Peer-reviewed by undergraduates, for undergraduates
Celebrating rigorous studies in diverse fields of historical inquiry
Based out of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY
Secondary Title
Volume I, Issue 1: Spring 2021
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Kathryn Biedermann
Antton De Arbeloa
Eric B. Kopp
Joseph Han
Theodore Karavolas
Elizabeth Atherton
Philip A. Chivily
Brian Seiter
Emma Tomlins
Casimir Zablotski
Brooks Bradford
Erick Christian
Luis Colli
Erica Ivins
Christine Walsh
Contact us at hamhistorical@gmail.com
The illustration on the cover is a map of Meztitlán, Mexico from the addendum to Relación no. 66. “Descripción de la provincia de Metztitlán por Gabriel de Chávez. 1 de octubre de 1579.” Size of the original: 58 x 42 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, The General Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin (JGI XXIV-12).
Dear readers,
Our very first issue has arrived! Born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, this journal started as an idea of how to create a community among history majors here at Hamilton College. The response was overwhelmingly positive—with an editorial staff of fifteen students across different class years, we have built a community of undergraduate historians from the ground up.
We are proud to inaugurate this journal with truly diverse content. We begin in colonial Mesoamerica with administrative reports penned by Spanish and creole administrators laden with European stereotypes in an attempt to describe and categorize indigenous populations. From there, we criss-cross geographies and time periods to provide snapshots into various lived realities that characterize our shared human past and present.
Enjoy these wonderful essays. Learn something new. Take a history class.
Yours,
Kathryn Editor-in-ChiefIn an effort to expand their trade networks directly to the far east, Queen Isabel I of Castile (14511504) and King Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452-1516) funded the ambitious Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus (1451-1506). Though they did not acquire new trade routes for spices and luxuries in the Pacific, their unification of the Iberian Peninsula and subsequent acquisition of large swaths of North and South America set the stage for an age of violent conquest and empires. Ruling over a peninsula packed with diverse ethnicities, religions, and identities, Ferdinand and Isabel attempted to unify their populace through the creation of a “Spanish” national identity.1
National identity does not develop overnight. Throughout history, rulers have unified nations against the “other,” creating exploitative hierarchies along the way. Perceiving difference and alterity when encountering individuals that do not look or act the way one does seems to be a universal phenomenon for humanity. As populations were constantly in motion from the Old World to the New World, Spaniards continually encountered and judged the “suspect” Mesoamericans and their “satanically driven” cultural norms. Just as Dante and Cervantes created their fictitious worlds through literature, Spanish administrators constructed a world full of familiar tropes to rationalize the unknown and exotic peoples surrounding them.2 Attempting to familiarize an Old World audience with their newly procured lands, Spanish colonial administrators used Old World categories to stereotype and categorize Amerindians.
The Spanish categorized Amerindians depending
1 Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1-17; In her introduction Perry masterfully explicates the ways in which Spanish royalty attempted to unify their newly acquired territories decades after 1492.
2 Barbara Fuchs, Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 1-9,17; Though Fuchs argues that Cervantes executed a challenge “to the enterprise of national consolidation according to essentialized hierarchies,” I wish to highlight the imaginative and fictitious nature of Cervantes’ world regardless of its aim to critique stereotypes and archetypes upheld by the Spanish administrative hierarchies.
on how they practiced religion, consumed food, dressed themselves, interacted in social environments, and systemized their writing. This project hopes to expose how colonial administrators conceptualized alterity amongst Mesoamericans through applications of Old World stereotypes and tropes of difference. As explored by Kim Tallbear in Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, it is critical to remember that colonial encounters were imposed upon Amerindians.3 It was not a choice. Millions suffered death—and sometimes worse, all for the benefit of empire.
Other than an account from Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) and images from a post-conquest Aztec codex, the Codex Boturini, the data and visualizations analyzed in this essay are largely from the Relaciones Geográficas del Siglo XVI (Geographic Relations of the Sixteenth Century). The responses are riddled with Spanish complaints of Amerindian population decline and subsequent lack of potential labor exploitation. More importantly, its collaborative nature produced a collection of colonial administrative documents which highlights the realities of an ethnically and culturally diverse sixteenth-century Mesoamerican world.
The Relaciones Geográficas del Siglo XVI is a ten-volume set of responses to questionnaires from sixteenth-century New Spain generated as a result of King Philip II’s (1527-1598) efforts to facilitate the creation of a map of the New World. However, this questionnaire was not used solely for mapmaking. Juan López de Velasco (1530-1598)—the main cosmographer-chronicler of the Council of the Indies—authored and distributed a carefully constructed questionnaire that predominantly served as an inventory of land, economic potential, and 3 Kim Tallbear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 31-62.
labor assessments across New Spain, the Caribbean, and South America.4 The fifty questions inquired after the local environment, climate, flora, fauna, indigenous languages, local history, status of religious conversion amongst locals, and descriptions of the Amerindian population.
The Relaciones corpus was created in what I have termed a “goldilocks zone” of history, a critical and short-lived timespan during which Mesoamerican elders could still shed light on life and culture prior to first encounters with the colonizers. In his 1582 introduction of the Tezcoco relacion, royal magistrate (corregidor)
Juan Bautista de Pomar notes:
“Though there are old Indians of more than eighty years of age, they do not generally know of their antiquities…and those who knew the important things, who were the priests of the idols and the sons of Nezahualpiltzintli, he who was king of this city and province, are now dead. Furthermore, the paintings which contained their histories are lost, because, at the time that the Marquis of the Valley Don Hernando Cortés, with the other conquistadors, entered for the first time, sixty-four years ago, more or less, the royal houses of Nezahualpiltzintli were burnt, in a large chamber that was the general archive of their records, in which all their ancient things were painted, which today their descendants cry over with much sentiment, for being left in the dark, without notice or memory of their ancestors’ acts.”5
While many scholars have underestimated the significance of this source and the research opportunities it presents, it is undeniable that the Relaciones Geográficas expose often overlooked facets of Spanish colonization, the early modern world, and pre-conquest Mesoamerica.
There is a gap to be filled in Spanish colonial scholarship with further study of the Relaciones. In 1964, Latin American historian Howard F. Cline’s article titled “The Relaciones Geograficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586” noted that “despite the almost self-evident
4 Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 11-20.
5 René Acuña, Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: México III, vol. 8, 10 vols., Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1986), 40-41; All translations were completed by me unless otherwise stated; “…aunque hay indios viejos de a más de 80 años de edad, no saben generalmente de todas sus antigüedades, sino unos, una, y otros, otra. Y los que sabían las cosas más importantes, que eran los sacerdotes de los ídolos y los hijos de Nezahualpiltzintli, rey que fue desta ciudad y su provincia, son ya muertos. Y, demás desto, faltan sus pinturas en que tenían sus historias, porque, al tiempo que el Marqués del Valle don Hernando Cortés, con los demás conquistadores, entraron la primera vez en ella, que habrá sesenta y cuatro años, poco más o menos, se las quemaron en las casas reales de Nezahualpiltzintli, en un gran aposento que era el archivo general de sus papeles, en que estaban pintadas todas sus cosas antiguas, que hoy día lloran sus descendientes con mucho sentimiento, por haber quedado como a oscuras, sin noticia ni memoria de los hechos de sus pasados.”
importance of the RG documents, individually and collectively, there has been relatively little written about them.”6 To this day, Cline’s assessment is valid. Though there has certainly been an expansion of scholarship on the Relaciones since 1964, significant contributions have been rare. Barbara Mundy’s The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas is one of the only monographs solely dedicated to exploring the corpus, presenting a polished study of mapmaking and its interactions with space in sixteenth-century Mexico.7 Widely published and transcribed editions of the corpus did not surface until the mid-1980s with René Acuña’s Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI. Nevertheless, Acuña’s ten-volume contribution concerns itself with the relaciones of Mexico and Guatemala, excluding the relaciones of South America, the Caribbean, and the majority of Central America.8 The tropes of alterity identified by the Spanish in their administrative responses were not uniform across their New World empire. However, the employment of Old World tropes of “othering” when categorizing Amerindians indicates a larger current of Spanish learned interlocutors who racialized and categorized difference.
Scholars have often characterized our modern understandings of race as a product of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.9 Yet, various historians and literary scholars have recently attempted to address the lacuna concerning the implications of racial categorizations prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng seeks to highlight “how differences among humans were selectively essentialized in absolute and fundamental terms, and attached to a human group to characterize it definitively, positioning the group within a hierarchy of power relations.”10 While Heng’s findings may not convince scholars of a medieval invention of race, her evidence does expose how groups of individuals were characterized via generalized tropes of alterity. Heng’s argument is well-founded and supported by dozens of primary sources; yet, it fails to address some critical influences on how Europeans viewed difference—lapses likely due to limitations of the time period she assesses.
6 Howard F. Cline, “The Relaciones Geograficas of the Spanish Indies, 15771586,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 44, no. 3 (1964): 341-42.
7 Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, xi-29, 213-216.
8 René Acuña, Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Michoacán, vol. 9, 10 vols., Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1987).
9 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 65.
10 Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 447.
Political scientist and historian Anthony Pagden confronts some of the questions left by Heng’s argument in his essay, “The peopling of the New World: ethnos, race and empire in the early-modern world.” Pagden posits that forms of ‘proto-racism,’ dating back to Aristotle, rationalized slavery and difference amongst peoples in the New and Old World.11 Pagden highlights three narratives that exemplify proto-racism: Aristotle’s “natural slaves,” conceptions of separate races, and the two bloodlines of Adam.12 “For not only did all three propositions threaten the idea of a single humankind; they also had the effect of placing those races outside the course of human history– the operatio Dei,” or God’s divine operation of society.13 In both his essay and his book, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France C.1500-c.1800, Pagden argues for a shared belief amongst the Spanish, British, French, and Portuguese empires: “the belief in the possibility of a universal human code of conduct.”14 For Pagden, this assumption of a single human nature in the imperial ideologies of the aforementioned empires showcases that, “paradoxical though it may seem, ‘race’ plays no part in the early-modern ideologies of empire.”15 Pagden’s hypothesis evidently has some lapses of its own. Did colonial administrators and magistrates who racialized and stereotyped the bodies of New World inhabitants not influence imperial ideologies? Although he recognizes that “there were many serving the interests of the European overseas empires who were…the most virulent racists,” Padgen contends the science of race was “a product of nineteenth-century positivism.”16
Unlike Pagden, historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra hypothesizes in Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World that “the science of race…was first articulated in colonial Spanish America in the seventeenth century, not in nineteenth-century Europe.”17 Whereas Pagden generalizes the imperial ideologies of Britain, Portugal, France, and Spain, Esguerra’s scholarship recognizes the pitfalls to broad claims when undergoing imperial comparisons such as Pagden’s. Esguerra articulates how “modern views of the racialized body” were heavily influenced by Iberian royal policies that the Spanish brought with
11 Anthony Pagden, “The peopling of the New World: ethnos, race and empire in the early-modern world,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed.
Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 292-293.
12 Ibid., 292-312.
13 Ibid., 308.
14 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France C.1500-c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 200; “The peopling of the New World: ethnos, race and empire in the early-modern world,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, 312.
15 Pagden, “The peopling of the New World: ethnos, race and empire in the early-modern world,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, 308.
16 Ibid., 292, 308.
17 Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World, 65-66.
them to the New World—especially the concept of limpieza de sangre, or “purity of blood.”18 This paper bolsters Esguerra’s argument by moving his analysis beyond the works of Spanish colonial intellectuals to incorporate Spanish administrative stereotyping found in at least twenty-six of the relaciones of New Spain.
Completed on October 10, 1579, the relación of Ajuchitlan was composed by the corregidor Diego Garcés. He was assisted by his son Diego Garcés Jr., Antonio de Rodas, an interpreter of the indigenous languages Tarasco and Cuitlateca and “the oldest of the naturals of said municipalities, and of best understanding.”19 Other than what is found in the pages of his response, little is known of Diego Garcés’ life. His references to Andalusian geography in his responses to questions eleven and nineteen of the questionnaire (those concerned with location of indigenous towns in relation to Spanish settlements and the details of the river(s) which pass by the area) suggest that he was a native of Seville or, more generally, born somewhere in southern Spain.20 He states that his son is “of thirty years of age” in his introduction to the relación; therefore, given his “more than twenty or so years that [he had] served public and Royal service, as so in the province of Guatemala and so in the one of Honduras,” it can be estimated that Garcés was over fifty years old when completing this survey of Ajuchitlan. In the months before October, Garcés completed multiple drafts of his responses. According to René Acuña, the final draft was likely written by the thirty-year-old Diego Jr. who would have had a much “firmer” script than his aging father.21 Garcés Jr. wrote the final draft based on notes that his father had taken while investigating throughout Ajuchitlan.
The relationship between regional administrators and their scribes can help situate some of the uncertainties of colonial and archival texts. Perhaps Garcés Jr. fiddled with his father’s narrative, occluded some of his notes, or even misread his father’s script. Whatever the case, one thing can be stated with confidence: this response, like all responses in the Relaciones, lacked objectivity. There is an uncertainty here that is familiar to any researcher accustomed to archival materials. Where can we draw the lines between fact and fiction in these texts? Can they be taken at face value? Uncertainties aside, these colonial administrators depicted their versions of reality through their writing—as noted by Mundy, for colonial administrators, writing was an action considered more noteworthy than producing a map
18 Ibid., 94-95.
19 Acuña, Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Michoacán, 29.
20 Ibid., 33-34, 39-40.
21
The corregidor of Ajuchitlan completed his surveying tasks under orders of King Philip II (1527-1598)— with the exception of completing a map of the area. Unlike many Spanish colonial administrators, Garcés took the task of writing his observations seriously. In the hundreds of Relaciones produced by Spanish administrators, most scribes did not reference autobiographical information when describing the environment surrounding them. Yet, Garcés utilized his past experiences as tools of analysis and description when identifying the peculiar and “unimaginable” actions of the Cuitlatecans of Ajuchitlan. As with any survey, the Relaciones questionnaire required substantial resources and manpower. It cannot be estimated how many responses were lost due to human error or wild circumstance; nevertheless, this relación successfully voyaged across the Atlantic and was stored in the crown’s archives at the Royal Academy of History in Madrid. Alas, Garcés’s responses may have never been presented before King Philip II or his main cosmographer-chronicler Lopez de Velasco; yet, dozens of relaciones never departed colonial archives of the New World. Perhaps after reading it, one can begin to explore why Garcés’ trope-plagued answers could have been selected for the arduous voyage to Madrid: It is of few natives. It has had many more in times past; they have diminished, and they diminish every day, with diseases and absences [of food], and it appears that with laziness; because in their past, they were greatly annoyed and overworked, and they did not eat or drink or dress or wear shoes as they do now, nor did they have horses on which to ride, nor rest or stillness. And now, that they have it all and they are privileged like children, they are diminishing.
They are in established towns, and many do not stay, because they go from one [town] to another and they go around like Gypsies with their bundles and women, and with their children on their shoulders. They are of bad inclinations and friends of novelties, and they are exceedingly malicious and deceitful, clumsy and sluggish for the good, very capable and attentive for the bad; they commit perjury frequently, both defending and suing, or if there is passion or friendship, or if they are prevented or bribing, which is a thing they use often. And they would not say more than what they want, and they
22 Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, 29-33; Most respondents viewed their written responses as more legitimate or noteworthy; Mundy notes several maps were left unsigned, leading her to conclude that its authors may not have been keen on claiming authorship; in fact, they could have been ashamed of their often contradicting and careless nature; Juan López De Velasco certainly did not receive what he was looking for with the responses to the questionnaire.
are so gifted at this that, if not with many repeated questions and that there be much vigilance on the selected witness to not speak with the rest, the truth could barely be illuminated; because each plaintiff proves their side with many corroborating witnesses that the sworn testimony is presented so neutrally that it can barely be determined. And, with these and other acts of cunning, there is no way to know the truth. And, if the leaders (or respected community members) want to destroy a Spaniard or Indian, the whole town swears to be true whatever they say, even if it hadn’t passed by the accused minds. And if the town, moved by a leader, wants to destroy their Governor and take away the position and see it without him, the whole town, likewise, would be against him, and even if they sack his house; and in Ajuchitlan it has happened to the letter. And, if the Governor later invites them and flatters them, they would return to support him, and even tell him for who they did it. And, like that, a man of bad conscience, if he wants to destroy a judge or a cleric, or another person, with a pitcher of wine that complainants give, they prove or say as much as they want, including deaths and assaults and robberies, no matter how good and just the accused have lived.
They obey and do the bidding of their Governor and leaders more than anyone else, because they fear them very much, because they punish them so secretly, that, with the Royal Magistrate/Mayor (Corregidor) being in the town, he would barely understand. Because of this, their testimonies should not be taken, if it was possible, as it is the cause of their condemnation. And I am very satisfied of this, and I have seen it, clear and visibly, in the business that has transpired in front of me, in more than twenty or so years that I have served public and Royal service, as so in the province of Guatemala and so in the one of Honduras, and now in this New Spain, and I could say much of this. And these and the others, they all go by some order and they have some of the same customs. And, if the judge proceeds against the Governor and leaders for drunkenness or other offenses, and they feel that they wish to arrest them, very quickly a number of Indians are gathered and they are in sight; that way it is more convenient to dismiss the business and cover up as it is, to not give them a place to lose fear or shame, except in the case that there are Spaniards on the side of justice, that, with the few there are, they would not dare intervene; and, many times, they have lost shame of their cures and justices.
In the business that passes before the Governors, and before the Indian mayors, they administer bad justice on all extremes, because they are greatly bribed. And the most prominent of the litigants, and the one that they most share favor with or receive bribes from, that is the one that leaves with the verdict and, although he has robbed or killed, nothing shall be proved against him. And, if they are in bad shape with one of them, the venial sins, or none, they make it mortal and very grave. They have uses and ways of robbing and bribing unheard of and unimaginable, and I could say an infinite amount; I have punished many. There was a mayor that, for only saying that an Indian had spoken to him harshly, gave a penalty for tribute more than what the Indian would pay in three years; however, the Spanish judges do not give penalties as those, because that is what our Sir Viceroy has commanded, with many other holy things that are convenient for good government, in favor of and for the utility of the naturals. And with reason and justice, because they are poor and miserable and any Christian man should give them condolences, although they do not feel it, nor pity for anything else: not deaths of children, not of parents nor relatives, not of husband nor of wife, not other wrongs and adverse events.
To weed out their maize/corn fields or paths, or sweep the home, they are always squatting/crouching, and, in church, the same, and that is their natural seat and the one they most like.
They are ingrates and thankless, and, likewise, they do not have custom to be thankful to those who raised them, nor any other favor or good that is done for them, and, likewise, what is done for them should be for love for God, without respect for anything else. They are far too addicted to the vice of lust, and they commit thousands of adulteries and incest and curses, and more so if they are drunk, which is a thing that many of them fancy and they believe to be honorable. They never hang on to loyalty nor do they receive shame from it, only here and there. If the judge speaks to them and treats them with docility, they respect him little, and if harsh, it is said that it frightens them as in the times of the conquest. If an Indian is a little warlike and speaks harshly in front of the leaders, then there is no bailiff/court clerk that would arrest them, because they say he speaks harshly.
The tarascos do not allow themselves to bribe or bother as much as the cuitlatecas and the other
nations, because they are very warlike, and they adjust to the sacraments and things of the church much better, and, to their deceased, with mass and offerings, if they are able, that which is not done by the cuitlatecas, and they dare come to complain to the Royal Magistrate/Mayor (Corregidor) of the offenses that their elders do to them.23
23 Acuña, Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Michoacán, 31-33; “Es de pocos indios. Ha tenido muchos más en tiempos pasados; hanse menoscabado, y menoscaban de cada día, con enfermedades y ausencias, y hay pareceres de que con la ociosidad; porque, en su antigüedad, eran grandemente vejados y trabajados, y no comían ni bebían ni vestían ni calzaban como ahora, ni tenían caballos en que andar, ni reposo ni quietud. Y ahora, con tenerlo todo y estar regalados como hijos, van desminuyendo. Están en pueblos formados, y muchos no permanecen, por que se pasan de unos a otros y andan como gitanos con sus hatillos y mujeres, y con los hijos a cuestas. Son de malas inclinaciones y amigos de novedades, y sobremanera maliciosos y mentirosos, torpes y tardos para él bien, muy hábiles y solícitos para el mal; perjúrame muy de ordinario, así demandando como defendiendo, o si hay pasión o amistad, o están prevenidos o cohechados, que es cosa que usan mucho. Y no dirán más dedo que la parte quisiere, y están tan diestros en esto, que, si no es con muchas repreguntas y con que haya gran vigilancia en que el testigo que ha depuesto no hable con los demás, apenas se podrán aclarar la verdad; porque cada.una de las partes prueba con número de testigos tan bastantemente su intento, que se viene a poner el pleito tan neutral que apenas se puede determinar. Y, con estas astucias y otras, no hay orden de poder saber la verdad. Y, si los principales quieren destruir a un español o indio, todo el pueblo jurará ser verdad aquello que ellos dicen, aunque no le haya pasado por el pesamiento al acusado. Y si el pueblo, movido por algún principal, quiere destruir a su gobernador y quitarle el cargo y lo ver sin él, todo el pueblo, asimismo, será contra él, y aun le saquearán la casa; y en Ajuchitlan ha. pasado a la letra. Y, si el gobernador después los convida y halaga, tornarán a abonarlo y volver por él, y aun dirán por quién lo hicieron. Y, así, hombre de mala conciencia, si quieren destruir a un juez o clérigo, o a otra persona, con una botija de vino que dan a los principales le prueban todo cuanto quieren, y muertes y fuerzas y robos, por muy bien y justamente que haya vivido. Obedecen y hacen más el mandamiento de su gobernador y principales que ningún otro, porque los temen mucho, porque los castigan tan secretamente, que, con estar el corregidor en el pueblo, apenas lo entenderá. Por eso, no se les debería tomar juramento, si posible fuese, pues es causa de su condenación. Y yo estoy bastantemente satisfecho dello, y lo he visto, clara y patentemente, en negocios que ante mí han pasado, en más de veinte y tantos años que ha que sirvo oficios públicos y reales, así en la provincia de Guatemala como en la de Honduras, y ahora en esta Nueva España, y pudiera decir mucho en esto. Y éstos y los otros, todos van por una orden y tienen unas mismas costumbres. Y, si el juez procede contra el gobernador y principales por borracheras u otros delitos, y sienten que los quieren prender, muy en breve ajuntan número de indios y están a la mira; de manera que conviene más sobreseer el negocio y disimular por entonces, por no darles lugar a que se desvergüencen, salvo si hay españoles al lado de la justicia, que, con pocos que haya, no se osarán menear; y, muchas veces, se han desvergonzado a sus curas y justicias. En los negocios que ante los gobernadores pasan, y ante los alcaldes indios, administran mal justicia por todo extremo, porque son grandísimos cohechadores. Y el más principal de los pleiteantes, y que más con ellos priva o los cohecha, ése sale con el pleito y, aunque haya muerto y robado, no se le probará nada. Y, si están mal con alguno, el pecado venial, o ninguno, se lo hacen mortal y muy grave. Tienen usos y maneras de robar y cohechar inauditas y no pensadas, y pudiera decir infinitas; yo he castigado a muchos. Y alcalde hubo que, por sólo decir que un indio le habló recio, le llevó de pena más de lo que él pagaba de tributo en tres años; aunque los jueces españoles no les llevamos penas, porque ansí nos lo tiene mandado el señor visorrey, con otras muchas y santas cosas que convienen al buen gobierno, pro y utilidad de los naturales. Y con razón y justicia, porque son pobres y miserables y cualquier hombre cristiano se debe condoler dellos, aunque ellos no lo sienten, ni les da cosa ninguna pena: ni muertes de hijos, ni de padres ni de deudos, ni de marido ni de mujer, ni otros males y adversos sucesos. Para desherbar sus milpas o caminos, o barrer la casa, siempre están en cuclillas, y, en la iglesia, lo mismo, y aquél es su natural asiento y el que más apetecen. Son muy ingratos y desagradecidos, y, así, ni tienen ley con quien los ha criado ni se lo agradecen, ni ningún otro
This passage responds to question five of the Relaciones Geográficas questionnaire: “Are there many or few Indians? Were there more or fewer at other times, and what are the known causes of this? Are they presently settled in planned and permanent towns? Describe the degree and quality of their intelligence, inclinations, and way of life. Are there different languages in the province or a general language that all speak?”24 This question would not have supplied the main cosmographer-chronicler of the Indies, Juan López de Velasco, with useful information for mapping. Instead, it catalogued and measured the worth of Amerindians based on Spanish and largely European standards of “civil behavior.” As explored by Surekha Davies in her book Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, for Europeans, and especially Spaniards, cities equaled civility.25 This imposition of European tropes of civility upon Amerindian society becomes evident through Davies’ examination of New World Maps. Creating fictitious and Europeanized depictions of New World cities such as Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, Spanish and European mapmakers illustrated the large cities as typical Old World urban centers—essentially, they were viewed as “formidable” under European tropes of “civility.”26 Therefore, Garcés portrayed nomads as barbarous and less civilized than individuals inhabiting cities.
