional structures’.48 A UNICEF Report on Women in Southern Sudan (1994) similarly ignored men, advising that ‘field-based gender sensitive organisations (NCA, OXFAM, ACROSS, SCF) should take the lead... in the direction of development and women economic empowerment’.

49 Like in Uganda, development agencies did not learn from their mistakes. The 2004 Interim Report for South Sudan discussed the need for ‘closer collaboration with national and international agencies, donors, the private sector and institutions working to empower women and girls in southern Sudan’.50 This reveals how OLS and other development actors paid lip-service to gender issues, but continued to ignore men. Using Dolan’s analysis, these gendered development initiatives likely contributed to the ‘massive use of rape as an instrument of terror and weapon of war’ in South Sudan, condemned by a UN report in 2016.51 Unsurprisingly, the report did not highlight UN policies as a potential causal factor.

Gender development policies from international agents also exacerbated violence because top-down policies failed to deal suf ciently with toxic masculinity in conflict . The following primary sources are slightly outside the periods discussed here but represent how late the topic began to get attention in the development sphere. A 2013 British government

41 Dolan, Understanding War, p. 35.

42 Woodburn, ‘IDPs’, p. 459.

43 Ibid., p. 445.

44 Anasuya Sengupta and Muriel Calo, ‘Shifting gender roles: an analysis of violence against women in post-conflict

Uganda’, Development in Practice, 26 (2016), p. 295.

45 Holly Porter, ‘Say no to bad touches: Schools, sexual identity and sexual violence in northern Uganda’, International Journal of Educational Development, 41 (2015), p. 271.

46 United Nations Development Programme, Final Millennium Development Goals Report for Uganda 2015, 2015.

47 OLS, OLS Southern Sector Needs Assessment (1994), p. 30.

48 Ibid, p. 30.

49 UNICEF/OLS, Report on Situation of Women in Southern Sudan, (1994), p. 22.

50 The New Sudan Centre for Statistics and Evaluation, Millennium Development Goals: Interim Report for South Sudan (2004), p. 27.

51 UNDP, Final Millennium Development Goals Report (2016).

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report outlined that ‘vital preventative and emergency responses to violence against women and girls are not accorded enough priority by donors,’ adding ‘DIFID must get tough with multilateral aid agencies which continue to ignore basic measures for safeguarding women in refugee camps and other displacement sites.’52 In 2018, another British government report blamed the ‘structural gender imbalance [that] persists within the sector… Aid organisations should follow the example of the UN and aim to achieve gender parity on boards, at senior management level, and throughout the workforce’.53 The absence of sources from development agents discussing toxic masculinity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century demonstrates that the issue was not prioritised by development ‘experts’.

Even in 2020, the problem persists. An ICAI report earlier this year condemned the failure of the first global conference against sexual violence in war. Having been launched in 2014 following pressure from celebrity Angelina Jolie, the report complained that sexual violence in conflicts continues ‘with almost total impunity’, because ‘after the summit, nothing was done to translate the pledges into practical, measurable steps.’54 Madut is the only historian to have partially addressed this problem in Sudan. In 1998, he highlighted that, despite UNICEF commissioning studies into women’s reproductive health problems during conflict OLS programs did not reflect a willingness to deal with it.55 The final analysis of how gender equality policies exacerbated conflict is the most shocking. There is undisputable evidence that development agency staffers themselves reinforced a toxic, violent masculinity. Again, the primary evidence used here is modern because, tellingly, earlier documents discussing the issue do not exist. A 2017 British government report stated ‘the aid sector, collectively, has been

aware of sexual exploitation and abuse by its own personnel for years, but the attention that it has given to the problem has not matched the challenge’.56 While historians have generally overlooked this issue, Madut corroborates that toxic masculinity was modelled by relief agency workers, who were predominantly male, in southwestern Sudan between 1993 and 1995.

He outlined how workers blamed women for male sexual practices and rape, highlighting how ‘one relief worker once asked a crowd of women in a demeaning tone why... the Dinka population was still so large’, while another, an employee of Médecins Sans Frontiers, said ‘these women cry all the time about where to feed their children, but next year they will give birth again… displaced women do not think economically’.57 To conclude, it is clear that national and international development policies, focussed on gender equality or otherwise, exacerbated conflicts in Sudan and Uganda by facilitating, and in some cases modelling, a toxic masculinity that increased violence between men and towards women. This would come as no surprise to the south Sudanese and Ugandan governments who deliberately endorsed violent masculinity and used gender equality policies as tactics of war. Yet the international development community have repeatedly feigned shock at continuing conflict while simultaneously denying that their well-intended policies contribute to that same conflict Having traced the problem back to the colonial period, it begs the question of why development continues despite its failures. The answer lies in this essay’s adaptation of Ferguson’s argument: the exacerbation of conflict represents just another unintended consequence of the anti-politics and anti-gender machine, which actually serves to entrench its institutional power. It is a huge oversight by historians to overlook gender when analysing the negative impact

52 International Development Committee, Violence Against Women and Girls (2013).

53 International Development Committee, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in the Aid Sector (2018).

54 The Independent Commission for Aid impact, Review: The UK’s Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (2020).

55 Jok Madut Jok, Militarisation, Gender and Reproductive Health in South Sudan (The Edwin Meller Press, 1998), p. 270.

56 International Development Committee, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in the Aid Sector (2018).

57 Madut, Militarisation, pp. 274, 287.

LIVINGSTONE - SUDAN & UGANDA of development policies and can only be explained by the relatively recent introduction of gendered historical analysis in the 1970s.58 This essay hopes that gender will become a more prominent focus in development historiogra-

89 phy, with historians taking the analysis further to explore the role of the church and local NGOs in contributing to development and expressions of gender, or broadening the study beyond Sudan and Uganda.

58 Joan W. Scott, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, The American Historical Review, 91 (1986), p. 1054.

6,000 WORDS

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FERNAND BRAUDEL & THE ANNALES How and why should historians revise their understanding of the creation of Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée?

Toby Donegan-Cross Introduction Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean needs little introduction. In the years after publication, the work was so well received that its author complained that it had been ‘criticised (too seldom) and praised (too often).’ 1Peter Burke argued that the work should ‘be regarded as the most important work of history of the century.’2 Veneration was also directed towards its author, who Oswyn Murray has argued was ‘the greatest historian of the twentieth century,’ a sentiment echoed by J. H. Hexter, David Moon, Hugh Prince, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Olivia Harris and others.3 Secondary literature on The Mediterranean has focused as much on the book’s creation as on its arguments, meaning historians have sought to understand the book’s major contributions – its tripartite conception of time (le courté, moyénne and longue durée), the pre-eminence of geography, and insignificance of individuals – as a product of Braudel’s own life experience. It is, of course, beneficial to reflect on an historian’s influence . As Aurell has reminded us, ‘we are part of the records we

keep.’4 Therefore, considering how Braudel’s life shaped his work offers the opportunity for a richer understanding of his historical contributions. In the case of The Mediterranean, the narrative most often put forward (I will refer to this as the ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ narrative) has emphasised in particular the relationship with Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of Annales, in developing his thesis. It is also posited that Braudel’s time as a prisoner of war in World War Two helped him to move beyond temporal events, embracing instead the pre-eminence of the longue durée in shaping man’s destiny. This experience made him see events as the ‘crests on the waves,’ while the more important longue durée privileged a temporality that transcended rupture and discontinuity.5 This essay contends that it is now time to move beyond the over-simplistic conventional interpretation of how Braudel came to conceive of time in a tripartite structure, while also seeking to explore the reasons why the account described above has proved so pervasive. The essay will begin (II) by arguing that

1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, (London, 1972), p. 1238.

2 Peter Burke, Sociology and History (London, 1980), p. 26.

3 Oswyn Murray, ‘Introduction’ in Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean (New York, 2001), p. ix.

4 Jaume Aurell, ‘Autobiographical Texts as Historiographical Sources: Rereading Fernand Braudel and Annie

Kriegel’, Biography, 29:3 (2006), p. 427.

5 Olivia Harris, ‘Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity’, History Workshop Journal, 57 (2004), p. 162.

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the traditional understanding is premised on a mischaracterisation of Braudel’s relationship with the older and (at that point) more infl ential Febvre, often overlooking the significant difference between their structuralist and voluntarist philosophies. This fl wed argument is sometimes buttressed by an unsophisticated understanding of the Annales school in general, which over-privileges the influence of a few individual figurehead , and wrongly assumes that the ‘school’ (a much-debated term) had a uniform ideology or method. The second part (III) of the essay addresses the excessive focus on Braudel’s time as a prisoner of war and illustrates that this account does not add up logically or in terms of the evidence on which it is argued. The enduring hold of this understanding owes in large part to its inherent strengths as a romantic narrative, as well as having been repeated and ossified by respected scholars.

Having tried to deconstruct the current understanding, the final section of the essay (IV) offers suggestions which seek to situate the conception of The Mediterranean in an altogether longer chronology, drawing attention to Braudel’s rural background, international perspective, and, perhaps most overlooked of all, his marriage.

Febvre the father and Braudel the son The first section of this essay argues that a mischaracterisation and overemphasis of Braudel’s relationship with Febvre, as well as an over-simplistic account of how the Annales school functioned, has somewhat impeded an accurate understanding of the origins of Braudel’s theory of time in The Mediterranean. The relationship between Febvre and Braudel began with a few disparate letters. However, after a chance meeting and ‘twenty days of laughter’ spent aboard a ferry from South America to France in 1937, their relationship became more

intimate: ‘It was there’, Braudel wrote, ‘that I became more than a companion to Lucien Febvre – a little like a son. His house… became my house, his children my children.’6 This endearing passage suggests that the relationship between the two men was first and foremost personal. Because of this relationship’s perennial presence in the literature surrounding The Mediterranean, the distinction between personal and professional is often obscured. An apposite example is Burke’s argument that Febvre ‘adopted him [Braudel] as an intellectual son (un enfant de la maison).’7 This problematic understanding has meant that Braudel’s thesis has been characterised as a continuation or fulfilment of Febvre’s aims for the Annales journal, with some even suggesting that Braudel displayed voluntarist tendencies. For example, Harris has argued that The Mediterranean often included ‘catastrophist visions of history, which recognised and privileged individual moments.’8 Similarly, Burke has drawn attention to how Braudel treated the individual as a driver in history.9 This analysis closely resembles Febvre’s oeuvre, but fits less comfortably with The Mediterranean, in which individual figures and events are relegated to products of the longue durée.

The misleading account of their relationship can be clarified if historians recognise the significant but often overlooked difference between patronage (personal relationships potentially leading to institutional progression) and academic influence (the ability to affect someone’s views on their discipline). It is certainly credible to argue that in the early stages of his career, Braudel relied on Febvre to progress. By 1937, when he and Braudel first met, Febvre had a large amount of institutional power and personal influenc . Because the French historical establishment had a highly centralised structure, almost all research had to be channelled through a few individuals.10 Maurice Aymard has shown through his studies of

6 Valensi, Lucette ‘The Problem of Unbelief in Braudel’s Mediterranean’, in Ruiz, Teofilo ., Symcox, Geoffrey, and Piterberg, Gabriel (eds.), Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean world, 1600-1800 (Toronto, 2010), p. 26.

7 Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School, 1929-2014 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 33.

8 Harris, ‘Braudel’, p. 161.

9 Burke, The French Historical Revolution, pp. 40-41.

10 Geoffrey Parker, ‘Braudel’s Mediterranean: the Making and Marketing of a Masterpiece’, History, 59 (1974), p. 242.

DONEGAN-CROSS - FERNAND BRAUDEL & THE ANNALES the letter exchanges between Febvre and Marc Bloch, that Febvre worked hard to persuade Bloch to accept the young Braudel. Bloch took issue with Braudel’s criticisms of more senior historians, particularly since he was yet to publish anything of great significance himself.

11 Further insight into Braudel and Febvre’s relationship can be gleaned from a close reading of Braudel’s acknowledgements in The Mediterranean, which thank Febvre on a personal level. Braudel expressed gratitude for Febvre’s ‘affectionate and energetic concern’ and ‘His encouragement and advice.’12 Braudel himself appeared to downplay the academic influence of his patrons. When reflecting on what made a good historian, Braudel said that the true historian was not the one who repeats his masters’ experiments, but instead one who set up his own historical shop.13 Despite any fascination he may have had with Febvre or Bloch, Braudel aimed to build on and ultimately divert from the work of his patrons.

To further develop this argument, a closer comparison between Febvre and Braudel’s work illustrates the differences in the way in which they conceived of the role of the individuals and the role of structures. Although pigeonholing Febvre as a ‘voluntarist’ and Braudel as a ‘structuralist’ is potentially a crude dichotomy, it helps to highlight the main differences between them, and therefore reinforce the argument that Febvre’s influence on Braudel was primarily personal. Braudel wrote at the end of The Mediterranean that he was ‘by temperament a structuralist, little tempted by the event, or even by the short term conjuncture.’14 In contrast, Febvre, while accepting the existence and importance of structures, argued

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that ‘We like to talk about the machine which we create and which enslaves us. But machines are not only made of steel’.15 This reflection illustrates that Febvre believed not only that individuals were not entirely ‘enslaved’ by structures, but also that individuals had a hand in creating structures in the first place. The view expressed here could partly explain Febvre’s exceptionally accomplished work in the category of biography, most notably Martin Luther.

In a later reflection on his studies of the Reformation, he wrote that ‘Of all the people who lived in those troubled times it was the best, noblest and liveliest minds who endeavoured to make… a faith adapted to their needs.’16 In other words, exceptional individuals, including Luther, were the agents of the Reformation. In stark contrast, Braudel, in The Mediterranean wrote that ‘When I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand.’17 In other words, structures imprisoned and governed individuals.

It is often argued that Braudel’s structuralist view of History was essentially at odds with the third section of The Mediterranean, which focused on the courté durée, meaning events, individuals, wars and treaties.18 Some historians have gone so far to suggest that this was essentially an act of appeasement for the Rankian (a school of history associated with the work of Leopold Von Ranke) historical establishment, who would have found Braudel’s honest view of the insignificance of the courté durée too radical.19 To reinforce this view, historians have pointed to the fact that Braudel significantly reduced the size of this section in his second edition.20 However, this relies on an

11 Maurice Aymard, ‘One Braudel or Several?’, Review, 24:1 (2001), p. 19.

12 Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 22.

13 Valensi, ‘The problem of unbelief’, p. 31.

14 Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 1244.

15 Lucien Febvre, A New Kind of History (London, 1979), p. 258.

16 Ibid., p. 88.

17 Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 1244.

18 Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo . Ruiz, and Geoffrey Symcox, ‘Introduction’ in Piterberg, Ruiz and Symcox (eds.), Braudel Revisited, p. 10.

19 Geoffrey Symcox, ‘Braudel and the Mediterranean City’ in Piterberg, Ruiz and Symcox (eds.), Braudel Revisited, p.

39.

20 Ibid., p. 40.

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inaccurate representation of the third section.

Take, for example, Braudel’s account of Don García de Toledo, the Spanish naval commander in The Mediterranean, who in 1565 was slow to relieve Malta from its siege by the Turks.

Braudel argued that ‘Historians have blamed Don García for his delay, but have they always examined thoroughly the conditions under which he had to operate?’. 21This example illustrates that although the third section takes as its subject the individual, it subverts the traditional Rankian view of the individual by showing, in Braudel’s own words that, ‘All [individual] efforts against the prevailing tide of history… are doomed to failure.’22 As Burke has helpfully pointed out, ‘ [In] The debate over the limits of freedom… it is extremely difficult for historians to go beyond a simple assertion of their own position.’23 A determinist view of the individual – such as Braudel’s view of man imprisoned in structures – is therefore incompatible with one which emphasises any individual freedom, such as Febvre’s.

Having argued that Febvre’s influence on Braudel’s development of his theory of time in The Mediterranean was potentially less important than has been assumed, there is an opportunity to evaluate a more complex network of academic influences on Braudel. In particular, there is significant evidence to show influence on Braudel from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Ernest Labrousse. Although Lévi-Strauss and Braudel gravitated towards different disciplines, similar questions of continuity and discontinuity, and the importance of structures motivated both their studies.24 Symcox has compellingly argued that the work of Lévi-Strauss helped fundamentally reconceptu-

alise Braudel’s approach. Lévi-Strauss, having dismissed historians as ‘collectors of information’, argued that only anthropologists could ‘unravel the secrets of human nature: historians… are occupied only with the surface phenomena.’25 It is likely that the time they spent together in Brazil between 1935-38 brought these debates to the fore, and encouraged Braudel to place greater emphasis on long-term structures, above other political or cultural factors.26 In a later reflection on the similarities between their disciplines, Braudel asked ‘who would deny that the great questions of the continuity or discontinuity of our social destiny, which the anthropologists are so busy discussing, are essentially a question of history?’27 This shows self-conscious recognition from Braudel of the similarity between the two.

Beyond Levi-Strauss, Braudel showed deep admiration for Ernest Labrousse, the Marxist economic historian who held the chair of History at the Sorbonne from 1943. In his paper ‘History and the Social Sciences,’ which focused on the longue durée, Braudel called Labrousse’s book The Crisis of the French Economy the ‘greatest work of history… in the last twenty-fi e years.’28 Braudel also said that were it not for Labrousse’s work, ‘historians would never have set to work as willingly as they did on the study of wages and prices.’29 Labrousse’s approach was quantitative and clearly infl enced Braudel methodologically, as seen in the over 150 graphs and tables in The Mediterranean. Since Braudel was typically snobbish towards Marx, whom he thought had been ‘too much discussed’, and what he called ’Sorbonnistas’ (his derogatory slur against those who worked at the Sorbonne), the praise he af-

21 Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 1017.

22 Ibid., p. 1244.

23 Burke, The French Historical Revolution, p. 40.

24 Ulysses Santamaria and Anne M. Bailey, “A Note on Braudel’s Structure as Duration”, History and Theory, 23:1 (1984), p. 83.

25 Symcox, ‘Braudel and the Mediterranean City’, p. 43.

26 Ibid., p. 48.

27 Harris, ‘Braudel’ p. 163.

28 Burke, The French Historical Revolution, p. 55.

29 Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism (London, 1982), p. 343.

DONEGAN-CROSS - FERNAND BRAUDEL & THE ANNALES fords Labrousse is all the more exceptional.30 Therefore, it is much more beneficial to think of a broader web of academic influences on Braudel, rather than the near-exclusive grip of Febvre, and thus to see The Mediterranean as a product of a longer, more complex process.

Much of the myth surrounding Febvre’s influence on Braudel, and the similarities of their historical instincts, is founded not only on a misreading of their work but also on a simplistic view of the Annales school. A more nuanced insight into understanding Annales comes from its most vocal British advocate, Burke, who argued that Annales should be understood first as a reaction against a traditional narrative of events, secondly, as a rejection of political history to the exclusion of a wider range of human activity, and finall , as an interdisciplinary pursuit.31 The strengths of Burke’s definition are that it is broad, and reflects the plurality of different practices and individuals that made up Annales. Furthermore, the defin tion is more about what the ‘school’ is not than what it is. By this logic, Braudel and Febvre were both Annales historians in the truest sense, despite their significant differences, because they both rejected the pre-eminence of the ‘event’ and embraced an interdisciplinary approach.

Burke argued that instead of a ‘school’, it might be more helpful to talk of an Annales ‘movement’ to account for the lack of organisation of Annales.32 However, both ‘school’ and ‘movement’, to some extent, assume some sort of uniformity and ideology, and so create similar problems.

The tendency to describe the Annales as a school or movement has led to an excessive focus both on a few individuals as well as the idea of ‘generations’ of historians with a unique set of aims building on a previous generation, Bloch and Febvre being first Braudel the second, and so on.33 Hufton has encap-

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sulated this fl wed approach when referring to Braudel’s The Mediterranean, arguing that after its publication, ‘he became a living legend, the incarnation of the historical energies of two, if not three, generations of historians, and a dynamic creative force.’34 The hero status assumed by the journal editors has greatly obscured a more faithful understanding of the school and partly explains why historians have come to overemphasise Febvre’s influenc , as one of the leaders of the first generation, on Braudel, the leader of the second generation.

There are perhaps two major reasons Annales, and thus Braudel’s place in the school, have been so seriously misrepresented. Firstly, the notion of a ‘French School’ of history – often epitomised, but not exclusively referring to the Annales – is a notion unique to the anglosphere. For example, Burke called his book The French Historical Revolution. Braudel pointed out that this perception does not match how the French understood Annales. ‘French school? A Frenchman hardly dares utter the phrase, and beset with a sense of all the internal divergences, he hesitates to repeat it.’35 As a result of the notion of a ‘French school’, generalisation abounds, and historians have sought to reduce the school’s diversity and strength with broad brushes of homogeneity. Thus, The Mediterranean should be understood as a product of the Annales, but only insofar that one also appreciates the lack of uniformity across the school or the lack of a neat progression between different generations. The second major reason, which will be developed further in the next section of this essay, is that this understanding has reinforced itself through the repetition of some of the most significant modern scholars whose views carry strong authority.

