Contact, Conquest and Colonization: How Practices of Comparing Shaped Empires and Colonialism Around the World 2020055457, 2020055458, 9780367894726, 9780367766931, 9781003019374

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Contact, Conquest and Colonization

Contact, Conquest and Colonization brings together international historians and literary studies scholars in order to explore the force of practices of comparing in shaping empires and colonial relations at different points in time and around the globe. Whenever there was cultural contact in the context of European colonization and empire-building, historical records teem with comparisons among those cultures. This edited volume focuses on what historical agents actually do when they compare, rather than on comparison as an analytic method. Its contributors are thus interested in the ‘doing of comparison,’ and explore the force of these practices of comparing in shaping empires and (post-)colonial relations between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will appeal to students and scholars of global history, as well as those interested in cultural history and the history of colonialism. Eleonora Rohland is Professor for Entangled History in the Americas and Director of the Center for InterAmerican Studies (CIAS) at Bielefeld University, Germany. Angelika Epple is Vice-Rector of International Affairs and Diversity and Professor of Modern European and Global History at Bielefeld University, Germany. Antje Flüchter is Dean of the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Theology and Professor for Early Modern History at Bielefeld University, Germany. Kirsten Kramer is Chair of the Department of Literary Studies and Professor for Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany.

Routledge Studies in Cultural History

100 Charles Kingsley Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy Edited by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver 101 British Concepts of Heroic “Gallantry” and the Sixties Transition The Politics of Medals Matthew J. Lord 102 Cultural Histories of Ageing Myths, Plots and Metaphors of the Senescent Self Edited by Margery Vibe Skagen 103 Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Edited by Anne Chapman and Natalie Hume 104 Disability and Tourism in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Italy Luciano Maffi and Martino Lorenzo Fagnani 105 De-Illustrating the History of the British Empire Preliminary Perspectives Edited by Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes 106 Contact, Conquest and Colonization How Practices of Comparing Shaped Empires and Colonialism Around the World Edited by Eleonora Rohland, Angelika Epple, Antje Flüchter and Kirsten Kramer For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Cultural-History/book-series/SE0367

Contact, Conquest and Colonization How Practices of Comparing Shaped Empires and Colonialism Around the World Edited by Eleonora Rohland, Angelika Epple, Antje Flüchter and Kirsten Kramer

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Eleonora Rohland, Angelika Epple, Antje Flüchter and Kirsten Kramer to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rohland, Eleonora, editor. | Epple, Angelika, editor. | Flüchter, Antje, editor. | Kramer, Kirsten, editor. Title: Contact, conquest and colonization : how practices of comparing shaped empires and colonialism around the world / edited by Eleonora Rohland, Angelika Epple, Antje Flüchter and Kirsten Kramer. Description: New York : Routledge, [2021] | Series: Routledge studies in cultural history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: LCSH: Colonization—History. | Europe—Colonies— History. | Europe—Colonies—Historiography. | Imperialism— Historiography. Classification: LCC JV105 .C67 2021 (print) | LCC JV105 (ebook) | DDC 325/.34—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055457 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055458 ISBN: 978-0-367-89472-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978 0-367-76693-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01937-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Introduction: On ‘Doing Comparison’ – Practices of Comparing

viii ix

1

E L E O N O R A RO H L A N D AN D KIRSTE N KRA MER

PART I

Women, Marriage Practices, and Morals 1 Bridging the Gap: Jesuit Missionaries’ Perspectives on Marriage in the Philippines in the Period of Contact

17

19

M A RYA SV E T L A N A T. CA MACH O

2 Constructing the Literati: The Jesuits’ Attempt to Understand China’s Confucian Elite by Dint of Comparison

38

N A D I N E A M SL E R

3 ‘Our’ Women, ‘Their’ Women: Domestic Space and the Question of Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India

57

S U B H A S R I G H O SH

PART II

Politics, Polemics, and Propaganda 4 Entre Nos: Comparison and Authority in the Epistolary of Antonio Valeriano E Z E K I E L S TE AR

85

87

vi

Contents

5 Global Benchmarks of Princely Rule in the Early Eighteenth Century? Transcultural Comparison in the Political Series of the German Publisher Renger (1704–1718)

110

VO L K E R B AUE R

6 Spain and Its North-African ‘Other’: Ambivalent Practices of Comparing in the Context of Modern Spanish Colonialism Around 1860

132

SA R A M E H L ME R

7 Propaganda, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Politics of Comparison in the Early Cold War, 1945 to the 1960s

152

B E N N O N I E T ZE L

PART III

Literature, Science, and Literary Discourse 8 Same Sky, Different Soil: Geographical Difference in Eighteenth-Century Astronomy and Its Impact on Literature

173

175

ALEXANDER HONOLD

9 Between Nature and Culture: Comparing, Natural History, and Anthropology in Modern French Travel Narratives Around 1800 (François-René de Chateaubriand)

198

K I RS TE N K R AME R

10 Comparison as Context in Sir William Jones’s Translations of Eastern Literature

225

CATH A R I N A G.M. JAN SSE N

PART IV

Race, Civilization, and Religion

243

11 Colonizing Complexions: How Laws of Bondage Shaped Race in America’s Colonial Borderlands

245

C H R I S TI A N P IN N E N

12 Tocqueville’s Compass: On History, Race, and Comparison in A Fortnight in the Wilds J U L I A N T. D. GÄ RTN E R

268

Contents 13 Climates, Colonialism, and the Politics of Comparison: The Construction of U.S.-American Tropicality in Colonial Medicine and Public Health, 1898–1912

vii

289

J U L I A E N G E L SCH ALT

14 Between ‘Cannibals’ and ‘Natural Freemasons’: The (Anti)Colonial History of Comparing Freemasonry to African Secret Societies

312

S TE P H A N I E Z E H N L E

Concluding Observations: Modes of Comparing and Communities of Practice

332

A N G E L I K A EP P L E A N D AN TJE FL ÜCH TE R

Index

339

Figures

5.1 Staat des Grossen Mogol, frontispiece. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Gb 298:13 (3) 5.2 Staat von Franckreich, pp. 5–6. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: QuN 512 (1) 5.3 Einleitung zu den Europäischen Staaten, frontispiece. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Gb 298:1 (1) 7.1 Department of Labour Study for the USIA, 1953. National Archives 7.2 Poster-chart by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1958. National Archives 12.1 The Superior was only the second steam-powered vessel traversing the Great Lakes. Courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio 12.2 The narrative structure of Toqueville’s A Fortnight in the Wilds. Graph by the author 13.1 Relative prevalence of various infectious diseases in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, in Charles F. Mason, “Observations upon Diseases in the Tropics,” in Report of the Surgeon-General of the Army to the Secretary of War for the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1901 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1901), 234–35, 234 13.2 Comparative increase in temperature of white skin and brown skin when exposed to sun, in Hans Aron, “Investigation on the Action of the Tropical Sun on Men and Animals,” in Philippine Journal of Science 6, no. 2 (April 1911), 101–31, 126

111 113 117 161

162

273 277

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Contributors

Editors Angelika Epple is Vice-Rector of International Affairs and Diversity and Professor of Modern European and Global History at Bielefeld University. She is also the Director of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1288) Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the World and principal investigator in the research training group (RTG 2225) World Politics at Bielefeld. She has broadly published on comparative historiography, gender history, and on asymmetries, transfers, and intertwinements between economic and political actors on the global as well as local levels. Her recent projects include the history of race and intersectional comparisons that led to the Cuban race war in 1912, and a monograph for the book series Historische Einführungen of the German publishing house campus with the working title (in German) “Globalgeschichte.” Antje Flüchter is Dean of the Faculty of History, Philosophy, and Theology and Full Professor for Early Modern History at Bielefeld University. She is a principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1288: Practices of Comparing. She has broadly published on early modern global and transcultural history, the history of religiosity and the confessional age in the Holy Roman Empire and in India, the history of knowledge, and gender history. Kirsten Kramer is Chair of the Department of Literary Studies and Full Professor for Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at the University of Bielefeld. She is also a principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1288) Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the World, principal investigator in the BMBF Research Project The Americas as Space of Entanglements, and associated scholar in the Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) at Bielefeld University. Since 2008 she has acquired international research and teaching experiences as a visiting professor at universities in Mexico (UNAM, Guadalajara), Colombia (Medellín), Argentina

x

Contributors (La Plata), and the US (Wesleyan). She has broadly published on literature and globalization, cultural techniques, visual studies, and actornetwork-theory as well as French, Spanish, and Hispano-American literatures from the early modern period to the present. Her current projects include practices of comparison and the production of world knowledge in modern French travel writing, a monograph on GeoImaginaries in Literature and Film: Figurations of the Desert in the Cono Sur, and an essay collection on Ethnopoetics and Globalization (co-edited with Christian Moser).

Eleonora Rohland is Professor for Entangled History in the Americas and Director of the Center for InterAmerican Studies (CIAS) at Bielefeld University, Germany. Since 2017 she is a principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1288: Practices of Comparing and co-coordinator of the research group “Coping with Environmental Crises” at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS), Bielefeld University/University of Guadalajara, Mexico. She is the author of two books, Sharing the Risk. Fire, Climate and Disaster. Swiss Re 1864–1906 (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2011) and Changes in the Air: Hurricanes in New Orleans, 1718 to the Present, in the series Environments in History: International Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018). A short book/“long essay” on Entangled History and the Environment? Socio-Environmental Transformations in the Caribbean, 1492–1800 will appear in 2021 with University of New Orleans Press.

Contributors Nadine Amsler studied history, religion, and Chinese in Bern, Berlin, Paris, and Beijing. Specializing in gender history, court history, and Sino-European relations in the early modern period, she wrote her PhD thesis on Chinese women’s entanglement with early modern Chinese Catholicism. The book resulting from this research is entitled Jesuits and Matriarchs: Domestic Worship in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2018). Nadine is currently fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where she is working on a project on wet nurses at Eurasian princely courts. Volker Bauer studied history and German at the University of Bielefeld and received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence in 1993. Since 2006 he is permanently employed at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel and in charge of its conference and seminar program. His main research interests are history of the early modern court society, media history, history of genealogy, and cultural history of dynastic rule. His most recent book (co-edited with Jost

Contributors

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Eickmeyer and Markus Friedrich) is Genealogical Knowledge in the Making. Tools, Practices, and Evidence in Early Modern Europe (Berlin and Boston, 2019). Marya Svetlana T. Camacho is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Asia and the Pacific (Pasig City, Philippines). She has published articles on women in pre-colonial and Spanish colonial Philippines. Her recent work examines the introduction of Catholic marriage in colonial Philippines. Julia Engelschalt is a doctoral candidate in history at Bielefeld University and a member of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the World. Her dissertation project focuses on the role of climatic thought in U.S.-American colonial medicine and domestic public health in the early twentieth century. Her research interests include history of science and medicine, environmental history, colonial and imperial history, and U.S.-American history. She is the author of “Straddling the Crystal Frontier: Reworkings of the U.S.-Mexican Border in the Lyrics of Calexico” (Forum for InterAmerican Research, 2018). Furthermore, she is a series co-editor of the biennial conference proceedings of INSIST, an interdisciplinary junior research network in science and technology studies, and former spokesperson of the network. Julian T.D. Gärtner is a doctoral researcher in Bielefeld University’s Collaborative Research Center Practices of Comparing. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Bielefeld University and a Master’s in German Studies from University of Cincinnati, where he worked as a teaching assistant. His thesis focuses on racial thought in nineteenthcentury French travel writing, namely Tocqueville and Beaumont. Subhasri Ghosh received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India, in Modern History. Subsequently, she was engaged as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. She is now engaged as an assistant professor in the Department of History at the undergraduate level at the University of Calcutta. Her research interests include forced migration and gender in South Asia. Alexander Honold is Professor of German Literature at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He has international research and teaching experiences (New York, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, Berlin, Konstanz) and received honors and fellowships from IFK Wien, Warburg Haus Hamburg, Munich University, Freiburg, and Essen. His publications include books on Friedrich Hölderlin, Gottfried Keller, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, and Peter Handke. For the comprehensive publication list, see: https://germanistik.philhist.unibas.ch/de/alexander-honold/ schriftenverzeichnis/

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Contributors

Catharina G.M. Janssen is a doctoral researcher in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies of the University of Warwick. Her research is on the contemporary reception of Sir William Jones’s translations of eastern literature. Her work is part of the project “Oriental Poetry, Latin Scholarship and the European Enlightenments: the Case of William Jones,” funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Kirsten Kramer is Chair of the Department of Literary Studies and Full Professor for Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at the University of Bielefeld. She is also a principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1288) Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the World, principal investigator in the BMBF Research Project The Americas as Space of Entanglements, and associated scholar in the Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) at Bielefeld University. Since 2008 she has acquired international research and teaching experiences as a visiting professor at Universities in Mexico (UNAM, Guadalajara), Colombia (Medellín), Argentina (La Plata), and the US (Wesleyan). She has broadly published on literature and globalization, cultural techniques, visual studies, and actor-network-theory as well as French, Spanish, and HispanoAmerican literatures from the early modern period to the present. Her current projects include practices of comparison and the production of world knowledge in modern French travel writing, a monograph on Geo-Imaginaries in Literature and Film: Figurations of the Desert in the Cono Sur, and an essay collection on Ethnopoetics and Globalization (co-edited with Christian Moser). Sara Mehlmer studied historical, German and Spanish studies in Mainz and Valencia (Spain). In 2013 she qualified as a secondary school teacher. From 2011–2012 she worked as a travel guide writer. Between 2013 and 2014 she was research assistant at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and a teacher of German as a foreign language. From 2014–2019 she worked as a doctoral researcher in the Emmy Noether Research Group “Battles over Belief: Religion and Violence in Catholic Europe, 1848–1914” at the Leibniz-Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz. Since 2019, she has worked as a secondary school teacher. Benno Nietzel is a lecturer in political history at the Department of History at Bielefeld University. After graduating at Humboldt University Berlin, he received is PhD from Ruhr University Bochum in 2010. Recent publications include “Propaganda, Psychological Warfare and Communication Research in the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War,” History of the Human Sciences 29, no. 4–5 (2016). He has recently completed a book manuscript on propaganda experts and communication study in the twentieth century.

Contributors

xiii

Christian Pinnen is an associate professor of History at Mississippi College. He studies race and slavery in the colonial American borderlands and the slave trade in the antebellum United States. His books include A Borrowed Land: A Colonial History of Mississippi, co-authored with Charles Weeks and published by Mississippi University Press in 2020, and Complexion of Empire in Natchez: Race and Slavery in the Mississippi Borderlands, published in the Early American Places Series by University of Georgia Press in 2021. He is also collaborating on a National Park Service site report of the Forks of the Road Slave Market in Natchez, Mississippi, with Max Grivno. Ezekiel Stear studies indigenous texts from Central Mexico and Perú in the colonial period. He focuses on how native writers have appropriated and repurposed scribal practices, often circumventing or resisting colonial power. His publications appear in peer-reviewed journals and academic presses. He has presented at conferences throughout North America and in Europe. His book project – Nahua Horizons: Writing, Rhetoric, and Future Paths in Colonial Mexico – examines indigenous texts and native strategies for continuing cultural practices and preserving knowledge as they moved into unknown times. He is Assistant Professor of the Literature of Colonial Latin America at Auburn University. Stephanie Zehnle is Assistant Professor for Non-European History at the University of Kiel, Germany. Her research focuses on pre-colonial and colonial West African History. She has published on Muslim African concepts of nature and on the so-called human-leopard murder trials of colonial Sierra Leone and Liberia. Moreover, her work is characterized by theories from environmental and human-animal history. She is currently preparing a research project on the history of comics in Africa.

Introduction On ‘Doing Comparison’ – Practices of Comparing Eleonora Rohland and Kirsten Kramer

Under normal circumstances this introduction might have started with a literary or historical quote on comparison. Or it may have dived straight into the thicket of the academic debate on comparison, practice theory, the state of research, etc. These are not normal times, however. Most nations around the globe are currently experiencing various stages of severity of the Coronavirus pandemic and the consequent – and variously severe and diverse – measures taken by state governments to contain this new virus. The effect of different political responses is already visible in the daily health statistics one is confronted with, comparing regions within nation-states and comparing nation-states with each other. These differences are likely to remain tangible for more than just a few months. The comparison of those health statistics becomes the driver for political action; one could even argue that comparison, for many, profoundly influences their chances of survival. Comparison is also at the basis of concern for friends and family members who live in different countries around the world. And so it is for academic colleagues and with the international group of authors who have contributed to this volume. The practices of comparison, which we were researching with professional curiosity until a few months ago, have become central to our own personal lives and the lives of everyone affected by the pandemic in a stark way. The world in which this volume will be published will not be the same as the one it was initiated in three years ago. The context of this volume, and the preceding conference, is the interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the World, which started at Bielefeld University in Germany in January 2017. The CRC is a university-spanning research format funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and it brings together roughly 60 senior and junior scholars from different faculties. The aim of this project – and by extension of this volume – is to uncover the dynamic and productive force of practices of comparing for microas well as macro-scale processes of historical transformation, including both significant changes in social practices and in forms of knowledge production.

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Postcolonial criticism of comparison and of comparative history, in particular, peaked during the first decade of the 2000s, fueled by the earlier rise of transnational and global history during the 1990s. Transnational history, and the history of cultural transfers (Transfergeschichte) in particular, was based on the comparison of nation-states, which in the postcolonial context often led to a perspective skewed in favor of the European or Western model, and putting former colonized states in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s famous “waiting room of history.”1 Several alternative approaches evolved from this debate. Indian historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam proposed the notion of ‘connected histories’ in his germinal 1997 article. French and German historians Bénédicte Zimmermann and Michael Werner developed their approach of histoire croisée as a result of this debate, which was taken a step further and out of its still-European context by anthropologist Shalini Randeria, who coined the term ‘entangled histories of uneven modernities.’ This debate, together with critical studies of comparison from sociology and literary and cultural studies, forms the larger research context and basis from which the notion of practices of comparing has evolved.2 The focus on ‘practices’ of comparing first of all means a shift away from conceiving of comparison primarily as a cognitive, analytic, or hermeneutic instrument3 and towards looking at the process of comparison and what individuals or organizations (actors) actually ‘do’ when they compare. What are the cultural functions and effects of comparisons at different points in time and among specific groups of historical actors? What are the interests, benefits, or social consequences that arise from comparative practices, and in what ways do comparisons interact with other forms of action carried out by social actors? In the more recent past, questions concerning the actors and the ‘politics of comparison’ have been raised notably in the context of postcolonial approaches.4 Comparative acts not only imply the selection of particular properties that are attributable to two existing objects and a suitable measurement of those properties, but they also presuppose more complex mutual interactions between the compared objects and their environments. Studying these more complex interactions in depth suggests that the process of comparative operation itself affects the compared elements and can cause significant changes and impacts to those elements.5 It has also been stated that comparative acts are never neutral in nature; they presuppose social or cultural differences and asymmetric power relations, which also affect the ways in which the relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is constructed.6 However, the practice-theoretical approach to comparison adopted in this volume moves the debate about comparative history and literary and cultural studies away from the important but familiar ground of perceiving comparison as a mere colonial practice and, hence, primarily as a tool for the ruling ‘self’ to discursively construct and understand ‘others.’

Introduction

3

The operation of comparing involves not only assumptions of difference but, crucially, also of similarity. The approach of practices of comparing hence focuses on the negotiation of similarities and differences in specific cultural and temporal contexts. Furthermore, as the cultural positions and identities of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are not previously determined, but only emerge and change in the course of comparative operations, it seems necessary to widen the scope by addressing the broader question of how, and against the backdrop of what forms of knowledge, compared objects or actors come to be constituted as comparable terms in the first place.7 Comparative practices thus always prove to be part of extensive social and cultural dynamics in that they may set into motion societal processes – yet they also contain an inherently ambiguous element in that on the one hand they can be used to create order and on the other they may create unforeseen and open-ended dynamics. Consequently, the practice-theoretical approach focuses on the various ways in which acts of comparing contribute to shaping, ordering, and changing the world. Interdisciplinary research on and theorization about comparison has become something of an emerging field over the last decade. For example, in 2013, literary scholars Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman published a collection of essays titled Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, which explores different aspects of comparative thinking focusing on political and ethical questions related to comparison, on different methods of comparison in different thematic settings, and on comparison from the point of view of different disciplines.8 Felski and Stanford Friedman’s volume is central to the theoretical and practical debate on comparison for literary studies, history, and anthropology. And even though our volume also proposes a theoretical approach as well as uses of comparison, it differs considerably from Felski and Stanford Friedman’s in that it presents historically situated case studies that show practices of comparison ‘in action,’ rather than being a handbook on comparison as an analytic tool. Recently, four volumes have emerged from the field of religious studies that all focus on comparison, namely Bruce Lincoln’s Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (2018), William Paden’s New Patterns for Comparative Religion: Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective (2017), Peter van der Veer’s The Value of Comparison (2016), and David Chidester’s Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (2014). These publications underline that comparisons remain a topic of sustained interest and a challenging issue. In contrast to our volume, they concentrate on the production of religious knowledge and document the emergence of comparative methodologies in religious or divine studies.9 The most recent anthology on the subject of comparison from the fields of history, religious studies, and anthropology that shares some parallels with our approach of practices of comparing is Renaud Gagné et al.’s

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Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, published in 2019. Like the volume proposed here, Gagné, Goldhill, and Lloyd do not focus on or criticize comparison as a heuristic method; rather, they propose the concept of ‘regimes of comparatism’ in order to take a reflexive stance towards comparison. By thus looking at the context in which comparison occurs, Gagné et al. take a similar approach to ours. However, while ‘regimes of comparatism’ approach the investigation of the cultural context in which comparisons are formed from the respective horizon of knowledge, and the concept is used as “a heuristic coinage for thinking the relevant epistemic space,”10 practices of comparing are more agent-focused on the individual (micro-) as well as the group (mid-range) level. Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler, Anthony Pagden, Stephen Greenblatt, Anthony Grafton, Jonathan Locke Hart, Alexander Honold, Ottmar Ette, and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra have shed light on different aspects of European perceptions and comparisons in the context of the European Expansion.11 Building on their work, this volume focuses on situations of cultural contact, conquest, and/or colonization in which Europeans, Native Americans, East and South Asians, and Africans had to come to terms with the astounding, conflicting, and novel realities of each other’s cultural expression through practices of comparing. A number of publications, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, Ann Laura Stoler’s Tense and Tender Ties, Rey Chow’s The Old/ New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies, Harry Harootunian’s Some Thoughts on Comparability, and Walter Mignolo’s On Comparison, have focused on the relations of power that stand behind comparison in the context of empire and colonial history.12 These and other authors have adopted a postcolonial stance and problematized the fact that comparison has been an instrument of power and dominance throughout European expansion. This is also the case in the context of our volume. However, the perspective of comparison as a culturally situated practice time and again allows for glimpses of moments when comparative acts come to open up dynamic ‘contact zones’13 serving as sites for encounters and negotiations going on between differing social or cultural actors, and when such practices were subverted or appropriated by the colonized or marginalized groups – moments that changed the course of history(ies). The volume therefore also responds to the larger research aim of the CRC, specifically to shed a new and critical light onto the genealogy of Eurocentrism. The 14 chapters of this volume are spread out from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and focus on different parts of the world as well as on different groups of people that were ‘doing comparison’ in specific settings with specific aims and outcomes. Our volume uncovers these different dynamics, highlighting the force of comparative practices in ordering and changing societal processes and their perception.

Introduction

5

The volume is divided along four themes that emerged as particularly pertinent in situations of cultural contact, conquest, or colonization. No matter whether colonization occurred during the early modern period or only during the nineteenth century, Women, Marriage Practices, and Morals (Part I) were a topic of concern and comparison for European missionaries and their quest for proselytizeable non-Christians, since the position of women in newly ‘discovered’ and colonized societies was an expression of the latter’s ‘civilizedness’ and, therefore, ease of conversion. However, colonial officials and indigenous communities also cared about women and marriage practices, and compared them against one another.14 Unsurprisingly, Politics, Polemics, and Propaganda (Part II) became arenas for comparative practices in the context of colonization and empire-building and could be closely connected to and overlapping with Literature, Science, and Literary Discourse (Part III). Travel accounts, in particular, could become vehicles for comparative practices.15 And lastly, Race, Civilization, and Religion (Part IV) usually appeared closely entangled in colonial practices of comparing, and evidently with close ties to the complex of Part I, Women, Marriage Practices, and Morals. Part I unites three chapters in which different European agents compare marriage practices from the Philippines, China, and India, ranging from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Both Marya Svetlana T. Camacho’s and Nadine Amsler’s chapters deal with the comparative practices of Jesuit missionaries with regard to the peoples they tried to proselytize. The two authors shed light on the role of comparison within the Jesuit genres of relación (relation) and historia (history), including as a tool for gauging whether non-Christians like the Filipinos or the Chinese could be converted to Christianity and, therefore, be saved. By analyzing four seventeenth-century texts by Spanish Jesuits in the Philippine mission (Francisco Combés, Francisco Ignacio Alzina, Francisco Colín, and Pedro Chirino), Marya Svetlana T. Camacho highlights the importance of comparing marriage practices for assessing the general morality of non-Christian peoples and shows how assumptions of civilizational difference and similarity were crucial prerequisites for these comparisons. Nadine Amsler’s chapter explores how seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Jesuit missionaries in China represented the Confucian elite in their quasi-ethnographic letters and reports. As Camacho before her, Amsler shows how comparison is used in order to test the cultural proximity of the Confucian literati to Christians, highlighting four different comparata that were used in these comparisons. Jesuits compared the literati to other Chinese ‘sects,’ the Ancients, and themselves, and the role of women and marriage practices in the Confucian elite with those in Europe. Though Amsler underlines the negotiation of similarity and difference in practices of comparing, she also shows that Jesuit practices of comparing with regard to the literati did not have a stabilizing effect on how they were represented. Both Camacho’s and Amsler’s chapters

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highlight temporal comparison as a means by which Jesuits could create cultural proximity between Christians and Filipinos or the Chinese, and therefore as a means to enable cultural translation.16 With Subhasri Ghosh’s chapter, we move from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Philippines and China to nineteenth-century India. The chapter outlines the struggle between the British colonial government and Indians over the role of women in Indian society and the question of child marriage. As in the previous two chapters, women became the ‘hinge’ around which questions of ‘civilizedness’ and ‘development’ revolved in British-occupied India during the nineteenth century. Based on a broad array of primary sources, Ghosh sheds light on the reasoning of the disputing factions in which comparison played an important role for the British to establish their perceived superiority. Ghosh’s chapter hence underlines how practices of comparison were used in the more classical sense during this dispute in nineteenth-century India, to create difference and constitute the ‘other.’ Part II, Politics, Polemics, and Propaganda, collects chapters that focus on practices of comparing in political discourse, diplomacy, and propaganda. Geographically and epochally, this part of the volume covers sixteenth-century Mexico-Tenochtitlan, eighteenth-century Europe, nineteenth-century Spain and North Africa, and the USSR between 1945 and 1960. Ezekiel Stear’s chapter centers on comparison as a rhetorical strategy in the letters of Antonio Valeriano, a Nahua nobleman, to Spanish Emperor Philipp II in 1561 and 1578. These letters were written during a time in which the deaths of indigenous leaders due to European epidemics had created difficulty for the Spanish colonial government since it relied on indigenous leaders as intermediaries. Stear shows how Valeriano, who straddled the indigenous and the Spanish colonial worlds, established argumentative authority in his letters to the Emperor by using temporal comparison (between Greco-Roman and Tepanec indigenous history) and in so doing creating similarity between the Spanish and his native group, allowing him to negotiate far-reaching political goals through his letters. Stear’s is thus one of three chapters (along with Christian Pinnen’s and Stephanie Zehnle’s) in this volume that show how comparative practices were used to subvert the dominant (European) discourse to the ends of the colonized group. While Ezekiel Stear’s contribution shows the adaptation of European practices of comparing by a Nahua scholar to attain political goals for his indigenous community in colonial Mexico, we return to a more clearly European perspective and shift into the early eighteenth century with Volker Bauer’s chapter on the German publisher Renger. Between 1704 and 1718, this publishing house printed some 80 monographs, each of which described a different state of the known world. In his chapter on the Renger series, Volker Bauer shows how the almost standardized structure of those volumes created a level playing field that became a prerequisite

Introduction

7

for the negotiation of similarity and difference in the transcultural comparison of princely regimes that is undertaken across the volumes of the series. Bauer underlines that although this comparative practice reveals a distinctively Eurocentric perspective, it nevertheless shows a high esteem for empires such as China or Persia and an acceptance of these and other non-European polities as equal competitors. Bauer’s chapter thus adds a pre-Montesquieuan and, in particular, early German perspective to the research on European perceptions of Asian and African political regimes. It also highlights a comparative practice in the context of competition and conflict, a theme that reappears in a different guise in Benno Nietzel’s chapter at the end of this part of the volume. With Sara Mehlmer’s chapter, Part II moves to mid-nineteenth-century Spain. Mehlmer focuses on the Spanish-Moroccan War in 1859–1860 and the practices of comparing used in war correspondents’ reports, thus pointing to this group as a community of practice. The chapter is set in the larger context of the European rush for colonies in Africa of the midto late-nineteenth century and underlines historical memory as a factor in temporal comparisons. Mehlmer highlights the long-standing and paradoxical relationship of the Spanish with Islam, oscillating between intimacy and estrangement, and offering a specific repertoire of comparative practices in the context of Spanish colonialism in North Africa. Identifying a discourse of ‘unequal similarity’ of the Spanish about Moroccans, Mehlmer sheds light on another constellation, in which the negotiation of similarity and difference became crucial not only for the national discourse of the time, but it also accompanied the formation of Spanish identity into the twentieth century. Benno Nietzel’s chapter takes us to the Cold War period and to the power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union and to practices of comparison under the specific conditions of conflict and competition. By observing the development of a ‘culture of comparison’ between the two superpowers, Nietzel sheds new light on U.S.-Soviet propaganda and counterpropaganda. Drawing on an array of primary records, he identifies three levels on which comparative practices drove the dynamism of Cold War propaganda and diplomacy; specifically, comparison in the self-perception of both Cold War nations, the suggestion of comparisons in international propaganda, and comparison directed at specific senders and receivers of propaganda. Nietzel shows that the dynamics thus created by comparative practices on both sides of the Iron Curtain were an important factor in fueling the Cold War. The three chapters in Part III focus on practices of comparing in Literature, Science, and Literary Discourse and their influence on the shaping of colonialism and empires around the world. All three contributions are set in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, a high phase for the production of travel literature and ethnography avant la lettre, secularization, and the advancement of scientific thinking. From

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the end of the previous part, Alexander Honold takes us back to Europe (and simultaneously to the global, or rather planetary, level) and unfolds the impact comparative practices in astronomy had on the realm of literature. Embedding the evolution of eighteenth-century astronomy within the discipline’s larger history and drawing on literary sources ranging from the encyclopedists to Pynchon, Herder, Hölderlin, Montesquieu, and others, Honold shows how the seemingly neutral, standardized, and ‘enlightened’ grid partition of the globe became the basis for colonial comparison and for the notion of colonial centers and periphery. Eighteenth-century astronomy’s claim to universalism, and hence the spread of a scientific explanation for the unequal treatment of peoples around the globe, became the spur for the geographies of inequality of the present and the vehicle for the practices of comparing that helped create them. Tying in with Alexander Honold’s argument about Enlightenment science and colonial practices of comparing, Kirsten Kramer focuses on the progressive discovery and scientific exploration of foreign cultures and territories as it was practiced in modern European travel writing around 1800. Referring to travel narratives published by François-René de Chateaubriand in the context of the European ‘world exploration politics,’ Kramer shows that in Chateaubriand’s travel writing the extensive topographical and cultural descriptions of former French colonies in North America establish a close connection between comparative forms of knowledge of the world and representations of nature, which draw both on contemporary travel literature (Diderot, Volney, Humboldt) and on scientific categorizations developed in natural history and anthropology, such as taxonomic classification systems of flora and fauna and ethnological distinctions between ‘savages’ and ‘civilized.’ These comparative categorizations, however, come to be increasingly questioned, modified, and extended by travel writing. Ultimately, the narrative practices of comparing appear to document and operate a significant shift in the concept of nature and thus come to open up new horizons of knowledge related to the field of modern ethnography. With Catharina G.M. Janssen’s chapter, we return to British colonialism in India, though this time at the end of the eighteenth century. Rather than highlighting the comparative practices embedded in specific groups, Janssen focuses on the comparative practice of a specific historical and literary agent, Sir William Jones. A judge and linguist, Jones was involved in the translation of Hindu law texts and literature during his tenure as a colonial judge in India from 1783 to 1794. While Edward Said in his Orientalism argued that Jones’s comparison of Eastern and Western languages and cultures had the goal of diminishing the accomplishments of the Orient and thus, ultimately, of ‘othering,’ in her chapter Janssen argues that, on the contrary, Jones’s aim was to increase the variety of Western genres by introducing his readers to new Eastern ones. Janssen hence adds a new facet to the negotiations of similarity and difference we

Introduction

9

have so far encountered in this volume and connects with the theme of comparison and cultural translation encountered in Part I. Part IV centers on Race, Civilization, and Religion, three tightly entangled concepts when it comes to practices of comparing, as Christian Pinnen’s chapter on ‘colonial complexions’ shows. It takes us to the eighteenth-century lower Mississippi Valley and focuses on colonial Natchez and the shifting meaning of race during the Southeastern borderland region’s checkered history of French, British, and Spanish colonial regimes up to its becoming part of the United States in 1795. As a space of multiple conquests and colonization by different colonial powers and repeated contact among different European, Native American, and Atlantic African groups, Pinnen shows how during the eighteenth century the lower Mississippi Valley became a laboratory for practices of comparing with regard to legal rights and identity. Drawing on a range of court cases from different colonial regimes, Pinnen shows how enslaved African men and women negotiated the not-yet-fixed meaning of race in their shifting political and legal surroundings in order to establish their place in those newly amalgamated societies. Pinnen’s chapter, like Ezekiel Stear’s chapter in Part II, highlights how colonized or enslaved groups of people skillfully used comparative practices to their advantage. The role comparative practices played in the construction of race and civilization is also at the center of Julian T.D. Gärtner’s chapter; however, it is treated in a different textual genre and historical setting from Pinnen’s. We remain on the North American continent and continue where Pinnen’s chapter stopped, in the still young United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Gärtner inquires into Alexis de Tocqueville’s understanding of race in his travelogue A Fortnight in the Wilds, and thus analyzes a distinctly European perspective on the culture and politics of the young republic. Gärtner argues that Tocqueville’s travelogue is an exploration of human history and a search for the source of human diversity rather than just an autobiographical souvenir. By highlighting Tocqueville’s use of comparison and analogy, Gärtner shows how the author builds a narrative of epic racial struggle that also resonated with the larger-scale historical context of the aftermath of the Haitian and the French July Revolution (1830) at the time of his writing A Fortnight in the Wilds. Julia Engelschalt’s chapter is set in the context of the Spanish-American War of 1898 and takes us to the era in which the United States rose as a world power. Focusing on the discourse of military and civilian medical and public-health experts, Engelschalt explores these agents’ comparative practices in constructing a U.S.-American version of tropicality. Sending out troops to new territories that were mostly located in the tropics meant that American military and health authorities needed to gauge the health impacts this might have on their personnel. In this process, medical experts were building on the long-standing discourse of tropicality of

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previous colonizing powers in the Americas in which comparative practices that revolved around race, climate, civilization, and hygiene had already been established. Engelschalt identifies three types of comparative practices that emerged from her primary records and highlights how similarity and difference between the United States and its new tropical territories were constructed in the discourse of military and civilian medical experts. With Stephanie Zehnle’s chapter on European and African secret societies in Sierra Leone and Liberia, our volume moves from North America to the African continent and temporally covers the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Both in the context of the British colony of Sierra Leone as well as the African American colony of Liberia, diverse ethnic groups and institutions were confronted with one another. Among those were the – by then globally active – secret societies such as the Freemasons, as well as local African secret societies. In her study, Zehnle brings to light the comparative practices employed by British Freemasons, Black American Freemasons, and members of African male secret societies (Poro) that existed in both colonies in their negotiations about admission of members and the legitimacy of those societies. Zehnle shows how black West African intellectuals challenged the colonial denial of the legitimacy of Poro societies by using specific comparative practices. As in the chapters of Stear and Pinnen, Zehnle’s analysis highlights the use of practices of comparing to subvert or challenge the colonial order.

Notes 1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 65. 2. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (July 1997): 735–62; Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (February 2006): 30–50; Shalini Randeria, “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Councils and Legal Pluralism in Postcolonial India,” in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. HeinzGerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 77–104. Bielefeld historians emeriti Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka were rather active in stirring the German debate on comparative vs. transnational for the field of social history, e.g. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, eds., “Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope and Perspectives of Comparative History,” in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 1–32; Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Theory 42, no. 1 (February 2003): 39–44; Jürgen Kocka, “Einladung zur Diskussion,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27, no. 3 (July 2001): 463; more recently

Introduction

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

11

Angelika Epple contributed to this debate in the field of global history, see e.g. Angelika Epple, “Die Größe zählt! Aber wie?: Globalgeschichte zwischen großen Synthesen, Skeptizismus und neuem Empirismus,” Neue Politische Literatur 53, no. 3 (2014): 409–36; Angelika Epple, “Globale Mikrogeschichte: Auf dem Weg zu einer Geschichte der Relationen,” in Im Kleinen das Große suchen: Mikrogeschichte in Theorie und Praxis, ed. Ewald Hiebl and Ernst Langthaler (Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag, 2012), 37–47; Angelika Epple and Kirsten Kramer, “Globalization, Imagination, Social Space: The Making of Geopolitical Imaginaries,” Forum for Inter-American Research FIAR 9, no. 1 (2016): 41–63, while Antje Flüchter has enriched the debate through the lens of transcultural history, a further approach that tried to overcome the billiard-ball separation between nations and cultures, see Antje Flüchter, “Handling of Diversity in Early Modern India?: Perception and Evaluation in German Discourse,” The Medieval History Journal 16, no. 2 (October 2013): 297–334; Antje Flüchter, “Translating Jesuits: Translation as a Useful Tool to Explore Transculturality,” in Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies, ed. Christiane Brosius, Susan Richter, and Diamantis Pangiotopoulos (London: Routledge, 2019), 199–215; Antje Flüchter and Jivanata Schöttli, eds., The Dynamics of Transculturality: Concepts and Institutions in Motion (Cham: Springer, 2014), and Eleonora Rohland has linked the concept of entangled history to environmental and climate history, see Eleonora Rohland, Entangled History and the Environment?: SocioEnvironmental Transformations in the Caribbean, 1500–1800 (Trier/Tempe: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT)/Bilingual Press, 2020). For a hermeneutical perspective on comparison see, notably, Hartmut von Sass, “Vergleiche(n): Ein hermeneutischer Rund- und Sinkflug,” in Hermeneutik des Vergleichs: Strukturen, Anwendungen und Grenzen komparativer Verfahren, ed. Andreas Mauz and Hartmut von Sass (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), 25–47. On the significance of postcolonial approaches to comparison see, among others, Haun Saussy, “Axes of Comparison,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 64–76; Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?,” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 453–71; Pheng Cheah, “Grounds of Comparison,” Diacritics 29, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 1–18; Natalie Melas, “Merely Comparative,” PMLA 128, no. 3 (May 2013): 652–9. For a concise analysis of the dynamic interaction processes going on between the actors and objects involved in comparisons, see Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Rethinking Comparativism,” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 609–26; K. M. Newton, “Homi K. Bhabha: ‘The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse’,” in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. K. M. Newton (London: Macmillan Education UK, 1997), 293–302. For some more detail on the theoretical concept and its application, see Kirsten Kramer’s contribution (chapter 9) in this volume. For an in-depth introduction and discussion, see Angelika Epple, “Doing Comparisons: Ein praxeologischer Zugang zur Geschichte der Globalisierung/en,” in Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens, ed. Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2015), 161–202; Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015); Angelika Epple, Walter Erhart, and

12

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

Eleonora Rohland and Kirsten Kramer Johannes Grave, Practices of Comparing: Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice (Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press, 2020); Angelika Epple, “Comparing Europe and the Americas: The Dispute of the New World between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Force of Comparison: A New Perspective on Modern European History and the Contemporary World, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020), 137–63. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Bruce Lincoln, Apples and Oranges: Experiments in, on, and with Comparison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); William E. Paden, New Patterns for Comparative Religion: Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective, Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Peter van der Veer, The Value of Comparison, The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014). Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd, eds., Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, vol. 24 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 3. Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, American Encounters/Global Interactions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” The Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 829–65; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies (Cambridgeshire/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Anthony Grafton, “Comparisons Compared: A Study in the Early Modern Roots of Cultural History,” in Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, ed. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 18–48; Anthony Grafton and April Shelford, eds., New Worlds, Ancient Text: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995); Jonathan Locke Hart, Comparing Empires: European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Alexander Honold, Ost-westliche Kulturtransfers OrientAmerika, Postkoloniale Studien in der Germanistik (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2011); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, Cultural Sitings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Ottmar Ette, ReiseSchreiben: Potsdamer Vorlesungen zur Reiseliteratur (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). Chakrabarty, Provincializing; Stoler, “Ties”; Rey Chow, “The Old/ New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective,” English Literary History 71, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 289–311; Harry Harootunian, “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem,” Boundary 2 32, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 23–52; Walter Mignolo, “On Comparison: Who Is Comparing What and Why,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 99–119.

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13

13. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London et al.: Routledge, 2009). 14. The role of women as a moral compass in colonial societies has been most famously outlined by Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); a more recent perspective on women, marriage, and sexuality in the British Caribbean is by Brooke N. Newman, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). 15. See, for example, Cañizares-Esguerra, History, chapter 1 in particular. 16. In her chapter on Translating Jesuits, Antje Flüchter describes how concepts from translation studies can be employed to analyze cultural translation, focusing in particular on transculturation and hybridization, Flüchter, “Translating Jesuits.”

Bibliography Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Cultural Sitings. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chea, Pheng. “Grounds of Comparison.” Diacritics 29, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 1–18. Chidester, David. Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Chow, Rey. “The Old/ New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A PostEuropean Perspective.” English Literary History 71, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 289–311. Epple, Angelika. “Comparing Europe and the Americas: The Dispute of the New World between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In The Force of Comparisons: A New Perspective on Modern European History and the Contemporary World, edited by Willibald Steinmetz, 137–63. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. ———. “Die Größe zählt! Aber wie?: Globalgeschichte zwischen großen Synthesen, Skeptizismus und neuem Empirismus.” Neue Politische Literatur 53, no. 3 (2014): 409–36. ———. “Doing Comparisons: Ein praxeologischer Zugang zur Geschichte der Globalisierung/en.” In Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens, edited by Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, 161–202. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2015. ———. “Globale Mikrogeschichte: Auf dem Weg zu einer Geschichte der Relationen.” In Im Kleinen das Große suchen: Mikrogeschichte in Theorie und Praxis, edited by Ewald Hiebl and Ernst Langthaler, 37–47. Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag, 2012. Epple, Angelika, and Walter Erhart. Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens, 1st ed. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015.

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Epple, Angelika, Walter Erhart, and Johannes Grave. Practices of Comparing: Towards a New Understanding of a Fundamental Human Practice. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press, 2020. Epple, Angelika, and Kirsten Kramer. “Globalization, Imagination, Social Space: The Making of Geopolitical Imaginaries.” Forum for Inter-American Research FIAR 9, no. 1 (2016): 41–63. Ette, Ottmar. ReiseSchreibe: Potsdamer Vorlesungen zur Reiseliteratur. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Felski, Rita, and Susan Stanford Friedman. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Flüchter, Antje. “Handling of Diversity in Early Modern India?: Perception and Evaluation in German Discourse.” The Medieval History Journal 16, no. 2 (October 2013): 297–334. ———. “Translating Jesuits: Translation as a Useful Tool to Explore Transculturality.” In Engaging Transculturality: Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies, edited by Christiane Brosius, Susan Richter, and Diamantis Pangiotopoulos, 199–215. London: Routledge, 2019. Flüchter, Antje, and Jivanata Schöttli, eds. The Dynamics of Transculturality: Concepts and Institutions in Motion. Cham: Springer, 2014. Gagné, Renaud, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd, eds. Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, vol. 24. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Gerbi, Antonello, and Jeremy Moyle. The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, 1st ed. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Grafton, Anthony. “Comparisons Compared: A Study in the Early Modern Roots of Cultural History.” In Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, edited by Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd, 18–48. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Grafton, Anthony, and April Shelford, eds. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Harootunian, Harry. “Some Thoughts on Comparability and the Space-Time Problem.” Boundary 2 32, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 23–52. Hart, Jonathan Locke. Comparing Empires: European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Jürgen Kocka. “Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope and Perspectives of Comparative History.” In Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, edited by Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, 1–32. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. Honold, Alexander. Ost-westliche Kulturtransfers: Orient-Amerika. Postkoloniale Studien in der Germanistik. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2011. Kocka, Jürgen. “Comparison and beyond.” History and Theory 42, no. 1 (February 2003): 39–44.

Introduction

15

———. “Einladung zur Diskussion.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27, no. 3 (July 2001): 463. Lincoln, Bruce. Apples and Oranges: Experiments in, on, and with Comparison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Melas, Natalie. “Merely Comparative.” PMLA 128, no. 3 (May 2013): 652–9. Mignolo, Walter. “On Comparison: Who Is Comparing What and Why.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 99–119. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Newman, Brooke N. A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Newton, K.M. “Homi K. Bhabha: ‘The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse’.” In Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader, edited by K.M. Newton, 293–301. London, UK: Macmillan Education, 1997. Paden, William E. New Patterns for Comparative Religion: Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective. Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies. Cambridgeshire/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. London et al.: Routledge, 2009. Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan. “Why Compare?” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 453–71. Randeria, Shalini. “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Councils and Legal Pluralism in Postcolonial India.” In Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, edited by Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, 77–104. New York: Berghahn, 2009. Rohland, Eleonora. Entangled History and the Environment?: Socio-Environmental Transformations in the Caribbean, 1492–1800. Trier/New Orleans: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT)/University of New Orleans Press, forthcoming 2020. Sass, Hartmut von. “Vergleiche(n): Ein hermeneutischer Rund- und Sinkflug.” In Hermeneutik des Vergleichs: Strukturen, Anwendungen und Grenzen komparativer Verfahren, edited by Andreas Mauz and Hartmut von Sass, 25–47. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. Saussy, Haun. “Axes of Comparison.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 64–76. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Rethinking Comparativism.” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 609–26. Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ———. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. American Encounters/Global Interactions. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

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———. “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies.” The Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 829–65. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62. Veer, Peter van der. The Value of Comparison. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Werner, Michael, and Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (February 2006): 30–50.

Part I

Women, Marriage Practices, and Morals

1

Bridging the Gap Jesuit Missionaries’ Perspectives on Marriage in the Philippines in the Period of Contact Marya Svetlana T. Camacho

The Intellectual Framework of Missionary Ethnography Missionary ethnographic literature produced in the period of Spanish contact is a principal source for pre-Hispanic Philippine culture and society, complemented by non-archival sources such as archaeology and language.1 Indeed, as J.P. Rubiés stated in his comparative work on Catholic and Protestant texts, given the close and generally long contact of missionaries with natives particularly in the rural areas, they “generated a specialized ethnography which went beyond the superficial observations of occasional visitors.” He distinguished between two ambits of translation made by missionaries: the first was the attempt to understand indigenous religion and culture on the ground, and the second was the effort to convey a coherent image and notion of indigenous societies to the intended European readership.2 An interpretive reading of missionary literature therefore is mindful of this twofold cultural translation. Early modern missionary historiography, and the ethnography embedded in it, was written within universalist framework: Christianity and the Renaissance notion of science. It was a universe constituted by nature – the physical world – and human beings, which could be understood rationally according to Thomistic-Aristotelian principles. Natural philosophy was compatible with religious faith; knowledge by observation and experience worked in continuity with the speculative method of philosophy and theology. Furthermore, science understood in this way could strengthen faith.3 In the case of early modern Jesuit ethnography, it may be posited that the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum heavily influenced the formation of those intellectual coordinates. The Ratio substantially derived from the Renaissance emphasis on classical learning. It drew from ancient Greek and Roman works and early Christian authors in the basic curriculum of rhetoric, humanities (literature and history), grammar to which the pedagogy of praelectio was applied in order to develop the intellectual powers as well as aesthetic sensibility. Philosophical education was Aristotelian, articulated in logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics. Aristotle

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was studied to the extent that his ideas were harmonious with the Christian faith. On this level, mathematics might extend to geography and astronomy. It was an education that was both intellectually stimulating and didactic, intended to form a well-rounded person, able to communicate eloquently and to use reason, virtuous and highly cultured at the same time. Theology was supremely Thomistic. Theological studies included commentaries on Scripture and cases of conscience, dovetailing with canon law and civil law when relevant to canon law. Secular subjects of the early years were to be guided by the final goal of the study of God for those who would proceed to theology.4 The Jesuit José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) became paradigmatic for succeeding works of its kind. It was systematically organized, comprehensive in scope, and comparative in approach, drawing on classical sources, in which the empirical-historical and ethnographic, describing differences and similarities, intersected with the philosophical which tried to make sense of the differences encountered.5 The four works by Jesuits selected for this study manifest Acosta’s influence in the organization of parts, beginning with geography and natural history, and devoting separate chapters to the ‘moral’ part describing the indigenous peoples, their society, culture, and religion. This mode of exposition following the hierarchy of beings, ultimately directing the natural to the supernatural objective of Christianization, set them apart from the missionary historiographical literature produced by other religious orders in the Philippines in the same period.6 In early modern Europe, the belief in a common human nature and origin and in natural law was the ultimate explanation of similarities. M. Hodgens traced this “mental habit” of seeking “cultural correspondence” from antiquity to the twentieth century.7 Identifying cultural similarities across time led to conclusions of relationships of origin across space. Thus it was possible to posit analogous stages of civilization that societies went through, as José de Acosta did when he considered the Mexicans’ gods associated with natural phenomena as comparable to the gods of ancient Greeks and Romans. As nuanced defense of the peoples of the New World, he even affirmed that their pagan practices were not worse than those of other ancient civilizations. As C. Ginzburg wrote, “Antiquarian knowledge (and philology) gave birth to ethnography – forms of knowledge which have been forms of domination as well.”8 The early modern standards of rationality applied to assess the cultural diversity found across space and which evolved over time were considered universal. Thus, an established scale of civilization, from barbarous to civilized, guided the classification of societies. This hierarchical paradigm was applied to the indigenous peoples of the Philippine islands that the Spaniards encountered.9 The capacity of the savage for Christian virtue had been a key question in regard to gauging his humanity, following the European moral and ethical standards.10 Likewise, the “limited

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relativism did not apply to religion, which was always measured according to a single standard of truth. Catholic Christianity was an absolute.” While civilization was a different category from religion, the two were connected in that a certain level of civilization was considered requisite to conversion.11 Overall, Christianity’s universality made room for cultural accommodation.12 In this study on the practice of comparison by Jesuits in the early modern period, Ginzburg’s point on ambivalence as inherent to Christianity may cast more light from within the authors’ belief system. Ambivalence was born from the relationship of Christianity with Judaism as the latter’s fulfillment. It was a historical relationship, which in Bible reading allowed for two levels of reading, the literal and the allegorical.13 In this light, the comparative method assumed a historical dimension within a Christian framework.