It cannot be determined if the corregidor’s observations were accurate; yet, Garcés’ response highlights the stereotypes that the Spanish brought with them from the Old World. Though Mesoamericans had never interacted with Gypsies, Garcés believed these Amerindians must be like Gypsies with their bundles— an item deeply rooted in Mesoamerican religion, politics, and everyday life. Large bundles served a practical purpose for nomadic Amerindians or simply inter-town commuters, like a backpack of sorts. As depicted in Book Eleven of the Florentine Codex, Amerindians traveled from town to town on foot.
However, small bundles, as studied by Iris Montero, Molly H. Bassett, and John M.D. Pohl, have a deeper meaning in Mixtec culture.27 Small bundles were not only used as spiritual protection for everyday migrants and travelers, they had a significant impact on Mesoamerican politics and the legitimacy of the Aztec rule.28 Garcés viewed the nature of the Cuitlatecan people to “go from one town to another with their bundles and women, and with their children on their shoulders’’ as a negative and Gypsy-like action. As explored by Heng, the Romani, dubbed “gitanos’’ by the Spanish and “Gypsies” by the English, were repressed and subjected to stereotyping throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period. Some of the main stereotypes attributed to the Romani were their “dark skin,” “trickery,” “light-fingeredness,” and their propensity to “wander”
beneficio ni bien que les hagan, y, así, lo que se hiciere por ellos ha de ser por amor de Dios, sin respecto de otra cosa. Son demasiadamente viciosos en el vicio de la carnalidad, y cometen millares de adulterios e incestos y maleficios, y más si están borrachos, que es cosa que mucho apetecen y lo tienen por honroso. Nunca se guardan lealtad ni reciben pena dello sino cual y cual. Si el juez les habla y trata con mansedumbre, respétanle poco y, si recio, dicen que los espanta como en el tiempo de la conquista. Si un indio es un poco belicoso y habla recio delante de los principales, no habrá alguacil ninguno que lo ose prender, porque dicen que habla recio. Los tarascos no se consienten cohechar ni molestar tanto como los cuitlatecas y otras naciones, porque son más belicosos, y acuden mucho mejor a los sacramentos y cosas de la iglesia, y, a sus difuntos, con misas y ofrendas, según que pueden, lo que no hacen los cuitlatecas, y osan venirse a quejar al corregidor de los agravios que les hacen sus mayores.”
24 Mundy, 227; Mundy’s Appendix B: The Questionnaire of the Relaciones. 25 Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 224-228.
26 Ibid, 224-254.
27 Iris Montero, “Hummingbird: Human and More than Human Migrants” (April 7, 2019); John M. D. Pohl, The Politics of Symbolism in the Mixtec Codices (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Publications in Anthropology, 1994); Molly H. Bassett, “Wrapped in Cloth, Clothed in Skins: Aztec Tlaquimilolli (Sacred Bundles) and Deity Embodiment,” History of Religions 53, no. 4 (2014): 369–400; Montero gave a riveting talk on the significance of hummingbird bundles to migration and Amerindian society; as well as the relationship of bundles to the Mixtec deity Huitzilopochtli who is often depicted as a half hummingbird half human; Montero notes the relationship between Huitzilopochtli and hummingbirds as a catalyst for reimagining and “rethinking” the categories of the human; one of the most compelling sources Montero references in her analysis is the depiction of a sacred bundle explosion which created the known universe from the Codex Borgia. 28 Pohl, 26; According to Pohl, “Bundles are commonly associated with the creation of the world and the migrations of the group. There is often a connection between the bundles and some form of kinship group hierarchy which includes a supreme sacred bundle which is viewed as the chief focus of social unity. Finally, chieftaincy or kingship is based on and/or traced back to the possession, preservation, or taking care of sacred bundles.; Bassett, 371.
or act like nomadic peoples.29 Garcés likened the Cuitlatecan “bad inclinations” and propensity to bribe and trick public officials to qualities of Gypsies; attributes that the “warlike” and God-fearing Tarascans—who had notably adopted Spanish tropes of Christianity, good behavior, and decency just like the subjects he oversaw in Guatemala and Honduras—did not share.
It is not surprising that Garcés had been familiar with the Romani people, as he had been in proximity to various population centers and lucrative trade routes that traveled through Andalucia. Yet, it is intriguing that Garcés and his fellow Spanish administrators created individualized accounts of facts through their personal observations of New World Amerindians. They encountered peoples that looked physically different from themselves and had cultural practices and customs deemed “unimaginable” to the Spanish mind. While the descriptions of Amerindians found in the Relaciones can often be disturbing, these examples of colonizers encountering “exotic naturals” and familiarizing them via their innate biases and cultural archetypes cannot be overlooked.30 To further situate the origins or possible inspirations for the array of Old World stereotypes which were applied to Mesoamericans, one must examine the political and social history of Iberia leading up to and during conquest.
Failing to discover a new route to the West Indies in 1492, Christopher Columbus initiated an unprecedented age of European colonization and exploration in the Americas. Conquistadors allied with indigenous dissidents to topple mighty empires in North and South America. The Spanish intended to only replace the highest strata of governors as they relied on systematic extraction that privileged pre-existing political structures; however, plague and invasive species hastened a cataclysmic cultural change. The Spanish filled the Americas with their own flora, fauna, and people, reproducing European values beyond original intentions. In just a century the New World became a New Spain.31 The ideals and philosophies feeding into the newly constructed “Spanish identity” were fueled by a long chain of significant historical events on and off the Iberian Peninsula.
Given its unique historical examples of cultural intersectionality, much about life in medieval Iberia has been dissected and analyzed. Beginning with the Muslim invasions in the early eighth century, the formation 29 Heng, 431-436.
30 Acuña, Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Michoacán, 31-32.
31 Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico, Studies in Environment and History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi-16.
of Al-Andalus, “that part of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule,” and ending with the completion of the Christian Reconquista in 1492, the Iberian Peninsula experienced a rare period of coexistence or “convivencia.”32 Although the over 700-year epoch on the peninsula certainly witnessed instances of violence, there is evidence to support periods of peaceful cooperation and coexistence resulting in reciprocal cultural interactions that benefitted Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout the Middle Ages. This period of cooperation amongst a wide array of Iberian identities came to a rather abrupt halt with the union of the expansionist Catholic monarchs of Castile and Aragon. Recognizing the difficulties in maintaining a state which contained multiple religions, ethnicities, and cultures, the monarchs chose to plant the seeds for mass conversions, limpieza de sangre or “blood purity,” and the creation of a nonexistent “Spanish identity.”33
According to historian Tamar Herzog, “a common Spanish nativeness, which included all natives of all Spanish kingdoms, originated in Spanish America sometime at the end of the sixteenth-century and was the result of a new monopoly that allowed only ‘natives of the kingdoms of Spain’ (naturales de los reinos de España) to emigrate to and to trade in the New World.”34 This newfound native identity came at the cost of multiple violent inquisitions, the Reconquista, and the forced conversion of Muslims and Jews on the Iberian Peninsula as well as pagan Amerindians in the New World. Furthermore, this creation of a new national identity facilitated the effectiveness of conceptualizing the “other” through stereotypes deemed typical of certain groups who populated Iberia. Medievalist David Nirenberg notes that cultural and hierarchical boundaries were built and reinforced by enduring stereotypes between Christians and Jews in Spain.35
The Jewish, Muslim, and Romani peoples of the Iberian Peninsula fell victim to prejudice and stereotyping well before and after the sixteenth century—a reality which permeates throughout the relaciones of New Spain. Though Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Catholicism by the late 1500s, they were labeled as
32 Thomas F. Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester, UK ; Manchester University Press, 1995), xiii.
33 Fuchs, 1-9.
34 Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (Yale University Press, 2003), 65.
35 David Nirenberg, “Was There Race before Modernity?: The Example of ‘Jewish’ Blood in Late Medieval Spain,” in Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today, by David Nirenberg (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 169–90.
conversos (Jewish converters/new Christians and their descendants) and moriscos (former Muslims and their descendants) by the Spanish crown and its administration.36 Alongside the negative tropes of the Romani as “wandering” and “swindling” nomads, the obsession of limpieza de sangre concerning conversos and moriscos led to continuous stereotyping and often senseless violence towards the minority groups. While many wealthy conversos and moriscos enjoyed a normalized life in Iberia, most individuals associated with these groups did not have that privilege. Furthermore, this Spanish concern with one’s familial reputation and limpieza de sangre highlights how the categories imposed upon Jews and Muslims of Iberia “were about reputation and were not really concerned with bodies.”37 These concerns with societal norms such as religious worship, food customs, and community interactions are what seem to influence the instances of stereotyping found in the Relaciones corpus.
I found a total of twenty-six mentions in relation to Gypsies, Jews, Moors, and Barbarians in nine of the ten volumes of the Relaciones Geográficas. Volume one, which contains the relaciones of Guatemala, was the sole volume without a response including the use of Old World stereotypes. As stated by Diego Garcés, the Guatemalans converted to Christianity with little to no resistance. In his relación of Ajuchitlan, Garcés likened the “God-fearing Tarascans” and their adherence to Christian societal norms such as mourning loved ones and regularly attending church to actions characteristic of the “Indians” he oversaw in Guatemala. Of the twenty-six relaciones that did include stereotypes, there are two that include two or more categorizations. Consequently, there are twenty-eight mentions of the four stereotypes: Gypsies, Jews, Moors, and Barbarians. I decided to include Vizcaino (Biscayan) as a stereotype in both the graph (Fig.4) above and the ArcGIS Esri mapping visualization (Fig.5) below.
This addition is due to a relacion of Tlaxcala completed by creole corregidor Diego Muñoz Camargo (1529-1599) in 1580 in which he equates Moors, Jews, and Biscayans (Basques) to villains.38 Camargo’s stereo
36 María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1-21.
37 Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 8-11.
38 René Acuña, Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Tlaxcala, vol. 4, 10 vols., Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1984), translation courtesy of Edsel Llaurador and Professor Mackenzie Cooley; “From each family branch of these and the capital, proceeded many other Tecotles entailed estates which means to say knights and lords, and other branches called Pilcales which is to say “branches descended from noble families of important men, hidalgos, of which to pay particular attention because the descendents of these are esteemed as eminent men. Because, although they be the poorest, they do not use servile trades, low or base conduct nor do they ever permit themselves to carry or dig with hoes, saying that they are hidalgos and that they are not to apply
typing of individuals from the Bay of Biscay as villains is intriguing since he was born in Mexico. Camargo’s stereotyping suggests that Spanish colonial administrators, whether creoles or Iberians, perpetuated Old World stereotypes despite having never interacted with these stereotyped populations.
Furthermore, later in his relación, Camargo said the following when considering some cultural and religious practices of the Tlaxcalans:
“Many want to assume that these people came from the Hebrews because their suits and footwear seem to be like Hebrew although in one thing it causes a big doubt and it is that if they were Hebrews they would be circumcised and would circumcise; but these nations did not do that. Nevertheless, they perform and use many other Judaic ceremonies. The first is that they are very fond of smelly flowers and foliage and green branches, that in their holiday they cover their houses and temples with foliage and a variety of flowers and branches...
…they had also lavaculos (butt-washers) where they washed the dirty things from the blood of these sacrifices of the things that they sacrificed themselves to these dirty things, if it has nothing to do with serving in wars and frontiers, as hidalgos, and to die as men, fighting. This virtuous madness lasts and remains until now, saying that they are hidalgos and caballeros from Abinitio and that now they are even better because they converted to the true God and have become Christians, pledging obedience to the Emperor Don Carlos, king of Castile. Besides and beyond this, they helped him to win and conquer all the surroundings and vast structure of this New World, giving him the right and action that they had against the Mexicanos because he was the universal king and lord of them; and that for this reason they are hidalgos and caballeros. They say these and other boastings and crazy things, they never stop boasting about the armor, so when some Spaniard mistreated them, they say that he is a bad Christian and not an hidalgo or caballero, because if he were, his works and words would be modest like a caballero; but that he must be a villain, Moor or Jew or Vizcaino. And as a final touch, when they do not find in him disgrace with which the censure him with, they say to him “in the end, you are portuguese” thinking that in this way they have insulted him a lot.”
like in the pool of Jerusalem, at the least in the pool of Mexico. Hebrew and Chaldaic vocabulary is found among these people, now the children, in the beginning to gurgle and talk, call bread Papa, and water Atl and mother Mana and father Tatah, and God they call Teotl...
…and that there were these Indians of the Hebrews we should not be amazed, now that they could come and pass through the straits that we talked about before, by trunks of trees, like they say, and being part of these, of those tribes of Roboan, and they went with Jeroboan, then so until today nothing was known of them, although some say that these tribes that split off like this are enclosed in the Sierras of Armenia by a curse and that they have to leave there when the end of the world approaches. As for this, each one will follow the opinion that best suits him; but to me, it seems that some of them come from those people and the tribes of Israel. As I have mentioned, since they split from their kinds and their law and now knowing the law under which they were to live, lured by the Devil, they gave into idolatry and fell in two-thousand errors against human and divine law and the law of nature. It is not found that they had synagogues nor covered temples but they worshiped in the fields and in the ranges and high mountain and there they built their heathen temples, and in a very high tower like a pyramid, although one climbed by stairs up to the top and on the surface of said tower they had two chapels at the top not bigger than how much was needed to fit the idols and their very bad priests, as will be said in due time. And those that they worshiped for gods, they had to be kings or princes that governed them well, they had their burials and ashes in these pagan towers or houses. Being alive, they wore tiaras or a kind of miter that served as crowns. And some of their idols they put them painted with these crowns and high kings that they had recorded in their ancient times. These people used work of woven feathers in their tabernacles, since God ordered that there be worked curtains, woven of feathers with which to decorate the tabernacle, as it appears in the Holy Scripture, which work, we read, none of the nations of the world, until today, had it nor used it nor had known how to use it for how difficult it was of not these Mexican Indians and their nations. From where it is inferred that really these are Jews, because with this adornment they serve their gods in their temples. Also, in the pieces of lands that they divided among themselves, they called them “cords of land” as we say “pieces of land” in this way the natives call them “mecatles of land.”39
39 Ibid, Camargo’s History of Tlaxcala.
As made evident by Camargo’s rant on the devilish Hebrews and Jews who were undoubtedly found amongst Tlaxcalan society, Spanish administrators concerned themselves with the “godless” and pagan rituals of Mesoamericans. Camargo notes these “Hebrews” were led by “bad priests;” perhaps he didn’t enjoy the priest’s service. Camargo not only imposes the categories of Hebrew and Jew onto the Tlaxcalans but further alludes to a sort of converso status, for even if they converted, “they gave into idolatry and fell in two-thousand errors against human and divine law and the law of nature.” A similar concern with Mesoamerican “heathen temples” is expressed by Hernán Cortés in his second letter to Emperor Charles V (1500-1558). When writing about his arrival to the city of Tenochtitlan, Cortés wrote “…on the other side there are very good and large houses, like of lodging from mosques.”40 Cortés proceeds to mention mosques at least fifteen more times when recollecting his wandering throughout Tenochtitlan. Though Cortés recognized the structural and architectural beauty of the Aztec temples throughout the capital city, he characterizes them as heathenistic mosques.
The percentage distributions on Fig. 4 open new paths of analyses on the topic of Old World stereotypes invading Mesoamerica. The most abundant mentions (sixty-two percent) are those of bárbaros (barbarians). These responses categorize the indigenous Mesoamericans as barbarians due to a range of factors from their modes of combating disease to the way they clean their homes. In his 1579 response to question seventeen which inquired about the “health of the land,” Pedro de Navarrete attributed the barbarous nature of the native population as the reason behind their inability to combat deadly disease.41 As defined by the 1611 Covarrubias Dictionary, also known as El Tesoro de la lengua Castellana o Española (The Treasure of the Spanish or Castilian Tongue), bárbaros are individuals who “are without letters [writing], those who are of bad customs, badly behaved,… and finally, those who are defiant and cruel.”42 Given its wide applications and versatility as a word that categorizes the “other,” it is not extraordinary that Mesoamericans were stereotyped as barbaric with six times the occurrence of mentions of Jews or Moors—especially when considering the locations of the mentions.
40 Hernán Cortés, “Second Relation Letter from Hernán Cortés to Emperor Charles V,” October 30, 1530.
41 René Acuña, Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Antequera II, vol. 3, 10 vols., Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1984); 34, “es el temple de este pueblo frío y airoso, y el aire que en él corre de ordinario son ponientes y solanos, y nortes que destiemplan los cuerpos de los naturales. Y, a causa de estar en serranía, hay muchos humedales que les causan romadizos y tos y, a otros, cámaras, de que mueren, aunque buscan remedios de yerbas y raíces y huesos de leones. Aunque, como bárbaros, no deben saber aplicar las medicinas conforme al humor de las enfermedades.”
42 Sebastián de Covarrubias, “Barbaro,” in The Tesoro de La Lengua Castellana o Española (Madrid, 1611).
Other than the cluster of barbarian mentions just north of Tenochtitlan in the Relaciones attributed to Alonso de Contreras Figueroa, the majority of barbarian mentions are mostly in rural or sparsely populated areas. Perhaps it proved more challenging to religiously convert and assimilate Mesoamericans in these secluded areas. Unlike the rurally prolific barbarian stereotype, three out of three mentions of Jews—one in Veracruz and two in Tlaxcala—are all describing Mesoamericans from urban centers. Two out of three mentions of Moors are located in urban centers (one in Tezcoco and one in Tlaxcala) while mentions of Gypsies are found in locations that were not as densely populated as the dwindling urban centers of Tlaxcala, Tezcoco, and Veracruz.43
In summary, colonial administrators employed stereotypes of Gypsies in responses concerning Mesoamerican clothing or nomadic peoples; likenings to Jews and Moors indicated heathen-like and villainous behavior coupled with a lack of Christian values; lastly, scribes used barbarian stereotypes in a more generalized context to describe indigenous peoples of rural towns. These categories of alterity were attributed to Mesoamericans in response to the ways they dressed, consumed food, practiced religion, and reacted to colonization. The indigenous state of nature and society was forever changed thanks to the Spanish colonizers and their burdens of Old World tropes of alterity, flora, fauna, religion, dress, and disease.
While it remains unclear whether the stereotypes attributed to Amerindians in the Relaciones contributed to a racializing of bodies, it can be said with certainty that Mesoamericans who failed to adapt to Spanish standards of society, civility, and true religion were stereotyped with Old World tropes of alterity. Just
43 Though these cities were certainly more populated than their rural counterparts, the once bustling urban centers were decimated by disease by the late sixteenth century.
as conceptions of “blood purity” and the legitimacy of genetic testing have plagued Native American tribes that once inhabited lands all across the United States, it is undeniable that refined Spanish concepts of “limpieza de sangre” exported from the Iberian Peninsula molded Mesoamerican and Latin American society to unimaginable extents.44, 45
The creation of a Spanish identity—whose foundations are still in question to this day—came at great cost. The multicultural and multiethnic peoples of the Iberian Peninsula were not easily unifiable for the empire. While the conquest of the New World provided the crown with the perfect opportunity for unification amongst the Catholic peoples of Iberia, this “unified” Spanish state was resting upon the creation of the “other.” Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Biology, Neurosurgery, and Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University, examines perspectives from various fields of science to synthesize the never-ending human struggle with group identification. He sheds light on the issues of the “other” as a means of creating social cohesion and feeding into our subconscious biases.46 Balancing innate biological and neurological tendencies with free will, Sapolsky takes a pragmatic and fact driven approach. Though historian of philosophy Justin E.H. Smith would surely say Sapolsky is being too hasty with his conclusions on “the kinks of the human mind,” Sapolsky understands the limitations of science in explaining behavior.47 We are complex social beings that hold ties to ethnicity, religion, nationality, and ideology. At the same time, we historically limit ourselves to our “in-groups” vs. “out-groups” no matter the nature of our groupings.
Acuña, René. Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Antequera. Vol. 2. 10 vols. Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1984.
Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Antequera II. Vol. 3. 10 vols. Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1984.
Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: México. Vol. 6. 10 vols. Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985.
44 Tallbear, 32.
45 Martínez, 52-8
46 Robert Sapolsky, “This Is Your Brain on Nationalism: The Biology of Us and Them,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 2 (2019): 42-47.
47 Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, & Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 266-267.
Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: México II. Vol. 7. 10 vols. Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1986.
Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: México III. Vol. 8. 10 vols. Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1986.
Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Michoacán. Vol. 9. 10 vols. Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1987.
Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Nueva Galicia. Vol. 10. 10 vols. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1988.
Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Tlaxcala. Vol. 4. 10 vols. Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1984.
Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI: Tlaxcala II. Vol. 5. 10 vols. Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985.
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The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. 30th anniversary ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
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Melville, Elinor G. K. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Studies in Environment and History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Montero, Iris. “Hummingbird: Human and More than Human Migrants.” Natural Things Conference at Hamilton College, April 7, 2019.
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Pbk. ed. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
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“After breakfast, [I] joined Mama & Alexander, who had come to be photographed by Dr. Becker. Albert came out about an hour [later]… Three photographs were taken, 2 of which proved complete failures.”1 Queen Victoria’s (1819 - 1901) relationship with photography is summed up perfectly in the quotation above: trial and error. Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (18191861) took a keen interest in photography. According to Anne Lydon, they acquired several daguerreotypes from the firm of Claudet and Houghton after their wedding to start a photographic collection.2 Victoria’s relationship with photography can be characterized by three evolutionary phases distinguished by shifts in her pictorial representation. First, there was a dualistic photographic representation of Victoria as both both regal and domestic, a queen as well as a wife and mother who embodied middle-class Victorian family values. Then Victoria appeared as a more distant and regal monarch, solidifying her role as a cultural icon who was both detached and ever-present through the growing culture of consumerism spearheaded by the bourgeoisie. Following Victoria’s death, her regal image was fully coopted by commercial interests and endlessly commodified. Over the course of this representational evolution, Victoria’s image became ubiquitous as the forces of commodification fashioned the Queen into a character both familiar and accessible to the masses.
I will use three seminal works in the history of photography to frame my argument: The Burden of Representation by John Tagg, Disillusioned by Jordan Bear, and On Photography by Susan Sontag. Tagg’s work sparked my intellectual curiosity as he challenged readers to distance themselves from the rhetorical history of photographs and question the structures supporting photographs’ significance.3 Tagg’s discussion of bourgeois
1 Queen Victoria, Queen Victoria’s Journals, 24 September 1853, Royal Archives.
2 Anne Lyden, A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2014), 27.
3 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 35.
hegemony has significantly influenced my analysis of Victoria’s commodification that follows. Bear provides insight into how Victorians viewed themselves and photography, and Sontag offers a broader analysis of the essence of photography’s power and how people relate to it.
Different photographs and other material objects demonstrate the progression of the commodification of Victoria’s persona. Official photographs from Victoria’s reign, especially the Golden and Diamond Jubilees, laid the foundation for the commodification of Victoria’s image. I will compare these images to other objects, ranging from milk jugs and medallions to mourning cloths produced after the Queen’s death. Commodification renders a person a persona, adaptable and malleable.4 Victoria initially worked to control her persona but the bourgeoisie worked to mold and further profit from her. Commodification lent Victoria’s image a sense of neutrality, allowing the forces of commodification to continually recast her image in various ways for diverse target markets.
Tagg asserts that “the camera is never merely an instrument.”5 Victoria viewed photography as a method to strengthen her pictorial relationship with her subjects; yet, she was unable to predict the larger consequences that would stem from the proliferation of her image, primarily her eventual objectification. The objectification of Victoria’s image was endowed with an ethereal, bourgeois power that swayed all members of society. The intoxicating power of Victoria’s image was proliferated by
4 The use of commodification in this essay mainly refers to the definition laid out by John Richards in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914. While mainly referring to physical demonstration, which this essay also covers in great length, commodification can be applied to people. This essay will primarily focus on auratic commodification that occurs with a being’s essence, referring to the ideals ical Texts,” The Russian Review vol. 60, no. 3(Jul., 2001): 340-359. modification dilutes said essence and places it across different objects and, mainly, images. These images are endowed with a similar auratic presence but is unnameable by the naked eye. Individual actors capitalize off of this structure for their own financial gain.
5 Tagg, Burden of Representation, 150.
new technological innovation, leading to the creation of a new, mass consumer culture.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Victoria experimented with new photographic methods to appeal to her changing country, especially to the growing middle class. While her interest in photography started as a private endeavor, Victoria’s court photographers gave her the tools to experiment with a new public image. Technological advancements allowed the Queen’s image to be reproduced for a larger audience. Victoria decided to propagate a dual public image, embodying both the regal and the domestic.
Victoria came to the throne after the passage of the Reform Act of 1832, which expanded the right to vote to an additional 250,000 men and granted more political representation to growing urban areas.6 In order to maintain their historical power, the aristocracy united with the emerging middle class to form a bourgeois political union. The middle class, ecstatic to be included, sought to liken themselves to the aristocracy through portraiture.7 However, while adopting some aristocratic aesthetic features, the middle class still differed in their ideals and manners.8 According to David Brewster, “sovereigns [sought] to reign only through the affections of their people,” but Victoria now had to appeal to this new political union both within and outside of the palace walls.9
Three photographers influenced Victoria’s early reign: Dr. Ernest Becker (1826 - 1888), Roger Fenton (1819 - 1869), and William Bambridge (1819 - 1879). While all three men showed Victoria how to use photography to benefit herself and the Crown, Becker initially taught her how to experiment with her domestic image. Becker had a close relationship with Victoria and her children, which allowed him to take informal photographs of the royal family.10 According to Lyden, Victoria
6 John A. Phillips and Charles Wetherell, “The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 414; These newly enfranchised men shifted the balance of power in Parliament. Prior to the Reform Act, Parliamentary constituencies favored aristocratic and rural areas. Now, urban middle class men, who had different concerns than rural aristocrats, had direct access to institutions of power like Parliament that made decisions regarding taxes, the budget, etc.