30 Macfarlane, Alan, ‘Fernard Braudel and Global History’ (1996), J. H. Hexter, “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien,” Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972), p. 483.

31 Ibid., pp. 2-3.

32 Ibid. p. 4.

33 Michael Harsgor, ‘Total History: The Annales School’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13:1 (1978), p. 3.

34 Olwen Hufton, ‘Fernand Braudel’, Past and Present, 112 (1986), p. 208.

35 Ibid., pp. 20-21.

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‘Down with occurrences, especially vexing ones!’: Braudel and the War36 The second arch of the traditional narrative of Braudel’s conception of time concerns his experiences during the Second World War. This narrative is on the surface captivating and has been much-repeated since the 1970s. However, a closer analysis suggests that it requires revision. The conventional account of the conception of The Mediterranean posits that the unique conditions of the prisoner of war camps in Lübeck and Mainz are integral in explaining how Braudel came to understand time and the longue durée. This was initially suggested by Hexter in 1972, however has been most cogently described by Howard Caygill, who argued that ‘Time for detainees was a burden, not only because of the dreary routines of the prison regime but also because of the sense of being detached from crucial historical events and helpless to intervene in them.’ 37The story goes that viewing events of the Second World War as ‘crests’ on the waves, not the deep ocean – to use Braudel’s terminology – actually became a type of coping mechanism as much as a new way of conceiving historical time.38 Braudel himself emphasised the infl ence of this context. In his ‘Personal Testimony,’ also published in 1972, he wrote that only his memory allowed him to write such a ‘tour de force. Had it not been for my imprisonment, I would surely have written quite a different book.’39 Elsewhere, he wrote that ‘In the course of gloomy captivity, I fought hard to escape the chronicle of these different difficult years. To reject the events and… not too much to believe in them.’40 There is no doubt that this origin story has qualitatively changed how historians view his work. Moon has elaborated this case

by showing how Braudel often used the imagery of imprisonment in his later work to explain his theory of time.41 Caygill concludes by saying that the fact that The Mediterranean was conceived in imprisonment makes it a work of ‘reflection on time which was at once a work of memory, a search for consolation, and above all an act of resistance.’42 Braudel’s experience in the camps was certainly profoundly influential to his life, however some evidence suggests it may not have had the same impact on his writing as he, and later scholars, have suggested. Firstly, Braudel flatly contradicts himself in the 1963 preface to the second edition of his thesis: ‘The Mediterranean does not date from 1949, when it was first published… The main outline of the book was already determined if not entirely written by 1939…’ 43This much overlooked passage throws considerable doubt on the notion that the book’s ‘outline’ – which almost certainly refers to the tripartite time-based structure – relied on the gruelling condition of the prisoner of war camp. Rather, it appears that the courté, moyenné and longue durée were conceived before the War. Two other pieces of evidence from the 1920s create a more complete picture, one a report which remains buried in the Archives Municipals de Saint-Dié, Alsace, and the other an early paper written by Braudel while in Algeria, much overlooked and still untranslated into English (a rarity for Braudel). The report explains Braudel’s summer plans for 1928. The Chinese historian Chen-Chung Lai, one of the few to examine the evidence, commented that as well as showing young Braudel’s ‘eagerness… ambitions… methodologies’, it is most remarkable for showing ‘how similar the initial project was to the finished book that was

36 Aurell, ’Autobiographical Texts’ p. 436.

37 Hexter, ’Fernand Braudel’, pp. 509-10.; Howard Caygill, ‘Braudel’s Prison Notebooks’, History Workshop Journal, 57 (2004), p. 152.

38 Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 21.

39 Fernand Braudel, ‘Personal Testimony’, Journal of Modern History, 44 (1972), p. 453.

40 J. H. Hexter, On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Masters of Modern History, (Harvard, 1986), p. 104.

41 David Moon, ‘Fernand Braudel and the Annales School’ (lecture, 2005).

42 Caygill, ‘Braudel’s Prison Notebooks’, p. 155.

43 Braudel, Mediterranean, p. 15.

DONEGAN-CROSS - FERNAND BRAUDEL & THE ANNALES published in 1949.’44 Likewise, Braudel’s first academic paper, ‘Les Espagnols et L’Afrique du Nord’ (‘The Spanish in North Africa’), without using the terminology of the longue durée, is unmistakably Braudellian in its approach.

For example, the introduction cautions historians that ‘we must not allow ourselves to be misled by the long list of military events of the period’.45 Finally, there is also a serious logical inconsistency in the P.O.W. account, in that the account typically emphasises the torment, physical exhaustion and drudgery of daily life, while also explaining that the environment was essential for the book’s conception and production. However, surely these conditions would have made it much more difficult to write a 600,000-word thesis practically and psychologically. This evidence illustrates that while Braudel’s approach may have consolidated when in the prisoner of war camp, changes to his view of time were of essence and not substance. The theory of time, without a doubt, preceded the war.

It is possible that Braudel enjoyed the romanticism of the prisoner of war story, and recognised its potential practical benefit . The underappreciated master, confined in a brutal reality, his thoughts fermenting in gloom and despair, but ultimately emerging triumphant, with a ‘miracle of historical scholarship’, to use Hexter’s phrase.46 The historian John Marino has added considerably to this debate by treating The Mediterranean as a site or island of memory, employing Pierre Nora’s stimulating ideas.47 What this means, in Marino’s view, is that at a certain point, the book became as much an artefact of history as a work of historiography. This change meant that it was now subject to ‘forgetfulness, manipulation, erosion through honest mistakes that we might call “tricks” of memory.’ The work was also, for Braudel, an opportunity for ‘propagandistic

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monumentalization,’ meaning Braudel could use and abuse the success of the book for his own professional advancement.48 This approach allows reconciliation of the favourable and unfavourable views of Braudel. On the one hand, Braudel’s lapse may have been a victim of the ‘tricks’ of memory, but there could also be a case of what Marino calls ‘propagandistic’ purposes.

Despite its inconsistency, the mythic P.O.W. element of The Mediterranean’s origins has ossified into orthodoxy. One central reason is that the narrative has been consistently repeated by later scholars. A key turning point in the historiography of this account was a 1972 edition of the Journal of Modern History dedicated to Braudel’s thesis, which includes his own ‘Personal Testimony’, as well as substantial works by Hexter, then professor at Yale, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor at Oxford, both of whom were highly acclaimed scholars at the height of their academic powers. Later on, Burke, a professor at Cambridge, published his otherwise excellent review of the Annales school, in which the account of Braudel was virtually identical to Hexter’s.49 A second revised edition, published in 2015, saw no change to this component of the story.50 Put simply, a network of scholarship including some important historians has reinforced this narrative, its basic components emphasised but never challenged.

Although the emphasis on Braudel’s time as a prisoner of war has been reinforced by this ‘network’, it is also simply a compelling narrative, and this has helped its propagation.

It is, without doubt, more romantic than a thesis conceived and written in a musty Parisian offic . More significantl , it evokes a parallel between Braudel and Henri Pirenne, an important historian of a past generation. Burke noted the parallel between their stories when

44 Cheng Chung Lai, ‘Braudel’s Memories of the Mediterranean’, The European Legacy, 7:2 (2002), p. 226.

45 Fernand Braudel, ‘Les Espagnols et L’Afrique du Nord,’ Revue Afrique, 337 (1928) p. 351.

46 Hexter, On Historians, p. 111.

47 John A. Marino, ‘The Exile and His Kingdom: The Reception of Braudel’s Mediterranean’, The Journal of Modern History, 76:3 (2004), p. 626.

48 Ibid., p. 626.

49 Burke, pp. 30-55.

50 Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School, 1929-2014 (Cambridge, 2015).

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talking about Pirenne’s Muhammed and Charlemagne : ‘Curiously enough, although this was Pirenne’s last book, the idea for it came to him in a prison camp during the First World War, while Braudel worked on his in a prison camp in the Second World War.’51 Although Burke sees this parallel as a coincidence, it seems more probable that a compelling personal story could somehow bolster perceptions of the quality of an historian’s work. The quasi-mythic status of Braudel, as has been noted, was certainly reinforced by the 1972 Journal of Modern History edition, with Trevor-Roper comparing Bloch, Febvre and Braudel to the first Roman triumvirate, and Hexter going further, to compare Braudel and Febvre to Rome’s founders, Romulus and his son.52 The narrative therefore saw Braudel’s The Mediterranean as the culmination of the first and second generation of the Annales School, not only because of its quality as a piece of history, but because of its compelling origins.

Moving beyond the conventional narrative Situating Braudel and The Mediterranean in a longer chronology – as in, more than a product of his relationship with Febvre and experience as a prisoner of war – allows a more rich and nuanced account of Braudel’s development of his theory of time. This section offers three suggestions for further study and aims ultimately to show how the conventional narrative has impaired constructive development of our understanding of Braudel’s academic growth.

The first overlooked factor is Braudel’s early years in Lume’ville, a small agrarian village in Alsace province, which potentially gave him a different perspective on time, meaning he was more interested in slow-changing structures which minimised the influence of indi-

vidual action and the shockwaves of events.53 Braudel memorably said in his ‘Personal Testimony’: ‘I was in the beginning and I remain now a historian of peasant stock.’54 He went on to nostalgically boast that he ‘could name the plants and trees of this village in eastern France … I observed the yearly rotation of the crops.’55 One of his biographers, Oswyn Murray, said that Braudel chose ‘resolutely to identify himself with the margins of French society and to escape from the bourgeois Parisian establishment.’56 If Murray’s view is elaborated, we could see Braudel’s theory of time, and his involvement in the ambitious but fringe movement of the Annales partly as a result of his socio-economic background, or, more specifica ly, as a result of the combination of the closed, privileged, Sorbonne, Rankian-obsessed, hegemonic historical establishment, with his more humble and self-conscious view of his own background.

There is substantial evidence to suggest that Braudel’s peasant background permeated his view of the pre-eminence of the longue durée in The Mediterranean, and, further down his career, his editorship of the Annales Journal. Again, telling insight comes from Paule Braudel, his wife, who revealed that, upon leaving the Sorbonne, his ambition was to become the historian of his home Meuse region, ambitions which self-evidently changed. Despite the expansive nature of The Mediterranean, allusions and references to agrarian life are peppered throughout. Paule Braudel revealed that, upon a visit back to the Meuse region, a historian of the region remarked, to his amusement, that he found ‘all the allusion to the village of Lume’ville’ in The Mediterranean, as if it were ‘a local history writ on a larger scale.’57 Braudel’s imagination, which was built on his childhood rural experience, clearly informed how he wrote his history. The historian

51 Ibid., p. 38.

52 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ‘Fernand Braudel, the Annales, and the Mediterranean’, The Journal of Modern History, 44:4 (1972), p.472; Hexter, ’Fernand Braudel’, p. 494.

53 Marino, ‘The exile and his kingdom’, p. 646.

54 Braudel, ‘Personal Testimony’, p. 448.

55 Ibid., p. 461.

56 Murray, ‘Introduction’, p.ix.

57 Marino, ‘The exile and his kingdom’ p. 643.

DONEGAN-CROSS - FERNAND BRAUDEL & THE ANNALES McNeill has gone so far to say that recollections of his childhood ‘undoubtedly provided the inspiration for the longue durée that Braudel investigated.’ McNeill also compellingly demonstrates that this side of the book explains its relative commercial success in France, evoking as it did a ‘past quickly vanishing in the modern world.’58 Braudel’s interest in the slower pace of agrarian life was also reflected in his period as editor of the Annales Journal, a period that has been described as exemplifying ‘the journal’s preoccupation with the life of the fields and villages.’59 The preoccupation with rural life was equally concerned with rural people, and Braudel later said his proudest achievement as editor of Annales was that ‘we never lost sight of real human beings who toil and talk, feel and reflect ’60 The DNA of Braudel’s view of time, as seen in The Mediterranean and later in his editorship of Annales, then, owes much to his early years.

Potentially as important as his peasant background was formative time spent in Algeria between 1923-29 and in Brazil between 1935-38. These experiences gave him a global rather than provincial perspective, and also confirmed the importance of geography as a discipline to the new types of history he sought to write. Braudel later summed up the effect of his time abroad, writing ‘Surprise and distance, those important aids to comprehension, are both equally necessary for an understanding of that which surrounds you, surrounds you so evidently that you can no longer see it clearly.’61 This passage reinforces the argument that The Mediterranean was a product of an altogether longer chronology.

In Algeria, then a French colony, Braudel taught what he described as ‘a superficial histo-

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ry of events’ at a Lycee.62 Even though what he taught was conventional, his world was forever changed by his experiences. ‘It was for me such a surprise! I did not know the sea. I saw the Mediterranean, avowing that it is a present of the gods!’ 63Braudel later memorably said that Algeria allowed him to see ‘the Mediterranean from below.’ This meant that he could move beyond a Eurocentric and Christianised world view, and, indeed, his early work reflects this shift, even if Algeria was the most heavily settled of all of France’s overseas territories.64 The article published in 1928, already mentioned in the context of showing Braudel’s earlier suspicion of the event, was written in Algeria and takes as its main protagonist sophisticated Islamic organisation and development, which made conquest difficult for the Spanish invaders.65 This focus would not technically fit with Braudel’s conception of the longue durée, instead being more at home in the moyénne durée.

Nonetheless, it is significant in that it rejects the centrality of events, individuals, or armies in governing history. Algeria, then, can be seen as an environment which stimulated Braudel to ask questions of conventional history, even if his ideas were developing rather than fully formed.

If Algeria had been youthful exploration, Brazil marked an altogether more mature level of consolidation for Braudel’s theory of time.

This was partly, as was discussed in the first part of this essay, as a result of the relationship between Braudel and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Brazil was to Braudel yet another world to discover, as well as, practically, a ‘paradise for work and reflection ’66 In addition, Brazil in the 1930s was, in Aymard’s view, a porthole to the ‘Ancien Régime’, due to surviving forms of soci-

58 McNeill, William H., ‘Fernard Braudel, Historian’, The Journal of Modern History, 74:1 (2001), p. 135.

59 F. Roy Willis, ‘The Contribution of the Annales School to Agrarian History: A Review Essay’, Agricultural History, 52:4 (1978), p. 538.

60 Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, Food and Drink In History (Baltimore, 1979), p. vii..

61 Burke, The French Historical Revolution p. 24.

62 Braudel, ‘Personal Testimony’, p. 450.

63 Pierre Daix, Braudel (Paris, 1990), p. 50.

64 Braudel, ‘Personal Testimony’, p. 450.

65 Braudel, ‘Les Espagnols et L’Afrique du Nord’, pp. 351-371.

66 Thomas E. Skidmore, ‘Lévi-Strauss, Braudel and Brazil: a Case of Mutual Influence Bulletin of Latin American Research, 22:3 (2003), p. 345.

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etal control, treatment of the labour force, and persistent archaic agrarian practices.67 Furthermore, like the Mediterranean, Brazil was a ‘racial melting-pot.’68 These two qualities potentially helped Braudel to reconceptualise the Mediterranean of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, in line with his experiences in Brazil.

He later said that ‘I came to understand life in a different way’ in Brazil, acknowledging the immense amount he owed to his experience there.69 Finally, the third avenue which merits further exploration as an influence is Paule Braudel, Braudel’s second wife. He married her in 1924, having taught her as a student in Algeria.70 Paule deliberately stayed out of the limelight throughout Braudel’s career, but what we can glean from the sources suggests her role was integral to his success and thought process. Having been taught by Braudel, she quickly occupied the same rank in the Lycee, becoming a teacher of history.71 Professionally, at an early stage, they were equals. During the time when Braudel worked on his thesis, Paule became an ‘assiduous and skilful reader’ of the infinite number of microfilms he accumulated.

To reduce eye strain, they shifted roles from time to time and discussed back and forth.72 This no doubt helped clarify Braudel’s thoughts. As has already been discussed, in interviews she gave after Braudel’s death to Marino, she elaborated on Fernand Braudel’s process, or, more accurately, lack of process. The tone that Marino conveys is gently mocking, as if Braudel was, in these early stages of working on his thesis, confused and frustrated.73 It is not hard to imagine, therefore, that having Paule there influenced Braudel’s development of The Mediterranean. After he died in 1985, Paule extensively edited and compiled differ-

ent manuscripts for publication, including the second part of Braudel’s work on The Identity of France and Memory and the Mediterranean.74 The fact that Paule was never acknowledged in any of Braudel’s six prefaces and acknowledgement sections in different editions of The Mediterranean, or in any other of his works, is more suggestive of the masculine-dominated French historical landscape than of her lack of influenc . Although the evidence this essay has considered is incomplete, it is suggestive of a dialectical and fruitful intellectual partnership of equals. There is no suggestion that Paule Braudel worked exclusively in an administrative capacity.

Conclusion There is something deeply ironic in the fact that Braudel, whose view of history was primarily built on a deeply-held rejection of the Rankian view of history, has been repeatedly lionised as a solitary creative genius, to the extent that he has assumed almost mythic status, and criticism of his work verges on the sacrilegious. This essay has aimed to complicate, not simplify, the traditional account of the creation of The Mediterranean, arguing that it is essential to understand the book as a product of a longer chronology with no simplistic causes.

It is, of course, beneficial for historians to, in E. H. Carr’s words, ‘study the historian before you begin to study the facts.’ 75Historiography is not only a necessity, but in fact provides an opportunity to better understand historical interpretations. These days, even those who reject Braudel’s view of history feel the need to venerate him somewhat. However, this hero-worship – which is cultivated over time

67 Aymard, ‘One Braudel or Several?’, p. 18.

68 Ibid., p. 24.

69 Murray, ‘Introduction’, p. x.; Aymard, ‘One Braudel or Several?’, p. 21.

70 McNeil, ‘Fernand Braudel, Historian’, pp. 136-7.

71 Ibid., p. 146.

72 Marino, ‘The Exile and His Kingdom’, p. 633.

73 McNeil, ‘Fernand Braudel, Historian, p. 143.

74 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down’, Journal of Modern History, 63:2 (1991), pp. 359–361.

75 E. H. Carr, What is History? (London, 1972), p. 22.

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plistic, over-romantic, and largely unsubstantiated interpretation of Hexter and Trevor-Roper is revised, if not altogether dismissed.

ART, SOCIETY & SEXUAL VIOLENCE To what extent is Maria Tatar’s Lustmord a valid contribution towards the sphere of the study of sexual violence and art?

Eleanor Radcliffe The purpose of this essay is to analyse the value of Maria Tatar’s Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Tatar splits her book into two sections, of which the first one sets out the theme of sexual murder in Weimar Germany through the introduction of three very real murder cases from the early 1920s. These cases range from cannibals to homosexual killers, such as Fritz Haarman. The second part depicts figurations of war, women and the city in the work of Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, and in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and in Lang’s M. The importance of this structure shall become apparent later, when analyzing Tatar’s writing style.

The modernist movement in Weimar Germany is depicted through the work of the aforementioned artists, underlining the notion of Lustmord as a ‘murder of passion’. The way she uses this word comes down to a concern with procreative power, wherein agency, duty and culpability are deviated from the female Op-

fer to the murderous Täter, whose traumatized psyche becomes his own ‘doing and undoing’.1 It is through this that Tatar can explain that her use of Lust in Lustmord does not actually relate to the English word ‘lust’ or ‘desire’, but rather to the ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘emotion’ present in the self-perceived victims of war, dealing with their grief by retaliating against the displaced enemy through the medium of a pen, a knife, a camera or a paintbrush. 2 My initial sense of motivation for this investigation into Tatar and her book stem from her intrigue with such morbid topics and the link to today’s fascination with serial killers, shown through a mass media surge of murderers such as Ted Bundy. As our understanding of the psychology behind sexual violence has changed with the evolution of science and technology, so has the historiography surrounding the excess of art from that period that was directly influenced by ideas of brutal,

1 Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, 1995) p.34.

2 Ibid, p.25.

RADCLIFFE - ART, SOCIETY & SEXUAL VIOLENCE sexual murder. The purpose of this investigation is to analyze the novelty and influence of Tatar’s scholarship in the wider range of historiography, while investigating the value in her ideas and case studies. No matter how much criticism a piece of scholarship receives for its writing style, evidence, or structure, the actual importance of a book is the legacy it carries, and it is the ultimate goal of this investigation to examine the legacy of Lustmord.