Early Modern Jesuit Historiographical Work in the Philippines In 1581, the first Jesuits, Antonio Sedeño and Alonso Sánchez, together with Nicolas Gallardo, a brother, arrived in the Philippines together with the first bishop of Manila, Domingo de Salazar. They began to administer Taytay, east of Manila, and were assigned the missions in the Visayan islands of Samar and Leyte as well as in Northern Mindanao. In 1605 the Philippines became a province of the Society. Most Castilian work up to the 1670s was about the Philippines, whereas the Portuguese wrote about a broader geographical field in Asia. Among the latter, the Jesuits wrote the most about the native societies. In the case of the Philippines, aside from the Jesuits, other religious orders also produced historiographical work.14 The difference from the Jesuit works from the earliest period was that the Dominicans and Franciscans mentioned features of indigenous culture which they encountered mostly in the narrative of their missionary work and less in separate ethnographic chapters.15 However, as mentioned previously, the imprint of José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias was evident in the historias and relaciones written by the Jesuits in the Philippines, becoming more pronounced later in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, the major parts of the Jesuit writings consisted of the chronicle of their missions and the hagiography of their members in the Philippine province.16 The relación was a more informal report that often had a personal tone, and historia was a longer, more formal narrative,17 more akin to Herodotus’ history. Although ethnographic passages are found in different genres of missionary literature, including letters, pastoral and educational works, the historical genre provides the most comprehensive sources in which the different cognitive purposes converge: natural and moral history, supernatural history that included hagiography, to which

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antiquarian learning was applied.18 The relaciones and historias were intended to inspire and edify the intended audience, mainly the Jesuits and other readers, including authorities and benefactors, and therefore could very well be meant also to solicit support for the missions.19 Before the expulsion of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century, three official histories of the Philippine Jesuits were published. They formed a continuity, covering the period until 1716: Pedro Chirino’s (1557/58– 1635) Relación de las Yslas Filipinas (Rome, 1604),20 Francisco Colín’s (1592–1660) Labor evangélica, ministerios apostólicos de los obreros de la Compañía de Jesús, which covered the Spanish colonial period until 1616, published posthumously in 1663;21 and Pedro Murillo Velarde’s (1696–1753) Historia de la provincia de Philipinas de la Compañía de Jesús, segunda parte, published in 1749. Murillo Velarde chronologically continued the history written by Colin, while the latter drew material from Chirino’s manuscripts for the first part of his work, as he acknowledged in the title, which included the geographic and ethnographic chapters. The first history, although less systematically organized and more personal in tone, became the model for the next two histories which evolved into more formal narratives. Influenced by José de Acosta, Chirino began his work with a description of the geographical setting aside from the historical narrative of the Spanish and Jesuit advent. As the story of the Jesuit missions went along, he interspersed ethnographic chapters and hagiography according to their relevance to the narrative.22 In comparison with the later Jesuit works, Chirino’s relación was the least systematic, although not less erudite. As R. Javellana points out, these authors did not intend to give a comprehensive account of indigenous society and culture but chose those aspects that showed more readily their level of civilization and virtue assessed in accordance with Christian norms. Thus the aspects described pertained to appearance, language, agriculture and other economic activities, social organization, vital milestones (marriage and death), laws and customs, and of course religion.23 While the work of Francisco Combés (1620–1665) and Francisco Ignacio Alzina (1610–1674) were not official histories but personal initiatives, they are nonetheless valuable for the information they give about those peripheral zones entrusted to the Jesuits. Francisco Combés’ Historia de Mindanao y Joló y sus adyacentes (1667)24 work was part of Jesuit efforts to convince civil authorities that abandoning Zamboanga, the Spanish foothold in northwestern Mindanao, was a serious mistake. However, the work in itself became the most comprehensive account of the island during the early Spanish colonial period. In Ana M. RodríguezRodríguez’s analysis of Combés’ work, the Jesuit alternated between two positions regarding Islam which Mindanao and Sulu represented, viewing it as an old enemy of Christianity, and by avoiding old prejudices, pointing to channels of communication between the two religions. Thus, he pointed out vices as well as virtues of Muslims. In both aspects the

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evangelizing intervention of the Jesuits was highlighted, and with that the value of the region as mission territory. Underlying the work was faith in Spanish capacity to succeed in this endeavor of conquest both military and religious.25 Francisco Ignacio Alzina (1610–1674) wrote Historia de las islas e indios de las Visayas26 on the basis of approximately 36 years he spent in the Visayas, particularly in Samar and Leyte.27 Among the four works studied in this chapter, his was the most evidently modeled on José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral. However, instead of writing an entirely different work on the Christianization of the natives, he wrote the historia eclesiástica o sobrenatural following on the historia natural y moral. The first part of the latter dealt with the physical world in relation to culture, and therefore transitioned more naturally to the properly ethnographic part. The second part, as the title indicates, is the sequel or the Christianized phase consisting of the missionary work that the Jesuits had carried out. The manuscript of this part is incomplete.28

Marriage in Focus As mentioned earlier, Chirino set the pattern for subsequent historicalethnographical works. In the introductory survey of the indigenous culture with which the authors came in contact, marriage was given more than a cursory treatment as an indication of its significance in the life of any society and, for the European, of the level of its humanity and potential for Christianization. In organizing their exposition, all four authors followed the chronological order, from the pre-matrimonial phase to the celebration of wedding to the possibility of divorce. Invariably, too, they framed it as a universal social institution but with the specific form of Tridentine canonical marriage that they were all trying to introduce or strengthen as part of their evangelizing mission. Among the four works that examined, that of Combés entered least into interpretations and comparisons with Spanish or European matrimonial customs, and settled for a highly detailed description of the rituals involved which were incomparable to anything he had known (“no admiten competencias”), particularly of an elite wedding that he witnessed. It might well be that his experience, limited dealings with the natives, and limited knowledge of their language, did not allow him go beyond that. However, at the outset he emphasized the importance of marriage, together with burials, in Mindanaoan societies. Their elaborateness and magnificence – which did not fail to cause wonder among the Spaniards – contrasted with the plainness, even primitiveness, of other aspects of their culture such as law and government.29 An admiring tone marked the description consistently. Also, Combés praised the Subanon for valuing sexual purity and modesty among their women, which they kept for marriage.30 Even the newlywed couple kept that modesty

24 Marya Svetlana T. Camacho in their demonstration of affection. Without expressly mentioning that he was describing a Christianized marriage, the reader is left wondering if that was the case given some rather ambivalent references, such as the exchange of consent, the nuptial blessings, and its being a sacrament. By setting Mindanaoan marriage as well as burials apart in the penultimate chapter of book one of his Historia, Combés presented it as noteworthy evidence of civilization, reversing the preliminary impression the people gave of being barbarous.31 Thus, marriage would be one of the points of conversion to Christianity that Rodríguez-Rodríguez referred to in Combés’ framing of Mindanaoan history and the Spanish intervention in it. The level of development of the virtues and values signified in the conduct of weddings that he so elaborately described accorded with the Christian meaning of marriage. I shall discuss Chirino and Colin’s treatment of marriage comparatively since, as mentioned prior, Colin based his exposition on Chirino’s manuscript for the history of the Philippine province, a more developed work than the Relación. The more informal character of the latter is seen in the brief statements and comments made as if in passing, interspersed with anecdotes and hypothetical examples in the manner of lessons on canon law that illustrate the main points which cover the key aspects of marriage. Chirino organized the chapters mainly following his personal pastoral experience. Hence, he began the chapter on marriage by stating that he discovered that polygamy was practiced by some natives with only ten years of experience in the field, his way of showing that it was exceptional and therefore that indigenous marriage was in accordance with human and Christian norms. As a support to this assertion, he surmised that polygamy, prevalent in Mindanao and Leyte, was a Muslim influence given that adherents to this religion had multiplied.32 His digression into the origins and spread of Islam in the Philippine archipelago, with a zealous tone of triumph that the Spanish arrival had stopped it, indicates a high degree of familiarity as to the threat it presented to Christianity. Most of the other points he made contribute to showing the proximity of indigenous custom to canonical marriage. Filipinos did not contract marriage with relatives within the first degree of consanguinity. Those familiar with the privilege given to new converts to consider marriages up to the third degree of consanguinity, whether in direct or transversal line, would interpret this information as another piece of evidence of the validity of such.33 They distinguished clearly between matrimony and concubinage, as the former required consent and was formalized in rituals. However, they easily divorced. Later, however, he qualified that such repudiation happened in polygamous marriages. His erudition in regard to marriage is displayed only once in the reference he made to Boethius (De topicis differentiis) and André Tiraqueau (De legibus connubialibus), when he compared the indigenous custom of buying brides to what was practiced in ancient Mesopotamia and other societies, a note

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that Colin repeated.34 Alzina broadened the comparison to other Asian civilizations such as China and Japan, perhaps referring to more recently acquired knowledge. Given the early date of Chirino’s work, and when it is compared with later writings whether chronicles or other genres, it seems that his interpretation of what modern anthropologists would call “bride price” or “bridewealth” was seminal and persisted in the colonial normative regime.35 In contrast, Colin’s chapter on marriage has a more juridical character in its organization and exposition. He prefaced the section on marriage by decrying the lack of value given to purity among women, and to virginity before marriage – as was expected of barbarous people – an assertion that could be traced to Chirino, as will be taken up later. Nonetheless, his opening sentence on “the celebration of marriages, betrothals, and divorce, and the giving and receiving of dowries” affirmed that it was “in accordance with reason.”36 He elaborated on the matter of penalties for breaking betrothals, as well as the dowry which the bride’s parents received and other gifts given to the bride’s relatives. After describing the pre-nuptial stage and the wedding rite, he proceeded to the aspects incompatible with Christian marriage as were divorce, even on flimsy grounds, and polygamy.37 Echoing Chirino, he also noted the limit of the first degree of consanguinity observed by the natives.38 A few pages away, Colin added a few more details not found in Chirino, on the dowry (bigay caya) and the bridegroom’s gift to the mother (panhimuyat), reinforcing his negative view on the avaricious, transactional character of marriage. The final detail he mentioned was the corresponding donation by the bride’s father, called pasonor, which he compared with the praeter dotem or bona paraphernalia in civil law, noting that it was still practiced at the time of his writing, that is, in the mid-seventeenth century. As mentioned earlier, Chirino’s observation that chastity was practically an unknown virtue among pagan Filipino women would be repeated in subsequent ethnographies aside from that of Colin’s, for example, in the Franciscan chronicles of Francisco de Santa Inés (1676) and Juan Francisco de San Antonio (1738). He had heard about the belief that women needed a lover (aficionado) to be able to cross a dangerous river to arrive in paradise; thus, they considered virginity a “misfortune” and “lowliness.” He actually mentioned this aspect of pre-Hispanic culture as a foil to his optimistic assessment of the progress of evangelization among the natives, recogimiento (reserve) and honestidad (virtue) being among the virtues that women had begun to acquire.39 Alzina’s ethnographic work is considered “a model ethnography in its systematic approach, depth of analysis, and sympathy towards the natives and their natural milieu.”40 The five chapters he devoted to marriage bears out this remark of Rubiés.41 Although perhaps his deep knowledge of the Bisayan language as well as his long immersion in indigenous communities might be comparable to Chirino’s, his perspective was much

26 Marya Svetlana T. Camacho more open to cultural difference, and this contributed greatly to attaining a level of insight that none of the other chroniclers seemed to have attained. He combined a dual approach of “domesticating” and “foreignizing” indigenous terms; the first through comparison, and the second by citing indigenous terms as cultural expressions, then explaining them.42 Alzina’s perspective corresponded to his unitary view of natural and moral (human) history, both governed by God and in accord with reason and natural law: En la historia natural de Alzina, la naturaleza es cultura y la cultura es naturaleza. Por ello, la diversidad de lo natural ayuda a comprender la diversidad de lo “moral.” La conjunción entre el orden natural y moral justifica el constante uso de analogías.43 Alzina used comparative lenses as seen in the opening lines in the section on marriage. As a natural institution, it was universal and necessary for the “propagation, increase and conservation of the human race.” Although there are many ways of celebrating it, según el uso y abuso de tan diversas gentes y naciones como hay en el mundo, dudo que ninguna de ellas tenga tantos requisitos, circunstancias y condiciones como ésta de los bisayas, y en común todas las de este archipiélago que, aunque con alguna diferencia, aunque poca, en algunas circunstancias, en lo general concuerdan; y es cierto que en cuanto yo he oído o leído de otras partes, no hallo de mucho las sinnúmero que por acá concurren, como se verá en lo que en este capítulo y en el siguiente diremos.44 In a consistent manner, he repeated this advertence as he proceeded to describe and explain the different phases and aspects of Bisayan marriage. In the matter of dowry (dote), which like the other chroniclers he qualified as a purchase, he forewarned the reader that contrary to European practice, here in the Visayas, the father received (instead of giving) it, such that he who had many sons needed more means to marry them off, especially if he belonged to the elite, while he who had many daughters was fortunate as he received much gold and silver for them. Then he went on, as if opening horizons: even if it was contrary to European custom, it was in accordance with the ancient Jewish custom, as Jacob served his father-in-law since he had nothing to ‘pay’ with for the dowry which was still common among Jews, and in Asia, specifically in China, Japan, and Cambodia, as well as in many other kingdoms. With a touch of humor, but also adding that “parece compran sus mujeres” (“they seem to buy their wives”), he commented that in Europe dowries were given by the woman’s family ad sustenda honera matrimonii, while here it was ad augendam onera.45

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On the custom of the couple living with the bride’s parents after marriage, or matrilocal residence, with the son-in-law serving the fatherin-law, he again noted that while this custom was opposed to “ours” (European), it had many advantages. Alzina conceded that when the bride was very young (usually 12 years old), which was a common phenomenon among the Visayans, she was not yet capable of attending to her husband; whereas in her parents’ house there was someone who could attend to their needs. Also, being young, the husband was often timid, so that with the father-in-law’s instruction for work equipped him to become independent and eventually have a separate household. There were other advantages which he did not elaborate, limiting himself to a final remark that almost all those who knew those benefits approved of such an arrangement. The role of the parish priest was to reduce the period of service, but it was a difficult endeavor, for the custom was deeply rooted.46 This view was unique among the voices denouncing the practice, whether in missionary literature, pastoral writings, or juridical literature of the period. He began the chapter on property in marriage with the advertence that it was just as contrary to European custom and law as the matter of dowries. Considering that the natives were the opposite in temperament, it was not surprising that their customs and usages should be likewise, and these were more or less shared with other more civilized societies in that part of the world. His starting point revealed his European background where women’s status was tied up with men’s, and married women subject to the husband’s authority. A related question was about the husband’s dominion over the wife’s property.47 Alzina forthrightly declared that women were subject to their husbands in regard to their work in the home, especially in providing clothing. Otherwise they owned their property such that the husband could not dispose of it – jewelry, personal effects, and especially slaves – without permission from the wife. They could enjoy only the usufruct and the services of slaves for farming. When the woman died, her slaves remained as her property even if they had served to augment conjugal property, so as to be inherited by her children.48 Alzina’s depth of insight into inheritance practices was unmatched by the other Jesuit authors, whose accounts were limited to the proportions corresponding to the heirs. The penultimate chapter on marriage49 in Alzina’s historia moral seems to be his concluding argument that Bisayan marriage in pre-Hispanic times, contrary though it was to many European matrimonial practices, was highly developed and ultimately valid according to Catholic norms. He attributed opposing opinions to lack of data and insufficient knowledge of native languages of Spaniards on the one hand, and the faulty information given by natives on the other, as they were presumably ignorant of the European paradigm in which questions were framed. He addressed the main argument that indigenous marriage was defective

28 Marya Svetlana T. Camacho from the outset as the contracting parties were not committed to indissolubility. He claimed that separation of spouses occurred mostly among the powerful and wealthy who practiced polygamy – a point in which he coincided with Chirino – and the conflation of marriage and concubinage. Therefore, divorce was actually exceptional, and it was hence unfair to categorize it as a general practice. Then he resorted to an argument of hierarchical comparison on the premise that more civilized (naciones políticas) and Christianized societies should be morally advanced. Citing that divorce also happened in Europe, the historical instances of powerful men giving in to unbridled passions, in the Visigothic period and more recently the case of Henry VIII of England, had not been sufficient to lead to the conclusion that divorce was a general European practice.50 In the ethnographic chapters, Alzina’s perspective is one of openness to cultural variety within the latitude permitted by natural law, with an occasional comparison of Bisayan custom with other more civilized nations in Asia, and always with Europe. In the chapter on the validity of indigenous marriage, his notion of cultural hierarchy emerged even more distinctly.51 Among the other authors studied here, Alzina stands out as an example of how linguistic expertise was used to advantage to access native custom and literature, in this case oral, enabling him to penetrate not only cultural forms but also the rationale and ethos behind them.52

Conclusions The ethnography of indigenous marriage in the Philippines in four Jesuit historiographical writings from the early modern period was articulated in European juridical terms and viewed through the lenses of Tridentine canonical marriage. The authors identified the matrimonial phases common to Philippine and European practice: betrothal, marriage, and separation, with the material dimension proper to each, such as dowry and arrhae, conjugal property, and inheritance. Thus they compared as they described, referring to what was familiar to them and their European readers, for example, distinguishing palabras de futuro (promise of future marriage) of betrothal from palabras de presente or declaration of matrimonial consent, which established the bond of marriage. In a similar vein, they concerned themselves with the problematic aspects of each phase, such as defaulting on marriage promises, and the customary ways of resolving them. Alzina in particular advised how important it was to know indigenous custom for pastoral work in the area of marriage and family relations. As if instinctively, they evaluated as they described according to the conception of marriage they were culturally and juridically familiar with, given that their task included shepherding the natives towards and in Christian marriage. They were keen to note the features of the indigenous institution which went against either the canonical form or the properties of Catholic marriage, as were polygamy and divorce; nonetheless,

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they also observed that polygamy was not a general phenomenon, usually practiced only by the wealthy and powerful. They found that the impediment of consanguinity, common in Europe and America, was less of an issue in the Philippines. A related matter of common concern to them was women’s sexuality, evaluated against the virtue of chastity before and after marriage. Except for Combés, they showed ambivalence, critical of pagan promiscuity while optimistic about the signs of assimilation of the Christian virtue. Overall, the missionaries’ bias was to gauge the adaptability of indigenous marriage to Christianity. Apart from their knowledge of law both civil and canonical, their humanistic education, which had familiarized them with classical learning and knowledge of other civilizations, afforded points of comparison and a sense of evolutionary history. The Jesuit authors approached indigenous marriage as a cultural artefact, indicative of the level of humanity of Philippine society, and thereby its place in the civilizational hierarchy according to European criteria. Colin highlighted the relative sophistication of Mindanaoan elite marriage as evidence of that region’s potential for conversion and therefore its worth to be subject to Spain. Alzina bore out his introductory words on the complexity of Visayan matrimonial custom with a highly detailed exposition enabled by linguistic expertise. Alzina places it almost at the end of his natural and moral history, seemingly to emphasize how highly developed the institution was, configured by a dense network of human relationships and material display. He presented Visayan marriage in an ambivalent key, repeatedly commenting that its practices were contrary to the European and yet defending its validity as a natural institution. As to its moral defects, it did not fare much worse than that of Christian Europe. Although Colin and Alzina wrote about the same time, the difference in their perspective on indigenous marriage would seem attributable to the difference in method, sources, and nature of their respective work. Alzina’s approach was definitely much more empirical, which his missionary task permitted him, than Colin’s historia which relied mostly on Chirino’s manuscript. Colin wrote an official history with its primordial function of edification as well as information of an intended readership. Alzina, however, was able to indulge his ethnographic zeal suffused with sympathy and affection for his flock. To what extent these Jesuit ethnographies would be seminal for subsequent production and reproduction of knowledge on Philippine indigenous peoples and their culture in the first century of colonial encounter is a subject yet to be explored. Those early colonial writers put their observations in writing at a time of transition, early enough to know native society in the pre-Hispanic and pre-Christian stage and at the same time to witness changes brought about by colonization. Those alterations took place in the context of continuities in vital areas such as marriage. In the Jesuit ethnographies examined here, the practice of observation and comparison proved

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to be a capacious strategy that gave latitude as well as limits to accommodation in the new normative order. Ultimately, that practice sought to discern the humanity of indigenous marriage – consonant with reason and natural law – and therefore its capacity to be Christianized.

Notes All translations from Spanish are the author’s. 1. See Laura Lee Junker, “Integrating History and Archaeology in the Study of Contact Period Philippine Chiefdoms,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 2, no. 4 (December 1998): 291–320. https://doi. org/10.1023/A:1022611908759; L. L. Junker, Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000); William Henry Scott, Barangay: SixteenthCentury Philippine Culture and Society (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018); and Barbara Watson and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 32, 86–7. 2. Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Spanish Contribution to the Ethnology of Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Renaissance Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 418–48, 422. https://doi.org/10.1111/1477-4658.t01-1-00030. He examines the impact of such writings on Spanish imperial historiography. He notes that the Spanish court did not obtain a clear perspective on the potential and strategic value of the Philippines in the first decades of the colony. 3. Rubiés, “Spanish Contribution,” 437. 4. For a brief history and description of the Ratio Studiorum in the sixteenth century, see Gabriel Codina, “Our Way of Proceeding in Education: The Ratio Studiorum,” in Resources for Jesuit Schools (London: Jesuit Institute, 2017), 5–7; for the complete Ratio of 1599, see “The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599,” ed. and trans. Allan P. Farrell, typescript (Washington, DC, 1970); on the praelectio, see Clement J. Fuerst, “A Few Principles and Characteristics of the Ratio Studiorum,” The Classical Journal 21, no. 3 (December 1925): 205–7. www.jstor.org/stable/3288956, accessed October 8, 2018. 5. Rubiés, “Spanish Contribution,” 437–8. 6. Contemporanous chronicles of the other religious orders in the Philippines are the following: Diego de Aduarte, Tomo primero de la historia de la Provincia del Santo Rosario de Filipinas, Iapon y China de la Sagrada Orden de Predicadores (Zaragoza: Domingo Gascon, 1693); Marcelo de Ribadeneyra, Historia de las islas del archipielago y Reynos de la gran China, Tartaria, Cuchinchina, Malaca, Sian, Camboxa, y Iappon .  .  . (Barcelona: Gabriel Graells y Giraldo Dotil, 1601); Juan de Medina, Historia de los sucesos de la Orden de N. gran P. S. Agustín, de estas Islas Filipinas . . . (manuscript dated 1630; Biblioteca Histórica Filipina, Manila: Tipo-litografía de Chofre y Comp., 1893). 7. See chapter 8 of Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 295–353. 8. Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory and World History,” in The Cambridge World History, vol. 6, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 468. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139022460.019.

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9. Rubiés, “Spanish Contribution,” 444. 10. Hodgen, Early Anthropology, 358–60; Hodgens discusses the two directions in which the savage’s place in the chain of humanity was resolved: either as a corruption and degeneration, or as a point of departure for progress and development. From the medieval notion of the hierarchy of beings ontologically different from each other, there developed a theory of historical evolution that located the savage as a phase of development between the sub-human and the fully human. 11. However, as Rubiés points out, being civilized was not to be equated to being faithful to one’s religion. “Spanish Contribution,” 444. 12. Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Ethnography and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern Missions,” in Translating Christianity, ed. Simon Ditchfield, Charlotte Methuen, and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 272–310, 291. 13. Ginzburg argues that the cognitive tools – historical perspective and different reading strategies – arising from Christianity’s ambivalence became useful for European expansion. “Microhistory and World History,” 471. 14. Rubiés, “Spanish Contribution,” 422, 428, 447–8. 15. An exception would be Francisco de Santa Ines’s chronicle, which seemed to have followed the Acosta model in its extensive preliminary section on the physical environment and ethnography, “para la perfecta inteligencia de los más de los sucesos que se contienen en esta Crónica” (“for a perfect understanding of most events in this Chronicle”). The section on marriage seems to have been lifted from Colin’s work. Crónica de la Provincia de San Gregorio Magno de Religiosos Descalzos de N.P.S. Francisco en las Islas Filipinas, China, Japon, etc., vol. 1 (manuscript dated 1676; Biblioteca Histórica Filipina, Manila: Tipo-litografía de Chofre y Comp., 1892). 16. The exception would be Alzina´s Historia de las Islas Bisayas, in which the historia natural y moral seems to be just as long as the historia sobrenatural about the Jesuit missions, albeit the manuscript of the latter is incomplete. 17. René B. Javellana,“Historiography of the Philippine Province,” Jesuit Historiography Online. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2468-7723_jho_COM_192583. He cites Horacio de la Costa, Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 630. 18. Rubiés, “Ethnography and Cultural Translation,” 288–9; Diogo Ramada Curto’s precautionary remark of not imposing our contemporary categories is relevant to this point: that the Jesuits’ work of cultural mediation or translation may not overshadow the basic religious mission they carried out in the first place. This perspective would keep our reading of the texts aligned with their original purpose. “Jesuits and Cultural Intermediacy in the Early Modern World,” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 74 (January–June 2005): 9–10. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015050940355, accessed October 5, 2018. 19. Javellana, “Historiography.” 20. Pedro Chirino arrived in the Philippines in 1590. For nine years he was assigned to different missions: first in the Tagalog province of Balayan (Batangas), then in Antipolo, east of Manila, after which he went to Tigbauan on the Visayan island of Panay, where he opened a school for sons of the native elite, and then in Cebu and Leyte, also Visayan islands. He was appointed rector of the Jesuit college in Manila. According to his account, he wrote the relación due to insistent requests since people in Spain were interested to know about the Philippines. He expanded it to become a much longer history of the Philippine province. José S. Arcilla, “Jesuit Historians of the Philippines,” Philippine Studies 44, no. 3 (1996): 374–91, 384–7. www.

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21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Marya Svetlana T. Camacho philippinestudies.net/ojs/index.php/ps/article/view/681/683; Manuel Ruiz Jurado, “Fr. Pedro Chirino, S.J. and Philippine Historiography,” Philippine Studies 29, nos. 3–4 (1981): 345–59. www.philippinestudies.net/ojs/index. php/ps/article/view/4804/6506. Francisco Colin came to the Philippines in 1626. In Manila he became a professor at the Jesuit-run Universidad de San Ignacio and Colegio de San José of which he became rector for four terms. After a short time among the Mangyans on the island of Mindoro, he returned to Manila where he was appointed rector of the university and also provincial. Arcilla, “Jesuit Historians,” 381–2. Javellana (“Historiography”) makes a comparative matrix that shows the standard organization of the content set by Chirino and more or less followed by Colin, Combés, Alzina, and Murillo Velarde. René B. Javellana, “The Jesuits and the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, vol. 1, ed. John O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 423, 425–46. Francisco Combés (1620–65) arrived in the Philippines in 1643. He spent most of his years in the missions in Mindanao and Visayas. He was vehemently opposed to the Spanish withdrawal from Mindanao to defend Manila from the Chinese threat in the mid-seventeenth century. This move made the Visayan islands more vulnerable to raids from Mindanao. By writing the history of that region, he attempted to persuade Spain of its importance. Arcilla, “Jesuit Historians,” 380–1. Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, “Old Enemies, New Contexts: Early Modern Spanish (Re)-Writing of Islam in the Philippines,” in Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World, ed. Santa Arias and Raúl MarreroFuente (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 137–57. The section on Mindanaoan marriage is found in Francisco Combés’ Historia de las Islas de Mindanao, Ioló y sus adyacentes: Progressos de la religion y armas catolicas . . . (Madrid: Los Herederos de Pablo de Val, 1667), 143–7. The English translation with annotations was published in installments in Philippiniana Sacra, vols. 14–17 (1979–1982), and subsequently in a bilingual three-volume work: Francisco Ignacio Alzina, Historia de las islas e indios de Bisayas . . . 1668/ History of the Bisayan People in the Philippine Islands, annot. Cantius J. Kobak, OFM and Lucio Gutiérrez, OP (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2002 and 2005). The entire extant manuscript, edited by Victoria Yepes, was published in three volumes: Historia natural de las Islas Bisayas del Padre Alzina, Una etnografía de los indios bisayas del siglo XVII del Padre Alzina, Historia sobrenatural de los indios Bisayas (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1995–1996). Both versions give a detailed historiographical account of the extant manuscripts. Francisco Ignacio Alzina arrived in the Philippines in 1632. He spent more than 30 years in the Visayan missions, especially on the islands of Samar and Leyte on the Pacific coast, with a hiatus probably beginning in 1658. He was Vice Provincial when he went back in 1660, during which he sent a report on the state of the missions, defending the work of fellow Jesuits; eight years later he went back definitively to Manila. He authored several pastoral works which he mentions in his Historia: handbooks of prayers, guides to the sacraments, and religious treatises and homilies. He also prepared a thesaurus of the Bisayan language and gathered Visayan proverbs. Alzina, Historia natural, xxi–xxxi. Alzina, Historia natural, xxi and xxxiii–xxxiv.

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29. Francisco Combés, Historia de las Islas de Mindanao, Ioló y sus adyacentes: Progressos de la religion y armas catolicas. . . . (Madrid: Los Herederos de Pablo de Val, 1667), 61. “Es accion de tanto señorio . . . porque ni acciones, ni palabras muestran que son Barbaros, sino la nacion mas modesta del mundo que celebra sus matrimonios, sin memoria de sus delicias; tan reportados en mostrar su afecto, que en tres días no valen de las licencias del estado . . . siendo las mayores acciones de su grandeza, entierro, y casamientos.” (“It is an action of such dignity and self-restraint . . . because neither in action or word do they appear like barbarians, but rather as the most modest nation in the world which celebrates marriages without evoking its delights; they are so moderate in showing affection that for three days [after the wedding] they do not engage in the intimacy permitted by their marital status . . . the major actions of their greatness being funerals and weddings”). 30. Combés, Historia de Mindanao y Joló, 54. 31. The very last chapter deals with the arms and sea vessels of the Mindanaoans, which were likewise highly developed considering that their main livelihood of trade and raiding necessitated such technology. 32. Pedro Chirino, Relación de las Islas Filipinas y de lo que en ellas han trabajado los padres de la Compañia de Iesus . . . (Roma: Estevan Paulino, 1604), 69–71. 33. On the papal dispensation of the impediment of consanguinity for new converts already married, see Daisy Rípodas Ardanaz, El matrimonio en Indias: Realidad social y regulación jurídica (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1977), 174–5. Recent converts who were to get married were dispensed up to the third degree of consanguinity. For the historical process of canonical regulation of indigenous marriage with regard to the impediment of consanguinity, see Federico R. Aznar Gil, La introducción del matrimonio cristiano en Indias: aportación canónica (s. XVI): Lección inaugural del Curso Académico 1985–1986 (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1985), 40–6, and Paulino Castañeda Delgado, “El matrimonio de los indios: problemas y privilegios,” in Homenaje a Don Agustín Millares Carlo, vol. 2 (Las Palmas: Caja Insular de Ahorros de Gran Canaria, 1975), 659–98. Chirino and Colin did not mention anything about impediments of affinity and spiritual kinship. 34. Rubiés, in comparing Morga with Chirino, qualifies the latter as more erudite, “often comparing modern and ancient customs – a tradition inaugurated in the sixteenth century by humanist armchair historians such as Barros and the Jesuit Maffei.” “Spanish Contribution,” 442. 35. See Excelso Garcia, “Particular Discipline on Marriage in the Philippines during the Spanish Regime,” Philippiniana Sacra 8, no. 22 (January–April 1973): 7–88, 22–7. 36. Francisco Colin, Labor evangélica, ministerios apostolicos de los obreros de la Compañia de Iesus: fundacion, y progressos de su Provincia en las islas Filipinas (Madrid: Ioseph Fernandez de Buendia, 1663), 71. 37. See Aznar Gil, Introducción matrimonio cristiano, 63–73, for the development of canon law dealing with polygamous unions in the Indies, and the privileges granted to convert them to monogamous marriage. See Rípodas, Matrimonio en Indias, 103–43, on the practice of polygamy among indigenous peoples in the Indies and the theological and canonical discussion revolving around the pontifical decrees in this regard. 38. Marriage-related topics followed: the technicalities of inheritance, adoption of children (which he also interpreted as a purchase) and its terms, and adultery and its punishment and the status consequences on the children born from the adulterous relationship.

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39. Chirino, Relación Islas Filipinas, 45. 40. Rubiés, “Spanish Contribution,” 443. On Alzina’s method of observation and use of sources oral and written, see Alzina, Historia Natural, lix–lxi. 41. The chapters on marriage are 12 to 16, found in book 4 which presents different aspects of community life (vivir en común). 42. Peter Burke, “Translating Knowledge, Translating Cultures,” in Kultureller Austausch: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung, ed. Michael North (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 69–77, 71. 43. Alzina, Historia Natural, lvii. “In Alzina’s natural history, nature is culture and culture is nature. Thus, the diversity of the natural world is an aid to understanding the diversity of the moral sphere. . . . The conjunction between the natural and moral order justifies the constant use of analogies.” 44. Alzina, Historia Natural, 231. “.  .  . according to the use and abuse of so many diverse peoples and nations as there are in the world, I doubt whether any of them has as many requirements, circumstances and conditions as the Visayans; and likewise all the peoples of this archipelago, albeit with some differences, though little, in some circumstances, but they generally coincide. And it is true that with respect to what I have heard or read about other places, I do not find the countless [requirements, etc.] here excessive, as will be seen in what we shall say in this chapter and in the next.” 45. Alzina, Historia Natural, 232–3. 46. Alzina, Ethnografía, 239. Alzina added other considerations about the good side of this custom, which was done especially if they did not have the wherewithal for the dowry, as it fostered a good relationship between in-laws and even helped the couple live married life well. In some cases the father-in-law gave enough independence to the couple so that the bridegroom might enjoy the fruit of his labor. 47. Alzina, Ethnografía, 244. Chapter 14 (244–50) is about the spouses’ ownership of property and succession. 48. Alzina, Ethnografía, 245–8. He went on to comment on the domestic friction arising from disagreement about what to order the slaves, also depending on the strength of character of either spouse or if the wife was wealthier than the husband, and such disagreements could spill over to relatives, resulting in lawsuits and family division. Inheritance customs also contrasted with European practice. As a simple rule, Alzina considered it necessary to know that inheritance always followed the straight line of descent; transversal inheritance occurred only when there was no succession in the direct line. About conjugal property, called bienes gananciales in Spain, if the parents survived the child, they shared equally what he had inherited from them. Lastly, neither spouse inherited from each other. The property they had left went to their children and respective closest relatives. 49. Alzina, Ethnografía, 251–6. Chapter 15 is titled: “Valor y firmeza del matrimonio: ajustanse sus costumbres antiguas en esta parte para que según ellas se conozca y entienda mejor todo” (“The value and stability of marriage: accommodating old customs in this place so that in accordance with them everything may be known and understood better”). 50. Alzina, Ethnografía, 251–4. 51. See Yepes’ discussion on Alzina’s theory of cultural hierarchy that had as its primary criterion the notion of policía. For Alzina, the Bisayans had the capacity for civilization and lacked only education in urbanized life, central governance, and liberal arts. The Spanish presence in the Philippines would contribute to their development in this regard (Alzina, Historia Natural, lviii–lix). Alzina differed from Acosta in his explanation, removing any racial

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or climatic factor from the cultural hierarchy (Rubiés, “Ethnography and Cultural Translation,” 288). 52. On the critical advantage of linguistic expertise, see Rubiés, “Ethnography and Cultural Translation,” 286.

Bibliography Aduarte, Diego de. Tomo primero de la historia de la Provincia del Santo Rosario de Filipinas, Iapon y China de la Sagrada Orden de Predicadores. Zaragoza: Domingo Gascon, 1693. Alzina, Francisco Ignacio. Historia de las islas e indios de Bisayas .  .  . 1668: History of the Bisayan People in the Philippine Islands. Translated, Edited and Annotated by Cantius J. Kobak, O.F.M, and Lucio Gutiérrez, O.P., 3 vols. Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2002 and 2005. ———. Historia natural de las Islas Bisayas del Padre Alzina. Edited by Victoria Yepes. Biblioteca de Historia de América. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1996. ———. Una etnografía de los indios bisayas del siglo XVII del Padre Alzina. Edited by Victoria Yepes. Biblioteca de Historia de América. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1996. Andaya, Barbara Watson, and Leonard Y. Andaya. A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Arcilla, José S. “Jesuit Historians of the Philippines.” Philippine Studies 44, no. 3 (1996): 374–91. www.philippinestudies.net/ojs/index.php/ps/article/view/ 681/683 (last access: 08/10/2018). Aznar Gil, Federico R. La introducción del matrimonio cristiano en Indias: aportación canónica (s. XVI). Lección inaugural del Curso Académico 1985–1986. Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1985. Burke, Peter. “Translating Knowledge, Translating Cultures.” In Kultureller Austausch: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Frühneuzeitforschung, edited by Michael North, 69–77. Cologne: Böhlau, 2009. Castañeda Delgado, Paulino. “El matrimonio de los indios: problemas y privilegios.” In Homenaje a Don Agustín Millares Carlo, vol. 2, 659–98. Las Palmas: Caja Insular de Ahorros de Gran Canaria, 1975. Chirino, Pedro. Relación de las Islas Filipinas y de lo que en ellas han trabajado los padres de la Compañia de Iesus . . . . Roma: Estevan Paulino, 1604. Codina, Gabriel. “Our Way of Proceeding in Education: The Ratio Studiorum.” In Resources for Jesuit Schools. London: Jesuit Institute, 2017. Colin, Francisco. Labor evangélica, ministerios apostolicos de los obreros de la Compañia de Iesus: fundacion, y progressos de su Provincia en las islas Filipinas. Madrid: Ioseph Fernandez de Buendia, 1663. Combés, Francisco. Historia de las Islas de Mindanao, Ioló y sus adyacentes: Progressos de la religion y armas catolicas .  .  .  . Madrid: Los Herederos de Pablo de Val, 1667. Costa, Horacio de la. Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Farrell, Allan P., ed. and trans. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599. Typescript. Washington, DC: Conference of Major Superiors of Jesuits, 1970.

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Fuerst, Clement J. “A Few Principles and Characteristics of the Ratio Studiorum.” The Classical Journal 21, no. 3 (December 1925): 204–10. www.jstor. org/stable/3288956 (last access: 08/10/2018). Garcia, Excelso. “Particular Discipline on Marriage in the Philippines during the Spanish Regime.” Philippiniana Sacra 8, no. 22 (January–April 1973): 7–88. Ginzburg, Carlo. “Microhistory and World History.” In The Cambridge World History, vol. 6, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, 446–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139022460.019. Hodgen, Margaret T. Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Javellana, René B. “Historiography of the Philippine Province.” Jesuit Historiography Online, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2468-7723_jho_COM_192583 (last access: 28/09/2018). ———. “The Jesuits and the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines.” In The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, vol. 1, edited by John O’Malley et al., 418–38. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Junker, Laura Lee. “Integrating History and Archaeology in the Study of Contact Period Philippine Chiefdoms.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 2, no. 4 (December 1998): 291–320. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022611908759. ———. Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000. Jurado, Manuel Ruiz. “Fr. Pedro Chirino, S.J. and Philippine Historiography.” Philippine Studies 29, nos. 3–4 (1981): 345–59. www.philippinestudies.net/ojs/ index.php/ps/article/view/4804/6506 (last access: 08/10/2018). Medina, Juan de. Historia de los sucesos de la Orden de N. gran P. S. Agustín, de estas Islas Filipinas . . . Manuscript dated 1630. Biblioteca Histórica Filipina. Manila: Tipo-litografía de Chofre y Comp., 1893. Ramada Curto, Diogo. “Jesuits and Cultural Intermediacy in the Early Modern World.” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 74 (January–June 2005): 3–22. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015050940355 (last access: 05/10/2018). Ribadeneyra, Marcelo de. Historia de las islas del archipielago y Reynos de la gran China, Tartaria, Cuchinchina, Malaca, Sian, Camboxa, y Iappon . . . . Barcelona: Gabriel Graells y Giraldo Dotil, 1601. Rípodas Ardanaz, Daisy. El matrimonio en Indias: Realidad social y regulación jurídica. Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1977. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Ana M. “Old Enemies, New Contexts: Early Modern Spanish (Re)-Writing of Islam in the Philippines.” In Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World, edited by Santa Arias and Raúl MarreroFuente, 137–57. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Ethnography and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern Missions.” In Translating Christianity, edited by Simon Ditchfield, Charlotte Methuen, and Andrew Spicer, 272–310. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. ———. “The Spanish Contribution to the Ethnology of Asia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Renaissance Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 418–48. https:// doi.org/10.1111/1477-4658.t01-1-00030. San Antonio, Juan Francisco de. Chronicas de la Apostolica Provincia de San Gregorio de Religiosos Descalzos de N.S.P. Francisco en las Islas Philipinas,

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China, Japon, etc. Parte primera . . . . Sampaloc: Convento de Nra. Señora de Loreto, 1738. Santa Inés, Francisco. Crónica de la Provincia de San Gregorio Magno de Religiosos Descalzos de N.P.S. Francisco en las Islas Filipinas, China, Japon, etc . . . . (1676), vol. 1. Biblioteca Histórica Filipina. Manila: Tipo-litografía de Chofre y Comp., 1892. Scott, William H. Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018.

2

Constructing the Literati The Jesuits’ Attempt to Understand China’s Confucian Elite by Dint of Comparison Nadine Amsler

Jesuit missionaries were the most important generators of European knowledge on China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If China attracted the early modern European scholarly community’s interest, this was not least due to the numerous accounts written by the missionaries and their publishing success in Europe. Historians have therefore highlighted the importance of analyzing these “proto-ethnographic” writings in order to better understand the Jesuits’ representations of China.1 The focus of most research was on synthesis – the ways in which the Jesuits amalgamated Chinese Confucian and Christian ideas in their descriptions of China.2 In this chapter, a different approach is taken. The focus is on the ways in which missionary authors used comparisons in their analyses of China. My hypothesis is that the Jesuits’ “doing synthesis” was closely interlinked with “doing comparison”3 – the latter being a precondition for the former. In order to substantiate this claim, I will look at the Jesuits’ practices of comparing that were targeted at a central figure in the Jesuits’ descriptions of China: the Chinese literati. The literati were late imperial China’s learned elite that was well versed in Confucian scriptures and referred to itself as “scholars” (shi 士 or ru  儒).4 Male offspring of literati families studied Confucian canonical texts from their early years onwards. As young men, they usually participated in the imperial examinations. If they were successful, they became eligible for imperial offices. However, many literati never attained a degree. A great number of them only passed the entry-level exam (yuanshi 院試), which did not yet qualify for office, thus constituting a large group of educated men without formal political power.5 In addition to Confucian education, literati also tried to distinguish themselves from other social strata through a range of cultural practices. These included consideration for the Confucian moral code (such as, for example, the ideal of gender separation), display of cultural refinement (by, for example, collecting rare and precious objects), or patronage of religious and social institutions.6 The literati soon became a major focus of interest of the Jesuits in China. Because the missionaries pursued a strategy of top-down evangelization,

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they started to adopt elements of the literati lifestyle in order to gain access to this social elite.7 They thus departed from their initial strategy to dress and behave like Buddhist monks – a strategy that had proven successful in Japan, but seemed to be inappropriate for China’s evangelization because the Buddhist monks were held in much lower esteem here. The Jesuits’ so-called accommodation to the literati elite was important for setting the course of the whole mission. It was also at the origin of the famous rites controversy – a controversy between mendicants and Jesuits about the degree to which the Catholic religion could be opened to the influence of non-Christian cultures.8 Due to the centrality of the figure of the literatus for the Jesuits’ mission in China, a focus on this figure in the texts of Jesuit missionaries seems to be a good starting point for an investigation of the role of comparisons in the Jesuits’ descriptions of China. Literati were a popular subject of the letters and accounts that the Jesuits sent to Europe and figured prominently in the Jesuits’ Chinese writings because the missionaries presented themselves to the Chinese as Western literati (xishi 西士).9 How did the Jesuits use comparisons to describe and understand the literati? How did the comparisons employed in texts intended for a European audience differ from the comparisons used in Chinese texts, and how did comparisons shape the picture of the literati constructed in the Jesuit texts? The chapter starts with two sections that analyze the Jesuits’ “doing comparison” in European letters and accounts.10 First, it analyzes the Jesuits’ descriptions of the literati as a “sect,” then it turns to comparisons between the literati and the Ancients of European history. In the third section, the focus shifts to the Chinese Christian treatise Questions and Answers about the West (Xifang dawen 西方答問, 1637), a representative example of Chinese writing of the Jesuits, in order to discuss the underlying practices of comparison in the Jesuits’ self-representation as “western literati.”11 The last section returns to sources written for a European audience and analyzes the role of women in the Jesuits’ comparative assessment of the Chinese literati.

Comparing the ‘Sect of the Literati’ With Other ‘Sects’ of China In their writings destined for a European audience, the Jesuits often described the Chinese literati as one of three “sects” or “laws” that were prevalent in China.12 Matteo Ricci, the founder of the China mission, explained it as follows: [The Chinese] say that there are only three different laws in the world: [the law] of the literati, [the law] of [the Buddha] Shakyamuni, and [the law] of Laozi, whose followers are called daoshi [道士]. It is in these three that all of China is divided.13

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The Jesuits’ tripartite descriptions of the Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ‘sects’ are the origin of a widespread Western conception according to which Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism are the three ‘religions’ of China. Scholars like, for example, Joël Thoraval or Adam Yuet Chau have shown that this conception is misleading because the modern Western concept of religion as an institution with a clearly defined faith and devotional practice is not applicable to the Chinese religious landscape.14 However, the ‘three sects’ were not a mere fabrication by the Jesuits. Instead, missionaries had borrowed the idea from an elite discourse that was prevalent in late Ming China, postulating that the three “teachings” (jiao 教) could be reconciled.15 The Jesuits used the idea of “three teachings” (sanjiao 三教) as a heuristic instrument in their search for Chinese religion (although they often admitted in their writings that more religious ‘sects’ existed in China).16 Within this heuristic framework, they also made comparisons between the three ‘sects.’ The ways in which comparisons were used in the Jesuits’ discussion of the three ‘sects’ can be studied in the Imperio de la China (1642). This book was published by a keen observer of China, the Portuguese Jesuit Alvaro Semedo, during his stay in Europe as a procurator of the Jesuit mission (1640–1644) and was one of the most widespread publications on China in seventeenth-century Europe.17 One of the book’s chapters was devoted to the “sects, sacrifices, and superstitions” of the country.18 At the very beginning of this chapter, Semedo explained that, of the three sects, “the first two [i.e., the Confucian and the Daoist sects, N.A.] have originated in China. The third, [the Buddhist sect, N.A.] the one of the idols, has come from India.”19 In this short sentence, Semedo differentiated the Confucian and Daoist traditions from the Buddhist tradition in two ways: with regard to their places of origin, only the Confucian and Daoist traditions were described as Chinese traditions, while the Buddhist tradition was said to be of Indian origin. With regard to their character, only Buddhism was described as an idolatrous sect. That especially the sect of the literati was free from idolatry was made clear in the following two sentences, where Semedo explained that “[t]he first [sect], [that] of the literati, is the most ancient one. . . . It does not adore pagodes, and recognizes a superior being, or Lord, who can punish and reward.”20 Here, Semedo added the time of origin as a tertium comparationis. He pointed out that the Confucian tradition was also the eldest Chinese ‘sect.’ The fact that it did not practice idolatry and instead knew about a ‘superior being’ was, for him, an indication of its illumination by the lumen naturale – the natural knowledge of God. Semedo’s implicit comparison of the three ‘sects’ with regard to their places and times of origin and its connection with statements about their degree of idolatry was an important means to stabilize the Jesuit representation of the ‘sect of the literati’ as a remnant of Ancient China’s natural religion. However, this was not the only possible way

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of comparing the three ‘sects’ with each other. Semedo added to his description of the ‘three sects’ some lines about the ways in which Chinese people compared the three teachings to each other. He wrote that the Chinese give much authority to the following sentence: sanjiao yi dao [三教 一道], which means: The doctrines are three, their reason but one. For although their cults, adorations, exercises are different, their goal is the same: kongxu [空虚], nothing.21 Semedo’s recapitulation of the sanjiao heyi 三教合一 (‘the three teachings are one’) idea, a very popular idea during the early seventeenth century, used a different tertium comparationis for comparing the three ‘sects.’ Here, not their origins and relations to idolatry were considered. Instead, their outer forms and inner goal were being compared. It is particularly interesting that Semedo identified ‘nothingness’ (kongxu) as the common goal of the ‘sects,’ something that the Jesuits usually identified with Buddhist thought. This makes clear that the reference to the Chinese mode of comparing the three sects undermined, to a certain extent, the missionaries’ idealization of the literati as the heirs of China’s ancient natural religion by approaching it to the “idolatrous” Buddhist tradition.22 Another way in which the Jesuits compared the three ‘sects’ was by evaluating their social prestige and morality. The first to do this was the founding figure of the China mission, Matteo Ricci. In a letter written to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus in 1595, Ricci explained that: while in China there are three principal sects, the one of the bonzes [Buddhist monks] who do not take women and stay in the temples to adore the idols is the lowliest because it is composed of poor, uneducated people. These preach virtue, but are probably the most vicious of all.23 Just like Semedo in his chapter about Chinese ‘sects,’ Ricci in his letter did not compare the three ‘sects’ systematically. Instead, his statement left many questions unanswered. If the Buddhist monks were the poorest, most uneducated, and most vicious of the three sects, what about the ranking of the other two? We know Ricci’s answer from his diary, where he explained that the literati not only form the most powerful and estimated ‘sects,’ but also the one with the greatest amount of books.24 Ricci, however, never aimed at making this ranking explicit or systematic. Comparison was apparently an important mental operation for his thinking about China. In his writing, however, only fragments of these comparisons can be found, with parts of his practices of comparing remaining implicit.

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Comparing the Literati With the Ancients The Buddhists and Daoists were not the only comparata with which the Jesuits compared and contrasted the literati. They also made selfreferential comparisons, trying to compare the literati with the Ancients of European history: the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews.25 Similar to Semedo’s comparisons of the origins of the three ‘sects,’ which sought to demonstrate that the literati were the heirs of ancient Chinese natural religion, these comparisons should also be understood as an attempt to integrate China, and especially the Chinese literati, into European concepts of history within a framework which Joan-Pau Rubiés has called “biblical universalism.”26 In these comparisons, morality figured prominently as tertium comparationis. Again, Matteo Ricci is one of the authors who provide important insights in this respect. According to him, the literati were always intent to follow the principles of reason of which they said to have received them from heaven. They never believed of their King of Heaven and of other spirits, his ministers, such scandalous things as our Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and other strange nations [had believed].27 Ricci’s mentions not only of a ‘King of Heaven,’ but also of ‘other spirits’ and ‘ministers,’ are an implicit acknowledgement of similarities between non-Christian ancient cults and the cult of the literati. The comparison of their morality was therefore employed to point to the dissimilarities between the two. Furthermore, Ricci’s mention of the ‘principles of reason,’ which the literati had reportedly received from heaven, made clear the literati were the adepts of a natural religion rather than idolatry similar to the cults of the ancient non-Christian people of the Mediterranean. However, comparisons between the Chinese elite’s and the Ancients’ morality did not always show the former in favorable light. This is shown by a story about the Wanli emperor (1572–1620) narrated by Gabriel de Magalhães, a Portuguese Jesuit who had lived in Beijing between 1648 and 1677. According to this story, the mother of the Wanli emperor, dowager Li, had allegedly had an affair with the powerful minister Zhang Juzheng 張居正, which finally resulted in the violent death of both of them. The Wanli emperor, however, wanted to save his mother’s reputation and therefore declared her to be Jiulian Pusa [九蓮菩薩], that is, the Goddess of Nine Flowers, and . . . she is adored under this title just like the courtesan Flora was honored by the Romans as Goddess of Flowers.28 Although this story is historically incorrect in several ways,29 it has a tiny historical core – namely dowager Li’s self-promotion as Buddhist

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“Boddhisattva of Nine Lotuses.”30 Magalhães rather freely translated this Buddhist term – symbolizing wisdom and purity in the Chinese context – as “Goddess of Nine Flowers” and used it to indicate similarities between the Chinese elite and the Romans, who allegedly both occasionally deified human beings, among them even women with sullied reputations.31 Of course, there is a formal difference between Magalhães’s and Ricci’s comparisons. While Ricci’s comparison focused on the literati as a group, Magalhães’s comparatum was the Chinese emperor and the Chinese people who adored the “Bodhisattva of Nine Lotuses.” Nevertheless, the inglorious role played by the Confucian official Zhang in Magalhães’s story shows that no stabilized, homogenous way of depicting the relation between the Confucian elite and the Ancients existed in the writings of the Jesuits in China. Instead, the missionaries drew different connections between the Chinese elite and the Ancients, making the perceived relation between the two complex and multifaceted. An additional example that demonstrates this complexity are the comparisons that the Jesuits employed when assessing the literati’s practice of polygyny. This was perceived as a main obstacle to China’s evangelization.32 Nevertheless, the missionaries often tried to save the literati’s reputation in their texts. They explained that the literati did not take concubines because of sexual desire, but because of their fear of childlessness. In order to back this claim, they compared the literati with the Hebrews of the Old Testament. In 1613, the mission’s Superior Niccolò Longobardo explained that “[t]he Chinese, and especially the literati and imperial officials have the custom to take one, two, or more concubines or second wives in addition to their wife, in the way the Hebrews did it.”33 Not only the practice of polygyny, but also the reason for it was, according to Longobardo, identical: both the Chinese and Hebrews feared to remain childless. By drawing attention to similarities between Chinese and Ancient Hebrew polygyny, Niccolò Longobardo reminded the reader that biblical history was not free from this practice that was now being sharply condemned by the Catholic Church. Furthermore, the similarities made him think about possible connections between the two comparata. As an addendum to his description, and enclosed in parentheses, he wrote that it seemed probable to many missionaries that the Chinese were the descendants of the Hebrews.34 Practices of comparison thus led him (and other missionaries) to the conclusion that his comparata were probably historically related to each other. In the Jesuits’ view, the literati were not a completely different ‘other,’ but rather distant relatives that played their own part in universal salvation history.

Comparing Oneself With the Literati The Jesuits’ analyses of the Chinese literati were not merely a part of an erudite discussion. The Jesuits aimed at converting the literati by

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becoming literati themselves. Therefore, their writing about China’s Confucian elite should be seen in the context of missionaries’ evangelization project for which they labored in China. As a consequence, it is not surprising to find discussions of the literati not only in their writings for a curious and pious readership in Europe, but also in their Chinese writings aimed at a Chinese audience. A telling example is the treatise Questions and Answers about the West (Xifang dawen 西方答問), published by the Italian Jesuit Giulio Aleni in 1637.35 Aleni worked in the Southern province of Fujian, where he was rather successful in establishing a Christian following. He was one of those missionaries who was exceedingly wellversed in standard Chinese (Mandarin) and earned educated Chinese people’s admiration for their knowledge of Confucian writings.36 With his Questions and Answers about the West, Aleni provided interested Chinese readers with a long treatise about European political organization, customs, and science. At its very end, the treatise contains a short chapter entitled “Western literati” (xishi), which is about the Jesuits who came to China.37 The title “Western literati” contains in itself a comparison: by translating “Jesuit missionaries” with the term “Western literati,” Aleni implicitly stated that the Jesuits were like the Chinese literati, with the sole difference that they were from a different geographical region, the ‘West.’ The ways in which the Jesuits resembled the literati was made clear in the following. Aleni described the Jesuits as “literati who are educated and firm in their moral principles” and who “cultivate themselves.” They proselytized, according to Aleni, because of their love of God and of the people.38 This description did not deploy explicit comparison to characterize the Jesuits. However, it pointed to the similarities between Chinese literati and Jesuits by invoking several Confucian ideals: education, morality, self-cultivation, and the love of people. These are congruent with four of the five core Confucian virtues: knowledge (zhi 智), righteousness (yi 義), integrity (xin 信), and benevolence (ren 仁).39 What made the Jesuits different from the Chinese literati was, according this description, their love of God and their will to spread word of their religion. Implicit comparisons like this are frequent in Aleni’s chapter about ‘Western literati.’ Thus the explicitly comparative question by the text’s fictive interrogator about the degrees held by the Jesuits (“I do not know whether these are the same as the Chinese ranks and degrees?”)40 is not followed by a comparative answer. Instead, the answer made clear that there were similarities between the Jesuits and Chinese officials because the Jesuits were chosen by examination, which were preceded by intense studies. Just as interesting as these implicit comparisons made by the fictive person answering the questions are the traces of practices of comparison that can be found in the word choices made by the Jesuits in their translations. This is illustrated by Aleni’s short outline of the Jesuits’ studies – a

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brief recapitulation of the Ratio Studiorum that was used as a guideline in all Jesuit colleges:41 Generally speaking, already when young [the members of our Society] study literature, then they turn to the investigation of things and the fathoming of principles [philosophy, N.A.]. After finishing this, they turn to the study of heaven and of the Way [theology, N.A.].42 When trying to explain to his Chinese audience the different steps in this plan, Aleni had to find Chinese equivalents for the Jesuit colleges’ genuinely European study matters. His solution was to equal “philosophy” with the Neo-Confucian “investigation of things and fathoming of principles” (gewu qiongli 格物窮理), a concept that played an important role in the Chinese intellectual debates of the early seventeenth century.43 For theology, he found the Chinese term “the study of heaven and the subject of the Way” (tianxue daoke 天學道科) – a term whose original Latin meaning would probably not have easily been guessed by any contemporary European reader who was not acquainted with China. Heaven and the Way were both key terms of Chinese thought, with a long and rich history.44 As a consequence, Aleni’s use of these terms for his translation of the term “theology” necessarily triggered in Chinese readers a wide range of associations which had little in common with the contents of theological studies in Catholic Europe. Comparison obviously played an important role in Aleni’s search for adequate Chinese equivalents of terms with a rich European tradition. In order to decide which translation to choose, a series of practices of comparisons were necessary. Unfortunately, these are only rarely documented in the Jesuits’ writing. Instead, we only know the result of the Jesuits’ practices of comparison: their word choices in their translations. Nevertheless, these choices also allow us glimpses into the missionaries’ mindset. They make clear that the translators were searching for Chinese equivalents of Christian concepts based on the assumption of ChristianConfucian convergence: the Jesuits’ hypothesis of similarities between Confucian and Christian traditions thus clearly influenced their practices of comparison and the results produced by them.

The Place of Literati Women in the Jesuits’ Comparisons In the descriptions discussed earlier, the Jesuits consistently depicted the literati as a group of men – either forming a ‘sect,’ or being in some ways similar to the Ancients of European history, or to the Jesuits themselves. Morality figures prominently as tertium comparationis, whence literati’s relations with women indirectly play an important role in these comparisons. We may ask, however, whether literati women – i.e., literati’s daughters, wives, and mothers – who, by dint of their performance of

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virtue, seclusion, and erudition, played a prominent role in the literati families’ self-representations, also played a role in the Jesuits’ construction of the literati.45 Surprisingly, the search for descriptions of literati women in the Jesuits’ accounts results in the puzzling conclusion that these were hardly discussed at all. Rather, most statements about women are very generic and do not allow for a differentiation of different groups of women within China. The Flemish Jesuit Philippe Couplet, for example, wrote in his Histoire d’une dame chrétienne en Chine (1681) that “the Chinese girls and women have so little contact with the world that you hardly ever see them.”46 Instead of describing the existing social, regional, ethnic, or religious differences among women in China, the Jesuits painted a generic and idealized picture of “all women of China,” according to which female reclusiveness was common in all strata of society – although there is ample historical evidence that this ideal was predominantly implemented by the elite.47 There are only a few accounts in which the otherwise neglected diversity of women in China becomes at least partially tangible. One case in point is the Relazione dell’entrata . . . nella China by the Portuguese Jesuit Diego Pantoja, published in Italian as early as 1607. In this account, Pantoja wrote the following about Chinese women: [Besides the custom of concubinage,] we do not know anything else about the doings, treatment, and costums of women, and it is not possible to know more. For women stay in their houses for all their lives; they very rarely go out to visit their mother, sisters, or close relatives. . . . I have of course seen sometimes the dress of artisan and other lowly women, because many of these walk the streets, and it has seemed to me to be honest and decent. In some places that we passed during our journey, we met many women (of low social origin) who wore court dresses, like the men of our countries use to do.48 Pantoja, just like Philippe Couplet and many others, also evoked an image of female seclusion as a general feature of Chinese society when speaking about ‘Chinese women.’ In contrast to Couplet, however, Pantoja then started to somewhat differentiate this image. Readers learn (ex negativo) that seclusion was a custom mainly practiced by elite women, for “artisan and other lowly women” walked the streets. We also learn that there is regional diversity in China – the lowly women did not wear the same dress everywhere. This differentiation was also made by Alvaro Semedo, who explained that “because China is so big, it is impossible that the observation [of seclusion] is the same everywhere . . . although [the women] of good quality always live in this way.”49 No explicit comparisons can be found in these descriptions. Instead, terms such as

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‘differentiation’ or ‘enumeration’ describe them more accurately. Yet, we may argue that implicit practices of comparison are hidden in these enumerations, with women’s seclusion as tertium comparationis, and women of different social classes or regional origins as comparata. Only these preceding comparisons enabled the missionaries to differentiate. Importantly, Semedo and Pantoja did not establish an explicit link between the ‘women of quality’ who live in seclusion and the male literati elite. There is a missing link in the Jesuits’ representation of China – something that is not made explicit and left to the reader’s speculation. It seems that the Jesuits preferred to give a little-differentiated, idealized account of the state of women in China in order to prove to a European audience China’s civility rather than to strive for ethnographical accuracy. The fact that the Jesuits obscured the importance of female virtue and seclusion for the self-representations of the literati elite might well account for the fact that historians have long ignored the importance of Confucian gender arrangements for the organization of Chinese Christian devotion.50

Conclusion Doing Sino-Western comparisons has recently become the focus of vigorous scholarly debates. Historians, sinologists, and economists have intervened in the comparative debate about the “Great Divergence” – a debate which seeks to find answers to the question “why Europe grew rich and Asia did not.”51 In this contribution, I have tried to abstain as far as possible from doing comparisons as a historian and, instead, analyze the ways in which the Jesuits as historical actors were doing comparisons in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China. This shift of perspective shows that the Jesuits, just like present-day historians, only rarely reached unambiguous answers through their use of comparisons. Instead, comparisons tended to complicate the picture just as much as it shed light on the observed society. Of course, the framework within which the Jesuits tried to understand China with the help of comparisons differs greatly from the framework in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians compare China with other countries in the world. While historians working on the “Great Divergence” understand history as a path-dependent, but basically open process, the Jesuits understood Chinese history within the framework of Christian salvation history. As Sven Trakulhun has recently pointed out, this was a universalistic analytical framework because missionaries thought salvation to be possible everywhere in the world.52 Simultaneously, however, the men’s eligibility for salvation was also a very powerful tertium comparationis that structured Jesuits’ descriptions of the countries they hoped to evangelize. People of various places, social backgrounds, and gender were not all equally probable

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to find salvation. In their writings on China, Jesuits therefore tried to implicitly answer the question of how eligible for salvation the Chinese people were. When the Jesuits assessed the literati’s religious beliefs and morality by dint of comparison, they did so to find out whether they would be saved. Jesuit authors tended to use comparisons in a very unsystematic way. They often only made a part of their comparison explicit and left it to the reader to reconstruct the rest of it from the context. To use a framework proposed by Michel Foucault, the Jesuits’ practices of comparison were somewhere in-between the thinking in analogies and similarities (characteristic, according to Foucault, to Renaissance thinking) on the one hand and systematic comparison operating with identity and difference (characteristic, according to Foucault, to modern scientific thinking) on the other.53 Clearly, comparison as a consciously employed intellectual tool was not as important for the Jesuits as it would become for later European observers of non-European countries. The Jesuits’ comparisons did not produce a homogenous picture of the Chinese literati. Although the positive evaluation predominated, a multifaceted picture emerges from a close look at the comparisons made by the Jesuits. Literati’s morality was thus alternately represented as better, just as bad, or just as good as the morality of the Ancients of the Mediterranean world. Comparisons among China’s three sects singled out the literati as the one illuminated by the natural knowledge of God, but also pointed to the commonalities of the ‘three sects’ with reference to Chinese debates about the unity of the ‘three teachings.’ This confirms Angelika Epple’s observation that “doing comparisons” always sets free dynamics into two different directions: it can question established order just as much as it can stabilize it.54 It shows that the Jesuits’ descriptions of Chinese literati should be read not only as a testimony of their Confucian-Christian synthesis, but also as a documentation of their strife for, and difficulties with, the production of a correct and coherent picture of the Chinese Confucian elite.