7 Tagg, Burden of Representation, 38.
8 While the middle class attempted to mirror the aristocracy, the financial realities of both groups were quite different. Those of the middle class had to work more consistent hours while receiving less pay and oftentimes sought cheaper alternatives to fit their budget constraints. The aesthetic appropriation of fine aristocratic commodities contributed to the growing middle-ground between a working-class and aristocratic “culture” in Great Britain.
9 David Brewster, quoted in Jordan Bear, Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 13; Bear, Disillusioned, 90.
10 Victoria, Queen Victoria’s Journals, 24 September 1853, Royal Archives.
and Albert began experimenting with their poses under Becker’s eye, sometimes appearing more serious and at other times more relaxed.11
Becker’s photographs had a limited influence because they were all daguerreotypes. Daguerreotypes, invented by Louis Daguerre, were one of the earliest photographic methods that could capture the pure image of an object. Presented in front of the French Chamber of Deputies in 1839, the process revolutionized how people saw the world. The French government gave Daguerre an annual life pension of 6,000 francs in return for the patent on the process, allowing his photographic method to be used across France and continental Europe.12 Dominique Francois Arago, addressing the chamber, claimed that “the rapidity of the method has probably astonished the public more than anything else.”13 This statement applied only to a bourgeois audience. The general public was likely unaware of this process, since the price alone excluded most working-class people from the opportunity to have their pictures taken.14 Daguerreotypes were
11 Anne Lyden, A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography (Loss Angeles: Getty Publications, 2014), 110-111.
12 Dominique Francois Arago, Report of the French Chamber of Deputies (1839), 15.
13 Ibid, 19.
14 Daguerreotypes were incredibly expensive. The average person’s weekly
not reproducible, meaning that each was one of a kind. Thus, most working-class individuals were precluded from even seeing a photograph, let alone having their own image captured.
Queen Victoria’s collection of daguerreotypes could only be shared with friends and relatives. She often delighted when Victoria, Princess Royal (1840 - 1901), provided her with photographs of her newly born children.15 At this point, photography for Victoria and Albert was merely a pastime reserved for the private sphere, not yet consumed with manufacturing the perfect image that would represent the royal family to the nation. While many of Roger Fenton’s photographs of the royal family were daguerreotypes and not for public consumption, they represent a noticeable shift in the demeanor of the royal family.16 Even though Fenton had a more formal working relationship with the royal family, he enabled Victoria and Albert to delve further into the composition and poses of their photographs. Under Fenton’s eye, both royals realized that slight differences in a photograph could drastically alter its meaning. As will be discussed later with Figure 2, a subject’s gaze in salary during this time would most likely cover the cost of obtaining a photo of themselves or their family. While many could have read news regarding the new invention, the average citizen would not have had ready access to such an image.
15 Victoria, Queen Victoria’s Journals, 24 September 1856, Royal Archives. 16 Lyden, A Royal Passion, 113-114.
a photograph in turn determines the focal point for the viewer.
Technological advancements in the 1850s made possible the mass reproduction of photographs, allowing photographs to reach more British subjects. The ambrotype, invented in 1851, was a cheaper and more reproducible photographic method than the daguerreotype. While it allowed more middle class families the opportunity to obtain their own photographs, the cost still served as a barrier to most working-class families. This changed in 1854, when André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri patented his carte-de-visite process. Using four lenses, Disdéri could produce up to eight photographs of a single plate.17 These images were then pasted on card stock and sold to the general public. For the first time, many Britons could physically hold a photograph of their own and see figures that they had only heard about or read about in the newspaper. Millions of Britons now gained access to photographs.
These technological advancements happened to overlap with the start of Bambridge’s tenure as family photographer in 1861. Almost all of Bambridge’s photographs of the royal family were ambrotypes or carte-devisites intended for public distribution.18 As Bambridge was the first photographer to publish images of Victoria, he enabled her experimentation to finally reach the British public. Through the influence of all three men and development of the carte-de-visite process, Victoria came to see photography “as a means to an end, as a way of creating and sustaining relationships” with her subjects.19
Bambridge’s tenure marked the decisive transition to the Victorian duality of the regal and domesticated monarchy. As Thomas Richards observes, Victoria realized that the image of the “domesticated consumer queen” appealed to women, who were slowly gaining new economic independence.20 Moreover, according to John Plunkett, Victoria sought to break from the “old autocratic past” by wearing new middle-class fashion, generating middle-class interest in the Queen.21
Victoria used carte-de-visites to propagate her duality and appeal to the bourgeoisie. Figure One is a carte-de-visite by John Jabez Edwin Mayall. Victoria attends to Albert as he sits reading in a chair, showcasing her femininity while playing into traditional gender roles. In 1860, Mayall would publish Figure one and other carte-de-visites in his “Royal Album.”22 Through these images, the royal family actively attempted to sell and
17 John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 151.
18 Lyden, A Royal Passion, 119.
19 Ibid, 126.
20 Thomas Richards, “The Image of Victoria in the Year of Jubilee,” Victorian Studies vol. 31, no. 1 (1987): 24.
21 Plunkett, Queen Victoria, 198.
22 Ibid, 144.
promote itself to the general public. As women gradually gained economic independence, they no longer had to be completely focused on serving their husbands. In Figure 1, Victoria assumes the role of a domestic monarch, acting as an attentive, yet not dominated, wife.
Figure Two is a carte-de-visite taken by Roger Fenton and offers a different view of Victoria and Albert’s relationship. Both Victoria and Albert sit on a bench. Attention is immediately drawn towards Victoria despite both figures sitting on the same level. Victoria’s gaze into the camera creates a connection with the viewer. As Henri Cartier-Bresson stated, “the eye [finds] and [focuses] on the particular subject within the mass of reality…the camera [simply registers] upon film the decision made by the eye.”23 The photograph dares you to look anywhere else but at Victoria, but her gaze is too strong. Even Albert’s gaze in the photograph is attentive to Victoria, presenting himself as the admiring and respectful partner in the displayed relationship.
Victoria used carte-de-visites to forge a pictorial relationship with British society. Photography could now operate as a method to maintain the Queen’s throne beyond the royal palace. The carte-de-visites, and photography more generally, powerfully portrayed “miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”24 The dual regal and domestic image of Victoria was palatable to every part of the bourgeoisie, both increasing the profitability of Victoria’s image and allowed her cartede-visites to reach many people in a relatively short period of time. The proliferation of these carte-de-visites gave consumers a “unique experience” in which they felt that Victoria and Albert were in their homes.25
These carte-de-visites marked a new relationship between mass culture, photography, and the royal family.26 Victoria’s image had a widespread appeal because it combined what Richards describes as “the material world of the Victorian court and the ethereal world of the beyond.”27 For the first time, the general public could interact with an institution that had been previously considered unreachable. 28 Victoria became generalized property, no longer simply viewed as an ethereal being, now belonging to the people of the United Kingdom. Victoria used photography to both enhance and supplement her regality, believing that her grip on the throne would be stronger through widespread interactions with her image. For the first time, both the
23 Henri Cartier-Bresson, “The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers,” The Decisive Moment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 32.
24 Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” On Photography (1973), 4.
25 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), 215.
26 Ibid.
27 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 104.
28 Plunkett, Queen Victoria, 145.
middle and working classes could forge a personalized connection with the monarch at minimal cost. To further strengthen her relationship with her subjects, Victoria only copyrighted about four hundred of her photographs between 1862 and 1901––an insignificant number compared to the Prince and Princess of Wales who each had almost seven hundred copyrighted photographs.29 Victoria sought to become a familiar image that would be further proliferated by artists.
Although Victoria cultivated a pictorial relationship with her subjects, the actual authenticity of her character was manipulated to portray an imagined Victoria. Becker’s daguerreotypes depicted only the real Victoria and her family; however, the movement of her dual image outside of the private sphere precipitated a muddled pictorial identity. This new character was now susceptible to other external forces that would attempt to coopt her image and claim it as their own.
The death of Albert in December 1861 sent Victoria into a deep depression that would last until the end of her reign. She stopped attending royal ceremonies and they had “to be conducted in absentia, [becoming] shabbier” than when Victoria had been in attendance.30 The British public missed the Queen and wanted to observe the unobservable.31 This seclusion created a greater demand for Victoria’s image to be shown, reinforcing the pictorial relationship with her subjects that had begun with carte-de-visites. Further technological innovations beginning in the 1860s precipitated an unprecedented proliferation of Victoria’s image, culminated with her 1887 Golden Jubilee celebrating of her fiftieth year on the throne. While believing that she was only furthering her pictorial relationship with her subjects, Victoria allowed capitalistic forces to appropriate and manipulate her image. The previous Victorian duality of regality and domestic life was tossed aside for a new Victoria.
In the beginning of her Jubilee year, Victoria’s depression was still evident. On June 20, 1886, she wrote in her journal:
I [am] upset at the thought of those no longer with me, who would have been so pleased & happy, in particular my beloved Husband, to whom I owe everything, & my dear children Alice & Leopold, who are gone to a happier world. I am very thankful to God for His protection & guidance through all these years, praying it may be continued, & for the great loyalty & devotion of my people!”32
29 Ibid, 157.
30 Richards, “Image of Victoria,” 9.
31 Bear, Disillusioned, 149.
32 Victoria, Queen Victoria’s Journals, 20 June 1886, Royal Archives; Victoria believed she was being bombarded by distracting and annoying questions
Victoria became anxious about preparations for the Golden Jubilee.33 She felt the planning was bothersome and decided to take a hands-off approach to the whole ordeal.34
While Victoria’s pictorial relationship with her subjects had remained important since Albert’s death in 1861, the Golden Jubilee provided new opportunities for commercial producers to utilize Victoria’s image. Technological innovations leading up to 1887 allowed photographs to be reproduced at a faster and cheaper rate. Advertisers and other commercial interests had previously attempted to appropriate Victoria’s image, but they had been unsuccessful prior to the Golden Jubilee. The Jubilee provided the perfect context to successfully propagate Victoria’s image across the United Kingdom. Victoria as an individual did not have the powerful charisma to sell thousands of photographs, but her role as monarch compounded with her seclusion after Albert’s death created a sense of spectacle around her.35
The most prominent image of Victoria was her Golden Jubilee portrait seen in Figure 3, originally taken by Alexander Bassano for the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Albany in 1882. Victoria did not particularly like any of the photographs taken specially for the Jubilee in 1887, so she chose one of Bassano’s earlier works. This image would be reproduced on official and commercial objects alike to commemorate the Jubilee.
Figure Four is a bronze Maltese cross with Victoria’s image in the center. On either side of her engraving are different symbols of the Kingdom, topped with a crown and the year of her coronation. On the back are the lyrics to God Save the Queen, with the opening words in the center. Easily transportable and relatively inexpensive, medals like these were widely distributed to subjects throughout the empire. Crosses and medals
33 Victoria, 25 March 1887, Royal Archives.
34 Ibid, 30 May 1887.
were in high demand because “everybody in London,” and throughout the country, “from countesses to costermongers, had to have some token of the Jubilee.”36
Victoria gave these medallions throughout the celebration to commoners and foreign dignitaries alike.37 As Richards asserts, “Victoria collected everything she came into contact with.”38 In turn, Victoria constantly gifted her image to visiting dignitaries, further expanding her pictorial relationship with them. When these dignitaries would return home, they could look back at that image and remember all the interactions they had had with her. This differed for commoners, who indirectly experienced the Queen through receiving the object from her servants. Despite her relative seclusion from royal ceremonies, Victoria was present in the homes and minds of her subjects.
According to Richards, Jubilee souvenirs attempted to narrate the events of Victoria’s reign, endowing them with a commemorative quality.39 These souvenirs offered widely different depictions of Victoria, as commercial producers had no uniform image or style with which to represent the Queen. Figure Five is a milk jug that displays Victoria’s Golden Jubilee portrait surrounded by a border and flowers. The other side has Victoria’s coronation crown and the year of the Jubilee, assuring consumers that this was no ordinary jug. The gold tracing on the rim and the size of the jug suggests that this product targeted a middle-class market.
Figure Six is another milk jug, displaying Victoria’s image encircled by the words “Victoria, Queen of England, Empress of India” with the year of the Golden Jubilee at the bottom. The other side of the jug features Victoria’s coronation crown. These two jugs mirror each other in design, but Victoria’s image in Figure Six is visibly distorted; therefore the jug was of a lower quality and likely produced for the working class.
Both images on the jugs exemplify how capitalistic forces started a new trend of production. According to Richards, capitalists saw Victoria’s image as “a model of referentiality: it burst the confines of traditional iconography and made it possible for any language to be attached to any image.”40 The Golden Jubilee signifies the decisive abandonment of Victoria’s bourgeoisie duality. Even though this duality had weakened after Albert’s death, Victoria had become the general property of millions of Britons, making her a universal image. It was only the new ability for mass photographical reproduction that allowed Victoria’s image to be co-opted by the bourgeoisie, for their own profit. Victoria accepted and encouraged this development. In her eyes, the middle-class was not appropriating her image. Her image
36 Ibid, 18.
37 Victoria, Queen Victoria’s Journals, 22 June 1887, Royal Archives.
38 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 110.
39 Ibid, 95.
40 Ibid, 107-108.
was again a way to maintain contact with her subjects.41 Victoria believed that she had control, because it was still her own image that was reaching her subjects. Victoria’s copyright on certain images gave her a sense of confidence, as she could personally decide who would be able to use her photographs, whether it was for an advertising campaign, news story, or to be placed on an object.
On the day of the Golden Jubilee, Victoria wrote: “The day has come, & I am alone, though surrounded by many dear Children. I am writing after a very fatiguing day, in the Garden at Buckingham Palace, where I used to sit so often in former happy days. 50 years today since I came to the throne. God has mercifully sustained me through many great trials and sorrows.”42 Victoria, still in a deep depression, viewed herself as an ugly, widowed queen. If presented with both milk jugs, Victoria would have been more concerned with how severely disfigured her image looked in Figure Six, than with how her image had been co-opted.
As the Jubilee day ended, Victoria found herself quite pleased with the outcome. In her journal, she wrote: “Never can I forget this brilliant year, so full of the marvelous kindness, loyalty & devotion of so many millions, which I could hardly have expected. I felt sadly the absence of these dear ones, who would so entirely have
rejoiced in this eventful time.”43
The Golden Jubilee presented a reinvigorated image of Victoria that “overwhelmed and obliterated the old image of the melancholy widowed queen” not only to the public, but to Victoria herself.44 The Victoria who would have been concerned with the crude milk jug had, even if momentarily, vanished; she was reminded of her millions of subjects throughout the Empire. Victoria had finally cemented her pictorial relationship with her subjects, not only through photography, but through its objectifications.
Although Victoria believed that she was in control of the situation, she had actually lost the right to claim her image as her own, because she had ceded it to advertisers and producers. According to Bear, the bourgeoisie’s “enterprise… depended upon the malleability both of visual belief and of the exemplary visual medium through which that belief could be secured.”45 The forces of production endowed Victoria with this malleability, creating a muddled image that could be used to promote any type of product. This cooptation was so effective because it created a truly neutral image of Victoria.
This is where the very spectacle in Victorian advertising melds so perfectly with the capitalist mode of production.46 The commercial producers of the Golden Jubilee were able to capitalize on Victoria’s seclusion, placing her image on a wide range of objects and advertisements. Although a diverse group of industries used Victoria in their advertising, according to Richards, producers and advertisers settled on one representation of Victoria as the “chief-consumer” of England.47 Victoria’s willingness to empower commercial producers was only a small reason for the cooptation of her image. Technological innovations that allowed Victoria’s image to be spread throughout a mass consumer culture marked a decisive shift from the Victorian duality established in the beginning of her reign to that of a malleable, “chief-consumer.”48 The bourgeoisie’s successful muddling of Victoria’s image laid the foundation for celebrity; Victoria served as the first prisoner of this system, her image held captive by the forces of commodification.
Toward the end of her reign, Victoria became even more secluded from the British public. She continued to rely on her pictorial relationship with her subjects, ensuring that her image proliferated throughout the Empire. Victoria’s dual image established when Albert was alive was decisively thrown away by the bourgeoisie and appropriated by an ever-growing visual
43 Ibid, 31 December 1887.
44 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 116.
45 Bear, Disillusioned, 55.
46 Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 16.
47 Richards, “The Image of Victoria,” 15.
48 Ibid.
commercial culture over which Victoria did not have strict control. This process was fully realized during the Golden Jubilee and would be accentuated by new technological innovations at the end of Victoria’s reign; in death, her image became that of a new commercial culture.
New photographic innovations in the 1880s, like half-tone printing and stronger cameras greatly expanded the capabilities of Victoria’s pictorial relationship and image of herself. For most of Victoria’s reign, photography was limited in its reproducibility in the media. Half-tone printing greatly expanded the opportunity for the media to include photographs in news stories and for businesses to experiment with photographic images in their advertisements.49 At the same time, the new strength of cameras made photographs clearer and focused.
The higher resolution of photographs presented a new challenge to Victoria, as she was troubled that these new cameras were able to pick up the marks of her advancing age, like wrinkles. Victoria required all of her 49 Plunkett, Queen Victoria, 166.
photographers to alter her portraits to remove not only wrinkles, but other blemishes that she thought made her look ugly. According to Cartier-Bresson, once “you start cutting or cropping a good photograph, it means death to the geometrically correct interplay of proportions.”50 Victoria molded her essence to appeal to a bourgeois audience. Once one edit was made, proportionality and truth were never achievable, allowing other actors besides Victoria to use that image to promote their own goals.
The next major event of Victoria’s reign to follow these technological advances was Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The event was filled with even more pomp and circumstance than Victoria’s Golden Jubilee had been a decade prior. Displeased with her present appearance, Victoria chose a photo by William and Daniel Downey taken for the wedding of the future King George V and Queen Mary in 1893 for her Diamond Jubilee portrait (Figure Seven).51 William Downey served as Victoria’s personal photographer at this time, in large part because he readily and successfully altered her images, putting her mind at ease.
50 Cartier-Bresson, “The Decisive Moment,” 34.
51 Royal Collection Trust, “Queen Victoria (1819-1901): Diamond Jubilee portrait,” https://www.rct.uk/collection/2912658/queen-victoria-1819-1901-diamond-jubilee-portrait.
Victoria waived the copyright on this image prior to the Diamond Jubilee, enabling anyone to use the image without her permission. As stated earlier, Victoria enjoyed giving her photographic portrait to visitors and receiving theirs in turn. As in the case of the Maltese cross in Part II, Victoria viewed the act of waiving copyright as a means to place her image in the hands of each and every one of her subjects. In this case, however, she was using consumer culture. With minimal effort, Victoria could further profit from her pictorial relationship with her subjects, while appealing to the middle class’ attraction to royal commodities.
As Victoria entered the final years of her life, she found it harder to eat and perform her royal responsibilities. During the final year of her life, Victoria wrote, “Another year begun, - I am feeling so weak & unwell, that I enter upon it sadly. – The same sort of night as I have been having lately, but I did get rather more sleep & was up earlier.”52 For the last years of her life, Victoria had a very difficult time sleeping and withdrew into a deeper seclusion. This placed an increased reliance on the capitalist bourgeoisie network to propagate her image, as she felt too unwell to attend public ceremonies.
Capitalizing on the uncopyrighted image for the Diamond Jubilee, advertisers began exploiting Victoria’s image in every newspaper in the United Kingdom. Figure
52 Victoria, Queen Victoria’s Journals, 1 January 1901, Royal Archives.
Eight depicts an advertisement for Golfer Oats that includes a mirrored version of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee portrait at the top. The caption of the image states, “The Two Safeguards of The Constitution,” referring to Victoria’s status as the head of a constitutional monarchy and how Golfer Oats would protect a person’s physical constitution. The oat industry and Queen Victoria had very few similarities, but capitalists knew their market.
Victoria’s photographic neutrality meant that her image would be effective in courting potential consumers in advertisements for two wildly different industries. In Figure 9, the image of Victoria appears in an advertisement for Fry’s Pure Concentrated Cocoa. The variation in quality between the two posters is apparent. On this jug, Victoria’s image is surrounded by different symbols of the United Kingdom and the flags of colonies throughout the Empire. In small text, it states “By Special Warrant to Her Most Gracious Majesty.” Even though this image was supposed to honor Queen Victoria, she herself would have despised it. Figure Nine portrays an image of Victoria that is extremely distorted and of a much lower quality than seen in Figure 8. Victoria’s main concern was control––she wanted to have the highest quality image of herself disseminated; however, the quality control of Victoria’s image was no longer confined to the palace walls. Outsiders now edited and reproduced the Queen’s image in any manner they desired.
No matter the quality of their depictions, Figures Eight and Nine both represented commercial enterprises that sought to profit from an association with Victoria. According to Tagg, the regime of truth is held up by a system of power created by capitalism.53 The capitalist mode of production was worshiped indirectly through the iconic figure of Victoria, the newly appropriated paragon of bourgeois consumerism. As Thomas Richards observes, “with Victoria already occupying the position of England’s most conspicuous consumer, it should come as no surprise that her image became a commodity.”54 By the time of the Diamond Jubilee, Victoria’s image had become ubiquitous. Her image, and by extension the associated bourgeois values, “appeared to be… a vast benign commissary dispensing the English way of life.”55 The middle-class attire featured in Victoria’s earlier cartede-visites was no longer required; Victoria’s royal image became synonymous with consumer culture, cementing her role as the servant of the bourgeoisie.
In her last diary entry, Victoria wrote, “Had a good night and could take some breakfast better. Took an hour’s drive at half-past two… It was very foggy, but the air was pleasant.”56 Less than two weeks later, Queen Victoria died at Osborne House. With the passing of the
53 Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 94.
54 Richards, “The Image of Victoria,” 13.
55 Ibid, 32.
56 Victoria, Queen Victoria’s Journal, 12 January 1901, Royal Archives.
consumer-queen, the capitalist modes of production wasted no time in appropriating her image yet again. Figure 10 shows a handkerchief mourning the death of the Queen. The image of Victoria is quite poor, likely produced quickly and cheaply. Victoria’s pictorial relationship with her subjects outlived her, now entirely controlled by the bourgeoisie. While still alive, Victoria had a certain degree of influence over her own image; it was never fully ripped from her grasp. Victoria’s death allowed for the complete appropriation by the forces of commodification of the pictorial relationship that Victoria had fostered with her subjects.
The cooptation of Victoria’s image had begun when she decided to glue it to the front of a carte-devisite for all her subjects to see. While Sontag states, “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,” she does not capture the entire picture.57 There is also an aggression implicit in every commodification of a photograph. The certain power of photography allows its objectifications to be imbued with the same power, upholding the systems of truth created by capitalism. Victoria believed that she controlled her image. While this may have been true to some extent in her early experience with photography, the Golden Jubilee relinquished the very definition of her image to commercial producers. In turn, these producers used their newfound power to create and commodify their own Victoria. What these capitalist forces could not do during Victoria’s lifetime was fully claim Victoria as their own; no matter what they did, Victoria had her own voice. When Victoria died, the bourgeoisie decisively gained the upper hand in this pictorial relationship while simultaneously profiting from and subjugating the working 57 Sontag, On Photography, 7.
class. Victoria unknowingly laid the foundation for the creation of a mass consumer culture.
Arago, Dominique. Report to the French Chamber of Deputies, 1839.
Bear, Jordan. Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1935.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. “The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers.” The Decisive Moment. 1952.
Lyden, Anne. A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2014.
Phillips, John and Charles Wetherell. “The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England.” The American Historical Review 100. no. 2 (1995). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2169005.
Plunkett, John. Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography. 1973.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Press, 1988.
Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Richards, Thomas. “The Image of Victoria in the Year of Jubilee.” Victorian Studies vol. 31. no.1, 1987. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/3828060.
Royal Collection Trust. “Queen Victoria (1819-1901): Diamond Jubilee Portrait.” https://www.rct.uk/collection/2912658/queen-victoria-1819-1901-diamond-jubilee-portrait.
Victoria. Queen Victoria’s Journals, Royal Archives. 24 September 1853, 24 September 1856, 20 June 1886, 25 March 1887, 30 May 1887, 20 June 1887, 22 June 1887, 31 December 1887, 12 January 1901.
In analyzing the rule of Joseph Stalin, we often focus on the many Soviet atrocities of the 1930s and accordingly condemn him as a tyrant. However, beyond collectivization, the purges, and the famines, we often fail to consider the quality of life for average Soviet citizens who were neither direct victims of Stalin’s most notorious policies nor members of the privileged elite. When we examine the living and working conditions of Soviet citizens in the 1930s, it becomes evident that even those Soviets whom Stalin did not directly persecute largely suffered.