The beginning of this project must start with the most compelling contextual evidence in the twentieth century, namely the two World Wars. Tatar uses the First World War and its traumatic impact on the male psyche to highlight her argument that the violent sexual nature of the Weimar period had a wider spectrum and was linked to more concepts than just German artists in the interwar era.3 There was a wide-spread opinion, exclaimed by George Bernard Shaw, that the Germans ‘lack talent for two things: revolution and crime novels.’4 This concept was still accepted in the mid-nineties, half a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, up until Maria Tatar published Lustmord and questioned this judgment completely. Tatar’s study of sexual murder in Weimar Germany shows that between both wars, crime novels, paintings and films were fervently produced. It is true that plenty of historiography on the Weimar period already existed prior to Tatar’s work, although little attention had been paid to the exploration of sexual violence in contemporary art. Tatar examines a repeatedly overlooked aspect of twentieth-century representations of criminality, namely the images of the Täter and Opfer in the act of Lustmord. She seeks to understand the symbolism of the broken female corpse that is ‘put on display or shielded from sight’ and to investigate ‘the aesthetic and psychological motives of the agent’– with ‘agent’ being defined as the orig-

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inal killer who commits the murder as well as the artists who depict it.5 Tatar’s timeline began with the First World War and ended with Hitler’s rise to power. She even explicitly analyzes certain real-life sexual murderers in Weimar, alongside their public response. Tatar draws a parallel between real-life murderers, such as Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kürten, and the Nazi vilification of Jews. The understanding of this occurs as Haarmann and Kürten both use medical language to characterize their Opfer as pathogens who threaten to infect their entire country and must thus be annihilated, as the Nazis did with the Jews. Lang’s M highlights the porousness of femininity, Jewishness, disease and criminality in the 1920s through the use of Hungarian-Jewish actor Peter Lorre in the confession scene of the child-murderer; it was futile to mention one without implicating the others.6 Alongside this however, Tatar does not forget to emphasize that the gender struggle in Weimar Germany did not just appear out of thin air, it escalated upon the catalyst of WW1 traumas and problems of ‘maternity, mastery and procreation’.7 This explains how pre-existing contested issues, such as procreation, link with the newer defamation of the female body to result in artworks such as Murder on Acker Street

by Grosz.

Tatar chooses to move freely across the boundaries of time and nationality. This is a seamless way of portraying her argument that sexual violence against women has always existed and that the instances of it in Weimar Germany are simply an episode within a freestanding timeline influenced by the effects of the war.8 Rather than seeing the Weimar period as distinct from the two wars, Tatar builds a bridge between two ‘cataclysmic historical events’.9 She sees interwar sexual violence against women as directly linked between the

3 Ibid, p. 35.

4 Todd Herzog, review of ‘Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany’, in MLN, Volume 110, Number 4, p.990.

5 Tatar, Lustmord, p.19.

6 Ibid, p.64.

7 Ibid, p.28.

8 Sackett, review of ‘Lustmord’, p.839.

9 Tatar, Lustmord, p.67.

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trauma and aggression of the first and second world wars. Interestingly, Tatar does not begin her analysis of the paintings with the very objects themselves, but rather with the biographical works of Grosz and Dix. They both fought in the First World War and published their artworks upon their return.

This slots right into Tatar’s deduction that the psyche of the war survivors, wherein the male body was violated on the battlefield was damaged, leading to the translation of this aggression to the female body upon their return. It functioned as a release of artists’ creative energies and legitimized the representation of brutal violence towards women on a domestic front rather than men on a military battlefield 10 The depictions of mutilated and exonerated women represented ‘a continuation of war by other means and with a very different adversary’, as the men worked through their trauma by converting it to their domestic lives.11 The psychological trauma inflicted on the soldiers of World War One is transcribed through Dix’s and Grosz’ paintings, and in particular their depiction of sexual violence.

Tatar’s analysis of these artworks leads to her ability to explore the translation of violence on the battlefield to aggression in a domestic setting. Her attention to detail in the writing of culture-specific aspects of German society linked to contemporary psychic anxieties, defining her argument in connecting art, motherhood, procreation, and violence.12 Tatar’s argument is familiar as it explains that male anxiety is formed from the outcome of a ‘double horror of maternal power and of tabooed female sexuality’, which were formerly united in the phallic mother as an object of terror but also of craving.13 The infamous

Freudian complex is alluded to in this, presenting a very interesting notion that will be investigated later, in conjunction with Tatar’s ‘theory of the female’. Tatar depicts Weimar Germany’s modernist culture as one steeped in extreme misogyny.14 By combining the Imperial German oppression of women with the traumas experienced in the First World War, Tatar concludes that the representations of violence demonstrated by the images of women being raped, eviscerated and dismembered, provided a release of the psyche for the male creators of these art pieces.15 Most reviews agree that this is a very interesting concept to start a book off with, it provokes the reader to want a greater understanding of this topic by laying out the cultural background and pain of the artists themselves, in relation to the wars that both preceded and succeeded them. The use of this notion of the traumatized psyche expressed through art is a strong contribution to the studies of the effects of the First World War on the soldiers and thus is valuable in the larger sphere of research on this topic.

The next noteworthy and controversial choice that Tatar makes is her use of the ‘theory of the female’, as Robert Sackett calls it.

16 At the beginning of her book, she starts her argument off by laying down the backbone of her investigation, namely the theory behind her scholarship. In an attempt to explain male artistic mistreatment of women, Tatar cites Walter Benjamin and Elisabeth Bronfen to demonstrate the idea of one’s femininity dying whilst one’s masculinity prevails. This would only occur after the creation of art, in which male artists projected their own hated sexual desires or their fear of ‘engulfment’ by women.

17 Feminism had greatly played upon men’s fears

10 Ibid, p.68.

11 Ibid, p.68.

12 Susan Kassouf, review of ‘Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany’, in German Studies Review,

vol. 21, no. 1, (1998) p.153.

13 Elizabeth Boa, review of ‘Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany’ in The Modern Language Review Vol. 94 (1999) p.593.

14 Tatar, Lustmord, p.57.

15 Andrew Lees, review of ‘Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany’ in The Historian, vol. 59, no. 1, p.205.

16 Sackett, review of ‘Lustmord’, p.839.

17 Ibid, p. 839.

RADCLIFFE - ART, SOCIETY & SEXUAL VIOLENCE of their inferiority, so by lashing out at women, men sought to demonstrate the superiority of their own masculinity. Tatar chose the Weimar Republic to act as the canvass for her investigation, as it was a time where sexual violence against women was only the beginning of the decline of society, wherein they were preparing for an even greater crime against humanity.

The rise of the ‘modern woman’ and the rise of feminism are acknowledged by Tatar as being the wave against which artists who identified with sexual murder felt they had to protect themselves.18 Tatar’s theory understands this through the relationship between the Täter and the Opfer being destabilized and reversed so that the sexual murderer – or simply the artist – saw himself as the Opfer defending himself against the primal force of the female, wherein the only means of survival was to kill. The link that Tatar composes between this and Nazi Germany is one of a ‘logical next step’. 19The Nazis were ready to project the German state as a heroic one that was wounded. It was a victim that was defending itself from the alien enemy who was so ruthless that the only way to ensure the survival of the German nation was to certify that ‘corruption’ was destroyed in the most brutal fashion. It was in this way that the Jews became, in a sense, Doppelgänger to Grosz and Dix’s creation of the female corpses, residing on their canvases. With this logic, the comparison between the male artists and the Nazis solidified itself in the notion of the blurring of victim and perpetrator, wherein the former definitely defined themse es as the Opfer.

The sexuality of the depicted women is defined in this art by their carnal lust defying the sense of their responsibility for their own destruction. One example of this in the evidence used by Tatar is the symbolism of Berlin as ‘The Whore of Babylon’ in Berlin Alexanderplatz.20 This was a prevalent theme in many

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other periodical works, wherein the fusion of prostitution, the biology of the female and womanhood in general, would be personified through certain synchronic symbols. Images or paintings of these women pertained to the narrative of their male murderers. It is here that the infamous role reversal, which Tatar bases her theory on, comes into play: in the eye of the narrator, his crimes are exculpated as he becomes the Opfer. This theory is very visible in Lang’s M, when the killer of the young girl is composed as being a vulnerable man, helpless to the urges within himself.21 Moreover, he denotes that a similar responsibility to the crime must be attributed to the mothers who failed to look after their children.

While M offers the most forthright example of the blurring of the Täter and the Opfer, it is the periodic painters who best portray the functions of the psyche, demonstrating how the effects of artistic violence against women may have served the artists themselves. Tatar argues that due to war-induced trauma alongside the disillusionment with the military effort, these men played a significant role in the postwar effort to convert hellish military memories into sexual nightmares in which women appeared either as ‘orchestrators of unspeakable atrocities or as abject victims of male violence’.22 In order to prove this to those Germans who had not experienced the atrocities of war, prominent artists such Dix and Grosz created depictions of mutilated women as demons to reveal to audiences a fraction of what they had to endure. Tatar ensures that this point is instilled in the reader, as she convincingly demonstrates how their self-portraits of the Weimar period depict themselves as sexually violent murderers, like Grosz’ self-portrait of himself as Jack the Ripper.23 Furthermore, Tatar finds cause to link the sense of a ‘Freudian Complex’ with these murderers, or artists depicting the murders.

18 Tatar, Lustmord, p.19.

19 Sol Gittleman, review of ‘Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany’ in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 27, no. 2, (1996) p. 325.

20 Lees, review of ‘Lustmord’, pp. 205–206.

21 Tatar, Lustmord, p.167.

22 Ibid, p.89.

23 Ibid, p.5.

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Upon analysis of the four artists’ works, ‘the most prominent explanatory model in our own culture’’ is the idea that a man’s violence comes purely from a woman’s prompting.24 This would often entail taking the form of Freud’s mother in the model of a hostile arrangement and seduction. Tatar strongly belittles this argument in her research, which in turn disparages her own argument as it is an important theory in gender studies, which greatly contributes to her investigation. The ostensibly distinct roles of Täter and Opfer become blurred through this theory. One example of this is in Lang’s M, where the murderer Beckert has a strong ‘pathology…linked to a need for maternal punishment embedded in a fear of maternal surveillance.’25 Tatar admits that she is not explicitly a historian of art but acknowledges that this is only a miniscule disadvantage in the grand scheme of her argument; however, certain reviewers disagree, arguing that her background in ‘The history of fairytales’ does not suffice to do justice to this type of investigation.

While this lack of knowledge and adamant opinion of her ‘theory of the female’ may work in some cases, it is not foolproof. Dix’s work can be interpreted in this way, as even the most abstract arguments comment on the male artists’ need to transcend women’s creativity and reproductive ability. His paintings show a clear boundary between male creative and female reproductive bodies.26 Sackett believes that Grosz leads Tatar to stray from her theories, and that she therefore discusses her theoretical approach within the chapters on Döblin and Lang.27 At times, Tatar is portrayed as a convincing and intelligent scholar in the media that she analyses. Her voice does carry a certain assurance, as well as speculation.

While this does allow for the readers a certain amount of freedom concerning the reception of her argument, it also results in a feeling of distrust and dissatisfaction in her investiga-

24 Ibid, p.28.

25 Ibid, p.169.

26 Ibid, p.91.

27 Sackett, review of ‘Lustmord’, p.840.

28 Gittleman, review of ‘Lustmord’, p.325.

29 Kassouf, review of ‘Lustmord’, p. 154.

tion. A strong opinion is needed to allow for a convincing piece of scholarship and at times Tatar fails to reach that cut-off point in her scholarship. She only seems to push her theories where works support them in order to keep her ‘’journalistic writing style’’ in check and make the book readable, almost like a fi tion in some chapters.28 Her ability to describe the horrors in a way in which the reader is able to comprehend them, while understanding her link to art and the broader notion of cultural history, shows that Tatar has a convincing writing style. This way of telling an interesting story cannot be confused with the portrayal of a convincing argument though. Just because something is an engaging read, like the first section of Tatar’s book, or grotesquely shocking to look at, such as her large collections of Dix’s and Grosz’ artworks, does not mean it offers a valid and useful argument. Having said that, although Tatar’s ‘convenience’ in using her theory detracts from the integrity of her argument, her fundamental introduction of the ‘theory of the female’’ in this sphere of research, is still extremely significant when looking at her investigation on a larger scale.

It is true that Tatar’s analyses are relevant and fascinating in relation to sexual violence and art in Weimar Germany; however, Kassouf picks up on an important point. It is true that her arguments rely on her attention to women as victims of sexual violence, whilst excluding living female artists, spectators and historical readers. According to Kassouf: ‘To her credit, women are reinstated in the Weimar canon; to my dismay, these women are invariably dead.’29 By describing the Lustmord movement as male and the victims of this phenomenon as female, there is a risk of the Täter being defined as male and the Opfer remaining within a female scope. Thus, while the text was and is revered in relation to the movement to reobserve and demythologize the Weimar

RADCLIFFE - ART, SOCIETY & SEXUAL VIOLENCE Republic, it was published at the very beginning of the movement of queer and feminist historiography. Thus, Tatar’s Lustmord might provoke a very opposed judgement. By instilling the very stereotypes that modern feminism hopes to dispel - namely, that men are not always the ‘bad guys’ and women are not always the ‘poor sufferers’’ - Tatar’s scholarship begs a somewhat skeptical view from the lens of a modern historian. In the scope of feminism, gender studies and queer theory, twenty-fi e years can seem more like a century as far as political correctness and modern-day equality go. While searching for a detail-orientated, yet compelling scholarship on sexual murder and art in Weimar Germany, Tatar’s does remain the most accessed and accepted scholarship of its kind. It is for these reasons that an updated scholarship on sexual violence and art in Weimar Germany is needed.

In my private correspondence with Maria Tatar, I asked her about Sackett’s comment on her ‘theory of the female’, hoping to get an answer to the questions that other historians and I have about the ‘‘convenience’’ of this theory.30 However, Tatar seemed to be unclear about my mention of her theory in that context. She did state that when writing her book, she was ‘very much focused on uncovering evidence and examples’, seeing as no one had previously focused their attention on these works, and ‘corralled them into one big rodeo’.31 She then compared herself to the female novelists who rediscovered the heroines of The Odyssey and The Iliad, giving voices to those who were silenced and enslaved, e.g. Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and Atwood’s Penelopiad.32 There is only so much you can analyse in one book, especially when one’s research is so pivotal and new in the chosen field particularly as a female academic. However, Tatar does have an extreme number of the chapters such as the one on Grosz, which seem to drag on slightly.33 Perhaps she could have been more

30 Sackett, review of ‘Lustmord’, p. 840.

31 Tatar Maria, Private correspondence (27 April 2020).

32 Tatar, Private correspondence.

33 Tatar, Lustmord, p.98.

34 Gittleman, review of ‘Lustmord’, p.325.

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concise in her analysis of artists such as Grosz in order to be able to widen her use of evidence and apply her theory to a wider range of artists and art pieces. In doing so, her argument might have been more convincing.

Tatar’s choice of case studies does not only receive criticism for its supposed convenience in fitting her theory, but also for the time and geography of her primary evidence, which precedes the Weimar period and dominates her scholarship. German-born playwright Frank Wedekind rattled the art epicenter by anticipating expressionism and epic theatre.

His Lulu tragedies, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, are a culmination of the slaughter of the female earth spirit by Jack the Ripper.34 As expected, Tatar never misses an opportunity to relate past evidence to some sort of fact or fi tion of the modern day. In the strain of intellectual history, taking an idea and translating it to our contemporary society allows for an appreciation of the issues at hand, from a fresh perspective. I appreciate this form of convincing argument, as it brings some sort of connection and reality to the reader.

However, a gap in the historiography can be found in the lack of twenty-first century examples used to relate Weimar art to the media in the period in which the reader is situated. Tatar makes comparisons to David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer in New York City; the films of Brian De Palma and Alfred Hitchcock; and Thomas Harris’ novel, The Silence of the Lambs. However, why are these all American examples? Where is her comparison of Weimar art to post-World War Two, postIron Curtain or simply modern-day German literature, paintings, film and photography?

Instead of contrasting Weimar art to Hitchcock who was American and based Psycho on Ed Gein, a Wisconsin murderer and grave robber, Tatar could have chosen some sort of constant to maintain. The only connection I can find between Psycho and Tatar’s argument is that the

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film was extremely popular when it came out, similar to the fascination surrounding the art produced in Weimar Germany. Also, Hitchcock wrote that he sought the impression of a ‘knife slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film ’35 One of Tatar’s major contentions is that male artists who depict sexual murder on their canvasses often identify with an actual female-killing murderer themselves, which does represent a tentative link. Moreover, Gein had a deceased, domineering mother with a room dedicated to her shrine and he dressed in women’s clothing. This does interestingly connect to my previous point about the ‘Freudian Complex’, but Tatar does not really express it in this manner, so I simply do not know if her reasons are compelling enough. Upon my research into Lustmord reviews, many of them use Psycho as the revered example of comparison. Psycho, in its fundamental form, is simply outdated. As far as horror and psycho thrillers go, there are many relevant ones in the surge of true crime media that I feel would be more fittin , in an up-to-date version of this historiography.

Again, this is something that I asked Dr Tatar in our private correspondence. I mentioned that she only used American-based creators for her modern-day comparisons and she agreed, all the while reminding me that ‘the grand master of horror, Hitchcock’, was actually in Berlin in the 1920s, as well as many German emigres in the US in the 1930s.36 Tatar did agree, though, with my idea that tracing an arc moving from Weimar to postwar Germany in the 1940s and 1950s would be extremely interesting.37 So, although she stated that it would in fact make more sense to compare the two German postwar periods, in order to develop this arc, her actual aim was to demonstrate how Weimar films carry ver and influence US ci ematic culture. Bringing in the US is an inter-

35 Tatar, Lustmord, p.35.

36 Tatar, Private correspondence.

37 Ibid.

38 Herzog, review of ‘Lustmord’, p.991.

39 Ibid, p.991.

40 Ibid, p.990.

esting choice and is definitely relevant to a certain field of study, but I just do not think that the analysis of sexual violence and art is that chosen field of study. I personally think that staying within the German realm would have allowed for a more riveting investigation.

Moving on from this omission of accurate and convincing evidence, the criticism within the four key case studies that Tatar uses must also be considered to determine the value of her work. The relevance of her research is not limited to Weimar Germany. It extends to the modern-day fascination of thrilling criminal cases. Todd Herzog draws the connection between such horrors and OJ Simpson’s trial, as he acknowledges the transferable ethnic controversy: replacing ‘black’ and ‘white’ with ‘Jewish’ and ‘German’.38 In addition, hyper-masculinity represents a parallel between Weimar society and today’s, but Herzog exemplifies how this now takes place on the football field rather than a battlefield 39 He also stresses that hyper-sexuality in tabloid magazines, where the most provocative pictures and stories of women’s sexual affairs are found, link to the artists’ depictions of females in the 1920s.40 This is an extremely interesting way to interpret Weimar culture and compare it to a modern-day conundrum, one that would have fit nicely into Tatar’s Lustmord. The transposition of the traumatic disruption of bodily integrity onto slaughtered women, so that the obliterated and shell-holed trenches, alongside the exonerated male corpses can be transmuted into female bodies is extremely important.

In terms of artistic imagery, the male body is stalwart and unchanging while the female body is horrifically mutant and permeable. The fear of the loss of manhood is represented through this, in that the feminizing of the corpses links into Herzog’s view of the link between hyper and toxic masculinity in the Weimar period and

RADCLIFFE - ART, SOCIETY & SEXUAL VIOLENCE the modern-day era.41 An extremely interesting link could have been drawn between these two representations of a male’s most intimate fear, in order for Tatar to produce a compelling argument of sexual violence and art. This could potentially have led to more support of her scholarship.42 There are in fact tentative arguments on this topic that Tatar makes in her reading of Berlin Alexanderplatz43. Her understanding of this book is reinforced by Karl and Rosa and Döblin’s ‘The Murder of a Buttercup’, but seems deficient without the mention of Döblin’s criminal case history, The Two Girlfriends and their Murder by Poisoning, in which he rewrites how two lesbian lovers murder a monstrous husband. Döblin links this into the category of Lustmord art, meaning it would definitely have been interesting for Tatar to analyse her thesis by reflecting on a different gender, linking back to the problem of her ‘theory of the female’. He did also speak out about the crucial nature of this criminal case from the viewpoint of a novelist and psychologist, whereas Tatar only analyses it from her viewpoint of a historian specializing in children’s fairy tales. This is not to say that this aspect of Tatar’s scholarship does not lend itself to Lustmord; if anything it brings a novel perspective to the table. She explained to me that pathologies have always been of great interest to her, rather than the good, the true, and the beautiful, wherein we ‘use stories and art to process trauma and pain’.44 Compelling novels, film , and works of art need to be parsed and analysed to decode their symbolic language so that we can decipher what expressive culture tells us about our society, who we are, and where we are heading.45 This is not to say that Döblin’s ignored criminal short story is the only one that deserved to be analysed in Tatar’s novel. It would 41 Ibid, p.991.

42 Boa, review of ‘Lustmord’, p.593.

43 Tatar, Lustmord, p.132.

44 Tatar, Private correspondence.

45 Ibid.

46 Herzog, review of ‘Lustmord’, p.991 47 Ibid, p.992.

48 Tatar, Lustmord, p.175.

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have been interesting to see her analysis of female painters and their depictions of male aggression too. This genre of research links the literary idea of Pitavalgeschichte with criminal case histories to result in a hybrid that is de nitely worthy of discussion in this sphere of academic study. The mixture of ‘true and fictional crime’, which allowed the urban resident to act as the detective, was extremely popular in the Weimar period.46 One notable example of this is the case of Peter Kürten, which was unsolved by the police, who then gave the general public a chance to solve it, by handing it out in 1930.