Notes 1. For overviews on the Jesuits’ ‘proto-ethnographic’ writings, see Daniel E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accomodation and the Origins of Sinology (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), and Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France 1640–1740 (Genève: Slatkine, 1971). 2. See Mungello, Curious Land: more recent research has focused on the interactions that resulted in the Sino-Western amalgamations that we find in the Jesuits’ texts. See the foundational work by Nicolas Standaert, The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 3. On the concept, see Angelika Epple, “Doing Comparisons: Ein praxeologischer Zugang zur Geschichte der Globalisierung/en,” in Die Welt beobachten:

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

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Praktiken des Vergleichens, ed. Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2015), 161–99. On the complexity of the term ru, see Nicolas Standaert, “The Jesuits Did Not Manufacture ‘Confucianism’ (Review Article on Lionel Jensen, the Manufacturing of Confucianism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997),” East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine 16 (1999): 115–32. See Martin Heijdra, “The Socio-Economic Development of Rural China During the Ming,” in The Cambridge History of China 8.II: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, ed. Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 417–578, 552–64. For a discussion of literati lifestyle as a broader cultural phenomenon, see Jonathan Spence, Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), esp. chapters 1–3. On gender separation, see Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chapter 1. On practices of collecting, see Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). On religious patronage, see Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1993). This strategy was initiated by Matteo Ricci: see Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapter 6. For an overview on the Chinese rites controversy, see George Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy from Its Beginning to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985). For a recent publication that stresses the global dimensions of the controversy, see Ines Županov and Pierre Antoine Fabre, The Rites Controversies in Early Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2018). Especially the Jesuits’ European-language descriptions on the Chinese Confucian elite have received much scholarly interest because of their pivotal role in the missionaries’ understanding of China. Most authors have focused on the Jesuits’ descriptions of the literati as a “law” (lex) or “sect” (secta) – the predecessor of what nineteenth-century scholars started to call “Confucianism.” For a controversial analysis of the Jesuits’ construction of ‘Confucianism,’ see Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). See also the response by Standaert, “Jesuits Confucianism.” Other publications include Mungello, Curious Land, and Wenchao Li, Die christliche China-Mission im 17. Jahrhundert: Verständnis, Unverständnis, Missverständnis: Eine geistesgeschichtliche Studie zum Christentum, Buddhismus und Konfuzianismus (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000). These were written to transmit knowledge within the Society of Jesus and to attract the European reading public’s interest and support for the China mission. On the circulation of information by written letters within the Society of Jesus, see Markus Friedrich,“Circulating and Compiling the Litterae Annuae: Towards a History of the Jesuit System of Communication,” in Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 77 (2008): 3–39. On published Jesuit accounts and their double purpose to still the readers’ curiosity and edify them, see Adrien Paschoud, “Apologetics, Polemics, and Knowledge in French Jesuit Culture: The Collection of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (1702–1776),” in Reporting Christian Missions in the Eighteenth Century: Communication, Culture of Knowledge and Regular Publication in a Cross-Confessional Perspective, ed. Markus Friedrich and Alexander Schunka (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017), 57–71. The fact that many letters survive in several

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11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

Nadine Amsler manuscript copies, whereas others were distributed through print, shows that it does not make sense to draw a clear-cut distinction between printed and manuscript accounts. Both types of writing will therefore be consulted. For a systematic overview on the Jesuits’ writings in Chinese, see Adrian Dudink, “Chinese Primary Sources,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, vol. 1: 635–1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 113–60. The modern, Western concept of religion was not yet fixed and established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead, a range of terms was used by contemporaries in order to describe what they perceived to be phenomena which were in some way comparable to Christianity (see Ernst Feil, Religio: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs, vol. 2: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs zwischen Reformation und Rationalismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997)). The Jesuits in China preferred the terms “sect” and “law,” which will be used in the following. See Nadine Amsler, “‘Sie meinen, die drei Sekten seien eins:’ Matteo Riccis Aneignung des sanjiao-Konzepts und ihre Bedeutung für europäische Beschreibungen chinesischer Religion im 17. Jahrhundert,” Schweizer Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 105 (2011): 77–93. “E solo dicono esser nel mondo tre leggi diverse cioè: de’ letterati, di Sciechia [Shijia], e di Lauzu [Laozi], i cui seguaci sono chiamati tausu [daoshi]. Et in queste tre sta divisa tutta la Cina, et i regni vicini che usano della lettera della Cina.” Pasquale M. D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane: Documenti originali concernenti Matteo Ricci e la storia delle prime relazioni tra l’Europa e la Cina, vol. 1 (Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1942), 115. See Joël Thoraval, “Pourquoi les ‘religions chinoises’ ne peuvent-elles apparaître dans les statistiques occidentales?,” Perspectives Chinoises 1 (1992): 37–44; and Adam Yuet Chau, “Modalities of Doing Religion and Ritual Polytropy: Evaluating the Religious Market Model from the Perspective of Chinese Religious History,” Religion 41, no. 4 (2011): 547–68. See Amsler, “‘Drei Sekten.’” See, for instance, Alvaro Semedo’s laconic sentence that besides the three “sects,” there are “many others” (“muchas otras”): Alvaro Semedo, Imperio de la China, i cultura evangelica en él por los religios de la Compaña de Iesus (Madrid: Juan Sanchez, 1642), 225. On Semedo, see Joseph Dehergne, Répertoire des Jésuites de Chine de 1552 à 1800 (Rome: Institutum historicum, 1973), 245. “De las Setas, de los Sacrificios, I de las Supersticiones,” in Semedo, Imperio de la China, 118–29. “Las primeras dos son naturales: la tercera, de os Idolos, advenediça Indiana,” in Semedo, Imperio de la China, 118. “La primera, de los Letrados, es mas antigua. . . . No adora Pagodes, i reconoce una Superioridad, o Señor, que puede castigar, i favorecer . . .,” in Semedo, Imperio de la China, 118. “Tienen una autoridad notable a este proposito: assi. San Kiao ye Tao; monta. Las dotrinas son tres, la razon dellas una sola: porque si bien el culto, adoracion, exercicio, sean diversos, el fin de todo es el mismo. Cum hiu, nada.” Semedo, Imperio de la China, 125. Although Semedo did not elaborate further on this point, other Jesuits wrote more extensively about the fact that many literati did not conform to the Jesuit image of them being heirs of ancient Chinese natural religion but instead had embraced Buddhist and Daoist ideas that were deemed idolatrous by the missionaries. The Jesuits resolved this problem by making an important distinction, differentiating between ‘ancient’ (uncorrupted) and ‘modern’ (corrupted) interpreters of the Confucian tradition. They thus helped create the

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23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

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still-influential concept of ‘Neo-Confuciansm:’ see Daniel E. Mungello, “Confucianism in the Enlightenment: Antagonism and Collaboration between the Jesuits and the Philosophes,” in China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Thomas H. C. Lee (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991), 95–122, 115–18, and Thierry Meynard, ed., “Introduction,” in Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687): The First Translation of the Confucian Classic (Rome: Institutum Historicum, 2011), 1–76. “come nella Cina vi sono tre sette principali, quella de’ bonzi che non pigliano mogli e stanno ne’ tempj adorando gli idoli, è la più bassa per esser di gente povera senza studio de lettere. E benche professano virtù, sono forse i più vitiosi di tutti gli altri.” Matteo Ricci to Claudia Acquaviva, Nanchang, November 4, 1595. Reproduced in Matteo Ricci, Lettere (1580–1609), ed. Francesco D’Arelli (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2001), 297–321, 309. Depreciative statements on Buddhist monks’ morality were frequent in the writings of Jesuits in China: see Nadine Amsler, Jesuits and Matriarchs: Domestic Worship in Early Modern China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 36–40. There were probably several reasons for this, the Jesuits’ adoption of Confucian anti-clerical stereotypes being one of them. Another, equally important reason was probably that the missionaries needed to explain to themselves and to others why the model of the Japanese mission, where the missionaries had (at least initially) been successful by accommodating to the Buddhist monks, was not suitable for China. And indeed, writings dating from the early years of the mission also draw comparisons between the social status of Buddhist monks in Japan and China, stating that the Buddhist monks had much more social prestige (suma autoridad) in Japan than they had in China: see e.g. Alessandro Valignano to Claudio Acquaviva, Macao, November 10, 1588, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (henceforth ARSI), Japonica Sinica 11-I, 1r – 8r, 3r. See D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, vol. 1, 115. On self-referential comparisons, see Epple, “Doing Comparisons.” See Joan-Pau Rubiés, “From Antiquarianism to Philosophical History: India, China, and the World History of Religion in European Thought (1600–1770),” in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800, ed. Peter N. Miller and François Louis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 313–67, 316. “Fecero sempre molto caso di seguire in tutte le loro opere il dettame della ragione che dicevano avere ricevuta dal cielo, e mai credettero del Re del cielo e degli altri spiriti, suoi ministri, cose tanto sconcie, quanto credettero i nostri Romani, i Greci, gli Egittij et altre strane nationi.” D’Elia, Fonti Ricciane, vol. 1, 109. “[Van-lie] déclara solennellement qu’elle était Kieù liên pu sa, c’est-à-dire Déesse de neuf fleurs; et elle a des Temples dans tout l’Empire, où elle est adorée sous ce titre, de même que la Courtisane Flore était honorée par les Romains comme Déesse des Fleurs.” Gabriel de Magalhães, Nouvelle Relation de la Chine, contenant la description des particularités les plus considérables de ce grand Empire (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1668), 265–6. Neither does the historical record give evidence for an affair between Zhang Juzheng (+1582) and dowager Li (+1614), nor did the two die violent deaths. Magalhães’ story can be explained by the fact that Zhang Juzheng had been posthumously accused of various crimes and publicly denounced (see Ray Huang, “The Lung-ch’ing and Wan-li Reigns, 1567–1620,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8.I: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, ed. Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 511–84, 528).

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30. Dowager Li’s self-promotion as Buddhist bodhisattva was a practice that was rather common among Chinese empresses (see Keith McMahon, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 130 and Yu-Ping Luk, “Heavenly Mistress and Bodhisattva: Visualizing the Divine Identities of Two Empresses in Ming China (1368–1644),” in Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c. 1500– 1900, ed. Melia Belli Bose (London: Routledge, 2016), 63–90). 31. On the Roman Deity Flora and her occasional interpretation as a deification of a courtesan, see Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 15–17. 32. On this, see Amsler, Jesuits and Matriarchs, 80–6. 33. “Costumao os Chinas especialmente os letrados, e Mandarins alem da molher legitima, tomar hua, duas, e mais concubinas, ou segundas molheres, da Man[e]ra que costumavao os Hebreos.” Niccolò Longobardo, Appontamentos a cerca da Ide do nosso P[adr]e Procurador a Roma, Nanxiong, May 8, 1613, ARSI, Japonica Sinica 113, 301r–309r, 309r. 34. Niccolò Longobardo to Claudio Acquaviva, Littera Annua, Nanxiong, March 20, 1613, ARSI, Japonica Sinica 113, 215r–263r, 258v. 35. For a photoreproduction of the Chinese text and a translation into English, see John L. Mish, “Creating an Image of Europe for China: Aleni’s HsiFang Ta-Wen, Introduction, Translation, and Notes,” Monumenta Serica 23 (1964): 1–87. 36. On Giulio Aleni, see Eugenio Menegon, Un solo Cielo: Giulio Aleni S.J. (1582–1649): Geografia, arte, scienza, religione dall’Europa alla Cina (Brescia: Grafo, 1994); Tiziana Lipiello, “Scholar from the West:” Giulio Aleni S. J. (1582–1649) (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1997) and, more recently, Gang Song, Giulio Aleni, Kouduo Richao, and Christian-Confucian Dialogism in Late Ming Fujian (London: Routledge, 2019). 37. See Mish, “Image of Europe for China,” 25–6 (Chinese text) and 76–9 (English translation). 38. 有學有守之士。未易多得。但是吾輩以愛天主愛人為務。歸用功自修。Mish, “Image of Europe for China,” 26 (my translation). 39. Significantly, the Confucian virtue that was absent in Aleni’s description was li 禮, correct behavior or rite. Chinese opponents of Christianity often accused the missionaries of neglecting important Confucian ritual duties such as paying respect to one’s parents. 40. 不知與我中夏職品同否。 Mish, “Image of Europe for China,” 26. 41. See John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1993), 200–42. 42. 大都年初皆已先進文科。後進格物窮理之學。又進天學道科。 Mish,“Image of Europe for China,” 26. 43. See Nicolas Standaert, “The Investigations of Things and the Fathoming of Principles (gewu qiongli) in the Seventeenth-Century Contact between Jesuits and Chinese Scholars,” in Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer and Diplomat, ed. John W. Witek (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994), 395–420, on the Neo-Confucian debates 396–7, on the Jesuits’ interpretation 40–407. 44. Especially “Heaven” was therefore one of the terms whose use by the Jesuits was contested during the rites controversy. See Nicolas Standaert, “The Rites Controversy,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, vol. 1: 635–1800, ed. Nicolas Standaert (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 680–8. 45. On the role of women in literati families’ self-representations, see Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century

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46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

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China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), and Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). “[L]es filles & les femmes Chinoises ont si peu de commerce avec le monde, que l’on ne les voit presque jamais.” Philippe Couplet, Histoire d’une dame chrétienne de Chine, par occasion les usages de ces peuples, l’établissement de la Religion, les manières des Missionnaires, et les exercices de piété des nouveaux Chrétiens sont expliquez (Paris: Estienne Michalet, 1688), 7. See Amsler, Jesuits and Matriarchs, 44–6. “Nient’altro sappiamo noi del procedere, tratto, & costume delle donne; nè men si può sapere. Stando elle dentro le case tutta la vita loro, se non quando vanno fuore (il che è rarissimo) à visitar ò la madre, ò le sorelle, ò le parenti strette. .  .  . Ho ben veduto alcune volte il vestir delle donne artegiane, & basse, che di queste molte escono nella strada, & m’è paruto honesto, & di buon garbo. In alcune parti del viaggio incontrammo molte donne vestite di corto (però di gente bassa) all’usanza de gli huomini de’paesi nostri.” Diego Pantoja, Relatione dell’entrata d’alcuni Padri della Compagnia de Giesu nella China (Rome: Bartolomeo Zannetti, 1607), 78. “[C]omo la China se estiende tanto, no puede ser igual esta observancia, . . . aunque las [moheres] de calidad buena siempre viven por aquel proprio estilo.” Semedo, Imperio de la China, 48. In unpublished annual letters, we sometimes find a more differentiated way of talking about women’s seclusion, attributing it only to “important women” (mulheres graves). See e.g. Francisco Furtado, Carta Annua da China, Hangzhou, September 8, 1622, Biblioteca de Ajuda, Jesuítas na Ásia 49-V-5, 309r–325v, 323r. See Amsler, Jesuits and Matriarchs. See the eponymous book by Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). The most prominent contributions on China include Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Roy Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). For a recent overview on the debate, see Matthias Middell and Philipp Robinson Rössner, “The Great Divergence Debate,” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 26, no. 3 (2016): 7–24. See Sven Trakulhun, Asiatische Revolutionen. Europa und der Aufstieg und Fall asiatischer Imperien (1600–1830) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2017), esp. 19–18. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2010). Compare Angelika Epple and Walter Erhard, eds., “Die Welt beobachten – Praktiken des Vergleichens,” in Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag), 7–31, 14. “Vergleichen weist zugleich in zwei unterschiedliche Richtungen: es schafft oder stabilisiert Ordnung und es verändert bzw. stellt bestehende Ordnung in Frage.” Epple, “Doing Comparisons,” 166.

Bibliography Amsler, Nadine. Jesuits and Matriarchs: Domestic Worship in Early Modern China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018.

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———. “‘Sie meinen, die drei Sekten seien eins’: Matteo Riccis Aneignung des sanjiao-Konzepts und ihre Bedeutung für europäische Beschreibungen chinesischer Religion im 17. Jahrhundert.” Schweizer Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 105 (2011): 77–93. Brockey, Liam Matthew. Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579– 1724. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Brook, Timothy. Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1993. Chau, Adam Yuet: “Modalities of Doing Religion and Ritual Polytropy: Evaluating the Religious Market Model from the Perspective of Chinese Religious History.” Religion 41, no. 4 (2011): 547–68. Clunas, Craig. Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Couplet, Philippe. Histoire d’une dame chrétienne de Chine, par occasion les usages de ces peuples, l’établissement de la Religion, les manières des Missionnaires, et les exercices de piété des nouveaux Chrétiens sont expliquez. Paris: Estienne Michalet, 1688. Dehergne, Joseph. Répertoire des Jésuites de Chine de 1552 à 1800. Rome: Institutum historicum S.I., 1973. D’Elia, Pasquale M., ed. Fonti Ricciane: Documenti originali concernenti Matteo Ricci e la storia delle prime relazioni tra l’Europa e la Cina. 3 vols. Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1942. Dudink, Adrian. “Chinese Primary Sources.” In Handbook of Christianity in China, vol. 1: 635–1800, edited by Nicolas Standaert, 113–60. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Epple, Angelika. “Doing Comparisons – Ein praxeologischer Zugang zur Geschichte der Globalisierung/en.” In Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens, edited by Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, 161–99. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2015. Epple, Angelika, and Walter Erhart, eds. “Die Welt beobachten – Praktiken des Vergleichens.” In Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens, 7–31. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2015. Feil, Ernst. Religio: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs, vol. 2: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs zwischen Reformation und Rationalismus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2010. Friedrich, Markus. “Circulating and Compiling the Litterae Annuae: Towards a History of the Jesuit System of Communication.” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 77 (2008): 3–39. Goossaert, Vincent, and Valentine Zuber.“La China a-t-elle connu l’anticléricalisme?” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 24 (2002): 5–16. Heijdra, Martin. “The Socio-Economic Development of Rural China during the Ming.” In The Cambridge History of China: Volume 8, Part 2: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, edited by Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, 417– 578. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hsia, Ronnie Po-chia. A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Huang, Ray. “The Lung-ch’ing and Wan-li Reigns, 1567–1620.” In The Cambridge History of China: Volume 8, Part 1: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, edited by Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, 511–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hyde, Elizabeth. Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Jensen, Lionel M. Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in SeventeenthCentury China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Li, Wenchao. Die christliche China-Mission im 17. Jahrhundert: Verständnis, Unverständnis, Missverständnis: Eine geistesgeschichtliche Studie zum Christentum, Buddhismus und Konfuzianismus. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000. Lipiello, Tiziana. “Scholar from the West:” Giulio Aleni S. J. (1582–1649). Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1997. Luk, Yu-Ping. “Heavenly Mistress and Bodhisattva: Visualizing the Divine Identities of Two Empresses in Ming China (1368–1644).” In Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c. 1500–1900, edited by Melia Belli Bose, 63–90. London: Routledge, 2016. Magalhães, Gabriel de. Nouvelle Relation de la Chine, contenant la description des particularités les plus considérables de ce grand Empire. Paris: Claude Barbin, 1668. Mann, Susan. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. McMahon, Keith. Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Menegon, Eugenio. Un solo Cielo: Giulio Aleni S.J. (1582–1649): Geografia, arte, scienza, religione dall’Europa alla Cina. Brescia: Grafo, 1994. Meynard, Thierry, ed. “Introduction.” In Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687): The First Translation of the Confucian Classics, 1–76. Rome: Institutum historicum S.I., 2011. Middell, Matthias, and Philipp Robinson Rössner. “The Great Divergence Debate.” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 26, no. 3 (2016): 7–24. Minamiki, George. The Chinese Rites Controversy from Its Beginning to Modern Times. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985. Mish, John L. “Creating an Image of Europe for China: Aleni’s Hsi-Fang Ta-Wen, Introduction, Translation, and Notes.” Monumenta Serica 23 (1964): 1–87. Mungello, Daniel E. “Confucianism in the Enlightenment: Antagonism and Collaboration between the Jesuits and the Philosophes.” In China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Thomas H.C. Lee, 95–122. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991. ———. Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985. O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pantoja, Diego. Relatione dell’entrata d’alcuni Padri della Compagnia di Giesu nella China. Rome: Bartolomeo Zannetti, 1607. Parthasarathi, Prasannan. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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Paschoud, Adrien. “Apologetics, Polemics, and Knowledge in French Jesuit Culture: The Collection of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (1702–1776).” In Reporting Christian Missions in the Eighteenth Century: Communication, Culture of Knowledge and Regular Publication in a Cross-Confessional Perspective, edited by Markus Friedrich and Alexander Schunka, 57–71. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017. Pinot, Virgile. La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France 1640– 1740. Genève: Slatkine, 1971. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Ricci, Matteo. Lettere (1580–1609), edited by Francesco D’Arelli, with a preface by Filippo Mignini and a contribution by Sergio Bozzola. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2001. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “From Antiquarianism to Philosophical History: India, China, and the World History of Religion in European Thought (1600–1770).” In Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800, edited by Peter N. Miller and François Louis, 313–67. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Semedo, Alvaro. Imperio de la China, i cultura evangelica en èl, por los religios de la Compaña de Iesus. Madrid: Juan Sanchez, 1642. Song, Gang. Giulio Aleni, Kouduo Richao, and Christian-Confucian Dialogism in Late Ming Fujian. London: Routledge, 2019. Spence, Jonathan. Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Standaert, Nicolas. The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. ———. “The Investigations of Things and the Fathoming of Principles (gewu qiongli) in the Seventeenth-Century Contact between Jesuits and Chinese Scholars.” In Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer and Diplomat, edited by John W. Witek, 395–420. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994. ———. “The Jesuits Did NOT Manufacture ‘Confucianism’: (Review Article on Lionel Jensen, the Manufacturing of Confucianism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1997).” East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine 16 (1999): 115–32. ———. “The Rites Controversy.” In Handbook of Christianity in China, vol. 1: 635–1800, edited by Nicolas Standaert, 680–8. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Thoraval, Joël. “Pourquoi les ‘religions chinoises’ ne peuvent-elles apparaître dans les statistiques occidentales?” Perspectives Chinoises 1 (1992): 37–44. Trakulhun, Sven. Asiatische Revolutionen: Europa und der Aufstieg und Fall asiatischer Imperien (1600–1830). Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2017. Wong, Roy Bin. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Županov, Ines, and Pierre Antoine Fabre, eds. The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

3

‘Our’ Women, ‘Their’ Women Domestic Space and the Question of Modernization in NineteenthCentury Colonial India Subhasri Ghosh

Introduction Set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century colonial India, this chapter will explore the various ramifications of the nuanced, complex, and multi-layered relationship between the ruler and the ruled within the socio-cultural-legal discourse pivoting on the women’s question under the overarching theme of comparison between the women of the West and the East. This mode of comparison was a tool, adopted to forge the superiority of one against the other. From the lens of the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ the debate pitted ‘our’ women against ‘theirs,’ to formulate the notion of an ‘ideal woman.’ The chapter will highlight the tussle between the two, with the British administration trying to remodel and reshape social lives of the Indians, and a section of the indigenous population vehemently opposing the same. The discourse was mediated through efforts at ameliorating the plight of women by ensuring their physical and mental well-being – the first hinged on outlawing customs and rituals considered anathema to the British psyche, while the second plank emphasized education. In their endeavor to reformulate the lives of women, the administration did receive support of a section of the subject-population led by stalwarts like Raja Rammohun Roy or Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar. But simultaneously there existed a strong lobby which vehemently opposed any external intervention in the sacrosanct domestic space. The latter gained momentum more from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the germinating spirit of nationalism due to colonial exposure had vectored within the enlightened Indians, what Kosambi calls a ‘creative introspection’ – a burning desire to tally and contrast everything with the epistemological legacy set forth by the West.1 However, while some embraced Western Enlightenment as panacea, some others were more oriented towards the ‘re-generation’ of the country. The more the former looked up to and portrayed bilat (England) as the birthplace of all progressive values, the more would the latter group try to counterpoise it by ‘re-invoking’ (cultural) indigenousness. Culling information from a wide array of sources – namely, archival documents such as official

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papers, literary works of both the British and the Indians, contemporary medical reports, ethnographic, physiological, and anthropometric works  –  the chapter will attempt to bring to the fore how the notion of ‘modernization of the domestic space’ was being fiercely debated in the spatial time-zone of the nineteenth century, by which the East India Company was in possession of the majority of the physical space of the Indian subcontinent. Placed on a surer footing, the British now looked upon India as a viable commercial market since the colony possessed the three-pronged advantages of territorial importance, commercial value, and maritime utility. Thus British power in India came to be regarded as an “instrument for ensuring the necessary conditions of law and order by which the potentially vast Indian market could be conquered by British industry.”2 This necessitated the task of justifying their rule, for which they found an ideology based on India’s ‘difference’ from Britain, with the larger project to inferiorize the subject-state. Under the influence of the ideals of evangelicalism, liberalism, and utilitarianism, the British identified themselves as civilized and modern and decisively set apart the non-European world as the ‘other.’ This distinction was forged through ‘mutual constitution’: making self, making others. Nicholas Hoover Wilson calls this the ‘refraction model,’ whereby the foundation of the administration is pivoted on the interpretation of the “colonial society in terms of conceptualizations of their subjects’ similarity or difference.”3 This process had as its outcome an array of polarities that shaped much of the ideology of the Raj during the first half of the nineteenth century, where at one end of the spectrum was the ‘civilized’ British and at the other end the Indians were plagued by ‘general corruption of manners and sunk in misery.’4 To amplify the inferiority of the Indians, lines of exclusion/demarcation were drawn along the triad of language, race, and gender: “colonial discourses were always gendered articulating men and women as having different characteristics and mapping hierarchies of racial difference on to those of gender difference, and vice versa.”5 Relations between men and women in colonized countries were indicators of degeneration, and British men, British women, Indian men, and Indian women were all fitted into distinct roles to spell out India’s difference. The British believed that the more ‘ennobled’ the position of women in a society, the ‘higher’ would be the civilization. As James Mill opines, “The condition of women is one of the most remarkable circumstances in the manners of nations. Among rude people, the women are generally degraded, among civilised people, they are exalted.”6 By this measure, not surprisingly India lagged far behind Britain. India’s women were not ‘ennobled’ by their men but instead ‘degraded’: India is unhappily an example to prove how manifold are the ramifications of evil spreading out of a demoralised and degraded state of

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domestic relations. Bigamy, polygamy, adultery, prostitution, abortion, infanticide, incest, fraud, robbery, violence, and all kinds of murder are the melancholy results . . . for the proper regulation of domestic society in India, remarriage of widows must be allowed, marriage of infants must be abolished, females must be educated, and restraints must be placed on marriage.”7 As Indian men did not perform their duty of uplifting the pitiable condition of women, the British determined that they should act as the protector of India’s women, by which they could proclaim their ‘masculine’ chivalrous character and moral superiority over the Indian male.

The Tussle and the Discourse of Differences Placing themselves on a high pedestal, the colonial administration now embarked on its ‘civilizing mission’ with a special emphasis on girls/ women. Harry Verelst, Governor of Bengal (1767–1769), raised a very relevant question, “Shall we disregard the condition of a wife, incapable of governing herself?”8 The writings of Monier-Williams in the late nineteenth century resonate with a similar sentiment: Are we Englishmen, who are responsible for the welfare of our Indian Empire, and who derive so much of our own welfare from the purifying and elevating influence of our own home-life, chargeable with indifference to the condition of the women of India?9 The domestic space, thus, became their chosen field of reform. The dawn of the nineteenth century witnessed government’s active involvement with the women’s issue, with questions being raised about their pitiable condition and the ways and means to pull them out of the morass: what should be the ideal age of marriage for a girl? When would a girl be allowed to enter into a sexual relationship? Should a widow be burnt alive on the funeral pyre of her husband? Should a widow be allowed to re-marry? Should a woman have access to education? These are some of the cardinal issues that rankled the colonial administration during the course of the nineteenth century, and their efforts to find answers to these questions brought them at loggerheads with the conservative sections of the indigenous society – the self-proclaimed spokespersons of traditions and culture that characterized the Indian way of life, including home life. The tussle between the two assumed a more contoured proportion from the second half of the nineteenth century, when such conservatism broke away from its simplistic anti-colonial linearity and became imbued with a wider connotation – regeneration and revivalism. Simultaneously resisting colonial attempts at transforming the social milieu, there was a distinct tilt towards self-introspection and reflection, thereby injecting a

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positive trait to this scheme of opposition to ‘external influence.’ Resistance to British schemes now became wedded to an avowal towards defining Indianness as juxtaposed against Westernness: [a] transformative project that sought to intervene in the racial nature of a colonized people, focusing on the reordering of familiarity, education, and health. Simultaneously liberating and constraining the individual subject, the interventions were expected to produce a population that, through engaging in a tense dialogue with Europe, could redefine its distinctive body of custom and also repair its perceived degenerative condition.10 The social space of the indigenous people was bifurcated, as identified by Partha Chatterjee, into the inner/home and the outer/world. Self-identity became co-terminus with the inner domain, representative of “one’s inner spiritual self, one’s true identity.”11 Thus it was fiercely guarded by the conservationists, “the crucial need was to protect, preserve, and strengthen the inner core of the national culture, its spiritual essence. No encroachments by the colonizer must be allowed in that inner sanctum.”12 However, as Chatterjee contends, reformation of the domestic setup was recognized by the anti-colonialists themselves, “a mere restatement of the old norms of family life would not suffice . . . new norms were needed, which would be more appropriate to the external conditions of the modern world.”13 But they would decide the course of these new norms, and the women’s question was situated within this broad framework of safeguarding one’s true self through the inner space as also altering the same to meet the demands of time but not a blind aping of the West. Women, being the custodians of home, became the forbearers of ‘nurturing and protecting’ this spiritual self, and the changes to be wrought within this sphere were to be the prerogative of the nationalists, but of course not at the cost of discarding feminine virtues such as chastity, self-sacrifice, submission, devotion, kindness, patience, and the labors of love, which had remained the hallmark of an Indian woman and which distinctively set her apart from her Western counterpart. Thus, the nationalists ushered in changes. Variously termed as the ‘new patriarchy,’ the ‘revivalist-nationalists,’ or the ‘regeneralists,’ they were a heterogeneous group of newspaper proprietors, Calcutta-based urban estate holders, intellectuals, and pundits.14 While the administrators charted out the roadmap of modernization and amelioration of the plight of Indian women through socio-legal measures that would eventually convert them into ‘ideal,’ ‘modern’ women, Indians such as Bhudev Mukhopadhyay felt that modernization along Western lines would rob them of features that would prove their exalted status vis-à-vis a Western woman: In a society [ostensibly referring to the British society] where men and women meet together, converse together, eat and drink together,

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travel together, the manners of women are likely to be somewhat coarse, devoid of spiritual qualities and relatively prominent in animal traits.15 To the colonial mind, recalibration of the domestic sphere necessitated an overhaul of marital relations that would free the wives – more precisely, the child-wives – from the stranglehold of domination and subjugation within the four walls. Marriage is regarded as one of the most sacrosanct institutions in Indian society. Hindus regard woman as Prakriti and man as Purusha, and marriage as the ceremony which unites Prakriti with the Purusha. Without that union, a man and a woman are only half a being. The chief object of a Hindu marriage, as expounded by Pandit Sasadhar Tarkachuramani, is the unification of two souls to secure temporal and spiritual happiness and moral perfection.16 To the colonial rulers, however, the emphasis that an Indian attached to marriage evoked bewilderment and astonishment, “In India a parent’s first thought for its child is not for its health – not for its wealth – not for its physical, moral or mental well-being – but for its betrothal and marriage.”17 Drawing a parallel between the institution of marriage as prevalent in Great Britain and India, Verelst commented that the differences lay not only in the ‘forms and solemnities’ but also in the ‘age of contracting’ and the ‘power and dominion of a husband.’ H.H. Risley, placing marriage in a broader context, linked the same with the making and unmaking of a nation: “Among the various causes which contribute to the growth of a race or the making of a nation by far the most effective and persistent is the jus connubii – the body of rules and conventions governing marriage.”18 Tradition and custom demanded girls to be betrothed and married off literally in the cradle. Hindu theologists such as Manu, Vrihaspati, Vasistha, Kasyapa, and Vyasa strictly enjoin that a girl must be given in marriage before puberty. The lower limit of age was not exactly defined. Ordinarily the lowest age for marriage is eight years, but Manu allowed a girl to be married even before the proper age if a suitable match was found. As per Hindu religious dictum, minors were not only eligible for marriage, but they were considered the fittest to be taken in marriage. This is because according to Manu a woman/girl has no right to be independent – na stri svatvantriyamrharti. The Census of India of 1881, the first census to classify women as per their marital status, shows that amongst the Hindus, in the age group between 0 and 9, only 24.8% remained single, implying that the vast majority of girls were married off by that age, some of whom may have even been widowed.19 Premature sexual intercourse was thus an everyday occurrence in Hindu households. This was statistically proved by the findings of Dr Allan Webb, Professor of Military Surgery in the College of Medicine in Calcutta. The data collected from Calcutta showed girls ‘menstruating’ at the age of eight, nine, or ten. The bleeding, Webb

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concluded, should not be correlated with the onset of puberty, but was due to rupturing of hymen because of premature sexual intercourse.20 Dr Norman Chevers, Secretary to the Medical Board, Government of Fort William in Bengal, portrayed the untold misery and pain that a young girl was subjected to, in the name of marriage: In a large proportion of cases of the younger children, it was very clearly proved that rather severe injury had been received. It is mentioned in several of the recorded cases that the vagina was lacerated. In a case of death of a girl of twelve, the Civil Surgeon deposed that there was a rupture of the lower part of the vagina to the extent of half an inch.21 The Civil Surgeon of Mymensingh informed the Viceroy, “A native medical witness here testified that in about 20% of cases, children were borne by wives of from 12 to 13 years. This leads to still-borns, sickly offspring, and often puerperal fever in the mother.”22 Dr Goodeve, Professor of Midwifery at the Medical College in Calcutta, after a survey of 265 women from Calcutta, Bangalore, and Bombay, calculated the mean age of motherhood of Hindu women in Calcutta to be of 14 years 8 months, in Bombay to be a little short of 17 years, while in Bangalore the age was 16 years 5 months. The mean age of India was taken at 15 years 6 months.23 The average age at which girls reached puberty was 14 years on an all-India scale, while in Bengal the age stood at 12 years 6 months.24 Physiologists identify factors such as climate, constitution, and mode of living as the major determinants of pubertal age. In warmer climates girls usually have their first menstrual secretion at the age of nine or ten, while in temperate climates it occurs around the age of 13 or 14, and in the Arctic regions studies show that the cycle commences not before the nineteenth or twentieth year.25 John Roberton, a noted English physiologist, begs to differ. After a comparative study of the menstrual pattern of girls in England and India, he concluded that the reason behind a comparative lower age at first menstruation in India, especially in Bengal, was not so much guided by climate, but by traditions and customs: “I attribute so curious a physiological phenomenon, to the practice of infantile marriage that for thousands of years has existed in Hindustan, and which has gradually in the lapse of time, produced the change.”26 It was in this context that colonial attempts to outlaw child-marriage and concomitant evils assumed a sustained tempo throughout the nineteenth century, which gathered momentum from the second half. The latter half of the nineteenth century, in fact, witnessed a stock-taking of Hindu religion by the administration, with the ultimate conclusion that social usages like early marriage, endogamy formed no part of original Hindu religion. Enquiring into the origin of infant marriage, H.H. Risley was eloquent that “infant marriage was in no way a normal product of

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social evolution.”27 Rejecting the Brahmanical canon of marriage being a sacrament, Risley’s own theory about the antiquity of the custom was that the growth of patriarchal power led to a curtailment of women’s rights to assert their choices in the selection of life partners. A more powerful influence, as identified by Risley, was the custom of hypergamy, which “limits the number of possible husbands for the girls of the higher classes and thus compels the parents to endeavour to secure appropriate bridegrooms as soon as possible.”28 Infant marriage was underlined as the cause that would spell doom for the entire Hindu population, “a population which countenances such a practice must be in a fair way towards extreme moral degradation, if not to ultimate extinction.”29 The outcome was four acts destined to regulate marriage and age of consent – Indian Penal Code, 1860; Special Marriage Act, 1872; Indian Limitation Act, 1877; Indian Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure 1882 Amendment Act, 1891. The steely determination of the administrators paved the path for a face-off between the ruler and the ruled. Coming out in support of child-marriage, in his essay Balya Bibaha (Child-Marriage), Bhudev Mukhopadhyay argued that early marriage would ensure the proper molding of the young minds, especially that of the bride according to the needs of the in-law’s family. This would ensure domestic peace and also foster life-long companionship and true understanding between the husband and the wife: “Chhelebela hoite mabap duitike milaiya den, tahara ekatra thakite thakite krome krome duiti nobin lotika-r nyay paraspar gaye gaye joraiya ek hoiya uthey”30 (“Once a girl and a boy are introduced to each other in childhood, they get the chance to know each other better and over course of time learn to complement and depend on each other”). Although acknowledging the negativities of child-marriage, Bhudev eloquently underlined that advantages outnumbered the disadvantages of such a system, and those who focus solely on the latter are the blind followers of Western ideals, much to the detriment of Indian cultural fabric. A mature girl of the age of 19–20 marrying into another family would be a misfit since her mental faculties would no longer be malleable and amenable to change – her habits and her character would have already taken a concrete shape. It would be well-nigh impossible for the bride, under the circumstances, to adjust to the new set-up at her marital home. Domestic tension will mark the husband-wife relationship. Late marriages would thus lead to severe maladjustments. Citing the instances of countries of the west such as England and the USA, Bhudev pointed out: Je desh-ey adhik boyeshey parinay-er niyom, sei desh-ei parinoychheder byabostha prachalito .  .  . ingraj-ra adhik boyish-ey bibaha koren . . . uha swata-i bichhino o skhalito . . . markin-diger desh-eo adhik boyeshey bibaha koribaar niyom .  .  . jodi oi sakal desh-ey udbahubandhan sukh-er bandhan hoito, tobey oi bandhan chhinno

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Subhasri Ghosh koribar jonyo eto jatno ebong eto agroho keno hoibey?31 (Marriage at a matured age would result in marital discord resulting in separation and divorce as exemplified by western societies.)

Estrangement amongst husbands and wives is thus a common occurrence in Western households. On the other hand, according to Hindu law, marriage is regarded as an indissoluble union. Manu emphatically declares, “Neither by sale nor desertion can a wife be released from her husband.”32 The inherent implication is that divorce is not obtainable even by a husband because a wife can never be released from a marital bondage. While the practice of polygamy rendered dissolution of marriage unnecessary for the husband, the prohibition of the second marriage of a woman rendered divorce useless for a wife. Thus the word divorce is taboo according to the Hindu law. John Morley, Secretary of State for India, observes: “It is remarkable that there have been no cases relating to the Hindu law of husband and wife reported in the Presidencies of Bengal and Madras.”33 Writing in the 1880s, Bhudev was trying to counter the sustained British efforts to legislate on marital issues. In 1868, in response to a petition submitted by a section of the reformist group – the Brahmos – the government introduced a bill titled the Native Marriage Bill, which aimed to legalize marriages between “Indians of British India not professing Christianity” if the marriage was solemnized in the presence of at least three witnesses, if the persons were unmarried and the husband had completed 18 years of age and the wife 14 years, if the parties were not related to each other as parents or children or ancestors or descendants of any degree, and if the marriage solemnized be certified by a government-appointed Registrar. Thus at one stroke, the government attempted to eliminate the twin vices of child-marriage (by fixing the age of 14 for girls) and also polygamy. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 had raised the age of consent from eight to ten, which effectively meant that a girl could still be married off at infancy as per religious prescription, but the same cannot be consummated unless the child-bride reached the legally stipulated age. However, that this could not preclude the possibility of premature intercourse is testified by instances like that of Haimabati Sen (nee Ghosh). She was married off at the age of nine and a half to a 45-year-old man, twice widowed and with two daughters of nearly Haimabati’s age. Although in the eye of the law, Haimabati was not deemed fit for sexual intercourse, she narrates her harrowing experience in her autobiography, which proves that the age of consent as stipulated by the Penal Code remained a sham, “I would lie silently, stiff like a piece of wood. When I fell asleep, someone removed my clothes. I woke up, felt scared, and again wrapped my clothes around my body.”34 To spare a child from undergoing such trauma, the government realized that an overhaul of the age of marriage was needed. The Native Marriage Bill sought to fix the age at 14 for girls.

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Another landmark provision of the Bill was making bigamy a punishable offence: Every person married under this Act who during the lifetime of his wife or husband, contracts any marriage without having been lawfully divorced from such wife or husband, shall be subjected to the penalties provided in Section 494 and 495 of the Indian Penal Code for the offence of marrying again during the lifetime of a husband or wife.35 This was necessitated by the fact that polygamy was practiced en masse by the Kulin Brahmins of Bengal.36 For many of them, such marriages were the only means of subsistence. For Kulin Brahmin females, their lineage opened the floodgates of misery and oppression. The stringency of laws governing the marriage of a Kulin Brahmin girl, which prescribed marriages only with an equal or superior grade, resulted in unmitigated hardships. Marriage with a non-Kulin male Brahmin would bring disgrace to herself and her family, who would be treated as a pariah in the society. Thus, Kulin fathers faced the daunting task of getting their daughters married before they reached puberty to Kulin Brahmin men of the same stature. Ensnared by customs and usages, the father was in a hapless situation – either get his daughter married to a man old enough to be her grandfather due to a paucity of Kulin Brahmin grooms or face ostracization. Want of suitable grooms often compelled the father to get his daughter married to a tree. Nistarini Debi, a widow herself, writing in the twilight of her life, recollects that when at the age of 12, she was married to a 25-year-old man, her husband had already been married 30 or 40 times.37 Her paternal grandfather maintained a record book of all his 56 marriages, wherein the addresses of those 56 fathers-in-law were noted down.38 Deprived of the company of their husbands and living in an environment oscillating between sympathy, pity, and taunts, the girls often fell prey to lures of a better life, ending up in brothels. In 1853, the Chief Magistrate of Calcutta reported that amongst the 12,419 prostitutes in Calcutta, 10,000 were Hindus, of whom several were daughters of Kulin Brahmins.39 Thus, in the official discourse, it was deemed to be another major cause of a girl-child’s woe and misery: The condition of women of this country is, unhappily, very different from that of the women of England and France; they are often neglected for other wives while still young. They share the attentions of a husband with several wives . . . an evil so deeply-rooted in the manners of the people of this country as polygamy.40 The Native Marriage Bill aimed to put to rest for good this vile practice. Condemning the Code of Manu governing Hindu society as being

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a system of law ‘of suspicious authenticity,’ Maine proposed to remodel marital practices by giving individuals free hands in forming associations with persons of their choice. What Maine envisaged was “the tie between man and man which replaces by degrees those forms of reciprocity in rights and duties which have their origin in the Family.”41 By freeing marriage from being imprisoned by meaningless religious diktat, Maine was trying to facilitate the elevation of Indian society towards “a phase of social order in which all . . . relations arise from the free agreement of Individuals.”42 However, with stiff opposition emanating from various sections of the indigenous society, the Bill failed to pass the acid test and see the light of day. The main bone of contention was that the Bill introduced “disturbing element to unsettle the customs and usages recognized by law of the whole body of the people.”43 The proposed law, the British Indian Association alleged, would practically encourage people to dispense with the sanction of religion. Coming out strongly in support of polygamy, Bhudev’s sarcasm is evident when he wrote, “Jahara ek stree-r biyog hoiley aar bibaha na koren, tahader je ki sukh hoy taha bujhitey pari na” (“Those who opt to stay single after the death of their wives, what pleasure they derive is beyond my comprehension”).44 A separate essay titled Bahubibaha (Polygamy) further explicates his position: “Ek purush ki ekadhik stree-key bhalobashitey parey na? – tahao parey” (“Is a man not capable of simultaneously loving more than one woman? – surely he can”).45 In the same essay, he philosophizes, “Ek-er modhhye aneketwer samabesh-er proyojon achhey . . . je purush ek aaponar ebong ek patni-tey anek-etwer samabesh koritey na paren, tini pabitra pranaybijer jathajogyo poshon-ey awshakto” (“There is need for plurality . . . a man who is incapable of spreading his love to many does not deserve to be loved . . . he has failed to nurture the seeds of love that would flower and bear fruits in the long run”).46 In the face of mounting criticism and apprehensive about rousing the antagonism of the indigenous population, the government ultimately backtracked and the bill finally passed as the Special Marriage Act in 1872, which was limited to the Brahmos only, leaving the vast majority of the population outside its pale. Not to lose hope, the government systematically collated data from different parts of the country, throughout the 1870s and 1880s, on the evils of pre-pubertal consummation – in Hughli in 1889, one Jamiruddin was acquitted after being charged with the unnatural death of his wife Parijan, who was between 11 and 12 years of age, since as per law the accused committed no offense in having sexual intercourse with her; in the same year in Malda one Panchu Menim, aged about 21, was released scot-free even after being charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder under the Indian Penal Code, since his wife, though medically proved died of forced sexual intercourse, was around 11 years of age.47 However, the government policy at this juncture was tethered to wait and

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watch. It was looking for that one opportune moment that would help justify its intervention. The death of 11-year-old Phulmonee due to excessive bleeding because of forced intercourse by her 35-year-old husband Hari Mohan Maiti in 1890 acted as the catalyst. Phulmonee was born in 1879 and married off at the age of 11, on May 11, 1890. She stayed back in her natal home, where Hari Maiti paid a visit on June 15. As was customary in any typical Hindu household where the son-in-law was fussed and feted, Phulmonee’s mother, Radhamonee, left no stone unturned to take special care of him. Hari Maiti was provided with a separate room with a bed, while Phulmonee, along with her three sisters, slept in the corridor. Her mother retired for the night around 11 pm, in another room. At around midnight, she was jolted out of her sleep by Phulmonee’s heartrending cries coming out of Hari Maiti’s room. Rushing in, she found her daughter lying in a pool of blood, with her husband standing beside her. Phulmonee breathed her last at around 3 am. Hari Maiti was charged under Sections 304, 304A, 325, and 338 of the Indian Penal Code, which amounted to culpable homicide not amounting to murder and grievous hurt that endangered human life. The case was heard by a single judge of the Calcutta High Court in its original jurisdiction. Maiti was ultimately acquitted of all charges, except Section 338, and was awarded a sentence of one-year imprisonment. The law of rape, which carried a sentence of either imprisonment of ten years or transportation for life, was not applicable, since Phulmonee had crossed the legally stipulated age of ten. The judge, Mr Wilson, regretted that, It by no means follows that because the law of rape does not apply between husband and wife if the wife has attained the age of ten years, that the law regards a wife over ten years of age as a thing made over to her husband, or as a person outside the protection of law.48 Phulmonee’s case brought the issue of marital rape out into the open. So far the sensitive question revolved essentially around the legislative discourse. The first reflection could be found in the draft Penal Code in 1837, submitted for government perusal. Rape was defined in Chapter XVIII – Of Offences Relating to Human Body. While outlining the circumstances that would constitute rape, the last of the five circumstances outlined intercourse “with or without her consent when she is under nine years of age.”49 Even in case of consensual sex, if the girl was under nine years of age, the intercourse would amount to rape. Exception was however made in case of “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife,”50 implying that a husband had the right to exercise his marital rights and force himself upon his wife, irrespective of her age. Objections to the exception were, however, raised by three Judges of the Sudder Court at Bombay, Mr J.C. Thomas, Mr W. Hudleston and Mr A.D. Campbell. Mr Thomas expressed his doubt at the propriety of this exception, “The

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early age at which children are married and in the eye of the law become wives, makes it necessary that protection should be given to them by the law till they are of age to reside with their husbands.”51 Siding with the opinion of the Bombay trio, the framers of the Code too felt the need that “the check of the law may be necessary to restrain men from taking advantage of their marital right prematurely.”52 Thus, in the final Penal Code of 1860, Section 375 laid down the rape clause and identified five circumstances which constituted rape. Of these, the last mentions, “Sexual intercourse by a man with his wife, the wife being under ten years of age” would also amount to rape.53 Thus a conjugal relationship, in a limited sense, was brought within the ambit of rape, if the age of the wife was less than ten. However, that fixing the age at ten failed to offer sufficient protection was evident from the various data collected by the administration. But, post-1860 Penal Code, attempts to raise the age of consent or marriage faltered at the altar of indigenous opposition. Phulmonee’s case provided the administration with the much-needed support they were looking for. Agitated at the death of an innocent girl, petitions poured in from crosssections of the society, urging some proactive measures from the government. Propped up by the support of a section of the Indian population, the government was convinced enough by the end of 1890 that a measure to the effect of raising the age of consent from ten would not meet with fervent antagonism. Sir Andrew Scoble introduced the Bill titled Indian Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure 1882, Amendment Bill in the Legislative Council on January 9, 1891, with the expressed objective of protecting female children from ‘immature prostitution’ and from ‘premature cohabitation.’54 Intervention was justified by Scoble because: there can be little doubt that the custom of child marriage, whatever its religious obligation or its convenience to the heads of families and however deeply rooted it may be in the Hindu social system, is attended by consequences to the children themselves against which it is the right and duty of the State to protect them.55 The Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne clarified, “Our object is simply to afford protection to those who cannot protect themselves, protection from a form of physical ill-usage which I believe to be reprobated by the most thoughtful section of the community.”56 The frontal attack on the sacred domestic sphere led a section of the intelligentsia to launch a scathing reply. Bal Gangadhar Tilak opposed the Bill for interfering in the age-old customs of the Hindus: “If today’s bill is passed . . . then it will damage our traditions and shastras.”57 For him, the reform of Indian women should be rooted in traditional norms. He was not opposed to social reform per se, but he did not endorse the methodology of the social reformers appealing to the government for

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legislation. Such a docile attitude, he felt, would weaken the moral and intellectual foundation of the national movement. He never undermined the need for social reform, but stressed that these should be carried out under the leadership of men embodying the pristine Hindu way of life and not by the government: “We would not like that Government should have anything to do with regulating our social customs or ways of living.”58 Reformation through Government legislation was labelled by Tilak as ‘Reformation through Tyranny.’ The tug of war hinged on the issue of marital rape, which the Bill sought to outlaw. The yardstick of being ‘civilized’ was pegged on the legal recognition of marital rape: A law so bad as that which makes the cohabitation of a husband with his wife rape is not to be found in any country. A law which will peep into a married couple’s bedroom and make holes and openings in the windows in order to enable the Magistrate to look into it, is possible only in this country.59 How could husbands, venerated as gods according to ancient texts, be prosecuted of marital rape? How can “in any civilized country a husband be held guilty of rape upon his own wife?”60 Absolving Hari Maiti of the guilt of being responsible for his wife’s death, Tilak argued: Hari Mohun could not be held responsible for intercourse with his wife which neither he nor almost the whole of India, nor even her legislators, had reasons to think to be dangerous to life or likely to cause grievous hurt dangerous to life. His rashness and negligence then made him guilty; and these consisted in nothing else than his having omitted to think on the possibility of his wife having an unusually dangerous organ and having omitted to speculate upon the comparative dimensions and vigour of the sexual organs of both either before or at the time of his marriage or intercourse. . . . But how many men do, or even can, think and speculate as above? Perhaps none does or can or is allowed to do so. Why should then Hari Mohun only be punished for omitting to do what nobody does or is expected to do? . . . Will the exasperated rape-law reformer who cites Phulmani’s death in support of the present Bill name the sage who can predict such dangerous freaks of Nature before marriage or intercourse? . . . Grim will be the hilarity of the torrid rape-law reformers when they are able . . . to persecute husbands diabolically for doing a harmless act.61 The Indian Association of Surendranath Banerjea, though supportive of the Bill, urged the government to reconsider the fact as to whether premature cohabitation could be classified as ‘rape,’ because it would stigmatize

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the woman as she would be at the receiving end of being castigated by the society as a fallen woman.62 Justice Mitter, in his note of dissent, argued that since as per British law, marital rape was not a prosecutable offence, it would be double standard on the part of the administration to penalize it as a crime in India. He believed that the ‘moral delinquency’ arising out of premature intercourse where no physical injury was sustained should be classed as a ‘vice’ instead of a ‘crime.’63 Oppositions notwithstanding, the law was signed on March 19, 1891, by the government of Lord Lansdowne raising the age of consent to 12 years.64 The Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure were accordingly amended to incorporate the modification, thereby making sexual intercourse with girls, either married or unmarried, less than 12 years old rape and punishable by ten years’ imprisonment or transportation for life. The only concession made for marriageable cases was that these were placed under the category of non-cognizable offenses, i.e. no arrests could be made without the prior warrant of the District Magistrate and these were made bailable. The Act, according to one estimate, saved nearly 250,000 girls’ lives.65 As pointed out earlier, the discourse of difference rotated around the twin axes of opposition and regeneration. In the first half of the nineteenth century, reformers like Rammohun Roy – purely from a utilitarian and rationalistic view – regarded foreign domination not as a curse, but as a blessing, which brought “liberty and social happiness, as well as free enquiry into literary and religious subjects.”66 Rammohun Roy’s nationalism bore the stamp of rationalism, where passion for India’s past was matched by his criticism of India’s present state of affairs. He believed what nations had in common or could have in common and not what made them different from each other. He regarded the national movements in Asia and Europe as a common struggle, and looked upon European nationalism as a model and achievements of Europeans as a nation as a goal. Moving away from that position, from the 1860s specifically, a growing reaction against such rationalism could be observed. This reaction took the form of a greater interest in the history of the country, of a new evaluation of traditions and customs, and of a new appreciation of the mother tongue. The reaction against ‘rationalism’ was also a reaction against foreign influence, post-1857. The positive aspects of such a trait was the ‘undigging’ of the past and breaking away from the colonial mould by foregrounding the differences from the West as a means of elevating the Orient on a higher pedestal than the Occident. As an example of this reaction, the words of Sisirkumar Ghose, in 1870, may be taken: India is a civilisation of its own. It is a distinct country from England, and its people have distinctive features, acquired by an exclusive civilisation of thousand years. It is not for a foreigner to come and at once unravel the Gordian Knot. It is not for a foreigner to come

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and analyse the manners, customs, civilisation and genius of such an intelligent and exclusive race which India is peopled with.67 This exclusiveness needed to be preserved and protected since “in nationalist representations, the colonial experience of becoming modern is haunted by the fear of looking unoriginal.”68 This originality and exclusivity, as Partha Chatterjee points out, was to be enshrined within the inner world/home/andar, which became the area of deliberation, discussion, and contestation. They saw eye to eye with the colonizers so far as reform of the domestic space was concerned, but at the same time reorientation and recalibration should be carried out on their terms and not dictated by the ‘alien rulers.’ Western parameters of civilization and mere replication of Western norms would not suffice. Applying the binary of the self and the other, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, through his writings, portrays the inherent negative traits of the European world: It is difficult to find any parallel to the vices possessed by the Europeans – hot-headed and selfish. They are engaged in bickering amongst themselves, indulge in riots, wife-beating and killing . . . they derive immense pleasure in torturing and subjugating the non-European world.69 Traversing the British-charted path to modernization would thus pollute the Indian way of life: the qualities introduced in India with the coming of the British can in no way be treated as positive . . . being analogous to Indian character . . . autonomy and individualism which the British claimed to have introduced are nothing but a façade to impose its own way of life . . . this would undermine the very essence of our civilization.70 Indulging in a comparative analysis, Bhudev was eloquent in his vitriolic attack on Western civilization, “Whereas the very plinth of Indian civilization is religion and tradition, Europeans are engulfed in consumerism . . . Indians treat their women as goddesses, Europeans see them as equals.”71 Autobiographical accounts of Indian women often echo such sentiments where femininity equals foregoing the British-prescribed reforms that would distance them from being virtuous Indian women. As Kundamala Debi points out, “If you have acquired real knowledge, then give no place in your heart to memsahib-like behaviour. This is not becoming in a Bengali housewife.”72 Krishnabhabini Dasi, writing in the 1880s after her travel to England along with her husband, was aghast at the British way of life, especially the lifestyles of women: Women also drink to the same extent as men. A grandmother, mother and daughter – all descend to the liquor shop early in the morning.

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Subhasri Ghosh The grandmother is around eighty years of age. Such a ghastly site can only be witnessed in England.73

Courtship before marriage, which was a common occurrence in Western societies, became the barb of satire in Jogendra Chandra Basu’s novel Radhanath. The Western model of domesticity was abhorred and looked down upon. As Bhudev countered, “We are a superior race . . . we cannot accept the servitude of the British.”74 As Tapan Raychaudhuri, in his analysis of Bhudev, opines: “He was convinced that the norms of Indian society, emphasizing a selfless concern for others, especially as enshrined in the traditional family system, were superior to those of Europe.”75 Home was deemed as a microcosm of the nation, and this needed to be fiercely guarded from any unwanted encroachment. As Bhudev reiterates in several of his essays, “A woman would be the true upholder of the virtues that would set apart the Indian home from a European one.”76 Reformation of the homefront gained coinage in the Victorian discourse, too, from the latter half of the nineteenth century. The accession of Queen Victoria to the throne led to the ‘domestication’ of monarchy.77 The notion of a perfect wife and mother or the ‘angel of the house’ became the dominant discourse in the British psyche beginning in the mid-1850s. On the imperial side, as more and more British middle-class women established their homes in India, the race for creating a ‘perfect home’ began. British wives and mothers created homes in India ‘superior’ to their indigenous counterparts, who were “immured from infancy to age, within the bare and silent walls of those castles of ignorance and listlessness, they call their homes.”78 Thus, imperial domesticity, its supposed superiority to Indian domesticity, and the place of British women in maintaining such domestic superiority were all thought to bolster the success of imperial power . . . political significance of imperial domesticity extended beyond the boundaries of home.79 Feminine dignity and prestige became the indicators of progress and superiority. The concept of difference with regard to home was an effective tool for both. To rival her European counterpart, an Indian wife’s role would be reformulated so that she reflects the true spirit of Indian culture and religion. She would be mentored to be a true companion and helpmate to her husband – her dress, food manners, education, and her role in organizing life at home were to be remodeled so that she could become the better half of her partner in every sense. She should be the epitome of grace, poise, and subtleness – qualities which distinctly set her apart from her Western counterparts. Education was considered as a panacea for regeneration. From 95 girls’ schools with a total attendance of 2,500 in

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1863, the figures went up to 2,238 with a total attendance of more than 80,000 students by the end of the nineteenth century.80 However, not all girls received formal education in schools. Many were coached under the tutelage of fathers, brothers, or husbands. Saradasubdari Debi, mother of social reformer Keshub Chandra Sen, recollects: My husband intensely desired that I learn to read and write. Since, there was no other avenue open, he himself took up the responsibility to teach me at the end of the day. His handwriting was pearl-like. He used to write and I used to copy whatever he has written.81 Kaliprasanna Ghosh emphasizes that women’s education should be formulated strictly within the framework of righteousness (nyay) and religion (dharma).82 Thus schools run by the British administration were frowned upon, though these strictly followed the purdah system in deference to the indigenous ethos. Iswar Chandra Gupta, satirizing the Bethune School and its students, wrote, “Agey meyegulo chhilo bhalo bratakarmo korto sab-ey/Eka Bethune eshey sesh korechhey aar ki tader temon pabey?/ Jato chhurigulo turi merey ketab haat-ey nichhey job-ey/Takhan AB sikhey bibi sejey biliti bol kobei kob-ey”83 (“Previously women engaged themselves in religious pursuits as per traditional norms . . . with the coming of Mr Bethune, they have forsaken religion in favour of textbooks . . . after learning the alphabets they have started to speak English and imitate the English way of life”). Thus, education under the British aegis was turning the women into non-conformists, robbing them of their uniqueness. The aim of the new patriarchs was to convert women into grihalakshmis, one who would abide by the diktats of her husband.84 A plethora of domestic manuals written in the late nineteenth century – namely Ramanir Kartavya (Jayakrishna Mitra, 1890) and Griha Lakshmi (Girijaprasanna Raychaudhuri, 1888) – contained copious instructions for women to become ideal housewives. The husband’s authority over his wife should be supreme, “As the husband is the support of a Bengali girl’s life, it is her duty to follow whatever advice he gives her – whether it is proper or improper.”85 Nagendrabala Dasi, analyzing an ideal husband-wife relationship, reifies the age-old notion: A wife’s duty is to ensure the welfare and well-being of her husband and her in-laws. Any woman who acts otherwise, is not worth calling a wife . . . an ideal wife should sacrifice her own desires and needs – that is the essential pre-condition of being an ideal wife. If you desire to win the affection of your husband then you should abhor things which your husband does not approve, even if you derive pleasure from such activities . . . never indulge in anything which your

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Monika Roy asserts, “Where the wife foregrounds her ego and refuses to adhere to the advices of her husband, invites conflict within the household.”87 Haimabati Sen, while studying to be a medical practitioner, conformed to the traditional notion that a husband would have the final say with regard to finances: I received the stipend from my scholarship every three months. The net saving after my fees came to twenty-one rupees at the rate of seven rupees a month. I brought it home and handed it over to my husband and he spent it the way he considered best.88 Even after she became an established professional, there was no significant change in her status: Since I handed over to my husband whatever I earned, I could not promise anything without first talking to him. I had to ask him if I needed even a single pice. I earned a lot at this time; I got three to four hundred rupees from my practice over and above my pay. I could not promise anything without asking him first.89 One of the leading Bengali periodicals of that era, Bamabodhini Patrika (Journal of the Women), that was in circulation between 1863 and 1922, catalogues in its pages the good qualities that a woman should internalize in order to ensure and maintain domestic harmony – saralata (simplicity), kritagyata (gratitude), daya (benevolence), and sneha (affection). Enunciating the assets of an ideal housewife, Parbati Basu writes: She should be endowed with qualities like forgiveness, selflessness, tolerance, piety, finesse and above all an open and perceptive mind . . . she should be patient and have a calm demeanour . . . any household with such a virtuous wife would be an abode of peace and happiness.90 In a series titled ‘Adarsha Bangaramani’ (Ideal Bengali Lady), the responsibilities and duties that would be the markers of an adarsha bangaramani were delineated: As a woman it is her beholden duty to spread happiness at home and society at large . . . she is the thread that binds and holds the family together . . . to a woman nothing comes before family . . . forsaking material wealth, a woman should embrace sacrifice as her real ornament . . . a gentle disposition is the priceless possession of any woman.91

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A woman who reflects these qualities would thus be venerated as a Sukanya (ideal daughter), Subhagini (ideal sister), Sumata (ideal mother), and Sugrihini (ideal wife). Thus, it was the nationalists who would chalk out the blueprint of regeneration of the women, and consequently that of the nation, strongly resisting any unwanted foreign onslaught in the inner sanctum.