A primary part of the average Soviet experience was the condition of life at home, specifically the lack of living space. In the 1930s, the majority of Soviets who lived in cities lived in kommunalki, or communal apartments, where a number of families lived together, sharing a single kitchen, toilet, and bathroom.1 From a modern perspective, this cramped environment would seem virtually uninhabitable. Interestingly enough, this assessment was not terribly far from the reality for many kommunalka inhabitants in the 1930s, as evidenced by the apartment of the Khaneyevsky and Sazonov families, in which as many as 15 people lived at one point.2 Conflicts broke out between the two families, such as accusations of “somebody stealing food,” concerns from Nikolai Khaneyevsky’s mother-in-law “that the Sazonovs would steal her silver,” and disputes over the privacy and hygiene of the Sazonov family.3 These battles over such seemingly trivial matters are representative of the social dysfunction that existed within kommunalki Given that, as Figes notes, “the Khaneyevsky household was not overcrowded by comparison with the majority of communal apartments in Moscow and Leningrad,” we should consider that the Khanayevsky apartment was in no way unique in its social dysfunction, especially when we look to the testimony of Vera Orlova who lived in an-
1 In Orlando Figes, The Whisperers, (New York, Metropolitan, 2007), 174.
2 Ibid, 175-176.
3 Ibid, 175.
other Stalinist kommunalka. 4 Orlova testified that “Communal life was terrifying. The inhabitants measured every square centimetre of the corridor and every patch of common space…The ‘neighbours’ timed how long we spent in the bathroom.”5 That kommunalka inhabitants were bitterly protective over their space down to the “square centimetre” reveals how Stalin’s hallmark housing projects caused rampant pettiness and spite among neighbors. Furthermore, it is illuminating that Orlova describes life in the kommunalka as “terrifying,” because it shows that these ubiquitous cases of childlike bickering were not just an inconvenience, but a frightful and taxing ordeal. However, Orlova was not the only citizen to privately complain of cramped living conditions. In a diary housewife Galina Shtange kept in the early 1930s, Shtange commented, “It’s just horrible when you think about how people live these days, and engineers in particular. I heard about one engineer who lives…in a nine[square] meter room. When his mother came to visit, there was absolutely no place for him to do his work.”6 This quotation only reinforces that it is not our modern assumption that life in cramped kommunalka was miserable. Also, that Shtange claims to have “heard” her story about the engineer’s plight suggests that inadequate living space was a common enough problem to be a topic of regular gossip. In looking at all of these accounts, we can see that, from a social standpoint, the limited space in communal apartments was tremendously burdensome, reduced ordinary people to vindictive behavior, and interfered with such fundamental responsibilities as work.
Limited living space was not the only hardship of living in the kommunalka since residents often had little personal property and few basic amenities. Yevgeny Mamlin lived in an early 1930s communal apartment with sixteen families, who, amongst all of them, had only one kitchen, “two toilets…two basins of cold water…
4 Ibid, 176-177.
5 Ibid, 176.
6 Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” The Russian Review vol. 60, no. 3(Jul., 2001): 340-359.[and] no bathroom.”7 For sixteen families to share these few resources must have been nearly impossible. The lack of hot water, along with having no bathroom, would have easily led to a serious hygiene problem. Beyond that, the need to share limited resources and property in apartments like Mamlin’s was likely a contributing factor to the pervasive bickering that, as we have already seen, plagued Stalin-era apartments, especially as the conditions of Mamlin’s kommunalka were rather typical. Minora Novika lived in a 1930s Moscow kommunalka, where her grandmother slept on a table, her brother slept underneath the table, and she and four other family members shared a mattress on the floor.8 In 1931, Nina Paramonova moved into a Leningrad kommunalka, where more than sixty people had to share one kitchen, one toilet, and one cold water shower.9 Accounts of living situations like these under Stalin in the 1930s are myriad. Here, we must acknowledge that the scarcity of these basic resources is evidence of the Soviet government’s inability to fully meet the needs of its citizens during this time, since the state was responsible for communal housing.
Admittedly, not every Soviet citizen in the 1930s lived in overcrowded and under-furnished kommunalki. For instance, in 1931 Mary Leder moved into a Soviet family’s Moscow apartment that contained its own kitchen, washstand, bathtub, and toilet.10 Nonetheless, conditions like these were uncommon, and the family that took Leder in explained to her all the same that life was difficult, food was scarce, and living conditions were poor, let alone nonexistent for those just arriving.11 Even a relatively financially well-off family still experienced a hard life with food rationing and believed housing to be inadequate; therefore, we can see that Soviet apartment life during this time was one of regular hardship that spanned different economic strata. As a result, it is evident that suffering and generalized difficulties were a unilateral experience of urban life under Stalin during the 1930s.
While the majority of ordinary Soviet citizens lived in kommunalki, there were a fair number who lived in barracks attached to their places of work. In 1932, American Andrew Smith traveled to the USSR and began work at the Elektrozavod factory where he chronicled his experience.12 On the Cherkizovo Barracks, in which his friend Kuznetzov and many other factory workers lived, Smith wrote the following:
Kuznetzov lived with about 550 others, men and
7 In Orlando Figes, The Whisperers, 177.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Mary Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia, (Bloomington, Indiana University, 2001), 29-30.
11 Ibid, 30.
12 Andrew Smith, I was a Soviet Worker, (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1936), 30-45.
women, in a wooden structure about 800 feet long and 15 feet wide. The room contained approximately 500 narrow beds, covered with mattresses filled with straw or dried leaves. There were no pillows, or blankets, Coats and other garments were being utilized for covering. Some of the residents had no beds and slept on the floor or in wooden boxes. In some cases beds were used by one shift during the day and by others at night. There were no screens or walls to give any privacy to the occupants of the barracks. There were no closets or wardrobes, because each one owned only the clothing on his back.13
Immediately this account exposes the severity of the familiar problems of overcrowding and lack of personal property. The conditions he depicts are primitive and conjure images of a prison camp, ironically similar to the conditions Alexander Solzhenitsyn would later describe in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. These workers slept in beds stuffed with leaves if they managed to avoid sleeping on the floor and had no way to keep warm save for the clothes that they wore. They had no expectation of privacy, to the degree that strangers would routinely share their beds. Most shocking is Smith’s simple explanation is the lack of furniture in the Cherkizovo Barracks—“each one owned only the clothing on his back”—revealing that the crisis in living conditions extended beyond inadequate housing to truly impoverished conditions amongst Soviet workers. In urban kommunalki, many families lacked furniture or other amenities, but these Soviet factory workers lacked the most basic necessities like clothing and a place to sleep. The image Smith creates in this passage is as much a glimpse into Stalin’s Russia as it is a glimpse into Hell. The Cherkizovo Barracks reveal the reality that ordinary citizens experienced conditions not far removed from the gulags in 1930s USSR.
Outside of citizens’ private lives, reorganization campaigns caused chaos in many Soviet workplaces. We can see the damaging effects of Stalin’s attempt at reorganization particularly well in the account of the operation of a trust in the early 1930s, which alleged that “we’ve undergone a structural change…but no administrative reform.”14 As David Shearer acknowledges, “one official [in this same trust] noted that it could take anywhere from twenty days to five months for a piece of paper to ‘swim’ its way through the bureaucratic system, if it made it at all.”15 The extreme difficulty in moving paperwork “through the bureaucratic system” indicates a greater structural difficulty with communication in general, which was especially problematic given that
13 Ibid, 47.
14 In David R. Shearer, Industry, State, and Society in Stalin’s Russia, 1926— 1934, (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1996), 175.
15 Ibid.
the “Vesenkha,” the body in charge of overseeing Soviet enterprises, requested information from enterprises mere days before administrative deadlines.16 For the governing economic entity to require data within days despite the remarkable difficulty posed by sending paperwork essentially doomed companies to failure. Such administrative mismanagement was certainly a cause of hardship for the average worker who would have suffered the stress of having to work in this dysfunctional bureaucratic environment.
The administrative chaos of the early 1930s under Stalin existed as much within firms as it did between firms and the Vesenkha. One employee of the same firm mentioned above complained that it could take several days to receive needed signatures from higher-ups, describing how “even when I leave a document overnight… it still doesn’t get signed.”17 Another official at the firm described his experience as similarly chaotic: “people are constantly running up to me, quite out of nowhere. They try to sneak a signature from me, often for paperwork marked ‘extremely urgent.’ Who knows what I am signing?”18 These conditions demonstrate a profound dysfunction within the Soviet workplace and allow us to realize the tangible impact of high-level bureaucratic failures on average Soviet citizens. One almost struggles to comprehend what it must have been like to work in an environment such as this firm, where, to accomplish anything, one had to track down superiors who were often absent, or at best totally unaware of the substance or import of what they were signing. Such circumstances resemble a children’s game of tag—having to play such games to conduct regular work created an extra source of stress for workers in many firms.
The Soviet bureaucracy was often simply unable to perform its duties, causing greater hardship for firms and their workers. A revealing example of such government inadequacy was a factory that in 1938 received direction from the Council of People’s Commissars to obtain its own lumber through logging.19 To conduct its own logging operations, the top factory officials determined that they would need “about four million rubles in order to purchase seventy horses, sleighs, equipment, riggings, and many other materials” for which they turned to the central board in Moscow.20 The central board acknowledged that these requests were “justifiable” but stated that it nonetheless “could not satisfy” them because regulations had required the administrative body to turn over any extra funds to the People’s Commissariat of Finance, which had by then already distributed those
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid, 176.
18 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
funds to other entities.21 Even when the government bureaucracy functioned properly, there remained inherent dysfunction related to the bureaucratic organization. Since the central board could not provide funding in this case, it recommended instead that the factory “operate with what [it had] at the plant,” even though the plant lacked what they needed.22 The factory had to draft loggers from its own workforce and owned no saws, having to pay “an exorbitant price” to local residents for their personal saws, posing burdens of lower productivity and higher operating costs on the factory.23 The factory thus subjected its workers to the hardship of demanding physical labor, especially for untrained individuals who have the task suddenly thrust upon them. Consequently, upper-level urban bureaucratic failures negatively impacted the lives of ordinary Soviet workers.
In addition to difficult work lives, many Soviet workers experienced coincidental difficult financial conditions. For instance, Naum Jasny estimates that workers’ real wages in 1932-33 were a mere 49% of their wage level in 1928, and, furthermore, throughout the 1930s real wages never rose above 60% of the 1928 level.24 While individual cases are helpful in illustrating some of the working conditions average Soviet citizens faced under Stalin’s rule, statistics like these illustrate the broad reality for Soviet workers in the 1930s. With such substantial declines in wages, it is without doubt that the average worker faced financial hardship. Furthermore, we can look to the testimony of the workers themselves to reinforce this claim, as one voiced his complaints in a 1934 letter to the party secretary of Tomsk.25 In this letter, the worker inquired “why was bread so expensive, why could workers not live in the city centre, why were their houses not repaired,” and “why was there no fish for sale?”26 As Davies notes, “despite the assurances of the propaganda that the worker ‘no longer thinks only about his daily bread,’ bread continued to assume a huge symbolic and material importance in everyday life.”27 This information depicts a sobering image of the Stalinist 1930s. Through his questioning, the worker reveals his plight of hunger and desperation along with the betrayal by his government that had promised him so fervently that he would have what he needed.
Some improvements arose in the working conditions for average Soviets from the late 1920s to the 1930s. “In the period between 1928 and 1933 alone, about 770,000 Party members from prole tarian backgrounds are supposed…to have moved up socially – either through…
the apparatuses of the state, Party and economy, or through training in technical colleges or…tertiary education.”28 For an example of this upward social mobility, by 1932 around half of all workers in large scale enterprises were new arrivals after having entered in or after 1928.29 While the working conditions in Soviet industry were not exactly adequate, they still were an amelioration for many Soviets. Before the mass industrialization campaigns under Stalin, many Russian peasants had been trapped in manual labor on farms. The chance to move to a more modern workplace with defined hours and an indoor work environment free from extreme weather was a significant amelioration of conditions for many workers. However, as Schröder notes, many former peasants lacked the knowledge and experience to properly operate industrial equipment, which led to decreases in productivity as well as damage to equipment.30 Therefore, one must acknowledge that, from a holistic perspective, even these minor improvements in working conditions came at a significant economic cost to the USSR.
As we have seen, private life, specifically at home and at work, was exceedingly arduous for average Soviet citizens living under Stalin in the 1930s. The time period and demographic studied here experienced what was likely the most favorable set of conditions for Stalin to have appeared as a successful ruler by the common people; yet, most ordinary Soviets lived in under-furnished apartments or barracks with little personal property and few amenities, and while working in environments governed by incompetent and convoluted bureaucracies. Consequently, it is evident that even the seemingly fortunate Soviets under Stalin, save for the most privileged elites, suffered. As a result, survivors of Stalin’s regime who insisted that he was Russia’s greatest leader are seemingly lasting victims of his cult of personality, as their claims do not account for the torturous ordeal that was ordinary life under Stalin.
Andreev-Khomiakov, Gennady. Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin’s Russia, trans. Ann Healy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997.
Davies, Sarah. Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Figes, Orlando. The Whisperers. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.
Hellbeck, Jochen. “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” The Russian Review vol. 60, no. 3 (Jul., 2001): pp. 340-359.
Leder, Mary. My Life in Stalinist Russia. Edited by Laurie Bernstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Schröder, Hans Henning. “Upward Social Mobility and Mass Repression: The Communist Party and Soviet Society in the Thirties.” In Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath, edited by Nick Lampert and Gabor T. Rittersporn, 157-183. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1992.
Shearer, David R. Industry, State, and Society in Stalin’s Russia, 1926-1934. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Smith, Andrew. I Was a Soviet Worker. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936.
28 In Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997), 24.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid, 160-61.
Having inherited from various African traditions the concept of an all-encompassing sacred world, enslaved Africans in the United States developed a religion in which the material world, and specifically nature, played a pivotal role. At the same time, slave religion was also a frequent site of rebellion. In her book Rooted in the Earth, historian Dianne Glave documents the centrality of nature to both religious conversion and rebellion among enslaved people, while theologian Joseph Drexler-Dreis, in his analysis of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, notes the essentially rebellious character of religious conversion within slave religion. This essay synthesizes Glave’s and Drexler-Dreis’ arguments to demonstrate how communion with nature contributed to conversion processes that were inherently rebellious. To support this argument, this essay considers the conversion narratives of ex-slaves in addition to documents pertaining to two major slave revolts: Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 and Denmark Vesey’s failed uprising in 1822.
Enslaved people in the United States practiced an idiosyncratic mix of African and American spiritual practices. Albert Raboteau termed the religion of these enslaved Africans “the invisible institution,” speaking to the fact that the majority of these enslaved people shared religious beliefs and practices that extended far beyond the Methodist or Baptist Christianity they practiced in institutional churches.1 These noninstitutional aspects of slave religion ranged from clandestine prayer meetings in the woods or in slave cabins to the singing of spirituals.2 They also, importantly, included various elements descended from African traditions. Though enslaved people hailed from a multitude of African tribes, kingdoms, and polities, with as many different belief systems, the West African peoples that constituted the majority of the enslaved mostly held “similar modes of perception, shared basic principles, and common pat-
terns of ritual.”3 These African religious frameworks underwent a further “blending and assimilation” in the New World, as captured Africans worked to find common ground with each other.4 As a result, the religious heritage of enslaved people included a common patchwork of African elements. Enslaved people typically did not draw a distinction between the African elements of their faith and the Christian. Rather, “the various components of their religion complemented and reinforced each other,” producing a unique slave religion.5
One of the most prevalent features of slave religion was a cosmology which historian Lawrence W. Levine later termed “the sacred world.” This was a worldview in which people constantly interacted with both their sacred pasts and the spiritual world. As Levine describes:
Denied the possibility of achieving an adjustment to the external world of the antebellum South… the slaves created a new world by transcending the narrow confines of the one in which they were forced to live. They extended the boundaries of their restrictive universe backward until it fused with the world of the Old Testament, and upward until it became one with the world beyond.6
The sacred world strongly influenced the way enslaved people understood the world around them, as the material realities of their environment and actions took on cosmic implications. The all-encompassing nature of the sacred world cosmology meant that every action promised both spiritual and concrete reactions. Enslaved people engaged with the sacred world generally through their everyday actions, as well as more pointedly through prayer. By embodying, interfacing with, and rehearsing biblical stories, most often stories of liberation from the Old Testament, enslaved people believed
3 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 7.
4 Ibid, 8.
5 Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 57.
6 Ibid, 32-3.
1 Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 212. 2 Ibid.they could manifest their own liberation. For example, Quakers observing a group of enslaved people in 1818 witnessed a ring shout in which the enslaved people sang “we’re travelling to Immanuel’s land” and blew a tin horn, emulating the biblical scene of Joshua’s army encircling the Walls of Jericho.7 These individuals might have hoped, through this reenactment, to bring about a triumph of their own to rival the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan. The sacred world framework meant that all activity, ranging from elaborate spiritual practices like the preceding example to quotidian daily routines, affected physical, concrete results.
The concept of a sacred world in which the individual’s life is deeply intertwined with the world around them has implications for the relationship between enslaved people and their environment. In Rooted in the Earth, Dianne Glave finds evidence of this African tradition in practices like earth shrines and prayer meetings in wooded areas.8 Glave also notes the impact that enslaved people’s orientation towards the environment had on both conversion processes and rebellion. For enslaved people converting to Christianity, touching God often meant touching nature; thus, an enslaved man named Morte heard plants and animals cry out to him and ended up destroying a field of corn during a religious trance, while the enslaved Nancy Williams unexpectedly “got ‘ligion’” and left her plow to run and jump through a field.9 Meanwhile, enslaved people plotting rebellion often framed their actions with reference to the environment. Many prominent abolitionists, such as David Walker and Frederick Douglass identified their work with the Old Testament image of the Hebrews wandering the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.10 The Black revolutionary Nat Turner saw his rebellion in terms of prophetic visions of nature, looking to the sky for a signal to start his insurrection.11 In this way, both the conversion process and rebellion among enslaved people typically involved direct interaction with nature. However, while Glave ties both conversion and rebellion to nature, she neglects the essential connection between conversion and rebellion. Indeed, as theologian Joseph Drexler-Dreis notes, the rebellions of Black revolutionaries such as Nat Turner (leader of an 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia) become a natural extension of the conversion process within a sacred
7 Don Yoder, Pennsylvania Spirituals (Lancaster, Pa., 1961), 54-5. Reproduced in Levine, Black Culture, with comments by Levine, 37-8.
8 Dianne D. Glave, Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010), 51-6.
9 Clifton H. Johnson, ed., God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1993) 15-18; Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia ExSlaves (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 320. Reproduced in Glave, Rooted in the Earth, 51-3.
10 Ibid, 60.
11 Ibid, 66-7.
world framework.12 As Black people turned toward a cosmology which called for active participation in biblical stories, liberatory tales demanded reenactment in the form of the liberation of their own people. It is in this light that we should understand this passage from Turner’s Confessions :
I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be the last and the last should be first.13
As Turner moves closer to God, he begins to identify his personal duty with that of Christ—the responsibility to “take it on and fight against the Serpent.” As theologian Drexler-Dreis describes, “Turner understood his rebellion to be a part of a deeper, even universal or transcendental, Christian experience.”14 Conversion, then, meant moving toward such rebellion; “Turner’s rebellion was a continuation and radicalization of his community’s religious traditions.”15 Denmark Vesey’s plotted rebellion could similarly be seen as embedded in the process of his conversion away from White Presbyterianism towards his own unique—though distinctly African—Methodism.16 In 1822, Vesey organized a large-scale slave revolt which involved raiding the city of Charleston, South Carolina for supplies before escaping to Haiti, though local authorities eventually thwarted Vesey’s plan).17 Accordingly, in their 1822 narrative of the rebellion, judges Kennedy and Parker identify “Zechariah, chapter 14th, verses 1, 2 and 3” as among Vesey’s favorite biblical texts.18 These verses, which describe the violent sacking of Jerusalem, mirrored the planned rebellion, with Vesey’s congregation taking the role of the Israelites. The examples of Vesey’s and Turner’s rebellions demonstrate that, within a sacred world framework, religious conversion entailed embodying biblical stories which could, in turn, lead to rebellion.
With this relationship between conversion and rebellion established, the role of nature in these processes deserves some further consideration. While
12 Joseph Drexler-Dreis, “Nat Turner’s Rebellion as a Process of Conversion: Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Christian Conversion Process,” Black Theology 12, no. 3 (November 2014): 248.
13 Nat Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va., ed. Thomas R. Gray (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 21.
14 Drexler-Dreis, “Nat Turner’s Rebellion,” 240.
15 Ibid.
16 Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison: Madison House, 1999), 113-4.
17 Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette, The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), xx-xxi.
18 Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker, “A Narrative of the Conspiracy and Intended Insurrection,” in The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History, ed. Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 75.
Glave notes that nature played a role in both conversion and rebellion, this paper argues that encounters with nature formed a central component of a continuous process from conversion to rebellion. As enslaved people and free Blacks moved towards a religion rooted in concepts of the sacred world and, by extension, oriented towards rebellion, they did so through communication with their natural landscape. The conversion stories collected in God Struck Me Dead, a 1930s compilation of interviews with ex-slaves, portray the connection between rebellion, conversion, and communion with nature. For instance, the story of the enslaved man Morte, previously cited in Glave, clearly demonstrates the turn towards both rebellion and nature inherent to the conversion process. Morte hears voices coming from “plants and animals… even the water where I stooped down to drink.”19 Falling into a fit of religious ecstasy, Morte destroys a field of corn and becomes “very bold” towards his enslaver.20 He then hears a voice from above, telling him “I will throw around you a strong arm of protection. Neither shall your oppressors be able to confound you. I will make your enemies feed you and those who despise you take you in.”21 Glave points out the natural elements of Morte’s conversion (the plants and animals, the cornfield) but misses the essentially rebellious aspects. Encountering God through nature, Morte feels empowered to speak boldly to his enslaver and envisions a world in which he is no longer in bondage. The conversion-through-nature that Glave sees is simultaneously a liberation-through-nature.
Many of the stories in God Struck Me Dead follow a similar pattern to Morte’s. God almost always strikes outdoors, and natural imagery pervades the accounts. Violent rebellion is rare, but changes in lifestyle are constant. The majority of the conversion stories in God Struck Me Dead end with the converted person making a major change to their life. These changes were rebellions in their own right, in that they all involved the enslaved person taking control of the world around them. Take the account of the enslaved man William, for example: After hearing God in the form of a dove’s call, William hears the spirit tell him “Go preach my gospel to every creature and fear not, for I am with you, an everlasting prop. Amen.”22 Reflecting on this call to action, William comments that “you can’t serve two masters.”23 It is unclear which masters William refers to here: God is one, but the other could refer to the person who enslaved William, a later employer, or the devil himself. It does not matter, for the content of William’s message remains the same; by becoming a preacher, William breaks the bonds of oppression by taking active control over his
19 Ibid, 15.
20 Ibid,16.
21 Ibid, 17.
22 Ibid, 21.
23 Ibid.
"Do so we pull the buckra to pieces"
life. It is important, then, that God inspires William’s rebellion through the natural phenomenon of a dove’s call. In keeping with a sacred world framework, God speaks to William through natural and physical means and encourages William to make material change. This kind of rebellion appears in almost all of the conversion stories, often in similarly physical terms, with emphasis on actions the enslaved person should take next. This was rebellion in the context of the sacred world; taking personal, material action to change the world around oneself. This is not to say that violent rebellion did not extend from the conversion process. Rather, Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey’s violent insurrection plots both arose out of similar processes of communion with God through nature (although only Turner’s was carried out). Like many of the sources in God Struck Me Dead, Nat Turner first spoke to God while at his plow.24 The knowledge that the Spirit gave to Turner during his visions was knowledge of the natural world, such as “the knowledge of the elements, the revolution of the planets, the operation of tides, and changes of the seasons.”25
Turner later saw these elements of nature as signs dictating when and how to proceed with his insurrection. A vision of “blood on the corn as though it were dew from heaven” first inspired him to revolt, while he understood a solar eclipse as a signal to begin his rebellion.26 Turner aimed his rebellion at a town called Jerusalem, a name which “evokes the civilization/wilderness template of the Promised Land.”27 Viewed as a conversion process occurring through engagement with nature, Nat Turner’s Rebellion clearly fits the mold presented in God Struck Me Dead. Just as those converts were inspired to make active changes to their lives after encountering God in nature, Turner envisioned his rebellion in natural terms and thereafter took physical—and bloody—steps to alter his surroundings.
The relationship between Denmark Vesey’s plotted rebellion and nature was less explicit than that of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, but nonetheless significant. No evidence exists of Vesey’s conversion to Christianity before his 1817 at the Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston, so it would be fruitless to speculate on the relevance of the natural world to Vesey’s own conversion.28 However, Vesey’s sermons focused on the images of the Hebrews wandering the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land, thereby returning to the civilization/wilderness dichotomy which Glave defined as central to enslaved people’s view of nature.29 Vesey also
24 Turner, Confessions, 9.
25 Ibid, 20.
26 Ibid, 20-1.
27 Glave, Rooted in the Earth, 67.
28 Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 105-6.