Although, Tatar is right in her depiction of the dread of imposed paranoia in Weimar Germany, contemporaries felt a certain fascination due to their inclusion and ability to participate in this game of ‘cops and robbers’.47 Writer Thomas Hartwig was so desperate for acknowledgment that he staged murders of women to bring himself to the attention of the public.

The ‘murders’, trial and revelation of the hoax made him a best-selling author overnight. So, even if a murder was found to be counterfeit, it was the sensational subject matter itself that elevated the simulacrum of the corpse.48 These are just a few examples of evidence Tatar could have included to elevate her investigation, seeing as some of the case studies she did include are problematic. Yet ultimately, Herzog agrees, and so do I, that Tatar has given us the best study of a previously unacknowledged crisis of sexual violence that has always existed, may always exist and is a perfect medium with which to demythologize the glitz and glamour of Weimar Germany. I would define Tatar’s main influence as being somewhat similar to that of Philippe Aries and his idea of a theory of childhood. Tatar’s scholarship is an incredibly important contribution to Weimar German cultural and social studies. However,

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there seem to be many historians including myself, who, after reviewing this book, conclude that despite the many interesting strains of argument, there are definitely areas lacking in order for Lustmord to be considered a revolutionary text. This situation is similar to the legacy of Aries, whose pivotal study on childhood led the way for a new strain of research but also received lots of negative feedback. Nonetheless, theoretically if the book is valuable in the field of study, and acts as a form of inspiration and motivation for other scholars to develop their own research, then it does not really matter whether the book is well-received. Although I personally deem her scholarship to be pivotal, I don’t think it was picked up as much as she hoped it would be. When I asked her about this, she confirmed that ‘surprisingly few people bit’ in regards to her monograph.49 Ultimately, though, her scholarship is accepted as a welcome critique on the German modernist canon and is a valid contribution to the debate on the representation of sexual violence.

It is true that more could have been achieved by this publication, but that should not devalue the fundamental significance of what Tatar achieved. This investigation into sexual violence and art in Weimar Germany specificall , is the first of its kind. It is just a shame that more people did not ‘bite’, as Tatar put it.50 Most of the historians that reviewed Tatar’s book agreed that her interpretation of the link of sexual violence in the Weimar period with the World Wars that enveloped it is extremely riveting. Highlighting Grosz and Dix’s backgrounds before analyzing their art in order to offer context for their artistic choices is clever and allows her argument to be portrayed convincingly to the reader. But her ‘theory of the female’ receives much criticism, as it is not fledged out to its full potential.51 Moreover, due to the writing style and layout of the book, Tatar’s

49 Tatar, Private correspondence.

50 Ibid.

51 Sackett, review of ‘Lustmord’, p. 839.

52 Tatar, Lustmord, p. 86.

scholarship lends itself to an easy read. It is potentially due to this that it is not taken as seriously as it should have been, resulting in a lack of interest in widening and deepening her research.

In terms of historiography, in 1995 gender and queer theories were only just starting to thrive. Moreover, they have expanded immensely in recent years. As a modern historian, I find it hard to ignore certain choices that Tatar made, like ignoring any female Täter. In doing this she ignores the feminist agenda completely, keeping the woman trapped in the role of Opfer, no matter how often she deems this ‘blurring of roles’’ to be occurring.52 The gap in historiography that this creates is further exemplified by the need for a new comparison between chosen case studies from the Weimar period and the post-WW2, post-Berlin Wall, post-2008 recession or modern-day German periods. Moreover, some of the case studies that she does use are not utilized fully, such as Döblin’s literature.

There are definiti e fl ws in this piece of scholarship but there is only so much criticism I can give it, because an investigation into a topic that was previously under-researched is a difficult task and normally is not perfect the first time, like Aries’ work. It is just a shame that this topic has not received more attention. Although, there have been a few pieces of work in the years following her publication, none quite cover the niche that she exposed. It would be extremely interesting to see this gap filled in the coming years, so that the demythologization - through the display of sexual violence and art - of the Weimar Republic and its connection to other parts of history can continue. The need for an updated investigation is an aspect Tatar actually agreed with during our private correspondence, meaning that the ‘creator’ of this niche somewhat supports my criticism, stating that my email to her ‘reengaged

RADCLIFFE - ART, SOCIETY & SEXUAL VIOLENCE her interest in this topicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.53 An updated historiographical work could similarly renew interest 53 Tatar, Private correspondence.

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in the history of sexual violence across multiple spaces and temporalities.

‘THE BODY’ IN RUSSIAN HISTORY ‘“The body” as a useful category for workingclass history’: the case of female prostitution in revolutionary and early Soviet Russia Emily Wall Body history and workplace identity Bodies are defined by their embodiment, meaning they are characterised by the processes of becoming a body within a social space.1 Baron and Boris conceptualise the body through embodiment by arguing the body carries additional significance within the workplace because of their comparison to the stereotypical worker of an able-bodied, white male.2 Embodiment inspires a politicised historical analysis, according to Horn’s understanding of the body as a social phenomenon which is located within neither nature nor the private sphere, but within the domain of knowledge and intervention carved out 1 K. Canning, ‘The body as method?: Reflections on the

place of the body in gender history’, Gender & History 11:3 (1999),p. 505.

2 A. Baron. and E. Boris, “The Body” as a Useful Category for Working-Class History’, Labor 4:2 (2007), pp. 24, 28, 29.

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WALL - THE ‘BODY’ IN RUSSIAN HISTORY through social hygiene, sociology and social work.3 Horn contradicts Scarry’s thesis which argues the experience of pain resists language since language cannot recreate the physicality of the experience.4 Russian historiography has attempted to understand history in a physical sense, notably the edited collections Russian History Through the Senses: from 1700 to the Present. Despite being interesting reading their attempts to use language to illuminate physical experience fall flat for the exact reasoning Scarry highlights. Once physical experience is brought forth into language it is no longer physical. Horn and Scarry highlight the two bodies of historical analysis, the social and the physical, both of which have a strong connection while only one can be fruitfully dissolved into discourse.

The relationship between social and physical bodies is seen across a wealth of disciplines. Gender identity construction, outlined

by Butler, is a result of bodies indicating a world beyond themselves.5 For example, the experience of bearing a child or the physical strength of men leads these bodies to indicate gendered characteristics such as feminine care or masculine aggressiveness. The physical denotes social traits. This interaction of social and physical, which Baron and Boris highlight, is important when using the body as a category of historical analysis. This begs the question of why the body is an important historical category since Horn’s definition reduces it to social analysis.

For Bynum, the body is “not topic or, perhaps, almost all topics” since the discussion of the body is not standardised across disciplines and, instead it is often reduced to discussion about sex and gender.6 While Bynum’s analysis carries weight, she also incidentally points to the integrity of body history. Everything within society is defined by sex and gender. Baron

and Boris’s argument for embodiment within the workplace and Butler’s analysis of gender performativity illustrate that these ideas are integral to society and body history cannot be understood without them. Failure to standardise understanding of body history does not undermine it as a discipline, but instead proves how rich and broad a study it can provide.

So, what relevance does this have to bodies of prostitution specifically within revolutionary Russia? For Canning, the body’s obvious presence in prostitution makes it futile to comment upon its existence.7 The obvious nature of the bodies of prostitution, however, makes the body an integral category for the historical analysis of Soviet-era prostitution.

Within Russia, the body was characterised through its expression as a collective experience. While Butler highlights physical experience had social implications, in Russia social ideology dictated physical experience. Sex threatened Soviet Russia through spermatic economy, meaning sex used up valuable energy which should have been used to build the state.8 This threat was further exacerbated in a state marked by war, famine, disease and social upheaval.9 When the body is part of the collective wasting valuable energy while the rest of the Soviet body is struggling to survive is fundamentally selfish Bynum’s argument that body history becomes reduced to a study of sexuality and gender undermines the integrity of these categories in a social context. The body encapsulates both these themes and highlights their thematic relationship with the upheaval of Soviet society. If one is to have a very Foucauldian perspective of sexuality, it is easy to conclude how sexuality comes to define biopower within Soviet society.10 The threat that sexuality posed to the population facilitated the state’s control of sexuality. Politics facilitat-

3 D. G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 4.

4 E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 5.

5 J. Bulter, Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge 1993) p. 12, ix.

6 C. W. Bynum, ‘Why all the Fuss about the Body?’, Critical Inquiry, 22:1 (1995), pp. 2, 5.

7 Canning, ‘The body as a method?’, p. 500.

8 E. Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton University Press 1997), p. 75.

9 F. Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (Dekalb, 2007), p. 133.

10 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction (trans.) Hurley., R. (Allen Lane, 1979), p. 139.

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ed the physical experience of control as well as created the conditions of poverty and unemployment which made it necessary for women to engage in prostitution.11 Sexuality became regulated to protect the state as well as the citizens. In Soviet Russia, the state and individual bodies conflated through, what Starks calls, the “body Soviet”.12 The metaphorical body of the whole population generates discussion of physical and discursive bodies. Soviet citizens’ health, which was often linked to sexuality, illustrated the material manifestation of the revolution’s success.13 For example, dictating the age of developing sexuality was integral to protecting citizens’ health. Medical writers believed if individuals had sex before the onset of sexual maturity, between 20 and 22 for women and 23 and 25 for men, the body’s sex hormones would prematurely deplete resulting in amenia, premature ageing, the weakening of muscles, productivity and creativity.14 If the youth, who were the foundations of the proletarian state, had depleted their necessary spermatic economy then this reflected failure of the new state. Study of sexual maturation illustrates how physical processes of the body became politicised through their connection to the collective. Logically, sexuality should be perceived as helpful to the state since it provides children who will continue state development.

The female body, however, neglected the Soviet state through her sexuality. The prostitute is a labour deserter because her energy is not used for the collective, meanwhile, the mother who focuses on caring for her child is liable on

the same basis of the prostitute for her neglect of the state. The mother should give up care of her child to the state after their first year and if she continued to care for her children after that she was no better than the prostitute in terms of labour desertion.15 Citizens neglected their collective responsibility through sexuality. Regulation of the body was underpinned by the threat the sexed body, particularly the feminine sexed body, posed to the state and collective body which makes study of Russian prostitution history through a social, bodily historical analysis fruitful. Starks’ conception of the ‘body Soviet’ highlights the idea of the metaphorical social body which is integral to Soviet ideology.16 This link between the ideological and the physical is clearly present in Soviet Russia, so why remark upon its existence, especially concerning prostitution where the body is so obvious? It is precisely the obvious nature of the links between body history and Soviet-era prostitution which makes it so important to connect the two. Although many works have focused on a bodily perspective of prostitution, they have failed to place their arguments implicitly within the ‘bodily turn’ of working-class history which Boris and Baron have called for.17 This failure is tied in with the discussion of workspace identity.

Space, identity and sexuality all interrelate within Soviet history. Kondakov’s frankly brilliant piece on queer urban spaces illustrates how space could be used as environments of resistance. Removal of capitalist spaces of queer expression, such as bathhouses, and removal of private space by develop-

11 F. Halle, Woman in Soviet Russia (London, 1935), p. 256. As of October 1 1923 there were only 2,294,000 employed

women within the Soviet Union. This was the economic and social context which forced women into prostitution.

12 T. Starks, The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), p.

24.

13 Ibid., p. 4.

14 Bernstein, Dictatorship of Sex, pp. 134-135.

15 A. Kollontai, ‘Prostitution and ways of fighting it Speech to the third all-Russian conference of head of the Regional Women’s Deparments, 1921 (in) A. Holt, Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai (Allison & Busby, 1977), A. Krylova, ‘Bolshevik Feminism and Gender Agendas of Communism’; (in) S. Pons. S., and S. A. Smith, The Cambridge History of Communism: Volume 1: World Revolution and Socialism in One Country 1917-1941 (Cambridge, 2017), p. 432.

16 Starks, The Body Soviet, p. 24.

17 Baron and Boris, “The Body” as a Useful Category for Working-Class History’, p. 43.

WALL - THE ‘BODY’ IN RUSSIAN HISTORY ing common apartment spaces, forced sexuality into the public.18 This too was the case for prostitution through removal of brothels and as a result, to quote Kondakov, “the private was forced into the political”.19 To understand why the body is important when analysing prostitution, one must acknowledge the ways space defined sexuality within Russia. The removal of privacy illustrates how sexuality in Russia was a collective matter and this, in turn, shaped public identities. This was sometimes positive for prostitutes, since deregulation of prostitution and removal of brothels meant the institutions which isolated prostitutes from society were removed so they could become accepted as a citizen. Increasing numbers of married prostitutes throughout the 1920s points further to their acceptance within the community.20 The workplace must be consciously acknowledged as a complex, two-fold concept where the relationship between place and identity becomes defined by the body. The destruction of the physical workplace of the brothel meant the place of sex was defined primarily through the body which was the site where prostitution took place. The geographical location of workspace was secondary to the physical body as a site of prostitution, hence, Baron and Boris’ argument surrounding an embodying experience within a workplace is complicated when talking about prostitution. This is further illuminated by Pateman’s ‘sexual contract’ thesis which argues that the prostitution contract is unlike any other employment contract since, rather than entering into a contract with an employer, she instead enters into a contract with the male customer who obtains the right of direct sexual use of her body.21 The body becomes the workplace due to the specific nature of the prostitution contract.

115 The importance of the secondary space of physical locations must also be acknowledged. Hubbard emphasises sexual identity as integrally linked to historical geography. Cities are sexualised in a way that perpetuates acceptable and unacceptable sexual identities. Acts of heterosexuality, such as holding hands, are acceptable within public environments. Meanwhile, transgressive sexualities are demonised and pushed to the margins of society in destitute areas.22 There is a specific link of class identities and poverty associated with transgressive sexualities such as prostitution. Space identity associated with the body is integral to an understanding of Russian sexual culture.

The Devil’s Wheel (1926) illustrates the association of divergent sexualities within run-down houses on the outskirts of Leningrad. The film follows with scenes of male harassment and the sexual corruption of the sailor, Ivan Shorin. Shorin ultimately rejects the urban lifestyle for his life as a sailor.23 Thus illustrating how dangerous urban space and transgressive sexualities stands at odds with individuals participating within the collective. Schrader develops this idea of space through the ideas posed by Scarry surrounding the subjective bodily experience. By focusing on the sensual experience of urban space in the Passazh shopping arcade and its associations with tsar era prostitution, she highlights how the dim lighting of these spaces placed women in jeopardy as they navigated the streets. This danger was exacerbated by the consumerism of these areas which led men to perceive women’s bodies as objects for sale.24 Her argument surrounding the unique experience of light alongside ideas surrounding urban environment and sexuality illustrates the interrelation of social and physical which marries Scarry and Horn’s ideas in

18 A. Kondakov, ‘Rethinking the sexual citizen from queer to post-Soviet perspectives: Queer urban spaces and the

right to the socialist city’, Sexualities 22:3 (2019), pp. 405, 406.

19 Ibid., p. 406.

20 E. Waters, ‘Victim or villain: prostitution in post-revolutionary Russia’ (in.) L. Edmondson, (eds.), Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 166.

21 C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 202-4.

22 P. Hubbard, Sex and the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West (Ashgate, 1999), pp. 2, 4, 210.

23 The Devil’s Wheel (1926) [film] Directed y G. Kozintsev and L. Trauberg. Soviet Union. Leningradkino.

24 A, Schrader, “Market Pleasures and Prostitution in St Petersburg”, (in) M. Romaniello, and T. Starks, (eds.) Russian History Through the Senses: from 1700 to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 70.

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a nuanced fashion. Her appreciation of space and its integrity to creation of bodily identity within a social context makes her argument all the more compelling. The embodying experience of space due to the displacement of the workplace in Soviet-era prostitution means that spatial identity is a crucial theme to include within this study.

When discussing the bodies of prostitution, one needs to keep in mind that the social context leads from the biological and is infl enced by socialist ideology. Historical analysis must be pursued through an understanding of the discursive body rather than the subjective body. The Russian context of the collective body, and its conflation of the biological and ideological, makes analysis of the body through a social context an incredibly useful point of historical research.

Female Bodies: victim, mother and ‘dangerous’ woman When applying the scholarly context already discussed to the context of prostitution during revolutionary Russia there are a few important things to note. Boris and Baron illuminate three categories which are particularly useful when talking about body history. The first two categories are representation and regulation.

Representation highlights how the physical body is perceived within a social context, while regulation is concerned with the way the state attempted to control bodies.25 These categories of this analysis are of particular importance, running throughout the analysis of both male and female bodies within prostitution, and highlight the ideas already outlined by Horn’s social and discursive body. Whereas their final category of corporeality cannot be used within analysis of these bodies. Their definition of corporeality in terms of making materiality a component of representation and discourse

directly parallels Scarry’s ideas.26 Corporeality is limited in its usefulness as an analytical category since it cannot be absorbed into discourse since language cannot replicate the reality of physical experience.

To prefix the analysis of the female bodies of prostitution they must be first broken down into three different bodies: the victim, the dangerous woman and the mother. All these bodies conflate into the single entity of the female. However, social perceptions and official discourse separate and compare these bodies constantly. These bodies are simultaneously distinct and fundamentally bonded through official and non-official discourse and representation.

The female body, although heteronormative in its gendering of sexual intercourse, challenges ideas surrounding heterosexuality by engaging in sexuality for economic gain rather than insemination. When considering the first analytical category of representation, this is illustrated thoroughly. FIG 1 highlights the visible culture of the prostitute in the context of challenging the heterosexual norm by using the ideas of Butler’s gender performativity to present herself in a way that marks her body as for sale.27 The intentions behind her performativity are to engage within the prostitution contract rather than conceiving a child, therefore, her sexuality is transgressive. The visual imagery of the prostitute illuminates the connection between biological and social transgressions further. Her capitalistic dress was a marker within Soviet society for lack of hygiene. Since mind and body were thought to be related, her ideological transgressions through her dress point to her biological sickness.28 The cigarette within the image presents a two-fold point of analysis. The passing of the flame accompanied with the visibility of the sore on the prostitute’s upper lip points to the spreading of disease through a point of contact illustrating the link of the visual culture of the

25 Baron and Boris, “The Body” as a Useful Category for Working-Class History’, p. 25.

26 Ibid., p. 25.

27 Hubbard, Sex and the City, pp. 4, 165.

28 Starks, The Body Soviet, pp. 23-25.

WALL - THE ‘BODY’ IN RUSSIAN HISTORY poster and biology.29 The cigarette is of further importance due to the state’s concern for pregnant smokers and the damage it would have on the unborn child accompanied by the threat of miscarriage.30 This example lends itself to a key theme of understanding the body within this context which is the dichotomy of a prostitute’s body with the mothering body.

The visual imagery of the bodies of motherhood and prostitution is exhibited within Prostitute, Killed by Life (1926). The prostitute, Liuba, encroaches on distinctly heterosexual, female space where a group of women gather to wash their clothes accompanied by their children. Liuba hugs one of the children, illustrated in FIG 2, and is subsequently met with hostility from the mother who drags her child away warning her child to stay away from the “bad woman”.31 The prostitute’s body becomes defined by its sexuality which places it at odds with the mothering body. Social perceptions, which are exacerbated by the geography of motherhood, characterise her as a dangerous woman through her incompatibility with motherhood. This is further complicated when considering the associations of venereal diseases with infertility, miscarriage, infant mortality and childhood impairment, which marks the physical and medical dissonance between the two bodies.32 The prostitutes’ association with venereal disease distinguishes her biologically from the mothering body.

However, the film reflects the attitudes of later Stalinist cinema through its focus on a female hero who teaches the viewer to navigate Soviet society. Patriarchal fantasies are destabilised throughout the film by diverting attention away from her sexuality to her victimhood.33 The film resolves through placing her within the context of motherhood by showing her with a child of her own. The contexts of FIG 2 and 3

117

FIG. 1. “Casual sex: the main source of the spread of venereal disease” (Moscow). Print run: 10,000 (in) Bernstein, F., ‘Envisioning Health in Revolutionary Russia: The Politics of Sexual-Enlightenment Posters of the 1920s’, Russian Review, 57:2 (1998), p. 207.

both show her with the care of a mother as if it is innate within her biological makeup. It is the social discourse that changes rather than visual representation of her care for children.

The discursive body is united with the biological body through the innate female ability to

29 F. Bernstein, ‘Visions of sexual health and illness in revolutionary Russia’ (in) R. Davidson and L. A. Hall (eds.)

Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal disease and European society since 1870 (Routledge, 2001), p. 109.