Conclusion In this clash between the two, the domestic thus became public, and that remained the common refrain throughout the nineteenth century. In this cross-current of arguments and counterarguments, the site of confrontation for both the opponents and the proponents remained the ‘welfare of the women.’ Women thus became colonized by various forms of patriarchal domination, emanating both from the colonizer and the colonized. In a sense they were ensnared by ‘double colonization.’ The indigenous patriarchy dictated the lives of womenfolk, in the name of custom, tradition, and religion while the Britishers, too, projected themselves as the messiah of the women; the second edition of James Peggs’s The Suttee’s Cry to Britain, published in 1828, contained an illustration that attained an iconic status because of its vivid imagery of the rite. The depiction of a to-be sati with an outstretched hand pointed upwards with hordes of men encircling the funeral pyre, was interpreted as the sati’s desperate cry to British men to save her from the clutches of her own countrymen. Thus, this discourse of difference revolved within the parameters of patriarchal premise of being the savior of Indian women, the fatherfigure who would determine and have the final say in eschewing what is right and just. Women were denied any agency in the entire process. In this sense, the perspectives of the colonizer and the colonized merged and echoed what James Stephen believed, that men were physically and intellectually far superior to women, with the additional advantage of having a “greater vigour of character . . . Strength, in all its forms, in life and manhood.”92 But who would be more suited to play the role of this father – the ‘effeminate’ Indian men or the more robust, ‘manly’ British? Both were stakeholders in this ‘politics of masculinity.’ As scholars have amply demonstrated, how the cry of ‘tradition in danger’ was in reality a scream for ‘manhood in danger.’93 Tilak, for instance, criticized the supporters of the Consent Bill, as ‘unmanly’ in being unable to control their household affairs and appealing to the government “to keep a watch in their private rooms . . . what better proof is there of our emasculation?”94 Apparently at opposite ends of the poles, the opposers as also the supporters strived to portray themselves as the true custodians of female sexuality. Cutting across factions, civilizing mission hinged on the axis of women, for both the nationalists and the imperialists, “the ‘women question’

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has  .  .  . acted as a .  .  . quality of civilisation.”95 But who would chart out the roadmap of this reformation? Throughout the nineteenth century, the struggle revolved within the matrix of women’s ‘emancipation.’ While the British concept was predicated on saving women from the clutches of social evils, which the emasculated Indian men remained silent on with the help of a section of the indigenous society, the opponents not only resented colonial interference, but their prescription consisted of an emancipatory role of a woman to strengthen the inner domain. But, while the discourse of difference centering on women was essentially a methodology to prove racial supremacy and tower over the rival, in a sense for both the blocs, differences collapsed when it came to the basic premise of upholding the indigenous tradition being the cornerstone. In his lengthy speech during the consent debate, Scoble defended the bill by saying, “the teachings of the sacred books of the Hindus are not in conflict with the proposals of the Bill.”96 In fact, the Bill/Act would aid “in enforcing their [religious obligations] due observance.”97 The imperialists carefully dovetailed their civilizing mission with the upholding of indigenous tradition. Appropriation of tradition was a potent weapon in the armory of colonial administration for legitimizing its power and authority. The same modus operandi was adopted by the opponents, too. Thus, at one level, the discourse of the two merged in one frame, where in the vortex of speeches, pamphlets, and petitions, patriarchal domination and control over the body and mind of the women became the focal issue.

Notes 1. D. D. Kosambi, Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2016). 2. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), xiii. 3. Nicholas Hoover Wilson, “From Reflection to Refraction: State Administration in British India, circa 1770–1855,” The American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 5 (March 2011): 1437–77, 1446. 4. Charles Grant, Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals and on the Means of Improving It (London: Privately Printed, 1797), 71. 5. Catherine Hall, “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46–76, 50. 6. James Mill, The History of British India, vol. 1 (London: James Madden and Co., 1817), 293. 7. H. Green, “The Deccan Ryots and Their Land Tenure,” The Bombay Quarterly Review 5 (July and October 1856): 388–91, 388. 8. Harry Verelst, A View of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the English Government in Bengal (London: J. Nourse, 1772), 139. 9. Monier Williams, Modern India and the Indians: Being a Series of Impressions, Notes and Essays (London and Ludgate Hill: Trubner and Co., 1879), 321.

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10. Satadru Sen, “The Conservative Animal: Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay and Colonial Bengal,” The Journal of Asian Studies 76, no. 2 (March 2017): 363–81, 363. 11. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 120. 12. Ibib., 121. 13. Ibid., 125. 14. For details, see Tanika Sarkar, “Rhetoric against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a Child Wife,” Economic and Political Weekly (September 4, 1993): 1869–80. 15. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 125. 16. Bangabasi, July 9, 1887. 17. Williams, Modern India, 377. 18. Herbert Hope Risley, The People of India (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1915), 154. 19. W. Chichele Plowden, Report on the Census of British India Taken on the 17th February 1881 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1883). 20. Alan Webb, Pathologia Indica or the Anatomy of Indian Diseases (London: W. M. Allen & Co., 1848). 21. Norman Chevers, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for Bengal and the North-Western Provinces (Calcutta: F. Carbery, 1856), 468. 22. Quoted in Judith Whitehead, “Bodies of Evidence, Bodies of Rule: The Ilbert Bill, Revivalism, and Age of Consent in Colonial India,” Sociological Bulletin 45, no. 1 (March 1996): 29–54, 29. 23. John Roberton, Essays and Notes on the Physiology and Diseases of Women and on Practical Midwifery (London: Churchill, 1851), 118. 24. John Roberton, “On the Period of Puberty in Hindu Women,” The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 66 (1846): 56–64, 60. 25. John Roberton, “An Inquiry into the Natural History of the Menstrual Function,” The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 38 (1832): 227–55. Physiologists still hold factors like climate as a crucial determinant of the age of menarche. Together with climate, other parameters like socio-economic condition have gained in importance as major determinants, in the present scenario. For details, see Kitae Sohn, “The Influence of Climate on Age at Menarche: Augmented with the Influence of Ancestry,” Homo 67, no. 4 (August 2016): 328–36; Tabassum Khatton et al., “Age at Menarche and Affecting Bio-Social Factors among the Girls of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh,” Journal of Indian Academy of Forensic Medicine 33, no. 3 (July–September 2011): 221–3. 26. Roberton, “Period of Puberty,” 61. 27. Risley, People of India, 188. 28. Ibid., 190. 29. Ibid., 191. 30. Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, “Balya Bibaha,” in Prabandha Samagra, ed. Bhudey Mukhppadhyay (Kolkata: Charyapad, 2010), 7, my translation. 31. Mukhopadhyay, “Balya Bibaha,” 8, my translation. 32. Gooroodass Banerjee, The Hindu Law of Marriage and Stridhan (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1879), 113. 33. William H. Morley, An Analytical Digest of All Reported Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Judicature in India (London: W. M. H. Allen and Co., 1899), 287. 34. Geraldine Forbes and Tapan Raychaudhuri, eds., The Memoirs of Haimabati Sen: From Child Widow to Lady Doctor (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2000), 81.

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35. “Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor General of India, Assembled for the Purpose of Making Laws and Regulations under the Provisions of the Act of Parliament, 24 & 25 Vic., Cap. 67,” Legislative Department: Other Series of Records, Papers Relating to Act III of 1872, National Archives of India (hereafter referred to as NAI), New Delhi. 36. For details on the origin of Kulin Polygamy, see Malavika Karlekar, “Reflections on Kulin Polygamy: Nistarini Debi’s Sekeley Katha,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 29, nos. 1–2 (January 1995): 135–55. 37. Karlekar, “Reflections,” 147. 38. Ibid., 150. 39. “Kulin Polygamy,” The Calcutta Review XLCII (1868): 136–47, 142. 40. The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China, and Australasia, vol. XXVII (September–December 1838): 344. 41. Henry S. Maine, “Ancient Law,” The Crayon 8, no. 4 (April 1861): 77–80, 79–80. 42. Ibid. 43. “Memorial of the Parsees of Bombay against the Native Marriage Bill,” Legislative Department: Other Series of Records, Papers Relating to Act III of 1872, NAI. 44. Mukhopadhyay, “Dwitiya Daarparigraha,” in Mukhopadhyay, “Balya Bibaha,” 68, my translation. 45. Mukhopadhyay, “Bahubibaha,” in Mukhopadhyay, “Balya Bibaha,” 69, my translation. 46. Ibid., my translation. 47. Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor General of India, Assembled for the Purpose of Making Laws and Regulations, “Speeches in the Supreme Legislative Council at the Time of Passing the Age of Consent Bill, on the 19th March, 1891,” 3–4 (hereafter referred to as Abstract). Scoble was attacked by Amrita Bazar Patrika for “ransacking every court of Bengal, if not India, for such cases for the purpose of strengthening his hands.” Amrita Bazar Patrika, May 2, 1891. 48. “Empress versus Hurry Mohun Maity,” The Age of Consent under Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code: Substitution for the Word “Ten” the Word “Twelve” in Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code Home Judicial October 1890 Nos. 210–213 a Proceedings, NAI. 49. Indian Law Commission, A Penal Code Prepared by the Indian Law Commissioners (Calcutta: Governor-General of India in Council, 1837), 92. 50. Ibid. 51. James C. Melvill, Special Reports of the Indian Law Commissioners, vol. 4: Report on the Indian Penal Code (Great Britain: House of Commons, 1948), 78. 52. “Information Required by the Age of Consent Committee in Regard to Legislation on Age of Consent and Marriage Before 1860,” Legislative Department, 1929, NAI. 53. W. Morgan and A. G. Macpherson, The Indian Penal Code (Act XLV of 1860) with Notes (Calcutta: G. C. Hay & Co., 1861), 324. 54. Abstract. 55. “Note by Scoble,” Amendment of the Law for the Purpose of Raising the Age of Consent under Section 375, Indian Penal Code, Home Judicial: A Proceedings Nos. 1–42, January 1891, NAI. 56. Abstract, 27. 57. Kesari, January 27, 1891. Quoted in Stanley Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962).

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58. Mahratta, May 29, 1881. Quoted in Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale. Tilak’s emphasis was on building public opinion against such practices and education. In August 1889, Tilak signed a letter to be circulated in Poona urging the Hindus not to marry off their boys before the age of 16, 18, and 20 and daughters before the ages of 10, 12, and 14. 59. Banganivasi, February 6, 1891. 60. Abstract. 61. Quoted from Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale, 52–3. 62. “Surendranath Banerjee to Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal, dated February 6, 1891,” Judicial Proceedings No 193 (Bengal), West Bengal State Archives (June 1893). 63. “A Note of Dissent by the Hon’ble Sir Romesh Chunder Mitter” Appendix A “The Humble Petition of the Inhabitants of Bali, Uttarpara and the Neighbouring Places in the District of Hughli” http://dspace.wbpublibnet. gov.in:8080/jspui/bitstream/10689/15693/4/Chapter1_1-78p.pdf (accessed on 21 December 2011)  64. Heimsath identifies three major factors that helped the passage of the bill, in spite of stiff opposition: 1) attitude of the Home Government, which adopted a pro-reform stance under pressure from British societies interested in the welfare of Indians; 2) the bill was essentially an innovation but an amendment of the existing law; and 3) Indian opinion in favor of the bill. Charles Heimsath, “The Origin and Enactment of the Indian Age of Consent Bill, 1891,” The Journal of Asian Studies 21, no. 4 (August 1962): 491–504. 65. The Manchester Guardian, March 11, 1891. 66. Jogendra Chunder Ghose, ed., The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Oriental Press, 1885). 67. Quoted in Bimanbehari Majumdar, History of Political Thought from Rammohun Roy to Dayananda (1821–84), vol. 1: Bengal (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1934), 337. 68. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Difference: Deferral of (A) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal,” History Workshop 36, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 1–34, 1. 69. Mukhopadhyay, “Samajik Prakriti: Hindu ebong Aparapar Samaj,” in Mukhopadhyay, “Balya Bibaha,” 150. 70. Mukhopadhyay, “Paschatya Bhaab: Tahar Upasanhar,” in Mukhopadhyay, “Balya Bibaha,” 199. 71. Ibid. 72. Quoted in Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?,” in The Decolonization Reader, ed. James D. Le Sueur (New York/London: Routledge, 2003), 428–98, 439. 73. Krishnabhabini Das, “England-ey Bangamahila,” in Andarer Itihaash: Narir Jabanbandi, ed. Prasun Ghosh and Ahana Biswas (Kolkata: Gangchil, 2013). 74. Mukhopadhyay, “Paribarik Niti,” in Mukhopadhyay, “Balya Bibaha,” 542. 75. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 44. 76. Mukhopadhyay, “Paribarik Niti,” in Mukhopadhyay, “Balya Bibaha,” 542. 77. For details, see Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640– 1990 (London/New York: Routledge, 1999). 78. J. E. Dawson, “Woman in India: Her Influence and Position,” The Calcutta Review 83 (July 1886), 347–57, 347. 79. Alison Blunt, “Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, no. 4 (1999): 421–40, 422.

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80. Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernisation (Rajshahi: Sahitya Samsad, 1983). 81. Saradasundari Debi, “Atmakatha,” in Ghosh and Biswas, eds., Andarer Itihaash, 18, my translation. 82. Kaliprasanna Ghosh, Narijati Bishayak Prastab (Kolkata: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, 2012), 218. 83. Iswar Chandra Gupta, Iswar Gupta-r Granthabali (Calcutta: Basumati Sahitya Mandir, no date), 324, my translation. 84. For further details of this conversion of women into grihalakshmis, refer to Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Difference.” 85. Purnachandra Gupta, Bangali Bou (Calcutta, 1885). For a detailed study of the domestic manuals, see Judith E. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004). 86. Nagendrabala Dasi, “Naridharma,” in Ghosh and Biswas, eds., Andarer Itihaash. 87. Monika Roy, “Amader Sambandhey Du Ekti Katha,” Bamabodhini Patrika, Phalgun 1328 (February 1922): 28–9, 28. 88. Forbes and Raychaudhuri, eds., Memoirs of Haimabati Sen, 296. 89. Ibid., 313. 90. Parbati Basu, “Adarsha Grihini,” Bamabodhini Patrika, Phalgun 1287 (February 1882): 127–8, 127. 91. Mankumari Basu, “Adarsha Bangaramani: Banga Mahila-r Patra,” Bamabodhini Patrika, Baisakh-Jaistha 1326 (April–May 1919): 130–1, 130. 92. James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (London: Smith, Elder, & Co, 1873), 221. 93. Dagmer Engels, “The Age of Consent Act of 1891: Colonial Ideology in Bengal,” South Asia Research 3, no. 2 (November 1983): 107–32; Padma Anagol-McGinn, “The Age of Consent (1891) Reconsidered: Women’s Perspectives and Participation in the Child-Marriage Controversy in India,” South Asia Research 12, no. 2 (November 1992): 100–18; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 94. Mahratta, April 12, 1891. Quoted in Sinha, Colonial Masculinity, 159. 95. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Difference,” 12. 96. Abstract. 97. Ibid.

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Khatton, Tabassum, Anoop Kumar Verma, Reema Kumari, Raja Rupani, Mousami Singh, and Andleeb Rizvi. “Age at Menarche and Affecting Bio-Social Factors among the Girls of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh.” Journal of Indian Academy of Forensic Medicine 33, no. 3 (July–September 2011): 221–3. Kosambi, D.D. Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2016. “Kulin Polygamy.” The Calcutta Review 47 (1868): 136–47. Legislative Council of India. Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor-General of India Assembled for the Purpose of Making Laws and Regulations. “Speeches in the Supreme Legislative Council at the Time of Passing the Age of Consent Bill, on the 19th March, 1891.” Calcutta, 1891. Maine, Henry S. “Ancient Law.” The Crayon 8, no. 4 (April 1861): 77–80. Majumdar, Bimanbehari. History of Political Thought from Rammohun Roy to Dayananda (1821–84), vol. 1: Bengal. Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1934. The Manchester Guardian, March 11, 1891. Melvill, James C. Special Reports of the Indian Law Commissioners, vol. 4: Report on the Indian Penal Code. Great Britain: House of Commons, 1948. Mill, James. The History of British India, vol. 1. London: James Madden and Co., 1817. Morgan, W., and A.G. Macpherson. The Indian Penal Code (Act XLV of 1860) with Notes. Calcutta: G. C. Hay & Co., 1861. Morley, William H. An Analytical Digest of All Reported Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of Judicature in India. London: WM. H. Allen and Co., 1899. Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev, ed. “Balya Bibaha.” In Prabandha Samagra. Kolkata: Charyapad, 2010. Murshid, Ghulam. Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernisation. Rajshahi: Sahitya Samsad, 1983. National Archives of India. Home Judicial October 1890 Nos. 210–213 a Proceedings. “Empress versus Hurry Mohun Maity.” The Age of Consent under Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code: Substitution for the Word ‘ten’ the word ‘twelve’ in Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code. National Archives of India. Home Judicial, a Proceedings Nos. 1–42, January 1891. Amendment of the Law for the Purpose of Raising the Age of Consent under Section 375, Indian Penal Code. National Archives of India. Legislative Department, 1929. “Information Required by the Age of Consent Committee in Regard to Legislation on Age of Consent and Marriage before 1860.” National Archives of India. Legislative Department: Other Series of Records, Papers Relating to Act III of 1872. “Memorial of the Parsees of Bombay against the Native Marriage Bill.” National Archives of India, New Delhi. Legislative Department: Other Series of Records, Papers Relating to Act III of 1872. “Abstract of the Proceedings of the Council of the Governor General of India, Assembled for the Purpose of Making Laws and Regulations under the Provisions of the Act of Parliament, 24 & 25 Vic., Cap. 67.” Raychaudhuri, Tapan. Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Risley, Herbert Hope. The People of India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1915. Roberton, John. “An Inquiry into the Natural History of the Menstrual Function.” The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 38 (1832): 227–55.

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———. Essays and Notes on the Physiology and Diseases of Women and on Practical Midwifery. London: Churchill, 1851. ———. “On the Period of Puberty in Hindu Women.” The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 66 (1846): 56–64. Roy, Monika. “Amader Sambandhey Du Ekti Katha.” Bamabodhini Patrika, Falgun 1328 (February 1922): 28–9. Sarkar, Tanika. “Rhetoric against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a Child Wife.” Economic and Political Weekly (September 4, 1993): 1869–80. Sen, Satadru. “The Conservative Animal: Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay and Colonial Bengal.” The Journal of Asian Studies 76, no. 2 (March 2017): 363–81. Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Sohn, Kitae. “The Influence of Climate on Age at Menarche: Augmented with the Influence of Ancestry.” Homo 67, no. 4 (August 2016): 328–36. Stephen, James Fitzjames. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873. Stokes, Eric. The English Utilitarians and India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Verelst, Harry. A View of the Rise, Progress and Present State of the English Government in Bengal. London: J. Nourse, 1772. Walsh, Judith E. Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004. Webb, Alan. Pathologia Indica or the Anatomy of Indian Diseases. London: WM. Allen & Co., 1848. West Bengal State Archives. “Surendranath Banerjee to Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal, Dated February 6, 1891.” Judicial Proceedings No 193, June 1893, Bengal. Whitehead, Judith. “Bodies of Evidence, Bodies of Rule: The Ilbert Bill, Revivalism, and Age of Consent in Colonial India.” Sociological Bulletin 45, no. 1 (March 1996): 29–54. Williams, Monier. Modern India and the Indians: Being a Series of Impressions, Notes and Essays. London: Trubner and Co., Ludgate Hill, 1879. Wilson, Nicholas Hoover. “From Reflection to Refraction: State Administration in British India, circa 1770–1855.” The American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 5 (March 2011): 1437–77. Wolpert, Stanley. Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962.

Part II

Politics, Polemics, and Propaganda

4

Entre Nos Comparison and Authority in the Epistolary of Antonio Valeriano Ezekiel Stear

In 1564, Philip II of Spain sent a gift to Antonio Valeriano, an indigenous scholar who that year began his tenure as governor of Azcapotzalco, a town northwest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The coat of arms the Spanish emperor sent to Antonio Valeriano commemorated the historical presence of the Tepanec Empire, which predated the reign of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan (the “Aztecs”).1 The Tepanecs ruled from Azcapotzalco for two centuries, twice the time the Triple Alliance (Mexico-TlacubaTexcoco) would later rule.2 The insignia from Phillip II cast the Tepanec legacy favorably, compared to the Mexica. The crest’s pairing of a cross with the xiuhuitzolli, the ancestral tiara of the tlatoani (ruler, ‘chief speaker’), expresses an imagined alliance of the Tepanec-Azcapotzalco political legacy with Spain. This symbolic association came at the request of Antonio Valeriano, who had petitioned Phillip II three years earlier in a letter he wrote, representing the Azcapotzalca nobles.3 A year later in 1565, Valeriano held a public unveiling of the crest in Azcapotzalco. The colleague and friend of Valeriano and Nahua governor of Xicuipilco, Francisco Plácido, sang a song he had composed to mark the occasion.4 The ceremony opens a window onto power dynamics among indigenous nobles after the Spanish conquest abruptly ended the Triple Alliance.5 After the shock of conquest in urban centers, early Spanish colonizers did not annihilate every aspect of indigenous governments, although they did restructure local politics to conform to Iberian feudalism.6 Although Philip II represented his authority through the gift of the crest, no Spanish colonial administrator supervised the event, and the Spanish did not require the observance. Thus, native leaders held an event that combined Nahua and European aesthetics and emblems, and used writing as a tool for influencing authority. Scholars have described the economic and political content of the 1561 letter. However, work remains for understanding how Antonio Valeriano interwove ancestral knowledge with Renaissance letters in his epistolary in order to advocate for his people,7 whom he represented first as one of the noble cohorts of Azcapotzalco and later as governor of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Valeriano wrote Philip II on two

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occasions. In 1561, he wrote in Latin with petitions from the nobles of Azcapotzalco. In 1578 he wrote again to Phillip II, this time in Castilian to send his thanks for an envoy of Nahuatl-speaking clergy who attended the sick during an epidemic in the capital. In what follows, I demonstrate how Antonio Valeriano employed comparison as a rhetorical strategy in his epistolary in order to establish his discursive authority. He presents his others – Spanish soldiers, clergy, and figures from Nahua and Greco-Roman antiquity – as counterpoints in a sustained argument of his merit (probanza de méritos). By highlighting what he considered the achievements and shortcomings of his others, Antonio Valeriano and his native colleagues present themselves as qualified to share authority with Philip II. His comparisons circumscribe his community of Nahua humanists, and at the same time allow the native governor to construct a discursive field, an entre nos, which includes even the Spanish emperor. Close readings of the two letters reveal how he adopted European cultural forms to benefit the communities he represented. Nahuas would accommodate European economics, politics, and religion; however, his epistolary shows that cultural accommodations would come neither as impositions, nor as accidental admixtures. Rather, Antonio Valeriano’s letters reveal cultural accommodation as the result of deliberations on indigenous terms. Valeriano advocates for reciprocity in native-Spanish negotiations, proposes lifelong study as a duty, and advances the right to religious practices suited to the linguistic and cultural contours of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Relying on the intellectual resources of his communities, the native scholar assembled evidence through comparisons as he requested favors and assistance from the king. Beyond requests, he even used comparison to give the Spanish emperor candid advice on how to rule. Contextualizing Valeriano’s letters, I will emphasize native representations of history that depart from the understanding and designs of colonial administrators.8 In light of Michel Foucault’s theorization of knowledge as a discursive field,9 we may conceptualize the liberal arts as a malleable discourse, which Antonio Valeriano used to advance native aims and long-term projects for the region. Thus, Valeriano finds new applications for western linear writing. His letters convey a particular rhetoric the Spanish friars did not instill in their native students, which sheds light on a network in which Valeriano played a crucial mediatorial role between Nahuas and Spaniards, and among indigenous groups.10 Letter writing proved indispensable as he bridged divides and realized innovative methods of advocacy for his people. Antonio Valeriano belonged to multiple communities and was able to reinforce his allegiance to them all through the written word.11 Indigenous epistolary in the colonial period sheds light on how native leaders reorganized and exercised political agency after the Spanish invasion. Mary Louise Pratt has explained how a group of Andean nobles used their

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collective identity to build their discursive authority in correspondence with Phillip II.12 By emphasizing their common ancestral civic culture – their entre nos – the principales advocated for legal protection of their customs.13 Antonio Valeriano represents his group affiliation with native leaders in his hometown of Azcapotzalco and in Mexico-Tenochtitlan; yet, Valeriano’s rhetoric is bolder. Through legal petitions, an appeal to Greco Roman letters and his ancestors, and displays of gratitude, Valeriano underscores his leadership in two hierarchies. He governed native groups, and as an appointee of viceroy Martín Enríquez de Almansa, he participated in a native-Spanish hierarchy, whose members were accountable to Phillip II. Antonio Valeriano participated in the indigenous leaders’ ongoing efforts to rebuild. Increasingly, we learn that during the Spanish invasion the majority of indigenous casualties did not perish from the sword, but from foreign diseases.14 Epidemics increased the effects of the colonial displacement of local political and religious institutions. As one historian has observed, “disruption of everyday rituals, the service to conquering Spaniards that native people had to perform, and their general suffering must have made it seem as though the world as they knew it was coming to an end.”15 In May 1565 the last Mexica governor of Tenochtitlan died. Luis Santa María Cipac fell from the rooftop of his residence.16 A native leadership crisis ensued as the group of Mexica nobles in the capital dwindled. A power vacuum remained, which Nahuas and Spanish sought to fill. Despite the grim realities, the decline of the political influence of the Triple Alliance in Tenochtitlan did not necessarily mean decline for the Tepanecs or other groups in the region. For Azcapotzalco, the decline of Mexica influence opened possibilities for negotiation with the Spanish.17 Under Spain’s feudalism, indigenous leaders and writers thus had the possibility to negotiate the meaning of European symbols in public, including the crest from Phillip II,18 and to advocate for protections for their communities’ ancestral properties and customs.19 In fact, through negotiations with the Spanish, the Nahuas found ways to “transcend” the conquest – as Stephanie Wood has explained – particularly in terms of identity and political participation.20 Far from acquiescence of conquered to conquerer,21 the colonial power structure functioned through negotiation with native nobles. As Brian Owensby has observed, “negotiation happened when Indian pueblos and individuals litigated over identities, communities, customs, resources, rights, and autonomy by using procedures and practices defined by Spanish law and its philosophical underpinnings.”22 The sum of existing indigenous networks, even during demographic decline and the displacement of ancestral institutions, provided individuals with possibilities for negotiating with colonizers and advancing their own projects.23 In this dynamic context, Antonio Valeriano studied and worked as a public figure.

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Noble Commoner or Uncommon Noble? Valeriano drew on his education to lead efforts to rebuild and forge paths for his constituency. How did his background prepare him to rule? Was he born noble, or did he ascend based on his study and statesmanship? For years scholars have upheld the claim that Valeriano was a commoner whose academic achievements distinguished him. Closer study, however, reveals that the idea of Valeriano-as-a-commoner comes from one indigenous writer: Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc – a Mexica noble – who in the Crónica mexicayotl wrote that Valeriano was amo pilli (not noble).24 María Castañeda de la Paz has traced Valeriano’s genealogy and demonstrated his descent from the royalty of Azcapotzalco, based on the records of Chimalpahin, the Amequemecan annalist, who drew from various authoritative genealogies. She argues that Alvarado Tezozomoc claimed Valeriano was not noble since, as brother of the previous ruler (Luis Santa María Cipac), Tezozomoc was the likely heir to the position of tlatoani.25 Tezozomoc thus considered Valeriano an intruder. She suggests that Valeriano’s noble birth into the royal house of Azcapotzalco made his marriage to the Tenochca noblewoman Isabel Moteuczoma a logical match. To Castañeda de la Paz’s evidence, we may add the painting of Antonio Valeriano on folio 59 of the Aubin Codex (1576), which depicts the beginning of his tenure as governor of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1573. He holds a Spanish staff of office and sits on a traditional reed throne (icpalli). Looking earlier in his life, Valeriano-as-a-noble aligns with his enrollment in the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (discussed later), which the Franciscans designated for the sons of native nobles.26 Understanding Valeriano’s leadership as emerging from his own noble heritage helps explain his ability to form and maintain the networks that allowed him to advocate for the city’s native residents. During the Spanish invasion and throughout the sixteenth century, epidemic diseases swept across the region, fragmenting native hierarchies. The resulting indigenous leadership crisis also affected Spanish colonial administrators, who generally did not speak Nahuatl and sought native intermediaries to interpret and assist with tribute collection. Facing the challenges of declining local leadership, two Franciscans – Sebastián de Fuenleal and Bernardino de Sahagún – promoted an educational project. They started the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, a center of advanced study for the sons of indigenous nobles, whose height was from 1536 to 1578. Their aims were two-fold: to proselytize young Nahua leaders away from their parents, and to use humanist education to train graduates as intermediaries in local native governments. The Colegio,27 where Antonio Valeriano studied, functioned as one of the first post-conquest institutions for higher education in the Americas.28 Modeled after universities in Salamanca, Bologna, Florence, and Paris, the students at the Colegio of Tlatelolco came into contact with humanism and the medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

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Concurrent to instruction at Tlatelolco, Sahagún headed a scriptorium there for compiling and preserving Nahua ancestral knowledge in order to inform the proselytizing efforts of clergy. This research culminated in the Florentine Codex (1578), which provided a systematic presentation of the Nahua cosmos.29 Bernardino de Sahagún chose the Colegio’s top students to assist with the linguistic aspects of his ethnographic research, among whom the scholar of Azcapotzalco exceled. Sahagún wrote, “the best and wisest one was Antonio Valeriano.”30 He excelled at Latin, mastered Spanish, and preserved ancestral forms of Nahuatl, which made him a regional authority on translation.31 The respect of Nahua students, along with Spanish clergy and educators, placed the native scholar in pivotal roles in the intercultural networks of the valley of Mexico. At 24 years old, Antonio Valeriano finished his studies at Tlatelolco and become a Latin instructor there.32 By the late 1550s, he began to assist the Azcapotzalca nobles, and in 1561 he wrote his first letter to Philip II on their behalf. Three years later, in 1564, Valeriano became the governor of Azcapotzalco and received the coat of arms from the emperor. In 1573, his governorship moved to the native cabildo (town council) of MexicoTenochtitlan, the seat of the república de indios in the valley of Mexico. In his letters, Valeriano interweaves comparisons between his people and the Spanish as well as between the Greco-Roman and indigenous past in order to advocate for reciprocity between the Spanish crown and his native constituents. The 1561 letter follows the Ciceronian structure for a petition letter in medieval epistolary manuals, the artes dictandi, with the salutatio, captatio benevolentiae, narratio, petitio, and conclusio.33 The petitions cover legal concerns – that Philip II intervene to prevent the Spanish and other natives from encroaching on Azcapotzalca lands; the request for the heraldic crest; and for the re-designation of their town (oppidum) to a city (civitas). The petitions also cover Azcapotzalca influence over draft labor, the right to hold a biweekly market (tianguis), and a request for funding to build a school to teach Latin and Castilian.34 The 1578 letter is a thank-you to Philip II in Spanish for the aforementioned envoy of Nahautl-speaking Augustinian priests, who ministered to the indigenous population of the capital during the cocoliztli epidemic in 1576.35 In both letters, Valeriano weighs various aspects of Nahua and European culture, in order to articulate nuanced appropriations of each.

A Tepanec Revival? As mentioned, universities in early modern Spain, which followed the Italian Renaissance revival of Greco-Roman learning and letters, influenced Valeriano’s education at the Colegio in Tlatelolco. Did Antonio Valeriano propose a similar Tepanec cultural revival? The fifth petition of the 1561 letter requests that Phillip II change Azcapotzalco’s status to city, a step toward improving infrastructure, increasing access to

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education, and encouraging economic growth. As evidence, Valeriano revisits genealogies of royal Azcapotzalco, particularly that of his greatgreat grandfather, Huehue Tezozomoc, by listing each kingdom (altepetl) Tezozomoc had conquered.36 Over these, he placed his twelve sons and four daughters as rulers. Valeriano focuses on an ancestral painting of Tezozomoc’s genealogical tree, a piece of evidence that required interpretation for Phillip II. Through a linearization in Latin of the indigenous pictorial legal document, the Azcapotzalca scholar requests the same status that Sevilla, Salamanca, or even Mexico City held. In colonial Mexico, Spanish tribunals considered indigenous pictorial documents as formal evidence for cases dealing with land ownership.37 Valeriano compares the historical importance of Tezozomoc’s lineage to his contemporary experience of the native leadership crisis: he implies that raising Azcapotzalco’s political status would help the nobles restore order and recover their ancestral authority. They could not bring back the days of Huehue Tezozomoc, but they could recover a measure of that ruler’s authority through a legal precedent. Valeriano presented groundbreaking scholarship in the fifth petition of the 1561 letter to Phillip II. With Valeriano’s Latin translation of Huehue Tezozomoc’s painted genealogy, the Azcapotzalca nobles have made local records of the past accessible to a wider cosmopolitan audience, even if it was an audience of one. The petition for the change in civic status forms part of the missive’s larger concern for the protection of indigenous territory: petitions one and two concern encroaching Colhuacanos and Spaniards, respectively. In the height of Huehue Tezozomoc’s empire, Tepanec lands stretched for three days’ walk in all directions from Azcapotzalco. The nobles now request a royal decree (cédula real) to protect their access to the land, timber, and fresh water. They remind Philip II of previous 1541 Audiencia legislation, which guaranteed those protections.38 Comparing the disorderly treatment he and his contemporaries received from the Spanish and other natives, Valeriano requests the enforcement of the existing law that protected his town. To safeguard the territory, he combines historical and legal precedent by appealing to the authority of Tezozomoc and current legislation from the Audiencia. The legacy of Huehue Tezozomoc’s territory complements an Azcapotzalca memory of his longevity – 166 years, as the 1561 letter claims. Grandiose descriptions of Tepanec antiquity differ from Mexica perspectives of the past, which tend to portray Azcapotzalco, the Tepanecs, and Huehue Tezozomoc as oppressive. The Mexica, and later the Spanish, would occupy settlements the Tepanecs had built. In fact, when they were still nomads, Huehue Tezozomoc had allowed the Mexica to use land that would become their capital. While to my knowledge no data confirm the claim of Tezozomoc’s long life and reign, the Codex Xolotl confirms the number of his children as sixteen, twelve males and four females,

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whom he appointed as rulers of his territory. Similarly, the letter boasts that the foundation of Azcapotzalco had taken place 1,525 years earlier. Reliable indigenous sources date the foundation of Azcapotzalco to the end of the tenth century, six rather than fifteen centuries earlier (Codex Chimalpahin 2:65), it remains that Azcapotzalco was the imperial center of the valley when Tenochtitlan was still a swamp.39 The memories of grandeur the nobles of Azcapotzalco recall to Phillip II contrast with the oft-cited negative Mexica perspective on the Tepanecs and Huehue Tezozomoc as unjust for requiring tribute payments.40 Though perhaps hyperbolic remembrances, the long life of Tezozomoc and the antiquity of Azcapotzalco serve to de-emphasize the recent reign of the Triple Alliance. Valeriano’s exegesis of the Tepanec pictorial document provides a counterpoint to the prevailing Mexica view of the past, and repositions Azcapotzalco rather than Mexico-Tenochtitlan as the valley’s longstanding political and cultural center.

The Liberal Arts: A Discursive Field The adaptability of the liberal arts generated no lack of early modern pedagogical debate, which encompassed even epistolary. The controversies surrounding letter writing demonstrate how humanists already had begun to adapt classical models to their needs. An old guard advocated for set models and phrases, which, for generations, scribes had followed in imitation of Cicero’s Orations.41 Others followed Desiderius Erasmus, who advocated for a flexible and natural approach to letter writing.42 Likely a key to Valeriano’s study of formal correspondence, Erasmus’s 1523 De conscribendis epistolis was in the library of the Colegio in Tlatelolco.43 In De conscribendis, “Erasmus insists that a letter can be on any topic and that its style will depend upon its purpose and on the relationship between the correspondents.”44 A situational orientation thus moved letter writing away from the Ciceronian models and the artes dictandi tradition. Although Valeriano’s letter of 1561 draws on medieval and Ciceronian formulae, local concerns remain paramount. As we have seen, Valeriano’s linearization of a native pictorial document in the petition for his town’s change in legal status exemplifies a flexible approach to correspondence. Thus, it is likely that Erasmus’s influence allowed the native scholar to draw on a range of comparisons and syntheses to communicate cultural content to Philip II. From common intellectual ground with Philip II, Valeriano appeals to Greco-Roman antiquity to argue for concessions and favors. He had never seen Philip II’s Escorial; likewise, the Spanish emperor would never travel to the Valley of Mexico. Yet both leaders could imagine Aristotle’s academia, Cicero’s oratory, or anecdotes about Roman emperors. Recalling the centrality of the notion of bonae litterae to Renaissance education, Valeriano and his peers fill their letter with what they call “the

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adornments of life” that letters bring,45 adornments that reinforce their requests. Thus, in the 1561 letter, the remittents recall that even pagan rulers: have been lenient, kind and merciful to their own subjects and they have been very willing to hear their complaints or suits of every kind. The emperor Hadrian is proof of this principle and this one figure will serve for many. On a journey he was making he was asked by a certain woman to hear her: when he replied he did not have time, he heard that very woman say, “In that case do not be an emperor.” At that he was moved to hear her very readily.46 In contrast with the usual humble tone of his prose to the king, Valeriano’s use of this exemplum stresses a common educational background between the letter’s senders and its recipient. With a touch of irony, the reference proposes that Phillip II’s knowledge on how to rule is inadequate without advice from the indigenous nobles. Greco-Roman learning became a gate that Antonio Valeriano swung both ways to reveal his concerns in a way intelligible to a European monarch who knew about Mexico only from maps, chronicles, letters, and the reports of his officials. Turning the liberal arts to an angle, which perhaps Phillip II did not anticipate, Valeriano calls the emperor to use their mutual learning for the benefit of natives in central Mexico. Valeriano continues to call to the king’s mind their shared education, through his selection of lexicons in Latin. In the salutatio portion of the 1561 letter, Valeriano and the Azcapotzalca nobles describe themselves as infimi famuli; that is, “lowly household servants.”47 In the Roman Empire famuli denoted household servants who received pay and could save to purchase their freedom.48 Family servants, though lower in rank, inhabited the same household and were informed regarding their master’s projects. The use of famuli thus produces a rhetorical effect, when, later in the captatio, they call themselves nos mancipia – we slaves – referring to unpaid manual workers. This self-identification prompts the question: what laborer would be able to compose in this subtle Latin? As one scholar has observed, “Valeriano clearly authored the letter, which explicitly holds its own scholarly erudition forward as evidence of Azcapotzalco’s innate worthiness.”49 Valeriano did not engage in manual labor, but in reading, writing, teaching, and proofreading for Franciscans who valued his linguistic expertise,50 in addition to the activities of his office as juezgobernador.51 Similarly, elsewhere Valeriano tactfully refers to Huehue Tezozomoc’s ancestral territory as a provincia rather than an imperium.52 He balanced nuances with deference for Phillip II’s position; a rhetorical strategy that permitted Valeriano to advance his community’s petitions. A scholar of Latin, Nahuatl, and Spanish, Valeriano advocated for access to language training. Consistent with the Nahua association between

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noble rank and eloquent speech,53 the Azcapotzalca scholar aimed to promote linguistic competence across indigenous and Spanish hierarchies. Petition seven of the 1561 letter requests the construction of a “‘House of Muses’ [musarum domo] in Azcapotzalco to teach at least Latin grammar and the Spanish language, both of which can without difficulty be taught by some among us, who know the Latin language as well as the Spanish.”54 The right to learn carries with it the right to teach. Knowing by comparison his own skill in Latin – after teaching the language in Tlatelolco – Valeriano finds himself and his colleagues qualified to expand educational access in the region. Language proficiency for native leaders promoted collaboration and parity between Nahua and Spanish hierarchies. Valeriano’s proposal that fluency in the languages of study and administration was a must for Nahua leaders resonates with ancient emphasis on noble eloquence. Access to language education correlates with the Azcapotzalca scholar’s view regarding the linguistic training of priests. In his letter of 1578, he favors the expectation that in their administration of sacraments priests speak Nahuatl, the regional lingua franca. The basic sense of the term “Nahuatl” is “that which rings clear,”55 a qualifier that points to implicit comparisons to speech which does not. Through the letter’s rhetoric of gratitude, Valeriano reveals his comparison between the recent envoy of Nahuatl-speaking priests and previous clergymen who did not speak the language. His consistent position: clergy should possess proficiency in the local languages to such a degree that their speech would ‘ring clear’ for their audience.

Lives Beyond Letters Through his intercultural formation, Antonio Valeriano’s hybridized rhetoric decentered colonial designs in favor of indigenous concerns. In distinction to colonial Eurocentrism, Valeriano assumed a polycentric epistemological frame. Aníbal Quijano has observed that central to Eurocentrism is the notion that certain human groups have “departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe.”56 Valeriano’s approach, however, resonates more with James Maffie’s polycentric global epistemologies, in its comparisons and innovative combinations of ancestral indigenous knowledge and humanism. His letters to Phillip II assume the importance of balanced living, which the Nahuas termed nepantla. One of the key ethical dimensions of nepantla is ongoing reciprocity.57 Thus, the letters propose exchanges of information and favors between cultural centers, a model fundamentally different from the colonial logic of metropole and colony. In fact, by appropriating Renaissance letters and study in conjunction with his own cultural knowledge and claims, Valeriano provided new information to the Spanish king, which no colonial administrator or agent could have solicited. For the Azcapotzalca

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scholar, humanity did not culminate in Europe: rather, his letters take for granted that reciprocal relationships can enrich humanity on both sides of the Atlantic. While advocating for equitable relations with the crown, Valeriano did not neglect concerns of the non-noble majority of Azcapotzalco. The third petition of the 1561 letter requests an exemption from the draft labor pool that required Azcapotzalco to send workers for ecclesiastical building projects in Mexico-Tenochtitlan and for Spanish fields. Epidemic diseases and the colonial relocation policy of congregación had reduced the number of available workers in Azcapotzalco. By centering work and commerce in newly founded European-style towns, congregación accelerated the abandonment of traditional hillside living and placed Nahuas in open spaces and valleys. Resettlement compromised native leadership and destabilized regional economic and ecological practices.58 Even so, on a weekly basis, colonial administrators required 65 laborers from Azcapotzalco: 30 for the Dominican monastery in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, 20 to work in Spanish fields, ten for the archbishop Alonso de Montúfar’s chapel, and five to help build a shrine to María de Guadalupe in Tepeyac.59 Valeriano laments that these projects diverted labor from finishing the Franciscan church and residence in Azcapotzalco. Valeriano prioritized the needs of his locality, especially when he compared those needs with projects that required multiple hours of walking before work even began. A roundtrip of 15 kilometers awaited the five men who trekked along the northern shore of Lake Texcoco daily to and from the Tepeyac building project. Workers on the  Dominican monastery traversed the same round-trip distance on the causeway to Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Valeriano, loyal to Azcapotzalco, directed his efforts to building religious infrastructure there first. Requests for ecclesiastical and educational infrastructure for his own constituency shed light on Valeriano’s views on language and catechesis. After more than a decade in public office, from experience he knew that priests fluent in Nahuatl were better prepared to address the people’s needs, particularly in times of crisis. In his 1578 letter, he thanks Phillip II for sending Augustinian priests who were fluent in Nahuatl. Yet, on an implicit level, the letter advocates for the linguistic competence of priests in the city, especially given the aftershocks of the cocoliztli epidemic of two years earlier in 1576. Valeriano laments that before Philip II’s envoy of priests, natives had insufficient access to clergy who spoke their language. He explains, they neither had nor have exercised the proper care that reason would suppose them to have, because most of them were not fluent in native languages, and the ones who were knew only a little and did not preach to the natives.60 The previous clergymen’s comparative lack of Nahuatl diverged from Valeriano’s experience with the high levels of fluency he knew with the

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Franciscans during his years in Tlatelolco. One friar, Alonso de Molina, born and raised bilingual in Mexico, produced a Nahuatl-Castilian dictionary that served as a constant reference for instructors and students at the Colegio in Tlatelolco.61 Valeriano could also compare the earlier priests’ lack of fluency in Nahuatl with Bernardino de Sahagún’s extensive research in Nahuatl. Amid the trauma of the epidemic, abstract religious discourse in Latin or Spanish lacked the relevance of Nahuatl. Valeriano’s clear distinction between effective and ineffective pastoral attention during the time of cocoliztli also signals a limit in Spanish power. He points out that not even the emperor could not exercise total control over his territory, asserting, “this grace and benefit that Your Majesty did for his people and vassals was Providence of Heaven for the work and mortality that the Majesty of Heaven, because of our sins, was served to send us.”62 The pious statement does not question the justice of an epidemic that may appear absurd and needless to contemporary readers. However, even the suffering from the epidemic allowed Valeriano an occasion for comparison. He reminds Philip II of the emperor’s comparatively subordinate place in the universe. Not even the strongest ruler in the world can control all events. In the face of catastrophe, cooperation offers a path forward. Thus, Valeriano’s gratitude for assistance carries with it an implicit admonishment to the monarch to act in a responsible manner for the welfare of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, in concert with the regional Nahua government.

Comparison and Authority Antonio Valeriano pursued reciprocity with the Spanish on behalf of his communities. Reciprocity implies equal exchange between parties and requires continuous comparison. Certainly, the crest Phillip II sent at Valeriano’s request shows one instance of success. Antonio Valeriano’s comparisons allowed him to represent merits from Azcapotzalco’s past to Spain’s ruler, who had never seen the Valley of Mexico. Comparisons allowed Valeriano to advocate for the protection of land and resources, and for access to economic and educational opportunity. The 1561 letter represents a culmination of the elders’ use of legal channels in Spanish tribunals: they now made the emperor aware of their long-time advocacy. The 1578 letter shows rhetorical versatility. Valeriano wrapped a policy recommendation in grateful prose. Though they never met in person, the letters connected Valeriano to Phillip II, who had the reputation of reading everything that crossed his desk.63 The Nahua scholar and governor marshalled his knowledge of liberal arts and local issues and of Spanish law and doctrine to build rapport with the emperor and present his people’s petitions. The complexity and subtlety of his letters evince Antonio Valeriano’s ongoing comparisons of what he knew to his own horizon of inquiry. A commitment to lifelong learning carried with it comparisons between

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traditional knowledge transmission and the emergence of new forms of intercultural communication. Beyond his early years as head research assistant to Bernardino de Sahagún, Valeriano remained the top Nahuatl expert in the city, constant in study and strategic affiliations. The liberal arts – despite their Eurocentrism – provided the Nahua scholar with methods for connecting the indigenous past with his colonial present. Knowing Latin meant access to advanced study. The same study and linguistic skill allowed him to develop a pragmatic heuristic and strategies for communication: Valeriano’s innovative appropriation of Latin helped him advise Phillip II on the ancestral knowledge of the noble lineage of Azcapotzalco. He and his fellow nobles called for a Tepanec cultural revival, identified with Erasmian rhetorical strategies, and translated native pictorial representation into alphabetic discourse. Through lifelong study, he maintained engagement in multiple communities to benefit his people. Equally skilled in Spanish, Valeriano turned to comparisons of linguistic practices among priests in the capital. While not in liturgy, at least in sacraments and preaching, he favored vernacularizing Catholic practices. Valeriano’s observations regarding clerical linguistic competency reveal his position as a member of the regional hierarchy and a coreligionist who considered himself qualified to advise Philip II on catechesis. His concerns were not otherworldly: clerical competence had concrete implications. Valeriano’s gratitude for the Augustinians fluent in Nahuatl avers that imperial policies should coincide with native leadership in order to maintain civic order in the capital, especially during calamity. Antonio Valeriano’s epistolary represents more than formal petitions and social graces: these letters give a glimpse of strategies he deployed in negotiations with imperial power. Recalling Pratt’s notion of entre nos as a native rhetoric of group affiliation in colonial native epistolary, we find that Valeriano constructed a discursive community among his peers. Through his epistolary, he expanded his discursive field to include the emperor. During his career, Antonio Valeriano combined the authority of his Tepanec royal heritage with his legal rights as a vassal of the Spanish Empire, and made selective appropriations of Western communicative technologies. Through suggestions to the Spanish monarch, Valeriano took for granted that authority and public policy were not unidirectional. Europeans had to make concessions to continue to collect tribute and avoid costly uprisings. In fact, Valeriano’s discursive construct ultimately reveals the limits of imperial influence in moments of crisis, and signals the commitment of millions of indigenous leaders to maintain their linguistic and cultural vitality. Antonio Valeriano extended his entre nos to more than native Mexico: yet in so doing, he advocated for protection and benefits for his communities, as they entered the Baroque middle of the colonial period.

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Notes 1. Alexander von Humboldt popularized the term “Aztec” after visiting Mexico (1803–1804); see Frances Berdan, Aztec Archaeology and Ethnothistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), xvii. They called themselves the Mexica, after the elder Mexicatl, portrayed in the opening of the Crónica mexicayotl, in the annals of the Amequemecan historian Chimalpahin’s Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahua Altepetl in Central Mexico: The Nahuatl and Spanish Annals and Accounts Collected and Recorded by Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Arthur Anderson, Susan Schroeder, and Wayne Ruwet (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), and on folio 2r of the Codex Mendoza, ed., Frances Berdan and Patricia Anawalt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 2. The Mexica consolidated their rule in the Valley of Mexico in 1428, when Itzcoatl formed the Triple Alliance, after which they spent 93 years at their height of regional control until the Spanish came; see Diego Durán, The Aztecs: The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas (London: Cassell, 1964). For an overview of Tepanec territory and growth, see also Alfredo López Austin, “Organización política en el altiplano central de México durante el posclásico,” Historia mexicana 23, no. 4 (1974): 515–50; and Robert Barlow, “La expansión final del imperio tepaneca,” in Obras de Robert H. Barlow, vol. 3: Los mexicas y la Triple Alianza, ed. Robert Barlow, Elena Limón, and Ruiz J. Monjarás (Mexico City: INAH, 1990), 43–5. 3. Native nobles typically wrote the king during early colonialism. As Matthew Restall has observed, in general, the Spanish “did not seek to rule natives directly and to take over their lands. Rather, they hoped to preserve native communities as self-governing sources of labor and producers of agricultural products.” Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7. 4. Plácido’s song is number LVIII in Cantares mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs, trans. and ed. John Bierhorst (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1985). 5. The Spanish depended on indigenous allies, mostly from Tlaxcala, to defeat the Triple Alliance; see Restall, Seven Myths, 46–7 and Ross Hassig, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 101–2. 6. On the general imposition of feudalism in the Central Mexican highlands, see Luis Weckman, The Medieval Heritage of Mexico (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), 73. The influence of feudal law led to the formation of parallel governments: the república de indios and the república de españoles, as explained in María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013), 91–122, and in Robert H. Jackson, “República de indios,” in Iberia and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History: A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, ed. J. Michael Francis (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 901–2. 7. By indigenous knowledges, I refer to culturally specific, practice-based knowledges including healing, hunting, weaving, fishing, food preparation, childrearing, and rituals: see James Maffie, “‘In the End, We Have the Gatling Gun, and They Have Not:’ Future Prospects of Indigenous Knowledges,” Futures 41, no. 1 (2009): 53–65.

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8. See the concept of “elsewheres” in chapters two, three, and nine of José Rabasa, Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). Rabasa explains how indigenous painter-scribes reveal their situated epistemes through their pictorial and alphabetic texts during the early colonial period. 9. Foucault attributes particular importance to “the Renaissance to the nineteenth century,” as a time for the generation of fields of knowledge, which led to the formation of various sciences and academic disciplines. See Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1995), 215. 10. Barbara Mundy, in The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 190–208, has traced the mediatorial role of Antonio Valeriano, who negotiated with Spanish colonial administrators to rebuild the Mexica aqueduct to Mexico-Tenochtitlan from Chapultepec. For broader regional studies of indigenous, mestizo, and African mediators, see Ethnohistory 59, no. 4 (Fall 2011), and Yanna Yannakakis, The Art of Being in-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 162–5, on native intermediaries in Oaxaca, whose negotiations limited Spanish power until Bourbon reforms restricted their self-advocacy. On Malintzin’s mediatorial roles, see Frances Karttunen, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides and Survivors (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 1–23, 305–7, and Camilla Townsend, Malinztin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). 11. Living in a varied milieu, Valeriano recalls José Rabasa’s “plural-world dwelling”; see Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 154. 12. Mary Louise Pratt, “Afterword: Indigeneity Today,” in Indigenous Experience Today, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn (New York: Berg, 2007), 397–404, 399. 13. They write, “may our good customs and laws be retained that among us have existed and exist, suitable for our government and justice, and other things we were used to having in the time of our infidelity” (my translation). (“Que se nos guarde nuestras buenas costumbres y leyes que entre nosotors ha habido y hay, justas para nuestro gobierono y justicia y otras cosas que solíamos tener en tiempo de nuestra infidelidad”). Quoted in Pratt, “Afterword,” 399. 14. The epidemics included well-documented smallpox and salmonella. For emerging DNA data on salmonella in victims in 1545 Oaxaca, see Åshild Vågene et al., “Salmonella enterica Genomes from Victims of a Major Sixteenth-Century Epidemic in Mexico,” Nature, Ecology, and Evolution 2, no. 1 (January 2018): 520–8. 15. See William F. Connell, After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and SelfGovernment in Mexico City, 1524–1730 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 6. Chapters one and two of Connell’s book outline the re-establishment of native government under Spanish colonial administration. On the initial shock of the Spanish displacement of native institutions, Enrique Florescano balances the reorganization of indigenous networks with challenges of demographic decline in Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence, trans. Albert and Kathryn Bork (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 100–23. 16. This fall from the roof recalls a version of the death of Moteuczoma Xocoyotl. See Carlos Romero Giordano’s overview of documents attesting to the

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18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

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multiple versions of the ruler’s demise in Moctezuma II: El misterio de su muerte (Mexico City: Panorama, 1992). Brian Owensby has termed the collective efforts of indigenous communities to self-advocate as “negotiation within domination,” which points to limitations in the Spanish colonial project: see Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Susan Kellogg, and Brian Owensby, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500–2010 (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2010), xii. See Robert Haskett, “Paper Shields: The Ideology of Coats of Arms in Colonial Mexican Primordial Titles,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 99–126; María Castañeda de la Paz, “Central Mexican Indigenous Coats of Arms and the Conquest of Mesoamerica,” Ethnohistory 56, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 125–61; and Mónica Domínguez Torres, “Emblazoning Identity: Indigenous Heraldry in Colonial Mexico and Peru,” in Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, ed. Ilona Katzew, William B. Taylor, and Luisa E. Alcalá (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 97–115. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities, 61–8, 285, details cases of indigenous success in courts of sixteenth-century New Spain, through the use of pictorial documents and títulos primordiales to defend their rights to ancestral lands. See Stephanie Wood, Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 21–2, 105, 146. While rich in documentation, Robert Ricard’s Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) posits a binary of active conquers and passive conquered subjects. Subsequent scholarship, including Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1964), began to reposition native agency, although Gibson is not free from the conquererconquered assumption. James Lockhart’s New Philology set a precedent for taking texts in Nahuatl as the starting point for understanding the region; see the introduction of James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992). Owensby, “Foreword,” in Negotiation Within Domination: New Spain’s Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State, ed. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano and Susan Kellogg (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2010), xi–xvi, xii. See Yanna Yannakakis, “Making Law Intelligible: Networks of Translation in Mid-Colonial Oaxaca,” in Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, ed. Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 79–103, 98, and Florescano, Memory, Myth and Time, 170. See Codex Chimalphhin, 62r. On Alvarado Tezozomoc as an annalist for the beleaguered Mexica nobles, see José Rubén Romero Galván, Los privilegios perdidos: Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, su tiempo, su nobleza y su crónica Mexicana (Mexico City: UNAM, 2003), especially the second part, on his life and indigenous chronicles related to his community of Mexica nobles. Rocío Cortés has examined how Alvarado Tezozomoc advocated in Spanish courts for the protection of the lands of Mexica nobles in El “nahuatlato Alvarado” y el “Tlalamatl Huauhquilpan”: Mecanismos de la memoria colectiva de una comunidad indígena (New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2011). See María Castañeda de la Paz, “Historia de una casa real: Origen y ocaso del linaje gobernante en México-Tenochtitlan,” Nuevo Mundo, Mundos

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26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

Ezekiel Stear Nuevos (2011): n. pag. https://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/60624, accessed March 20, 2020. Gerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana: Obra escrita a fines del siglo XVI, ed. Joaquín García Icazbalceta (Mexico City: Antigua Librería Fundación Sancho el Sabio Fundazioa, 1870), chapter XV. For overviews of the activities of the Colegio, see Pilar Gonzalbo Aispuru, Historia de la educación en la época colonial: El mundo indígena (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2008). Also of note is the 1553 foundation of the Real Universidad de Lima (Universidad de San Marcos). See Carlos Daniel Valcárcel Esparza, San Marcos, Universidad decana de América (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Fondo Editorial, 2001). See Marina Garone Gravier, “Sahagún’s Codex and Book Design in the Indigenous Context,” in Colors Between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún, ed. Gerhard Wolf and Joseph Connors (Florence: Villa I Tatti/Cambridge: Harvard University Center for Italian Rennaissance Studies, 2011), 157–97, for her study on the formatting of the Florentine Codex and European texts that served as possible models for Sahagún and his native collaborators. Previously in Tlatelolco, Martín de la Cruz had written a text in Nahuatl on medicinal plants, which fellow native scribe Juan Badiano translated to Latin; see Martin de la Cruz and Juan Badiano, Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis: Manscrito aztecade de 1552, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991). See Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain, Introductions and Indices, 13 vols., trans. Charles Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982), 55. The Franciscans trusted Valeriano to teach their own. Gerónimo de Mendieta reported: “he taught young priests in that monastery and after was elected to be governor of Mexico and he has ruled in that city a little less than thirty years, in all affairs that pertain to the Indians, and is met with great approval from the viceroys and has been an example for the Spanish.” In Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana, Bk. 4, Chap. 15). See Frances Kartunnen, “From Courtyard to Seat of Government: The Career of Antonio Valeriano, Nahua Colleague of Bernardino de Sahagún,” Amerindia 19/20 (1995): 113–20, 115. See Malcom Richardson, “The Ars dictaminis, the Formulary, and Medieval Epistolary Practice,” in Letter-Writing: Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historiographic Studies, ed. Carol Poster and Linda Mitchell (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 52–6. Emma Pérez-Rocha and Rafael Tena credit Valeriano with the letter’s composition, which is the general view, “Carta de Don Hernando de Molina, de don Baltasar Hernández y de los alcaldes y regidores de Azcapotzalco al rey Felipe II: En latín, Azcapotzalco, 10 febrero 1561,” in La nobleza indígena del centro de México después de la conquista, ed. Emma Pérez-Rocha and Rafael Tena (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2000, 213–25, 213. The original is in Sevilla, AGI, Audiencia de México, 1842. Miguel León-Portilla found the holograph; he has observed that the letter has a “somewhat rhetorical tone,” Antonio Valeriano and Miguel LeónPortilla, “Una carta inédita de don Antonio Valeriano, 1578,” Estudios de cultura náhuatl 49, no. 1 (2015): 199–207, 202, my translation. Not present in León-Portilla’s transcription of the letter are the signatures of the alcaldes who governed Mexico-Tenochtitlan under Valeriano’s supervision: Gaspar de Aquino, Pablo Xuarez, and Pedro Geronymo. An altepetl is the basic territorial unit of the Nahuas. The roots (atl = water and tepetl = hill) connote elevation from the surrounding land and

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37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

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a freshwater supply as key components for social organization and urban planning. An altepetl can be mobile, shares a linguistic and ethnic heritage, a tutelary deity, and mythic past. On the historical development of the altepetl, see Marcelo Ramírez Ruiz and Federico Fernández Christlieb, “La policía de los indios y la urbanización del altepetl,” in Territorialidad y paisaje en el altepetl del siglo XVI, ed. Federico Fernández Christlieb and Ángel Julián García Zambrano (Mexico City: FCE, 2006): 114–67, 31–113. On use of native pictorial documents as evidence in Spanish tribunals, see Susan Kellogg, Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500–1700 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005). For further case studies of native litigants who prevailed in Spanish colonial courts with pictorial evidence, see Rocío Cortés, Nahuatlato Alvarado, 27; Stephanie Wood, “The Cosmic Conquest: Late-Colonial Views of the Sword and Cross in Central Mexican Títulos,” Ethnohistory 38, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 176–95, 179, and Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Reshaping New Spain: Government and Private Interests in the Colonial Bureaucracy, 1531–1550, trans. Julia Constantino and Pauline Marmasse (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006), 55, 156, 171. Antonio Valeriano used at least one other pictorial text as evidence in his career: as governor of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, he painted a register of tribute collection to advocate for equitable tribute requirements. The codex is in the National Library of France, Livre des comptes, des tributs, á payer par les indigenes de San Pablo Teocaltitlan á leur Gouverneur Don Antonio Valeriano. Mexico, 1574, ed. Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci and E. Eugène Goupil. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica: Bibliothèque numérique. “Carta de Don Hernando,” 218. On the history of Azcapotzalco and the Tepanec Empire, see Handbook of Middle American Indians, vols. 10 and 11: Archaeology of Northern Mesoamerica: 1 and 2, ed. Robert Wauchope, Gordon Ekholm, and Ignacio Bernal (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1971). The Crónica mexicayotl (1609) – part of the Codex Chimalpahin – focuses on Huitzilopochtli’s dealings with the Mexica. The Codex Mendoza (1542) shows a series of defeats of Tepanec towns as the newly triumphant Mexica progressively conquer the region. Judith Rice Henderson, “Humanism and the Humanities: Erasmus’s Opus de conscribendis epistolis in Sixteenth-Century Schools,” in Letter-Writing, 141–77, 145. Gideon Burton, “From Ars dictaminis to Ars conscribendi epistolis: Renaissance Letter-Writing Manuals in the Context of Humanism,” in LetterWriting, 88–101, 97. Gerónimo de Mendieta, Códice Mendieta: Documentos franciscanos, siglos XVI y XVII (Mexico City: Imprenta de Díaz León, 1892), 260. Rice, “Humanism,” 145. Andrew Liard has observed that the expression likely comes from Book I, chapter two of Antonio Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana, ed. Guillén Lozano and Vega González (Madrid: RAE/Barcelona: Galaxia, 2011 [1492]), 35. English translation by Andrew Liard, “Nahua Humanism and Ethnohistory: Antonio Valeriano and a Letter from the Rulers of Azcapotzalco to Phillip II, 1561,” Estudios de cultura náhuatl 52, no. 2 (2016): 23–74, 37–38; The Latin original reads, “in suos subditos fuisse mites, benignos, clementes, eosdemque in suis querellis aut quibusvis petitionibus lubentissime audisse. Cuius rei argumento est Adrianus imperator, et is pro multis unus sufficiet, qui transiens in itinere a muliere quadam rogatus ut eam audiret, cum respondisset sibi ocium non esse, audivit ab ipsa muliere: Noli ergo imperare; tum conversus aequissimo animo eam audivit.” “Carta,” in Nobleza, 214.