29
viewed his rebellion in terms of land to be conquered. In an analysis of Vesey’s biblical references, theologian Jeremy Schipper argues that “Vesey connected Charleston with biblical cities that face divine condemnation” and “associate[d] the white residents of Charleston with the inhabitants of Canaan and surrounding areas who are divinely condemned during the Israelites’ conquest of these lands.30 In this sense, Vesey engaged with the sacred world through physical interaction with the landscape.
The most compelling evidence of the relationship between Vesey’s rebellion and nature comes not from Vesey himself, but from his accomplice, “Gullah” Jack Pritchard. Pritchard was an Angola-born priest who supplemented Vesey’s Christian preaching with his own African magic.31 Pritchard supplied Vesey’s supporters with magical charms meant to protect them, consisting of items such as “parched corn and ground nuts” and a “crab-claw.”32 According to Kennedy and Parker, “vast numbers of the Africans firmly believed that Gullah Jack was a sorcerer … and that whilst they retained the charms which he had distributed they would themselves be invulnerable.”33 This belief makes sense in a sacred world framework in which magic like Pritchard’s was a common way to intervene in the world. It also constitutes the kind of communion with nature which would have been important to convincing enslaved people to commit to a rebellion. The fact that they could take control of their surroundings through Pritchard’s magic suggested to Vesey’s followers that they could also take control of their political situation. By engaging with nature through communication with Pritchard, Vesey’s followers began their own process of conversion to a religion in which the kind of violent revolt Vesey was planning was possible and religiously justified. And, indeed, Pritchard was a successful recruiter, claiming to have “spoken to 6,600 persons who had agreed to join.”34 In one meeting with his followers, Pritchard laid out the goals of Vesey’s rebellion in terms that epitomized the centrality of physical action through engagement with nature to conversion and rebellion among enslaved people. As Pritchard watched his audience scramble over a fowl which he had performed a witchcraft ceremony over, he quipped “do so we pull the buckra to pieces.”35 The preceding examples illuminate the relationship between religious conversion, rebellion, and nature for enslaved people in the United States. Communing
30 Jeremy Schipper, “‘Misconstruction of the Sacred Page’: On Denmark Vesey’s Biblical Interpretations,” Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019): 38.
31 Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 133-4.
32 Kennedy and Parker, “Official Report,” 198.
33 Kennedy and Parker, “A Narrative,” 76.
34 Kennedy and Parker, “Official Report,” 183.
35 Philadelphia National Gazette and Literary Register, in The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History, ed. Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 429.
with God through nature, communities entered a sacred world cosmology that demanded direct physical engagement with their surroundings. For many enslaved people, such interventions simply meant standing up to the overseer or devoting themselves to biblical study. For others, such as those involved with Nat Turner’s and Denmark Vesey’s Rebellions, religious conversion meant the violent overthrow of the institution of slavery. In both cases, interaction with the natural world played a central role in the conversion process and the rebellions that followed.
Drexler-Dreis, Joseph. “Nat Turner’s Rebellion as a Process of Conversion: Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Christian Conversion Process.” Black Theology 12, no. 3 (November 2014): 230-50.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey. Madison: Madison House, 1999.
Egerton, Douglas R. and Robert L. Paquette, editors. The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017.
Glave, Dianne D. Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010.
Johnson, Clifton H, editor. God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1993.
Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Schipper, Jeremy. “‘Misconstruction of the Sacred Page’: On Denmark Vesey’s Biblical Interpretations.” Journal of Biblical Literature 138, no. 1 (2019): 23-38.
Turner, Nat. The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. Edited by Thomas R. Gray. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Once seen by Western society as an uplifting and emancipating utopian concept, company towns have become a hallmark of colonial control. Early industrialists in England first developed company towns to order life around work. Workers in factories needed new places to live after migrating from rural farmlands at the onset of the English Industrial Revolution. Industrialists, seeing opportunity, created a system in which all needs were met within the confines of a town run by the company. Company towns proliferated on a global scale throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the demand for mines and factories continued to grow. Soon, companies and even governments maligned the foundational concepts of education and community-building, further instituting them as a conscious form of social control. Companies forged an invisibility around their workers through built environments that obscured living conditions along with their workers’ humanity, traditions, and health.
The European Scramble for Africa in the early twentieth century opened new stores of coal, gold, and land ripe for exploitation by colonial powers. With the imposition of these new colonial ventures came ideas of how to control and order the lives of Africans, most especially in Niger, South Africa and Cameroon. Company towns expanded into mining industries in South Africa, uranium mines in Niger and Ghana, and public works projects such as the Cahora Bassa Dam in Mozambique and the Cameroon Development Corporation villages of Cameroon. Colonial companies and governments saw in the company village a way to order and control African workers.
Company towns aimed to obscure and neglect the human rights of resident workers. In Being Nuclear, Gabrielle Hecht describes the process of creating invisibility in company towns. The strong colonial demand for uranium led to the neglect of safety precautions in these African mines and surrounding towns. For Hecht, invisibility tied directly to notions of nuclearity and the con-
ception that certain forms of work required more safety precautions than others. Conveniently, nuclear agencies excluded the work that African laborers performed from this classification and therefore did not involve any of the testing or protective measures that white scientists or reactor workers had. Michelle Murphy states that for many communities invisibility “resulted from… regimes of perceptibility—that is, assemblages of social and technical things that make some hazards and health effects visible but leave others invisible.”1 These regimes crossed “local, national, and global dimensions that included dosimeters and protective equipment, laboratories for analyzing exposure results, mechanisms for communicating those results, national regulatory systems, manuals, guidelines, and conferences.”2 The different avenues for making issues visible did not include the work of Africans in uranium mining, especially not the living conditions of those living in the mining towns. This kind of invisibility extended into the home life of those living in company towns.
African laborers experienced intense health risks, terrible living conditions, and unknown emotional trauma from their time in company towns. Initially created to promote utopian idealisms of what work should be, colonial companies in Africa built physical towns, far removed from society that built invisibility through structures and management policies which affected the work and lives of Africans living in the villages. Invisibility permeated through every facet of company life: how companies ordered people’s lives, obscured their health risks, and demanded labor. Through architecture and design principles, colonial companies brought invisibility into the living space of laborers. Colonial governments and companies’ use of built form and management style stopped their populations from moving around, gaining representation in labor, or reaching the global community for help. Africans’ position inside the company town
2
1 Gabrielle, Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012, 44. Ibid.made their plights effectively invisible, enforcing a colonial project that demanded their labor but ignored their humanity. Colonial corporations used company towns to render living and working in a colonial context invisible. Company towns represent the built form of this invisibility, physically removing workers from the world and the ability to report and organize around problems of their living conditions.
Where uranium towns in Russia and the U.S. featured high-tech living arrangements and placed an emphasis on the intelligence of the community, company towns in Africa—specifically those mining nuclear materials—lacked these opportunities.3 The towns, “through particular social, cultural, and historical categories of meaning,”4 have commonalities but do not perfectly replicate what colonial powers promised. In the case of two African mining towns, Arlit and Mounana, the objective of the companies and governments was to hide and silence the voices of labor, capitalizing on their work while ignoring their humanity, effectively making them invisible.5 These issues manifest in the harms that were inflicted, like cancer, severed limbs, and countless other ailments.6 The need to obscure risks to health and safety while retaining labor intersected with the building and management of company towns, solving both issues for companies.
Designers, architects and planners imbue political meaning in their buildings. Those constructing company towns created compounds designed to oppress and silence African wage laborers. Explored in the twentieth century throughout the modern architecture movement, architects viewed their work as potentially freeing while others, including Michel Foucault, saw certain design principles as controlling and destructive of communities. While Foucault discussed the schoolhouse and prisons, his views of social control extend beyond specific buildings and onto the entire makeup of towns and cities.7 The same principles seen in prisons and schools appear in the ordering of buildings and space in company towns, encouraging the same social control and invisibility Foucault defined in Discipline and Punish.
Colonial governments prized order and surveillance over the freedom and movement of people living in the compound: they treated African workers as a unit of
3 Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 10.
4 Julie Livingstone, Improvising Medicine : An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic, 52.
5 Jonathan Crush, “Scripting the Compound: Power and Space in the South African Mining Industry,” Environ Plan D 12, no. 3 (1994): 301-324. doi:10.1068/d120301, https://doi.org/10.1068/d120301, 302.
6 Julie Livingstone, Improvising Medicine, 52.
7 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
labor. The company town existed as a stockpile of labor for colonial governments and companies. The colonial compounds, Jonathan Crush found in studying South African towns, “function so effectively as instruments of capitalist profit-taking precisely because they are institutions of incarceration.”8 Colonizers treat the colonized as less than human, forcing them into a system that destroys their humanity and recreates them into units of labor. Compounds assist in this process by treating those people as incarcerated, as if prisoners; the colonial governments took away their agency, seeing them only for their labor towards the metropole. In Scripting the Compound, Jonathan Crush asserts that these “conceptions of African labour … were driven by the ‘expert’ culture that found a public voice in a succession of government commissions.”9 The colonial racism and expertism pushed them to devalue the individuality of Africans, creating their own modernist narrative and sidelining African voices. The state, driven by an assumed objective science found these compounds to work with little repercussions or resistance, delivering on the promise of reliable labor and complacent attitudes among workers. Company towns expressed in the built form the dehumanization of workers for the purpose of capitalist enterprise.
Compound designers developed ways of controlling populations and removing power from laborers through architecture and design. The architecture of compounds worked in concert with colonial government structures to inhibit the autonomy and humanity of workers. Referencing the panoptic ideas of Foucault, Jonathan Crush analyzes the designs of multiple South African mining towns built by companies from the early 1900s to the 1990s. His detailed examination of the compound structure gives context to the strategies used to control and subvert populations of people, which colonial entities recreated across multiple different countries and time periods. Compounds utilized “the physical and political” aspects of architecture to create an “instrument of coercion.”10 Architects and companies acted to develop “compounds … within which individuals and groups were “observed, partitioned, subject to timetables and disciplined.”11 These motivations translated into physical choices, the structure of compounds, and how people lived. This manifested in designs of company towns that resembled compounds. In the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries, designers made compounds that “were square or rectangular … [and,] around the solid perimeter of a large open square, were the worker’s dormitories,”12 making surveilling workers easy for management. With such an open design and di8 Jonathan Crush, “Scripting the Compound”, 304.
rect line of sight, workers could not escape the watchful eye of their employer. The Portuguese government replicated this design with their incredibly regular aldeamentos: these towns occupied various rectangular plots of land and often had multiple guard stations overlooking the town.13 The square compound represented the most isolating version of the compound, as no windows faced outside of the compound and, beyond the compound buildings, the companies built large walls to further close off the area. This kind of treatment serves as the best indication of instituting invisibility through architecture in the compound setting. Those living inside the compound no longer existed to the outside world and, inside the compound, their lives existed only as far as working, eating and sleeping, with no privacy for themselves.
Colonial governments and companies used similar language to that of American uranium towns of the 1950s, drawing parallels of modernizing cultures. Richland, a government sponsored company town built by DuPont in Washington State in 1943 to support the manufacturing of nuclear weapons, emblematized the kinds of company towns many European companies promised to build across the African continent. The town followed rigid planning meant to encourage worker morale, adhered to ideas of modernist planning and equality, and offered educational programs to workers and their children.14 When creating the living spaces, the head designer of the village believed that “the success and security of the plant depended on housing designs and urban planning.”15 Thus, they planned a city with accommodations that were unusual for the time, mostly three-bedroom dwellings on large plots of land, instead of crowded single- or double-bedroom accommodations.16 In a time when most of the U.S. lived in two-bedroom homes, this was quite extravagant, but worked to enforce the idea of Richland as a middle-class village even though Kate Brown notes that “Richland was a city with a working-class majority until the 1970s.”17 The Portuguese and British espoused these modernizing principles of uplifting populations through design for aldeamentos of Mozambique, and the Cameroon Development Corporation villages of Cameroon, though their real intentions varied from the U.S concept.
Even in U.S. nuclear villages, however, officials sought to make information and hazards invisible to residents. Working with plutonium, workers were constantly in danger of exposure, which they were not made aware of due what Kate Brown describes as “an institu-
13 Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Dams, Displacement and the Delusion of Development Cahora Bassa and its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965 – 2007 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013), 102.
14 Kate Brown, Plutopia, 39.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid, 41.
tional impenetrability”18 of the research that attempted to bring attention to exposures.19 The village allowed for the tight control of scientific research and, even though the U.S. towns lacked the fences of those towns in Gabon and Cameroon, federal officials still intended to keep their residents isolated and in the dark about the true work happening in their village.20 Nonetheless, such instances of invisibility never went as far as the treatment of Africans in ever more complex company towns. The Portuguese government, in trying to develop Mozambique into a modern colony, placed great emphasis on infrastructure. In doing so, they placed the construction of a dam as more important than the displacement and destruction of people’s lives in the Zambezi River Valley. Modernizing principles of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s led to a serious consideration of reforming and uplifting countries deemed to be of lower status than those of the West. Lost in this reading of progress was the local knowledge and understanding of the local populations’ customs. The linearity of this thinking meant that the building of a dam, called Cahora Bassa, represented the peak of modernization. Colonial officials and the cosmopolitan elite believed that “Cahora Bassa represented high modernism at its best—the ultimate confirmation that science and technological expertise, in the hands of a strong state, could conquer nature and reorder biophysical systems to serve mankind.”21 The state’s desire to showcase progress and control trumped every other consideration of the state. Those living in the valley in the 1960s and 1970s would undergo tremendous change that could only uplift them according to the Portuguese. By writing their own narrative of progress, the state “projected that the spin-off effects of its construction would improve the region’s roads and other physical infrastructures, stimulate commerce, and generate income that would be used to construct a network of rural schools and health posts.”22 These improvements showcased how modernism would benefit everyone in the valley and obscured the damaging effects of displacing thousands of people. Even worse, the aldeamentos resembled nothing that the Portuguese promised. As guarded compounds, they locked the population inside, forcing them into cramped quarters with little place for social movement. Seen as a store of labor, the aldeamentos were more a system of controlling and keeping labor than a method of liberation. This led to terrible living arrangements that only increased the dangers of working on Cahora Bassa.
The Portuguese towns resembled a newer version of watched compounds appearing across the continent. In South Africa, compounds and towns started 18
replicating the panopticon of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, in which prisoners lived in a circular building, a guard tower in the middle observing the prisoners at any moment. At Harmony Mine in South Africa, a guard building occupied the middle of compounds as well, watching over a semi-circular configuration of buildings, observing African workers, and restricting their movement around the compound and outside.23 These concepts of watched villages translated well for other colonial powers. In Mozambique, the Portuguese Zambezi Valley Planning Office guaranteed better living conditions in a town consisting of “roughly fifteen hundred people living in approximately 250 small, poorly constructed huts. The compounds had insufficient space for the average household of six to eight people, and huts were often less than three meters apart— leaving their occupants little privacy.”24 In no way did these villages resemble the promises made to the people of the Zambezi valley. Instead, these cramped towns, surrounded by barbed wire, helped the Portuguese authorities quiet dissidents, control populations, and restrict travelers. With the needs and wants of the Africans living in the villages made invisible, they struggled to create new lives in a foreign town, reducing them to a disposable workforce for the Portuguese. The invisibility induced the Portugese narrative of modernization to fulfill colonial aspirations of being a world power. Failing to replicate American uranium towns, the Portuguese destroyed the local culture of the Zambezi valley. Much the same had previously occurred in Cameroon.
Towns developed by the Cameroon Development Corporation for the British government in the post-war 1940s Cameroon utilized many of the same social controls through the built environment. Following a pattern of a European regularized grid for houses, these new model camps and villages across the Cameroon countryside replicated many of the same modernist principles occurring in similar towns, for instance, the aldeamentos or the South African mining compounds.25 These mainly agricultural villages gave colonial officials a chance to exert the force of “Spatial isolation,” exiling workers’ families, making polygamy impossible by the restriction on plot sizes, and tying laborers to their workplace.26 Living in these villages, the lives of Cameroonian field workers revolved around the work in agricultural fields. Portuguese erased other facets of workers’ humanity by the oppressive living conditions and work schedules. The isolation coupled with new European technology and living styles forced African
23 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195.
24 Allan F. and Barbara Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development, 102.
25 Njoh, Chie, and Bigon, “CDC Company Towns in Cameroon: A Case of Shaping Built Space to Articulate Power and Social Control in Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives,” Journal of West African History 6, (2020): 177.
26 Ibid.
workers to abandon their traditional living style and heritage.27 The corporation built the town using imported European materials, European stoves, and followed European planning principles, drastically changing how Africans lived.28 The stoves, for instance, required gas fuels instead of the more traditional firewood practices of Cameroonian society, changing how Cameroonians approached cooking.29 These changes further obscured the culture and humanity of African workers, which forced many migrant laborers into a system of dependence on imported materials, especially natural gas.30 As in South African mining towns, over time the companies slowly removed every vestige of traditional culture from those living in the quarters. Mining companies forced Africans, through the design of towns and policies, to participate in a European work ethic that fed into a system of colonial capitalist gain. Their traditions stolen, Cameroonian agricultural workers accepted more European modes of living, a direct result of the building design, created to force native tradition into invisibility.
The use of physical space in company towns influenced how workers lived their lives. Not just a space for living, these homes and complexes enacted a political policy that negated the traditions and values of the African workers living there. The CDC towns of Cameroon moved a large portion of workers into remote areas, removing them from their original communities and placing them into a cog-work of colonial industrialization. Similar to Cameroon, the South African mining towns promised to reform and modernize migrant labor, solving the “native question” of how to deal with migrant Africans who would leave as they pleased.31 As colonial officials sought to expand production and improve their bottom line, they depended on the language of modernization and improvement to create spaces of control and manipulation. Colonial entities looked to these towns as proof of “attainment of laudable goals such as accommodating workers,” proving the worth of colonial intervention and development.32 The imposition of modernist European ideals on Africans disregarded established ways of living, forcing many to relinquish what made them African to find work in an oppressive modern society. This social control led to serious health risks and cultural ruptures across the continent.
A small town in Niger, Arlit represents the worst of these issues of invisible disease and mistreatment. Built to support the Areva uranium mining company, Arlit primarily housed the mine workers. The corporation, introduced with an air of hope of development and the advancement of the town and country, ended 27
up destroying the local community and introducing countless health issues. While talking with villagers of Arlit, journalists Lucas Destrijcker and Mahadi Diouara learned that “the uranium mining industry has taken a huge toll on Arlit and the region.”33 While Areva profited greatly in Arlit, many of the people in the village “live in a patchwork of corrugated iron shelters on sandstone foundations.”34 The conditions left many residents without important infrastructure, living in stone shacks next to an advanced mine responsible for modernizing the world. The village of Arlit today struggles with the effects of the mines.The French Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radiation found that the “drinking water contains levels of uranium at ten to a hundred times the World Health Organization’s recommended safety standards.”35 Despite obvious scientific findings and clear health effects, “Areva has stated continuously that they haven’t measured any excess radioactivity during biannual examinations.”36 Areva’s influence in the region allows for such obscuring of health issues.
With total control of the surrounding area, Areva denied all health complications and hid the issues persistent in life in Arlit. The company town, in the sparse north section of the country, houses 120,000 people.37 No matter the size of the population, Arlit’s remoteness and inaccessibility allowed Areva to obscure health and living issues. The location of company towns, near mines and away from urban centers, benefits companies in trying to keep health issues silent. The villagers expressed surprise when Lucas Destrijcker and Mahadi Diouara reached out to visit, pointing to the irregularity of public attention on the community.38 The placement of these towns speaks to the considerations of hiding, controlling, and surveilling populations. Areva benefits from the distance and the relative quietness of the area. Paired with the limited built infrastructure, the geography of mines allows mining companies a great amount of autonomy in the running of their towns. In Arlit, this has worked extremely well to the detriment of the village as the community continues to struggle to gain recognition by the international community as a place of serious nuclear work in need of medical attention. These efforts highlight a key component of colonial planning: obscuring and isolating populations to quell dissent.
Colonization of the African continent institutionalized the invisibility of those living in company towns, 33 Mahadi Diouara and Lucas Destricker, “A Forgotten Community: The Little Town in Niger Keeping the Lights on in France,” African Arguments (JULY 18, 2017), https://africanarguments.org/2017/07/18/a-forgotten-communitythe-little-town-in-niger-keeping-the-lights-on-in-france-uranium-arlit-areva/.
creating complex rules and regulations that restricted Africans rights and movement. While invisibility occurred in many areas of the world, African colonial governments were especially brutal. Commercial and political efforts in Cameroon, South Africa, and Niger exist for the exploitation of labor benefitting a foreign power. Colonization pre-supposes a level of superiority that leads to the subjugation of a population based on an inherent power imbalance. While in the U.S., company towns were somewhat restricted within the confines of a democratic republican system and deal with union workers, colonial companies had free reign and the power of government to back their policies. The relaxed rules in colonial environments allowed for serious health issues to permeate throughout company towns and obscured unsafe working and living conditions.
Mining companies and colonial governments used politically motivated town planning to hide issues of their labor practices among Africans. The structuring of physical space in these mining and agricultural towns obscured the lives, human rights, and traditions of African laborers. From Mozambique to South Africa, Niger and Cameroon, Western imperial forces coerced groups into unfit living conditions to garner the labor they needed for colonial industries that benefited the metropole over local needs.
The surveillance and control infrastructure in company towns did not stop Africans from subverting rules and creating their own communities of culture. South African mining companies ruled with informal codes called mteto that both managers and employees had to follow.39 While these negotiated rules restricted the movement and agency of the worker, it also allowed workers to somewhat negotiate the tactics of the compound manager. Workers found ways to slip through restrictions and, if a manager overstepped their boundaries, they risked “moral outrage, mass organization, and collective action by workers.”40 Inside this ambiguous zone of surveillance, miners worked to refashion their culture. Africans found ways to continue their beliefs, and the rituals, stories and songs of their culture, and leisure activities like drinking while staying within the negotiated rules of the mteto. In a more dangerous vein, they challenged management by engaging in unionization.41 The unions tried to form strikes and challenged the living conditions of the mining town. While mining companies crushed these instances of unionization and organization, miners proved that companies could not fully control or order the lives of African workers, pushing against managers. Even within such oppressive con-
39 Jonathan Crush, “Scripting the Compound,” 315.
40 Ibid, 315.
41 Ibid, 317.
ditions as the company towns of South Africa, African workers found ways to circumvent systems of invisibility. Their ability to continue their culture and enjoy their leisure time how they saw fit speaks to the resiliency of the community, and speaks to the inability of colonial governments to fully expunge the humanity and tradition of people within their control. Even under the guise of modernization, tight security, and surveillance, mining companies could not instill a fully European work ethic and culture on a resistant population. The blatant strategies of creating invisibility failed to fully obscure or destroy the defiance of African populations.
African mineworkers in Mounana, a uranium mining town in Gabon, articulated resistance to being made invisible most clearly in their fight for retribution for the damages done to their community from mining under the COMUF mining company. Realizing the mine had poisoned them, a group of Mounana residents formed the Collectif des anciens travailleurs miniers de Comuf (CATRAM) in 2005.42 The collective demanded of the legacy corporation of COMUF, Areva, a “health and environmental monitoring program and a fund to disburse medical compensation claims,” aimed at correcting some injustice in the treatment and living conditions of Mounana residents.43 Through their actions and working with NGOs, CATRAM finally achieved visibility for Mounana residents, with Areva agreeing to create observation clinics for the community.44 Mounana residents stopped COMUF and then Areva from deliberately obscuring the town through isolation. Through their work with international partners and news coverage, Mounana residents connected their work with a wider definition of nuclearity and shed the invisibility placed on them. While mining companies tried to fully obscure the lives and health of workers, Africans managed to defy them in critical areas, regaining their agency and creating visibility for themselves, to bring attention to their towns.
While colonial governments and mining companies tried to completely obscure the lives of African laborers, the resistance they met was too great, enabling the continuation of culture and in some cases the rectification of deplorable housing conditions. In South Africa, this meant African workers could continue their traditions and culture while Mounana residents found ways to gain medical attention. The work done under surveillance and oppression is astounding, as Africans clung to their agency and fought against the obscuring of their work. As the colonial period came to an end, supporting African agency became a paramount issue for post-independence countries.
As African countries gained independence, new governments sought to create a system of democratization among company towns, plunging workers into a new reality with both differences and continuities to the previous state of colonization. As the world moves away from company towns, what happens to these institutions can change how millions of people live. The process of making a company town into a democratic state associated town is called normalization. Mining companies have the most to gain from normalization, limiting the amount of liability on their part for the living conditions workers withstood.45 Seen as a vestige of the colonial era, company towns “prevented black people from settling permanently in mining communities.”46 Opening up and democratizing these towns in South Africa would enable autonomy and increase homeownership, “ensuring restorative justice,”47 a key component of a post-apartheid South Africa in the 1990s. This form of normalization occurred across different countries as when the CDC Cameroon villages slowly merged with urban sprawls extending into rural areas. The effects of this normalization had good and bad impacts. Normalization included the workers into a more democratic system. Finally, those living in villages had a formal say over their own towns, enabling representation and producing a more autonomous living arrangement. However, these local governments were “unable to cope with the pressures of providing infrastructure and services and dealing with the sprawling informal settlements,”48 leading to further dilapidation of the infrastructure around mining towns. This has led many mining companies to continue investing in local infrastructure, something demanded by local governments.49 While these normalization efforts meant the reversal of years of colonial-style living for South Africans, it also let companies limit their costs associated with non-mining activities.50 This does not provide enough retribution for the untold costs and lifestyle demands of those living in the villages. Normalization simply detaches the villages from the companies and seeks no reimbursement for damage done to African communities. Furthermore, the lack of investment means many of these villages still live in abject poverty and terrible environments isolat-
45 Marais, Lochner, Fiona Haslam McKenzie, Leith Deacon, Etienne Nel, Deidre van Rooyen, and Jan Cloete, “The Changing Nature of Mining Towns: Reflections from Australia, Canada and South Africa,” Land use Policy 76, (2018): 779-788. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.03.006.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Marais Lochner, “The Changing Nature of Mining Towns.”