30 Starks, The Body Soviet, pp. 23-25, 178.

31 Prostitute, Killed by Life (1927). [film] Directed y O.Frelikh. Soviet Union. Belgoskino.

32 C. Parks, J. F. Peiper, D. G. Tsevat and H. C. Wisenfeld, ‘Sexually transmitted diseases and infertility’, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 216: 1 (2017),p. 1; S. Hearne, ‘To Denounce or Defend? Public Participation in the Policing of Prostitution in Late Imperial Russia’, Kritika 19:4 (2018), p. 725.

33 A. E. Moss, ‘Stalin’s harem: the spectator’s dilemma in late 1930s Soviet film’ Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 3:2, (2009), p. 158.

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FIG 2: Prostitute, Killed by Life (1927).

care for children which ultimately serves as her liberation. The heterosexual norm is challenged not by the prostitute’s taboo sexuality, but by the contradictions and compatibilities of the bodies of the prostitute and the mother.

To further elaborate on the connection of the different female bodies of prostitution, the idea of the dangerous female body and its connections with the themes of bodily autonomy and identity must be developed. Looking at the earlier context of late Imperial Russia, Hearne illustrates how prostitutes sought personal bodily autonomy by writing to the authorities concerning their legal status. They drew on the discourse of legality when disputing their enrollment onto police lists without their consent. Sixteen independent prostitutes in Brest demonstrate this in their 1908 dispute over the state’s attempt to force them into state-licensed brothels.34 These women presented themselves as compliant citizens, who are biologically controlled by the state, throughout their defence of their workplace identity by arguing they have followed the rules by attending their weekly compulsory venereal disease

examinations.35 They characterise themselves as citizens through discourse and state control over their bodies while simultaneously claiming bodily autonomy with their choice of private workspace. As previously illustrated, this idea of space is integral to sex worker identity.

While many women would identify themselves as victims of circumstance when engaging with legal discourse, they would continue to fight for this spatial freedom.36 Space became the main area of autonomy of which they were entitled since their bodies would be controlled by the state and their male clients. These women may be characterised as dangerous through their outspoken defence of their workplace identity, however, the physical reality of their body continued to represent the victimisation of the body thereby conflating these two bodies into a single discourse.

The bodies of the dangerous woman and the victim were categorised within labour clinics based on their willingness to conform to the ideal of the redeemable woman. This was policed through a form of one hundred questions based upon their childhood, temperament and sex life.37 Since the primary aim of these institutes was to treat infected prostitutes, willingness to reform needed to be accompanied by infection with venereal diseases to be admit-

FIG 3: Prostitute, Killed by Life (1927).

34 Hearne, ‘To Denounce or Defend?’, pp. 720, 734-5.

35 Ibid., p. 741.

36 Ibid., p. 741.

37 S. Hearne, ‘From Liberation to Limitation: The Early Soviet Campaign to “Struggle with Prostitution”’ in L.

Douds, J. Harris, and P. Whitewood (eds), The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917-1941 (Bloomsbury, 2020), p. 235.

WALL - THE ‘BODY’ IN RUSSIAN HISTORY ted.38

The link of the social, discursive body and the physical, biological body is defined here through the categorical analysis of regulation. The clinics prided themselves on curing women ideologically, socially and physically.

Hearne outlines the two schools of thought within the early Soviet campaign against prostitution. The first was that it was an economic problem on account of unemployment which meant emancipation required financial help, whereas the other school of thought posed them as blameless victims of the capitalist pre-revolutionary regime.39 Both these official discourses place the prostitute within the context of victimhood from which they would be emancipated through ideological education and providing them with work.40 State control, however, did not emancipate these women from bodily control nor grant bodily autonomy. Instead, the subjugation of their body was transferred from male clients to the state. The very fact that the state discourse failed to comprehend the willingness of women to enter prostitution through their own free will in the first place shows a complex interplay of autonomy, economic circumstance and gender hierarchies.41 Social perceptions colour the female as a victim and if she were to defend her bodily autonomy and workplace identity, like the prostitutes in Brest, she was perceived as a lost cause.42 These women, who were categorised as hardened (zakorenelyi) prostitutes, were subjected to intense state control through labour camps. In 1929, ten labour camps were being set up for these ‘hardened’ prostitutes who were characterised alongside wreckers for their failures to engage within productive labour.43 Their associations with the capitalist past alongside their unwillingness to reform led to the state seizing control over their bod-

119 ies more forcefully. Either way, the prostitute’s body could not escape being controlled and regulated. Although Russia was a state defined by ideological equality, the reality of the situation illustrated that it remained a state dictated by patriarchy. The bodily associations with the mother, the victim and the dangerous woman all tie to the social perception of the female body as weak and subjugated under male control. The autonomy of the hardened prostitute who sold her body through choice surrounding her workplace identity, rather than out of necessity because of her weakness, was a threat to traditional gender assumptions. The state’s control of these women through labour camps illustrates the conflict between autonomy and control which characterises Russia’s failure to free itself from gendered assumptions surrounding female sexuality and the body.

Male Bodies: representation, regulation and war Male bodily experience in heterosexual prostitution is essential to exploring the female since gendered history is more powerful when analysed through the interrelation between genders rather than focusing on the singular.

Study of the male body lends itself perfectly to the categories of regulation, representation and corporeality. Venereal diseases associated with prostitution were significant to the male body due to the integrity of their bodily health to state security. Concern over state security, rather than victimhood or bodily autonomy as it was for women, facilitated state regulation of male bodies. As of 1926, 15.5% of sailors in the Black Sea fleet were infected with venereal disease which made it the most venereally diseased fleet worldwide.44 In line with Starks’ in-

38 F. Bernstein, ‘Prostitutes and Proletarians: The Soviet Labour Clinic as Revolutionary Laboratory’ in W. Husband, (eds.) The Human Tradition in Modern Russia (Rowman & Littlefield 2000), p. 117.

39 Hearne, ‘From Liberation to Limitation’, p. 231.

40 Bernstein, ‘Prostitutes and Proletarians’, p. 115.

41 Hearne, ‘From Liberation to Limitation’, p. 1 .

42 Ibid., p.234; Hearne, ‘To Denounce or Defend?’, p. 735.

43 Waters, ‘Victim or villain’, p. 161.

44 S. Hearne, ‘The “Black Spot” on Crimea: Venereal Diseases in the Black Sea Fleet in the 1920s’, Social History, 42:2 (2017), pp. 190, 181.

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sistence on the body Soviet, this lack of health became a reflection of the failure of the revolution and marked Russia’s backwardness.

The context of the first Soviet peacetime existence allowed the state to justify turning their attention away from the threat of impending enemies to regulating the sailors’ bodies.45 The Revolutionary Military Soviet of the Black Sea fleet began controlling the sailors’ behaviour by making it mandatory to report to their nearest medical point for prophylactic care following sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse often implied engagement with a prostitute due to the higher wages and free time of the sailors in the autumn and winter which gave them the opportunities to visit prostitutes.46 Comparing this to Germany during World War One, one can gain insight into the invasive nature of Soviet regulation.

During World War One the German state believed, since men were sexually aggressive, sexual activity was necessary to maintain troop morale. Their sexuality became nationalised through procuration of front brothels and distribution of condoms. Venereal diseases were not linked to endangering state security but rather the private household in endangering their wives and impairing their fertility.47 In both cases sexuality was nationalised, however, the motivations behind it were very different. In Germany sex was promoted as a necessary biological function whereas in Russia, while male aggressiveness was acknowledged, they sought to promote this use of energy through organising boxing and wrestling matches to reduce sexual tensions.48 Male clients’ bodies were regulated according to their gender performity of aggressiveness, meanwhile female bodies were regulated according to their victimhood. The dichotomy between these methods illuminates Butler’s thesis, illustrating how biological assumptions characterised their social treatment.

Furthermore, the privacy of German sexuality was exhibited by the use of condoms and concern over the private household. Whereas the Russian state-controlled sexuality, by administering prophylactic care publicly, reflects their focus on the collective body. Russia failed to deal with venereal diseases as successfully as Germany due to shortages of personal prophylactic kits and condoms. The private act of sex became a public matter because shortages meant they were more at risk.49 The material reality behind this control meant that the nationalisation of efforts to prevent prostitution was evermore integral to state protection.

Bodily invasion and the physical experience of pain surrounding venereal disease treatment should be considered within the context of corporeality. The treatment for gonorrhoea was administered after sex, involving urinating, washing the penis with soap and water then injecting diluted Protargol solution directly into the urethra.50 Scarry argues the language of pain is usually brought forth in medical terms meaning pain is spoken about on behalf of those who are in pain.51 It is impossible, especially writing as a female, to place this procedure within the language of physicality. However, understanding men’s institutional reaction whenever anyone talks about the painful invasion of their genitalia, the description alone plays a powerful role in understanding the historical experience of men’s bodies.

Considering the bodily invasion was not facilitated with the concern for the single individual but rather the collective body who would be threatened if there was a depleted military force, the magnitude of the invasion of lack of privacy can be illustrated. The experience of the individual body was defined by how it threatened the collective and its medical treatment was coloured by this perception thereby placing it at odds with Germany’s concern for

45 Ibid., pp. 181-182.

46 Ibid. ,pp. 184, 197.

47 E. Domansky, ‘Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany’(in) G. Eley (eds), Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930 (University of Michigan Press 1996), pp. 448-449.

48 Hearne, ‘“Black Spot” on Crimea’, p. 197.

49 Ibid., p. 198.

50 Ibid., p. 186.

51 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 6.

WALL - THE ‘BODY’ IN RUSSIAN HISTORY the individual bodies within households.

Gendered space and Konakov’s spatial identity thesis are integral to understanding the male client’s body. Workspace became the main arena for the construction of male identity and in the example of war, which was defined by bodily pain and mass death, this identity construction took on a very aggressive characterisation.52 Looking at an earlier context of World War One, female presence posed a threat when it encroached on the male space of war.

Non-official underground sources circulated focusing on the sexualisation of wartime nurses. The term ‘sisters of comfort’ became sexualised, betraying its earlier association with the emotional support provided by nurses.53 The idea of the caring woman in this sense links to her motherly instincts, however, when this is displaced within the gendered space of war it

121 becomes misconstrued. This private discourse presented the extent of the overpowering male identity within this space as shown in FIG 4.

In a highly male charged environment, the female body became sexualised as men desperately engaged with crude sexuality to construct their gendered identity. The image’s vulgarity highlights the vulnerability of the women who are powerless to the groups of men in line with their members ready and waiting. The visual nature of sexuality here is present within private discourse, however, the ideas behind it continue to threaten the state because it undermined the structures of nursing. Women were present to care for these men, however, the performity of masculinity which was exacerbated by the place of war sexualised this necessary relation. Nurses would have to conceal their feminine bodily characteristics with

FIG. 4: Postcard circulated among Russian troops depicting the sexualisation of nurses in L. S. Stoff, Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War: More than binding men’s wounds (University Press of Kansas, 2015), p .29.

52 A. Baron, ‘Masculinity, the Embodied Male Worker, and the Historian’s Gaze’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 69 (2006), p. 143.

53 Stoff, Russia’s Sisters of Mercy, p. 267.

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FIG. 5: “Article 15 severely punishes those who infect another with venereal disease” (Moscow). Print run: 10,000 (in) Bernstein, ‘Envisioning Health in Revolutionary Russia’, p. 208.

their nurses uniform to deflect this attention.

However, due to the private discourse around the sexuality of nurses this uniform came to be defined by its relation to sex work.54 There was a reality to the situation with women dressing up as military nurses to enter military zones although to what extent is questionable.55 The male behaviour surrounding the situation highlights the sexuality of gendered relations and a crisis of masculinity in which men felt like they had to prove themselves under threat of female presence. Male workspace identity became threatened by female workspace identity and this reduced women to their sexuality due to male fears over the power of women and their pressure to perform their masculinity.

Representation of the male body often centred around villainisation. Criminalisation of the spreading of venereal disease through article 15 conveyed that the male was an active

participant in his exchange with a prostitute and was liable to punishment for its consequences.56 The villainisation of the male body centred around the mothering body and domestic household. FIG 5, following on from FIG 1 in a Narkomzdrav series on venereal disease, highlights the villainisation of the male client and the female prostitute through the victimisation of the wife.57 The series highlights the physical connection of these bodies through sexual contact where the primary source of disease remains as the prostitute. Although the male is responsible, the prostitute still holds the majority of the responsibility within these sources as the origins of disease.

The physical connection of these bodies ties in with the body Soviet and illustrates how Soviet society is intricately connected, the physical pain of the body poses a danger to society on a public level but also poses a tangible threat

54 Stoff, Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War, pp. 286, 282.

55 Hearne, ‘Sex on the Front’, p. 102.

56 Bernstein, ‘Envisioning Health in Revolutionary Russia’, p. 208.

57 Bernstein, ‘Visions of sexual health and illness’, p. 109.

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WALL - THE ‘BODY’ IN RUSSIAN HISTORY to the private domestic household. Kollontai contextualised these ideas within Marxist feminism through her short story Sisters. She talks about a wife who previously had a comradely relationship with her husband. Her husband becomes corrupted following a business trip with several NEPmen and starts bringing prostitutes back to their household. The second prostitute which he brought to their home tells the story of her suffering to the wife and they “parted like sisters”.58 The victimisation of the prostitute turns her into a comrade which unites the women in a very inspiring way. It is the manipulation of the prostitute through the prostitution contract, which presents itself as a remnant of the capitalist past since a man who “buys the favours of a woman does not see her as a comrade”, which connects the two bodies through collective ideology.59 Buying a woman’s body undermines socialism thereby the connection of physical culture and social policy are underpinned. Although Kollontai rejected prostitution, she does so through the lens of Marxist feminism, stressing the role of patriarchy and capitalism in manipulating women.

The idea of the collective body means everyone has a role within the spreading of venereal diseases, however, the stress on the victimisation of the prostitute within official discourse meant blame was also placed on the male.

a state defined by its proletariat. The nature of this research is obvious which is what makes it so important in creating a case example of the integrity of body history within a larger context. This study can generate a starting point for changing attitudes towards the ways working-class history is approached. The body does not need categorising within corporeality to produce a fascinating study. The social bodies of prostitution inspire an analysis of medicine, state control and propaganda, national security and socialist ideology, gender and sexuality just to name a few. The body is the single most important factor of human existence since without it there is no existence. Its embodiment and spatial identity apply to all elements of social existence, placing it as an important category for understanding both working-class history and any other historical endeavour you can imagine, of which the history of prostitution is just the tip of the iceberg.

Conclusion Prostitution is by nature embodied and Soviet Russia’s history is obviously working-class as 58 A. Kollontai, ‘Sisters’ (1923), trans in L.Lore, A Great Love (Vanguard Press, 1929).

59 Kollontai, ‘Prostitution and ways of fighting it’

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FEATURED CONTRIBUTIONS

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GENDERING THE METROPOLIS: A DEBATE Collected Essays from the Module ‘The Metropolis: Urban Histories of Modern Europe, c.1790-1990’ Dr Markian Prokopovych This debate is one of the unanticipated – but hugely rewarding – outcomes of my module ‘The Metropolis: Urban Histories of Modern Europe, c.1790-1990’ at Durham University, in which we critically engage with and challenge orthodox narratives of European urbanisation.

Capitalising on the interest in gender history amongst this year’s student cohort, this debate includes contributions by Georgie E. Caine, Artemis Irvine, and Alice McKimm. When I write ‘unanticipated’ and yet ‘hugely rewarding’, this is because even though the creative potential of interdisciplinarity and of the merging of gender and urban history is fairly self-evident, I did not fully anticipate the richness and diversity of my students’ approaches to the topic of gendering the metropolis, each of them gleaned from a different set of primary sources.

The debate that the following three texts engage in is, first of all, a debate with each other –indicated by their comments on each other’s work and arguments. But much more importantly, they approach cities and urbanisation critically, without the celebratory pathos that classic urban historical studies have employed to describe them, and look at the complexity of the multifaceted urban experi-

ences beyond those that concerned successful and powerful men. What becomes clear from the debate is just how much scholarship has grown since the publication of pioneering works such as Maureen A. Flanagan’s ‘Women in the City, Women of the City: Where Do Women Fit in Urban History?’1 – the work that we read and discussed in class. While women’s histories of European urbanisation are still not complete, filling them with further case studies and broader comparative approaches is no longer adequate for the participants of this debate. ‘Adding women and stirring,’ as some earlier studies have done, is no longer sufficient because the more we learn about the scale of women’s involvement in these phenomena, the more fundamental they appear to our interpretation of urbanisation. In the wake of calls to decolonise the curriculum, the inclusion of women into the classic narratives hitherto dominated by masculinised approaches (such as those of urbanisation) is complemented by approaches that incorporate the gendering of both sexes, as well as by alternative histories of other, non-heteronormative urban groups.

Of course, typical narratives of nineteenth-century urbanisation are still predominantly male, middle-class narratives – but did

1 Flanagan, M. A. (1997). ‘Women in the City, Women of the City: Where Do Women Fit in Urban History?’, Journal of Urban History, 23(3), pp. 251–259.

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even the middle class conform to such imagined depictions? In a 1900 Baedeker guide to London, we only encounter women in ladies’ societies; or when in the dinner invitation etiquette ‘gentlemen’ were expected to ‘remain at the table, over their wine, for a short time after the ladies have left.’2 But such representations, as the following essays show, are misleading.

Even some middle-class women would actually break away with these norms in many different ways. Cities were full of women: barmaids, waitresses, middle-class flâneuses – if one accepts the applicability of the term – as well as those others who were less visible and yet essential for the functioning of urban economies, such as, for example, housemaids, women working from home, and those employed in numerous urban sweatshops. And cities were also full of other, non-heteronormative groups, who each had their own topographies that reflected urban power structures and ways to subvert them.

How rigid were the boundaries between what constituted public and private space in the city? Was public space threatening – or even plain inaccessible – to women or gay men in a way that prevented them from establishing their own, fairly comfortable urban topog-

raphies for their everyday activities? Was the strict separation of the public and the domestic spheres along gendered lines even possible in a modern metropolis, with its celebrated sense of anonymity and the opportunity for a spectator to ‘hide in the crowd’? Should we continue to stick to nineteenth-century depictions of ‘disreputable’ urban areas and neighbourhoods and the often sensationalised visions of dangers that they presented, from prostitution and crime to the harassment of women in such places by fellow men and the police? What sources and approaches could one use in an aim to gain a historical view of the metropolis that would be more inclusive of hitherto understudied and underrepresented groups? How powerful was the agency of these groups in shaping the metropolis? Equally, to what extent were their actions controlled and regulated by the police? The participants in this debate provide different answers to these questions, but all three agree that asking them is key to opening unexpected vistas of historical research that can lead us to a more complex understanding of cities and urban groups, as well as modern sexualities and power.

2 Karl Baedeker, Baedeker’s London and Its Environs 1900 (London: Bloomsbury, 2002, Facsimile edition).

RE-EVALUATING FEMALE AGENCY IN THE MODERN METROPOLIS A Visual Analysis of Nineteenth-Century London and Paris Georgie E. Caine Following the revisionist methodological trend to study history ‘from below’, alongside a feminist response to the absence of women as ‘historical subjects’ in the 1970s, a gendered consideration of urban processes in nineteenth-century Europe has surfaced, opposing traditional narratives of the metropolis.1 Historians such as Carol Schmid and Erika Rappaport have evidenced for women’s increased liberation and autonomy in urban spheres in Berlin and London respectively, thus challenging perceptions of urban processes dictated by patriarchal structures and experiences.2 Their work builds on the legacy of earlier scholars,

including Helen Meller and Elaine Showalter, who have cited the prevalence of male-dominated urbanisation, particularly in the use of public areas and the position of women within both geographical and symbolic space, in urban historical scholarship.3 Considering women’s prominence in mental asylums, purported scientific essentialism and limitations to women’s activity within commercial spaces of London and Paris in the ‘long nineteenth century’, this essay contributes to this debate by positing that despite propagations of further female agency in urban processes, such agency was not necessarily extensive.4 Rather, utilising visual

1 Marion Pluskota, ‘Research in Urban History: Recent PhD theses on gender and the city, 1550-2000’, Urban History,

41.3 (2014), pp. 537-538.

2 Carol Schmid, ‘The “New Woman” Gender Roles and Urban Modernism in Interwar Berlin and Shanghai’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 15.1 (Jan., 2014); Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, 2000).

3 Helen Meller, ‘Planning theory and women’s role in the city’, Urban History, 17 (1990); Elaine Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Menstruation’, Victorian Studies, 14.1, The Victorian Woman (Sep., 1970); Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure.

4 Elaine Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Insanity’, Victorian Studies, 23.2 (Winter, 1980); Helen Meller, ‘Planning theory and women’s role in the city’.