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47. “Carta,” in Nobleza, 213. 48. See Jeanne Neumann, Lingua Latina: A Companion to Familia Romana, ed. Hans Oerberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2016), 32. The Latin meaning lingered in the thirteenth-century Spanish term famulia; see Joan Coromines, Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Gredos, 2006), 245. 49. Peter Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 85. 50. Kartunnen, “Courtyard,” 116–17. 51. Mundy, Death, 207–8. 52. Liard, “Nahua Humanism,” 34. 53. Noble speech tecpillatlatolli remained in use among native nobles in the sixteenth century; see Frances Karttunen and James Lockhart, The Art of Nahuatl Speech: The Bancroft Dialogues (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). 54. My English translation; (“at certe grammatica cum lingua hispana quae commodious praelegi possunt a quibusdam nostris qui sermonem latinum perinde ac hispani seape sunt professi.”) “Carta,” in Nobleza, 222. 55. Frances Kartunnen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 157. 56. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 190. 57. James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2013), 355–6. 58. Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous, 91–6; Lockhart, Nahuas, 44–7. 59. Per the earlier discussion of Valeriano’s skill as Latin rhetorician, see Liard on the use of templum and vulgo as indicative of Valeriano’s ambivalence toward the Dominican building project at Tepeyac, Liard, “Nahua,” 57–8. For summary and analysis of the context and the polemics that have surrounded Guadalupe ever since the sixteenth century, which exceeds the scope of this chapter, see David Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 60. My translation; “[N]o tenían ni han tenido el cuidado que fuera razón tuvieran. Porque los más de ellos no eran lenguas, y algunos que lo eran sabían poco y no predicaban a los naturales.” Valeriano, “Carta inédita,” 206. 61. The library at the Colegio in Tlatelolco held multiple copies of Molina’s 1555 Vocabulario (Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 6th ed. (Mexico City: Porrúa, 2008)); Mendieta, Códice Mendieta, 260. 62. My translation of the original: “esta merced y beneficio que vuestra majestad hizo a su pueblo y vasallos fue providencia del cielo para el trabajo y mortandad que luego la majestad del cielo, por nuestros pecados, fue servido enviarnos.” Valeriano, “Carta inédita,” 206. 63. Hugh Thomas, World without End: The Global Empire of Phillip II (New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2015), 298.

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Berdan, Frances. Aztec Archaeology and Ethnohistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Bierhorst, John, trans. and ed. Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1985. Brading, David. Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Burton, Gideon. “From Ars dictaminis to Ars conscribendi epistolis: Renaissance Letter-Writing Manuals in the Context of Humanism.” In Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historical and Bibliographic Studies, edited by Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell, 88–101. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. “Carta de Don Hernando de Molina, de don Baltasar Hernández y de los alcaldes y regidores de Azcapotzalco al rey Felipe II: En latín, Azcapotzalco, 10 febrero 1561.” In La nobleza indígena del centro de México después de la conquista, edited by Emma Pérez-Rocha and Rafael Tena, 213–25. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2000. Castañeda de la Paz, María. “Central Mexican Indigenous Coats of Arms and the Conquest of Mesoamerica.” Ethnohistory 56, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 125–61. ———. “Historia de una casa real: Origen y ocaso del linaje gobernante en México-Tenochtitlan.” Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos (2011): no page. https:// journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/60624 (last access: 20/03/2020). Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, Domingo de San Antón Muñón. Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Texcoco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahua Altepetl in Central Mexico: The Nahuatl and Spanish Annals and Accounts Collected and Recorded by Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, vol. 1. Edited by Arthur Anderson, Susan Schroeder, and Wayne Ruwet. Translated by Arthur Anderson and Susan Schroeder. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Codex Aubin: Códice Aubien 1576: Historie mexicaine. Mexico, 1576. The British Museum, Collection Online. www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/ E_Am2006-Drg-31219 (last access: 15/05/2019). Codex Mendoza. Edited by Frances Berdan and Patricia Anawalt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Códice Xolotl. Edited by Charles Dibble. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1951. Connell, William F. After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and Self-Government in Mexico City, 1524–1730. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Coromines, Joan. Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Gredos, 2006. Cortés, Rocío. El ‘nahuatlato Alvarado’ y el ‘Tlalamatl Huauhquilpan’: Mecanismos de la memoria colectiva de una comunidad indígena. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2011. Cruz, Martín de la, and Juan Badiano. Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis: Manuscrito azteca de 1552, 2nd ed., 2 vols. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991. Domínguez Torres, Mónica. “Emblazoning Identity: Indigenous Heraldry in Colonial Mexico and Peru.” In Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, edited by Ilona Katzew, William B. Taylor, and Luisa E. Alcalá, 97–115.

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Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Durán, Diego. The Aztecs: The History of the Indies of New Spain. Translated by Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas. London: Cassell, 1964. Erasmus, Desiderius. Opus de conscribendis epistolis. Basel: Froben, 1522. Google Books. Essential Codex Mendoza. Edited by Frances Berdan and Patricia Anawalt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Florescano, Enrique. Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence. Translated by Albert and Kathryn Bork. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 1995. Garone Gravier, Marina. “Sahagún’s Codex and Book Design in the Indigenous Context.” In Colors between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún, edited by Gerhard Wolf and Joseph Connors, 157–97. Florence: Villa I Tatti/Cambridge: Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2011. Gibson, Charles. The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1964. Gonzalbo Aispuru, Pilar. Historia de la educación en la época colonial: El mundo indígena. Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2008. Haskett, Robert. “Paper Shields: The Ideology of Coats of Arms in Colonial Mexican Primordial Titles.” Ethnohistory 43, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 99–126. Hassig, Ross. Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, 2nd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006. Jackson, Robert H. “República de indios.” In Iberia and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History: A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, edited by J. Micheal Francis, 901–2. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006. Karttunen, Frances. An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. ———. Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides and Survivors. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. ———. “From Courtyard to Seat of Government: The Career of Antonio Valeriano, Nahua Colleague of Bernardino de Sahagún.” Amerindia 19/20 (1995): 113–20. Karttunen, Frances, and James Lockhart. The Art of Nahuatl Speech: The Bancroft Dialogues. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Kellogg, Susan. Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500–1700. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. Liard, Andrew. “Nahua Humanism and Ethnohistory: Antonio Valeriano and a Letter from the Rulers of Azcapotzalco to Phillip II, 1561.” Estudios de cultura náhuatl 52, no. 2 (2016): 23–74. Lockhart, James. The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992. López Austin, Alfredo. “Organización política en el altiplano central de México durante el posclásico.” Historia mexicana 23, no. 4 (1974): 515–50. Maffie, James. Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013.

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———. “‘In the End, We Have the Gatling Gun, and They Have Not’: Future Prospects of Indigenous Knowledges.” Futures 41, no. 1 (2009): 53–65. Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013. Mendieta, Gerónimo de. Códice Mendieta: Documentos franciscanos, siglos XVI y XVII. Mexico City: Imprenta de Díaz de León, 1892. ———. Historia eclesiástica indiana: Obra escrita a fines del siglo XVI. Edited by Joaquín García Icazbalceta. Mexico City: Antigua Librería Fundación Sancho el Sabio Fundazioa, 1870. Molina, Alonso de. Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 6th ed. Mexico City: Porrúa, 2008. Mundy, Barbara. The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Nebrija, Antonio. Gramática sobre la lengua castellana. Edited by Guillén Lozano and Vega F. González. Madrid: Real Academia Española/Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2011. Neumann, Jeanne. Lingua Latina: A Companion to Familia Romana. Edited by Hans Oerberg. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2016. Owensby, Brian. “Foreword.” In Negotiation within Domination: New Spain’s Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State, edited by Ethelia Ruiz Medrano and Susan Kellogg, xi–xvi. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2010. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Afterword: Indigeneity Today.” In Indigenous Experience Today, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn, 397–404. New York: Berg, 2007. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification.” In Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, 181–224. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Rabasa, José. Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. ———. Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Ramírez Ruiz, Marcelo, and Federico Fernández Christlieb. “La policía de los indios y la urbanización del altepetl.” In Territorialidad y paisaje en el altepetl del siglo XVI, edited by Federico Fernández Christlieb and Ángel Julián García Zambrano, 114–67. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006. Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ricard, Robert. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523– 1572. Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Rice Henderson, Judith. “Humanism and the Humanities: Erasmus’s Opus de conscribendis epistolis in Sixteenth-Century Schools.” In Letter-Writing: Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historiographic Studies, edited by Carol Poster and Linda Mitchell, 141–77. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.

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Richardson, Malcolm. “The Ars dictaminis, the Formulary, and Medieval Epistolary Practice.” In Letter-Writing: Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present: Historiographic Studies, edited by Carol Poster and Linda Mitchell, 52–6. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. Romero Galván, José Rubén. Los privilegios perdidos: Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc, su tiempo, su nobleza y su crónica mexicana. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2003. Romero Giordano, Carlos. Moctezuma II: El misterio de su muerte. Mexico City: Panorama, 1992. Ruiz Medrano, Ethelia. Reshaping New Spain: Government and Private Interests in the Colonial Bureaucracy, 1531–1550. Translated by Julia Constantino and Pauline Marmasse. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006. Ruiz Medrano, Ethelia, Susan Kellogg, and Brian Owensby. Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories, 1500–2010. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2010. Sahagún, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain: Introductions and Indices, 13 vols. Translated by Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–82. ———. General History of the Things of New Spain by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún: The Florentine Codex, 3 vols. World Digital Library. www.wdl.org/ en/item/10096/ (last access: 01/08/2014). Thomas, Hugh. World without End: The Global Empire of Phillip II. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2015. Tomlinson, Gary. Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albequerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. Vågene, Åshild, Alexander Herbig, Michael Campana, Nelly Robles García, Christina Warinner, Susanna Sabin, Maria Spyrou, Aida Andrades Valtueña, Daniel Huson, Noreen Tuross et al. “Salmonella enterica Genomes from Victims of a Major Sixteenth-Century Epidemic in Mexico.” Nature, Ecology, and Evolution 2, no. 1 (January 2018): 520–8. Valcárcel Esparza, Carlos Daniel. San Marcos, Universidad decana de América. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Fondo Editorial, 2001. Valeriano, Antonio. Livre des comptes, des tributs, á payer par les indigenes de San Pablo Teocaltitlan á leur Gouverneur Don Antonio Valeriano. Mexico, 1574. Edited by Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci and E. Eugène Goupil. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica: Bibliothèque numérique. https://gallica. bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8455947h (last access: 10/04/2018). Valeriano, Antonio, and Miguel León-Portilla, eds. “Una carta inédita de don Antonio Valeriano, 1578.” Estudios de cultura náhuatl 49, no. 1 (2015): 199–207. Villella, Peter B. Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500– 1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Wauchope, Robert, Gordon F. Ekholm, and Ignacio Bernal, eds. Handbook of Middle American Indians, vols. 10 and 11: Archaelogy of Northern Mesoamerica: 1 and 2. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1971. Weckmann, Luis. The Medieval Heritage of Mexico. New York: Fordham University Press, 1992.

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Wood, Stephanie. “The Cosmic Conquest: Late-Colonial Views of the Sword and Cross in Central Mexican Títulos.” Ethnohistory 38, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 176–95. ———. Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. Yannakakis, Yanna. The Art of Being in-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. ———. “Making Law Intelligible: Networks of Translation in Mid-Colonial Oaxaca.” In Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, edited by Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, 79–103. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

5

Global Benchmarks of Princely Rule in the Early Eighteenth Century? Transcultural Comparison in the Political Series of the German Publisher Renger (1704–1718) Volker Bauer

In 1704 a small octavo volume of 68 pages was published anonymously. It was simply titled Der Staat von Portugall and offered an account of the eponymous polity.1 This modest book launched an enormously successful series of more than 80 monographs, which were issued between 1704 and 1718 by the German publishing house Renger, and each described one political entity of the known world. The core consists of 40 books on European states, followed after 1707 by 15 books on non-European ones, comprising examples from Asia, Africa, and America (Turkey, Persia, Mughal Empire, Siam, China, Japan, the Tartarian regions, four tributary states of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa, Morocco, Guinea and Congo, Abyssinia and America).2 This serial publication is arguably the most comprehensive work on political regimes on a global scale in early modern Germany and offers ample opportunity for a systematic study of the levels, practices, and limits of transcultural comparison between systems of rule in that period. The only type of illustrations to be found in this rather cheap, definitely commercial series is frontispieces. It is quite remarkable that five out of the 15 books on non-European countries feature frontispieces, which show basic ceremonial situations such as an audience,3 whereas not a single volume on a European state includes a similar image. Despite the conspicuously outlandish setting, the publisher obviously thought he could count on his German readership’s ability to grasp and decipher the ceremonial logic underlying the frontispieces’ exotic appearance. They might showcase an alien material culture, replete with strange garments and fabrics, but at the same time the postures and positions of the persons depicted were familiar enough to indicate their respective social status and political power across the wide geographical and cultural distance between Europe and, for example, the Mughal court (Figure 5.1). The ceremonial frontispieces are therefore the visual manifestation of a fundamental trait of the Renger series: although the pertinent books clearly acknowledge the cultural differences between the European and

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Figure 5.1 Staat des Grossen Mogol, frontispiece Source: Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Gb 298:13 (3)

the non-European countries and empires, they also rely on their basic commensurability on the political level, because after all they mostly were dynastic monarchies. The dedication to a Prussian state councilor of a special edition from 1711 dealing with three Asian states therefore simply states: “Although the states described here are far away from our

112 Volker Bauer state, the subject-matter itself is not so far away from the state affairs with which Your Excellency deals every day.”4 The following chapter will show how the Renger publications navigate the differences and similarities between the European and non-European polities. It will firstly treat the basic structural resemblance of monarchical rule across the world as reflected by the books in question. Secondly, two alternative analytical frameworks will be presented which inform the worldwide references and comparisons made within the series. The third part will address different practices and modes of comparing European and non-European countries employed by the relevant volumes and be followed by a short conclusion.

Common Ground: Political Similarities Across Cultural Divides The Renger series is an excellent source to examine the ways in which the states of the world are perceived, compared, and evaluated, because it provides a sort of level playing field. Since all the volumes were published for purely commercial reasons, they were compiled by academic hack writers under the control of the publishing house. Consequently the books came out anonymously. The pace of production was breathtaking, given that the original 40 books on the European polities were published in a timespan of a mere three years. This output was only feasible because all parts of the series share a largely standardized format, which deploy a common set of criteria and treat the same aspects for each case. This becomes clear, for example, by a look at the respective tables of contents that are largely identical and thus give a certain consistency to the implicit and explicit comparisons being made. Therefore, the index of the Staat von Franckreich (Figure 5.2), a somewhat exemplary volume from 1705, can indeed be seen as a model of the disposition of the entire series. Another unifying factor is that the Renger publications proceed from the notion of hereditary monarchical rule as the standard form of government. After all, only nine of the 40 mentioned volumes on European states described electoral monarchies or outright republics. Consequently the general “introduction to and conclusion of” the relevant series from 1708 (Einleitung zu den Europäischen Staaten Und Derselben Beschluß) focuses on those aspects of an “accurate political examination of a state” that are linked to a dynastic regime.5 The table of contents of the book on France reveals at a glance that the majority of the 12 chapters deal with institutions and social groups typical of this sort of state: they concern the king, the royal house, the ranks of the nobility, orders of knighthood, and the royal court.6 Similarly every other contribution to the series considers certain structural problems shared by all monarchies.7 Crucial among them are, for example, the access to the ruler and the succession to the throne, which accounted for the emergence of similar institutional

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Figure 5.2 Staat von Franckreich, pp. 5–6 Source: Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: QuN 512 (1)

solutions such as courts and dynasties. By regularly devoting a lot of space to both institutions, Renger’s works provide a sufficient basis for comparisons on a global, intercontinental level. The special emphasis that the books on European as well as on nonEuropean monarchies put on court matters is particularly significant, because it seems to enhance their mutual commensurability. In his book Courtly Encounters from 2012, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has made an intriguing observation concerning the perception of transcultural familiarity on different fields. Analyzing early modern Indo-Portuguese encounters, he stresses that “with regard to customs in general” there was a keen awareness of cultural differences. With regard to court society, however, things are fundamentally different: For the most part – rightly or wrongly – there was a confident assumption that in the encounter between courtly cultures, whether through formal diplomacy or other means, most things passed easily

114 Volker Bauer precisely because of an implicit theory of broad congruence inside this sphere. . . . [W]henever one court society imagined it had found another, exchange was facilitated and could be codified.8 Other scholars have basically brought forward the same argument with respect to European visitors at non-European courts.9 Although the apparent similarities often proved to be deceptive,10 courts all over the world indeed served as the main places where the interaction of the political elites took place. Individual ranks were manifested by an intricate ceremonial, which was predicated on the position, posture, and movement of the persons involved. The spatial arrangement of power and status followed some virtually universal patterns. A sitting person normally demonstrates superiority over a standing, genuflecting, or even prostrate one, and an immobile person is superior to a moving one, who is forced to negotiate the distance between the two.11 So a foreigner with personal experience at his or her domestic princely court might justifiably assume that he or she might by intuition also be able to penetrate into the mechanisms and power balance of a court society in a different cultural setting. Thus by virtue of their courts, monarchies all over the world seemed to share certain central features that allowed for them being juxtaposed and compared to each other. The Renger series furthermore facilitated the crossing of cultural borders by offering two alternative models of inter-state entanglement, which both were initially developed for the European level, but could easily be, and were in fact, extended onto the global one. Firstly, the European states handled within the 40 single volumes were conceived as a society of princes.12 According to the advertising and recommendation issued by the publisher Renger, these books were not to be listed and bound together in the sequence of their respective dates of publication, but according to the rank and title of the heads of state. At the very top is the venerable Holy Roman Empire, whose presentation again proceeds top-down, starting with the Emperor and his hereditary lands, which are followed by the electoral states and then the imperial principalities of the established Altfürsten. Only after the entire Holy Roman Empire are the kingdoms registered, which is also done in a roughly rank-based manner. The next tier is made up by the Italian princes, led by the Pope, and finally, at the bottom end as it were, the republics are registered.13 How were the non-European states included in this customary hierarchy, which comprised states and rulers that were not considered equal, but treated differently, i.e. appropriate to the princes’ individual titles, honors, privileges, and dynastic prestige? The solution within the Renger series was quite pragmatic and straightforward. Since there were only monarchies to consider, apart from small West African republics like Axim and Ante,14 the rulers in Africa and Asia were as a rule subsumed

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under the rank of kings, by which they were expressly recognized as princes of indisputably sovereign status.15 But in the case of non-European monarchs, this designation was quite flexible. It comprised the rulers of relatively small countries on the Guinea coast, whose inhabitants “did not know the word king” before the Europeans had arrived, as the Staat Von Gvinea und Congo from 1713 puts it.16 It was also applied to the potentates of the larger African and Asian realms. In the respective volumes, the rulers of Persia, the Moghul Empire, Siam, Morocco, and Abyssinia were normally called kings, but also designated by more ambitious titles, which claim reign over vast empires, such as “King of all Kings,” “Emperor in Hindustan,” “King of Heaven and Earth,” “Emperors in Morocco,” or “King of Kings” in Ethiopia.17 The rulers of Ottoman Turkey, China, and Japan were uniformly labeled emperors.18 While using the imperial title in a European context was politically charged, it was obviously much more acceptable in nonEuropean cases.19 And like the more frequent use of “king,” it served as a means of rendering foreign monarchs compatible and of ranging them in the hierarchical European society of princes. In contrast to this mode of integration, which relies on the personal rank of a monarch, the second model of inter-state association in the Renger series assumes the form of an international system based on the transpersonal interests of the respective state. These interests are determined by partly objective factors, e.g. the geopolitical situation, natural resources, and the form of government. State interest is thus not only largely independent from, but might even run contrary to, the particular interests of the ruling elites, i.e. princes and dynasties. It therefore fits the idea of a state which relies on bureaucratic institutions rather than on personal rule. Once state interest is recognized as a high-priority political criterion, the coequality of all countries ensues. Since the interests of the individual states are likely to conflict, the resulting international system is inherently competitive. There are only a few scattered passages in Renger’s publications where this conception is discussed in general, theoretical terms,20 and basically there is no more than the generic statement “that the true interest of every state consists firstly in its survival and secondly in its growth and expansion.”21 But apart from three volumes, any other book of the European series contains a chapter on the domestic as well as external interests of the particular state. And those among the 15 books on non-European countries and regions which deal with independent and political stable single states and empires likewise treat the interests. Among them are five which comprise a separate chapter on it, and they are treating the states with quite intense international relations (Turkey, Persia, Mughal Empire, China, Morocco),22 whereas the books on somewhat more isolated Siam, Japan, and Abyssinia make do with some pertinent remarks.23 Within the series, non-European states are evidently as much entitled (or

116 Volker Bauer even obliged) to define and pursue their very own interests as are their European competitors. Thus, it seems fair to say, as a conclusion to this section, that European and non-European states are largely analyzed on equal terms in the Renger series. As a rule, they were hereditary monarchies and as such shared certain institutional characteristics such as courts and dynasties. Thus, they could be described and examined by a standardized set of criteria. This approach made possible the construction of a unified global space in which European and non-European powers interacted, be it in the form of a society of princes of unequal status or of an international system of equal states.

Drawing Distinctions: Europe as an Exception to the Rule of Despotism? This result is only partly true, because the Renger publications are generally characterized by a deplorable lack of conceptual clarity. The approach and the assumptions of the series never nearly amount to a coherent analytical program, not even in the summarizing Einleitung zu den Europäischen Staaten, published just after the 40 volumes on the European states had been completed in 1707 (Figure 5.3). It does, however, contain a heavy dose of a European sense of superiority. The volume starts with a frontispiece, which blatantly depicts the alleged supremacy of Europe over the world. Crowned queen Europe is sitting on a throne, while the other known continents (Asia, Africa, America) pay homage to her. This image, conventional as it might be,24 very much determines the following reasoning. The Einleitung praises Europe for its favorable geographical location, its cultural achievements, and for being a Christian continent. The argument is, however, focused on the political culture and structure of Europe, which are characterized by plurality and diversity. Because all attempts to erect a universal monarchy have failed, Europe makes up a system of states with a high degree of inherent competitiveness – the consequence being that its “states are organised most prudently”. And, unlike “other parts of the world” where only an “absolute monarchical regime” is known, Europe also features democratic and aristocratic republics and variously limited monarchies.25 Europe’s polities thus largely conform with the ideal of statehood, which is based on natural law theory and expressed in the Einleitung as follows: The true essence of a state consists in the fact that a sufficient number of free people devolve the authority over themselves and over their estates unto others, and subject themselves to their will, but in such a way that as persons they remain free and are just able to have security, protection and safeguard that they require for themselves.26

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Figure 5.3 Einleitung zu den Europäischen Staaten, frontispiece Source: Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Gb 298:1 (1)

This is more than only a theoretical, normative definition, but has tangible political consequences within the Einleitung. After all, preserving the personal freedom of the subjects – and one might infer their personal property, too – either takes a republic or a somewhat limited monarchy.

118 Volker Bauer These moderate forms of government are almost exclusively to be found in Europe, and this achievement in turn accomplished the global expansion of the small continent: Europe boasts “the best and most-orderly forms of government which have planted great colonies in the other parts of the world and miraculously maintain their dominion over considerable parts of them.”27 European specifics are dealt with in the Einleitung by explicitly contrasting them to the political structures in “the Orient” or “in Asia,” where “despotic regimes” are endemic, which have overturned the original “natural freedom of the family patriarchs.” This could only happen because of the particular “oriental morals” (“Orientalischen Sitten”), especially indulgence and lust, which made the respective people become “effeminate and slavish.”28 So, although hereditary monarchy ensures the overall compatibility and commensurability of global regimes, the Einleitung marks a fundamental difference between the political culture of Europe and that of other continents. While the former is characterized by constitutional diversity and limited monarchies, the latter is largely determined by regimes that correspond with the notion of “oriental despotism.”29 Though this expression does not show literally in the Renger publications, the elements of this notion are definitely present and applied to the African and Asian states considered.30 The Staat Von Persien as the first book on a non-European country sets the tone. The chapter on the “form of government” declares: Just as the peoples in the whole of the Orient are born for servitude as it were and the subjects are slaves by nature .  .  ., so it is also currently the case in Persia. The will and order of the king is their law. . . . He disposes of their estates and lives according to his own pleasure and with unlimited power.31 The ruler who encroaches upon the life and property of the subjects (thus violating the “true essence of the state” as quoted earlier), and the latters’ characterization as slaves is a common feature of Renger’s other non-European volumes, especially those on Turkey, the Mughal Empire, Siam, Japan, Morocco, and Ethiopia.32 Obviously the idea of oriental despotism is an attractive analytic tool, because it helps to highlight certain characteristics of the single states, which then allow for the latters’ homogenization and othering. But again, things are more complicated than they seem at first glance. For in addition to the overall interpretative framework of a special type of despotic rule that is inherent in oriental culture, the series also offers a different approach which is likewise designed for transcultural comparisons. It is to be found in the preface to the volume on Persia, which serves as a sort of general introduction to the non-European volumes. The text starts with the observation that in spite of their respective national

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prejudices, the Europeans jointly tend to regard people “beyond the river Ob and the Mediterranean Sea” as “dumb, savage and crude barbarians.” They do so “against their better judgement” and “out of sheer arrogance, exaggerated self-esteem and undue contempt of all the others.” Therefore, “many peoples in Asia, Africa and America have unfairly been labelled barbarians,” who are said to “live without police, laws, order and godliness” and do not use “reason, their most noble organ.” One aim of the book is to set the record straight and to present Persia as an example of the states which must be “deleted from the list of barbarians,” because the Safavid great power certainly is a country “of police and science.” The preface of the Staat Von Persien thus contains the outline of an alternative differentiation. It does not construct Europe as a distinct political region in contrast to the despotic rest of the world, but rather counter-balances any pro-European bias. It relies on the distinction between barbarians on the one hand and all countries based on “police, laws, order and godliness”33 (which might be translated as countries with stable institutions) on the other hand, regardless of their continental location. The great majority of the states considered clearly belong to the second category. An ex negativo case in point provides the Staat von der Kleinen und Grossen Tartarey, because in it the territories inhabitated and controlled by the Tartars are excluded from the ranks of the civilized states. This happens on the ground of the concededly broad criteria given in the preface to the Staat Von Persien. The volume in question repeatedly calls the Tartars – a designation which encompasses different Siberian and Central Asian ethnic groups – barbarian. By studying them one cannot help but “realise the depth of human misery and the terrible decay of human nature.”34 A closer look at the Crimean Tartars reveals that, due to their ferocity, they do not even have a proper history, which in the end means the absence of any politics: “Since these people . . . have acquired renown by no other feat than by constant raids . . . and lamentable devastations of many provinces, we do not have to register any political changes [Staats = Veränderungen] in their case.”35 Alongside the book on the Tartars, the Staat Von America also fails the test set up in the volume on Persia, because the only proper indigenous “government” (“Regiment”) is attributed to the Aztec and Inca empires, and thus is a matter of the past and not a topical, political one.36 At the same time, at least two of the polities described in the Staat Von Gvinea und Congo certainly qualify as states with a sufficient level of “police, law, order and godliness.”37 In summary, except for the volumes on the Tartars and on America, all states that were taken into consideration by Renger, whether they were European, Asian, or African, fulfill the requirements as laid down in the Staat Von Persien. Therefore, this approach definitely encourages and enhances global commensurability. Yet the other, more clear-cut distinction between European powers that are republics or mostly limited

120 Volker Bauer monarchies on the one hand and oriental despotism on the other likewise draws on structural similarities. After all, this distinction is secondary to the basic similarity of any monarchical rule, which actually provides the initial basis for a comparison. Thus the distinction between European and ‘oriental’ regimes turns out to be the end result of a process of comparing. Although the Renger series has achieved some level of standardization in selecting and presenting political information, it still offers two alternative and partly contradictory frameworks which inform the practices of comparing in the various books. Therefore, all the references to and comparisons between the discussed states take place on different levels and can hardly be brought down to a common denominator.

Negotiating Difference: Levels, Criteria, and Limits of Transcultural Comparison Given the supposedly similar structures of hereditary monarchies across the world, the clearest markers of difference within the Renger series are found in those passages that deal with the inhabitants and cultures of the foreign countries rather than with their political systems. We might use Subrahmanyam’s terms “customs in general” and “court society” for this constellation. If we put aside skin color, which is duly registered in the case of the Asian, African, and American ethnic groups, but never used to construct a hierarchy among them,38 the two most important indicators of difference are religion and polygyny (Vielweiberey). The Einleitung makes a point of declaring Europe a stronghold of Christianity, “by which this continent is elevated . . . above the other ones where pagan idolatry or Islamic abomination prevails.”39 Both varieties of religious depravity must, however, be distinguished from each other, because they are perceived and dealt with differently in the single volumes. Islam is seen as a result of mere priestcraft, i.e. as an ingenious invention by Mohammed, which had fused Christian and Jewish elements into a highly successful new faith. It was created as a means to a political end, i.e. to establish Mohammed as king of Arabia.40 Although admittedly there is a wide, unbridgeable gap between Christian and Muslim beliefs, there is also another dividing line which jointly separates these monotheistic religions from the “pagans” (“Heyden”) and their “idolatry” (“Abgötterey”).41 Pagan beliefs, religious practices, ceremonies, and cult objects are labelled “foolish” (“närrisch”), “superstitious” (“abergläubisch”), “despicable” (“abscheulich”), and “ridiculous” (“lächerlich”).42 These verdicts even apply to the Japanese, which are otherwise judged extremely positively because of their good character and polite manners. Their many gods are of euhemeristic and thus of human origin, and though these “idols” (“Götzen”) are normally cherished and worshipped, they can occasionally be harshly abused by the believers.43

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A particularly intriguing feature of non-European cultures seemed to be polygyny, which is almost omnipresent in the series. Apart from the book on Abyssinia, every volume on Asian, African, and American countries and ethnic groups – regardless of their Muslim or “pagan” faith  – dwells on it, sometimes even a bit obsessively.44 It comes as no surprise that an everyday issue with deep social impact like marriage patterns raises the interest of a European readership. After all, accounts of polygyny are expected to arouse curiosity or even sexual fantasies in a more or less exclusively monogamous cultural environment. But in the Renger context, this issue mainly has a political edge. For besides general remarks like “Polygyny is extremely popular among them,” referring to the indigenous population of North America,45 the bulk of the relevant passages deal with the consorts of the respective rulers. Thus, polygyny is not just a matter of customs, but belongs to the sphere of court society. In a hereditary monarchy where the personal power to rule is transferred on the basis of kinship, the question of who actually gives birth to offspring that is eligible to rule as future prince is paramount and has important political implications. Whereas the European model of dynasticism is predicated on monogamy and has increasingly favored a strictly agnatic model in the course of the early modern period, which very often led to a scarcity of pretenders to the throne, the polygynic variant “generated numerous royals.”46 Although the Renger books do not contain an explicit comparison of the European and non-European dynasticism, they are nevertheless keenly aware of the potential risks incurred by a ruling house built on polygyny.47 The historical accounts of the Islamicate and Asian realms – but also of monogamous Ethiopia – largely assume the shape of reports of a permanent succession crisis, in which numerous candidates fight for the throne and different ways are tried to neutralize potential or real contenders.48 According to the Staat von Türckey, the establishment of a polygynic court had a political reason as well as severe political consequences, as it led to bloody troubles, due to the competing ambitions of different consorts to see their sons succeed to the throne.49 Thus polygyny as a cultural practice is – quite similar to how Islam is defined – translated into an eminently political matter. In the European mind, oriental despotism and gender relations were anyway inextricably linked by the seraglio as “a site of absolute power which is . . . invested with sexuality.”50 It must, however, be noted that according to the Staat von Sina, polygynic China provides a counterexample. Although there might have been 2,000 eligible princes of the blood, the choice by the Emperor of his successor did not meet any resistance by the others. This is seen as a remarkable difference to Europe, where “a great number of princes of blood is always something to be afraid of.”51 In spite of this comment, there is nowhere in the Renger series an explicit, elaborate discussion of the dynastic regimes across the continents of the Old World. The books

122 Volker Bauer instead count on the tacit knowledge of its domestic German readership about how the European ruling houses are organized. It is ironic that while most Asian and African monarchies are depicted as extremely crisis-prone in times of the transfer of power, the pitfalls of the entanglement of the diverse European dynasties were only taken into account in passing,52 although nearly all volumes were published during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714).53 Generally speaking, the lack of systematic and coherent comparisons across the single books is a common trait of the whole series. A case in point is the discussion of the role of a hereditary nobility, which is definitely a central and much-debated political and constitutional topic in pre-modern times. Directly drawing on Francis Bacon, the Staat von Türckey states that the sultan deliberately enhances his “despotic power” by preventing the occurrence of a “nobility or ancient families.” Here a nobility in its own right is seen as a political asset, because it would bring about the moderation of a monarchical regime, which otherwise is a “tyranny.” The Staat von Sina assumes the opposite attitude: the absence of a “hereditary nobility” guarantees the existence of an effective functional elite and thus the well-being of a state. The two books in question – which are likely to be written by two different authors – do not even agree on such a fundamental issue, while other volumes of the series simply do not discuss the role of a nobility by birth at all.54 Most explicit comparisons concerning the political sphere therefore rather consist of single, impromptu observations. In the Staat Von Siam, for instance, the royal palace of the capital Ayutthaya is found lacking, because it features nothing that “equals a European one.” Within the Staat von Türckey the account of the achievements of the founder Osman I (1288–1326) turns into a short description of a crucial difference between Ottoman and European ceremonial: the former stipulates that “even the noblest visitors have to leave their retinue” outside the entrance of the palace, whereas the “European, Christian courts” grant the entourages access into the courtyard. Both passages appear isolated in the respective texts, and the relevance of the treated aspects must remain obscure to the reader.55 Another analytical problem is the absence of a coherent use of language in the series. This becomes clear by a look at all the terms which are deployed to distinguish among different types of princely rule. It is quite remarkable that there is basically only one expression which designates a regime that possesses somewhat “limited” power, e.g. requiring consent of the estates or parliament.56 Conversely, the extent of the personal power and prerogatives of a ruling prince can be described by various terms: “souverän,” “monarchisch,” “absolut” (also “ungebunden” in vernacular form), “tyrannisch,” and “despotisch.”57 This semantic abundance seems to suggest a nuanced notion of the monarchies of the world. But unfortunately, the use of these words is a mess. The most basic and

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most frequently used term is “sovereign,” which simply denotes the status of a ruler or a territory as independent, which means virtually free from external interference. It is also applied to the imperial princes, “who are ruling their respective countries completely sovereignly.”58 According to the Staat Von Groß=Britannien, a ruler “should be acknowledged as sovereign,” if nothing else “than God and the sword” stand above him.59 Sovereignty is derived from the “hereditary right” to rule a country, but in the end only great powers seem to be truly sovereign.60 The respective meaning of the more specific terms is difficult to define and to distinguish from each other. A telling example is to be found in the Einleitung, where “absolute monarchical reign,” “sovereign rule,” and “despotic regimes” seem to merge.61 Another significant case is the choice of words in the Staat Von Groß=Britannien: although the royal “sovereignty” of the British king is considerably limited (“eingeschrencket”) by parliament, he nevertheless possesses “absolute power” so that the “form of government” can be labeled “indisputably monarchical.”62 Other than the designations of “sovereign,” “monarchical,” and “absolute,” which are all employed for European as well as non-European countries, the adjective “tyrannical” only appears once in the volume on China, where the possibility of a “tyrannical government” is emphatically ruled out.63 The crucial term in the Renger context, however, is “despotic.” Originally it pertains exclusively to non-European cases and draws on the established notion of oriental despotism,64 which separates the political systems of Europe categorically from those in Asia and Africa. Therefore, the unique case of its truly transcultural, comparative use involving a major European state is all the more significant. In the Staat von Franckreich from 1705, the French “form of government” is called “purely despotic and sovereign,” because “the king acts in all matters according to his pleasure without interference from anyone else.” This sentence clearly refers to the disregard of the estates and the Parliaments by Louis XIV65 and would normally have earned his reign the common label “absolute.” This adjective appears in the Idea Statuum Europae, a small book from 1699 which generally inspired the Renger series and contains a passage that undoubtedly served as a model for the quoted qualification in the Staat von Franckreich.66 The Renger book deliberately altered “absolute” into “despotic” and thereby made an openly polemic statement. Most likely this must be interpreted as a reaction to the War of the Spanish Succession, in which Louis XIV was seen as the archenemy of the Habsburg claim and the Holy Roman Empire. The same ploy can be found in the Renger series another time. The volume on Morocco published in 1714 attributes “despotic power” to the Maghrebian king. The book then quotes this ruler, who has stated that, other than the rest of the Europeans monarchs, the king of France is “the only one among the European potentates who, like himself, knows how to govern.”67 Thus the asserted despotic character of the Moroccan regime

124 Volker Bauer is transferred to the French monarchy. The statement of the Moroccan ruler is borrowed from the main source of the Staat Von MAROCCO, i.e. the account of François Pidou de Saint-Olon, French ambassador to Morocco in 1693. In his Relation de l’empire de Maroc, however, the rule in Morocco is defined as “absolute“ (“absolut”), whereas the term “despotic” only figures in an entirely different context.68 Done twice, the intentional choice of the expression “despotic” as a designation of the French monarchical system under Louis XIV – instead of the original formulation “absolute” – must be seen as a means to delegitimize his rule and to picture him as an alien, non-European, in one word: ‘oriental,’ king. In this case comparison clearly is a potent political weapon. The only Asian empire to escape the verdict of despotism is exceptional China. The pertinent Staat von Sina is the one book of the Renger series which comprises quite a lot of not only implicit, but also explicit comparisons and cross-references between the country considered and Europe. The preface translates Leibniz’s famous Latin phrase in his Novissima Sinica (1697) and calls China “the oriental Europe.” Compared to the Chinese, the Europeans excel in mathematics, calendrical calculations, and the arts.69 There is no concept of a republican form of government in Chinese culture, but this does not affect the quality of the political system: “Perhaps there has never been established a monarchy more perfect than the Chinese one.” The strictly monarchical character of China is reproduced on every level of the administration, which is organized as a rigorous hierarchy.70 It is working exceedingly well because it is directed by a meritocratic elite, which is superior to the European model of a hereditary nobility.71 The emperor “possesses complete and unlimited” or “absolute power,” and he is master “of the lives of all . . . subjects” and of their “property” (“Vermögen”), “if he deems it necessary.” By these prerogatives he would qualify as a despotic ruler, were it not for the “moderation” that is imposed on the monarch by the “fundamental laws” and by the “rules of reasonable [vernünfftigen] policy.”72 These safeguards are reinforced by the extraordinary personal character and capacities of the current incumbent Kangxi (1661–1722), who is the subject of a long chapter in the Staat von Sina, which amounts to nothing short of a veritable mirror of princes.73 Drawing a comparison between the Chinese and the European ruling systems is thus largely tantamount to recognizing the superiority of the Asian country. The Chinese emperor is “without argument the most powerful potentate of the world” and “beyond doubt” also the “richest” one. His court expenditure outdoes “the most splendid courts of Europe.” He elects his own successor with such a care “that Christian kings would have to be admired for.”74 And the respective volume ends with the assertion “that China acts on more reasonable maxims than many potentates in Europe do.”75 To conclude: according to the Staat von Sina China is the model state without the blemishes of the other non-European polities,

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especially without oriental despotism. Thus oriental Europe appears pretty un-oriental in the understanding of the Renger series. The most self-evident and easy way to compare is to provide statistical data allowing for a quantitive analysis of certain parameters. Nearly all volumes of the Renger series contain such data on the troop strength and on the revenues of the respective states. The book on Persia, for example, devotes a separate chapter to each of these two subjects.76 The readers of the volumes on Sweden and China are able to contrast the maximal 80,000 soldiers that the European power could mobilize to the several millions who China could muster.77 While the revenues of the French monarch, the most affluent of the European rulers, amounted to 100 million Livre, the Chinese emperor disposed of at least 288 million Livre.78 This example also shows that the readers were actually invited to compare, since the budgets of the major non-European powers were given in European currencies, among them Reichsthaler and Stuiver.79 Across the Renger series there is obviously a lot of comparing taking place on a transcultural level, but there is no systematic or coherent approach, and often the references between European and non-European countries are undertaken implicitly and deal with isolated observations. But the very fact that so many comparisons dealing with the details of the respective political regimes exist prove that the authors of the books were convinced of basic structural similarities of the considered systems of rule. And these even span the perceived gap that seems to separate European moderate from ‘oriental’ despotic monarchies. It must, however, again be noted in this context that the single acts of comparing are not only determined by this dichotomy. Because in the end all African and Asian polities apart from the Tartary also meet the criteria from the preface to the Staat Von Persien of being marked by “police, laws, order and godliness.”

Conclusion: One World of Monarchies – From a German Angle The Renger series depicts a global world of ‘sovereign’ monarchies: from Sweden in the North to Ouidah (Fida) in the South,80 from Portugal in the West to Japan in the East. They share one political space which is either defined by their conflicting or converging ‘state interests’ or by being ranged in a hierarchical society of princes. Due to their standardization and uniformity, these publications provide a kind of level playing field which allows for comparisons among princely regimes of different cultural backgrounds. The pertinent volumes are not free from Eurocentric stereotyping and labeling strategies, but following Osterhammel this Eurocentrism might be termed “inclusive” rather than “exclusive.”81 The books’ amazing esteem for the countries on other continents – especially for China and Persia – is caused by the fact that their political structures

126 Volker Bauer are described as largely identical with the European ones. They can all be seen as hereditary monarchies with the requisite court and dynasty. And they were obviously taken seriously as political contenders for power. The differences could, and in fact did, become apparent only because they were accepted as equal competitors. In this context it is relevant that the most influential travel accounts by Europeans, which served as the main source of the volumes on non-European countries, seemed to capture the contemporary regimes in their prime. The travelogues were often written and published before or in the 1680s,82 in which the great Asian empires at least looked stable and powerful.83 A study of the Renger publications extends our knowledge of the European view of the non-European cultures, countries, and polities in three important ways: firstly, the series documents a rather detailed preMontesquieu European perception of Asian and African political systems, which supplements the research that normally focuses on Montesquieu and his impact on this field.84 Secondly, it brings in a distinctive German perspective from the early eighteenth century, which is largely neglected compared to the period starting in the 1760s, in which for example Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi’s famous work Vergleichungen der Europäischen mit den Asiatischen und andern vermeintlich Barbarischen Regierungen was published,85 and the anthropology and universal history in Göttingen as well as the ideas of Herder and Kant proved seminal.86 Thirdly, since the books of the series were commercial, vernacular, cheap, and popular, they attracted a relatively wide readership beyond political experts and academic scholars. Their commodity character resulted in a remarkably unideological stance and provided surprisingly reliable information for a larger public. They are thus an extremely relevant early modern source for how rule in non-European monarchies was analyzed and evaluated and compared to the polities in Europe.

Notes 1. Der Staat von Portugall (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1704). 2. See the list in the Einleitung zu den Europäischen Staaten Und Derselben Beschluß (Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig: Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1708), 61–4, and Staat Der Japanischen Und der übrigen Vornehmsten Insuln In Ost=Indien. Als ein Beschluß aller ausländischen Staaten / nebst einer ordentlichen Verzeichniß derselben / wie sie nach und nach im Druck erschienen (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1716), Verzeichniß Aller ausländischen Staaten. Due to their special status, the four North African states of Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers are not taken into further consideration. 3. Der Staat Des Grossen Mogol (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1710); Staat Von Siam, In Ost=Indien (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1715); Staat Der Japanischen; Staat Von dem König=Reiche FEZ und MAROCCO in Africa (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1714); Der Staat von Habeßinien (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1711).

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4. Staat Des grossen Mogol / wie auch von Sina / und Der kleinen und grossen Tartarey (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1711), dedication. 5. Einleitung, esp. 67–9. 6. Staat von Franckreich (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1705), 5–6. 7. On the structures of dynastic rule on a global scale, see Jeroen Duindam, Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 8. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 214. 9. Christina Brauner, “Loss of a Middle Ground?: Intercultural Diplomacy in Dahomey and the Discourse of Despotism,” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 24, no. 5 (2014): 99–123, 110–11; Romain Bertrand, “Des gens inconvenants: Javanais et Néerlandais à l’aube de la rencontre impériale,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 171–172 (2008): 104–21, 119. 10. Audrey Truschke, “Deceptive Familiarity: European Perceptions of Access at the Mughal Court,” in The Key to Power?: The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400–1750, ed. Dries Raeymaekers and Sebastian Derks (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016), 65–99. 11. Cf. also the discussion of seating arrangements on a transcultural level in Wolfram Drews and Antje Flüchter, eds., Monarchische Herrschaftsformen der Vormoderne in transkultureller Perspektive (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 104, 109–28. 12. Cf. Lucien Bély, La société des princes, XVle-XVe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 13. Einleitung, 56–8 and 61–4. 14. Staat von Von Gvinea und Congo in Africa (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1713), 3 and 48. 15. Cf. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger,“Honores regii: Die Königswürde im zeremoniellen Zeichensystem der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Dreihundert Jahre Preußische Königskrönung: Eine Tagungsdokumentation, ed. Johannes Kunisch (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 2001), 1–26. 16. Staat von Gvinea, 3; cf. also Christina Brauner, Kompanien, Könige und caboceers: Interkulturelle Diplomatie an Gold- und Sklavenküste im 17. Und 18. Jahrhundert (Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2015), 84–6 and 94–131. 17. Der Staat Von Persien (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1707), 5; Staat Des Grossen Mogol, 71; Staat Von Siam, 43; Staat Von MAROCCO, 19; Staat von Habeßinien, 30. 18. Staat von Türckey (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1708), e.g. 72–3; Der Staat von Sina (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1708), e.g. 195–8; Staat Der Japanischen Insuln, 32. 19. Walter Demel, “Kaiser außerhalb Europas?: Beobachtungen zur Titulatur außereuropäischer Herrscher zwischen ‘deskriptiver’ Reiseliteratur und politischen Interessen,” in Überseegeschichte: Beiträge der jüngeren Forschung, ed. Thomas Beck (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1999), 56–75. 20. Cf. e.g. Einleitung, 22 and 61. 21. Einleitung zur Nachricht von Städten des Heil. Röm. Reichs Teutscher Nation (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1707), 155–6. 22. Staat von Türckey, 107–19; Staat Von Persien, 56–88; Staat Des Grossen Mogol, 127–8; Staat von Sina, 332–42; Staat Von MAROCCO, 38–43. 23. Staat Von Siam, 49–53 and 69–75; Staat Der Japanischen Insuln, 69; Staat von Habeßinien, 64–7 and 130.

128 Volker Bauer 24. Cf. Claudia Bruns, “Anthropomorphe Europakarten im Übergang zur Frühen Neuzeit,” Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 21, nos. 1–2 (2017): 9–43. 25. Einleitung, 52. 26. Ibid., 7. 27. Ibid., 52. 28. Ibid., 8–9. 29. Cf. Joan-Pau Rubiés,“Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu,” Journal of Early Modern History 9, no. 1 (2005), 109–80. 30. Cf. esp. Staat von Türckey, 72, 104. 31. Staat Von Persien, 24–5. 32. Staat von Türckey, 72; Staat Des Grossen Mogol, 72; Staat Von Siam, 40–1; Staat Der Japanischen Insuln, 32; Staat Von MAROCCO, 38–40; Der Staat von Habeßinien, 52–3. 33. Staat Von Persien, 2–3. 34. Staat von der Kleinen und Grossen Tartarey (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1709), preface. 35. Ibid., 30–1. 36. Cf. Staat Von America (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1714), 283. 37. Staat Von Gvinea, esp. 91–4 and 111–12. 38. Cf. Der Staat von Sina, 189–90; see also the favorable characterization of the black Ethiopians in Staat von Habeßinien, 19–20. 39. Einleitung, 53. 40. Staat von Türckey, 8–11, 100; cf. also Staat Von Persien, 89. 41. Cf. e.g. Staat von Habeßinien, 21; Staat von der Tartarey, 22. 42. Staat Von Gvinea, 83 and 96; Staat Von America, 169; Staat Von Siam, 39. 43. Staat Der Japanischen Insuln, 81–2, 101–2 and 106. 44. Staat von Türckey, 22, 41–2, 90; Staat Von Persien, 13–14, 115; Staat Des Grossen Mogol, 93–4; Staat Vom MAROCCO, 25, 28, 72; Staat Von Siam, 28; Staat von Sina, 92–3, 223–5; Staat Der Japanischen Insuln, 21, 44; Staat von der Tartarey, 21, 36; Staat Von Gvinea, 55, 82, 89–90, 93; Staat Von America, 177, 183–4. 45. Staat Von America, 183. 46. Duindam, Dynasties, 130. 47. Cf. ibid., 121–2. 48. Staat Von Persien, 15, 57; Staat des Grossen Mogol, 6–51; Staat Von MAROCCO, 20–3, 25–7; Staat Von Siam, 59–60; Staat Der Japanischen Insuln, 30; Staat von Habeßinien, 38–42, 48–9. 49. Staat von Türckey, 22 and 31–2, 41–4, 46, 49, 51. 50. Cf. Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East (London: Verso, 1998), esp. 114–19, 125 (quotation), 126, 141–6, 166–83; cf. also Staat von Türckey, preface (Vorrede), 51; Staat Des Grossen Mogol, 9. 51. Staat von Sina, 204. 52. Einleitung, 68. 53. Cf. though Staat Von Chur=Bäyern (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1705), e.g. 3–4, 13–15; Staat Der Fünff Teutschen Ertz Bischöffe Als Des ErtzBischoffen / und Chur=Fürsten zu Mayntz / Trier / und Cölln (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1705), 33–4; Staat Von Spanien (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1705), 3–4, 6–14, 61–2. 54. Staat von Türckey, 74–5; Staat von Sina, e.g. 336. 55. Staat Von Siam, 8; Staat von Türckey, 15. 56. Der Staat Von Groß=Britannien (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1706), 18; cf. also Einleitung, 52. 57. Cf. e.g. Staat Von MAROCCO, 38.

Global Benchmarks of Princely Rule 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

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Einleitung, 56. Staat Von Groß=Britannien, 18. Staat Von Siam, 1, 49–51. Einleitung, 9. Staat Von Groß=Britannien, 17 and 30. Staat von Sina, 197; see also Staat von Türckey, 75; Staat Von Persien, 57; Staat Des Grossen Mogol, 43. Einleitung, 9; Staat von Türckey, 72. Staat von Franckreich, 59–60. IDEA STATUUM EUROPAE Oder Der Europaeischen Reiche / Und Republiquen, Vormahlige und itzige Beschaffenheit / Interesse und Haupt=Absehen (Cologne: Peter Marteau, 1699), 1, 164. Staat Von MAROCCO, 38–40. François Pidou de Saint-Olon, Relation De L’Empire De Maroc: Ou L’On Voit La Situation Du Pays, Les mœurs, Coûtumes, gouvernement, Religion & Politique des Habitans (Paris: Cramoisy, 1695), 66–8, 108. Staat von Sina, 3, 300, 304–5. Ibid., 194–6. Ibid., 226–37, 336. Ibid., 195–202, 332. Ibid., 70–115. Ibid., 89, 203, 263. Ibid., 341–2. Staat Von Persien, 41–6 and 46–114; cf. also Staat Des Grossen Mogol, 96–114 and 114–22; Staat von Sina, 263–74 and 274–85. Der Staat von Schweden (Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1704), 34; Staat von Sina, 275–6. Staat von Franckreich, 57; Staat von Sina, 272. Staat Von Persien, 49–50; Staat Des Grossen Mogol, 113; Staat Von Siam, 58–9; Staat Der Japanischen Insuln, 63. Staat Von Gvinea, 91. Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 65 and 489. Cf. e.g. Staat von Sina, 5; see also the footnotes in Staat Von Siam. Osterhammel, Unfabling, 22–6. Cf. e.g. Melvin Richter, “The Comparative Study of Regimes and Societies,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Marc Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 147–71; see also Osterhammel, Unfabling. Cf. Osterhammel, Unfabling, 77–81. Cf. e.g. Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Richter, “Comparative Study,” 169–70.

Bibliography Bély, Lucien. La société des princes, XVle-XVe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 1999. Bertrand, Romain. “Des gens inconvenants: Javanais et Néerlandais à l’aube de la rencontre impériale.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 171–172 (2008): 104–21. Brauner, Christina. Kompanien, Könige und caboceers: Interkulturelle Diplomatie an Gold- und Sklavenküste im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2015.

130 Volker Bauer ———. “Loss of a Middle Ground?: Intercultural Diplomacy in Dahomey and the Discourse of Despotism.” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 24, no. 5 (2014): 99–123. Bruns, Claudia. “Anthropomorphe Europakarten im Übergang zur Frühen Neuzeit.” Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 21, nos. 1–2 (2017): 9–43. Demel, Walter. “Kaiser außerhalb Europas?: Beobachtungen zur Titulatur außereuropäischer Herrscher zwischen ‘deskriptiver’ Reiseliteratur und politischen Interessen.” In Überseegeschichte: Beiträge der jüngeren Forschung, edited by Thomas Beck, 56–75. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999. Drews, Wolfram, and Antje Flüchter, eds. Monarchische Herrschaftsformen der Vormoderne in transkultureller Perspektive. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Duindam, Jeroen. Dynasties: A Global History of Power, 1300–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Einleitung zu den Europäischen Staaten Und Derselben Beschluß. Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig: Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1708. Einleitung zur Nachricht von Städten des Heil. Röm. Reichs Teutscher Nation. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1707. Grosrichard, Alain. The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East. London: Verso, 1998. IDEA STATUUM EUROPAE Oder Der Europaeischen Reiche/Und Republiquen, Vormahlige und itzige Beschaffenheit/Interesse und Haupt=Absehen. Cologne: Peter Marteau, 1699. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pidou de Saint-Olon, François. Relation De L’Empire De Maroc: Ou L’On Voit La Situation Du Pays, Les mœurs, Coûtumes, gouvernement, Religion & Politique des Habitans. Paris: Cramoisy, 1695. Richter, Melvin. “The Comparative Study of Regimes and Societies.” In The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Marc Goldie and Robert Wokler, 147–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu.” Journal of Early Modern History 9, no. 1 (2005): 109–80. Staat Der Fünff Teutschen Ertz Bischöffe Als Des ErtzBischoffen/und Chur=Fürsten zu Mayntz/Trier/und Cölln. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1705. Staat Der Japanischen Und der übrigen Vornehmsten Insuln In Ost=Indien. Als ein Beschluß aller ausländischen Staaten/nebst einer ordentlichen Verzeichniß derselben/wie sie nach und nach im Druck erschienen. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1716. Der Staat Des Grossen Mogol. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1710. Staat Des Grossen Mogol/wie auch von Sina/und Der kleinen und grossen Tartarey. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1711. Staat Von America. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1714. Staat Von Chur=Bäyern. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1705. Staat Von dem König=Reiche FEZ und MAROCCO in Africa. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1714. Staat Von der Kleinen und Grossen Tartarey. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1709. Staat Von Franckreich. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1705.