49 Phia van der Watt and Marais Lochner, “Normalising Mining Company Towns in Emalahleni, South Africa,” The Extractive Industries and Society 6, no. 4 (2019): 1205-1214. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j. exis.2019.11.008. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S2214790X19301704.
50 Ibid.
ed from further economic job opportunities other than mining. The use of normalization in South African mining towns points to a wider movement of neo-liberalization as governments try to limit impediments to global competition for mining corporations.51 This has created a system in which local governments take control of colonial-era housing with little to no resources while mining companies make more profits with less expense. The lack of investment means that colonial living conditions and spatial power structures have persisted, and local workers still feel invisible and unable to properly exert themselves in a new democracy. The shift towards normalization has not done enough to rectify colonial architectures both mentally and physically present in the built environment.
Invisibility associated with living inside a company town led many issues to proliferate among Africans. Their inability to gain representation, attract international attention, or properly influence the town structure forced them into conditions benefiting a system of colonization and capitalism. Even worse, the conditions directly affected the health and safety of those living inside the towns.
Living in company villages led to degraded living conditions that left many in terrible health. Arlit and Mounana and other villages still occupy land near active uranium mines, and this close proximity as well as the use of nuclear materials in buildings is a detriment to the health of their inhabitants.52 The isolation and fleeting significance of these towns mean that representation is hard to come by, as mines move away, and towns die off, these narratives become forever buried. A new mine near Arlit will soon draw workers away, erasing the town from the map as the whole operation moves only eighty kilometers away.53 The temporary status of these villages, the isolation, and the erasure of people’s experiences living in these communities feed into a system of exploitation that thrives off of the invisibility of the damage being done.
Aldeamontos, CDC company towns, and uranium villages all partake in the modernizing principles of invisibility. Working towards a state steeped in modernism, colonial entities disregarded the traditions and humanity of their workers. Throughout the history of these towns, companies took steps in their spatial planning to dismantle any kind of autonomy and visibility of Africans’ tradition. A modernizing agenda obscured the damage to these communities. Narratives included the impressiveness of dams, but not the destruction of the family unit; they included the creation of new housing
but not the robbing of land; and finally, the education of a race deemed inferior in European work ethic but not the erasure of local heritage.54 These were not accidental byproducts of modernization but carefully orchestrated strategies to support the economic bottom line of the metropole. As Jonathan Crush states in discussing the Harmony mine, “the distinctive panopticon … was not embedded in the landscape by accident”55 but a deliberate exertion of colonial power on African labor.
Post-colonial countries still grapple with rectifying the creation of these spaces. The normalization efforts ongoing in several countries, including South Africa, Cameroon, and Niger56 demonstrate a serious intention of bringing these communities into visibility. However, in trying to support global businesses with neo-liberal policies of limiting liability, these independent countries run the danger of continuing a process of obscuring the issues of local populations for economic gain.57 Understanding why colonial regimes created these towns, and the tools used to develop them can guide policymakers towards creating a more equitable planned cityscape, one that does not hide the issues of its inhabitants and does not engage in colonial spatial forms of control. Is there space for a more positive argument here? rather than the “negative” what not to do, a positive what a more equitable cityscape can do?
Brown, Kate. Plutopia : Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Crush, Jonathan. “Scripting the Compound: Power and Space in the South African Mining Industry.” Environ Plan D 12, no. 3 (1994): 301-324. doi:10.1068/d120301. https://doi.org/10.1068/d120301.
Diouara Mahada and Destrijcker Lucas. “A Forgotten Community: The Little Town in Niger Keeping the Lights on in France.” African Arguments (JULY 18, 2017). https://africanarguments.org/2017/07/18/a-forgotten-community-the-little-town-in-niger-keeping-thelights-on-in-france-uranium-arlit-areva/.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Hecht, Gabrielle. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012.
Isaacman, Allen F. and Barbara Isaacman. Dams, Displacement and the Delusion of Development Cahora Bassa and its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965 - 2007. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013.
Livingston, Julie. Improvising Medicine : An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Marais, Lochner, Fiona Haslam McKenzie, Leith Deacon, Etienne Nel, Deidre van Rooyen, and Jan Cloete. “The Changing Nature of Mining Towns: Reflections from Australia, Canada and South Africa.” Land use Policy 76, (2018): 779-788. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.03.006.
Njoh, Chie, and Bigon. “CDC Company Towns in Cameroon: A Case of Shaping Built Space to Articulate Power and Social Control in Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives.” Journal of West African History 6, (2020): 91. doi:10.14321/jwestafrihist.6.1.0091.
van der Watt, Phia and Lochner Marais. “Normalising Mining Company Towns in Emalahleni, South Africa.” The Extractive Industries and Society 6, no. 4 (2019): 12051214. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.11.008. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S2214790X19301704.
On July 1, 1997, the red flag of the People’s Republic of China flew over Hong Kong, where only the day before the Union Jack had flown. The territory of Hong Kong consists of three parts: Hong Kong Island, Kowloon Peninsula, and the New Territories, which had entered British control in 1842, 1860, and 1898 respectively, the last leased for ninety-nine-years until 1997.1 Despite its occupation by Japanese forces from 1941 to 1945, Hong Kong otherwise avoided being drawn into major geopolitical conflicts, such as the Chinese Civil War.2 In 1984, after it became clear that China would seek the “return” of its territory, the British and Chinese governments signed the Joint Declaration, which stated that the Chinese government would gain sovereignty over all three parts of Hong Kong thirteen years later, at the end of the ninety-nine-year lease.3 Under the “one country, two systems” agreement, Hong Kong was supposed to retain its previous legal and economic systems as well as some degree of autonomy for fifty years until 2047.4 While the British government refers to the “Hong Kong handover,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prefers to describe this transfer of sovereignty in English as the “return of Hong Kong.”5 This essay will generally refer to “the handover,” but it will also use these other two terms as appropriate to the discussion of a particular government’s actions and policies. Twenty-three years after the transfer of sovereignty in 1997 and despite the supposed guarantees of the “one country, two systems”
1 John M. Carroll, A Concise of Hong Kong (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 1.
2 Steve Yui-Tsang Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong (London, UK: I.B.Tauris, 2004), 158.
3 Ibid., 226.
4 Chris Patten, East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom, and the Future (Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1998), 29.
5 Ibid., 45, 84, 309; Li Fei, Explanations on the Draft Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Issues Relating to the Selection of the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region by Universal Suffrage and on the Method for Forming the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in the Year 2016 (Beijing, China: Tenth Session of the Standing Committee of the Twelfth National People’s Congress, August 27, 2014), 201.
agreement, Beijing’s control over Hong Kong is increasingly authoritarian under the 2020 National Security Law. This law limits civil liberties and sanctions a crackdown on dissidents, partly in response to the massive 2014 “Umbrella Protests” and 2019 protests against a proposed extradition law.6
This essay examines the role of human rights in the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong. It considers several important questions, such as how did British and Chinese governments use human rights as political rhetoric and as negotiation leverage? How did the United States government, particularly under the Clinton Administration, employ human rights as an interested external party? To answer these questions, this project examines issues of international reputation, which all three countries hoped to shape with the political rhetoric of human rights, and negotiation leverage as the U.K., Chinese, and U.S. governments sought agreements as British control of Hong Kong ended. This essay also seeks to determine whether governments actually incorporated these widely-discussed ideals into the Hong Kong legal system as a legitimate recourse for residents, beyond merely using human rights as political rhetoric. It assesses the extent to which human rights became a part of bilateral legal agreements and the Hong Kong legal system as a basis for the legal code or as guarantees for citizens. When considering this incorporation of human rights into legislation, Mary Ann Glendon’s analysis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is useful, particularly her closing argument that “the Declaration’s principles … increasingly acquired legal force, mainly through their incorporation into national legal systems”7 to evaluate if this occurred in Hong Kong. This essay considers the political discussions and legal presence of human rights in Hong Kong after its return to Chinese sovereignty in 6 “Hong Kong security law: What is it and is it worrying?,” BBC News, June 30, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52765838; Austin Ramzy, ”On Hong Kong Handover Anniversary, Many Fear Loss of Freedoms,” The New York Times, July 1, 2019, https://nyti.ms/2No2M3Y.
7 Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), 237.order to assess the actual effects of the political and legal advocacy for human rights.
It is important to note that the transfer of Hong Kong was not a question of self-determination: two global powers, one losing its previous international influence and the other rising as an economic powerhouse, decided the fate of millions of Hong Kong residents without their participation, let alone their consent. However, as Samuel Moyn argues in The Last Utopia the absence or presence of self-determination of peoples does not determine human rights. Indeed, Moyn states “Anticolonialism [after the Second World War] wasn’t a human rights movement.” Instead, he argues that “human rights experienced their triumph as a wide-spread moral vernacular,” a shared language with which individuals, organizations, and nations could discuss and express their moral intentions. This essay examines how governments employed this vernacular “after decolonization not during it.”8
In examining the rhetorical and legal role of human rights during the Hong Kong handover, this essay considers how key players prepared for the Hong Kong handover and how the situation in Hong Kong changed as the territory peacefully left the British Empire and initially played a key role in the People’s Republic of China’s growing overseas economic impact. It explains the background to the changing situation in the former British colony over the two decades after the handover as Beijing moved to exert increasingly direct, authoritarian control over Hong Kong and its residents.
The British government’s Hong Kong handover marked the end of the overseas British Empire.9 However, British interests in the future of Hong Kong were more prosaic and, fundamentally, economic. Since the CCP had made it abundantly clear that there would be no extension granted to the British lease of Hong Kong, and recognizing the threat that Chinese Communist control posed to their economic interests in Hong Kong, successive British governments utilized human rights discourse in an attempt to establish moral leverage in their negotiations with Beijing. The U.K. government (under the Conservative Party leadership of first Margaret Thatcher and then John Major) sought economic concessions and safeguards for Hong Kong residents, knowing that the Chinese government held all the cards. During a 1996 visit to Beijing, British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind “stressed Britain’s intention to remain involved
8 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 117.
9 Andrew Higgings, “A last hurrah and an empire closes down,” The Guardian, July 1, 1997. https://www.theguardian.com/world/1997/jul/01/china. andrewhiggins.
in Hong Kong through the 1997 handover to China,” directly tying this involvement to “’continuing [British] economic interests’ in the colony.”10 This desire to “remain involved” pushed the British government back into negotiations “after six months of bitterness”—according to Philip Webster for The Times—had brought a halt to bilateral “talks on the future of Hong Kong” from 1992 into 1993.11 Protecting British economic interests, in particular seeking Chinese guarantees for the pre-existing systems of private ownership and capitalism, required British leaders to gain negotiation leverage where they had very little.
In the years leading up to the handover, the British government—in particular, its most prominent representative in Hong Kong, Governor Christ Patten— publicly invoked both the British government’s role in safeguarding human rights in Hong Kong and its duty to defend them after 1997. On Patten’s appointment as Hong Kong governor in 1992, Prime Minister John Major stated to the news media that Patten’s intended role in Hong Kong was “to manage the transition to 1997 so as to safeguard Hong Kong’s freedom, stability, and prosperity.”12 Reflecting on his time as governor in his memoir, Patten argued that he tried “to entrench Hong Kong’s rule of law and protection of human rights.”13 British officials did not confine these arguments to the British press. Meeting with Premier Li Peng in Beijing in 1991, Major “lectured [his Chinese counterpart] at length … on the world’s concerns about human rights abuses in China,” making explicit reference to the 1989 state crackdown on dissident protests in Tiananmen Square, “as he sought to be “unrelenting [and] unremitting” on the issue.”14 Embarrassing China on the world stage over alleged human rights abuses was unlikely; the CCP argued it was “willing to listen to criticism on human rights but that such matters [were] its own affair.”15 However, in the aftermath of international outrage over the 1989 crackdown, the Chinese government sought to limit further public accusations of human rights violations. The British government intended to apply pressure to this sensitive point as its representatives continued to nego-
10 Sheila Tefft, “As Clock Ticks for Hong Kong, Britain Seeks a Graceful Exit,” The Christian Science Monitor, January 9, 1996, 6, https://web.b.ebscohost. com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=96e61d4a-c6ea-4901-9cb7-1911976 371c4%40pdc-v-sessmgr02&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=9607101628&db=aph.
11 Philip Webster, “Common Sense Victory, Says Patten,” The Times, April 14, 1993, 1, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/IF0501972375/TTDA?u= nysl_ce_ hamilton&sid=TTDA&xid=ff36189b.
12 Robin Oakley, “Patton Risks Political Career on Hong Kong,” The Times, April 25, 1992, 1, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/IF0503306475/ TTDA?u=nysl_ce_hamilton&sid= TTDA&xid=48770a7a.
13 Chris Patten, First Confession: A Sort of Memoir (London, UK: Allen Lane, 2017).
14 Robert Benjamin, “Major lectures China on human rights abuses Li reminds Briton of colonial past,” Baltimore Sun, September 4, 1991, 17A, https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=WORLDNEWS&docref=news/0EB2E0745D41F4C0.
15 Ibid.
tiate.
Members of the British Parliament frequently raised the issue of human rights in Hong Kong during Parliamentary debates. Both members of the government and the opposition often focused on safeguarding civil-political human rights, or civil liberties. While “human rights” were mentioned over two hundred times in connection with Hong Kong during debates in the House of Commons between January 1980 and December 2010, certain examples are particularly illuminating.16
On June 15, 1994, Ian Davidson, a member of the Labour Party in opposition representing Glasgow Govan, asked: As the Government is no doubt aware, many in this country are worried that human rights in Hong Kong will be severely eroded once the colony is taken over by China. What assurances can he give us that that will not happen?17
Alastair Goodlad, MP for Eddiesbury and representing the Foreign Office, responded that the Conservative government had “repeatedly urged the Chinese authorities to adhere to internationally recognised standards of behaviour and to improve their human rights record.”18 He felt confident in the “body of local human rights jurisprudence,” and “the joint declaration of 1984” to preserve “Hong Kong’s existing legal system” in addition to the provisions of the 1991 “Hong Kong bill of rights,” which applied the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) to Hong Kong.19 The desire among politicians across the political spectrum to protect—or at least be seen to protect—human rights in Hong Kong reflected both moral conviction and calculated negotiation.
Beyond repeatedly invoking the moral vernacular of “human rights,” British governments of both major parties maintained remarkably consistent policy on Hong Kong. Chi-kwan Mark contends in his analysis of British foreign policy before Thatcher’s 1982 visit to China that “successive British governments” recognized “Hong Kong was militarily indefensible” and had little to “no chance of advance towards self-government and independence.”20 Instead, he states that the Minis16 Hansard, China and Hong Kong Debates (London, UK: UK House of Parliament, 2010), https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/Contributions?startDate=1980-01-01&endDate=2010-12-31&searchTerm=%22hong%20 kong%22%20%22human%20rights%22&house=Commons&partial=False
17 Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Sixth Series, 18 July 1994, Vol. 247, 8, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1994-06-15/debates/7fac907e-3695-4077-8186-6fbe9b660f3b/China#contribution-8534da9b-9bf2-4091-b90b-bc3b5a1df1f4.
18 Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Sixth Series, 18 July 1994, Vol. 247, 8, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1994-06-15/debates/7fac907e3695-4077-8186-6fbe9b660f3b/China#contribution-92e23b03-c98b-4e38b1da-63347a481ab5.
19 Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Sixth Series, 18 July 1994, Vol. 247, 8, https://bit.ly/2KmTm7N; Richard Swede, “One Territory: Three Systems?
The Hong Kong Bill of Rights,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1995): 361-62, http://www.jstor.org/stable/760755.
20 Chi-kwan Mark, “To ‘Educate’ Deng Xiaoping in Capitalism: Thatcher’s Visit to China and the Future of Hong Kong in 1982,” Cold War History 17, no.
terial Committee on Hong Kong under Harold Wilson’s Labour government determined in 1967 that “Hong Kong’s future must eventually lie in China,” with a negotiated handover that protected Hong Kong residents and British economic interests in the soon-to-be-former colony.21 Thatcher recounted in her memoirs that, during a 1982 meeting with Deng Xiaoping, she argued a “collapse of Hong Kong would … discredit” not only the Chinese government but the U.K. too.22 A failure of Hong Kong’s financial markets was entirely possible: if investors feared Chinese seizure of private property or other future upheaval, it could provoke an abrupt loss of confidence. Such economic harm would spell disaster for major British firms and have far-reaching effects on the U.K. economy and trade relations in Asia, including the “more than [U.S.]$5 billion [in bilateral U.K.-China trade] annually” as Sheila Tefft described for the Christian Science Monitor.23 For the British government, public invocations of human rights were a moral means to realist ends: securing financial confidence and the rule of law.
The Chinese government regained control over Hong Kong in 1997, guaranteeing that it would maintain the legal and economic systems established by the British, under the “one country, two systems” agreement. Before the return of Hong Kong, Chinese political leaders utilized the “moral vernacular” of human rights in public statements deliberately intended for the international community. They sought in part to rehabilitate the nation’s international image after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and violent government response. The Chinese government also sought to reassure financial investors that Hong Kong would remain open for business to avoid a flight of capital or financial panic by protecting the civil liberties upon which their pre-existing and newly gained financial interests in Hong Kong relied. However, the CCP prioritized national sovereignty above all else.
The CCP initially utilized the language of human rights in developing and updating the Chinese National Constitution in the 1980s. Article 33 states that “the state shall respect and protect human rights.”24 Since neither the Chinese people nor the state-controlled judiciary could hold the Chinese government accountable to such a commitment, the text of the constitution served only as propaganda, whether internal or external. That the CCP felt a need to define its supposed respect and protection for human rights indicates that the Party ei-
2 (April 2017): 164. doi:10.1080/14682745.2015.1094058.
21 Ibid.
22 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 597-98.
23 Sheila Tefft, “As Clock Ticks for Hong Kong, Britain Seeks a Graceful Exit.”
24 Fifth National People’s Congress, The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing, China: National People’s Congress, 1982).
ther believed that they did protect certain human rights or that they ought to at least publicly claim to do so. Respecting and protecting human rights in principle is not the same as doing so in practice; however, the rhetoric encourages financial stability since foreign firms and governments can claim ignorance of human rights violations and point to supposed legal guarantees when defending international trade and financial investments.
Part of the CCP’s attitude towards Hong Kong and subsequent actions were related to this broader hope of financial stability, but not entirely. Fundamentally, regaining legal control of Hong Kong reinforced Chinese sovereignty over its legitimate territory.25 Peaceful transfer and control would allow the CCP to advocate for a similar “solution” to Taiwanese independence, according to Tianbiao Zhu’s analysis of Chinese foreign policy.26 Similarly, nonviolent governance and protection of human rights in Hong Kong could rehabilitate the CCP’s international reputation after the widely-publicized brutal crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square. In a 1990 interview with The Times focusing on the previous year’s events in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Ambassador in London, Ji Chaozhu, specifically referenced Hong Kong and potential fears for the legal and political situation after the transfer of sovereignty. He argued “Hong Kong had nothing to fear” and could rely on the guarantee of “‘one party, two systems,’” in part due to Hong Kong’s position as “China’s main trading partner,” with strong financial ties to the “Guangdong province.”27 To further repair their public image, China signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1997 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1998.28
Beyond the financial and realist motivations for the CCP’s attitude to Hong Kong and human rights, the underlying policy provides further insight into the Chinese government’s actions. How can one profess respect for human rights while suppressing free speech and dissent? Above all, the CCP, according to Premier Zhao Ziyang in a meeting with Margaret Thatcher in 1982, prioritized “sovereignty above prosperity and stability:” a “matter of principle” over financial gain.29 In a 1991 (since declassified) private meeting with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Chinese Premier Li Peng explained his attitude towards human rights.30 Bluntly, Li
25 Chi-kwan, “To ‘Educate’ Deng Xiaoping in Capitalism,” 172. 26 Tianbiao Zhu, “Nationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy,” China Review 1, no. 1 (2001): 16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23461927; Chi-kwan, “To ‘Educate’ Deng Xiaoping in Capitalism,” 180.
27 Tiffany Brown, “Change of Line on Tiananmen,” The Times, November 6, 1990, 12.
28 “Suppressed in translation,” The Economist, March 17, 2016, https:// www.economist.com/china/2016/03/17/suppressed-in-translation.
29 Chi-kwan, “To ‘Educate’ Deng Xiaoping in Capitalism,” 173.
30 See Maurice Cranston, What are Human Rights? (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1962), 35, 63 for discussion of this contrast between conceptions of human rights.
stated that he believed that individuals must “have food, and only then can you have other human rights.”31 This illustrates an explicit contrast between socio-economic rights and the Anglo-American tradition of civil liberties, largely socio-political human rights, which theorists and jurists consider fundamental to free society, such as private property and free speech. While few intellectuals or politicians would argue that a state or an individual could access civil-political rights without food and other basic necessities of life, explicitly positioning socio-economic rights and national sovereignty above other human rights creates a vastly different discourse and public policy than a prioritization of civil-political rights.
While Tianbiao Zhu argues that China had previously struggled to balance “its relationship with the West ... and its consideration of national independence,” the CCP sought to promote “economic development” whenever possible, including making concessions to Western powers.32 Although Mark Chi-kwan notes that “Beijing regarded resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong as a foregone conclusion,” Chinese political leaders put significant effort into promoting faith in Hong Kong’s stability after 1997 to “maintain [the territory’s] prosperity.”33 This stability would be best served by the preservation of secure private property ownership and the rule of law: civil-political human rights. Such stability was necessary as Hong Kong held major financial importance for China, contributing almost a sixth of China’s GDP.34 Direct trade between mainland China and Hong Kong firms or international companies based in Hong Kong was a major component of Chinese international trade. Moreover, financial stability in Hong Kong and ever-closer ties with China could encourage further international investment, whether into the former British colony or other areas of China.
To support peaceful reunification and financial stability, Chinese officials directly connected the “moral vernacular” of human rights to the forthcoming return of Hong Kong. Ambassador Ji Chaozhu sought to present an optimistic future for Hong Kong, explicitly invoking human rights. He claimed that the Chinese government had “every intention of respecting human rights, [as] that was the reason for the revolution.”35 This statement was made to a journalist from The Times of London, so the intended audience is clear. Ji sought to reassure the international community, particularly the British polit-
31 U.S. Department of State, “Former President Carter’s Meeting with Premier Li Peng, April 14, 1991,” Washington, D. C., 1991, https://searchproquest-com.ez.hamilton.edu/dnsa/docview/1679077990/23D52059A57 34ACCPQ/1?accountid=11264.
32 Tianbiao Zhu, “Nationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy,” 20.
33 Chi-kwan, “To ‘Educate’ Deng Xiaoping in Capitalism,” 166.
34 Keith B. Richburg, “Five myths about Hong Kong,” The Washington Post, June 21, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/fivemyths-about-hong-kong/2019/06/21/d72eb0b2-935e-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html.
35 Brown, “Change of Line on Tiananmen,” 12.
ical establishment and financial institutions, that Hong Kong’s civil liberties and thus their investments in the soon-to-be-former colony would be secure.
The United States government sought stability in Hong Kong to protect its economic investments in China, both for those companies with major or growing investments in mainland China and for those financially involved in Hong Kong. In the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton sought to publicly hold China accountable for the protection of human rights, after previous criticism. Above all, the U.S. government sought financial stability and a peaceful transition from the British administration of Hong Kong to Chinese control, particularly given the recent, high tensions in the region.
Clinton had campaigned for the presidency with promises to hold China to account for human rights abuses, in contrast to the incumbent President George H. W. Bush. However, as President, “the most conservative Republicans and the most liberal Democrats” had severely criticized Clinton for extending China’s most favored nation (MFN) status without significant improvement in safeguarding human rights, according to Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover for the Baltimore Sun.36 To counteract Clinton’s image problem, Robert L. Bernstein and Richard Dicker argued that Clinton needed to show the U.S. public, the Chinese government, and the international community that he was “not about to sacrifice human rights” in mainland China or Hong Kong for U.S. economic gain.37 However, there were certainly plenty of financial gains to be made. As Clinton began his first term in office, “U.S. investments in Hong Kong reached [US]$7 billion,” Kerry Dumbaugh reported for the Congressional Research Service.38 In the rest of China, international companies sought to get rich by ignoring or even exploiting the absence of human rights protections. However, a fear of private property seizure and subsequent upheaval could have serious financial repercussions for the former British colony, even before government action. Dumbaugh describes how such policies—real or feared—from the CCP threatened to change the lives of more than “25,000 Americans [who] live[d] and work[ed] in various US private and government enterprises in Hong Kong,” and significantly harm the U.S.$10 billion worth of imports into the U.S. from Hong Kong and the import market in Hong Kong, the 36 Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, “The critics of Clinton’s China policy don’t like each other, either,” The Baltimore Sun, April 2, 1997, https://www. baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-04-02-1997092107-story.html.