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sources from the period, I argue that women – particularly working-class women – continued to be relegated to a domestic and ‘other’ space, regardless of perceived greater autonomy. In order to avoid a simplistic reduction of the term ‘gender’ as a synonym for women, specific male experiences in the European metropolis are also examined.5 Considering these in conjunction with female narratives also allows the perception of the industrial revolution as a glorified process to be re-evaluated: the harsher realities of marginalised groups are revealed, such as perpetual fear of arrest and the struggles faced by the working-class.6 At the turn of the century, the image of women in public spaces emerged: riding bicycles, walking, smoking or socialising.7 Artwork depicting women in places typically inhabited by men elucidates the loosening of control of urban space and the new liberty afforded to women to occupy such space. For example, Van Gogh’s In the Café: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin captures the female owner of a Parisian cafe smoking and drinking a beer (Figure 1). These actions – entrenched in the nineteenth-century imagination as virile aspects of male pleasure and bonding rituals – would have juxtaposed perceptions of ‘natural’ female behaviour and challenged masculine hegemony of public activity, visually and symbolically.8 This is furthered by Susanna Barrow’s assertion of the café as ‘primary theatre of everyday life’.9 Whilst this denotes the transformation of quotidian existence into a ‘spectacle’ through the creation of a place from which to

FIG. 1: Vincent van Gogh, In the Café: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin (1887), Van Gogh Museum, Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons).

observe, it also infers the reciprocal ability to draw conclusions about societal trends from activity within cafés.10 Despite a shortage of historiography and primary sources regarding the history of Parisian cafés, it is undeniable that this realm had previously been dominated by men, being a communal site of political discourse and cultural modernity.11 The appearance of women within such space connotes a spatial ‘opening

5 Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review, 91.5 (Dec., 1986),

pp. 1055-1056.

6 Matt Houlbrook, ‘“The Man with the Powder Puff” in Interwar London’, The Historical Journal, 50.1 (Mar., 2007); J. M. Chaumont, M. Rodriguez Garcia, P. Servais, eds. Trafficking in Women 1924-1926: The Paul Kinsie Reports for the League of Nations. 2 Vols. (Geneva, 2017).

7 Dolores Mitchell, ‘The “New Woman” as Prometheus: Women Artists Depict Women Smoking’, Women’s Art Journal, 12.1 (Spring-Summer, 1991), p. 4; Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, p. 15.

8 Mitchell, ‘The “New Woman” as Prometheus’, p. 3.

9 Susanna I. Barrows, ‘Nineteenth-Century Cafes: Arenas of Everyday Life’, in Pleasures of Paris: Daumier to Picasso, ed. Barbara Stern Shapiro (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1991), p. 17.

10 Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris (California, University of California Press, 1998), p. 8; Hazel H. Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 31.

11 W. Scott Haine, ‘Privacy in Public: The Comportment of Working-Class Women in Late Nineteenth-Century Parisian Proletarian Cafes’, Western Society for French History, 14 (1987), pp. 204-212; Julie Anne Johnson, ‘Conflicted Sel es : Women, Art & Paris 1880-1914’, PhD dissertation, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 2008).

CAINE - FEMALE AGENCY IN THE MODERN EUROPEAN METROPOLIS up’ in Paris. This may be applicable specifically to gendered boundaries, the extended use of public space to incorporate women inferring greater female freedom of movement. However, it also echoes a literal ‘opening up’ of physical places as reflected in Haussmann’s architectural transformation of Paris, suggesting fluidity and urbanisation dictated by liberal mobility rather than the construction and separation of specific sphere .12 The ‘gendering’ of department stores in London also reveal the ‘emancipation’ of women in public areas, in the words of Gordon Selfridge.13 Whilst articles in the Globe (1876) reported the refusal of male admittance into the Army and Navy Co-operative Society, shops like Selfridges were personified as feminine.14 Both Selfridges’ advertising and architecture called upon feminine associations: adverts featured majestically attractive women, small window displays were dainty and building exteriors were ‘delicately painted’.15 By appealing to ‘womanly’ traits and desired femininity, female shoppers were targeted and subsequently enticed into the department store. The proliferation of the London commercial district as ‘feminine’ signified a capitalist victory over the traditional conservatism of the middle-class.

Recognising the economic benefits of mobilising women as paying customers, retailers endorsed and naturalised consumption as a ‘respectable’ female amusement, thereby legitimising shops and department stores as sites of female activity.16 Further autonomy was encouraged through the ability to buy on cred-

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it; this eliminated women’s financial dependency and thus signalled an appropriation of economic control.17 In comparison to having once required a chaperone to walk ‘alone’, this progression would certainly have compounded new power and independence to women.18 However, this was primarily afforded to the ‘respectable’ middle-class and those who possessed the time, money and status to participate in consumer and leisure activity.

Acceptance of women in public places, such as Parisian cafes and London department stores, may have had wider implications, as women’s participation in public life brought them closer to the political world and women’s suffrage. As propounded by Haine and Burrows, Parisian cafes ‘played an important role in the political life of the capital’, the ‘primary arena for many political activities’.19 Besides engendering sociability and interaction, such a ‘multifunctional’ space also facilitated political mobilisation, discussion and organisation.20 For example, construction and metal workers instrumental in the 1871 labour insurrection were able to rally comrades under the cover of ‘mundane activities of eating, drink and talking’, while unions used cafes surrounding their workshops and factories as headquarters during strikes.21 However, cafes ‘opened up’ to Parisian women at the fin-de-siècl . Female proximity to political activity was therefore enabled, as was the subsequent possibility for their political participation and engagement.

Similarly, institutions that ‘dominated…politics and society’ were no longer ‘forbidden’

12 David P. Jordan ‘Haussmann and Haussmannisation: The Legacy for Paris’, French Historical Studies, 27.1 (Winter,

2004).

13 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, p. 167.

14 Globe (December 11, 1876) in Erika D. Rappaport, ‘“The Halls of Temptation”: Gender, Politics and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London’, Journal of British Studies, 35.1 (Jan., 1996), p. 74.

15 Vanessa R. Schwartz, Jeannene M. Przyblyski, The Nineteenth-century Visual Cultural Reader (Psychology Press: 2004) p. 156; Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, pp. 151-155.

16 Rappaport, ‘“The Halls of Temptation’, p. 70.

17 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, p. 162.

18 Ibid., p. 7.

19 W. Scott Haine, ‘“Café Friend”: Friendship and Fraternity in Parisian Working-Class Cafes, 1850-1914’, Journal of Contemporary History, 27.4 (Oct., 1992), pp. 619-621; Susanna Barrows, Robin Room, Drinking: Behaviour and Belief in Modern History (University of California Press, Jan., 1991), p. 88.

20 Haine, ‘“Café Friend”’, pp. 619-621.

21 Ibid.

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to women in London.22 Also multifunctional, women’s clubs functioned as a safe venue for relaxation, lectures and debates; such debates ranged from vegetarianism to socialism to women’s suffrage.23 In this way, women’s access to public space in nineteenth-century Europe was synonymous with access to political space.

No longer confined to traditional domestic spheres, increased female agency constituted a challenge to male political hegemony.

However, one must avoid romanticising or simplifying urban gendered processes. For instance, despite the above arguments for political progress, female suffrage was not achieved in nineteenth-century Britain and

FIG. 2: Jean Beraud, Paris Kiosk (1880-1884), Walters Art Museum, Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons).

France. Perceptions of progress may be further undermined in artwork portraying public spaces, such as Jean Beraud’s Paris Kiosk (Figure 2). Singularly reflecting a middle-class topography, the women depicted are elegant, affluent dressed respectfully and opulently.

Working-class women are notably omitted or feature only in the background. Furthermore, these women are captured in the midst of movement, indicating a temporality in public spheres. Despite portrayals of the industrial revolution and the fin-de-siècle as prosperous and egalitarian, closer inspection reveals a persistent marginalisation and a disparate reality for working-class women.

Indeed, in contrast to the jovial images of middle-class ‘flâneuses’ working women’s experience in ‘ateliers de miseres’ or domestic service was markedly different. Lexicon used in newspapers, like the 1888 Liverpool Review detailing ‘wretched women’ with ‘poor wages’, briefly indicates an alternate and vulnerable reality for the under classes.24 Considering that domestic service constituted a main source of employment for women within the formal economy – in 1881, 40% of registered female workers in Liverpool worked as servants and working class occupations accounted for 87.4% of all occupations in England – this poor existence may be viewed as representative of a large proportion of women, albeit not ubiquitous.25 This directly opposes generalisations of middle-class experiences as archetypal of all ‘western civilisation’ and negates perceived notions of extensive female autonomy.26 High levels of employment within domestic service connotes a lack of employment opportunities outside of domestic responsibilities, thereby perpetuating fixed gender roles. Simply, industrialisation failed to ‘emancipate’ women, instead proliferating their reduced access to public space.

A gendered evaluation of factories and

22 Carol Schmid, ‘The “New Woman” Gender Roles and Urban Modernism in Interwar Berlin and Shanghai’, Jour-

nal of International Women’s Studies, 15 (2014), p. 9; Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, p. 74.

23 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, pp. 74-91.

24 Robert Lee, ‘Domestic Service and Female Domestic Servants: a port-city comparison of Bremen and Liverpool,

1850-1914’, The History of the Family, 10.4 (2005), p. 443.

25 Lee, ‘Domestic Service and Female Domestic Servants’, pp. 441-444; Joan W. Scott, Louise A. Tilly, ‘Women’s Work and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17.1 (Jan., 1975), p. 38.

26 Scott, Tilly, ‘Women’s Work and the Family’, p. 37.

CAINE - FEMALE AGENCY IN THE MODERN EUROPEAN METROPOLIS sweatshops in Paris and London corroborate this. Renowned for atrocious conditions, these were the antithesis of impressive boulevards, cafes and department stores accessed by upper-class women. ‘Sixteen hour days, six days a week’ and ill health from dangerous and unhealthy environments (such as breathing in dust from textile fibres in unventilated rooms) were common amongst women in London factories.27 Conditions were so poor that the Daily News organised an exhibition in 1906 to highlight such suffering. The Sweated Industries Exhibition Handbook condemned the ‘unduly low rate of wages’ and ‘excessive hours of labour’ which characterised sweatshop work; images of women slaving over ‘pom-poms’, fl wers or cardboard boxes provided photographic evidence (Figure 3).28 With the purpose of lambasting working conditions to ‘cultivate an opinion’, the authenticity of staged images may be questioned, although such fervent compulsion to ‘acquaint the public’ with working-class oppression indicates its existence.29 Correspondingly, Parisian working-class women ‘worked long, hard hours’ and suffered extreme poverty: in Paris in 1883, the basic living cost was estimated at 850 francs per year, while female cotton spinners earned a meagre 780 francs if they worked fulltime with ‘no stoppages’.30 Terrible standards of living were exacerbated due to overtime work to avoid dismissal and managers’ refusal to improve conditions or shorten days to maintain competitiveness.31 Further reports of strikes mounted by Parisian female garment workers in the first decade of the 20th century evince persistently abject conditions, to the

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FIG. 3: Pom-Pom Making in Sweated industries: being a handbook of the “Daily News” exhibition, compiled by Richard Mudie-Smith (1906), London, Public Domain (Warwick Digital Collections).

extent that protests were necessary.32 Contrary to lionised perceptions of middle-class experiences, working-class women endured extremely difficult realities during nineteenth-century industrialisation and urbanisation.33 Progress, prosperity and independence did not extend to all.

An evaluation of working-class women in ‘ateliers’ also challenges perceptions of Parisian urbanisation dictated by liberal mobility and ameliorated fluidit . Rather than ‘opening up’ urban spaces, the construction and separation of specific spheres was invigorated. This is clearly demonstrated in the gendered division of labour. For example, in Paris in 1901, women constituted 90% of the clothing labour force.34 Argued as attributable to their ‘sense of style’, women’s consistent predominance in the lowest paid jobs within the labour market’s

27 Benjamin Powell, ‘Meet the Old Sweatshops: Same as the New’, The Independent Review, 19.1 (Summer, 2014), p. 110;

Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work 1700 to Present (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 104-110.

28 Mudie-Smith, Richard, Sweated industries: being a handbook of the ‘Daily News’ Exhibition, pp. 8-15, https://wdc. contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p21047coll2/id/337/rec/3 [last accessed 28/01/2020].

29 Ibid.

30 Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work, pp. 104-110.

31 Jerome Bourdieu and Benedicte Reynaud, ‘Factory Discipline, Health and Externalities in the Reduction of Working Time in 19th Century France’, Socio-Economic Review, 4 (2006), pp. 102-111.

32 Louise Tilly, ‘Reviewed Work: The Politics of Women’s Work. The Paris Garment Trades 1750-1919 by Judith G Coffin International Review of Social History, 43.3 (Dec., 1998), pp. 486-487.

33 Bourdieu and Reynaud, ‘Factory Discipline, Health and Externalities’, pp. 102-111.

34 Diane Elson, ‘Nimble Fingers and Other Fables’, in Of Common Cloth: Women in the Global Textile Industry, eds.

Wendy Chapkis and Cynthia Enloe (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 1983), pp. 5-14.

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hierarchy cannot be explained by contestations equating proficiency ‘at wearing clothes’ with proficiency ‘at making them’.35 Obviously unrelated and illogical, a skilled trade is not learned merely by using its end product. Instead, collating women with domestic services such as sewing is more believably evidence of patriarchal schemas to limit female activity to the domestic realm.36 Not only restricted to manufacturing household items, women were also restricted to work in the house. By 1848 in Paris, 83% of ‘confection’ (garment and textile work) was ‘en chambre’, stockings seamed and garments sewn at home; the household and workplace became synonymous for working-class women.37 In the process, their relegation to private spaces and their inability to transcend fixed gender roles became entren hed.

This was perpetuated by adverts encouraging women to engage in labour activities in the home. For example, the sewing machine company, Singer, adapted marketing techniques in Paris in the 1880s to target exclusively women, consolidating the notion that it should be exclusively women who engage in household work (Figure 4). Whereas Singer pamphlets had once illustrated a soldier sowing at a machine, this was replaced by the trademark ‘Singer girl’ sewing; machines themselves were adorned with elaborate sculptures, such as cupids with bows or fl wers, to exaggerate femininity.38 The message was clear: sewing machines were for women, enabling them to undertake confection in their own home. Women could, and therefore should, remain in private, domestic spaces. These notions were seemingly internalised, one writer estimating that 80% of Singer purchases in ‘magasins’ had been made by women.39 The power and success of advertising in shaping public behaviour and reinforcing a binary distinction between male and female activity is evident.

FIG. 4: Advertisement for singer sewing machines

(1892), Biblioteque Nationale de France, Public Domain (Gallica).

This is also echoed in middle-class women’s experiences. Perpetually emphasising a distinction between feminine and masculine space, the resemblance of London shops to ‘cosy, luxurious’ homes – ratified by Selfridges’ acclamation that he had created a ‘private’ place in public – continues to denote women’s place as fixed in domestic domains.40 Rather than signifying an ‘opening up’ of public space to include women, the notion of dichotomous

35 Ibid.

36 Nancy L. Green, ‘Women and Immigrants in the Sweatshop: Categorise of Labour Segmentation Revisited’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38.3 (Jul., 1996), pp. 413-426.

37 Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work, pp. 142-152.

38 Judith G. Coffin ‘Credit, Consumption and Images of Women’s Desires: Selling the Sewing Machine in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, French Historical Studies, 18.3 (Spring, 1994), pp. 758-765.

39 Coffin ‘Credit, Consumption and Images of Women’s Desires’, pp. 758-765.

40 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, pp. 98-168.

CAINE - FEMALE AGENCY IN THE MODERN EUROPEAN METROPOLIS spheres is developed. Furthermore, rather than inciting female agency for the sake of equality, adverts suggest that women were viewed as a market to tap into for commercial success, their commercial autonomy exploited for economic gain.

London’s commercial culture serves as an exemplary window into the maintenance and regulation of separate spheres in the nineteenth-century metropolis. Erika Rappaport’s appraisal of department stores expounds gendered control over urbanisation and public space. The sale of liquor in Whiteley’s department store evoked fervent protest and outrage from the middle-class: ‘sherry and silks need not go together when ladies go shopping!’41 Imbibing spirits in public violated the image of the respectable Victorian woman and blurred the distinction between ‘proper’ behaviour and prostitution.42 Arguably, the dichotomy between the consumer and the consumed had been collapsed. The visibility of women in streets mirrored shop window displays and prostitute activity – ‘flâneuses often assumed as ‘street walkers’ – thus reinforcing female objectification and commodification as products of exchange and consumption.43 This correlation of women’s physical freedom with sexual freedom reveals middle-class opposition to the destruction of public and private binaries, and women’s mobility from one to the other. Responses to blurred distinctions can also be seen in the arrests of men in possession of powder puffs in early 20th century London; as posited in the weekly journal John Bull in 1925, such an ‘offence’ did not signify a criminal act in itself, rather an ‘external signifier of transgressive effeminacy and the erosion of distinctions between men and

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women.44 Arguably as an attempt to maintain ‘normality’, order, integrity, stability, morality and purity against the ‘other’ – especially following threats to these during the First World War – such acts deserved punishment.45 Seemingly, desires existed for spatial and gendered boundaries to be maintained, rather than relaxed. A brief look at marginalised sexes and sexualities also revises our understanding of the treatment of the under classes in the metropolis. Their existence within urban space was not entirely autonomous or positive.

The reinforcement of physical divides between sexes materialised in English town planning. Incorrect scientific theories ‘proving’ the biological difference between sexes influenced town planners in the 1890s to perpetuate gender divisions in their use of public space.46 For example, women’s role as ‘carer’ was reinforced by the creation of ‘healthy environments for house-mothers’ and the expansion of communities closer to nature in late nineteenth-century garden city ideals; in the Bourneville Model Village, men gardened whilst women ‘looked after’ produce and arranged fl wers.47 Even in asylums, women were inhibited from venturing outdoors and bedrooms were ‘fashioned like ladies’ boarding-schools’, décor intended to remind women of home or school.48 Whilst inadequate scientific techniques and developments during this era may be culpable for the acquisition of false data, Showalter cites scientific fact as biased by a belief in women’s inferiority; she references a statement in 1896 to the Anthropological Society of London, postulating women as intellectually ‘invalid’ due to their menstrual cycle.49 Regardless of rationale, misogynistic and misinformed

41 Henry Walker, “Whitely’s Liquor License”, Bayswater Chronicle (March 23, 1872) in Rappaport, ‘“The Halls of Temptation”’, p. 11.

42 Rappaport, ‘“The Halls of Temptation”’, p. 11.

43 Schmid, ‘The “New Woman”’, p. 10.

44 Houlbook, ‘“The Man with the Powder Puff”’, pp. 146-150.

45 Ibid.

46 Meller, ‘Planning theory and women’s role in the city’, pp. 86-98.

47 Ibid., p. 93.

48 Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Insanity’, pp. 165-168.

49 Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Menstruation’, p. 85.

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theories concerning menstruation were used to justify separate urban, academic space for men and women. Pedagogically, it was recommended that the sexes were separated during education and that women did not attend school during menstruation due to weakness.50 Meanwhile, an examination of asylums and mental institutions in the late 1800s reveal that women, primarily servants, outnumbered and outstayed male patients.51 Even if they were indeed more susceptible to maladies due to societal degradation and poor living conditions, the extent to which inequalities occurred instead infers the misdiagnosis of lunacy and scientific misconceptions of menstruation invoking madness.52 Science substantiated women’s physical detention and separation from outside space. Thus, the scientifically ‘proven’ ideal of a metropolis divided into Two Spheres repudiates lionised perceptions of liberal and egalitarian urbanisation.53 Women remained relegated to interior domains, regardless of purported freedom.

Women’s experiences are often overlooked and underrepresented in historiography of the European metropolis, the ‘male experience’ taken to be the archetypal ‘urban experience’.54 Gendering urbanisation reveals the complexity and multifaceted nature of cities. While fellow contributors to this debate,

Alice McKimm and Artemis Irvine, note women’s integral influence over urban processes – including their economic contributions, development of health policies and new perceptions of poverty and public spaces – this essay illustrates that women continued to be relegated to a domestic and ‘other’ space, regardless of ostensible agency. Nineteenth-century urbanisation involved an ‘opening up’ of public and political space and greater autonomy afforded to middle-class women, demonstrated by their prevalence and mobility in boulevards, cafes and department stores. However, a consideration of working-class women challenges this glorified image of industrialisation. Conditions in sweatshops, ‘ateliers de miseres’ and domestic services explicate the austere realities and disparities for minority and marginalised groups. Dominant narratives of the fin-de siècle metropolis are further contested in the maintenance of separate symbolic and physical urban spaces for men and women. As also highlighted by Artemis Irvine, an appraisal of commercial centres, the workplace and medical institutions show that urbanisation was characterised by persistent female subordination and restriction to domestic and interior domains. Studying alternative gendered experiences compels a re-evaluation of nineteenth-century European urban processes.

50 Vern Bullough and Marth Voght, ‘Women, Menstruation and Nineteenth-Century Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Jan-Feb., 1973), p. 71.