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Der Staat Von Groß=Britannien. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1706. Staat Von Gvinea und Congo in Africa. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1713. Der Staat Von Habeßinien. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1711. Der Staat Von Persien. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1707. Der Staat Von Portugall. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1704. Der Staat Von Schweden. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1704. Staat Von Siam, in Ost=Indien. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1715. Der Staat Von Sina. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1708. Staat Von Spanien. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1705. Staat Von Türckey. Halle (Saale): Rengerische Buchhandlung, 1708. Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara. “Honores regii: Die Königswürde im zeremoniellen Zeichensystem der Frühen Neuzeit.” In Dreihundert Jahre Preußische Königskrönung: Eine Tagungsdokumentation, edited by Johannes Kunisch, 1–26. Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2001. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Truschke, Audrey. “Deceptive Familiarity: European Perceptions of Access at the Mughal Court.” In The Key to Power?: The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400–1750, edited by Dries Raeymaekers and Sebastian Derks, 65–99. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016. Vermeulen, Han F. Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

6

Spain and Its North-African ‘Other’ Ambivalent Practices of Comparing in the Context of Modern Spanish Colonialism Around 1860 Sara Mehlmer

If you ever get the chance to visit the city of Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain, you should definitely have a look at its famous cathedral. Inside the building, you would not only be impressed by the countless number of confessionals offering multilingual services, but you would most likely also stumble over the statue of Spain’s patron saint, Santiago Matamoros, the ‘Moor killer,’1 on his horse. It is said that, in 844, Saint James appeared to the Christians and helped them to win the Battle of Clavijo against the Moorish kings on the Iberian Peninsula – one of the most famous Christian victories during the so-called Reconquest. Since then, the figure of Santiago became part of Spain’s legendary repertoire, combining religious as well as military and national identarian elements. The image of Santiago Matamoros as a strong and merciless warrior does not at all match the peaceful appearance of the flowers currently covering the statue’s feet and horse in Santiago de Compostela. However, a closer and more attentive look enables the cathedral’s visitor to depict a handful of mournful ‘Moors’ behind the floral arrangement. After the Islamist train bombings occurring in Madrid in 2004, there was a discussion about removing the statue in order to avoid any religious provocation. In the end, the statue was not removed, but it was covered with flowers to hide the ‘Moor killer’s’ victims. Although the representation of Saint James should remain intact as an important part of Spain’s history and national myth, at least its connection with anti-Muslim violence should not become clear at first glance. In my opinion, this is a quite metaphorical illustration of Spain’s ambivalent relationship towards Islam. On the one hand, collective memories of war and conquest, of military as well as religious confrontation, fostered the perception of the Muslim world in general and North Africa in particular as Spain’s eternal enemy and its historical ‘other.’2 On the other hand, under certain circumstances, stressing the violent struggle between Christian Spain and the Muslim world could be harmful to the interests of the Spanish state, either with respect to its security or with respect to economic and political benefits. In such occasions, instead of

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accentuating violent legends and memories of war, it seemed much more reasonable to evoke peaceful and non-violent images – usually less by covering brutal scenes with flowers but first and foremost by referring to the peaceful side of the historical Muslim-Spanish relationship. Centuries of contact and coexistence between Christians and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula have left a strong cultural legacy in Spain, still perceivable in Moorish architecture or Arabic influences on the Iberian languages. This cultural legacy, which extensively contrasted with the formerly described violent animosity, represented the peaceful side of Spain’s historical connection towards the Muslim world – especially towards its neighbor in the south, just across the Strait of Gibraltar.3 These forms of comparing, oscillating between hostility and kinship, between foreignness and intimacy, seem paradoxical. However, they offered Spanish agents a range of discursive measures to react to specific circumstances and contexts. In the following, I will try to exemplify this hypothesis by focusing on the different discourses accompanying the initiation of modern Spanish colonialism in Northern Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century.4 First, I will give a short overview of Spain’s relationship to Islam and the Muslim world to demonstrate the ambivalent possibilities of historical reference that played a role for the period depicted in this article. Furthermore, the first part will focus on the characteristic elements of Spanish orientalism in the nineteenth century.5 Finally, I will show how these characteristic elements interacted with the beginning of modern Spanish colonialism in Northern Africa.6 Besides newspaper articles, military as well as scientific monographs, I will predominantly focus on speeches held at the Congress of Spanish Africanists in 1884 and on a war diary published by a young Andalusian aristocrat, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1833–1891), who accompanied the Spanish army as a war correspondent for the Spanish newspaper La Iberia.7 His diary is one of the central Spanish sources of the HispanoAfrican war. Moreover, this work gives us insights into changing forms of perception and of dealing with differences and similarities, or in other words, into ambivalent practices of comparing on-the-scene.

Catholic Spain and (North African) Islam Since the so-called Christian Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula that ended with Emir Boabdil’s surrender of Granada to the Catholic Kings Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1492, Catholicism became the fundamental ideology of unified Spain.8 Systematic persecutions, expulsions, and killings of Jews, Muslims, and conversos meant to secure the ethnical as well as the religious purity of the Iberian people and, subsequently, the unity of the Spanish state. National, ethnical, and religious notions converged in the idea of ‘blood purity’ (limpieza de sangre) that clearly defined what Spanishness was and what it was not.9 Besides the

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Jews, it was above all Islam that became Spain’s antagonist, which was displayed in national myths and rituals like the cult of Santiago Matamoros or the mock battles between moros y cristianos, which are still today practiced in various Spanish villages.10 Thus, Spain’s dealing with its Islamic past basically accentuated differences by evoking collective memories of hostility, conquest and domination, violence, threat, and fear. This created a spirit of ‘Spanish’ belonging by clearly defining the ‘other.’ However, the Spanish fear of the ‘Moor’ did not just ground on the preoccupation for Spanish biological and religious purity. It was also the result of the ongoing threat of another invasion on behalf of the North African Muslim kingdoms. To contain this threat, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spain and Portugal conquered several towns at Morocco’s Western and Northern coast. Especially the cities in the North, among them Ceuta and Melilla that remain Spanish exclaves until today,11 served as fortresses and were meant to secure the Iberian Peninsula against possible invaders. Since the sixteenth century, the accentuation of Spanish moral, ethnic, as well as military superiority together with the omnipresent fear of another Muslim invasion had served to mobilize the Spanish population against Muslim states, the Ottoman Empire, as well as Morocco. Thus, Spanish-Moorish differentiation was used not only for national unification but also for military purposes and security policy. Furthermore, by stressing the differences towards Islam, Spain underlined its belonging to ‘civilized’ Europe and denied any parallel between Spain and ‘the Orient,’ which some liked to draw. Since the sixteenth century, the so-called black legend left its mark on the European perception of Spain as backward, cruel, and fanatic.12 The practices of the Spanish Inquisition, the persecution of non-Catholics, as well as the ill treatment of the Indians made their contributions to this perception. Whereas the ‘black legend’ was dominant in the early modern period, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the European perception of Spain diversified. The image of backwardness was still present, albeit it was now associated with Spain’s Islamic past and, at least in part, positively marked as ‘originality.’ An increasing romantic interest in ‘the Orient’ was projected on Spain, especially on Andalusia and its Moorish cultural as well as architectural relics.13 In his famous work Tales of the Alhambra, published in 1832, the American writer Washington Irving contemplated Spanish nature, culture, and physiognomy: “the country, the habits, the very looks of the people, have something of the Arabian character.”14 In the eyes of Washington Irving, Alexandre Dumas,15 Victor Hugo, and many others, Spain’s alleged oriental character and backwardness differentiated it from the rest of Europe, as well as all these factors constituted central elements of its attractiveness. Thus, apart from national and military purposes, Spain’s accentuation of differences towards the Muslim ‘Orient’ meant, furthermore, to stress Spain’s similarities towards Europe.

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However, Romanticism and orientalism did not only influence American, French, and British, but also Spanish artists, writers, scientists, politicians, and travelers of the nineteenth century. Yet, the Spanish case was fundamentally different from the French, British, or American one, due to its own Islamic or ‘oriental’ past.16 In contrast to the traditional idea of the ‘Moor’ being Spain’s religious as well as cultural and biological antagonist per se, the Romantic image rather evoked historical parallels, biological as well as cultural resemblance and characteristic similarities, rooting in almost eight centuries of Muslim domination and a supposedly peaceful coexistence between the three monotheistic cultures from the beginning of the eighth until the end of the fifteenth centuries. In Spanish oriental discourses, Al-Andalus not only represented a point of connection between the East and the West, ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident,’ but it was also idealized as the embodiment of the positive image of Arabic civilization in Spain during a time when the rest of Europe was still stuck in medieval darkness.17 In her quite illuminating book on Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity, published in 2008, Susan MartinMárquez uses the term ‘disorientation’ to describe the Spanish phenomenon of being at the same time orientalized and orientalizing, the Oriental being “simultaneously ‘self’ and ‘other.’”18 The country and its people seemed to be lost between two worlds, belonging to neither one nor another. Or, as Martin-Márquez quotes from the New York Times in 1898, Spain is situated between two continents, the most advanced and the most backward, the most illumed and the darkest – Europe and Africa. . . . There are, then, in the Spanish national character, dwelling side by side, and most of the time blended into one, these two forces – civilization and barbarism.19 On the one hand, oriental discourses within Spain questioned the traditional image of Islam as Spain’s eternal enemy and, with that, challenged the notion of Spain’s religious and ethnical purity, as we have seen, important fundaments of Spanish national identity. On the other hand, these discourses could serve as a basis for a narrative of common ground, of a shared history, a geographical and, thus, natural proximity as well as of linguistic, cultural, and biological similarities between ‘Moors’ and Spaniards. This interpretation offered a particular approximation towards the Muslim world, especially towards the part lying just across the Strait of Gibraltar. Seeing Islam on the whole and the Maghrib in particular at the same time as part of the self and the exotic other, not only indicated an unsolvable ambiguity and ‘disoriented’ Spanish identity building, but it also enabled Spanish agents to deal with this ambiguity in different ways, depending on specific circumstances and contexts. This

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will be demonstrated in the following parts regarding the beginning of Spanish colonial intervention in Africa.

The ‘African War’ (1859–1860) and the Beginning of Modern Spanish Colonialism As we have already seen, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Iberian-Christian kingdoms had conquered several towns at Morocco’s Northern and Western shore in order to contain the threat of another invasion by North African Arabs, to protect the economically important Strait of Gibraltar as well as to eventually broaden the Iberian influence in Northern Africa. Among these towns were Ceuta and Melilla, which have remained Spanish exclaves until today. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, both exclaves were doomed to live a miserable existence, almost forgotten by their Spanish heartland. However, this changed gradually in the course of the nineteenth century. After the French occupation of Algiers in 1830 and the French-Moroccan Battle of Isly in 1844, Spain became increasingly interested in securing and expanding its possessions in Northern Africa. This was intensified by the fact that it had already lost many of its American colonies in the 1820s and therefore searched for imperial recuperation. The privileged position Britain obtained in 1856 regarding the Moroccan market intensified Spain’s wish to be economically and politically involved in the African continent even more.20 Finally, in October 1859, the Spanish government used the occasion of a border quarrel in front of Ceuta to declare war on Morocco. The so-called African War (1859–1860),21 although of short duration and doubtful profit for triumphant Spain, is seen as the beginning of Spain’s colonial intervention in Northern Morocco and, thus, as a prelude to the twentieth-century Spanish protectorate, which endured until 1956.22 The treaties following Spain’s victory in 1860 not only expanded the Spanish possessions around Ceuta and Melilla, but they also facilitated economic, political, and missionary activities in Morocco on behalf of Spain, and generally favored an intensification of the European presence in Northern Africa. The obligation to pay large amounts of war reparations to Spain weakened the Moroccan state and forced it into an increasing financial dependency on Great Britain.23 In sum, the years following the Spanish-Moroccan peace treaty can be described as key years in Moroccan as well as in Spanish history.24 Spain’s declaration of war in October 1859 must be understood, first of all, as a Spanish attempt to keep up with France and Great Britain regarding their influence in Africa. At the same time, Spain tried to reestablish its imperial status and, with that, to position itself among the main European powers. Furthermore, the war aimed at overcoming manifold symptoms of financial, social, and political crisis within Spain, not only by exploiting new markets in Morocco, but also by strengthening a sense

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of nationhood in the face of war against a supposed traditional enemy. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Spain had gone through numerous internal and external crises. The land’s occupation under Napoleon and the so-called war of independence against the French, the loss of colonies, as well as the conflicts concerning the question of succession after the king’s death in 1833 had weakened the state, strengthened the army, and favored political radicalization. Numerous military coups and civil wars had shattered the political and social order. In this context, the declaration of war against Morocco was a welcome national undertaking, as it evoked a wave of national enthusiasm among all political parties and social classes in Spain.25 El Estado, a moderate Spanish newspaper, explained this enthusiasm with the century-old animosities between Spain and the Islam: “[The war] is so sensationally popular because it is waged on the ‘Moors,’ because the religious feeling beats in every single [Spanish] heart.”26

The Outbreak of the War and the Revival of Spanish-Moorish Antagonism When the war broke out, references to the historical differences between Spain and Morocco, between Spaniards and ‘Moors,’ were the order of the day.27 Images of the cruel and fanatic, underdeveloped and backward Moroccan contrasted with the image of the civilized and tolerant, in other words, European Spain. This was used to legitimate Spain’s military intervention with the popular European discourse of a civilizing (and at the same time Christianizing) mission in Africa. The moderate newspaper El León español stated in August 1859: Spain has the holy duty to bring the religion of Christ to this idolatrous, nomadic and savage people. . . . Spain has the duty to hand over this vast and fertile territory to Civilization, a territory separated from all the prosperity and all the advances man’s genius achieved for his brothers. Spain has the duty to regard its aggrandizement, to create a vast and rich colony.28 This kind of discourse did not differ much from the colonizing discourses in France or Great Britain and, thus, aimed at positioning Spain among these powers. However, there was also another line of argument, aiming mainly at the own Spanish community. “The morisma has once more thrown her iron glove at the foot of Ceuta, and entire Spain has hurried to pick it up,” the Spanish aristocrat and war correspondent Pedro Antonio de Alarcón theatrically states in his “Diary of a witness of the African war.”29 “War on the moor! the government and the national representatives have cried out, and 17 million of our compatriots have answered this call.”30

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It was not just Alarcón who interpreted the so-called African War as a continuity of the century-old struggle between Christian Spain and Muslim Maghreb – a struggle for territory, for military as well as religious domination. Rafael del Castillo, a military officer who took part in the Spanish campaign, was equally convinced of the conflict’s historical continuity: The war against Africa has been initiated many centuries ago. Since our brave defenders beat the crescent in Granada and replaced the blue Muslim banner . . . on their high minarets with the flag of the cross, the African war was a necessary consequence.31 The supposed continuation of the Spanish-Moroccan struggle was not only used to legitimate Spain’s military intervention, but it also evoked collective hostility and, thus, served to mobilize the Spaniards to support the campaign – with human as well as with financial resources. For Alarcón, the war was “a great national question” and a “patriotic crusade.”32 As we have already seen, in the context of the otherwise national dissent, the war against Morocco seemed to be a welcome national undertaking, able to reunite the divided Spanish population. “Go back! Tempers of discord!,” the absolutist newspaper La Esperanza exclaimed in October 1859. “Go back! Make way for the Cross. Make way for the glorious shadows of las Navas, el Salado and Lepanto. Down with the crescent!”33 For a short period of time, the war favored national unification on the basis of a discourse of difference, which was nourished by a large repertoire of national legends and collective memories of war and violence, like those of the legendary battlefields of las Navas, el Salado, or Lepanto. Once again, Santiago Matamoros personified the century-old animosities, even parallels were drawn between Spanish generals of the ‘African War’ and the Spanish patron saint.34 The mobilization against Morocco managed to unite the diverse political groups; liberal as well as Catholic nationalism confluenced in their accentuation of Spain’s historical mission of intervening in Africa not just to fight its traditional enemies but to reestablish its national unity and international greatness.35 The war correspondent Pedro Antonio de Alarcón seems to adopt more or less the common Spanish imagery concerning the supposedly fanatical and uncivilized character of the Moroccans; especially the beginning of his diary is full of negative attributes such as “ferocious animals,”36 “primitive people,”37 “enemies of the fatherland and the faith,”38 “worthless circumcised,”39 or “fanatical race,”40 combining racial with religious and cultural degradations. This is not very surprising, yet the first parts of his diary are marked by Alarcón’s experience of bloody battles between Spaniards and Moroccans, which obviously influenced his simplified negative perception of the enemy.

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In sum, at the initiation of the so-called African War of 1859, religious, cultural, and biological as well as historical differences regarding the African ‘other’ were stressed, not only to emphasize Spain’s Europeanness and its progressive character, but also to legitimate the military intervention and to overcome political and social discord within Spain. Tradition as well as racial, civilizational, and missionary arguments nourished this discourse and, at least for the duration of the war, eclipsed the popular Romantic inclination towards Moorish culture, although this inclination was still present, even in the writings of Spanish war correspondents.

Romantic Imagination A – real or imagined – biological, cultural, and historical connection between Moroccans and Spaniards, particularly influenced by Romanticism in general, had a strong impact on Spanish travelers and adventurers. It is interesting to notice how the Spanish perception of the contemporary Moroccan enemy of war as the total opposite of Christian Spain contrasted with the idea of Al-Andalus as the point of connection between ‘Moors’ and Spaniards.41 In his “Diary,” the Andalusian Pedro Antonio de Alarcón explains his fascination for Morocco as follows: Many years ago . . ., the wish to travel the empire of Morocco first moved my heart. – Born in Sierra-Nevada, from whose tops one may identify the beaches where the morisma sleeps its historical death; son of a town marked by the influence of the Arabic domination . . ., I had passed my childhood in the ruins of mosques and citadels . . .; naturally . . ., I felt requested by the proximity of Africa, and yearned to cross the Mediterranean to touch . . . the lively reality of the past.42 Obviously, Alarcón felt attracted by the Andalusian proximity towards Morocco. This proximity did not just base on the small geographical distance between the Spanish southern and the Moroccan northern shores, but also on architectural, historical, literary, and traditional remnants of Moorish heritage in Andalusia. I don’t know much, apart from the fact that moors had been living in Spain throughout seven centuries, that they lived in my village; that they believed in Mahoma . . . and that the histories and traditions of my fatherland refer to all these things.43 Alarcón’s admiration for Moorish architecture and culture was basically nourished by a Romantic longing for discovering Spain’s past as it was presented in art and literature. Thus, one of the main objectives of his journey was “to find out if, in the middle of the 19th century, reality can correspond to poetry.”44 Alarcón seems always delighted when he

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finds his Romantic imagination confirmed, for instance, when he meets with Moroccans who correspond to the ‘legendary Arab’ or the ‘Moor of the short novel,’ that is, the tall, dark-haired, and attractive man of noble and indomitable character. Apart from his own Romantic inclinations towards Morocco, Alarcón implies that the Moroccans must have the same feelings towards Spain. In his opinion, the Spanish coast was “like a golden dream or a sweet memory for the Arabs.”45 In Alarcón’s diary, affection repeatedly competes with repulsion, sometimes even in the same scene, for example, when Alarcón first comes upon the corpse of a Moroccan soldier: My first sensation was of certain repulsion, certain disgrace, certain repugnance. It is because I thought that those adversaries were unworthy to measure their arms with ours; I found them too despicable and miserable to take up a chapter in our history; . . . Afterwards, I do not know for what kind of mental evolution, I experimented a profound compassion towards these unfortunates; and, finally, I felt possessed by admiration for them and I found them so great, so noble and so beautiful, that it made me sad to think of the hatred with which they would have looked at me if life had come back to illuminate their eyes.46 The image of the noble and brave Moroccan worthy to fight the equally brave and noble Spaniard rooted in an ideal of virility upheld especially in military circles. It connected the collective Spanish memory of war against the ‘Moor’ with the narrative of the outstanding braveness of its protagonists on both sides and, thus, stressed belligerent analogies that somehow contradicted the discourse of differences and hostility.47

Blurring Boundaries, Connecting Places Especially after the termination of war, personal travel experiences and changing political interests more and more favored rhetorics of analogies and similarities over those of hostility and differences. The Spanish historian Eloy Martín Corrales explains the positive Spanish perception of Morocco, among other things, with the personal contacts between both peoples and, thus, with a leveling of prejudices.48 This explanation might be true; however, there surely is another one, too. Spain’s interest in expanding its economical as well as political influence in Morocco augmented with the 1860s Hispano-Moroccan peace treaty, and it significantly enhanced a fraternal rhetoric in order to overcome or at least to disguise hostilities that might hinder the desired expansion. In the following, I will try to exemplify both assumptions – that of personal contact as well as that of colonial interests.

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In the course of his diary, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón gets to know some Moroccans personally. They are, above all, prisoners of war, which means we need to have in mind that significant differences of power position marked those encounters. When Alarcón meets Omar-ben-Mohamed, a Moroccan soldier quartered in the hospital of Ceuta, they start to talk about the animosities between Spaniards and Moroccans. “The principal reason for the moor’s hatred towards the Spaniards,” Omar states, “is the fear or disdain with which they [the Spaniards, S.M.] observe the Empire of Morocco. . . . This fear . . . makes us suspect that you consider us as enemies, and that, if we went to Spain, we would be in the same danger you are afraid to find in our land.”49 It is a quite peculiar twist Omar brings in by declaring the own hatred to be a product of the other’s hatred and vice versa. In the end, this explanation reduces the mutual animosity to absurdity. “Yet,” Alarcón returns to his interlocutor, “the moors detest us, because they remember that they had been in Spain throughout eight centuries, from where they believe they were unjustly dispossessed.”50 At this point, the conversation shifts from the confirmation of differences to the discovery of similarities, finding in the city of Granada their common ground, yet Omar’s ancestors had lived there before they were expelled from Spain.51 After they have found out about their common place of origin, Alarcón, in an emotional outburst, invites Omar “with true effusion” to come to Spain.52 Their conversation is interrupted. Nevertheless, it can serve as an illustrative example of the ambivalent Spanish-Moroccan modes of comparing, between differentiation on the one hand and searching for congruence on the other hand, as well as it demonstrates the ability and the facility of both interlocutors to switch between these modes even in the same conversation. In various contemporary Spanish works on Morocco, we can find references to Granada as a connecting place. The city, in the eyes of Spanish travelers, obviously seemed the ideal point of reference to create a common ground with their Moroccan interlocutors. However, the memory of Granada was ambiguous, because it did not only stand for a historical connection, but it also symbolized Spain’s final victory over the Moorish kings. The opportunity of rhetorical switches between familiarity and animosity, between friendship and subjugation becomes clear, yet referring to Granada as a connecting place, in the end could also be interpreted as reminding the Muslim counterpart of Spanish-Christian superiority and domination and, with that, historically justified Spain’s colonial intervention. On the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar, the city of Tétouan especially became a shared space, able to blur geographical, national, as well as historical boundaries.53 Many of its residents were descendants of Spanish Jews and Muslims who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had been expelled from their place of origin and fled to Northern Africa.

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In the eyes of Spanish military and travelers, Tétouan had a privileged status, yet it almost seemed European and, thus, culturally as well as historically closer to Spain than the rest of Morocco. In the course of the ‘African War’ the Spanish troops occupied the city of Tétouan – an occasion that was not only enormously celebrated by the Spaniards, but also forced the Moroccan sultan to surrender to Spain and accept the payment of war reparations.54 When Pedro Antonio de Alarcón entered the outskirts of Tétouan together with the Spanish troops, he wrote: Well, Tétouan is Granada! . . . the plains, the boundary of its horizon, its color, its air, its light, the entire region reminds of the plains of Granada. The same dark greenness, the same luxery of fruit trees, the same farmhouses. . . . Ah! The illusion is complete.55 But also the city itself reminded him of its Andalusian equivalent: The town I saw . . . was the town of my memories, that of my dreamy fantasy, that of my loves of a poet. It was the oriental town, the Arabic town. . . . It was the secret of a forgotton history; it was the reality of my illusions as a child; it was 14th century Granada.56 As we have already seen, Morocco in general and its people and towns in particular served as objects of projection for the Romantic search for remnants of medieval Spain. Alarcón’s enthusiasm to find in Tétouan a copy of medieval Granada must be understood in this context. Yet, the equation of the two towns may not just be interpreted as a product of Alarcón’s Romantic thinking, but also as a product of imperial dreams, because in the end it equated Spain’s victory over Granada in 1492 with the Spanish occupation of Tétouan in 1860 and, thus, legitimated the occupation as a historical continuity. However, Alarcón does not only equate the occupation with the final Spanish victory over the Moorish kings, but also with the famous conquests that founded Spain’s imperial ‘golden age’ in the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries.57 At this point, the Spanish longing for imperial recuperation becomes visible.

Discovering Spain’s In-betweenness – Colonialism in Fraternal Disguise As already mentioned, since the early nineteenth century Spain’s Moorish past was increasingly instrumented as an explanation for its intermediary position between the East and the West, Africa and Europe, Orient and Occident. This intermediate position, in the eyes of Spanish Africanists and politicians, predestined it for a colonizing mission in Africa. The

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French invasion of Northern Africa in 1830 and the following FrenchMoroccan war in the 1840s preoccupied the Spanish government, which feared not only to be outstripped as a colonial player in Northern Africa, but also to become surrounded by France even in the south. Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853),58 a conservative Spanish politician, theologian, influential political theorist, and member of Spanish parliament in the 1840s, had criticized the French interventions in Northern Africa as the attempt to assimilate “the most extreme barbaric into the most advanced civilization.”59 “Assimilation is impossible,” he detected in his congress speech in 1847, “except between bordering civilizations.”60 Spain, in his opinion, was the ideal example of this kind of bordering civilization, being at the same time European and African, advanced and barbaric, cultured and primitive.61 Juan Donoso Cortés is described as one of the first Spanish “Africanists”62 – a group of people that were interested in Africa, its languages and cultures, this interest being predominantly accompanied by colonial intentions, especially in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Scientific findings as well as travel accounts describing geological, cultural, and biological analogies between Spain and Morocco were used to depict a mutual inclination between Spain and Morocco and to derive a particular Spanish debt from this inclination. At the congress of Africanists, held in Madrid in 1884, many important Africanists spoke to an audience of approximately fifteen hundred people gathering in the Spanish capital’s Alhambra Theatre.63 The discourses of analogies, of historical, biological, and cultural similarities were overwhelming. In his congress speech, the Africanist Joaquín Costa (1846–1911) stated: “Iberia is a botanical province of Africa. . . . Spain and Morocco are like two halves of one geographical unit.”64 Influenced by scientific racism,65 Costa claimed that a dominant Mediterranean race had developed at both shores, due to their geographical proximity. In his eyes, these geographical as well as racial or biological analogies explained the cultural similarities and mutual affection: “Between Spaniards and Moroccans, there exists a certain secret attraction, which can only be explained by some kinship uniting them, strengthened and confirmed by secular influences of the natural environment.”66 In the end, all this justified not only Spain’s particular interest in Africa, but also its undeniable mission to release the Moroccans from supposed misery: Regarding this background, we can explain the origin of this instinctive affection Spaniards and Moroccans feel for each other, and which leads the former to place the ground of their ideals in Morocco, and the latter to base their hopes for redemption in Spain.67 In Spanish colonial discourse, similarities between Spain and Africa were stressed, although to a certain extend distorted. Africa, and especially

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Morocco, was presented as stagnated, and thus, as a kind of remnant of Spain’s medieval past. The narration of underdeveloped Morocco was transformed into a particular Spanish obligation of helping Morocco to overcome its supposed miserable status. Just as the Arabs had once brought civilization to underdeveloped Iberia in the Early Middle Ages, the Africanists argued, it was now Spain’s duty to bring civilization to stagnated Morocco. Or, as Francisco Coello (1822–1898), cartographer and one of the founders of the Spanish ‘Society of Africanists,’ proclaimed at the Congress of Africanists in 1884: [W]e have a debt to pay to the Moroccans, because at the same time as they dominated us, they left us fertile seeds, which contributed to develop our agriculture, our arts and scientific knowledge . . . and this debt we have to pay them back by conquering Morocco, not with arms . . . but with civilization.68

Conclusion In twentieth-century Spain, the discussion about the historical SpanishMoorish relationship went on.69 It accompanied the formation of the Spanish protectorate in Morocco (1912–1956) as well as the employment of Moroccan soldiers in Franco’s nationalist army during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939).70 Probably the most important representatives of the conflicting discourses on the nature of the Spanish-Moorish relationship were the historians Américo Castro and Claudio SánchezAlbornoz.71 In his work on España en su historia, written in exile from Franco Spain, Américo Castro stressed the importance of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity for the formation of a specific Spanish hybrid identity.72 In his opinion, even Santiago Matamoros can be seen as the result of Muslim influence and as a Spanish reaction to this. Just as the Muslim prophet Muhammad, Santiago represented a warrior saint, and his shrine in the city of Santiago de Compostela became a ‘Mekka’ for Christians from all over Europe.73 If this interpretation is true or not, in any event it exemplifies how, even in the most violently laden image of SpanishMuslim animosity as represented by Santiago Matamoros, the hybridity of Spanish identity as well as the ambivalent options of comparing can become visible. As we have seen, the Spanish agents’ perception of the Moroccans shifted from antagonism to kinship and vice versa, depending on specific circumstances as well as on personal experiences. Whereas the discourse of difference was considerably dominant during the so-called African War, it changed significantly in view of Spain’s increasing colonial interests after the 1860s peace treaty. However, although notions of similarity and fraternity now ostensibly prevailed, a strong imbalance of power position still marked these notions, resulting from the Spanish self-perception as

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being militarily, politically, nationally, as well as morally more powerful than its inferior ‘little brother’ Morocco. This discourse of ‘unequal similarity’ represented a fertile ground for Spanish colonial discourse, yet it allowed stressing a supposed historical debt to help the Moroccan brother by colonizing him. Finally, I would like to draw attention to a group of people I deal with in my doctoral thesis:74 Spanish prisoners and soldiers of the prison camps in Ceuta and Melilla who escaped or deserted to Morocco and converted to Islam. The Spanish perception of those renegades can illustrate once more Spain’s ambivalent relationship towards Islam in general and Morocco in particular, oscillating between repulsion and recognition. In the course of the war, the image of the renegades was even worse than that of the ‘Moors’ themselves, as by crossing national as well as religious boundaries, they had betrayed their fatherland and their faith. However, in the Africanist discourse of the end of the nineteenth century, the renegades rather seemed to prove Spanish-Moroccan kinship and, thus, legitimated Spanish colonial intervention: “How fast our deserters and prisoners adapt to the customs and life of Morocco!,” Joaquín Costa exclaimed to his audience in 1884. If you want to know the reason for that, don’t ask me for explanation. Search it in yourselves; search it in what there is of Oriental and African in the Spaniards and of Spanish in the Berbers. . . . And then tell me, if it is not the voice of blood that calls us, if it is not the fate of legacy that pulls Spaniards and Moroccans towards each other, in order to establish one social unit in history, like their territories constitute one geographical unit in the planet.75

Notes 1. On the ambiguous contemporary meanings of the Spanish term moro, ranging from geographical (Maghrib) to religious (Muslim) connotations, see La Academia Española, ed., Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1852), 464. In the following, I will use the English translation “Moor” in quotation marks to point out this ambiguity. 2. See Eloy Martín Corrales, La imagen del magrebí en España: Una perspectiva histórica siglos XVI-XX (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2002); Eloy Martín Corrales, “El ‘moro’, decano de los enemigos exteriores de España: una larga enemistad (siglos VIII-XXI),” in Los enemigos de España. Imagen del otro, conflictos bélicos y disputas nacionales (siglos XVI-XX), Actas del IV Coloquio Internacional de Historia Politíca, 5–6 de junio de 2008, ed. Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas and Francisco Sevillano Calero (Marid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2010), 165–82; Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra, La imagen de los musulmanes y del Norte de Africa en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII: Los caracteres de una hostilidad (Madrid: CSIC, 1989). 3. On the mutual connection of Moroccan and Spanish history and its instrumentality, see Eric Calderwood, Colonial Al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture (Cambridge/London: The Belknap Press of

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Sara Mehlmer Harvard University Press, 2018). On the role of Morocco’s and Spain’s “liminal” status, between Islam and Christianity, Europe and Africa, see Amira K. Bennison, “Liminal States: Morocco and the Iberian Frontier between the Twelfth and Nineteenth Century,” in North Africa, Islam and the Mediterranean World: From the Almoravids to the Algerian War, ed. Julia ClancySmith (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 11–28. Other scholars have dealt with topics related to Spanish orientalism, colonialism, and Spanish identity on a broader level. The literary scholar Susan Martin-Márquez analyzes the impact that Spain’s rediscovery of its own Muslim past, together with the adaption of nineteenth-century orientalism and scientific racism, had on Spanish identity building. Eric Calderwood completes the former study by investigating the influence Spanish colonialism had on the formation of Moroccan culture and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, the Spanish historian Bernabé López García analyzes the connection between Spanish Arabism and orientalism on the one hand and Spanish colonialism on the other hand. See Susan Martin-Márquez, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2008); Calderwood, Colonial Al-Andalus; Bernabé López García, Orientalismo e ideología colonial en el arabismo español (1840–1917) (Granada: University of Granada, 2011). Instead of presenting just another overview of the ambivalent relationship between Spain and North Africa, I will focus especially on the initial phase of modern Spanish colonialism in Africa in order to depict concrete practices of comparing in this context. I will argue that different perceptions of the “Moor” were, to a large extent unproblematically, exchangeable, depending on certain circumstances and contexts. Thus, differentiating and equating must be seen as flexible practices rather than as exclusive alternatives, which contradicted each other. In his classical study Edward Said defined “orientalism,” amongst other things, as a form of Western perception of the “Orient” as fundamentally different and inferior to the “Occident” – a perception that legitimized domination and subjugation of the “Orient” on behalf of the West. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism, reprinted with a new Preface (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 2–3. Said’s understanding of “the West” basically grounded on France and Great Britain and, thus, neglected other, especially southern European states, whose relation towards “the East” was fundamentally different to the British or French ones. On this critique see, for example, Martin-Márquez, Disorientations, 8; Calderwood, Colonial Al-Andalus, 19–21. Of outstanding importance on this topic are the works of the Spanish historian Bernabé López García. See López García, Orientalismo e ideología colonial; Bernabé López García, “Arabismo y Orientalismo en España: Radiografía y diagnostico de un gremio escaso y apartadizo,” Awraq 11 (1990): 35–69. Eric Calderwood demonstrates convincingly how “[a] Spanish way of talking about Morocco became a Moroccan way of talking about Morocco.” Calderwood, Colonial Al-Andalus, 9. Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África (Madrid: Gaspar y Roig, 1859). On Pedro Antonio de Alarcón see the anthology edited by José Antonio González Alcantud and José Antonio, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón y la guerra de África: Del entusiasmo romántico a la compulsión colonial (Rubi (Barcelona): Anthropos, 2004). See Mariano Delgado, “Nation und Religion in den ‘zwei Spanien:’ Der Kampf um die nationale Identität 1812–1980,” in Religion und Nation: Katholizismen im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Urs Altermatt and Franziska Metzger (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007), 51–68; José Álvarez

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

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Junco, Mater dolorosa: La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2005), 305–41. The anthropologist Christiane Stallaert uses the term “biological Christianity” (“cristianismo biológico”) to describe the strong connection between religious and ethnical/biological elements in the formation of Spanish identity. See Christiane Stallaert, Etnogénesis y etnicidad en España: Una aproximación histórico-antropológica al casticismo (Barcelona: Proyecto A, 1998). On the concept of limpieza de sangre, see Stallaert, Ethnogénesis, 32–6. See Henk Driessen, “Mock Battles between Moors and Christians: Playing the Confrontation of Crescent with Cross in Spain’s South,” Ethnologia Europaea 15 (1985): 105–15. For a historical overview on Ceuta and Melilla, see Máximo Cajal, Ceuta, Melilla, Olivenza y Gibraltar ¿Dónde acaba España? (Madrid: siglo veintiuno, 2003), 93–123. See Ricardo García Cárcel, La leyenda negra: Historia y opinión (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992); Martin-Márquez, Disorientations, 41. See, among others, Martin-Márquez, Disorientations, 18–27. Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1832), 4. Alexandre Dumas is said to have coined the proverb ‘Africa begins in the Pyrenees,’ although Eric Calderwood proved this origin to be false. See Eric Calderwood, “The Invention of Al-Andalus: Discovering the Past and Creating the Present in Granada’s Islamic Tourism Sites,” The Journal of North African Studies 19, no. 1 (2014): 27–55, 40, footnote 19. On the subject of Spanish orientalism, see López García, Orientalismo e ideología colonial; Victor Morales Lezcano, Africanismo y orientalismo Español en el siglo XIX (Madrid: UNED, 1988), as well as the anthology published by José Antonio González Alcantud, ed., El orientalismo desde el sur (Barcelona et al.: Anthropos, 2006). See, for example, the inaugural lecture held by Francisco Javier Simonet, a famous Spanish Arabist, at the University of Granada in 1862. On Simonet’s ambiguous views of Spain’s Muslim past in general and his lecture of 1862 in particular, see López García, Orientalismo e ideología colonial, 101–7. Martin-Márquez, Desorientation, 9. The New York Times, April 1898, quoted from Martin-Márquez, Disorientations, 42. See Martin-Márquez, Disorientations, 50–1. Whereas in Moroccan literature the war between Spain and Morocco was called ‘Tétouan war’ or ‘Spanish-Moroccan war,’ in Spain it received the term ‘African War,’ which made it seem much bigger than it was. See Joan Serrallonga Urquidi, “La guerra de África (1859–1860): Una revisión,” Ayer 29 (1998): 139–59, 139. In view of its reduced geographical extension, the historian Richard Pennell describes the Spanish-Moroccan war of 1859 as “a border squabble blown up into a war.” Richard Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (London: Hurst, 2000), 64. See Edmund Burke, III, Prelude to Protectorate: Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860–1912 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976); Eloy Martín Corrales, ed., Marruecos y el colonialismo español (1859–1912): De la guerra de África a la “penetración pacífica” (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2002). Germain Ayache, “Aspects de la crise financière au Maroc après l’éxpédition espagnole de 1860,” Revue Historique 220, no. 2 (1958): 271–310. See Abdellah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretative Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015 [1977; first edition in French 1970]), 322; Jean-Louis Miège, Le Maroc et l’Europe (1830–1894), vol. II:

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25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

Sara Mehlmer L’ouverture (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 369–93; Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 66–70. See José Álvarez Junco, “El nacionalismo español como mito movilizador: Cuatro guerras,” in Cultura y movilización en la España contemporánea, ed. Rafael Cruz and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (Madrid: Alianza, 1997), 35–67. El Estado (17–11–1859), quoted from: Marie-Claude Lécuyer and Carlos Serrano, La Guerre d‘Afrique et ses répercussions en Espagne: Idéologies et colonialisme en Espagne 1859–1904 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976), 66. All subsequent quotes are my own translations. See Martín Corrales, La imagen del magrebí, 59. El León español (27–8–1859), quoted from: Lécuyer and Serrano, La Guerre d‘Afrique, 62. Alarcón, Diario, III. Ibid. Rafael del Castillo, El honor de España: Episodios de la guerra de Marruecos (Madrid: Imprenta de Don Antonio Gracia y Orga, 1859), 41–2. Alarcón, Diario, 38. La Esperanza (25–10–1859), quoted from: Lécuyer and Serrano, La Guerre d’Afrique, 74. See Martín Corrales, La imagen del Magrebí, 60. See Álvarez Junco, “El nacionalismo español,” 47–8. Alarcón, Diario, 14. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 27. Ibid. Ibid., 37. Al-Andalus as a reference point was and is still used in Spain as well as in Morocco in order to stress their respective role as intermediaries between the West and the East or their tolerant policy regarding religious differences. See José Antonio González Alcantud, Al Ándalus y lo andaluz: Al Ándalus en el imaginario y en la narración histórica española (Córdoba: Almuzara, 2017); Calderwood, Colonial Al-Adnalus. Alarcón, Diario, III. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 91–2. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 46. See José Antonio González Alcantud, Lo moro: Las lógicas de la derrota y la formación del estereotipo islámico (Rubí (Barcelona): Anthropos, 2002). Eloy Martín Corrales, La imagen del Maghrebí, 48. Alarcón, Diario, 73–4. Ibid., 74. Ibid. Ibid. On Granada and Tétouan as places of mutual reference between Moroccans and Spaniards, see Calderwood, Colonial Al-Andalus, 30–73. Although Tétouan should remain occupied until Morocco had fulfilled the payment, the Spaniards left the town in 1862 without having received the whole sum of war reparations. This was criticized by many Spaniards, yet without clear financial or territorial profits, the peace seemed quite small regarding the high costs of the war. The Spanish proverb ‘small peace of a great war’ was created in this context. Alarcón, Diario, 105. Ibid., 190.

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57. Alarcón refers on Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, and Ferdinand Magellan to position the occupation of Tétouan in a historical line with the “golden Age” of Spanish imperialism. Alarcón, Diario, 183. 58. “Juan Donoso Cortés,” in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. www.iep. utm.edu/donoso/, accessed May 31, 2019. See also Martin-Márquez, Disorientations, 52. 59. Juan Donoso Cortés, “Discurso sobre Relaciones de España con otras potencias,” in Obras de D. Juan Donoso Cortés, vol. 3, ed. Gavino Tejado (Madrid: Imprenta de Tejado, 1854), 145–69, 153–4. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. See Martin-Márquez, Disorientations, 52. On the Society of Spanish Africanists see Azucena Pedraz Marcos, Quimeras de Africa: La Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas: El colonialismo español de finales del siglo XIX (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 2000). 63. The event was financed by the Spanish Society of Africanists and Colonialists in order to augment the civilian support for Spain’s intervention in Morocco. See Martin-Márquez, Disorientations, 57. 64. Joaquín Costa, Intereses de España en Africa: Discursos pronunciados . . . en el meeting celebrado en el Teatro de la Alhambra el dia 30 de marzo de 1884 por la Sociedad española de Africanistas y Colonistas (Madrid: Fortanet, 1884), 13–14. 65. On the Spanish discourse on race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Joshua Goode, Impurity of blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). 66. Costa, Intereses de España, 14. 67. Ibid., 15. 68. Francisco Coello in Intereses de España, 11. 69. For an overview, see Hisham Aidi, “The Interference of Al-Andalus: Spain, Islam and the West,” Social Text 87 24, no. 2 (2000): 67–88. 70. On this topic, see Maria Rosa de Madariaga, Los moros que trajo Franco (Madrid: Alianza, 2015). 71. See Aidi, “The Interference of Al-Andalus,” 70 f. 72. See Américo Castro, España en su historia (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1948). 73. See Aidi, “The Interference of Al-Andalus,” 71. 74. See Sara Mehlmer, Grenzleben zwischen Religion und Realpolitik: Ceuta und Melilla um 1860 [draft title], forthcoming. 75. Costa, Intereses de España, 17.

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La Academia Española, ed. Diccionario de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1852. Laroui, Abdellah. The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretative Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015 [1977; first edition in French 1970]. Lécuyer, Marie-Claude, and Carlos Serrano. La Guerre d‘Afrique et ses répercussions en Espagne: Idéologies et colonialisme en Espagne 1859–1904. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976. López García, Bernabé. “Arabismo y Orientalismo en España: Radiografía y diagnostico de un gremio escaso y apartadizo.” Awraq 11 (1990): 35–69. ———. Orientalismo e ideología colonial en el arabismo español (1840–1917). Granada: University of Granada, 2011. Madariaga, Maria Rosa de. Los moros que trajo Franco. Madrid: Alianza, 2015. Martín Corrales, Eloy. “El ‘moro’, decano de los enemigos exteriores de España: una larga enemistad (siglos VIII-XXI).” In Los enemigos de España: Imagen del otro, conflictos bélicos y disputas nacionales (siglos XVI-XX), Actas del IV Coloquio Internacional de Historia Politíca, 5–6 de junio de 2008, edited by Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas and Francisco Sevillano Calero, 165–82. Marid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2010. ———. La imagen del magrebí en España: Una perspectiva histórica siglos XVIXX. Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2002. ———, ed. Marruecos y el colonialismo español (1859–1912): De la guerra de África a la ‘penetración pacífica’. Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2002. Martin-Márquez, Susan. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2008. Mehlmer, Sara. Grenzleben zwischen Religion und Realpolitik: Ceuta und Melilla um 1860 [draft title], forthcoming. Miège, Jean-Louis. Le Maroc et l’Europe (1830–1894), vol. 2: L’ouverture. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961. Morales Lezcano, Victor. Africanismo y orientalismo Español en el siglo XIX. Madrid: UNED, 1988. Pedraz Marcos, Azucena. Quimeras de Africa: La Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas: El colonialismo español de finales del siglo XIX. Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 2000. Pennell, Richard. Morocco since 1830: A History. London: Hurst, 2000. Said, Edward W. Orientalism, reprinted with a new Preface. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Serrallonga Urquidi, Joan. “La guerra de África (1859–1860): Una revisión.” Ayer 29 (1998): 139–59. Stallaert, Christiane. Etnogénesis y etnicidad en España: Una aproximación histórico-antropológica al casticismo. Barcelona: Proyecto A, 1998.

7

Propaganda, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Politics of Comparison in the Early Cold War, 1945 to the 1960s Benno Nietzel

It might seem obvious that the culture of the Cold War had a lot to do with comparing or that it even essentially was about comparing. The United States and the Soviet Union represented antagonistic systems in conflict and competition. In the “imaginary war” that the struggle between these two superpowers and their blocs has been termed, it was often hardly determinable where immediate, yet unarmed conflict ended and ‘peaceful,’ yet aggressive competition began.1 Both were deeply intertwined. Consequently, the United States and the Soviet Union were not solely bound in a bilateral relationship of hostility, but were also part of a triadic structure in seeking to outdo each other in a global competition for legitimacy, allegiance, and support among the world population.2 Competition means comparing and to be compared. However, the proliferating Cold War studies have never focused systematically on how practices of comparison were involved in shaping an international culture that was oscillating between bipolar structures and perceptions and what Jason Parker recently called a “multipolar conversation.”3 This contribution makes a first step towards reading Cold War culture as a culture of comparison. Drawing on a vast body of literature, it explores how practices of comparison shaped the politics of propaganda and cultural diplomacy in the United States and the Soviet Union from the end of World War II to the beginning of the 1960s.4 During the emerging Cold War, both global superpowers engaged in a mutual propaganda battle, appealing simultaneously to their domestic publics, to the enemy population and, increasingly important, to an international audience that they were “addressing and imagining” simultaneously.5 Practices of comparison can be traced on three different levels: first, in the way Cold Warriors perceived themselves and their activities from a comparative point of view; second, in the presentation and suggestion of comparisons in international propaganda; and third, in comparisons made by those who were targets and receivers of this propaganda. Both superpowers were confronted by the fact that comparisons unfolded unforeseeable dynamics, as the way people interpreted and made use of them could not be fully predicted or controlled.

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Comparing Concepts: The Beginning of the US-Soviet Propaganda War The history of US public diplomacy is deeply rooted in World War II propaganda. During the war, the Unites States built up a large propaganda apparatus to foster the war effort, undermine the enemy’s morale, and explain America’s mission to the occupied people of Europe.6 After the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the Truman administration was contending with the issue of dismantling or maintaining the machinery for international propaganda. On the one hand, the United States had never had institutions for foreign information and propaganda work in peacetime, and large parts of the American public considered ‘propaganda’ an evil thing that the government should only employ under the pressing conditions of war. On the other hand, the emerging conflict with the Soviet Union made many politicians call for an international information service that would counter Communist international propaganda and serve as a voice of freedom and democracy in the world. Already during the World War, US overseas information struggled not only with the task of winning the war, but also with the distorted image of America among the peoples of Europe. In his final report to the president, Elmer Davis, director of the Office of War Information from 1942 to 1945, stressed the ongoing need to tell the world “what America is really like” if the United States were to assume a leading role in building a new world order.7 In the immediate postwar period, spokespeople for the continuation of an international information service advertised it as a contribution to global peace and mutual understanding. Political scientist Arthur MacMahon, in a memorandum on the future of overseas information, called for a “full and fair picture” of the United States to be presented to an international audience that did not exclude or conceal domestic problems and conflicts.8 In this idealistic perspective, factual information about America was not a continuation of wartime propaganda, but it was meant to answer and neutralize propaganda tendencies in the postwar world. The ‘full and fair picture’ approach served as a guiding principle for US international information in the decades to come, but it did not remain uncontested, nor was it always realized in pure forms. In the face of increasingly aggressive propaganda by the Soviet Union directed against the United States and its postwar policies, leading members of the international information staff, temporarily affiliated to the State Department, began to feel “that it is useless to pin our hopes on the ultimate effectiveness of high-principled objectivity and cultural cooperation.”9 The question was if in the emerging global conflict, the initial approach to counter propaganda with information would be sufficient or if the United States had to employ the same means as its opponent. In April 1947, pressed by leading officials in his department to reconsider US international

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information objectives and strategies, Secretary of State George Marshall still insisted that the overall principle of the overseas information program “must be to present nothing but the truth, in a completely factual and unbiased manner.” Embarking on a strategy to counteract Soviet propaganda and psychological warfare activities by equal means would inevitably play “directly into the hands of the Soviets who are masters in the use of such techniques.”10 However, as the Soviets intensified their anti-American propaganda, the conviction gained ground inside the administration as well as among Congress members that something had to be done. The threat posed by Communist propaganda now grew into the most important argument in the debate on the future of US overseas information. In September 1947, a group of Congressmen known as the Smith-Mundt group traveled to 22 European countries to investigate the state of US international information and the effects of Communist propaganda in the postwar economic distress. In their report to the Senate, they urged the US government to exert strong leadership “to counteract the insidious undermining of the free forces resisting communism” and to take “aggressive steps to carry the true story of her ideals, motives and objectives” to a demoralized European population.11 The Smith-Mundt Act of January 1948 put the overseas information activities of the United States on a legislative basis for the first time.12 In the subsequent years, US strategy in international information shifted towards a more aggressive and offensive stance against the challenge of Soviet propaganda while strongly adhering to its rhetoric of truth and objectivity. A State Department policy paper set as a new main goal for the overseas information program to address directly Soviet propaganda themes and to counteract anti-American charges and misrepresentations of US objectives and policies. The paper warned that US information programs “should not imitate the propaganda pattern of the Soviet Union” nor get lost in a fruitless game of accusations and counter-accusations, citing the “danger of other peoples equating the U.S. with the USSR.”13 If used in a targeted manner, truthful and objective information could be a mighty counter-weapon to expose and discredit Communist propaganda directed against the United States. President Truman was using the same language when, in April 1950, he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, proclaiming a grand “campaign of truth” against the worldwide danger of Communist propaganda. Truman described global communication as divided into two distinct spheres: one dominated by Communist imperialism that deliberately and systematically used “deceit, distortion and lies” to pursue its political aims and cut people off from accurate information, the other one being devoted to the free flow of ideas, freedom of speech, and the right for every human being to have access to the true story of world events. The United States and all Americans had a mission to teach the world about freedom as the basis of economic and social advancement,

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political independence, and the pursuit of happiness as well as to stand up against the propaganda of oppression and slavery.14 In the meantime, US foreign policy strategists worked out plans to leave a mere defensive position and take the initiative in the international propaganda war with the Soviet Union. This included means of psychological warfare that clearly transcended the ‘full and fair picture’ approach. In June 1948, the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency was charged by the National Security Council with conducting covert operations related to propaganda, sabotage, subversion against hostile states, and the support of anti-Communist resistance worldwide.15 One of the most-debated policy documents of the early Cold War, NSC 68, called for overt as well as covert psychological warfare operations to encourage mass defections from Soviet allegiance and to stimulate unrest and revolt inside the Communist orbit.16 In the same year, the clandestine radio station Radio Free Europe began to broadcast its programs to the peoples behind the Iron Curtain. In the practice of overseas information, a division of labor structure evolved during the 1950s: the Voice of America as the official broadcasting station of the US government and the United States Information Agency (USIA, established in 1953) were charged with providing factual and objective information about America and world relations (although they were continuously blamed to fall short of this standard and to be too ‘propagandistic’). Covert propaganda and psychological warfare measures were placed within the structure of the emerging security state. While the official information work of the United States presented itself as an absolute other and thus incomparable to Soviet propaganda, countermeasures of an equal type were considered legitimate but held non-attributable to state agencies.17 These US developments did not go unnoticed by Soviet propagandists, who in the postwar period were rebuilding and readjusting the vast propaganda machinery of the Communist state and party. In the Soviet Union, obviously, there was no general discussion about the issue of international propaganda after the victorious war against Nazi Germany. Propaganda was a key concept of Leninism and a self-evident means of politics, revolution, and class war. However, for the protagonists of Soviet foreign propaganda, the activities of the United States and other countries of the capitalist West became a main reference when they lobbied for a broader funding and for increased attention of the Central Committee for their work and the challenges they faced. When in early 1946, Solomon Lozovskii, head of the Soviet Information Bureau, reported to Andrei Zhdanov on the state of Soviet foreign propaganda, he extensively described the international information activities of the United States and Great Britain and compared them to the Soviet efforts to catch up in this field.18 As Soviet observers did not differentiate in their reports to their superiors between public and commercial activities in international mass communication, they could easily pass over the

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ongoing domestic debates on overseas information in the United States and merge all international media stemming from North America, public and private, into a giant machinery of anti-Soviet propaganda. When comparing the means the American media and publishing business had at its disposal to their own, Soviet propagandists –  pictured abroad as masters of suggestion and manipulation with a tremendous institutional power behind them – clearly felt themselves to be in the defensive. An issue that bothered the Communist party leaders was that after many years of almost complete international isolation, during World War II and in the postwar period, masses of Soviet citizens were brought into contact with Western countries and made “comparative experiences” that seemed potentially dangerous for the Stalinist system of power and its ideology.19 In order to rally the Soviet people around the cause of Socialist supremacy, the government launched a massive campaign to foster Soviet patriotism in which the Soviet model was pictured as fundamentally distinct from and superior to the capitalist West. As a ‘negative’ supplement to this campaign, plans were worked out to flood all available media channels with anti-American content designed to demonize the United States as the absolute other of Soviet socialism and enemy number one of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. In this social and cultural climate of late Stalinism, even putting the Soviet Union into a comparative view with America, not to speak of unfavorably comparing it to the United States, could prove life-threatening.20 In their self-evaluation with regard to enemy activities, American and Soviet propagandists used different points of comparison. American officials attached great importance to clearly separating the underlying concepts of US information work vs. Soviet propaganda and to avoiding being equated with their opponents. Their Soviet counterparts saw no need to worry in that respect. They took it for granted that both the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in an international propaganda battle, yet each fighting in the name of antagonistic interests and goals. Sneeringly recording American efforts to escape the label of ‘propaganda’ and dismissing them as dishonest and dissembling, Soviet observers did not take US debates on information vs. propaganda very seriously, as this play on words could not alter nor conceal what the ongoing war of words was all about.21

Comparing Audiences: Universal Appeals or Targeted Messages Speaking to a global public required new kinds of knowledge about the world. The mobilization of professional expertise for propaganda purposes in the United States and the Soviet Union differed largely. Soviet officials in the international propaganda apparatus continuously complained how their work was hampered by the lack of specialists for

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foreign countries. The authors who wrote materials for dissemination in specific countries often had no precise knowledge about local circumstances and the audience they were addressing.22 There were few hopes for an improvement of that situation, as at the beginning of the 1950s, scholarly institutions dealing with foreign countries and international relations were almost nonexistent. The problem of finding adequate forms of appealing to foreign populations was aggravated by the Stalinist discourse to which the idea that one and the same content could be presented in multiple ways according to specific situations was deeply suspicious. As only one objective truth existed, there could not be any leeway in terms of presentation. Although Soviet leaders repeatedly instructed foreign propagandists to take account of their specific target audiences, in the end, the sole criterion for judging their performance was how strictly they followed the predefined ideological patterns.23 While the Soviets soon realized that their propaganda directed toward the US population faced almost insurmountable obstacles, American policy strategists invested great energy in finding ways to reach the people behind the Iron Curtain and thus to penetrate and undermine the Soviet system. After the Soviets began to jam the programs of the Voice of America and other Russian-language broadcasts in 1949, the State Department launched ‘Project Troy,’ an interdisciplinary research group, to find ways of getting messages across the Iron Curtain. Administered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the group members delivered their final report to the Secretary of State in February 1951.24 The report suggested a couple of advanced techniques for carrying political information and propaganda content into enemy countries, but also transcended the group’s initial assignment by discussing what kind of content seemed suitable for the purposes of psychological warfare. The social scientists responsible for these parts of the report dismissed the existing strategy of US international information towards the Soviet population as a failure. Appealing to reason, correcting lies and misrepresentations in Communist propaganda, and presenting an alternative picture of the United States would only make sense “if we were addressing a country where the underlying sentiments, assumptions, and the general frame of reference were very similar to our own.”25 The Troy report recommended instead to formulate exclusively messages and contents that fit the frame of reference of Soviet recipients and referred to their personal values and experiences. Hence, psychological warfare measures should address the inherent frictions of Soviet society by suggesting, for instance, that Soviet politics had long ago departed from Marxist principles and ideals and that the Communist leadership had broken many of their promises. Project Troy was operating on the premise that in order to reach and influence the minds of foreign people, it was essential to study them and to understand their social and cultural dispositions.26 The conclusion to align all propaganda content according to the targeted audience did

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not, however, remain uncontested. State Department officials vigorously contradicted the Troy report, as it tended to downplay American values of freedom and democracy for the reason that they allegedly did not appeal to foreign people living under different political circumstances. They had no objections against directly comparing living conditions in the United States and in the Soviet Union in international information materials which the Troy report explicitly advised against.27 This was, to be sure, not a matter of scholarly vs. political arguments. Research in international communication during the 1950s was wavering over the question whether the mass media exerted their influence in the same way anywhere in the world. In 1950, the State Department commissioned another research project with the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University in order to find out about the potential audience of the Voice of America in several countries of the Middle East. This project was called the International Radio Project, and it was closely associated with German-speaking immigrants. One was Leo Löwenthal, who today is known for being a member of the Frankfurt school in sociology. In 1949, he became head of the program evaluation branch of the Voice of America and was in charge of improving the effectiveness of its programs. The second was Paul Lazarsfeld, an Austrian psychologist and sociologist, who immigrated to the United States in 1938 and became one of the founders of modern mass communication research.28 At the beginning, it was quite open where the project would be going. State Department officials offered little advice as to what exactly the researchers were expected to find out, as they knew literally nothing about the public in the Middle Eastern countries. They had little information on the population structure and did not know how many radio sets were in use in the region, how many people had access to radio receivers, what kind of people listened to foreign broadcasts, or why and how often they tuned in. So, a lot of basic information was lacking, and the project should deliver at least some of it. But the researchers were also supposed to offer recommendations on how the Voice of America could reach the people in the Middle East most effectively. Altogether, there were seventeen country reports and two summary reports with recommendations for Voice of America programs. One of the summary reports was written by Siegfried Kracauer, who is today commonly known for his work on the history and theory of film. His recommendation was to appeal to the lower middle classes of the Middle Eastern population and to concentrate on social themes like poverty, unemployment, prosperity, and economic development. A different approach was taken by Daniel Lerner, one of the most prominent experts on psychological warfare during World War II, who was in charge of writing the country report on Turkey. Lerner looked at the Middle Eastern media public rather from an anthropological perspective, and in the subsequent years, he turned the project data into a theory of modernization that was centered around

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media consumption.29 In his book The Passing of Traditional Society, Lerner contended that international mass communication was pivotal to the modernization of underdeveloped countries as it brought people into contact with other parts of the world. He suggested “that before any enduring transformation of the vicious circle of poverty can be started in the Middle East, people there will have to learn about the lifeways evolved in other societies.”30 Deeply embedded in the US-centered worldview of early modernization theory, Lerner was convinced that the United States and the Western world obviously represented the benchmark that other people wanted to reach since the moment they became exposed to them by way of international mass communication: “What the West is, in this sense, the Middle East seeks to become.”31 That was not only a scholarly proposition, but also reflected widespread convictions on the global impact of American culture that underlay the international information program during the 1950s.