37 Robert L. Bernstein and Richard Dicker, “Human Rights First,” Foreign Policy 94 (Spring 1994): 47, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1149129.
38 Kerry Dumbaugh, “Hong Kong: Sino-British Disputes and Implications for U.S. Interests,” Congressional Research Service (Washington D.C., 1994), CRS1, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs74/.
“12th largest US export market, importing approximately [U.S.]$9 billion in U.S. goods in 1992.”39 The civil-political human rights that protect private property ownership and free speech could protect American businesses’ financial investments in Hong Kong. Moreover, an example of capitalist success under CCP control could create further opportunities in the rest of China.
Politicians from both major parties often publicly advocate human rights protections as part of U.S. foreign policy in an attempt to influence other nations and to present a positive national image to the international community. Members of both major U.S. political parties called on China to protect human rights in Hong Kong and pledged that the U.S. government would hold the Chinese government accountable. In the fall of 1991, three members of the U.S. House of Representatives on a visit to Beijing “warned China not to take for granted the unconditional renewal of its favorable trade status with the United States,” Robert Benjamin reported for the Baltimore Sun.40 Although President George H. W. Bush intended to—and did—“veto congressional efforts” that would require the Chinese government to notably improve its record on human rights protections in order to retain Most Favored Nation trade status, “Representatives Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, Ben Jones, D-GA, and John Miller, R-WA” successfully organized the necessary votes in the House to override the veto. Their measures did not, however, win sufficient support in the Senate.41 As the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty drew near, Steven Erlanger described for the New York Times that Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and President Clinton presented a united front, encouraging the Chinese government to “preserve democracy, human rights and a market economy in [their newly returned territory of] Hong Kong.”42 Although Clinton “pronounced himself ‘quite satisfied’ with the assurances … he received … from the Chinese Foreign Minister,” both U.S. leaders suggested that failures to “live up” to these agreements could have severe, negative consequences for China in terms of U.S. economic investments and diplomatic relations.43
U.S. officials were able to discuss their hopes for stability and human rights protections with the highest levels of the Chinese government. Preparing Clinton’s Secretary of State Warren Christopher for a 1994 meeting in Paris with his counterpart Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen, State Department staffers noted that “human rights will be the most urgent topic.”44 Christo-
39 Ibid.
40 Benjamin, “Major lectures China on human rights.”
41 Ibid.
42 Steven Erlanger, “Clinton and Gingrich View Hong Kong as Test for China,” The New York Times, May 1, 1997, A8.
43 Ibid.
44 U.S. Department of State. Briefing Memorandum: Meeting with PRC Foreign Minister. Washington, D. C., 1994a. https://search.proquest.com/ docview/1679077967/abstract/D179BB2B09594EE1PQ/28?accoun-
pher intended to focus on bilateral issues, the upcoming transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty, and nuclear armament of North Korea.45 His advisors urged him to “underline [the U.S.’] large stake in Hong Kong’s future” and hoped that the U.S. could “urge China to re-engage with Britain in negotiations on Hong Kong to ensure a smooth transition.”46 The Clinton Administration controlled U.S. foreign policy before the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty and were willing to devote influence and resources to limited human rights advocacy. However, as President Bush had done before him, and despite his campaign promises, President Clinton repeatedly vetoed bipartisan congressional attempts to make Most Favored Nation trade status contingent upon improved human rights protections. Instead, Clinton sought to protect U.S. economic interests in China and the financial benefits of bilateral Chinese-U.S. trade. Similarly, when Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry met with his Chinese counterpart, the Minister of National Defense General Chi Haotian, his priority was not human rights. The since-declassified talking points prepared by Department staffers explicitly state that they believed discussing the “outstanding differences” between the U.S. and China on nuclear “nonproliferation and human rights” would prevent “full cooperation and shift the focus of [the forthcoming] senior-level dialogue away from the theme of common interests.”47 Despite the public moral discourse of human rights, U.S. presidential administrations were unwilling to sacrifice more vital national interests (such as military or financial) to demand improvements for human rights.
The concept of human rights was not implemented in Hong Kong legal systems. Although British common law protected certain rights that are normally included under the umbrella of human rights, such as freedom of the press and the protection of private property, the British colonial power had not permitted Hong Kong to hold fully democratic elections—a cornerstone of human rights.48 The ostensibly legally binding joint declaration between the British and Chinese governments did not employ human rights as a term but did enumerate many specific rights and privileges. After the return to Chinese sovereignty, however, the Chinese administration sought to roll back even the limited protections previously afforded to Hong Kong residents. The political tid=11264.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 U.S. Department of Defense, “Private Meeting: Expanded Talking Points,” 1996, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1679076086/fulltextPDF/AB17CCE5D9B442DPQ/1?accountid=11264.
48 Jonathan Mirsky, “Australia hailed by Patten as model for Asian democracy,” The Times, February 15, 1994, 14.
rhetoric around human rights, particularly from the CCP, did not translate into corresponding legal safeguards. Moreover, while the British had enforced certain rights and privileges, they did not legally define these rights within a broader concept of human rights. Human rights served only as a rhetorical, rather than legal, catch-all term. Mary Ann Glendon’s analysis of the UDHR’s global influence allows consideration of the failed incorporation of human rights into legislation in Hong Kong. While she asserts that “the Declaration’s principles … increasingly acquired legal force … through their incorporation into national legal systems,” this did not occur in Hong Kong.49 Without incorporation into domestic legal codes, the principles of human rights exert no legal force: international agreements are rarely if ever enforced, as there is rarely any effective enforcement mechanism. Consequently, Hong Kong residents had and continue to have extremely limited legal recourse to human rights.
Before the Hong Kong handover, the British colonial government had enforced political reform. As Kerry Dumbaugh describes in the U.S. Congressional Research Service report, Governor Patten focused on electoral reforms: lowering the voting age, redefining electoral constituencies, and reducing the number of appointed leadership positions relative to those that were elected.50 These new laws and regulations made no explicit, textual reference to the concept of human rights. Amnesty International reported in 1984 that “despite a Hong Kong Legislative Council vote, without dissent, to establish an independent human rights commission,” Patten had failed to create the desired commission.51
However, the concept of human rights was protected but not legally defined in China under the CCP. Nonetheless, although the CCP included the language of human rights in the Chinese Constitution, stating in Article 33 that “the state shall respect and protect human rights,” this offered no effective legal recourse for Chinese citizens.52
By contrast, the Joint Chinese-British Declaration of 1984 makes no explicit reference to the concept of human rights. However, Appendix II states that “the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) as applied to Hong Kong shall remain in force.”53 The U.K. signed 49 Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New, 237.
50 Dumbaugh, “Hong Kong: Sino-British Disputes and Implications for U.S. Interests,” CRS-3
51 “Hong Kong: Amnesty International criticizes flaws in protection of human rights; Calls for Establishment of a Human Rights Commission,” Amnesty International News Service, April 21, 1984, https://www.amnesty.org/en/ documents/NWS11/054/1994/en/.
52 Fifth National People’s Congress, The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing, China: National People’s Congress, 1982); Emily Lau, “In Defense of Universal Rights,” Amnesty International, July 30, 1998, https:// www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/148000/act300071998en.pdf. 53 China and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, “Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong (with Annexes),” United Nations,
both these international agreements in 1966, ratifying them in 1976, largely applying the provisions of the ICCPR to Hong Kong.54 However, China did not sign either until the late 1990s, ratifying only the ICESCR in 2001.55 The negotiators of the Declaration devoted special attention to “rights concerning the ownership of property, [which] shall continue to be protected by law,” the basic civil rights of the “freedom[s] of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, … of demonstration … [and] of belief” and the rights fundamental to capitalism: the rights “to form and join trade unions, … of strike, …, of choice of occupation, of academic research.”56 This document guaranteed Hong Kong residents more than thirty specific rights or privileges, all of which correspond with human rights enumerated in the ICCPR and ICESCR. In enumerating specific rights, the British government sought to hold the Chinese government accountable after 1997 in specific areas, with a focus on “private property” and “foreign investment,” without opening themselves up to criticism on the much broader issue of their record of human rights protections.57 It is most telling that although the Joint-Declaration guaranteed Hong Kong residents certain rights and protections, it gave individuals no clear, institutional, legal recourse. Instead, it was an agreement between two governments for their mutual financial benefit.
Similarly, the Chinese Government’s Basic Law for Hong Kong subverted human rights, despite Article 6 stating that “the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall protect the right of private ownership of property in accordance with law.”58 As in the case of the Chinese constitution, there was no practical remedy— legal or otherwise—available to Hong Kong residents who believed that their rights had been violated.
The Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance, which became law in 1991, sought to define and protect the rights of Hong Kong residents, from “the right to liberty and security of person” (Article 5) to “the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” (Article 11), holding the British colonial government and—it was hoped, Richard Swede contends—the CCP to account.59 Such a Bill of Rights was not then present in British common law (although the Human Rights Act of 1998 does
1984, 70.
54 “United Nations treaties ratified by the UK,” Scottish Government, May 3, 2016, https://www.gov.scot/publications/united-nations-treaties-ratifiedby-the-uk/; Richard Swede, “One Territory: Three Systems? The Hong Kong Bill of Rights,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 44, No. 2 (April 1995), 360, https://www.jstor.org/stable/760755.
55 “Suppressed in translation,” The Economist
56 China and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, “Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong (with Annexes),” 66, 69-70.
57 Ibid., 62.
58 Seventh National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China, The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, Third Session (April 4, 1990): 58.
59 Richard Swede, “One Territory: Three Systems?,” 361.
serve a similar practice of enumerating specific rights).60 However, Richard Swede argues in his examination of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights and its historical context, that the U.K. has frequently sought to enshrine human rights protections in the “constitutions of its former colonies … and [those of] territories not scheduled for independence.”61 While the Ordinance in Hong Kong has “no special constitutional status,” and could therefore be “amended or repealed in the same way as any other ordinance,” it held significant legal weight. After the passing of the Bill of Rights, the Hong Kong Letters Patent (defining the structure of government) required that no future laws could conflict with the ICCPR in Hong Kong. Previously, legal protections of human rights in British-controlled Hong Kong relied upon the pre-existing foundation of British common law. Richard Swede argues that many judges in Hong Kong believed that the rights defined in the ICCPR had “common law origins” or could be similarly protected by British common law as they were by the ICCPR and that on ICESCR.62 Although Hong Kong judges interpreted common law to protect certain rights, such as protections for criminal defendants, they did so without referring to a broader concept of human rights.
However, the British government under Tony Blair leadership of the Labour Party, passed the Human Rights Act in 1998, incorporating much—but not all—of the tenets of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, including, controversially a provision for appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.63 However, this law applied only to the four major nations: England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, explicitly excluding the Crown dependencies (the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) and remaining British Overseas Territories, such as the Falkland Islands or Gibraltar.64 Even if Hong Kong had remained under British control at the time the Act was passed, its residents would not be protected by its provisions. Moreover, the U.K. maintained “derogations” to the Convention in the areas of education rights and detention without judicial oversight in Northern Ireland.65 Even under the Blair Labour government, which supported human rights in principle, the U.K. experienced the incomplete incorporation of international human rights laws and such laws did not apply overseas.
Nonetheless, human rights protections for Hong Kong residents were significantly reduced once the territory was under Chinese control. Despite previous public
60 Dominic McGoldrick, “The United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act 1998 in Theory and Practice,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 50, no. 4 (Oct. 2001): 902, https://www.jstor.org/stable/761519.
61 Swede, “One Territory: Three Systems?,” 360-61.
62 Ibid., 369.
63 McGoldrick, “The United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act 1998 in Theory and Practice,” 939.
64 Ibid., 902, 902n10.
65 Ibid., 907.
statements and legal commitments, as early as February 1997, the New York Times reported that a “Beijing-appointed committee” in Hong Kong had “voted … to repeal several key laws protecting Hong Kong’s civil liberties.” 66 While this committee was based in Hong Kong, its members had been directly appointed by the Beijing government, making its actions representative not of the will of Hong Kong residents but of the CCP’s. Edward A. Gargan for the New York Times noted that “many critics of Beijing” believed that “eviscerating the Bill of Rights and repealing the civil liberties laws” would seriously reduce “the protection of human rights in Hong Kong.”67 Regardless of whether the language of human rights was incorporated into the legislation of Hong Kong under Chinese control, it provided neither protection of human rights nor recourse for residents whose rights the government violated.
Since 1997, the heavily Beijing-influenced Hong Kong legislative council has passed major legislation that circumscribed Hong Kong residents’ human rights, particularly their civil-political rights that allow and encourage a free democratic society with the rule of law and the free exchange of ideas, including those in opposition to the government. The Chinese government in Beijing imposed a national security law in June 2020 that created a Beijing-controlled National Security Office in Hong Kong and threatened any act of secession, subversion, terrorism, or foreign collusion (as defined by the Chinese Government) with a permanent ban from holding public office and a maximum punishment of life imprisonment.68 Hong Kong residents have often taken to the streets in huge numbers to protest against laws restricting their human rights, especially civil-political rights. However, as critics of the CCP predicted prior to 1997, authorities in Hong Kong and Beijing have continued to reduce the human rights protections for Hong Kong residents. With the recent jailing of prominent democracy activists and the mass resignation of pro-democracy lawmakers from the legislative council, the future of human rights in Hong Kong looks bleak.69
66 Edward A. Gargan, “Beijing Panel Votes to End Rights Laws in Hong Kong,” The New York Times, February 2, 1997, 8.
67 Ibid.
68 “Hong Kong security law: What is it and is it worrying?,” BBC News
69 Helen Davidson, “Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong faces jail after guilty plea over police HQ protests,” The Guardian, November 23, 2020, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/23/hong-kong-protests-joshuawong-guilty-police-hq-protests-agnes-chow-ivan-lam.; Lilian Cheng, “Echo chamber or sound politics: how will Hong Kong’s legislature function without an opposition?,” South China Morning Post, November 22, 2020, https:// www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3110881/echo-chamberor-sound-politics-how-will-hong-kongs.
Even before the Chinese government took control of Hong Kong, legal safeguards for human rights were already under fire, as previously observed in this essay, with the overturning of important laws that had previously protected civil-political rights.70 In a broad 2007 report, Hong Kong-based researchers for Amnesty International argued that “The [Hong Kong Special Administrative Region] authorities have missed several key opportunities to take concrete steps to enhance protection of the basic human rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong over the last ten years.”71 The report’s authors describe “police use of excessive force against peaceful protests … [including] pepper spray, tear-gas, and bean-bag rounds.”72 These police actions (beginning as early as September 1997) were undertaken in attempts to restrict the Hong Kong residents’ ability to exercise in practice the rights they held in principle. However, “a large number of media outlets remain[ed] in Hong Kong, expressing a diversity of opinion and reporting on various social and human rights issues.”73 To protest potential legislative restrictions on human rights, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents peacefully took to the streets to try to influence the government, showing a deep commitment to human rights despite the acts of police violence.74
Austin Ramzy of the New York Times argues that, in the near quarter-century since the Chinese government took control of Hong Kong, “every day brings new evidence [Hong Kong’s] freedoms are slipping away.”75 The rights that Hong Kong residents felt to be secure, such as their rights to freely protest and publish, have been threatened or, in some cases, abrogated. Although Hong Kong has never been a true democracy, Jimmy Lai, “a Hong Kong media tycoon,” whose publications criticize Beijing, described those human rights (largely civil liberties) that the colonial British government had guaranteed as “the protection of freedom.”76 This, in Lai’s opinion, is why the “Hong Kong people are so rebellious” against the CCP’s attempts to subjugate them to the terms of mainland rule.77 This rebellious attitude is visible in the massive public demonstrations against previous national security laws, stricter CCP control of education, potential extradition to mainland China, and
70 Gargan, “Beijing Panel Votes to End Rights Laws in Hong Kong,” 8. 71 Amnesty International, “Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty: ten years on,” June 29, 2007, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ ASA19/001/2007/en/, 1.
72 Ibid., 3-4.
73 Ibid., 6.
74 Ibid., 14.
75 Austin Ramzy, “On Hong Kong Handover Anniversary, Many Fear Loss of Freedoms,” The New York Times, July 1, 2019, https://nyti.ms/2No2M3Y.
76 Jimmy Lai, “Jimmy Lai vs. China,” interview by Austin Ramzy and Tiffany May, The Daily, The New York Times, September 3, 2020, audio, 33:56, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/podcasts/the-daily/hong-kongchina-jimmy-lai.html.
77 Ibid.
restrictive electoral laws.78 Although there are a few high-profile examples of Hong Kong authorities caving to public pressure, such as the temporary withdrawal of previous extradition or national security laws, under the CCP’s influence, neither the Legislative Council nor the Chief Executive—as a rule—respond satisfactorily to public pressure.79 Despite protests and massive unpopularity, Beijing sought to enforce the June 2020 National Security law. According to the BBC, this law defines each of the four areas broadly: it punishes any act or attempt of secession (“breaking away” from China), subversion (“undermining the power or authority of the central government”), terrorism (using “violence or intimidation” against others), or “collusion with foreign or external forces.”80 This law takes preference in any “conflicts with … Hong Kong law.” Anyone “suspected of breaking the law can be wire-tapped and put under surveillance” and, if found guilty, will be banned from public office and could be punished with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The law not only creates a Beijing-controlled national security office and police force in Hong Kong but gives the Beijing government control over the law’s interpretation and the power to extradite an individual to face their charges in a mainland court.
Critics of the CCP have long predicted that Hong Kong’s rights and freedoms were at risk, despite the “one country, two systems” guarantee. This is the result of two trends: Hong Kong’s shrinking economic importance to China and the CCP’s general crackdown on dissent. Hong Kong may have been a “golden goose” to China in 1997, contributing about “16 percent of its gross domestic product,” according to Keith B. Richburg of the Washington Post, but Hong Kong’s economic contributions have since decreased in relative importance to China.81 Instead, Hong Kong now relies more economically on the mainland than the rest of China relies on it.82 Moreover, the availability in Hong Kong of books and reports critical of Chinese Communist leaders led to restrictions after 2010 on what could be printed or sold, whether to residents or visitors from the mainland.83 After the secret arrests and renditions of five Hong Kong residents involved in the selling of critical books, which the CCP had banned in the rest of China, Ilaria Maria Sala reported in the Guardian that “Chinese authorities [continued their attempts] to counter the influence of the
78 Yi-Zheng Lian, “Reports of Hong Kong’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated,” The New York Times, November 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/11/25/opinion/hong-kong-democracy.html; Austin Ramzy and Mike Ives, “Hong Kong Protests, One Year Later,” The New York Times, June 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/world/asia/hong-kong-protests-one-year-later.html.
79 Lian, “Reports of Hong Kong’s Death.”
80 “Hong Kong security law: What is it and is it worrying?.”
81 Keith B. Richburg, “Five myths about Hong Kong.”
82 Ibid.
83 Ilaria Maria Sala, “In Hong Kong’s book industry, ‘everybody is scared,’” The Guardian, December 28, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2016/dec/28/in-hong-kongs-book-industry-everybody-is-scared.
Hong Kong publishing industry.”84 As the CCP loosened travel restrictions for visitors from the rest of China to Hong Kong and sought to further incorporate Hong Kong into the national system, Hong Kong’s free press posed an intolerable threat to the Chinese political order and its leaders.85
Nonetheless, the restrictions on human rights in Hong Kong were not entirely predictable. Before the return of Hong Kong, the CCP had hoped that peace and preservation of human rights in Hong Kong would encourage reunification with Taiwan under a similar “one country, two systems” guarantee.86 Instead, Beijing’s crackdown on dissent and proscription of human rights protections “has further eroded what little support there was in Taiwan for unifying with the mainland,” according to Javier C. Hernández and Steven Lee Myers, writing for the New York Times.87 Fewer and fewer Taiwanese lawmakers and residents trust China or support moves towards compromise, let alone national reunification. While the CCP has brought Hong Kong into greater compliance with the rules of the mainland, it has only driven Taiwan farther away.
The CCP may have feared international sanctions but China’s importance as a trade partner protected it, given the global focus on the economic crises of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the international community, including the U.K. and the U.S., criticized the 2020 National Security Law, yet took little practical action, with the important exception of increased access to visas and foreign citizenship for Hong Kong residents.88
As the CCP and its appointed authorities continue to erode human rights protections in Hong Kong, exporting “mainland-style authoritarian governance” to the territory according to Nathan Law Kwun Chung and Alex Chow, the truth of the past three decades becomes ever clearer.89 The rhetoric around human rights was useful in negotiations and creating a positive national image to the world for the U.K., Chinese and U.S. governments, but meant extraordinarily little to the lives of Hong Kong residents. Neither the U.K. nor Chinese governments incorporated the concept of human rights into laws that gave Hong Kongers effective legal protections
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid. “Nobody knows exactly why the authorities in China decided to crack down on Causeway Bay Books, though it is thought that the final straw is likely to have been a salacious work about China’s president Xi Jinping’s relationship with women that was about to be published.”
86 Tianbiao Zhu, “Nationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy;” Chi-kwan, “To ‘Educate’ Deng Xiaoping in Capitalism,” 180.
87 Javier C. Hernández and Steven Lee Myers, “As China Strengthens Grip on Hong Kong, Taiwan Sees a Threat,” The New York Times, July 1, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/asia/taiwan-china-hong-kong.html.
88 “Hong Kong: ‘Five Eyes could be blinded,’ China warns West,” BBC News, November 19, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-54995227.
89 Nathan Law Kwun Chung and Alex Chow, “Mr. Biden, Keep the Pressure on Hong Kong,” New York Times, December 2, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/12/02/opinion/hong-kong-biden.html?auth=login-google.
or recourse. Instead, the stability of the free market and maintaining private property has taken and continues to take precedence over residents’ socio-political human rights. While young activists remain committed to fighting for true democracy and civil liberties, the future for human rights protections in Hong Kong is most likely their demise.
Books
Carroll, John M. A Concise History of Hong Kong New York, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007.
Cranston, Maurice. What are Human Rights?. New York: Basic Books Inc., 1962.
Glendon, Mary Ann. A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: Random House, 2001.
Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011
Patten, Chris. East and West: The Last Governor of Hong Kong on Power, Freedom, and the Future. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1998. ——— First Confession: A Sort of Memoir. London, UK: Allen Lane, 2017.
Thatcher, Margaret. The Downing Street Years. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
Yui-Tsang, Steve. A Modern History of Hong Kong London, UK: I.B.Tauris, 2004.
News Articles
“Hong Kong security law: What is it and is it worrying?.” BBC News, June 30, 2020. https://www.bbc. com/news/world-asia-china-52765838.
“Hong Kong: ‘Five Eyes could be blinded,’ China warns West.” BBC News, November 19, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-54995227.
“Hong Kong: Amnesty International criticizes flaws in protection of human rights; Calls for Establishment of a Human Rights Commission.” Amnesty International News Service, April 21, 1984. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ NWS11/054/1994/en/.
“Suppressed in translation.” The Economist, March 17, 2016. https://www.economist.com/china/2016/03/17/suppressed-in-translation.
Benjamin, Robert. “Major lectures China on human rights abuses Li reminds Briton of colonial past.” Baltimore Sun. September 4, 1991, 17A, https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/ news/document-view?p=WORLDNEWS&docref=news/0EB2E0745D41F4C0.
Brown, Tiffany. “Change of Line on Tiananmen.” The Times, November 6, 1990.
Cheng, Lilian. “Echo chamber or sound politics: how will Hong Kong’s legislature function without an opposition?.” South China Morning Post, November 22, 2020. https://www.scmp.com/news/hongkong/politics/article/3110881/echo-chamber-orsound-politics-how-will-hong-kongs.
Chung, Nathan Law Kwun and Alex Chow. “Mr. Biden, Keep the Pressure on Hong Kong,” New York Times, December 2, 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/12/02/opinion/hong-kong-biden.html?auth=login-google.
Davidson, Helen. “Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong faces jail after guilty plea over police HQ protests.” The Guardian, November 23, 2020. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/23/hongkong-protests-joshua-wong-guilty-police-hq-protests-agnes-chow-ivan-lam.
Erlanger, Steven. “Clinton and Gingrich View Hong Kong as Test for China.” The New York Times, May 1, 1997, A8.
Gargan, Edward A. “Beijing Panel Votes to Rights Laws in Hong Kong.” The Sunday Times, February 2, 1997.
Germond, Jack W. and Jules Witcover. “The critics of Clinton’s China policy don’t like each other, either.” The Baltimore Sun, April 2, 1997. https:// www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-0402-1997092107-story.html.
Hernández, Javier C. and Steven Lee Myers. “As China Strengthens Grip on Hong Kong, Taiwan Sees a Threat.” The New York Times, July 1, 2020. https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/world/asia/taiwan-china-hong-kong.html.
Higgins, Andrew. “A last hurrah and an empire closes down.” The Guardian, July 1, 1997. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/1997/jul/01/china. andrewhiggins.