51 Elaine Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Insanity’, pp. 158-180.

52 Ibid.

53 Helen Meller, ‘Planning theory and women’s role in the city’, pp. 86-98.

54 Maureen Flanagan, ‘Women in the City, Women of the City: Where do Women Fit in Urban History’, Journal of Urban History (1997), p. 2.

FIELDS OF POWER Gendering NineteenthCentury London: Understanding the Field of Power Artemis Irvine Gender history has regularly taken the female experience as its principal subject because women’s lives and voices have so often been devalued and ignored as a result of their gender. Shedding light on the struggles, triumphs and even mundanities of women’s lives over the last two thousand years is a monumental, ongoing and vital line of historical study. Yet, it is important to acknowledge that to gender the nineteenth-century metropolis is not simply to include women.

It is a fact, though sometimes overlooked, that men have a gender just as constructed and constricting as women’s. Progress has been made since the 1990s to explore masculinity as a historical category more fully, yet a certain sexual segregation persists in some histories of gender which can obscure the complexities of gender relations as a whole. For instance, all of the essays in Gendering the City: Women, Boundaries, and Visions of Urban Life exclusively concern women.

This is not bad or misleading but it seems only right that when analysing a subject as dynamic and complex as the modern metropolis, an awareness of gender should illuminate a diverse range of interactions between groups, not just the characteristics of that group alone. In his study of Victorian masculinity John Tosh describes this as ‘understand[ing] a system of social relations as a whole.’ He continues, ‘unless the field of power in which women have lived is studied, the reality of their historical situation will always be ob-

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scured.’1 This essay will contribute to the debate by suggesting that gendering the nineteenth-century metropolis means to take gender as the principal lens through which one interprets the behaviours, attitudes and actions of both sexes. It will do this by highlighting instances where gender played the defining role in interactions between men and women, often to the disadvantage of the latter. Nineteenth-century ideas about masculinity and femininity contributed in equal measure to the discourse surrounding the sexual division of labour, interactions between male police officers and female citizens, encounters between street harassers and woman shoppers or barmaids and their male customers. As such, this study of nineteenth-century London, the quintessential modern metropolis, will demonstrate how gender can be used as an interpretative tool that challenges our perceptions of urban processes.

In 1873, social commentator Thomas Wright identified ‘the working man’ as the principal representative of the working class.2 Wright was neither the first nor the last to make this assumption about who the most significant and typical contributor to the economy was. Keith McClelland admits in his essay ‘Masculinity and the “Representative Artisan” in Britain’ that due to scarcity of information about working-class women’s lives ‘the sources themselves tended to push me into effectively marginalising gender as a primary determinant of social identities and divisions […] I tended to assume that the “issue of gender” was largely about women and that all I could do effectively was to register their absence from the kinds of public activities I was interested in.’3 One clear

example of the negation of women’s economic contributions in nineteenth-century source material can be found in the 1851 census, which declared that 57% of all women over the age of twenty-two living in London had no occupation.4 Sally Alexander has argued that it is unlikely that this number of women belonged to families who could afford to have them not work at all. She suggests that there must have been types of employment that the Census overlooked. One possible explanation could be the women who helped their husbands in their profession, be that as innkeepers’, shopkeepers’, butchers’, bakers’ or shoemakers’ wives.

Such women had a vital role in sustaining the family business but that they still would have been listed as ‘housewives’ by their husbands, who were responsible for filling out the census.

Further, Alexander suggests that many women took in supplementary forms of work when the family’s expenses were in need, for example in needlework, washing or childcare.

This was true particularly during the economic depression of the 1830s and 40s when, for lower income households, the family became the primary economic unit in which every single member had to contribute. As Alexander stresses, ‘the diversity and indeterminacy of this spasmodic, casual and irregular employment was not easily condensed and classified into a Census occupation.’5 It was not only male bureaucrats who underestimated the value and extent of women’s work but other women too. Dina M. Copelman explains how middle-class women often used working-class women factory workers as their figures for reform in this period. Yet they focused primarily on traditionally feminine lines of work, like the

1 John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain’, History Work-

shop Journal, Vol. 38, Issue 1, (Autumn, 1994) pp. 179–202, p. 179.

2 Thomas Wright, as quoted in, Keith McClelland, ‘Masculinity and the “Representative Artisan” in Britain, 1850–80’, in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. by Michael Roper and John Tosh (London, 1991), pp. 74–91, p. 74.

3 McClelland, p. 75.

4 Sally Alexander, ‘Women’s Work in Nineteenth-Century London’, in The Rights and Wrongs of Women, ed. by Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 59–111, p. 64.

5 Alexander, p. 65.

IRVINE - FIELDS OF POWER sweatshop industries, to the exclusion of women who worked in mining or chain-making.6 The exclusion of women’s work is particularly unhelpful when one considers how essential their contributions were to the expansion of nineteenth-century London. It has been estimated that forty percent of the demographic growth of urban Britain during the nineteenth century was due to internal migration, a route commonly taken by young women who moved to London to enter into domestic service.7 By the middle of the century 140,000 women over twenty were employed in this way.8 By appreciating the diversity in experience of employment that existed between men and women this fuller picture of London’s economy can come to the fore.

The importance of gender as a prism through which nineteenth-century Londoners thought about their identities is clearly demonstrated by the highly gendered language of and about urban protest movements. In many ways, the rhetoric of protest movements provides a particularly useful insight into Victorian mentalités because in order to be effective, the protester’s language had to cut to the very emotional core of a community. This is particularly evident in the language adopted by one of the most significant urban protests movements of the nineteenth century – the Chartists.

The movement was nation-wide and particularly potent in areas of the country that had been the most aggressively industrialised, such as Birmingham and Yorkshire, but they had a strong base in London too. For example, it was on Kennington Common in south London in April 1848 that a mass rally took place as part of a procession to Westminster to present a Charter containing over fi e million signatures.9 Chartist speeches often posed a dichotomy between the negative effect that the

137 exploitative nature of capitalism had on working-class families with the uplifting possibilities presented by Chartism. For example, one speech from 1839 stated, ‘Toryism just means ignorant children in rags, a drunken husband, and an unhappy wife. Chartism is to have a happy home, and smiling, intelligent, and happy families.’10 This image was potent as the basis on which the working-class had been excluded from political and labour rights – the 1832 Reform Act, the failure of factory reform, and the 1834 New Poor Law – was often highly gendered. Prejudicial attitudes towards the working-class maintained that working-class men were incapable of taking proper care of their wives and children, preferring to waste away in squalor and drink. Malthusian philosophy inspired anxiety about working-class people ‘over-breeding’ and the New Poor Law of 1834 dictated that husbands should be separated from their wives when sent to the workhouse.11 The work of Chartists, therefore, was to create a positive working-class identity which asserted a commitment to domestic life. Of course, this vision of Victorian domestic life, in which the man was the bread-winner and the woman stayed at home, was an ideal that was only available to the affluent As such, an inextricable connection was cast between one’s class and the ability to fulfil contemporary gender roles.

Ideas about the sexual division of labour also played a significant role in another era-defining urban protest movement – the campaign for women’s suffrage. For anti-suffrage campaigners, the division was a ‘natural’ and positive one which was undermined when women engaged in politics. In an article written by E. B. Harrison, a female member of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, she states that a ‘division of functions’ is ‘the keystone of civ-

6 Dina M. Copelman, ‘The Gendered Metropolis: Fin-de-Siècle London’, Radical History Review, Issue 60 (1994), pp.

38–56, p. 44.

7 Amy J. Lloyd, ‘Emigration, Immigration and Migration in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, British Library Newspapers (Detroit, 2007), pp. 1–7, p. 2.

8 Roy Porter, London: A Social History (London, 2000), p. 240.

9 Porter, p. 305.

10 Mr Macfarlane to Glasgow Chartists, as quoted in, Anna Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Jan., 1992), pp. 62–88, p. 62.

11 Clark, pp. 66–67.

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FIG. 1. Dunston-Weiler Lithograph Company, ‘What is a suffragette without a suffering household?’

(1909), Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

ilization.’ She asserts that women should refrain from entering into public life as it might prevent them from carrying out their ‘own special work’.12 Elsewhere, more aggressive anti-suffragette sentiment sought to undermine the femininity of the women who protested.

One cartoon from 1909 depicts a husband and wife on ‘election-day’. While the husband is pictured sitting with a crying baby and grumpy toddler on his lap, himself very fed-up, the wife turns her nose up at them. The cartoon is captioned, ‘what is a suffragette without a suffer-

ing household?’ (Figure 1). In many anti-suffragette cartoons the women are depicted as old and unattractive. The implication is that women who ‘choose’ politics over their family sacrifice the very essence of their femininity and forget their place. Both the Chartist’s and the anti-Suffragettes’ recourse to gender to bolster their political arguments demonstrates how pervasive a force it was in the nineteenth-century metropolis.

Despite the prevalence of these articulations of gender in the nineteenth-century, London, as the quintessential modern metropolis, provided a promising stage from which to challenge tradition. This quality of the modern experience was encapsulated by Marx and employed by Marshall Berman in the phrase ‘all that is solid melts into air.’13 Indeed, if the modern condition can be characterised by ‘newness, artificiality and emancipation,’ then developments in the second half the century spoke to the city’s burgeoning modernity.14 The Education Act of 1870 granted women the right to participate in the triennial elections for the London School Board, and in 1882 women ratepayers won the right to vote in local elections. By the time of the creation of the London County Council in 1889 – perhaps one of the most important representative bodies in the country – women were playing increasingly prominent roles in local politics.15 Indeed, the heart of the suffrage movement originated in London. Yet, it has certainly not always been the case that modernity has represented an ever-forward march of progress towards a more enlightened future. In fact, in many modern processes, traditional paradigms of power were often simply reconfigured and sustained. This is illustrated particularly well by what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has identified as the modern state’s impulse to ‘garden’ its citizens, in order to purify society ‘of the last shred of the chaotic, the irrational,

12 E. B. Harrison (1908), as quoted in, Julia Bush, ‘The anti-suffrage movement’, The British Library (March 2018)

<https://www.bl.uk/votes-for-women/articles/the-anti-suffrage-movement> [accessed 10 March 2019].

13 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1983).

14 Philibert Secretan, as quoted in, Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1780 (New York, 1998), p. 3.

15 Copelman, p. 42.

IRVINE - FIELDS OF POWER the spontaneous, the unpredictable.’16 Signi cantly, the distinction between rationality and irrationality is deeply gendered, meaning that this ‘gardening’ process has often involved the suppressing of female ‘irrational’ voices and the amplifying of male ‘rational’ ones. This idea is particularly pertinent to nineteenth century, when women were often portrayed or even diagnosed as mentally un-well or hysterical. Indeed, by 1872, out of 58,640 certified lunatics in England and Wales, 31,822 were women.17 A particularly striking example which illustrates the gendered nature of the modern state’s ‘gardening’ impulses can be found in the creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829. From his very inception, the figure of the policeman was intended to represent the ultimate Victorian masculine ideal. Writing to the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police in December 1829, Robert Peel stated, ‘there is no quality more indispensable to a police officer than a perfect command of temper, never suffering himself to be moved. . . . by any language or threats [and to] do his duty in a quiet and determined manner.’18 Tosh has argued that the nineteenth century produced a particularly heightened ideology of masculinity, one which emphasised the kind of self-control that Peel described in his letter and which ‘was treated as the essence of civic virtue.’19 The tension between the rational-male who polices and the irrational-female who is policed is brought out in the, often violent, interactions women had with police officers in nineteenth-century London. For example, by 1887 the Pall Mall Gazette was compelled to add ‘police assaults on women’ as a more specific category within their reporting of ‘assaults on women’ and

139 ‘police assaults’ more generally.20 In 1910 police violence towards suffragettes reached a particularly violent climax on ‘Black Friday’ when 300 women met outside Parliament to protest the government’s recent failure to pass a suffrage bill. The women were surrounded by policemen on horses and met with extraordinary violence, as they were pushed, pulled and even sexually assaulted by the policemen themselves.21 It is interesting to note that rebellious or independently minded women were often characterised as irrational and mentally disturbed. In his 1867 lecture series F. C. Skey commented that a typical hysteric tended to be a young woman who ‘exhibit[ed] more than usual force and decision of character, of strong resolution, fearless of danger.’22 A perception that the police might be a neutral force in society, or at least one that was there primarily to protect, is challenged when we take into consideration such gendered notions of desirable and undesirable peoples and behaviours.

A further, less explicit method, that women’s behaviour in the urban environment could be policed was by cultural norms which dictated the terms on which they were allowed to use public space. Whilst living in London in the second half of the nineteenth century, the writer Henry James wrote vividly about his experience of living and walking around the metropolis. He described how a person may live in one ‘quarter’ or ‘plot’ but in ‘imagination and by a constant mental act of reference. . . [inhabit] the whole.’23 Judith Walkowitz reflects that Henry James, like many others, viewed the urban landscape as something to be observed, delved into and engaged with. His experience of walking around London is a familiar trope

16 Zygmunt Bauman, as quoted in, Ogborn, p. 4.

17 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London, 1993), p. 52.

18 Robert Peel, as quoted in, J. L. Lyman, ‘The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminol-

ogy, Vol. 5, Issue 1 (March), pp. 141–154, p. 153.

19 Tosh, p. 180.

20 Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London, 1992), p. 127.

21 Fern Riddell, Death in Ten Minutes: The Forgotten Life of Radical Suffragette Kitty Marion (Lon-don, 2019), pp. 141–142.

22 F. C. Skey, as quoted in, Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London, 1993), p. 145.

23 Henry James, as quoted in, Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London, 1992), p. 16.

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and one that belongs distinctly to the privileged male viewer who is free to explore the metropolis at will – the flâneu .24 Whilst men were able to experience public space freely as observers, women found themselves observed.

This was evident particularly in the shopping districts of the West End. The explosion in commercial shopping and department stores represented an opportunity women to engage in the public sphere as consumers. By the 1880s, department store culture had evolved to place the comfort and ease of the (female) shopper at front and centre. The experience could be a somewhat empowering one. Mary Vivian Hughes describes how she acquired ‘the Londoner’s ability to enjoy things without buying them. . . . My delight was to walk down Regent Street and gaze in shop windows, pointing out all the things I would like to have.’25 Walkowitz observes how ‘in the controlled fantasy world of the department store, women safely reimagined themselves as flâneur , observing without being observed.’26 Her apt use of the word ‘fantasy’ accurately reflects the conditional reality of women’s admittance into these spaces.

As well as being well-known for its shopping, the West End was also notorious for sexual harassment. Contemporary testimonies from women reveal an endemic problem of street harassment for which strategies had to be adopted by women in order to stay safe.

For example, Jeanette Marshall stated she always made sure to walk alongside the edge of Green Park rather than the other side of the road where many of the clubs and bachelor chambers were located. She also observed that the Burlington Arcade was to be avoided after lunchtime as it was known to be a place where sex workers operated and men might proposi-

tion one if seen there.27 The Girl’s Own Paper advised readers to ‘avoid strolls where you are annoyed, and al-ways look straight before you, or on the opposite side when passing any man.

Never look at them when near enough to be stared at in any impertinent and abrasive way.’28 The development of the Victorian pub and its principal representative, the barmaid, is a further example of this contested dynamic between observer and observed in public space. Whereas previously, ale-houses and taverns were local, familial affairs, run by a publican and his wife, ‘in catering to the more numerous, transitory and anonymous urban crowd, the new pubs were bigger, and sales were made across a bar counter’ by a barmaid, who was an object of fascination and desire.29 In many respects, the barmaid was a figure of authority. She dispensed the drinks, dealt with drunks and held her own with the customers.

On the other hand, her authority was only lent to her within the context of the ‘liminoid space and time of the pub.’30 Whilst the usual gender and class dynamics were subverted in the interaction between the male middle-class customer and the matriarchal working-class barmaid, Peter Bailey has argued that it was this subversion that lay at the heart of the eroticism of the encounter for the men. From this perspective, the barmaid’s authority only extended as far as it sustained the bawdy atmosphere of the pub. She remained, in essence, a thing to be lusted over and objectified Of the new bars being built in the West End in the 1860s one commentator observed, ‘the brightest, most glittering, and most attractive thing about the bars was the barmaids.’31 Indeed, standing in front of the array of bottles and taps, the barmaid ‘shared

24 Ibid., pp. 16–18.

25 Mary Vivian Hughes, as quoted in, Ibid., pp. 49–50.

26 Ibid., p. 48.

27 Jeanette Marshall, as quoted in, ibid., pp. 51–52.

28 The Girls Own Paper, as quoted in, ibid., p. 51.

29 Peter Bailey, ‘Parasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype’, Gender & History, Volume 1, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 148–172, p. 150.

30 Ibid., p. 163.

31 Anonymous, as quoted in, Ibid., p. 151.

IRVINE - FIELDS OF POWER her stage’ with the commodities she sold and herself became a commodity.32 Overall, to study urban processes in nineteenth-century London without taking into consideration the implications of gender would be as unsatisfactory as studying the city without thinking to mention class. Although many modern commentators continue to find discussions of ‘identity politics’ annoying or unhelpful, it is almost impossible to deny that one’s gender has an immeasurable impact not just on an individual and personal level, but on a vast social-historical one too. Crucially, 32 Ibid.

141 this essay has sought to highlight the fact that women were not the only ‘gendered’ subjects in the metropolis. Men were equally implicated in Victorian discourse surrounding gender. In almost any given ‘gendered’ interaction, ideas about masculinity and femininity came to the fore in equal measure though it was almost always the latter who fared the worst. Patriarchal notions of gender were (and are) entirely dependent on the existence of an irreconcilable binary of ‘male’ and ‘female’ with men and women the unwitting players in it.

GENDER IN MODERN LONDON Re-Examining Traditional Interpretations of Spatial ‘Separate Spheres’, the East-West Divide and ‘Policing by Consent’ Traditional historical studies of late-Victorian London, such as that by Asa Briggs, centred around male activities and testimonies.1 While such methodologies overlooked the experiences of half the population, they also obscured women’s inextricable influence over masculinised urban processes. Considering the voluntary, professional and leisure activities of women, as well as the regulation of deviant sexual groups, offers a more complete picture of urban experience in fin-de-siècle London. This essay will contribute to the debate on diverse methodologies to gender the modern metropolis by examining middle-class women’s roles in creating the literal and interpretative maps that determined the uses of public space in the late-Victorian capital. I will then investigate working-class women’s and homosexual men’s impacts on law enforcement practices.

Alice McKimm Despite women’s official exclusion from municipal power for much of the century, I argue that it might be productive to examine how middle-class female philanthropists instituted social reform from below. Innovating a more interactive approach to charity work, which Judith Walkowitz argues redefined the role of urban commentators, women redrew the psychological boundaries of London.2 Middle-class women often disregarded male depictions of the metropolis as dangerous, instead reclaiming public space by forming new heterosocial spaces, female amenities and feminised pockets of late-Victorian London. Erika Rappaport has aptly highlighted the roles of the Lady Guide Association and nineteenth-century department stores in instituting these topographical changes.3 Finally, Julia Laite and Harry Cocks have persuasively demonstrated

1 Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, (London, 1963); Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship be-

tween Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth, 1984).

2 Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), p. 53.

3 Erika D. Rappaport, ‘Travelling in the Lady Guides’ London: Consumption, Modernity, and the Fin-de-Siècle Metropolis’ in Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (eds.), Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford, 2001), pp. 25-44; Erika D. Rappaport, ‘The halls of temptation: Gender, politics, and the construction of the department store in late Victorian London’, Journal of British Studies 35:1 (1996), pp. 58-83.

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how prostitutes and homosexual men resisted repression in late-Victorian London.4 Instead, subversive gender communities moulded specific procedures of the Metropolitan Police.

Whereas Georgie’s and Artemis’s contributions emphasise the objectification of women in public spaces and their confinement to the domestic sphere through town planning initiatives, I suggest that women and homosexual men pushed back against restrictive gender ideals, adopting the role of the flâneus , creating female environments and shaping new policing practices.

Foregrounding the experiences of excluded gender groups challenges orthodox interpretations of late-Victorian London. Although Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall acknowledged that the ‘separation of spheres’ was incomplete in the late nineteenth century, they nevertheless argued that ‘Public spaces began to be more differentiated from residential areas’ after London industrialised.5 Janet Wolff concurred that women were only ‘allowed minimal participation as guests’ in public spaces.6 However, considering the philanthropic, professional and recreational activities of women in late nineteenth-century London reveals a blurring of public and private spaces, as women feminised existing areas and created new unisex environments. Asa Briggs and Gareth Stedman Jones identified further division of fin-de-siècle London along class lines, suggesting that tensions between rich and poor separated the city into ‘two worlds’: the affluent West End and destitute East End.7

Female philanthropists challenged this class separation when working with the urban poor, while the burgeoning shopping culture made distinctions between ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ areas more difficult Examining the regulation of deviant sexualities problematises T. A. Critchley and R. Reiner’s concept of ‘policing by consent’, which stipulates that the Metropolitan Police were able to enforce laws due to widespread support from normal citizens.8 Working-class distrust of the police, and officers lax approaches to law enforcement, instead indicate a volatile relationship between police and policed in the late-Victorian capital.