Peaceful Coexistence and the Propaganda of Comparisons After the concept of ‘psychological warfare’ and the idea to roll back Soviet power in Europe loomed large in American rhetoric and strategic policy planning in the first half of the 1950s, the uprisings against Communist governments in Eastern Germany 1953 and in Hungary 1956 meant serious setbacks for an aggressive US strategy towards the Soviet Union and paved the way for more realistic approaches. Working against popular sympathies for the Soviet Union among the European population became less urgent, as the openly violent suppression of popular dissent severely diminished the prestige and the moral authority of the Soviet-led Communist bloc in Western Europe.32 Blatant anti-Soviet rhetoric and attacks on Communist ideology did not disappear altogether from the international information program, but they became less dominant, making way for a more positive approach of advertising the American way of life both to audiences in the free world as well as to the people behind the Iron Curtain. This reflected a shift from a political warfare approach to a long-term strategy of cultural infiltration by what came to be called “cultural diplomacy” towards the Soviet Union.33 In an address to Congress in 1947, President Truman had talked of two alternative ways of life between which every nation had to choose, juxtaposing a way of freedom and democracy and a way of terror and oppression.34 This was, obviously, not a choice between equivalent options. During the 1950s, then, US propaganda for the American way of life was increasingly based on the suggestion that any political or social system was working towards the same goal – to provide its people with the highest attainable standard of living. Overseas information materials invited an international audience to draw comparisons in order to demonstrate that the American political and economic system performed

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best in that respect. In a pamphlet published by the Advertising Council for USIA dissemination abroad, the fact that “today the American way of life provides the highest level of living ever enjoyed by any people in all history” was explained by the high and still increasing productivity of American workers, which was intrinsically linked to a system of free enterprise and limited state intervention into economic matters.35 Answering canonical Soviet propaganda charges that working people in the United States were suffering from impoverishment and exploitation by the ruling class of capitalists, USIA materials put labor conditions and the life of ordinary workers in America into the center of international information programs. “The story of United States industrial progress can best be told in terms of the life of the average American worker – how he lives, how he works and what benefits he has,” as a feature story had it in 1957.36 As American workers earned more money in less time than in other countries of the world, they could buy a much higher amount of consumer goods. While cars and household equipment as symbols of the American world of consumption featured largely in USIA materials, they also constructed comparisons nearer to the basic needs of Soviet workers, contrasting the worktime required to buy a unit of bread, potatoes, beef, and sugar in Moscow and New York City (Figure 7.1). Later comparisons demonstrated that the purchasing power of Soviet workers made only modest progress, while it continued to increase rapidly in the United States. In certain areas, the Soviet Union was much nearer to Belgian Congo than to Western countries (Figure 7.2). To unify the stories of American economic progress and prosperity into an overall framework, the USIA developed the ‘People’s Capitalism’ campaign, which was launched with an inaugural exhibition in February 1956. The man behind it was Theodore Repplier, president of the Advertising Council and personal adviser to President Eisenhower, who after an evaluation of the overseas information program advocated for a positive scheme to counter Soviet propaganda by focusing on “a moralistic idea with the power to stir men’s imagination.”37 ‘People’s Capitalism’ suggested the idea that in the United States a new form of capitalism had evolved that had nothing in common with the inhuman system that loomed large in Communist theory and propaganda. American capitalism was not based on the interests of the ruling class, but enjoyed almost unanimous support among the masses of ordinary citizens. The slogan, although maintaining the dichotomy between capitalism and communism, built a bridge between American and Soviet discourse by appropriating the concept of “people’s democracies” and transforming it into a description of the US system.38 Under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the post-Stalinist Soviet Union also moved from dichotomist to a comparative self-positioning visà-vis the United States as its main adversary in the Cold War. The motives behind this shift were manifold. Khrushchev honestly believed that the

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Figure 7.1 Department of Labour Study for the USIA, 1953 Source: National Archives

threat of a global war between the superpowers had to be avoided and could make way for a period of peaceful competition in which the socialist system would inevitably prevail in the long run. Opening the Soviet Union towards international exchange and personal interactions with foreigners was an important element in assuring the world that Soviet citizens were not ideology-driven fanatics, but ordinary and peace-loving

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Figure 7.2 Poster-chart by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1958 Source: National Archives

people whose aspirations in life were common to most other people in the world. The Communist leaders also recognized growing interest abroad about the everyday life of ordinary people in the Soviet Union, and they wanted to correct the widespread prejudice against the country’s population as being uncivilized and backward.39 It was clear that comparisons between the United States and the Soviet state with regard to the material standard of living and the availability of consumer goods were unfavorable for the moment, but Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders of his generation showed deep conviction that time would change the tide in the competition of economic systems and that the Soviet Union would “catch up and overtake” the West in the foreseeable future.40 In the second half of the 1950s, Soviet delegations of artists, journalists, and technical experts visited the United States, and the Communist leadership allowed for and even stimulated the reflection and discussion of their comparative experiences with America. Comparisons to the Cold War adversary were now seen as a vitalizing and motivating force in the Soviet struggle for a better life. As the United States was ahead in the production of consumer goods and the material living standard, these comparisons allowed for looks into a future that would be approaching soon. Studying American accomplishments and picking things suitable to be transplanted to the Soviet context could accelerate domestic economic development. However, continuous comparison to the Capitalist West was a two-edged sword. It exposed current Soviet vulnerabilities and weaknesses and tied the Communist leaders to their promises of raising the domestic living standard significantly in the years to come. It also established the United States as the main reference and benchmark in assessing the Soviet path of development and modernization.41 In 1957, the Soviets found a way to escape the race for a consumer’s society, when they launched Sputnik, the first human-made satellite, into

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orbit and shocked the world with this display of technological advancement and leadership. Almost immediately, Sputnik was put in the center of Soviet worldwide cultural diplomacy. The thematic plan for the 1958 universal exhibition in Brussels, in which technology initially was a mere one of four major themes, was changed to feature replicas of Sputnik I and II as the centerpieces of the Soviet pavilion.42 Soviet cultural diplomacy missed no opportunity to stress that the spectacular achievements in space technology were intrinsically linked to the Communist economic system. The launch of Sputnik, carried into space by a rocket of the same name, not only demonstrated that the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in the field of science and technology, but also suggested that the Soviets outscored its Cold War adversary in terms of military power. Nikita Khrushchev himself repeatedly bragged before an international audience about the Soviet capacity to produce long-range missiles in any quantity desired.43 The Communist leader now seemed to talk from a position of superiority. The agreement on bilateral cultural exchange that the United States and the Soviet Union concluded in 1958 opened the way for unprecedented personal encounters between the Capitalist West and the Communist bloc on a mass basis. Reciprocal national exhibitions were the main vehicles of this new level of exchange. The Soviets opened a national exhibition in New York during the early summer of 1959, which was followed by an American exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow shortly after. The two exhibitions presented unique opportunities for propaganda planners to make an impact in the heart of enemy territory. In their New York exhibition, the Soviet planners played the card of technological advancement once again, setting the focus on the latest achievements in a variety of scientific disciplines and their application in industrial production. Predictably, the US counter-exhibition centered on consumer goods and the comfortable living standard ordinary Americans enjoyed. In his opening speech, Vice President Richard Nixon lectured to a Soviet audience that an average factory worker in America “can buy and afford to own a house, a television set, and a car in the price range of those you will see in this Exhibit.”44 A main feature of the Moscow exhibition was an American model kitchen, furnished with the latest technical equipment, which served as the stage for Vice President Nixon and General Secretary Khrushchev to dispute the rivalry and competition between their nations. US foreign policy strategists were convinced that displaying the American way of life to others would serve their cause of infiltrating and finally breaking the Soviet system. They turned the exhibition into a propaganda vehicle “aimed to instill envy, delegitimate the regime, and ruin the Soviet economy by raising demands for products available only to Western consumers.”45 Triumphalist interpretations of Cold War history have taken this goal as a fact that helps to explain what finally brought the Soviet

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system down. Walter Hixson, in his standard account of US cultural diplomacy in the 1950s, maintains: The teeming crowds at Sokolniki now knew, from first-hand experience, that their country lagged well behind the United States in the quality of life that it could provide to consumers. The images and symbols of American life had made a profound impression. Most Soviets, it seemed, were still willing to be patient and give the socialist system the time it needed to catch up with the West. Thirty years later, their patience would come to an end.46 Contemporary perceptions of Soviet visitors’ reactions to the Moscow exhibition inside the US administration were much more mixed and contentious. A preliminary report by the USIA challenged widespread, yet uncritical claims among American officials that the exhibition was a stunning success and, as some US media reported, a “smash hit” for the local population.47 Drawing on reports by the Russian-speaking exhibition guides, the USIA report cited frequent voices of dissatisfaction among the Soviet visitors. What disappointed quite a number of them was the fact that the exhibition focused so heavily on ready-to-use consumer goods while completely omitting the technical production process behind which was of much greater interest to them than the products. There was also widespread criticism that the exhibition was weak in displaying the latest technological achievements from the United States. Many Soviet visitors acknowledged that Americans had a comfortable life and enjoyed plenty of nice consumer goods, but for them that was not the decisive point in comparing the two countries. Being very much aware of the competitive character of the two reciprocal exhibitions, they expected them to present the top end of what a socio-economic system could achieve in technology and science, not what it could deliver to the masses of ordinary people.48 The Sputnik launch and its massive exploitation in Soviet international propaganda profoundly challenged US convictions to base the image of America as the world’s leading nation on the material standard of living of its population. What added largely to the shock caused by the Soviet satellite program was that it disproved long-held anti-Communist beliefs that the Soviet economic system was backward and unable to produce creative innovations.49 In his last two years in office, President Eisenhower became under heavy pressure from an American public demanding an immediate reaction to the Soviet advance in space technology. Surveys of world opinion pointed to the fact that the launch of Sputnik had a very real impact on judgements of US vs. Soviet scientific superiority and that many people considered the Soviet Union to be ahead of the United States in scientific development.50 Another report concluded that the USSR, by having overtaken the US in a field in which the US was generally assumed to be the first by a wide margin, is now able to

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present itself as a power fully comparable to the US, superior in some fields, and able to challenge it in any way.51 Having underestimated the propaganda impact of the Soviet space program, Eisenhower persistently tried to avoid being forced into a race that would eat up large amounts of federal money for the sake of mere propagandistic symbolism. Stressing his conviction to prioritize space projects with a higher scientific significance, the President publicly dismissed expectations to compete with the Soviets in every single area.52 However, he could not escape the fact that many Americans did not accept the idea of the US being second in anything and that advancement in space technology had, unlikely enough, become the main point of comparison between the two superpowers in the eyes of millions of people inside the United States and around the globe.

From Peaceful Coexistence to World Prestige The emerging space race between the United States and the Soviet Union had deep repercussions in US domestic politics. Public opinion surveys reported that the Soviet lead in space technology development was transforming into the widespread impression that the Soviet Union was leading in science and in overall military strength generally.53 Now the US focus on consumerism heavily backfired, as it fueled the stereotype of a self-complacent, well-fed American who was enjoying a comfortable life while being unaware that the Communist bloc surpassed the West in crucial areas of technological development and thus posed a severe threat to the American way of life. It also scratched the public image of Eisenhower who, though being a military man by profession, now appeared to have lost his sense of what was essential in the global conflict between the superpowers. In the 1960 presidential election, Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy built his campaign largely on charges that by allowing the Soviets to take the lead in space and military technology, the Eisenhower administration had severely damaged the international prestige of the United States. The issue of ‘world prestige’ became one of the most decisive factors in the battle for the White House between Kennedy and Nixon. By forcing the United States into a comparison of advancement in space technology, the Soviets not only shaped American political culture for the years to come, but also made a crucial step towards being accepted as equally ranked to the US in the eyes of an international audience. However, the focus on high-end technology and the space race had its own dynamic the Soviets could not escape either, as it put them into a competition in which they could hardly succeed in the long run. The dynamics of Cold War comparisons unfolded in three respects. Both superpowers were pushing for points of comparison in the global competition for prestige and support that they deemed favorable for themselves and detrimental to the opponent. However, it could hardly

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be foreseen if a current advantage could be secured in the future once a common reference frame for comparative judgements had been established. Transitory successes in the Cold War competition could thus turn into a burden, as they implied the obligation to stay in the lead in fields considered significant in the West vs. East comparison. Finally, as in any act of communication, especially in transcultural settings, people often made up their minds about suggested comparisons in a way that contradicted the ideas and intentions behind them. The recipients’ reactions had to be monitored, and propaganda strategies constantly readjusted. Practices of comparing and their dynamics were an important factor in keeping the Cold War conflict going.

Notes 1. Mary Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Understanding the East-West Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); on the concepts of competition and conflict and their relationship, see Mathias Albert et al., Vergleichen unter den Bedingungen von Konflikt und Konkurrenz: Praktiken des Vergleichens. Working Paper 1 of the Research Group “Practices of Comparing” at Bielefeld University, April 2019. https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/record/2934783. 2. For a model of global competition for attention and legitimacy, see Teresa Koloma Beck and Tobias Werron, “Violent Conflictition: Armed Conflicts and Global Competition for Attention and Legitimacy,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 31, no. 3 (2018): 275–96. 3. Jason C. Parker, Hearts, Minds, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1. 4. Major publications on Cold War propaganda and cultural diplomacy include Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union 1945–56 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Shawn J. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda and the Cold War 1945–1955 (Westport: Praeger, 2002); Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Laura Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2008); Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lowell H. Schwartz, Political Warfare against the Kremlin: US and British Propaganda Policy at the Beginning of the Cold War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); there has been much less research on the Soviet side: Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); Soviet Foreign Propaganda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); Richard Stites, “Heaven and Hell: Soviet Propaganda Constructs the World,” in Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s, ed. Gary D. Rawnsley (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999), 85–103; see also Lada Silina, Vneshnepoliticheskaia propaganda v SSSR v 1945–1985 gg. (po materialam otdela propagandy i agitacii CK VKP(b)-KPSS) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011); Oksana S. Nagornaia et al., Sovetskaia kul’turnaia diplomatiia v usloviiakh Kholodnoi voiny: 1945–1989 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2018); most recently Rósa

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5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda 1945–1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Beck and Werron, “Violent Conflictition,” 285; Nicholas J. Cull and B. Theo Mazumdar, “Propaganda and the Cold War,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (London/New York: Routledge, 2014), 323–39. Allen M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Clayton D. Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors: America’s Crusade Against Nazi Germany (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). Elmer Davis, The Office of War Information, June 13, 1942–September 15, 1945, Report to the President, Library of Congress, Elmer Davis Papers, Box 10, quote 89. Arthur W. MacMahon, Memorandum on the Postwar International Information Program of the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1945). William Stone to W. R. Tyler: Further Notes on the OIC Program, May 12, 1947, Yale University Library, Harold D. Lasswell Papers, Series I, Box 94, Folder 1151. George Marshall to William Benton, March 15, 1947, University of Chicago Library, William Benton Papers, Box 375, Folder 5. The United States Information Service in Europa, Report of the Foreign Relations Committee, 80th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington, DC. 1948, quotes 1. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 11; David F. Krugler, The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles 1945–1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 65–70. Memorandum: U.S. Information Policy with Regard to Anti-American Propaganda, December 1, 1947, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 59, International Information Activities 1938–1953, Box 122, Folder: Policy Guidance and Directives. Address by President Harry S. Truman to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, DC, April 20, 1950, Department of State Bulletin, May 1, 1950, 669–72. NSC 10/2: National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects, June 18, 1948, in: Foreign Relations of the United States 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, no. 292. NSC 68: Report to the National Security Council on US Objectives and Programs for National Security (April 14, 1950). www.trumanlibrary.org/ whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/. Osgood, Total Cold War. Report on the Work of the Soviet Information Bureau in 1945, January 29, 1946, Russian State Archive for Social and Political History (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 128, d. 217, 10–14. Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments 1945–1957 (Armonk: Sharpe, 1998), 18. Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One; A. V. Fateev, Obraz vraga v sovetskoi propagande 1945–1954 gg. (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii, 1999). Report on the Information and Propaganda Work in the United States and the Institutions Involved, July 14, 1946, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 128, d. 217, 10–14. Solomon Lozovskii and Boris Ponomarev to Andrei Zhdanov, April 5, 1947, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 509, 131–2.

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23. Vladimir O. Pechatnov, “Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early Cold War 1945–1947,” Cold War History 1, no. 2 (2001): 1–27; Silina, Vneshnepoliticheskaia propaganda; on Soviet foreign propaganda to India, see Andreas Hilger, Sowjetisch-indische Beziehungen 1941–1966: Imperiale Agenda und nationale Identität in der Ära von Dekolonisierung und Kaltem Krieg (Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2018). 24. MIT: Project Troy. Report to the Secretary of State, February 1, 1951, NARA, RG 59, Subject Files of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research 1945–1960, Lot 58D 776, Box 14, Folder: Project Troy; on Troy see Allan A. Needell, ‘Truth Is Our Weapon’: Project TROY, Political Warfare and GovernmentAcademic Relations in the National Security State,” Diplomatic History 17, no. 3 (1993): 399–420. 25. Project Troy, vol. 1, 43. 26. Tim B. Müller, Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010). 27. Memorandum to Edward Barrett Regarding Project Troy, March 26, 1951, Harry S. Truman Library, Truman Papers, Psychological Strategy Board, Box 1, Folder: Rand Corporation Study. 28. Rohan Samarajiwa, “The Murky Beginnings of the Communication and Development Field: Voice of America and ‘The Passing of Traditional Society’,” in Rethinking Development Communication, ed. Neville Jayaweera and Sarath Amunugama (Singapur: Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre, 1987), 3–19. 29. Hemant Shah, The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media and The Passing of Traditional Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 30. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York: Free Press, 1958), quote 411. 31. Ibid., 47; see also Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 32. Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 33. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 57–86. 34. Belmonte, Selling the American Way, 24. 35. The Miracle of America, 6th edition, NARA, RG 306, Press and Publications Service, Feature Packets with Recurring Subjects 1953–1959, Box 7, Folder: Labor Packet August 1953, quote 11; Facts About Labor in the United States. A Series of Questions and Answers, NARA, RG 306, Press and Publications Service, Feature Packets with Recurring Subjects 1953–1959, Box 8, Folder: Labor Packet March 1954. 36. Living and Working in a Free Enterprise System, NARA, RG 306, Press and Publications Service, Feature Packets with Recurring Subjects 1953–1959, Box 14, Folder: Labor Packet #51. 37. Memorandum on Conversation between the President and T. S. Repplier, August 3, 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Eisenhower Papers as President, White House Central Files, Confidential Files 1953–1961, Subject Series, Box 99, Folder: USIA 2. 38. Osgood, Total Cold War, 270. 39. Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One, 110. 40. Jutta Scherrer, “‘To Catch Up and Overtake’ the West: Soviet Discourse on Socialist Competition,” in Competition in Socialist Society, ed. Katalin

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

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Miklóssy and Melanie Ilic (London: Routledge, 2014), 10–22; Nigel GouldDavis, “The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 27, no. 2 (2003): 193–214. Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One. Lewis Siegelbaum, “Sputnik Goes to Brussels: The Exhibition of a Soviet Technological Wonder,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 (2012): 120–36. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 192. Richard M. Nixon, What Freedom Means to Us, July 24, 1959. www. speeches-usa.com/Transcripts/richard_nixon-freedom.html. Susan E. Reid, “Who Will Beat Whom?: Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959,” Kritika 9, no. 4 (2008): 855–904, quote 861. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 213. Visitors’ Reactions to the American Exhibition in Moscow, A Preliminary Report, September 28, 1959, NARA, RG 306, Office of Research and Analysis, Research Reports 1956–1959, Box 7. Reid, “Who Will Beat Whom.” William I. Hitchcock, The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 377. Report WE-52: The Impact of Sputnik on the Standing of U.S. versus the U.S.S.R., December 1957, NARA, RG 306, Office of Research, Public Opinion Barometer Reports 1955–62, Box 5. Report P-52–59: World Impact of US and Soviet Space Activities, October 20, 1959, NARA, RG 306, Office of Research and Analysis, Research Reports 1956–1959, Box 7. Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Helen Bury, Eisenhower and the Cold War Arms Race: ‘Open Skies’ and the Military-Industrial Complex (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014). Report WE-63: U.S. or U.S.S.R. The Wave of the Future?, April 1960, NARA, RG 306, Office of Research, Public Opinion Barometer Reports 1955–62, Box 5.

Bibliography Albert, Mathias, Julia Engelschalt, Angelika Epple, Kai Kauffmann, Kerrin Langer, Malte Lorenzen, Toben Möbius et al. Vergleichen unter den Bedingungen von Konflikt und Konkurrenz: Praktiken des Vergleichens. Working Paper 1 of the Research Group ‘Practices of Comparing’ at Bielefeld University, April 2019. https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/record/2934783. Barghoorn, Frederick C. The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. ———. Soviet Foreign Propaganda. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. Beck, Teresa Koloma, and Tobias Werron. “Violent Conflictition: Armed Conflicts and Global Competition for Attention and Legitimacy.” International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society 31, no. 3 (2018): 275–96. Belmonte, Laura. Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2008. Berghahn, Volker. America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Bury, Helen. Eisenhower and the Cold War Arms Race: ‘Open Skies’ and the Military-Industrial Complex. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Cull, Nicholas J. The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy 1945–1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cull, Nicholas J., and B. Theo Mazumdar. “Propaganda and the Cold War.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, edited by Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle, 323–39. London/New York: Routledge, 2014. Fateev, A.V. Obraz vraga v sovetskoi propagande 1945–1954 gg. Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii, 1999. Gilman, Nils. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Gould-Davis, Nigel. “The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy.” Diplomatic History 27, no. 2 (2003): 193–214. Hilger, Andreas. Sowjetisch-indische Beziehungen 1941–1966: Imperiale Agenda und nationale Identität in der Ära von Dekolonisierung und Kaltem Krieg. Köln/Weimar/Wien: Böhlau, 2018. Hitchcock, William I. The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. Hixson, Walter L. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War 1945–1961. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Kaldor, Mary. The Imaginary War: Understanding the East-West Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Krugler, David F. The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles 1945–1953. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Latham, Michael E. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Laurie, Clayton D. The Propaganda Warriors: America’s Crusade Against Nazi Germany. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: Free Press, 1958. Lucas, Scott. Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union 1945–56. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. MacMahon, Arthur W. Memorandum on the Postwar International Information Program of the United States. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1945. Magnúsdóttir, Rósa. Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda 1945–1959. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Mieczkowski, Yanek. Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. Müller, Tim B. Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010. Nagornaia, Oksana S., Olga Iu. Nikonova, Aleksei D. Popov, T.V. Raeva, and N.A. Tregubov. Sovetskaia kul’turnaia diplomatiia v usloviiakh Kholodnoi voiny. 1945–1989. Moscow: Rosspen, 2018. Needell, Allan A. “‘Truth is Our Weapon’: Project TROY, Political Warfare and Government-Academic Relations in the National Security State.” Diplomatic History 17 (1993): 399–420.

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Osgood, Kenneth. Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. Parker, Jason C. Hearts, Minds, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Parry-Giles, Shawn J. The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda and the Cold War 1945–1955. Westport: Praeger, 2002. Pechatnov, Vladimir O. “Exercise in Frustration: Soviet Foreign Propaganda in the Early Cold War 1945–1947.” Cold War History 1, no. 2 (2001): 1–27. Reid, Susan E. “Who Will Beat Whom?: Soviet Popular Reception of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959.” Kritika 9, no. 4 (2008): 855–904. Samarajiwa, Rohan. “The Murky Beginnings of the Communication and Development Field: Voice of America and ‘the Passing of Traditional Society’.” In Rethinking Development Communication, edited by Neville Jayaweera and Sarath Amunugama, 3–19. Singapur: Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre, 1987. Scherrer, Jutta. “‘To Catch Up and Overtake’ the West: Soviet Discourse on Socialist Competition.” In Competition in Socialist Society, edited by Katalin Miklóssy and Melanie Ilic, 10–22. London: Routledge, 2014. Schwartz, Lowell H. Political Warfare against the Kremlin: US and British Propaganda Policy at the Beginning of the Cold War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Shah, Hemant. The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media and The Passing of Traditional Society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. Siegelbaum, Lewis. “Sputnik Goes to Brussels: The Exhibition of a Soviet Technological Wonder.” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 1 (2012): 120–36. Silina, Lada. Vneshnepoliticheskaia propaganda v SSSR v 1945–1985 gg. (po materialam otdela propagandy i agitacii CK VKP(b)-KPSS). Moscow: Rosspen, 2011. Stites, Richard. “Heaven and Hell: Soviet Propaganda Constructs the World.” In Cold-War Propaganda in the 1950s, edited by Gary D. Rawnsley, 85–103. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999. Winkler, Allen M. The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942–1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Zubkova, Elena. Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments 1945–1957. Armonk: Sharpe, 1998. Zubok, Vladislav, and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Part III

Literature, Science, and Literary Discourse

8

Same Sky, Different Soil Geographical Difference in Eighteenth-Century Astronomy and Its Impact on Literature Alexander Honold

Equality and Difference: Astronomy in the Time of the Enlightenment Whoever ‘compares,’ works out the differences and similarities of diverse phenomena and issues with regard to a comprehensive system of coordinates, measurement units, or values. Under the guise of enlightenment, science, and political universalism – tendencies that woven together form the paradigm of an era of criticism and revolution in the eighteenth century – egalitarian and differential cultural mechanisms stand opposed to one another in an exacerbated form. From the geographical journeys of discovery and conquest of the eighteenth century to the French Revolution in 1789 and their successful impulses towards a new ordering of Europe, the science of astronomy, an exemplar of the art of observation and calculation, also played a politically and culturally important role – perhaps due to the lack of any other rational instrument for representing the superordinate perspective of cosmic neutrality. Just as the cenotaph for the natural scientist Isaac Newton drafted by Boullé appeared so ‘round’ and ‘even,’ so did the ideologies of the Revolution demand the new constitution of societal relationships through egalitarian concepts. By ridding themselves of the traditional clerical order of time and introducing a revolutionary calendar, the Jacobin reign at the beginning of the 1790s created, for about a decade, a singular case of a time regime based entirely on astronomical symmetry and transparency. September 21, 1792, when for the first time the new National Assembly convened in Paris, was declared ‘Day One’ of the new calendar by parliamentary decree. No longer would the arbitrariness of kings and churches decide the beginning of the year or the festival days. Instead of these forces, an astronomically fixed point, the autumnal equinox, whose particularity was obvious to anyone with eyes, was now relevant. At this fulcrum in the astronomical year the hours of light and night were the ‘same length everywhere’ on the Earth and in this sense ‘fairly balanced.’ As one of two intersections of the ecliptic and the celestial equator, the autumnal equinox served as an astronomical allegory of political rationality;

176 Alexander Honold an allegory that could be elevated through this epochal political turning point to a Kantian historical symbol. With regard to its astronomical position, the earth in the age of the Enlightenment, despite the evident topographical and ethnographical differences of its habitats, turned out to be a uniform and connected form: a ‘globe.’ Over the preceding centuries, astronomy had already begun to prepare this ‘geospheric model’ by overlaying the formal system of rotational axes, orbital planes, graduations, and arc lines drawn from the observable spatial aspects of the virtual celestial sphere onto the less comprehensible aspects of the experienced Earth. So, in a certain sense they brought heaven down to earth. Surprisingly, however, this abstract form built from equatorial planes, both poles and the grid created by latitudinal and longitudinal lines, succeeded in establishing, and this despite (or perhaps because of?) its strict ‘equal treatment’ of individual zones and segments of the world, new types of ‘differences,’ ‘hierarchies,’ and ‘exclusion mechanisms’ within the human community – armed now with a scientific basis as it were. Attributable to this ‘intellectualized’ system of geographical inequality (together with their far-reaching cultural, economic, and political consequences) is obviously the dominance of the north-south opposition, as well as the privileging of the European and Atlantic Meridians1 over those areas laying farther west and east; and do not forget the symbolic predominance and moral superiority of the moderate latitudes over the subtropical and tropical climate zones when considering the anthropological aspects of a balanced and performance-based life. Both surprising and in need of explanation, as I want to show, is this conspicuous interplay of ‘equal treatment’ and the ‘creation of differences’ in the astronomical science. And in my opinion, it is worth investigating this interrelation with a more probing inspection of that historicalepistemological phase in which astronomers began to further the natural history of the sky by finding new constellations and planets while at the same time the standardization of time and space marked the beginning of globalization. As the scientific branches of different European academies and universities recognized in the middle of the eighteenth century, successful astronomy could not be conducted through observing the stars in Europe alone; establishing a valid foundation of astronomical data for the whole world required the installation of fixed and reliable observation points across as many latitudes and longitudes as possible. Great events visible worldwide, such as solar and lunar eclipses or the appearance of comets, stimulated the efforts to create a worldwide strategic distribution of astronomical observatories. Two such macro-events in the 1760s in particular expedited the ‘globalization’ of astronomy, namely the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769. These rare and informative spectacles gave rise to a number of astronomical excursions to far reaches of the world, supported by the state,

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academic institutions, and private funding and sometimes combined with intricate geographical exploratory journeys of the colonizing kind. In this way the astronomer Charles Green found himself part of the first circumnavigation in 1769 with the then-famous Captain James Cook. Already in 1761, a British excursion, initially to Sumatra but later truncated at Cape Town, brought the astronomer Charles Mason and the surveyor Jeremiah Dixon to the southern hemisphere. Despite substantial hurdles and various kinds of distractions, the two gathered in those short hours of Venus’ transit the most reliable observations in the world by far – a scene Thomas Pynchon relayed in exquisite detail in his 1997 novel about these two researchers Mason & Dixon, a brand name in pioneering astronomical and geodetic data. This team of incongruent temperaments had gathered extensive experience in South Africa regarding the difficulties of scientific evaluation in a heated colonial situation. This somewhat incidental political and ethnographic information got useful a few years later when the pair demarcated the border between the British North American colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland, using an EastWest latitude as a guide. A century later, this line, the Mason-Dixon line, became the border between slave states and free states. On a methodological level it holds true: uniform, formal standards generate unequal areas of application. Natural scientists who prefer to orient themselves on strict mathematical constructions, but inadvertently fall into extreme situations of colonial violence and disquieting foreignness, make good fodder for a book, as any reader of Pynchon’s picaresque novel can attest. It is particularly bizarre then, when an astronomer, forced by his profession to work at night, tries to track heavenly Venus in a foreign land. Astronomers in particular – though by no means just them – move between heaven and earth, ideal and reality in a permanent discrepancy. The philosophical tradition gives us the anecdote of the ancient natural scientist Thales, who, when gazing at the stars, forgot the ground beneath his feet and fell into a well beneath the wry eyes of a maid. More systematically relevant, however, and what will be further illuminated in subsequent considerations, is the historical entanglement of scientific universals and cultural practices of discrimination, demonstrated so clearly in the colonial applications of spherical astronomy. It is only thanks to the epistemological innovations of the eighteenth century that it was possible to conceive of all cultures and regions of the world under the same, unifying celestial architecture. We must now ask to what extent, for what reason, in which way and with what results did astronomy’s spatial standardization of the globe contribute to the production of that cultural and geographical ‘world formula of inequality,’ which proclaimed the greatest possible differences on the earth under the same sky and determined the center and the periphery, winners and losers, for centuries.

178 Alexander Honold

Consent in Dissent: The Apportioning of the Globe In the eighteenth century, European colonial nations (and those that wanted to be) saw the globe as an exceedingly profitable area of deployment, though one only researched and measured in its outlines. On every non-European continent remained immense potential for discovery and conquest. The creeping expansion of the previous centuries through knotted nautical networks had just halfway inventoried the coasts of Africa, the Americas and Southeast Asia and begun to use them as military bases and ports. These scattered maritime posts were only rudimentarily connected with further exploratory paths running alongside rivers into the hinterlands or the steppes and mountainous regions. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, an increasingly heated race to expand and safeguard military, economic, scientific, and cultural supremacy broke out among the colonial protagonists with these colonial outposts at the center. Already over the course of the seventeenth century the hierarchies of dominance had begun to shift inexorably and consequently between the old and new imperial powers, especially between the Spanish and Portuguese colonial spheres in Middle and South America and the upstart colonial nations of France, England, and Holland, rapidly making their presence known in North America, Africa and Southeast Asia – a transfer of power the end of the militaristic Napoleonic Era would seal definitively. Within this ‘new dynamic,’ the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and its bundle of factors shifted the leadership role towards players in the British Empire, especially during the reign of King George III, with the previously French territories of Canada and large parts of East India falling under British control. Colonialism during the Enlightenment was more rational, more efficient, and therefore institutionally more relentless than the often brutal, though in many cases experimental if not theatrical, show of force by the Europeans in the preceding centuries. The white man’s claim to superiority was now grounded in racial biology and geographically supported, justifying unilateral transport routes of raw materials and slaves coupled with military expansion that formed a collaborative and efficiently self-perpetuating transatlantic triangle. Over was the era of “marvelous possessions,” as Stephen Greenblatt named the incubation phase of European colonialism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, using a quote from Mandeville.2 The times in which the world and its knowledge were still progressing were also over. No longer could irrefutable and fantastical tales from the edges and interstices of the world be told. Through the interplay of astronomical and geographical revelations, the image of the world became more rational and consistent. Certain unshakable facts arose in the second half of the eighteenth century: (a) that the Earth was one planet among many in the solar system, and (b) that it was more or less a sphere; (c) that nearly three-quarters of its surface was covered with water, while (d) the remaining land masses were unevenly

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distributed, but that continental borders seemed to fit together remarkably well. When these cosmological and geological questions had been vehemently debated in antiquity, the middle and the early modern period, philosophical authority, verbatim Bible quotations, and the machinery of censorship were deployed before any empirical set of facts could break through that assigned the earth and its inhabitants clearly delineated borders and spaces of action. To a certain extent, the eighteenth century serves as a geographical apex and turning point in the history of globalization, because in this time that earlier blend of knowledge and ignorance, discovered and imaginary spaces was given a new basis that essentially still applies today. The earth is ‘finite,’ but within itself ‘unlimited’; in its global shape it is determined through extraterrestrial forces (like the sun or the moon) and dependent on them. With its curved surface, the planet offers immeasurable potential for expansion, including delving into hidden depths or scaling challenging heights. Not least it was the aesthetic experience of a permanently vanishing horizon3 that made it semantically possible to recognize, in the cosmic sense, the rather small, incidental earth as nothing less than the ‘world,’ that is the whole. As the ‘world,’ the globe is put into a totalizing frame, even when the earth’s inhabitants are well acquainted with its finite nature, its dependence and, more recently, its depletion. That one could, in principle, move from place to place on or around the earth forever, but still at some point close the circle, lapping oneself like a long-distance runner, does invite all types of narrative imagination (à la Jules Verne); furthermore, the concept of ‘cyclicality’ already played an important and evocative role in the philosophy of history debate between the Enlightenment and the Romantic period – a hundred years before Nietzsche’s Zarathustrian principle of ‘the eternal return.’ All linear movements on the earth that are long and wide enough become circular at some point. Therefore, it is not possible to pursue infinite goals horizontally; this is why every ideal (the striving after the unattainable) lies along a vertical axis. If the earthly paths (in principle) are flat, its goals could be immeasurably wide, but never extend to eternity. It’s exactly this coupling of ‘finitude and limitlessness’ characterizing the globe that appears to have won out in the lexical division of labor between the terms earth and world. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, new terms like ‘part of the world,’ ‘world trip’ and, last but not least, ‘history of the world’ joined the vernacular;4 in all the widely used European languages a complementary delineation between the concepts of ‘earth’ and ‘world’ arose almost simultaneously,5 whose function, according to the thesis, was to express the conditio terrestris as a paradoxical base tension of an unlimited finitude. A combination of the elementary characteristics of finitude and limitlessness, however, is a paradox not just in the cosmological but also in the semantic sense. I also emphasize this duality of the aspects of earth and

180 Alexander Honold world because it places the discourse of globalization and colonial practices in the eighteenth century in a frame that distinguishes them from the tendencies and the balance of power in the preceding three centuries in three basic ways. Firstly, with the new all-inclusive model of the earth as ‘world,’ collected traditions of substantial ‘other worlds’ and their enigmatic inhabitants were put aside in a relatively short time. The map was also freed of diverse ontological mysteries and exoticism like doubleheaded creatures, human-beast hybrids, and similar fantastical creations. The universal validity of the laws of nature, to which anthropological and biological stores of wisdom also belonged, described the world as a homogenous space empty of surprises of the supernatural kind. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters demonstrate with their hypothetically fictional scenarios what new satirical possibilities this rational turn held for social criticism within the cultural knowledge in Europe. How easily the proportions, political systems, and dependencies could be turned on their heads with a mere change in the frame of reference! Old becomes young, the precious repellent; the exotic seems rational. The occurrence of such experimental effects of reversal or reevaluation supposes that they take place in a principally unitary and common epistemic space that furthermore adheres to an encyclopedic accessibility of both natural and historical order. Progress exists first when the coordinates of the situational scope gain stability. Secondly, the distant, foreign and new, towards which Europe’s expansionary ambitions were also undoubtedly directed, now also moved into a dynamic framework that grew accordingly without the need to permanently adapt its fundamental premises. The dualism of earth and world allows the players making forays into the unknown to behave ‘both particularly and universally’ with a bifocal orientation. Since the great expeditions of the first age of discovery, the instrument of ‘circumnavigation,’ traveling around the world by ship (first accomplished by Magellan), came to symbolize the admission of historical figures into a field of action comprising global options. During the second age of discovery begun in the middle of the eighteenth century, for which the circumnavigation of the British admiral Charles Anson’s lead ship served as the spark, the geospheric circle was accompanied, complemented, and redefined by a second form of circularity: the knowledge circle of the Encyclopedia. As a large lexicographic and essayistic enterprise founded in France by philosophic luminaries such as Diderot, D’Alembert, and Voltaire, it called for knowledge of and about the world to be compiled as comprehensively as possible. It was hoped that a wide-ranging network of contributing authors combined with a finite and contingent list of alphabetical keywords would, despite its provisional and patchy nature, provide an ‘idea’ of the whole and thereby promote ‘Big Ideas.’ With its name, the Encyclopedia implicitly asserted that the rounding of the earth itself was already the clearest and most evident argument

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for such a scientific undertaking that approached the earth as a whole. Thirdly, the fact that the earth was ultimately a closed, self-supporting system provided fertile ground for competition among global players in economic, political, and also military regards. In the time of ornamental maps and their mirabilia, colonial expansion was a ‘win-win’ – different protagonists could claim and cultivate their own gains relatively undisturbed. What the Spanish hoped for in the auspiciously named El Dorado was not a competitive advantage but a font of ‘primitive accumulation’ (Karl Marx) lying outside all rules. This all changed in the eighteenth century: almost everywhere someone wanted to go meant pushing out someone who was already there. The three-step process of contact, conquest, and colonial oppression was now, as it always had been, a ‘win-lose’ situation, disadvantaging and minimizing both the colonizing competitors as well as the colonized in the service of profitable dealings. However, the value levied, expressed in the currency of money, was henceforth only interesting in its universal convertibility. The mental concept of the closed circle transforms every endeavor around colonial hegemony into a battle of distribution within the globally expanding nations and harnesses every overseas engagement in a corset of economic cost-benefit calculations. With the general recognition of a single, finite global field, the competing players settle into a modus vivendi determined by a social mechanism of ‘consent in dissent’ later analyzed by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, antagonism in accordance with a prevailing framework. This consensus meant that rival protagonists met on a common field of action and were subjected to a valuation standard accepted by both sides. Bourdieu developed the analysis of these mechanisms in the wake of his theory of social fields; the field functions like a base metaphor for the most diverse venues and stages of societal mechanisms of distinction. At the same time, however, the category of field retains a topographic reification that is hard to neglect – it manifests itself deeply embedded in the macro-processes of the history of European and non-European land grabs that spans epochs. Any dispute involving the framework of field structures was accompanied by bitter wars or raids or indicated massive shifts in the dominant production and economic forms.

The Measure of the Ground and the Differences in the Climate Zones The rise of cartography to an operational leading science mirrored the aforementioned escalation of territory-oriented battles of distribution under whose pressure both individual and collective players found themselves. Authoritative coordinated grids, outlines, and raised-relief maps created a concrete, recognized framework that defined margins of geographic colonial expansion. The increasing exactness of surveying

182 Alexander Honold instruments, as we know today, do not render disputes between owners superfluous, but rather they facilitate such quarrels. Jean-Jacques Rousseau pinned the primal scene of our societal order built around private ownership to a hypothetical moment in which, for the first time, a man felt inspired to erect a fence around a certain piece of land and thereby claim it as his own.6 The process of so-called value production for ground, cultivation, and property areas7 is a reasoned, re-narrated mystery whose enigmatic nature philosophers and writers have tackled over and over again. In principle, acts of arbitrary land seizures were even carried out in Europe with no less usurpation as they were under the power conditions of colonial circumstances, although in the early commercial days on the old continent customary rights and established negotiation practices clearly played a much larger role. In the middle of the eighteenth century, England underwent politically implemented rasterization and the fragmented parceling of property (“the period of parliamentary enclosures”),8 which had a profound and revolutionary effect on the farming and forestry systems. With substantial historic and economic consequences, hedges, fences, walls, and ditches came to signify the small-scale balancing of ownership structures. The handiwork of land surveyors gained prominence in the societal allocation battle. In Pynchon’s historical novel Mason & Dixon, the protagonist Jeremiah Dixon, a land surveyor by trade, is almost instinctively connected with the historically consequential fencing in and parceling of land areas: On the other hand, Surveyors are runnin’ about numerous as Bed-bugs, and twice as cheap, with work enough for all certainly in Durham at present, Enclosures all over the County, and North Yorkshire, – eeh! Fences, Hedges, Ditches ordinary and Ha-Ha Style, all to be laid out. . . . I could have stay’d home and had m’self a fine Living . . . ?9 Such remarks about the profitable procedures of hedging, demarcating, and regulating allude to the prosperity of land surveyors in the age of the English parceling process. By downplaying disputes over land, the venerable guild of royal astronomers, as Pynchon interprets the contrasting pair of astronomer and surveyor, can, of course, feel esteemed: Well it is a peculiar station in Life, isn’t it? How many Royal Astronomers are there? How many Royal Astronomers’ Assistants are there likely to be? Takes an odd bird to stay up peering at Stars all night in the first place, doesn’t it . . . ?10 Mason and Dixon, as Pynchon portrays them, are a quirky symbolic pair; their engagement is determined by contrasting scientific educations,

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but they are both similarly bizarre oddballs that in a short amount of time become an inseparable duo whose preferences for heaven or earth complete each other wonderfully. The historically vouchsafed pair of natural scientists well-known for their impact provide the postmodern novelist with such fertile personages because with their tandem they ideally unite those interrelations that bring together the astronomical and geographical models of the world, as they work together toward a common geospheric theoretical explanation. This was obviously not a one-off operation, but rather one instance of the repeated, then partially in the interim, re-submerged or negated expansions of knowledge that reach back to the cosmological interests of antiquity. And from the beginning it was always those endeavors of the Mediterranean ecumene to travel, to trade, and to settle that not only enriched the study of the stars and planets with new perspectives and observational data, but also bolstered it. Exploring the sky from dispersed points across the globe was at first a sort of side effect of terrestrial and especially nautical expansions, long before astronomical realizations promoted and supported the modern pathways of globalization. The decisive epistemological breakthrough in the history of philosophy, according to the astronomer and scientific historian Otto Neugebauer, were those basic concepts of spherical astronomy the Greeks discovered in the fifth century B.C. as they expanded into southeastern Europe and Asia Minor. Traveling north or south changed not only the height of the midday sun, but also the place of the circumpolar constellations. These deviations, as Neugebauer emphasizes, were “quite drastic between Greek settlements, e.g. in the Nile Delta and in the Crimea.”11 Using the substantial discrepancies between the astronomical observations along the northern and southern limits of the Greek ecumene – the impressive opulence of the polar constellations that never dipped below the horizon, the biannual solar zenith in the southern regions – the world known to the Greeks was enlarged through the subsequent astronomical model that incorporated these northern and southern extremes. Remarkable is how terrestrial and celestial observations took shape in accordance with one another; the north-south and east-west orthodromes of the earth mirrored the coordinates in the sky whose virtual construction was essential for our corresponding terrestrial conception. The false, but operationally sensible adoption of a spherical dome (suggested by the Pythagorean model of the harmony of the spheres) was the historical and epistemological prerequisite for the more accurate, more well-known, but much later accepted inference of the earth’s global shape.12 The systematic interplay of astronomy and geodesy that entered the world stage in the eighteenth century ground itself in the successful reapplication of the earlier established parameters of movement like the ecliptic and celestial equators onto the observational stage – a stage that mutated into a ‘globe,’ an empirical analogue to the celestial sphere that

184 Alexander Honold only existed virtually. Columbus’ voyage, the primal scene of modern colonial practices of globalization, first put the theory to the test, terribly underestimating the dimensions of the earth’s circularity. However, the spheres of heaven were still definitively and irreversibly brought down to earth. The spherical model of motion initiated wide-ranging anthropological and cultural debates in the subsequent period, especially in two (connected) problem areas; it established a modified basis of knowledge with regards to the alternating seasons and diverse geographic climate zones. Seasons and climate zones give the globe its temporal and spatial diversity. Both effects could be explained by the earth’s orbit around the sun and within the solar system as well as the earth’s own rotation and its tilt on its own axis. The mathematic and geospheric links between these phenomena were theoretically worked out upon the historic and epistemological line from Copernicus to Galileo, from Kepler to Newton and subsequently substantiated with empirical observations whose quality and amount rapidly increased. A conversely yet comparatively new effect of the second age of discovery and the excursions that emerged from it could be found in the fact that for the initially small fleet of observers, whose potential findings could be checked at any time, those locational shifts in seasonal and climatological conditions were physiologically and directly experienced. The possibility of considering the markedly different positions of the sun and stars from different latitudes with one’s own eyes was only a question of time – and, of course, of money, as well as a matter of willing personnel, proper equipment, and fitting opportunities. But is it possible to replace the empiricism of one’s own travel experience or even anticipate it with poetic experimentation? While academics like Georg Forster and later Alexander von Humboldt undertook investigative trips around the world, we find in the work of one of their like-minded contemporaries, Friedrich Hölderlin, an intensive literary engagement with exploratory routes of seafarers and circumnavigators; he mentions figures such as Columbus, de Gama, Bougainville, and their adventures, and he also repeatedly mentions remote and only recently accessible Pacific Island destinations like Tinian and Otaheite. In our context, Hölderlin’s virtual configuration of the North-South divide in his 1797 elegy Der Wanderer is particularly notable: Einsam stand ich und sah in die Afrikanischen dürren Ebnen hinaus; vom Olymp reegnete Feuer herab; Reißendes! milder kaum, wie damals, da das Gebirg hier Spaltend mit Stralen der Gott Höhen und Tiefen gebaut. Aber auf denen springt kein frischaufgrünender Wald nicht In die tönende Luft üppig und herrlich empor. . . .

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Um der Haine Gesang, ach! um die Gärten des Vaters Bat ich vom wandernden Vogel der Heimat gemahnt. Aber du sprachst zu mir: auch hier sind Götter und walten, Groß ist ihr Maas, doch es mißt gern mit der Spanne der Mensch. . . . Und es trieb die Rede mich an, noch Andres zu suchen. Fern zum nördlichen Pol kam ich in Schiffen herauf. Still in der Hülse von Schnee schlief da das gefesselte Leben, Und der eiserne Schlaf harrte seit Jahren des Tags. Denn zu lang nicht schlang um die Erde den Arm der Olymp hier, Wie Pygmalions Arm um die Geliebte sich schlang. Hier bewegt’ er ihr nicht mit dem Sonnenblike den Busen, und in Reegen und Thau sprach er nicht freundlich zu ihr.13 Hölderlin’s elegy tells of two trips undertaken in opposite directions during which the lyrical subject (‘I’) dramatically exposes himself to external tests determined by the elementary extreme positions of fire and ice. In the deserts of Africa, the lyrical I is threatened by scorching heat, and in the Arctic latitudes near the pole, blooming life is brought to a standstill by a “Hülse von Schnee” (“sleeve of snow”), so that nature is condemned to steadfast sleep like the statue the sculptor Pygmalion cannot awaken to life. The idiosyncrasy of this poem does not lie in the evoked geographical designs of the African and Arctic situations that are scarcely surprising in their contrasting hostility towards life and suggest by way of nature an encomium to the moderate climes that lie between, as the third part of Hölderlin’s elegy logically intones. Much more impressive is how explicitly and strenuously the poet holds to the constructive line of the Meridian for the progression of these virtual trips, deriving his argumentative basic figure of the poem from it. The ‘Meridian’ is the Great Circle that traces from the southern horizon relative to an observer over the Zenith, the celestial north pole, and the northern point of the horizon before circling back to the nadir, the southern point. As a longitudinal line laid upon the Earth, it intersects the equator at a right angle as well as all the other parallel latitudinal lines of diminishing circumference. Both fictitious journeys of the lyrical wanderer in Hölderlin’s poem describe nothing other than the solar altitude relative to different longitudinal positions. With its divergent excursions, the poem highlights both extremes of the heliac arc from its zenith (“regnete Feuer herab”/“It rained down fire”) until it sinks below the horizon (“das gefesselte Leben”/“the chained life”). The latticed coordinate system of ‘longitude’ and ‘latitude’ provides for two complementary practices of comparison when one moves along a particular axis. A journey along the same latitude would precisely follow the virtual daily path of the sun and thereby allow for conclusions about the relationship between geospherical segments of the arc and the

186 Alexander Honold distance traveled. The intervals and angular distances within a spherical segment are, in accordance with astronomic convention, gauged by the common measurement of arc-minutes and arc-seconds. Using these relationships, the East-West displacement effect regarding the prognosticated astronomic azimuths (as they were recorded in the so-called ephemerides) was used in the eighteenth century not only to improve chronometers but also to determine geographic longitudes more precisely.14 The transverse movement along the same longitude, in turn, demonstrated with its variance in the north-south direction the correlation between successive shifts of solar position, radiation angles, and temperature; Hölderlin’s elegy illustrates this by contrasting the desert belt and the ice zone. Jumping from latitude to latitude comes with dramatic changes in geophysical conditions. Each latitude (in contrast to the purely arbitrary positions of longitudinal lines) has a natural reference point unambiguously manifested by solar position, variations in temperature, weather, vegetation, and so forth, and they are easily distinguished from one another. The ensemble of stable meteorological conditions that held fast throughout the annual cycle fell under the term ‘climate’ in the middle of the eighteenth century. The word is derived etymologically and factually from the ‘incline’ of the sun, the characteristic slope and solar noon height at each latitude.15 Even when the incidence angle of solar rays in the expanded climatology of Alexander von Humboldt no longer served as the exclusive determinate of meteorological variation, this variable remained a decisive factor in cultural and geographical inequality that, disregarding accidental terrestrial character, was constructed using spherical astronomy and the grid it laid across the earth. Certainly not all climatic and vegetative conditions of a given land area can be derived from the criteria of its geographical latitude alone. There is a methodically important difference between common geospherical legitimacy and the respective actual character of a specific topographical segment, particularly as the latter can only be established with empirical, on-the-ground contact – a haptic corrective that the war strategist Carl von Clausewitz described at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the concept of ‘friction’ as regards combat situations.16 Hölderlin expressed the divergent methodologies of astronomical and topographical determination with a line in which the divine and earthly standards stand opposed as absolute and relative patterns of scale respectively: “Groß ist ihr Maß, doch es mißt gern mit der Spanne der Mensch” (“Great is their measure, yet man measures well with the range of man”). However, the humanities in the eighteenth century did not pass up the opportunity to use the seemingly stringent astronomical foundation of a ‘natural hierarchy’ of peoples and habitats to legitimize unequal development opportunities and levels of prosperity in different corners of the earth. Climate theory, the leading ideology in Montesquieu’s treatise The Spirit of the Laws, becomes an indicator of morality and their scales of

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values were in turn used to justify political and economic claims of hegemony. “As climates are distinguished by degrees of latitude, we might distinguish them also in some measure by those of sensibility,”17 as Montesquieu maintains. He reasons the intellectual and moral superiority of the northern peoples over those living in the tropical regions stems from the effects of the warm air on bodily tissue, stretching it and causing it to go limp and thereby causing the people to forfeit motivation and self-control.18 The people in the southern climates had, according to Montesquieu, a “much greater need than the European nations of a wise legislator.”19 In this way, the geospheric model of climate zones delivered a welcome argument for the inevitability of colonial power. According to climatic and geographic anthropology those moderate latitudes, with their refreshing and balanced changes from cold to warm, from humidity to aridity, were privileged by nature. In the circular dance of changing seasons, humanity could live a life between the extremes; the climatic amplitudes of heat and ice are here curbed by moderate change. Cultural theory and the philosophy of history were quick to seize upon this astronomical state of affairs to create a secularized theodicy. Johann Gottfried Herder forwarded the view in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man that we should view the tilt of the earth’s axis toward the ecliptic, which was responsible for the seasons, as a godsend in the history of our species. Indeed, the comparable wide geographic fluctuations corridor between hot and cold zones was a prerequisite for making large swaths of the globe equally “habitable” for mankind.20 The Earth must have a regular inclination, that regions, which would otherwise lie in Cimmerian cold and darkness, may behold the beams of the Sun, and be fitted for organization. As the history of the Earth from the remotest times informs us, that the difference of the zones has had considerable influence on all the revolutions of the human mind and its operations: . . . we see with what fine straits the finger of omnipotence has described and encircled all the changes and shades on the Globe.21 Nothing less than the finger of God, as numerous eighteenth-century cosmogonies would have it, tipped the orbiting earth a few angular degrees to trigger a successful geographical dynamic. The divinely ordered cant of the earth’s axis leads to the logical conclusion that the globe should be ‘developed’ and settled as comprehensively as possible. Herder’s model, however, aims at a quasi-natural balance of dramatically different locational factors; this also concerns the existential difference between colonizer and colonized, which is not justified in his opinion and against which he took a decisive stand.22 In the absence of climate zones, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the other hand maintained, neither language or culture would have developed on earth. His essay On

188 Alexander Honold the Origin of Language is a plea for the societal strengths of exchange and journeying that recognized in the periodically advancing and retreating of the invigorating sun a natural example of cultural diversity: He who willed man to be social, by the touch of a finger shifted the globe’s axis into line with the axis of the universe. I see such a slight movement changing the face of the earth and deciding the vocation of mankind.23

Borderlines and Passages How and when the concept of the equator further developed from a geospheric model to a culturally useful conception is a question worthy of more exact investigation.24 However, the through line from the illustrative material offered by the early modern terrestrial and celestial spheres to the nautical ‘crossing-the-line ceremonies’ and the political allegories of equatorial positioned states is a longer and more complex path. The astronomers who reformed the calendar in the context of the French Revolution celebrated the concept of a spherical center line as a “great equalizer” of social and political relationships as well, for which reason they also viewed the equinoctial points in particular as “emblems of rationality” in the astronomical calendar.25 Celebrating the equator as a symbol did little to change the fact that crossing this imaginary line juxtaposed two hemisphere in no way the same or even equivalent. One can only speak of a true trip around the world when at least a part of the journey dips into the southern hemisphere, or when at least 12 arc-hours, i.e. half of a latitude circle, along the east-west axis of a longitudinal space was covered. Only when we have quantitatively meaningful deviations from the European starting point do we see the emergence of massively divergent experiences of the customary coordinate system. There are comparatively far fewer continental land masses in the southern hemisphere, but in their place numerous far-flung islands;26 this was even more the case on the Pacific side of the globe, which appeared a wide-open space and gave rise to the most bizarre etiological speculations in the eighteenth century. Also, the images cast in the fixed stars exhibited a different cultural semantic in the north-south comparison; records of the constellations visible in the northern hemisphere dated back to antiquity and were identified with gods and heroes. They were part of a stable tradition. The exploratory excursions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, raised the question of how to fit the constellations observed of the southern hemisphere into the nomenclature. With a collective intuition, which had a certain plausibility, the scientific academies in London and Paris decided to name these constellations primarily after nautical, scientific, and technical instruments, hence among names like ‘Sextant,’ we also find ‘Air pump.’ A very symptomatic occurrence: whenever it

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concerned the southern, putatively ‘underdeveloped’ regions, arbitrary, makeshift, and less prestigious concepts and images were the order of the day. The formal parity line between north and south was in actuality more a vehicle of geographic and cultural otherness construction: it divided the area of seemingly naturally established forms of rule with a habitually ingrained perception of the world from the still undescribed, empty spaces of the south ready to be possessed. When, in the final stage of our deliberations, we once again turn our thoughts to Pynchon’s oddball surveying duo in Mason & Dixon, who now find themselves put to sea on the frigate Seahorse sailing for Sumatra to measure the transit of Venus, we encounter in these figures that same adopted and normative conception of associating the exactness of the geographic grid with the virtues of justice and equal treatment: In return for freedom to range upon the Sea, one was bound by a Code as strict as that of any ancient Knight. The Seahorse’s Motto, lovingly embroider’d by a certain Needlewoman of Southsea, and nail’d above the Bed in his Cabin, reads Eques Sit Aequus.27 The educated passengers fall over themselves to convey the sense of this resolution to the captain: “So we might take your ship’s Motto to mean, ‘Let the Sea-Knight who would command this Sea-Horse be ever fairminded,’ –.”28 This explanation alludes to the etymologically close, but semantically faulty connection between geometric parity and the two symmetrical sides of a horse – that is aequus and equus. Even when it has no basis in the logic of language, the verbal and tonal similarities of aequus and equus constitute the implicit core argument of this scene; a Seahorse, ploughing through the sea with surveying experts, is bound to the rational equal treatment of all the zones and regions it passes through. As ‘knights’ and keepers of the infallible measure, Mason and Dixon travel south together to collect astronomical comparison data as far from Europe as possible. The surveyors likewise follow a strict geometrical line when carrying out their second great assignment, establishing the border between the British North American colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. As knights of equality, they work strictly and steadily from east to west upon one and the same latitude no matter what terrain they pass through. The Astronomer Royal Maskelyne, who had also (less successfully) taken part in the observation of Venus’ passage, passed this new assignment onto Mason and Dixon during the latter’s layover on the island St. Helena, an earned respite on the way home. Maskelyne himself obviously entertained no great interest in such further colonial deployments: Through his Correspondence, Maskelyne has heard of one Possibility. . . . Following the Chancery decision the year before, as to the Boundaries between the American Provinces of Pennsylvania and

190 Alexander Honold Maryland, both Proprietors have petition’d the Astronomer Royal for assistance, using the most modern means available, in marking these out, – one of them being a Parallel of Latitude, five degrees, an Hundred Leagues, of Wilderness East to West.29 Mason and Dixon take over the work and within a year complete the topographically detailed task of drawing the line that later came to be known as the Mason-Dixon line in US-American history, infamous because, among other things, the Civil War between the northern Union and southern Confederate states flared up along this line, where adherents of slavery and abolitionists met. The line drawn straight and parallel to the latitudinal circle by Mason and Dixon using every means of the surveying arts treated ‘equally,’ what remained, irrespective of this geographic regularity, blatantly ‘unequal.’ During their American adventure, the two are accompanied by a Chinaman, to whom their mercilessly geometric slicing through the land seems an incomprehensible act of violence against the scenic landscape through which they traveled. Such cutting, he says accusatorily to the surveyors, creates a “terrible Feng-Shui” that will invite every kind of wicked energy. He predicts that every earthly spirit will be deeply injured by this stubborn setting of a line and will be awakened to revenge. Of course, both protagonists fatally refuse to listen to the indignant advice of this man who understands nature: The Chinaman begins to pull upon his hair and paw the earth with brocade-slipper’d feet. “Ev’rywhere else on earth, Boundaries follow Nature, – coast-lines, ridge-tops, river-banks, – so honoring the Dragon or Shan within, from which Land-Scape ever takes its form. To mark a right Line upon the Earth is to inflict upon Dragon’s very Flesh, a sword-slash, a long, perfect scar, impossible for any who live out here the year ‘round to see as other than hateful Assault. How can it pass unanswer’d?”30 With stubborn persistency, Mason and Dixon hold to the exactness ethos of their latitude and cut their border not only straight through woods, fields, and lakes with no regard, but also occasionally through the middle of towns, in one case through the middle of a residence. Buried within following of a clear and ideal line to determine the border, as the Chinaman warns, is the coming calamity. Through the arbitrary demarcation using a coordinate net, the violent seizure of colonial powers scars the surface texture of the earth like a punitive ornament – as in Africa, now also in North America. Again and again, the astronomer and surveyor, girdled by equality, must close their eyes as they work in order to transform areas already treated unfairly into a seemingly organized coexistence.