Lau, Emily. “In Defense of Universal Rights.” Amnesty International, July 30, 1998. https://www. amnesty.org/download/Documents/148000/ act300071998en.pdf.
Lian, Yi-Zheng. “Reports of Hong Kong’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated.” The New York Times, November 25, 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/11/25/opinion/hong-kong-democracy. html.
Mirsky, Jonathan. “Australia hailed by Patten as model for Asian democracy.” The Times, February 15, 1994, 14.
Oakley, Robin. “Patton Risks Political Career on Hong Kong.” The Times, April 25, 1992, 1, https:// link.gale.com/apps/doc/IF0503306475/TTDA?u=nysl_ce_hamilton&sid= TTDA&xid=48770a7a.
Ramzy, Austin and Mike Ives. “Hong Kong Protests, One Year Later.” The New York Times, June 9, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/world/ asia/hong-kong-protests-one-year-later.html.
Ramzy, Austin. “Hong Kong’s Hand-Over: To Celebrate Or Not?” The New York Times, Jul 7, 1996. https://search.proquest.com/ docview/109628360.
“On Hong Kong Handover Anniversary, Many Fear Loss of Freedoms.” The New York Times, July 1, 2019. https://nyti.ms/2No2M3Y.
Richburg, Keith B. “Five myths about Hong Kong.” The Washington Post, June 21, 2019. https://www. washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/fivemyths-about-hong-kong/2019/06/21/d72eb0b2935e-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html.
Sala, Ilaria Maria. “In Hong Kong’s book industry, ‘everybody is scared.’” The Guardian, December 28, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2016/dec/28/in-hong-kongs-book-industry-everybody-is-scared.
Tefft, Sheila. “As Clock Ticks for Hong Kong, Britain Seeks a Graceful Exit.” The Christian Science Monitor. January 9, 1996, 6. https://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=96e61d4a-c6ea-4901-9cb7-191197637
1c4%40pdc-v-sessmgr02&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=9607101628&db=aph.
Webster, Philip. “Common Sense Victory, Says Patten.” The Times, April 14, 1993. https://link.gale. com/apps/doc/IF0501972375/TTDA?u= nysl_ce_ hamilton&sid=TTDA&xid=ff36189b.
Interviews
Lai, Jimmy. “Jimmy Lai vs. China.” Interview by Austin Ramzy and Tiffany May. The Daily, The New York Times, September 3, 2020. Audio, 33:56. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/podcasts/the-daily/hong-kong-china-jimmy-lai.html.
Journal Articles
Bernstein, Robert L., and Richard Dicker. “Human Rights First.” Foreign Policy, no. 94 (1994): 43-47. doi:10.2307/1149129.
Mark, Chi-kwan. “To ‘Educate’ Deng Xiaoping in Capitalism: Thatcher’s Visit to China and the Future of Hong Kong in 1982.” Cold War History: Socialism, Capitalism, and Sino-European Relations in the Deng Xiaoping Era, 1978-1992 17, no. 2 (Apr 3, 2017): 161-180. doi:10.1080/14682745.2015.1 094058. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. 1080/14682745.2015.1094058.
McGoldrick, Dominic. “The United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act 1998 in Theory and Practice.”
The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2001): 901-53. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/761519.
Swede, Richard. “One Territory: Three Systems? The Hong Kong Bill of Rights.” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1995): 358-78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/760755.
Zhu, Tianbiao. “Nationalism and Chinese Foreign Policy.” China Review 1, no. 1 (2001): 1-27. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/23461927.
“United Nations treaties ratified by the UK,” Scottish Government, May 3, 2016. https://www.gov. scot/publications/united-nations-treaties-ratifiedby-the-uk/.
China and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong (with Annexes) United Nations, 1984.
Fifth National People’s Congress. The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. Beijing, China: 1982.
Seventh National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China. The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. Third Session. (April 4, 1990).
Li Fei. Explanations on the Draft Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Issues Relating to the Selection of the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region by Universal Suffrage and on the Method for Forming the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in the Year 2016. Tenth Session of the Standing Committee of the Twelfth National People’s Congress. China: August 27, 2014.
Parliamentary Debates
Hansard. China and Hong Kong Debates. London, UK: UK House of Parliament, 2010. https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/Contributions?startDate=1980-01-01&endDate=2010-12-31&searchTerm=%22hong%20kong%22%20
%22human%20rights%22&house=Commons&partial=False
Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Sixth Series, 18 July 1994, Vol. 247, 8, https://bit.ly/2KmTm7N
Internal Governmental Memos
U.S. Department of Defense. Private Meeting: Expanded Talking Points 1996. https://search. proquest.com/docview/1679076086/fulltextPDF/ AB17CCE5D9B442DPQ/1?accountid=11264.
U.S. Department of State. Briefing Memorandum: Meeting with PRC Foreign Minister. Washington, D. C., 1994a. https://search.proquest. com/docview/1679077967/abstract/D179BB2B09594EE1PQ/28?accountid=11264.
———. Former President Carter’s Meeting with Premier Li Peng, April 14, 1991, Washington, D. C., 1991. https://search-proquest-com.ez.hamilton. edu/dnsa/docview/1679077990/23D52059A573 4ACCPQ/1?accountid=11264.
Reports
Amnesty International. “Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty: ten years on.” June 29, 2007. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ ASA19/001/2007/en/.
Dumbaugh, Kerry. Hong Kong: Sino-British Disputes and Implications for U.S. Interests. Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metacrs74/.
“I became obsessed with the thought of India. What was this India that possessed me and beckoned to me continually, urging me to action so that we might realize some vague but deeply felt desire in our hearts.”1 Jawaharal Nehru, a key Indian independence activist and the first Prime Minister of India, wrote The Quest during his imprisonment by British officials from 1942 to 1945. It is emblematic of the negotiation and formation of Indian identity which at its core is, as Benedict Anderson asserts, an imagined community.2 This imagined identity, which originally entailed a united subcontinent, ended as a partitioned state, giving birth to India and Pakistan. Many present-day commentators argue that this two-state divide was not only natural, but inevitable. Such notions place the evolution of history on “antecedent causes rather [than] complex transactions between the past and the present.”3
To bypass this History,4 Duara lays forward the theory of bifurcation that examines how Historical narratives are appropriated to mold the present, allowing for a reclamation of history.5 Using Duara’s theory of bifurcated history, I will refute the claim that the path to Indian independence was always via a two-state partition. Instead, British manipulation of the subcontinent created an underlying identity framework that exacerbated religious identity formation building up to the eve of partition. This paper focuses on three main periods: Indian identity under the Mughal Empire, the establishment of British rule and formation of an identity structure, and subsequent Indian response and identity solid-
1. Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Quest” in The Discovery of India: Part II, from Modern India: An Interpretive Anthology (London: The Macmillan Company, 1971), 3-4.
2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
3. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4.
4. Duara posits a difference between History and history, the former being historical narratives that are appropriated to mold the past, present, and future, while the latter concerns unlocking trends in context with historical events. Duara also places history as the ultimate goal of historians.
5. Duara, Rescuing History, 5.
ification.
The Mughal Empire’s religious and ethnic diversity fostered a sense of unity throughout the subcontinent. The upper-level mansabdars—military commanders of the mid-seventeenth century—consisted of Afghanis, Persians, Rajputs, Marathas, Iranis, Turanis, and other Indian ethnic groups, who were in turn Sunni, Shi’i, Hindu, and even Zoroastrians. These leaders prospered as the empire expanded across the subcontinent.6 However, mansabdars identified primarily with their “clear-cut lineage and familial ties…place of origin… [and] sharply demarcated social customs and habits,” rendering religious and ethnic identities relatively soft and flexible.7
Identity formation occurred around the khanzad ideology. Khanzad became prevalent during Akbar’s reign and relied on ultimate loyalty to the Mughal emperor. The emperor primarily rewarded a khanzadi’s loyalty with court positions and mansabs (military ranks); this status became hereditary with time.8 Raja Man Singh (15501614), a Rajput and Hindu, was the son of a khanzadi. His own personal loyalty resulted in the attainment of the highest mansab 7,000 (5,000 was the highest a regular noble could achieve) and the title of farzand (son) from Akbar.9 Singh’s status and identity lasted into Jahangir’s reign, demonstrating the formation of an identity of loyalty to the emperor, an identity that bypassed local ties and constituted a broader Mughal identity. The hereditary nature and tradition of khanzad provided an articulation on the future of the empire, one irrespective of religion.
7. Ibid, 258.
8. Ibid, 262.
6. John Richards, “Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers,” Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. Barbara Metcalf (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 257-258. 9. Catherine Asher, “The Architecture of Raja Man Singh: A Study of Sub-Imperial Patronage,” The Powers of Art: Patronage in Indian Culture, ed. Barbara Milles (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 184.A similar dynamic played out with local populations, including the Jats. As Richard Eaton notes, the pastoralist Jats, an ethnic group which had migrated and settled in Punjab by the end of the sixteenth century, began relying on the Sufi-shrine patronage network.10 The Jats did not originally identify with one of the major religions on the subcontinent, but the third and fourth generation of settled Jats often converted to Islam. A population’s ability to convert to a religion demonstrated a relatively unimportant characteristic of one’s identity. The shrine network provided a path in which nomads would settle land within the empire. The Mughal emperor as well as Muslim and Hindu leaders patronized shrines throughout the empire and their localities. The shrine network established a framework for a nascent Mughal identity in which prosperity could be achieved across various religious and ethinic groups.
The centrality of Mughal identity prevailed during the decentralization period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Decentralization primarily occurred due to the rise of new social groups, including a proliferation of merchants and provincial rulers. As Christopher Bayly observes, the “creation of new wealth and social power in the provinces… could not be easily controlled by the distant monarch in Delhi.”11 Barbara and Thomas Metcalf posit that the emperor’s loss of political power coincided with the solidification of his status as a religious and cultural authority as shahinshah (king of kings).12 While the power of the Mughal waned during this decentralization period, the ultimate authority of the emperor himself was never challenged. Instead, local leaders looked to appropriate aspects of the Emperor’s persona to solidify their rule. Therefore, the articulation and use of the emperor’s essence constituted an underlying Mughal identity. This active imagining of shared community stood in opposition to the establishment of colonial rule. In fact, the Mughal Emperor served as a rallying symbol during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 that united Hindus, Muslims, and various ethnic groups against the East India Company. This unity directly refutes the colonial fall narrative popularized by James Mill, which placed the beginning of Indian history at the fall of the Mughal Empire.
The construction of colonial narratives is inextricable from the history of partition. To piece together these narratives, the British positioned themselves as arbiters of “complicated and complex forms of knowledge created by Indians.”13 This positional superiority, which Edward Said articulates, allowed the British to permanently assert their superiority over indigenous Indian scholars and peoples.14 The British implemented a dual Hindu and Muslim legal administration under Warren Hastings’s (1732-1818) governorship. Hastings constructed an India through a Western lens, placing “two codes, one Hindu and the other Muslim” as part of India’s “ancient constitution,” yet established a supposed Hindu Golden Age.15 Later Muslim activity and rule over the subcontinent corrupted this Golden Age, creating a narrative of the subcontinent’s past that mirrored the European Reformation and the religious strife between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Unlike the Reformation, the British-instituted identity framework placed Hindus and Muslims as inherently different from each other and unable to coexist. This discourse allowed for “both ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as we know them [to be] contemporaneously produced.”16
The British framework did not immediately cause a hardening of religious identity throughout the subcontinent, instead laying the groundwork for further British objectification of information to alter the past, present and future. According to Said’s analysis, this latent orientalism was integral in standardizing Hinduism through caste. Caste prior to colonial rule stressed mutuality, centrality, or other ranks, and differed from locale to locale.17 The British forged “caste as separate races with different…natural temperament and qualities” and focused on varna (Brahman, Ksatriyas, Vaisyas, or Sudras) instead of local understandings of jati (occupation) that prevailed in the pre-colonial era.18 The census diffused this varna-centric Hinduism across the continent. The census provided Indians with the opportunity to “stand back and look at themselves, their ideas, their symbols and culture and see it as an entity.”19 Henceforth, Indians could begin to articulate a greater
13. Bernard Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276.
14. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 21.
10. Richard Eaton, “The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid,” Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. Barbara Metcalf (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 342-343.
15. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” 290.
16. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 116.
17. Diane Mines, Caste in India (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2009), 40.
18. Ibid, 40-41.
19. Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist Among Historians (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 229.
national identity. This objectification through European and “British-made categories” influenced personal identity as well as other cultural aspects such as architecture.20 Thomas Metcalf argues that the British creation of the Indo-Saracenic style used for most colonial buildings from 1860 to 1910 drew “upon the legitimacy of the Mughal Empire—and, occasionally and ambivalently, of Hindu rulership,” which was part of a greater initiative “to create for Britain in India a ‘secure and usable past.’”21 But this style was generally devoid of any Western models. The British willingness to appropriate and negotiate depictions of Indian history and culture established a dual identity framework, which forced historical Indian actors to not only respond to this framework but also operate within its context.
Operation within the dual-identity framework led to a hardening of religious identity as Indians had to respond to altered tradition.22 Mohandas Gandhi articulated his response to this framework through Hindu principles. In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi asserts that ahimsa (non-violence) is the only way for India to achieve independence. “If India adopted the doctrine of love as an active part of her religion and introduced it in her politics, Swaraj [independence] would descent upon India from heaven.”23 Gandhi’s use of ahimsa is explicitly a Hindu tradition, yet he attempts to paint this tradition “as quintessentially Indian” to further his political goals.24 Gandhi, further adopting Orientalist tactics, points to ahimsa as a way to throw off the shackles of Western modernity, placing the West and East as separate entities. While it may seem like Gandhi rejects the initial identity framework, he reinforces and appropriates the British notion of a Hindu Golden Age. Duara notes that “while on one hand, nation-states glorify the ancient or eternal character of the nation, they also seek to emphasize the unprecedented nature of the nation-state, because it is only in this form that the people-nation has been able to realize itself as the self-conscious subject of History.”25 Therefore, rearticulation of ancient “Hindu” values can distinguish the Indian nation in the present and provide a path for the nation’s future.
These values are evident in the khadi movement. Khadi, as Lisa Trivedi observes, linked national values
20. Mines, Caste, 39.
21. Thomas Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation for Empire: India, 1860-1910,” Representations 6, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 39.
22. Duara, Rescuing History, 5.
23. Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Revised New Edition (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1938), 16.
24. Cohn, An Anthropologist Among Historians, 229.
25. Duara, Rescuing History, 29.
to consumer goods and served as a greater identifier of religion and caste, furthering the nationalist cause.26 While Trivedi describes this link as an articulation of “Indian” national community, the khadi movement furthered Gandhi’s Hindu view of the nation. Hindu nationalism appropriated this articulation, demonstrated through Gandhi’s depiction of Mahatma, which became a larger representation and form within Hindu nationalism.27 After Gandhi visited Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, local peasants began using the Mahatma to justify their ideology, which ultimately resulted in violence at Chauri Chaura. Shahid Amin notes that the peasant’s “ideas about Gandhi’s ‘orders’ and ‘powers’ were often at variance with those of the local Congress-Khilafat leadership and clashed with the basic tenets of Gandhism itself.”28 These expressions of violence act as a response to the identity framework established under Hastings, in which Muslims and Hindus are entirely different peoples. Traditional historiography treats such moments as ruptures, devoid of any rationality besides its antecedent events. A bifurcated examination of history reveals the thread of continuity between the creation and solidification of said history. The colonial regime created the violence narrative during the Benares Riots of 1809. Gyan Pandey asserts that the riot began a colonial narrative in which “‘natives’ are hopelessly divided [and] given to primitive passions” due to Historical animosity between Hindus and Muslims.29 The British applied the Hindu-Muslim strife in Banaras “to the country as a whole. Banaras becomes the essence of India, the history of Banaras the history of India.”30 This pitting of Muslim against Hindu is a reconstruction that guts all history “from the political experience of the people, and [places] the identification of religion, or the religious community, as the moving force of all Indian politics.”31 Yet it sets the grounds on which the identity of the nation will occur. Nationalist and native use of this narrative reinforced the identity framework, which rapidly hardened Hindu and Muslim identity. Some Hindu groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) argued that India was solely for Hindus and viewed a partition of the subcontinent for Muslims as a “vivisection” of the motherland.32 The RSS’s claims not only called into question the place of Muslims in a unified India, but their value as human beings. Ishtiaq Qureshi asserts, “small manifestations of Hindu revivalism would not have produced the
26. Lisa N. Trivedi, “Visually Mapping the ‘Nation’: Swadeshi Politics in Nationalist India, 1920-1930,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 1 (2003), 14.
27. Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-
2.” ed. Ranjait Guha, Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 51-52.
28. Ibid, 55.
29. Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 45.
30. Ibid, 28.
31. Ibid, 24.
32. Metcalf and Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 229.
same [reactions in the Muslim community] as did larger attempts that embraced broader aspects of life.”33 It was only around 1935 that calls for an independent Pakistan started gaining serious traction, pressuring Muslims to assume their separated status within the identity framework and ending the possibility of a unified India.34
Other groups contested the binary within the framework. The Untouchables remained at the periphery of the established identity framework. The Indian National Congress and Gandhi’s response to this inherent exclusion was to include the Untouchables as Hindus within constitutional frameworks. B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit leader, rejected this and instead directly critiqued Hinduism:
To put the matter in general terms, Hinduism and social union are incompatible. By its very genius Hinduism believes in social separation which is another name for social disunity and even create social separation. If the Hindus wish to be one they will have to discard Hinduism. They cannot be one without violating Hinduism. Hinduism is the greatest obstacle to Hindu unity. Hinduism cannot create that longing to belong which is the basis of all social unity. On the contrary Hinduism creates an eagerness to separate.35
Ambedkar’s attempt to rectify this inherent social separation through separate electorates articulates a hardened formation of Untouchable identity that exists outside of the existing identity framework.
As mentioned earlier, Hinduism rose out of direct manipulation. While the INC attempted to project its supposed ideal of modernity that accomplished a swaraj free from the specter of British-esque rule, its conception of modernity relied on the very colonial narratives, regimes, and frameworks that were implemented by British rule. Therefore, the INC’s response to independence and the identity framework were coterminous, rationalized opposing ideals of “tradition and modernity, hierarchy and equality, and empire and nation.”36
The British imposition of a religious identity framework shaped the grounds in which the eventual partition of India and Pakistan would occur. By examining the Mughal period, early British colonial rule, and subsequent Indian identity formation through bifurcation, the true negotiation of the Indian nation is revealed, in which separate Indian and Pakistani nations sacrificed a united India. This disunity is the source of Nehru’s
33. Ishtiaq Quershi, “Hindu-Muslim Social Relations 1935-47,” in Vol. II, India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, ed. Mushirul Hasan (The Lotus Collection, 1995), 174.
original struggle to define India. Indians and Pakistanis attempted to respond to an unnatural identity classification imposed on them by the British order. As Anderson asserts, “awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity–product of the ruptures of the late eighteenth century–engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity.’”37 A narrative of identity cannot erase the forging of both nations through blood. The general amnesia that exists pertaining to the partition’s aftermath cannot be fully examined or processed until one engages with the foundations of the nation.
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji. “The Real Issue: Aren’t the Untouchables a Separate Element?” In The Penguin Gandhi Reader, 181-233. Penguin Books, 1993.
Amin, Shahid. “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2.” Edited by Ranjait Guha, 1-55. Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Oxford University Press, 1984.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1971.
Asher, Catherine. “The Architecture of Raja Man Singh: A Study of Sub-Imperial Patronage.” Edited by Barbara Milles, 183-201. The Powers of Art: Patronage in Indian Culture. Oxford University Press, 1992.
Bayly, Christopher. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Cohn, Bernard. An Anthropologist Among Historians. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Cohn, Bernard. “The Command of Language and the Language of Command.” Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Eaton, Richard. “The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid.” Edited by Barbara Metcalf. Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam. University of California Press, 1984.
34. Ibid, 172.
35. Bhimrao Ambedkar, “The Real Issue: Are’t the Untouchables a Separate Element?,” in The Penguin Gandhi Reader (Penguin Books, 1993), 187.
36. Duara, Rescuing History, 4.
Gandhi, Mohandas K. Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Revised New Edition. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1938.
Mani, Lata. 1990. “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India.” Edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Metcalf, Barbara and Thomas Metcalf. A Concise History of Modern India. 3rd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Metcalf, Thomas. “Architecture and the Representation for Empire: India, 1860-1910.” Representations, 37-65. University of California Press, 1984.
Mines, Diane. Caste in India. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2009.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. “‘The Quest’ in The Discovery of India: Part II.” In Modern India: An Interpretive Anthology, by Thomas Metcalf. London: The Macmillan Company, 1971.
Pandey, Gyan. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial India, 23-65. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Qureshi, Ishtiaq Husain. Hindu-Muslim Social Relations 1935-47. Vol. II, in India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, edited by Mushirul Hasan, 172-183. The Lotus Collection, 1995.
Richards, John. “Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers.” Edited by Barbara Metcalf. Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam. University of California Press, 1984.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Trivedi, Lisa N. “Visually Mapping the “Nation”: Swadeshi Politics in Nationalist India, 1920-193,” 11-41. The Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 1. 2003.Press, 2012.
In the Paduan town of Vigonza on March 24, 1577, Vincenzo Molinaro suffered from a fever and a large carbuncle on his thigh; these ailments precipitated his demise. When the news of Molinaro’s death reached local administrator Giacomo Zabarella the next morning, he inquired to whom Molinaro had recently attended, presumably as a barber or physician, so that those individuals could be isolated to prevent further transmission of the deadly plague. The messenger assured Zabarella that Molinaro had not recently travelled to Padua or to Venice and drew a curious conclusion as to the source of the disease––a vagabond cat. The infectious creature allegedly caught the disease from a different house in Vigonza that had recently been burned following the outbreak, and since the creature had lost its home, it wandered in search of shelter. Molinaro had allowed the animal into his home and became so comfortable with his furry companion that he slept beside it.1 By this theory, coming into such intimate proximity with an infected stray led to Molinaro’s death.
Human-animal relationships were subject to constant renegotiation in the Renaissance when it came to disease. Animal parts and products were often used in recipes to cure human ailments that called for ingredients such as animal urine or glandular secretions like musk and civet. On the other hand, medieval and early modern veterinary treatises elucidate how elite classes of animals were cared for when they fell ill, most especially dogs, horses, and birds of prey. Cats, in particular, did not enjoy as intimate a pet-keeping relationship as dogs in Italian cities, although Renaissance elites welcomed cats among the ranks of their prized pets – such as Isabella d’Este (1474-1539) of Mantua who carried her little red cat sourced from India, nicknamed her animalino, in her luxuriously wide sleeve.2 The animal had a troubled track record in the Renaissance imagination, long associated with malevolent forces and purported to be the animal guise of the devil as recounted by the likes of Franciscan missionary Bernardino of Siena (13801444) and by the testimonies of early modern inquisitorial witch trials.3 Despite cats’ relatively shaky position in Renais-
1 Archivio di Stato di Padova (ASPd), Sanità, tomo n. 282, 24 marzo 1577.
2 See Sarah Cockram, “Sleeve cat and lap dog: affection, aesthetics and proximity to companion animals in Renaissance Mantua” in Interspecies Interactions: Animals and Humans between the Middle Ages and Modernity, ed. Sarah Cockram and Andrew Wells (London: Routledge, 2017), 34-65.
3 See Franco Mormando, Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
sance society, Zabarella’s account of Molinaro’s death more closely aligns with the feared porosity concerning what might transfer across the ostensible boundary between human and non-human animal.
Molinaro was one of many who suffered from the plague of 1575-1577, and animals were highly suspected of disease transmission. This outbreak hit Venice the hardest––more than a quarter of the population died––and as the city’s death toll continued to rise, it became clear that the tried and true measures of quarantine, social isolation, and the eradication of contaminated goods were not enough. The city thus executed cats and dogs en masse; Venetian notary Rocco Benedetti recounted how the screechings of the animals could be heard throughout the city and how afterward the dead, bloodied animals littered the canals.4 Dogs and cats were similarly killed in Milan, since those kept as household pets were suspected of transmitting the disease to the children they entertained who, in turn, spread the disease to other households.5 However, urban animals were not simply eradicated any time the plague swept through. The medical professor Baravalle of Piedmont described Padua as so decimated by plague and famine that only dogs, cats, and chickens wandered the streets amidst the outbreak of 1555 two decades earlier.6
The anxiety that surrounded the wandering cat of Vigonza highlights the potent connection perceived between human and animal bodies. Early moderners were unafraid to act on their suspicions about the animals with which they surrounded themselves in the midst of the chaos and fear that plague outbreaks precipitated. Perhaps the stray that wandered into Molinaro’s home was left behind to wander the streets or maybe it was seized by a town administrator and reached its end for its suspected role in spreading pestilence. The cat ultimately lives on in the archival record, preserved as a vector of plague from 1577 as the world today grapples with yet another deadly disease that has renewed our fears in the dangers of the animal other while having simultaneously reminded us of the all too fragile boundary between human and non-human animal bodies. We continue to relate to the fears and experiences of those who lived before us.
5 Ibid, 104.
6 Ibid, 146.