Broadening our understandings of municipal power demonstrates the importance of female philanthropy to influencing social reforms in fin-de-siècle London. Briggs’ focus on social welfare’s ‘reorganisation from above’ conceals the informal developments implemented by female charity workers.9 Beginning in 1865, Octavia Hill’s model tenancies pioneered new methods of ‘reforming’ the poor by improving their housing conditions.10 As a founding member of the Charity Organisation Society, established in 1869, Hill trained female district visitors, sanitary inspectors and poor law guardians, who determined the distribution of welfare aid.11 Women were also integral to the development of health policy, as the Ladies’ Sanitary Association trained public health inspectors, while Florence Nightingale was essential to the professionalisation of nursing.12 Female charity work laid the foundations for later government-controlled facilities,

4 Harry Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2003); Julia Laite, Common

Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960 (Basingstoke, 2012).

5 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, ‘The Architecture of Public and Private Life: English middle-class society in a provincial town, 1780 to 1850’, in Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (eds.), The Pursuit of Urban History (London, 1983), p. 331.

6 Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, Theory, Culture & Society, 2:3 (1985), p. 43.

7 Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 317; Stedman Jones, Outcast London, p. 13.

8 T. A. Critchley, A History of Police in England and Wales (London, 1969); R. Reiner, The Politics of the Police (Hemel Hempstead, 1992).

9 Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 323.

10 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (London, 1985), pp. 216-217, 234.

11 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 55.

12 Ibid., p. 54; Vicinus, Independent Women, p. 86.

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supporting Martha Vicinus’ claim that women’s ‘philanthropy was closely tied to the increasing bureaucratization of the social services’. 13Considering female charity organisations thus problematises Briggs’ suggestion that urban welfare initiatives were the result of official and predominantly male bodies like the London County Council, which was established in 1889.14 In reality, the process of urban reform often originated in grassroots, feminised movements.

Female philanthropists appropriated the role of the flâneu , feminising the process by which late-Victorian London was interpreted and understood in the middle-class imagination. 1980s’ scholarship emphasised the impossibility of female social commentators due to women’s persistent objectification in the late-Victorian city. While Wolff misguidedly argued that the flâneuse s existence ‘was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century’, Susan Buck-Morss concurred that public women were ‘the embodiment of objectivity, not subjectivity’.15 Unaccompanied middle-class women indeed faced scrutiny in the streets, rendering traditional techniques of flâneurie impossible, as the male stroller was required to ‘remain hidden from the world’ that he observed.16 Far from accepting their objectification however, middle-class women often appropriated the role of social investigator by adopting working-class aliases and living among the poor.17 Female philanthropists never fully integrated into destitute communities, as working women often viewed middle-class philanthropists as condescending.18 Despite their continued detachment from the urban poor, Louisa Hubbard noted the presence of

over 20,000 salaried and 500,000 voluntary female charity workers in London in 1894, many of whom recorded their experiences in journalistic articles, fictional stories or drawings.19 Contrary to Wolff’s and Buck-Morss’ suggestions that women were merely objects of the male gaze, female slum travellers can thus be considered flâneuse , observing the practices of working-class communities much like their male counterparts. Examining the work of female philanthropists in turn diversifies our understanding of flâneuri , shifting focus from the idle male spectator of public thoroughfares towards the proactive female observer of working-class homes.

Female philanthropists’ work among the poor partially weakened the physical and psychological divisions between the wealthy West End and destitute East End. Flâneurs like Mayhew stressed the differences between the upper and lower classes, mapping these distinctions onto the London cityscape: ‘In passing from the skilled operative of the West-end, to the unskilled workman of the Eastern quarter, the moral and intellectual change is so great, that it seems as if we were in a new land, and among another race.’20 Thus, according to male commentators, the geographic east-west divide materialised class, imperial and racial tensions. Female charity workers likewise failed to assimilate into poor communities, consolidating tensions between women of different social standings during the ‘war against “dirty heads”’, which demonised working-class mothers whose children suffered from headlice.21 In contrast to flâneurs constant detachment from the poor, however, middle-class women who lived within destitute communities more per-

13 Vicinus, Independent Women, p. 211.

14 Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 323-4.

15 Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse’, p. 45; Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The

Politics of Loitering’, New German Critique, 39 (1986), p. 120.

16 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), in Jonathan Mayne, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, (London, 1964), p. 9.

17 Ellen Ross (ed.), Slum Travellers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860-1920 (California, 2007), p.1.

18 Martin Hewitt, ‘The Travails of Domestic Visiting: Manchester, 1830–70’, Historical Research, 71 (1998), pp. 219-220.

19 Louisa M. Hubbard, ‘Statistics of Women’s Work’, quoted in Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 53.

20 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (Dover, 1861), p. 233, quoted in Walkowitz, City of Dreadful of Delight, p. 19.

21 D. M. Copelman, ‘The Gendered Metropolis: Fin-de-Siècle London’, Radical History Review, 60 (1994), p. 44.

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manently crossed geographic class divides. By living among the urban poor, female philanthropists gained greater empathy for the working classes than their male equivalents, thereby partially reconciling the middle classes with their social inferiors. For example, whereas male reporters applied Darwinian theories of moral degradation to the labouring classes, female philanthropists developed a new perception of poverty as a structural issue rather than a personal failure.22 Contrary to Briggs’ identification of a ‘deep gulf in experience and values between observers and observed’, female slum travellers participated in working-class life, as clear when the socialite Margot Asquith engaged in a brawl.23 Considering women’s infiltration of deprived East-End communities thus tempers Stedman Jones’ argument that ‘Class divisions [became] geographical divisions’.24 Female philanthropists not only individually transgressed physical east-west boundaries, but also shaped more harmonious psychological maps of late-Victorian London in the broader public imagination.

Women’s social commentary also problematises the notion that late-Victorian London was divided along gender lines, as female philanthropists’ attention to the working-class home blurred the boundaries between the ‘male’ public and ‘female’ domestic spheres.

Male investigators like Charles Booth mapped the metropolis by observing the clothing, interactions and behaviours of people in the streets.25 In contrast, women’s accounts of the urban poor deliberately broke with public-oriented flâneuri , with case-worker Helen Bosanquet ridiculing the male ‘outsider who confines his investigations to the main

thoroughfares’.26 Female investigators instead stressed the essentiality of the domestic sphere to understanding destitute communities. For example, Maude Stanley examined the home lives of residents in the Five Dials district of Soho, while Ellen Ranyard recorded the family dynamics she encountered when selling Bibles door-to-door in St. Giles.27 By exposing the urban poor to increased scrutiny, female social commentators presented working-class homes as legitimate arenas for social investigation, thereby redefining them as public spaces. This merging of public and private areas contradicts Davidoff and Hall’s identification of increasingly spatially segregated gender spheres in late-Victorian London.28 Outside of philanthropy, female professionals challenged male depictions of the metropolis as a dangerous place, instead reclaiming public space for women through more optimistic portrayals of late-Victorian London. During the 1880s, novels by George Gissing, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson created the popular image of London as a threatening metropolis.29 Real-life crimes, such as the 1885 moral panic over ‘white slavery’ and the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, reinforced fictional depictions of the ‘city in a nightmare’.30 Although images of the imperial capital as dangerous operated to confine women to the private sphere, female professionals reasserted their right to occupy public space by constructing a counter-image of London as exciting but secure. Women employees of the Lady Guide Association reassured female tourists by accompanying them around the city and avoiding areas known for street harassment.

31 The Lady Guides’ West-End office provided

22 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful of Delight, p. 195.

23 Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 315; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful of Delight, p. 53.

24 Stedman Jones, Outcast London, p. 13.

25 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (London, 1889), in Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 34.

26 Helen Bosanquet, ‘Children of Working London’, in Aspects of the Social Problem (London, 1895), quoted in Ross, Slum Travellers, p. 13.

27 Ross, Slum Travellers, pp. 226-238, 198-207.

28 Davidoff and Hall, ‘The Architecture of Public and Private Life’, p. 331.

29 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. 38-39.

30 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Cheltenham, 1995), p. 5; Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. 2-4.

31 Rappaport, ‘Travelling in the Lady Guides’ London’, pp. 34-37.

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respite from the overwhelming urban environment, transforming London from an intimidating labyrinth into a ‘home away from home’.

32 Female professionals thus shaped more welcoming impressions of the metropolis, psychologically reclaiming public space from real and imagined male threats.

In addition to challenging abstract representations of London as intimidating, professional women made the physical cityscape more hospitable by moulding it to their practical and vocational needs. New professional women’s associations regularly opened their offices to female visitors, providing the first female lavatories in the city centre.33 This significantly increased the amount of time middle-class women could spend in public areas, as their excursions in the city were no longer limited by the strength of their bladders.

34 Women’s federations also created feminised spaces within central London by establishing headquarters beside each other. For example, Dina Copelman persuasively demonstrates that Mecklenburgh Square became ‘a women’s “state” within the metropolis’, as it housed the offices of the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Federation of Women Workers and the Anti-Sweating League.35 Considering the physical structures of women’s organisations thus problematises Davidoff and Hall’s view that women were confined to ‘the fabrication of domesticity’ while men constructed public spaces.36 Instead, fin-de-siècle women shaped public space by adding feminised amenities

and institutions to the London topography.

Women’s participation in new, or newly unisex, leisure activities blurred the lines between the ‘male’ public and ‘female’ private spaces of late-Victorian London, countering the traditional view that the capital was divided along gender lines.37 The increasingly popular discussion clubs of 1880s’ London, including the Browning Society, the Proudhon Club and the Zetetical Society, created new heterosocial areas.38 By hosting interactions between strangers in a welcoming environment, discussion society drawing-rooms occupied a liminal space between the domestic and public spheres.39 Likewise, the opening of music halls to women in the 1870s not only mixed people of different nationalities, ages and genders, but also merged the surveillance of public places with the anonymity of the home. 40The establishment of new department stores offered additional heterosocial environments, such as the shared library that opened in Grosvenor Gallery in 1877.41 Although William Whiteley was initially criticised for selling his products to people of all genders and classes, department stores soon became symbols of the metropolitan melting-pot.42 Indeed, Harrods adopted the Latin motto ‘Omnia Omnibus Ubique’ meaning ‘All Things for All People, Everywhere’.43 Women’s recreational activities thus created new intermediate spaces that problematise Wolff’s division of fin-de-siècle cities between ‘male’ public and ‘female’ private areas.44 By facilitating women’s increased occu-

32 Ibid., p. 27.

33 Ibid., p. 31.

34 Alwyn Collinson, ‘Women’s Right to Sit Comfortably’ (6 September 2017), at https://www.museumoflondon.or . uk/discover/womens-right-work-toilet-bathroom-victorian-london-wwi-factory-protest (viewed 26 January 2020).

35 Copelman, ‘The Gendered Metropolis’, p. 46.

36 Davidoff and Hall, ‘The Architecture of Public and Private Life’, p. 329.

37 Ibid., p. 331; Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse’, p. 43.

38 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 69.

39 Ibid., p. 69.

40 Peter Bailey, ‘Introduction: Making Sense of Music Hall’, in Peter Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Milton Keynes, 1986), p. xvii.

41 Rappaport, ‘The halls of temptation’, p. 76.

42 Ibid., p. 61.

43 BBC News, ‘History of Harrods Department Store’, (8 May 2010), at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10103783 (viewed 27 January 2020).

44 Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse’, p. 37.

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pation of public space, shopping weakened the separation between ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ areas of fin-de-siècle London. Unlike many nineteenth-century European cities, London lacked a single ‘red light’ district, with prostitution occurring throughout the metropolis.45 Flâneurs like Booth had identified areas with widespread prostitution by simply observing the number of unaccompanied women in the streets, using ‘moral and visual semiotics to identify the social character of streets as rough or respectable’, according to Walkowitz.46 London’s burgeoning shopping culture, however, complicated this process, as social spectators could no longer easily assume that stylishly dressed women in public areas were sex workers. Instead, middle-class women frequented fashionable shopping areas in the West End, such as Regent Street and the Burlington Arcade, which were also notorious for prostitution.47 Distinguishing between prostitutes and shopping ladies was made even more difficult by the latter’s new style of dress, as middle-class women adopted the extravagant clothing, jewellery and cosmetics that Victorians had formerly associated with sex workers.48 Since women’s presence in thoroughfares had determined the ‘character’ of public places, the convergence of ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ women in the West End contested the area’s previous association with prostitution, challenging the established moral geography of public space in late-Victorian London.

Tensions over women’s rights to occupy public space crystallised in the bitter contests between suspected prostitutes and the Metro-

politan Police, questioning Reiner’s suggestion that the service enjoyed ‘a large measure of legitimacy in the eyes of the working class’ by the late nineteenth century.49 When seamstress Elizabeth Cass was mistakenly arrested for soliciting on 28 June 1887, the late-Victorian press turned her story into a cause célèbre.50 Although Cass was acquitted, newspapers emphasised that her case was just one example of the Metropolitan Police’s habitual mistreatment of working-class women.51 Press criticisms of the police reflected wider working-class distrust of law enforcement, which Cocks persuasively argues had existed since the Metropolitan Police’s creation in 1829.52 These latent grievances erupted in several public protests in 1887, including that in West Ham Town Hall, where the crowd destroyed an effigy of Cass’s accuser, Police Constable Endacott.53 Newspapers used the assault of Annie Coverdale by Police Constable Bloy in January 1888 as further evidence that aggressive policemen systematically maltreated destitute women.54 Studying the experiences of working-class women in late-Victorian London thus contradicts Metropolitan Police Commissioner James Monro’s assertion, in 1890, that ‘the citizens at large [conceived] of the police as their friends and protectors’.55 Instead, the Cass and Coverdale cases intensified working-class resentment, supporting David Taylor’s identification of ‘popular dissatisfaction’ with the Metropolitan Police in late nineteenth-century London.56 The Cass case influenced specific policing procedures in late-Victorian London, once again demonstrating the grassroots impact of

45 Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 18.

46 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 34.

47 Rappaport, ‘The halls of temptation’, p. 68.

48 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 51.

49 Reiner, Politics of the Police, p. 49.

50 David Taylor, ‘Cass, Coverdale and Consent: The Metropolitan Police and Working-Class Women in Late-Victorian London’, The Journal of the Social History Society, 12: 1 (2015), p. 115.

51 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 282.

52 Cocks, Nameless Offences, p. 52.

53 Taylor, ‘Cass, Coverdale and Consent’, p. 128.

54 Ibid., p. 116.

55 James Monro, Late Commissioner of Police in the Metropolis of London, ‘The London Police’, North American Review (1890), quoted in Taylor, ‘Cass, Coverdale and Consent’, p. 113.

56 Taylor, ‘Cass, Coverdale and Consent’, p. 128.

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women on urban processes. T. A. Critchley’s study of English policing overlooked women’s roles in shaping police practices, instead focusing on the top-down imposition of police reforms, such as by the 1888 Local Government Bill.57 The Cass scandal, however, directly inspired changes to police procedures, as Chief Commissioner Charles Warren issued new orders in July 1888 that were designed to protect officers from similar accusations to those levelled against Endacott.58 These instructions targeted everyday practices, stipulating that officers should caution prostitutes the first time they were caught, keep a record of such interactions, and only arrest the suspected sex worker if the man they had solicited requested police action.59 Considering the furore over the wrongful arrest of Elizabeth Cass thus reveals the influence of women on changes to police procedures, countering Critchley’s suggestion that reforms were predominantly instituted from above.60 The Metropolitan Police’s laissez faire attitude towards prostitution and homosexuality problematises the notion that late-Victorian London was controlled through ‘policing by consent’.61 As a result of Warren’s procedural changes in 1888, arrests for solicitation in London dramatically decreased, halving from around 6,000 apprehensions in 1887 to 3,000 in 1889, and remaining below 5,000 until 1898.62 Similarly, the police tolerated homosexual offences because they were difficult to prove without engaging in agent provocateur strategies; the public associated these tech-

niques with European despotism, thereby exposing officers to criticism during trials and in the press.63 Instead, policemen wilfully ignored London’s frequent drag balls, only investigating when considerable public disturbance forced them to act.64 Indeed, John Saul testified during the 1889 Cleveland Street Scandal that officers had ‘deliberately shut their eyes’ to the male brothel’s ‘infamous practices’.65 The Metropolitan Police’s lenient approach to homosexuality and prostitution by no means fulfilled the nine principles of ‘policing by consent’ specified in Sir Robert Peel’s 1829 ‘General Instructions’.66 While Peel emphasised the importance of ‘constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law’, policemen neglected to enforce the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act’s discriminatory rules against homosexuality and commercial sex.67 Whereas Peelian principles underlined the importance of maintaining ‘public approval’ to enabling ‘the police to fulfil their functions’, late-Victorian officers alienated the working classes, rendering their attempts at control ineffective.68 Examining the experiences of ‘deviant’ sexual groups instead supports Taylor’s suggestion that late-Victorian London was regulated through ‘non-policing by consent’: police inactivity and wilful ignorance of crime, with the approval of offenders.69 Police regulation paradoxically facilitated the continuance of homosexual ‘crimes’ and prostitution in certain areas of late-Victorian London, influencing the mental topography of the metropolis by ghettoising deviant sexual

57 Critchley, A History of Police, pp. xviii, 126-140.

58 Charles Warren, Police Orders (19 July 1888), in Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 74.

59 Ibid., pp. 74-77.

60 Critchley, A History of Police, pp. 126-140.

61 UK Home Offic , ‘Definition of policing y consent’ (10 December 2012), https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policing-by-consent/definition-of-policing- y-consent (viewed 12 January 2020).

62 Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 225.

63 Cocks, Nameless Offences, pp. 63-65.

64 Ibid., p. 67.

65 John Saul quoted in Cocks, Nameless Offences, p. 67.

66 UK Home Offic , ‘Definition of policing y consent’.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Taylor, ‘Cass, Coverdale and Consent’, p. 130.

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cultures. Police attempts to contain homosexuality to fewer areas actually solidified homosexual communities in the West End and the Square Mile.70 Likewise, the Metropolitan Police’s organisation into separate districts enabled the emergence of notorious prostitution sites at the boundaries between zones, since contiguous divisions were unsure who controlled the areas.71 Further police confusion over whether public parks were included in their jurisdiction led to the increased association of open spaces with both prostitution and homosexuality.72 Although 250,000 people had gathered in Hyde Park on 22 August 1885 to show their support for the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, the park subsequently hosted increasing numbers of prostitutes, who were forced onto the streets after the same Act suppressed urban brothels.73 Laite therefore convincingly argues that Hyde Park was ‘a powerful symbol of the dynamic and contested geographies of commercial sex’ in late-Victorian London, as parks and streets simultaneously acted as sites of regulation and sites of contravention.74 Investigating the experiences of excluded sexual groups in the fin-de-siècle metropolis thus demonstrates the interplay between policing practices, disputes over public space and interpretative maps of the city.

Whereas Georgie’s and Artemis’s essays emphasise the gardening and domestication of women through town planning and housing initiatives, considering middle-class women’s philanthropic work, as well as the impact of deviant sexual groups, demonstrates that attempts to confine women to the home were frequently contested. Gendering fin-de siècle London reveals a much more cohesive city than that depicted by contemporary male

commentators and orthodox historians. Stedman Jones’ and Wolff’s respective suggestions that the metropolis was divided along class and gender lines were both informed by Victorian social ideals, which stratified society and confined women to the domestic sphere.75 Interpretations of policing by Critchley and Reiner were similarly based on abstract principles of law enforcement.76 These studies imposed ideological maps onto the physical cityscape, overestimating the extent to which excluded gender groups conformed to the social restrictions placed upon them. In reality, late nineteenth-century women and homosexual men subtly but assuredly challenged the restraints on their behaviour, simultaneously altering the literal and psychological geographies of London. By feminising the work of urban commentators, women appropriated the process by which the city was interpreted. Female depictions of London partially dissolved the psychological east-west divide and weakened the cautionary narratives that had discouraged female excursions into the metropolis. More welcoming portrayals of the city facilitated women’s increased presence in the public domain, symbolically and spatially defying the ‘separate spheres’ ideology. Women’s transgression of imagined urban boundaries transformed the physical appearance of public places, creating new heterosocial spaces and feminised pockets of London. Deviant sexual groups similarly established cultural ghettoes, while influencing more concrete changes to policing practices.

In these ways, although women and homosexual men had distinct and specific experiences of late-Victorian London, their study is nevertheless indispensable to understanding the wider topographies and urban processes of the fin-de-siècle metropoli .

70 Cocks, Nameless Offences, p. 73.

71 Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 79.

72 Cocks, Nameless Offences, p. 59.

73 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, p. 82.

74 Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 19.

75 Stedman Jones, Outcast London, p. 13; Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse’, p. 37.

76 Critchley, A History of Police, p. 127; Reiner, The Politics of the Police, pp. 51-52.