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“Wait,” objects Mr. Dixon.“It’s as plain as pudding that Pennsylvania and Maryland are so different, that thy fatal Distinction was inflicted upon these Shores, long before we arrive’d.”“Poh, sir,” goads Mason, “the Provinces are alike as Stacy and Tracy.” “Except for the Negro Slavery upon one side,” Dixon points out, less mildly than he might, “and not the other.”31 How unequal and unjust the power relationships across the world are and with what mechanisms they are often so stubbornly maintained are core questions that our duo touches upon several times throughout their years of work together. The line, determined by astronomy and drawn straight across the land, did not constitute the arbitrary moment of despotism that created the colonial usurpation, rather made it, at most, more visible. A whole heap of furthering and more extensively critical questions comes into play, which a historical novel is not called upon to answer. The construction of the novel, however, follows in a particularly calculated manner the goal of contraposing two ‘typologically contrary forms’ of measuring nature from the historically documented impact of both researchers. Their later mission is the more detailed account of drawing the Mason-Dixon line, but the one before concerns the oft-mentioned African adventure to observe the transit of Venus. While in marking of a border between two provinces strictly parallel to a virtual line of equality only serves to highlight the prevalent inequality, the South African excursion (like the numerous other large-scale expeditions undertaken at this observation post) aims to make a final, congruent trigonometric calculation using the most significant variance of the compiled data; the goal is to integrate the greatest possible diversity into the big picture. Furthermore, in the case of the transit of Venus, the novelist does not need to invent much to expose the colonial conflict inherent in such a research project. Conflict emerges for the two experts with the fact that their original destination was Bencoolen on the southeast Asian island of Sumatra, but the attack of a French ship-o-war as well as the enemy occupation of the target location make a quick end to this plan. This deflating episode shows that the clashes of the Seven Years’ War had global repercussions and presented problems for the expansion of scientific research projects. Nevertheless, for a project looking to gather significant observational data, the substitute choice of the southern tip of Africa proves to be a much better destination – particularly as their British colleague Maskelyne set up at St. Helena, produced wholly inadequate date thanks to foul weather conditions.32 Mason and Dixon spend spring and summer of the year 1761 in the Dutch Cape Colony in order to observe Venus passing before the solar disk at the beginning of June. They were by no means the only professional European scientists sent to far-flung, non-European locations to measure this rare astronomical phenomenon. Both transits of Venus in the years 1761 and

192 Alexander Honold 1769 constituted the first large-scale coordinated efforts of astronomical observation. Already in 1761, at a time of war and limited visibility, astronomers traveled to, among other places, Siberia or the Indian Ocean in order to gather data as far as possible from the northern European outposts in St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, or Stockholm. The second passage of Venus eight years later offered considerably more favorably corridors of visibility: a time of peace and improved achromatic telescopes allowing for reliable observations and measurements from varied locations spread across the globe. The array of cooperating observation posts stretched from California over Northern Canada and Siberia down into the southern latitudes, where Captain Cook’s trip around the world deliberately navigated towards the pacific Island of Otaheite. As Captain James Cook landed in Tahiti on April 12, 1769, with his three-masted ship the Endeavour, he had on board numerous scientists, among them Charles Green, employed at the observatory in Greenwich, and the wealthy botanist Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Academy. Despite the ambitious scientific agenda of Cook’s crossing of the Pacific, their mission to observe the ‘transit of Venus’ from the South Sea Island had, thanks to the troubling back story of the venue, taken on an obscene connotation. A year before, two south sea expeditions had anchored in the Bay of Matavi, those of Wallis and Bougainville. They had ‘discovered,’ or better ‘invented,’ Tahiti as the ideal type of Pacific island paradise for European civilization.33 Delighted by the beauty of the island women as well as the skimpiness of their clothing and the ‘looseness’ of their morals, Bougainville had given the island the name New Kythira, an island love paradise. A published report of Bougainville’s talks of the Tahitian women who “unabashedly let their clothes fall” and presented their divine beauty to the sailors.34 The exoticized colonial desire articulated by this crude masculine gaze upon female nakedness soon gained a critical epilogue in the form of Denis Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, a polemic that came to the defense of faraway parts of the world threatened by European domination.35 Even today the promontory Pointe Venus on Tahiti’s northern shore recalls Cook’s excursion and its astronomical observation post. But what were the drivers of such a lively interest in observation posts as remote and widespread as possible? In scientific regards, it was paramount to make use of the optic effects of the parallax through measurements taken as far apart from each other as possible, in order to more precisely calculate the distance between the planet Earth and its central star. The process functioned like this: the transit of Venus denotes those instances in which the planet Venus passes before the solar plane, looking like a small black point to earthly observers. Due to a miniscule shift between the orbital planes of both planets, this occurrence happens very rarely, though always in a pair separated by eight years – and then not for more than a hundred years. Johannes Kepler was the first to calculate

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the date in advance, applying his ellipses model to the passage of Venus in 1631. The passage in 1639 was observed by several English astronomers in a coordinated fashion as a result.36 For both of the transits of Venus in the eighteenth century (1761, 1769), astronomy organized a worldwide effort of observation teams strewn systematically across the globe for the rare occurrence. They wanted to avail themselves of the fact that the duration of the transit could vary by quite a few arc-minutes depending on the geographic latitude of the observer, the shifting of the azimuth yielding the aforementioned parallax effect. From a southern viewpoint the line of passage was ‘higher’ on the solar disk, from a northern point ‘lower’ than the average comparative value. The length of the passage grew significantly (along with the measurable duration of the transit) as it tended toward the middle of the sun, while those transits closer to the edge of the circle had abridged transit times. Half a century before, the astronomer Edmund Halley, using the Kepler’s laws, had ascertained that through trigonometric analysis of the angular difference it must be possible to determine the distance between the earth and the sun with unheard of exactitude. The relocation of observation points along a north-south access (or the comparison of stations far from each other) generated a parallax effect large enough for someone with a capable telescope to precisely determine. The strategy chosen for the occasion of both passages, which functioned far better with the second occurrence, was to send observers both as far north and as far south as possible. However, it was known already for the 1761 passage that the most suitable observation points were deep in the southern hemisphere, while the best-equipped observatories were in middle and northern Europe; the “point of longest duration” for an eyewitness in 1761 was “about twenty degrees west of Cape Horn,” as the astronomy historian J.F. Encke remarked, to whose detailed accounting and evaluation of the measuring events we owe a debt of gratitude.37 Frustrated by how difficult it was to ready suitable stations ad hoc in the southern hemisphere, astronomical researchers became acutely aware of the global inequality of living conditions – as well as the possibilities of development. With the “advantage the northern hemisphere had over the southern hemisphere in terms of general culture,”38 it was much easier to gather valid measurements in Europe and other locations in the north than in the southern latitudes. Against the background of the overwhelming majority of data coming from the well-equipped north, the excursions of Mason and Dixon to Capetown or Cook’s and Green’s stops in Tahiti won a singular status; their divergent views were extremely valuable to astronomical research, exactly because they stood out so prominently in a sea of methodical inadequacy. Because of these endeavors, astronomy became an inadvertent crown witness to a certain phase of the ‘non-equatorial’ world order of our globe.

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Notes 1. E.g. the determination of the longitude at Greenwich as the Prime Meridian for gauging time or the stipulation that the prototypical meter should be geodetically deduced from the meridian that passed through France’s west coast. 2. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). 3. Albrecht Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990). 4. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 14. (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1955), Weltgeschichte: Sp. 1587–91; Weltreise: Sp. 1680; Weltteil: Sp. 1703–4. 5. See Robert Stockhammer, “Welt oder Erde? Zwei Figuren des Globalen,” in Figuren des Globalen: Weltbezug und Welterzeugung in Literatur, Kunst und Medien, ed. Christian Moser and Linda Simonis (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2016), 47–72. 6. “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it upon himself to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes [1755]; Eng.: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, trans. and ed. Helena Rosenblatt (Boston/New York: First Edition, 2011), 70). 7. The economic-historical term value production presupposes, both analytically and historically, the categorical distinction between (economic) production and (biological as well as social) reproduction, but at the same time describes their growing permeability and saturation that offers de facto the starting point of a new critical economic theory (Adelheid Biesecker and Sabine Hofmeister, Die Neuerfindung des Ökonomischen: Ein (re-)produktionstheoretischer Beitrag zur Sozial-ökologischen Forschung (München: oekom, 2006)). 8. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973) (London: Oxford University Press, 2016), 138. 9. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), 17. 10. Ibid., 16–17. 11. Otto Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, vol. 2 (Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer, 1975), 576. 12. “For the east-west-curvature of the earth one has, of course, no such simple observational data at one’s disposal but arguments of symmetry and successful explanation of the phenomena connected with risings and settings by means of a rotating celestial sphere must have strongly supported the concept of a spherical earth.” (Ibid.) 13. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Der Wanderer. Zweite Fassung,” in Friedrich Hölderlin: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Michael Knaupp, 3 vols. (München: Hanser, 1992), vol. 1, 305f., v. 1–6, 15–18, 19–26. 14. Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker and Company, 1995). 15. Wilhelm Pape, Griechisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1864), art. Klima, 1335–6; the derived and likewise with the solar arc connected klimakedon means “stufenweise, nach Art einer Treppe” (1336). “The original meaning of the term . . . is geometric in character: ‘inclination.’ In astronomical context it means the inclination of the earth’s axis with respect to the plane of the local horizon, directly observable

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

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by the . . . ‘elevation of the pole.’ Obviously, this concept presupposes the discovery of the sphericity of the earth.” (Neugebauer, History Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, vol. 2, 725; see as well Gonthier-Louis Fink, “Klima- und Kulturtheorien der Aufklärung,” in Georg-Forster-Studien, vol. 2 (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1996), 25–44). Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Colonel J. J. Graham (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1873). Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), trans. Thomas Nugent (London, 1793), 167. “In warm climates, where the cutis is relaxed, the ends of the nerves are expanded and laid open to the weakest action of the smallest objects.” (Ibid., 166) Ibid., 168. Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (London: printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, by Luke Hansard, Great Turnstile, Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, 1800), 12. Ibid. John Noyes, Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 95–6f. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Language which Treats of Melody and Musical Imitation (1761),” in On the Origin of Language: Two Essays: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder, trans. with afterwords John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 1–74, 39. For the cultural history of the equator, see Kyung-Ho Cha, “Der Äquator – Weltrand und Weltmitte,” in Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, ed. Hartmut Böhme (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005), 673–97. The autumnal equinox was overdetermined to the figurative entrance of the sun into the zodiac sign of the scales, which as an allegory of justice also simultaneously strengthened the semantic of the equator anew. Judith Schalansky, Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln (Hamburg: Mare Verlag, 2009). Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 36. Ibid. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 542. Ibid., 615. Johann Franz Encke, Die Entfernung der Sonne von der Erde aus dem Venusdurchgange von 1761 hergeleitet (Gotha: Beckersche Buchhandlung, 1822), 11. John Hawkeswort, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (London: printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell in the Strand, MDCCLXXIII, [1773]). Lewis de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World: Performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty in the Year 1766, 1767, 1768, and 1769. By Lewis de Bougainville, Colonel of Foot, and Commodore of the Expedition, in the Frigate La Boudeuse and the Store-ship L’Etoile, trans. John Reinhold Forster (London: Printed for J. Nourse, Bookseller to His Majesty, in the Strand; and T. Davies, Bookseller to the Royal Academy, in Russel-Street, Covent-Garden, MDCCLXXII, [1772]). Denis Diderot, “Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, ou dialogue entre A et B sur l’inconvénient d’attacher des idées morales à certaines actions

196 Alexander Honold physiques qui n’en comportent pas,” in Opuscules philosophiques et littéraires, la plupart posthumes ou inédites (Paris: L’imprimérie de Chevet, 1796), 187–270. 36. For its impact, see Encke, Entfernung der Sonne von der Erde, 1. 37. Ibid., 5. 38. Ibid., 8–9.

Bibliography Biesecker, Adelheid, and Sabine Hofmeister. Die Neuerfindung des Ökonomischen: Ein (re-)produktionstheoretischer Beitrag zur sozial-ökologischen Forschung. München: oekom, 2006. Bougainville, Lewis de. A Voyage Round the World: Performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty in the Year 1766, 1767, 1768, and 1769: By Lewis de Bougainville, Colonel of Foot, and Commodore of the Expedition, in the Frigate La Boudeuse and the Store-Ship L’Etoile. Translated by John Reinhold Forster. London: Printed for J. Nourse, Bookseller to His Majesty, in the Strand; and T. Davies, Bookseller to the Royal Academy, in Russel-Street, CoventGarden, MDCCLXXII, 1772. Cha, Kyung-Ho. “Der Äquator – Weltrand und Weltmitte.” In Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, edited by Hartmut Böhme, 673–97. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Translated by Colonel J.J. Graham. London: N. Trübner & Co., 1873. Diderot, Denis. “Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, ou dialogue entre A et B sur l’inconvénient d’attacher des idées morales à certaines actions physiques qui n’en comportent pas.” In Opuscules philosophiques et littéraires, la plupart posthumes ou inédites, 187–270. Paris: L’imprimérie de Chevet, 1796. Encke, Johann Franz. Die Entfernung der Sonne von der Erde aus dem Venusdurchgange von 1761 hergeleitet. Gotha: Beckersche Buchhandlung, 1822. Fink, Gonthier-Louis. “Klima- und Kulturtheorien der Aufklärung.” In GeorgForster-Studien, vol. 2, 25–44. Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1996. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 14. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1955. Hawkesworth, John. An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere. London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell in the Strand, MDCCLXXIII, 1773. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Translated by T. Churchill. London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, by Luke Hansard, Great Turnstile, Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, 1800. Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Der Wanderer. Zweite Fassung.” In Friedrich Hölderlin: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, edited by Michael Knaupp, 3 vols. München: Hanser, 1992. Koschorke, Albrecht. Die Geschichte des Horizonts: Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990. Montesquieu, Charles de. The Spirit of the Laws (1748), 6th ed. Translated by Thomas Nugent. London: F. Wingrave, 1793.

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Neugebauer, Otto. A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, vol 2. Berlin/ Heidelberg/New York: Springer, 1975. Noyes, John. Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pape, Wilhelm. Griechisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch, 2nd ed., vol. 1. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1864. Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Essay on the Origin of Language Which Treats of Melody and Musical Imitation (1761).” In On the Origin of Language: Two Essays: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder. Translated, with afterwords, by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode, 1–74. London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755; Eng.: Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, with related documents. Edited, Translated and with an Introduction by Helena Rosenblatt. Boston, NY: First Edition, 2011. Schalansky, Judith. Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln. Hamburg: Mare Verlag, 2009. Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker and Company, 1995. Stockhammer, Robert. “Welt oder Erde?: Zwei Figuren des Globalen.” In Figuren des Globalen: Weltbezug und Welterzeugung in Literatur, Kunst und Medien, edited by Christian Moser and Linda Simonis, 47–72. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City (1973). London: Oxford University Press, 2016.

9

Between Nature and Culture Comparing, Natural History, and Anthropology in Modern French Travel Narratives Around 1800 (François-René de Chateaubriand) Kirsten Kramer

Introduction Modern European world travel literature, which was produced in the period between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, is marked by the progressive discovery and scientific exploration of foreign cultures, territories, and ethnic communities, in which it exhibits its specific geophysical and geocultural “worldliness.”1 At the same time, it represents the privileged site of emergence of diverse practices and operations of comparing, which relate the newly discovered cultural and geographical phenomena to familiar and already existing forms of experience and knowledge. Travel writing is thus situated in the context of European “world exploration politics,”2 which, since the age of the Enlightenment, has been practicing the increasing measuring, appropriation, and colonization of the world; it is characterized by complex networks of scientific, geopolitical, technical, and cultural dispositives, which come to make accessible various inter- and intracultural “contact zones.”3 The narrative descriptions and constructions of these contact zones establish a close connection between different forms of knowledge of the world and contemporary notions of the order of nature, drawing on both traditional and newly emerging orders of knowledge in the fields of botany, zoology, geography, and ‘ethnology’ or anthropology, while critically questioning their basic assumptions; they thus come to open up new spaces for exploring and negotiating divergent cultural norms and forms of knowledge. The reliance on different scientific models of knowledge production is clearly reflected in the diversity of genres of travel writing, which include documentary reports (such as navigation books, travelogues, or essays) as well as logbooks, diaries, itineraries, collections of letters, fictional narratives, or hybrid text forms; around 1800, these travel narratives were marked by crossovers between scientific, historiographic, and literary narrative models, as well as by the overlapping of fictional and factual narrative modes with which modern travel literature comes to explore and to negotiate new fields of cultural experience.

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During this period, the disciplines of natural history and ‘ethnology’ or anthropology in particular articulated a specific understanding of the order of nature that was largely based on operations of comparing. This shows paradigmatically in the formation and differentiation of the ‘comparative method’ within different disciplines during the nineteenth century,4 with natural history chief among them. As has been foregrounded by recent criticism,5 the complex comparative operations form the central basis for the taxonomic classification systems developed in anatomy and biology, which – as is demonstrated in the writings of Carl Linnaeus or Georges Cuvier – describe nature on the basis of the divisions and distinctions between genus and species or organic forms and functions; during the nineteenth century, these, in turn, provide the methodological framework for the emergence of further classificatory disciplines such as ‘comparative grammar,’ ‘comparative architecture,’ ‘comparative law,’ or ‘comparative literature.’ In nineteenth-century anthropology, in addition, the scientific method represents the dominant paradigm for the study of the general laws underlying the development of human society. Although around 1900 – as is shown in Franz Boas’ theoretical considerations formulated in The Limitations of the Comparative Method (1896)6 – the method increasingly proved to be subject to critical challenges, these challenges do not in any way deny the general viability of comparative processes used in ethnographic descriptions of regions, populations, or civilizations, but are merely directed against their universalist foundation, which significantly reduces the diversity of forms of social organization by postulating a uniform model of evolutionary development. Within both scientific disciplines, around 1800, acts of comparing served to profile different historical concepts of nature, and gained a fundamental significance with regard to the formation and growing implementation of the networks underlying European ‘world exploration politics,’ which developed in the fields of scientific research activities and colonial practices of conquest, as well as contemporary techniques of measuring, writing, and aestheticizing the world, in which travel writing assumed a decisive role. Starting out from brief preliminary theoretical considerations which conceive of comparisons as forms of social or cultural ‘practices’ carried out by actors in concrete situational contexts, the following analysis of modern European travel writing will focus on selected travel narratives by François-René de Chateaubriand. These draw on travel literature belonging to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – as represented by Bougainville, Diderot, Lahontan, Humboldt, and others – as well as on the discourse of natural history, and on Enlightenment anthropology, which is largely based on universalist assumptions closely related to the tradition of natural law and the Rousseauist opposition of nature and culture. The complex literary practices of comparing, which in Chateaubriand refer in particular to cultural contacts between Europe

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and America, reveal significant transformations of both the taxonomic classification systems underlying contemporary natural history and the ethnological categorizations inherent in Enlightenment anthropological thought. It will be argued, firstly, that these comparative practices instigate new forms of representation of foreign territories and civilizations that deliberately dismiss the universalist opposition of nature and culture. Secondly, the analysis of comparative practices will focus on the formation of narrative forms which, in transgressing the boundaries of traditional travel genres, generate new models of narration. These models not only displace the conceptual hierarchies underlying Enlightenment ‘ethnology’ but ultimately come to establish in its formal structures dynamic narrative ‘contact zones,’ which gather protagonists and narrators of different ethnic and cultural origins and seek to supplant the methodological approach of distant anthropological reflection with modern modes of ethnographic description and observation based on participation and proximity.

Operations and Practices of Comparing: A Practice-Theoretical View According to recent criticism, travel and travel narratives can be described as products of a historical “school of comparison”7 that comes to initiate new forms of world knowledge and world observation. Viewed from the perspective of cultural studies, acts of comparing do not present themselves as logical, cognitive, or hermeneutic operations,8 but are to be understood as broader cultural practices carried out by historical and social actors in specific situational contexts.9 Cultural-studies analyses therefore do not deal primarily with the issue of how the nature of comparative operations is to be defined, but instead raise the questions of what specific actors ‘do’ when they compare; what interests, benefits, or consequences arise from the comparative performance; and in what form comparisons, in conjunction with other forms of action carried out by social actors, contribute to shaping, ordering, and changing the world. Accordingly, comparative operations cannot be described by a simple triadic relation, in which at least two comparata are related to at least one tertium comparationis, but enter into more complex constellations that not only take into account the objects compared and the grounds of comparison, but also include the respective actors as well as the involvement of both objects and actors in specific cultural situations. On the one hand, this practice-theoretical view entails the assumption of a significant dynamization underlying the interaction of comparata with regard to tertia that serve to establish the specific relationship between these comparata. Comparison does not only imply the selection of one or more properties that are attributable to two existing objects or entities and that allow for the comparative act to be carried out in the first place, but is also

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based on more comprehensive relations that presuppose mutual interactions between the compared objects and their respective environments; comparative operations therefore initiate dynamic processes that, relying on similarities and differences, simultaneously presuppose movements of approximation and distancing of the objects involved.10 In this respect, it seems crucial to determine in particular whether the compared objects, after having been related to an object that is distinct from them, retain their original identity and internal integrity or whether they undergo significant changes in the course of the comparative operation. Viewed from a practice-theoretical perspective, comparative practices obtain a specific heuristic function in this respect: they do not necessarily build on known properties of the compared objects, but are marked by a ‘productivity’ with regard to comparata, as they often prove to be ‘explorative’ procedures capable of unfolding unknown relations between the related elements, or even represent ‘creative’ processes that come to produce these elements in the first place. Comparative operations, then, are able to generate new classifications, attributions, or views of the related terms which are no longer identical with the initial elements, and thus replace prior epistemological views with different forms of experience and knowledge, which open up spaces for new interpretations and forms of social action. At the same time, the practice-theoretical perspective deliberately takes into account the cultural context of the actors of comparative processes: as is demonstrated in particular by intercultural comparisons of different ethnic groups, communities, races, or languages since the eighteenth century, the processes of comparison of different worlds often presuppose the (normative) assumption of cultural differences and asymmetric power positions or relations of domination among the cultures, peoples, or tribes involved, and thus potentially imply the affirmation and consolidation of cultural hierarchies and power relations. In such normative assumptions a ‘politics of comparison’ is articulated which, in the recent past, has been critically examined by representatives of postcolonial theoretical approaches that are based on the legitimate assumption that comparisons are never neutral in nature, but, as a rule, appear to be closely linked with specific interests and judgments.11 If in these approaches the fundamental distinction between self and other gains major interest, this perspective focuses primarily on existing cultural identities of subjects or communities, whose peculiarities, as a rule, tend to be related to the basic dichotomy of Western and non-Western cultures that forms the basis for modern Eurocentrism and European colonialism. From a practicetheoretical point of view, it should be foregrounded, however, that the dynamization of the comparative constellations also affects the positions of self and other, as their identities are not previously determined, but only emerge and change on the basis of specific practices of comparison. It therefore seems necessary to refrain from reducing the analysis of historical comparative operations to mere descriptions of similarities and

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differences between (European) self and (non-European) others and to widen the scope by addressing the broader question of how, and on the basis of which forms of knowledge and categories of experience, compared elements come to be constituted as comparable terms in the first place. As comparisons not only aim at establishing and consolidating existing forms or categories of knowledge, but also possess the potential of creating and shaping new relations, they open up spaces of knowledge and routines of action that, in some cases, may confirm simple dichotomizations such as the opposition of self and other or nature and culture, whilst, in others, critically confronting these or transferring them into different epistemological or geopolitical constellations.12 The fundamental ambiguities and shifts that result from the productive force of comparative practices with regard to the development and transmission of new models of knowledge also characterize both the scientific appropriation and the geopolitical conquest or colonization of the world, as unfolded in French travel literature emerging in the context of European ‘world exploration politics’ around 1800; in its narrative and comparative practices, it constitutes complex ‘contact zones,’ which come to assemble various historical models of knowledge and routines of action underlying the transcultural interactions and colonial encounters of European and non-European cultures, and which will be examined in more detail in the following pages.

The Concept of Nature: Comparing and Natural History in Chateaubriand’s Travel Literature French travel literature, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, draws on a broad variety of comparative practices that developed in the course of the progressive discovery, scientific exploration, and colonial appropriation of foreign cultures during the Enlightenment. Within the French-speaking cultural world of the period around 1800, the specific interrelations between narrative and scientific operations of comparing are documented in particular in the travelogues and travel narratives written and published by François-René de Chateaubriand. His travel writings outline a comprehensive knowledge of the world whose narrative articulations, especially in the representations of the order of nature, are marked by a significant productive force with regard to the creation of new and the transformation of existing models of knowledge and experience. The development of new horizons of perception and routines of action relies to a large extent on the close exchange with different scientifically and culturally based comparative practices, both simultaneously presupposed and produced by the narratives. The ‘explorative’ production of meaning in relation to contemporary knowledge practices and techniques of world discovery becomes most evident in the descriptions of Chateaubriand’s

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voyage to America, which was placed by the author in the tradition of the scientific expeditions of the eighteenth century, took him to North America and Canada, and was originally meant to serve the geopolitical aim of discovering the Northwest Passage and gaining new colonies for France.13 The experience of this journey, undertaken in 1791, is presented in a broad variety of travel reports and narratives, which assume different forms and were published at various stages within the author’s literary production: the proper travelogue, published in 1827 under the title Voyage en Amérique,14 is preceded by initial descriptions presented in the autobiographical text Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1811–1848), as well as by the two fictional narratives Atala and René, which are part of the long epic Les Natchez (published only in 1826), but appear as soon as in 1801–02 as inserted narratives within the programmatic aesthetic essay Génie du christianisme. As this brief overview of the publication history already illustrates, the author’s experiences of his journey to America are presented both in fictional narratives as well as documentary forms of narration such as the travelogue Voyage en Amérique, which directly reflects the empirical observations of the traveler.15 The complex publication history of the travel writings reveals that around 1800 there is no categorical distinction to be drawn between fictional and factual narratives. Rather, the travel narratives display various parallels with forms of representation that also characterize documentary reports of expeditions of the eighteenth century, which essentially aimed at transmitting and communicating extensive knowledge of the world. The preface of the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811), which contains an account of Chateaubriand’s journey to the ‘Orient,’ it is true, documents the author’s and narrator’s explicit distancing from scholars and explorers who travelled to the ‘Orient’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “I do not follow in the footsteps of the Chardin, the Tavernier, the Chandler, the Mungo Park, the Humboldt: I do not pretend to have known peoples with whom I have only passed.”16 Yet the travelogue constantly refers to the authorities of these and further contemporary explorers or scientists, ostentatiously insists on the accuracy of the data listed and, in focusing on the past of the sites visited during the journey, establishes a close link between travel literature and historiography, which, during this period, is equally invoked by Constantin François Volney who, in the preface to the Voyage en Égypte et Syrie (1787), imputes to travel literature a quasi-scientific claim to objectivity and truth.17 Yet the close connection between the narrative and the scientific discovery of the world in the context of European ‘world exploration politics,’ in Chateaubriand’s writing, is documented in particular by the comparative operations exposed in the descriptions of landscapes and tribes of America, which form the second part of the Voyage en Amérique and also appear in the fictional American narratives of the author;

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they represent articulations of a specific understanding of the order of nature, which in the eighteenth century provides the central frame of reference for the formation of knowledge about foreign worlds and peoples. The descriptive narratives provide a form of representation based on comparison which, in Chateaubriand’s narratives as well as in Alexander von Humboldt’s writings,18 is firmly rooted in the context of scientific traditions and ordering systems pertaining to natural history and, in Chateaubriand’s case, also refer back to central assumptions inherent in Enlightenment anthropological thought. Paradigmatically, the significance of scientific descriptions shows most clearly in the documentary travelogue Voyage en Amérique, which explicitly ties in with the tradition of travel literature ranging from antiquity to the voyages of discovery undertaken by Bougainville or Humboldt.19 Although the report follows the individual stages of the journey, which takes the narrator from the Niagara Falls to Florida through different regions of America, it is also characterized by a thematic division into chapters, which, by naming flora, fauna, customs of the inhabitants of America, and social community forms, takes up the arrangement of contents inherent in the ordo naturalis of contemporary discovery voyages and expeditions,20 while at the same time recurring to the taxonomic classification and ordering systems of natural history. A similar scientific gesture in describing the world also occurs in other travel narratives, as exemplified by the prologue of the narrative Atala (1801). Like the narrator of the prefaces, which reports on Chateaubriand’s project of discovering the Northwest Passage and alludes to the sale of the French colonies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,21 the narrator here ostentatiously adopts the pose of a European explorer and naturalist around 1800, who first provides the contemporary reader with concise information on the history of the French colonization of Louisiana since the end of the seventeenth century, and presents an exact geographical view of the landscape, which is inserted into a cartographic grid of coordinates aligned according to cardinal directions and rivers and divided into well-defined areas: France formerly possessed in North America a vast empire, extending from Labrador to the Floridas, and from the shores of the Atlantic to the most distant lakes of Upper Canada. Four great rivers, deriving their sources from the same mountains, divided these immense regions: the river St. Lawrence, which is lost to the east in the gulf of that name; the Western River, whose waters flow on to seas unknown; the river Bourbon, which runs from south to north into Hudson’s Bay; and the Mississippi, whose waters fall from north to south into the Gulf of Mexico. The last-named river, in its course of more than a thousand leagues, waters a delicious country, called by the inhabitants of the United

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States the New Eden, to which the French left the pretty appellation Louisiana.22 This form of cartographic mapping of newly explored territories implicitly alludes to Denis Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1772), where the places visited by the explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville are named and traced on a globe by one of the two representatives of French civilization appearing in the opening dialogue: A: B: A: B:

Was it a long voyage? I’ve traced it on this globe. Do you see that line of red dots? Starting from Nantes? And running from the straits of Magellan, entering the Pacific Ocean, winding through the islands that form the great archipelago which extends from the Philippines to New Holland, skirting Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope, and then proceeding into the Atlantic, hugging the coast of Africa, and finally ending up at the point of departure.23

The interlocutor in Diderot’s Supplément thus identifies himself as an ‘armchair traveler’ in the tradition of the French philosophes24 who reconstructs the journey in his imagination without ever having moved to foreign territories and environments; the narrator in Chateaubriand, on the contrary, suggests that the cartographic mapping of the places is the result of his own empirical experience, observation, and measuring, and thereby places himself in the succession of European scientific explorers such as Bougainville himself. The gesture of the observing naturalist expresses itself on yet another level in the subsequent description of the Mississippi River landscape: the brief geomorphological and hydrographic observations on the river system25 already anticipate similar indications of the chemical composition of the water, the system of underground channels, and the fauna of the Dead Sea, which are formulated in more detail and with explicit reference to numerous scientific authorities such as the British anthropologist Richard Pococke or the French chemists Antoine de Lavoisier and Pierre-Joseph Macquer in the third part of the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem.26 In the prologue of Atala, these observations primarily refer to visible natural phenomena and combine with explicit references to their sensory perceptibility;27 at the same time, however, they identify the phenomena described as elements of a tableau28 of the landscape that forms the object of the viewer’s description and refers equally to pictorial views of nature as well as to numerical data collections and scientific representations or schematic overviews such as charts or diagrams.29 The references to visual perception, in conjunction with the allusion to the representation form of the tableau, document an “empirical evidence constraint” (Empirisierungszwang) which, in the

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history of science, occurred around 1800 in the course of the transition leading from natural history to natural science and significantly links the scientific description of nature to the presence of an empirical observer.30 The integration of narrative in the context of modern world exploration shows in the most obvious form, however, within the comparative practices underlying the description: if, here, plant species such as “pistias” or “nénuphars” are compared in metaphorical form with sailing ships or flags, and animal species such as “serpents,” “herons,” “flamingoes,” or “crocodiles” are compared to “passengers,”31 these are nautical comparisons which, in explicitly referring to shipping and navigation, identify two of the most important technologies which allow for the increasing discovery, exploration, and appropriation of the overseas territories in America to be realized in the first place. In combining comparisons between natural phenomena and technical navigation processes with references to the history of colonization, to the measuring of the world in cartographic representations or scientific data records, and to the empirical observation of nature, the description of the river landscape comes to reveal the extensive network structures that characterize both modern world exploration politics and the scientific and technological appropriation of the world on which it is based. At the same time, the comparative practices underlying the descriptive narratives are marked by a close relationship with scientific ordering systems of contemporary natural history and Enlightenment anthropology as well as their ‘productivity’ with regard to the concept of nature on which these are founded. This applies in particular to the formalized system of naming organisms and the taxonomic classification of plants and animals by species and genera, which was developed in Carl von Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae (1735) and had a strong impact on eighteenth-century natural history.32 In the prologue to Atala, the proximity to ordering systems derived from natural history is not only documented by the order of descriptive elements following the classificatory division into flora and fauna, which characterizes the river landscape of the Mississippi;33 it also manifests itself in the enumerations of various animal species including “cariboos,” “black-squirrels,” “mocking-birds,” “Virginian pigeons,” “cardinals,” “humming-birds,” and others,34 which directly refer to the systematic naming of the plant and animal kingdom by species, which in contemporary writings on natural history – such as the writings of the naturalists and explorers Jonathan Carver, William Bartram, and Pierre François Xavier Charlevoix, explicitly mentioned in the preface to the 1805 edition of the narrative – also assume the form of descriptio and are derived from systematic comparisons among the different varieties.35 In contemporary natural history, the naming of genera and species serves as a guarantee for the establishment of taxonomic ordering systems, which are based on methodologically regulated comparisons between features of individual specimens or species, and

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note significant similarities and differences between the compared items, allowing the identification of individual specimens within the hierarchically structured system. The prologue of Atala, however, presents a different constellation. In contrast to the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, only few comparisons between European and foreign animal or plant species are formulated; in the books of the Memoires d’outre-tombe dedicated to the journey to America, Chateaubriand distances himself from these comparisons in a quasi-parodistic form suggesting, by mentioning grotesque features of domestic animal and plant species, that this type of comparison represents a pseudo-scientific ethnocentric instrument of interpretation that proves unable to provide adequate descriptions of the foreign world and its “otherness.”36 Yet in the prologue as well as in other travel writings by Chateaubriand, numerous metaphorical comparisons recur in which natural phenomena appear as comparata, which, drawing on different tertia, are related to a wide variety of cultural phenomena. In particular, these comparisons include several rapprochements in which botanical phenomena such as trees or plants come to be associated with architectural structures such as colonnades, vaults, or bridge constructions: Suspended along the course of the waters, grouped upon the rocks and upon the mountains, and dispersed in the valleys, trees of every form, of every color, and of every perfume, throng and grow together, stretching up into the air to heights that weary the eye to follow. Wild vines, bignonias, coloquintidas, intertwine each other at the feet of these trees, escalade their trunks, and creep along to the extremity of their branches, stretching from the maple to the tulip-tree, from the tulip-tree to the holly-hock, and thus forming thousands of grottoes, arches and porticoes. Often, in their wanderings from tree to tree, these creepers cross the arm of a river, over which they throw a bridge of flowers.37 Referring frequently to the visible form of the compared phenomena, which serves as tertium comparationis, descriptions of this kind again take recourse to the ordering principle of taxonomic classifications in contemporary natural history, which – as demonstrated in the writings of Linnaeus and in the sensualist approach developed in Georges de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (1749–1804) – derives primarily from visually or sensorially perceptible external features of plant and animal morphology, which are replaced by functional internal laws only in Georges Cuvier’s anatomical writings.38 Nevertheless, these narrative comparisons do not primarily serve to confirm and consolidate the hierarchically structured system of classification and ordering of physical nature. In relating botanical elements such as plant species to cultural monuments that primarily display a sacred character, comparative

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practices rather come to document a significant shift in the concept of nature, as nature is no longer merely understood as a taxonomic system of animal and plant species that represents the object of scientific descriptions, but rather appears as a quasi-metaphysical or cosmological ordering system which forms the basis of the Romantic aesthetic developed by Chateaubriand in the programmatic essay Génie du christianisme.39 Combining comparata originating from the areas of nature and culture, the comparative practices thus set out to open up a new horizon of meaning by gradually supplementing the scientific concept of nature derived from natural history with an aesthetic frame of reference that draws on traditional cosmological and metaphysical notions of the world. Contrary to views suggested by critics,40 this cosmological, religious, and aesthetic concept of nature, which is partially linked to the early modern imagination of universal analogies and hidden correspondences, does not, however, contradict the contemporary scientific notion of nature. The classificatory naming system of natural history, in the writings of Linnaeus and Buffon, also provides the frame of reference for the assumption of a divinely created order which reveals God’s plan through scientific and taxonomic divisions of the species system in botany and zoology or through the idea of an infinite chain of beings embodying the unity of nature.41 In addition, in the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, natural history forms the basis for the conception of the world as a homogeneous “cosmos” whose uniform design, however, is to be mapped empirically by taking recourse to the method of “physical world description.”42 In Chateaubriand’s world travel narratives, in turn, the narrative comparative practices themselves operate as a significant extension of the concept of nature; the specific arrangement of comparata drawn from the fields of nature (animal species) and culture (sacred monuments) succeeds in presenting the biological order of the natural realm as an expression of the metaphysical and aesthetic order of divine creation, which does not dismiss the descriptive models of modern natural history, but, quite to the contrary, continues to rely on scientific descriptions while deliberately seeking to reconcile them with new religious interpretations of nature.43

Nature and Culture: Comparing and Anthropology in Chateaubriand’s Travel Writing In addition, the comparative operations underlying the descriptive narratives, in which the narrator appears not only as a geographer, botanist, or zoologist, but also assumes the role of an ‘ethnologist,’ reveal significant modifications of the concept of nature inherent in the opposition of nature and culture developed by Rousseau as well as in Enlightenment anthropological thought based on the tradition of natural law. As is well known, Rousseau’s theory of the state of nature, formulated in the Discours sur

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l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), describes a hypothetical primitive state preceding socialization in which individuals act according to their natural desire for self-preservation. In Chateaubriand’s travel writings, the descriptions of nature come to be inserted into numerous intercultural and temporal comparisons between the New World (America) and the Old World (Europe), which here – similarly to the writings and narratives by other early Romantic authors such as Étienne Pivert de Senancour or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre –44 are directly related to the Rousseauist dichotomy of natural state and social state,45 in the context of which nature itself appears to be a heuristic comparative construct, representing a prior natural state of humans against which all current states of society are to be assessed.46 Nature thus functions both as a comparatum opposed to culture as well as a higher-order tertium and a universalist standard of comparison prescribing ‘natural life forms,’ which provides the normative frame of reference for the evaluation of European culture and civilization. Within Chateaubriand’s travel narratives, numerous dualistic and temporal comparisons opposing old Europe to young America already come to reveal significant contradictions and inconsistencies, which let a clear and stable hierarchization of the cultures based on the Rousseauist concept of nature appear problematic. In addition to several representations of America in which the primacy of nature over civilization is postulated, there are also numerous descriptions which, in implicitly recurring to the Enlightenment notion of the infinite ‘perfectibility’ of humans, emphasize the primacy of civilization over ‘primitive’ forms of society spread among the ‘savages.’47 A yet more complex situation arises in those descriptions that transform the twofold comparisons into triadic constellations that not only refer to Europe and America, but also come to include the ‘Orient.’48 Within these triadic comparisons, the ‘ancient’ cultures of the ‘Orient’ (such as the Egyptian, Greek, or Arab cultures) often appear as the origin or cradle of European civilization, while modern political forms of government and power configurations such as the Turkish rule over Greece are interpreted as a relapse into a ‘barbarism’ similar to the forms of life of the ‘savages’ in America.49 In the prologue of Atala, this notable extension of geocultural schemes of comparison is documented in the context of another architectural reference, which  – referring once more to the visible form – relates cultural tombs of the indigenous population to the Egyptian pyramids and furthermore combines this with a comparative assimilation of the American Mississippi with its Egyptian counterpart, the Nile: At intervals the swollen river [Mississippi] raises its voice, whilst passing over the resisting heaps, and spreads its overflowing waters around the colonnades of the forests, and the pyramids of the Indian tombs: and so the Mississippi is the Nile of these deserts.50

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As recent research has underscored,51 similar triadic comparisons linking America, Europe, and the ‘Orient’ are also to be found in the contemporary travelogues written by Alexander von Humboldt, in which the Orinoco repeatedly appears to be compared with the Nile; the pyramid is used as a recurring architectural reference denoting the relation of different cultures and civilizations; and a multitude of linguistic, cultural, economic, and geographical parallels are established among the three cultures, creating complex and partially contradictory constellations in which the ‘Orient’ is alternately approximated to America or Europe. If these triadic comparisons, in Humboldt, serve above all to promote knowledge about foreign America and its ‘otherness’ as well as to revise common ‘orientalist’ stereotypes, in Chateaubriand’s writings, however, they appear to provide the starting point for a broader critical examination of the anthropological opposition of nature and culture. In the example mentioned, the metaphorical association of the Mississippi with the Nile and of indigenous tombs with the Egyptian pyramids implicitly refers back to a scientific debate led since the 1780s by numerous authorities, such as Thomas Jefferson or the naturalists William Bartram and Gilbert Imlay, with respect to the origins and cultural significance of indigenous burial mounds found in the Ohio Valley and the American Southeast.52 Drawing on central historical arguments occurring in this debate, the metaphorical description in the prologue to Atala transforms the dualistic comparison of America and Europe, which forms the basis of the whole narrative, into a triadic constellation, which now relates the ‘young America’ to the ‘old Orient’ and, in reversing the de facto historical order of precedence, suggests that young America potentially takes on the role that is attributed to Egyptian culture in Chateaubriand’s ‘oriental’ travelogue Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. This is confirmed by the last part of the Voyage en Amérique, in which the indigenous ‘savages’ are accorded a high degree of civilization based on the development of their languages and forms of political organization, which appears to be similar to that of modern Europe: From the examination of these languages alone, it is clear that the peoples named by us as savages were far advanced in that civilization which involved the combination of ideas. The details on their government will confirm this truth more and more.53 The similarity between the cultures is also foregrounded in the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem in the context of another direct comparison between the Egyptian pyramids and indigenous tombs, where, from an ethnographic perspective, it is traced back to their common cultural function, which consists in sustaining the memory both of the dead and of entire defunct societies.54 In Voyage en Amérique, the ethnographic association of the tumuli of the Amerindians with the pyramids furthermore

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combines with cultural and historical reflections, which take into consideration the possibilities of real migration movements and cultural contacts that may have taken place between American tribes and the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Egyptians, and which place America on a par with the early high cultures of the ‘Orient.’55 Viewing all of these comparative settings from a joint perspective, it becomes obvious that the ‘young America’ now appears to be situated on the same cultural level as the ‘old Orient’56 and no longer represents the antithesis to Europe as the embodiment of ‘wilderness,’ but, due to a significant reversal of the historical evolution postulated in the temporal comparisons, now comes to be conceived of as the true origin of modern European civilization.57 Thus, the triadic comparative constellations already articulated in Atala serve to outline a new geocultural configuration linking America, Europe, and the ‘Orient,’ which, in combining geographical landscape elements with architectural constructions not only documents a new appreciation of American civilization visible in its rapprochement to ancient non-European high cultures, but also comes to revise the entire frame of reference provided by Rousseauist ‘ethnology’ and anthropology. The travel writings reveal a critical inversion of the system of reference that within the Enlightenment tradition of natural law is based on a universalist concept of nature, which, set against the backdrop of the heuristic opposition of the state of nature and the state of society, forms the normative standard for the assessment of human civilizations. Ultimately, nature thus loses its privileged status with regard to the comparative descriptions of American and European culture, as is illustrated in the epilogue of Atala in the final account of an indigenous woman. As a survivor of the massacre perpetrated by the French against the Natchez in 1729, she describes the decline of the Indian tribe,58 which, in the narrator’s view, proves to be a direct correlate of the subsequent loss of the French colonies and the ensuing decline of France’s colonial power in Florida, Louisiana, and Canada that the narrator of Voyage en Amérique, in turn, explicitly sets in close relation to the historical disappearance of the indigenous tribes from North America.59 It is no longer the order of nature that presents the overall tertium for comparisons relating newly discovered territories and communities to familiar cultures; it comes to be increasingly supplanted by a geopolitical dynamic of history, which now provides the frame of reference for the proliferating rapprochements and demarcations of different world regions, peoples, and societies and irrevocably obliterates the heuristic basis of Enlightenment anthropological world experience. The descriptive associations of foreign landscapes, peoples, and cultures are therefore characterized by varying and disparate constellations of compared objects and standards of comparison, in which a fundamental “heterogeneity of the field of observation” is expressed,60 which indicates that the order of nature neither functions as a stable object of

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scientific classifications within natural history nor provides a universalist standard for ‘ethnological’ reflection. As the proliferating modes of comparison impressively document, around 1800 the idea of a homogeneous natural order tends to dissolve into a multitude of nature-culture configurations, which can no longer be assigned to uniform interpretation schemes. Comparative practices rather develop a notable productivity with regard to given scientific ordering systems by placing them – as in the case of the integration of scientific classification models into the cosmological context of the Christian poetics – within new frames of reference, or else by entirely dismissing existing models of knowledge such as the Enlightenment tradition of anthropology. In world travel literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century, comparisons therefore do not primarily appear to confirm or consolidate existing knowledge regimes, but rather serve to shape new kinds of relations, which, on the contrary, constantly transform, modify, or expand these regimes and thus contribute significantly to opening up new spaces of experience.

Comparing and Narrating: Anthropology and Ethnography in Chateaubriand’s Atala The fundamental transformations of historical comparative operations and models of knowledge, in modern world travel literature, are also manifest in the varying narrative forms which are directly involved in contemporary cultural exchange processes that are related to European ‘world exploration politics.’ As previously mentioned, around 1800 travel literature is characterized by the emergence of a wide variety of narrative forms of representation. The beginning of the nineteenth century is regarded as a turning point in cultural history, as scientific travelogues are increasingly permeated by fictional narrative schemes that were already present in earlier centuries, but during this period more and more fulfill a mediating function linking scientific demands and aesthetic composition.61 However, the co-presence of scientific or documentary reports and fictional representations of the discovery voyages indicates that no categorical distinction can be drawn between the different types of narration during this period. Both narrative forms are therefore not primarily to be determined by particular features defining specific genres and by the constitution or suspension of direct references to reality, but can be viewed as rule-based forms of organization of cultural experience, which intervene in the relationship established between humans and the world, and which provide basic symbolic orientation by embedding reality in comprehensible contexts, thereby giving the world an intelligible form and opening up scopes for new routines of social behavior and action.62 Within Chateaubriand’s travel writings, the experiences linked with his journey to America are presented in three complex narrative forms. These narrative models are the itinerary, the descriptive narration, and

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the intercultural dialogue, and display different forms of linking narrative and comparative practices, each of which contributes in its own way to transforming existing or producing new forms of knowledge and is integrated into the network processes underlying European world exploration. The narrative model of the itinerary, on which is based not only the description of Chateaubriand’s journey to the ‘Orient’ presented in the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem but also the first part of Voyage en Amérique, in its narrative organization and arrangement of events follows the succession of the geographical stations of the journey, which are linked by the traveler’s parcours and presented in chronological order.63 The places visited by the traveler not only provide the basis for temporal comparisons linking past and present experiences, but also form the starting point, in both travel narratives, for comprehensive comparisons of topographical landscapes and cultural monuments. On the one hand – like the expedition reports written by Humboldt or Charles Darwin – these mark the beginning of modern nineteenth-century natural history in the temporal sequencing of “biogeographical” forms of observation.64 On the other, they form a dense network of ethnological references that relate different cultures, peoples, and civilizations of America and Europe in such a way that broader geocultural and political constellations of comparisons emerge. The second narrative model is represented by the descriptive narrations previously analyzed, which appear in particular in the second part of Voyage en Amérique as well as in the author’s fictional American narratives; in Chateaubriand’s work – similarly to Humboldt’s65 – it is based on the alternation and close intertwining of itinerary narration and relational description which is marked, as shown earlier, by the close relation set up between contemporary systems of knowledge in natural history and in anthropology. A third narrative is represented by the intercultural dialogue between representatives of European civilization and indigenous Americans, which appears in different variants in eighteenth-century literature and – particularly in Montesquieus Lettres persanes (1721), Lahontan’s Dialogues curieux entre l’auteur et un sauvage de bon sens qui a voyagé (1703), and Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville – provides the narrative framework for ‘ethnological’ comparisons and the opposition of ‘savages’ and ‘civilized.’ Lahontan presents a dialogue between the baron himself and the Huron Adario, in which the Amerindian adopts the position of natural law and, basing his argument on the distinction between natural law (ius naturae) and human law (lex humana), formulates the claim for natural life.66 A more complex form is provided by Diderot’s Supplément, in which the monologue of a Tahitian old man and the dialogue held between a French chaplain and the Tahitian Orou are framed by further dialogues led by two representatives of French culture; the dichotomy of natural state and social state, deeply rooted in the tradition of natural law inherent in Enlightenment anthropology,

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also forms the basis for the comparisons relating European and nonEuropean cultures. However, the true critical and reflexive dimension of the narrative unfolds within a complex constellation which proves asymmetrical in a double sense, as one of the two representatives of French civilization paradoxically presents himself as an advocate of nature, just as, conversely, the Tahitian Orou appears as a defender of a natural law that bears close affinities to the utilitarian legal and economic system practiced in modern European states.67 However, despite the apparent contradiction that exists between the argumentative positioning of the interlocutors and their pertaining to different forms of society, all protagonists are characterized by a well-defined cultural identity and origin, which identifies them as representatives of either natural ‘savage society’ or of European ‘civil society.’ The model of dialogue that is widespread in Enlightenment literature is also adopted in Chateaubriand’s American narrative Atala. The text displays a complex structure, which is based on the interlocking of different narrative levels to which belong different narrative voices. Yet it is significant that – in contrast to the narrations presented by the Enlightenment predecessors – all the protagonists and narrators appearing in the narrative possess complex cultural identities: thus the intradiegetic narrator Chactas, who represents the central narrating voice in the main part of the narrative, is a member of the Indian tribe of the Natchez who spent several years at the French court of Louis XIV and in the city Saint Augustine, rebuilt by the Spanish after the takeover of the colony of Louisiana, before he returns to the wilderness, where he still lives at the time of the narrative.68 His interlocutor is the Frenchman René, who arrived in the French colony of Louisiana in 1725 and – as is explicitly noted in the text69 – appears as a representative of European culture who took the opposite path, from civilization to American wilderness. Chactas narrates his love for the mestiza Atala, who is of indigenous descent on her mother’s side and of Spanish origin on her father’s side, and who acts within the narrative as a hypodiegetic narrator telling her own life story. Her narrative is supplemented by the account of Father Aubry, who is another complementary figure to Chactas in that he lives in the wilderness as a Christian missionary of French origin. All narrative voices, which are closely interrelated, either appear to be representatives of the ‘savages’ who, by engaging in direct contact and exchange with Europe, have acquired characteristics of European civilization or, conversely, appear in the role of Europeans who have adopted ways of life that belong to ‘wilderness.’ The text thus reveals a new narrative constellation that is not only to be interpreted as an expression of the “mixed world,”70 the intermediate stage between nature and culture which, in the genealogical account of the history of civilization outlined in Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité, represents the ideal state of human society, but can be related, at the same time, to the peculiarities characterizing the

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colonial situation in Louisiana, in which the French settlements appear as dynamic ‘contact zones’ marked by the increased ‘intermingling’ of the French colonizers with the indigenous peoples.71 In addition, the complex structure of the narrative represents a further form of critical reception of the comparative model of knowledge provided by Enlightenment ‘ethnology.’ For it is also significant that all narrative instances represent homodiegetic narrators who are directly involved in the events of the narrated world and who recount incidents that they have observed or experienced themselves. This compositional principle furthermore comes to be applied in an innovative way to the narrator of the frame narrative and can be interpreted as a further critical revision of the anthropological method employed by the Enlightenment philosophes, who, representing “armchair anthropologists,” have never seen the cultures and peoples they describe whose habits and customs are depicted from a distance and by deliberate reliance on theoretical abstraction.72 If, in the prologue to Atala, the narrator of the frame narrative on the one hand assumes the position of a European geographer who engages in the cartographical mapping of the territory, he represents, on the other, a distanced observer who, even when reproducing visual impressions, relies on pictorial or scientific tableaux that thwart immediate sensorial perception and suggest that he represents a heterodiegetic narrative instance that is both temporally and spatially separated from the narrated colonial world. In the epilogue, however, the narrator portrays himself as a nomadic wanderer whose life equals the habits of the indigenous, who describes real encounters with the survivors of the Natchez massacre perpetrated by the French, who actively participates in the death rituals practiced by the indigenous people,73 and thus replaces the reflexive distance prevailing in the prologue with a relation of proximity that identifies him as a homodiegetic narrator who is part of the described indigenous world.74 Suggesting a transformation of the heterodiegetic narrator into a homodiegetic narrator, who, being a European, also approaches the customs of native Americans, the narrative illustrates the narrator’s double pertaining to nature and culture, which also applies to the other protagonists and narrators in the text. At the same time the narrative structure documents a significant transition leading from the practices of the distanced anthropologist and naturalist to alternative modes of ethnographic perception and representation based on new forms of a “participant observation,” “descriptive integration,” or shared “experience of habitation,” which within scientific contexts only come to be established in the course of the consolidation of the academic discipline of ethnology in the twentieth century.75 It can therefore be concluded that the compositional structure of the narrative itself serves to implement complex comparative constellations relating the ‘wild’ and ‘civilized,’ which indicate that the travel narrative as a whole constitutes a dynamic cultural ‘contact zone’ of its own right

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that assembles the protagonists and narrators of different ethnic and cultural origins in a common situational milieu and now comes to reject on a methodological level the universalist distinction of nature and culture presupposed in Enlightenment anthropology. The comparative operations of world travel literature thus prove to be highly explorative processes that ultimately contribute to introducing new descriptive models. In the period around 1800, these descriptive models not only express the irrevocable dissolution of the traditional concept of nature, but also serve to shape a new ethnographic understanding of the world which, in transforming, transgressing, and extending existing scientific and narrative orders of knowledge, proves to be constitutive for the formation of modernity.

Notes 1. See Alexander Honold, “Literatur in der Globalisierung: Globalisierung in der Literatur,” (February 2010). www.germanistik.ch/publikation.php?id= Literatur_in_der_Globalisierung, accessed January 31, 2020. 2. On the concept of “world exploration politics,” see Philippe Despoix, Die Welt vermessen: Dispositive der Entdeckungsreise im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 11. 3. On the connotations and implications underlying the concept of the “contact zone,” see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London et al.: Routledge, 2009). 4. On the origin and significance of the ‘comparative method’ within nineteenthcentury anthropology and sciences, see Matthew Candea, Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); see also Angus Nicholls, “Max Müller and the Comparative Method,” Comparative Critical Studies 12, no. 2 (June 2015): 213–34. 5. See Haun Saussy, “Axes of Comparison,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 64–76; see also Michael Eggers, Vergleichendes Erkennen: Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und zur Epistemologie des Vergleichs und zur Genealogie der Komparatistik (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), 9–29. 6. Franz Boas, “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology,” Science 103, no. 4 (December 1896): 901–8. 7. See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2: The Science of Freedom (London: Random House, 1970), 319. 8. On comparison conceived of as a hermeneutic category, see Hartmut von Sass, “Vergleiche(n): Ein hermeneutischer Rund- und Sinkflug,” in Hermeneutik des Vergleichs: Strukturen, Anwendungen und Grenzen komparativer Verfahren, ed. Andreas Mauz and Hartmut von Sass (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), 25–47. 9. See the introduction to this volume; see also Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, eds., “Doing Comparisons: Ein praxeologischer Zugang zur Geschichte der Globalisierung/en,” in Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015), 7–31. 10. On the notion of dynamic relations underlying comparative operations, see in particular Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?,” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 453–71. 11. On the impact and viability of postcolonial approaches within recent research on comparison see, among others, Saussy, “Axes of Comparison”;

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

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Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?”; Pheng Chea, “Grounds of Comparison,” Diacritics 29, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 1–18; Natalie Melas, “Merely Comparative,” PMLA 128, no. 3 (May 2013): 652–9. For a concise account of the wide range of interpretations offered by comparative practices, with respect to the early modern period, see Anthony Grafton, “Comparisons Compared: A Study in the Early Modern Roots of Cultural History,” in Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, ed. Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 18–48; see likewise Melas, “Merely Comparative,” who, from a systematic perspective, describes the opening up of a “space of mere relationality,” characterized by complex negotiation processes taking place between heterogeneous positions of power and knowledge. On the geopolitical project of the discovery of the Northwest Passage, see, among others, Benjamin Hoffmann, “Chateaubriand and Nostalgia for French America,” in Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 124–80, 129–30; references to the geopolitical context linking the publication of the text to France’s colonial involvement in North America can also be found in the preface of Atala; cf. François-René de Chateaubriand, “Atala,” in Œuvres romanesques et voyages, ed. Maurice Regard, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 1–99, 16–17. On the complex publication history of the travelogue, which goes back to two manuscripts dating from the years 1791 and 1793–1800, see in detail Hoffmann, “Chateaubriand,” 132–8. See Philippe Antoine, Les récits de voyage de Chateaubriand: Contribution à l’étude d’un genre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), 12 f. François-René de Chateaubriand, “Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris,” in Œuvres romanesques et voyages, ed. Maurice Regard, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 679–1343, 701. See Philippe Antoine, “Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem” de François-René de Chateaubriand (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 31–2; see also Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785, reprint (Paris: Volland, 1787), iij–ix. On Humboldt, see Ottmar Ette, Weltbewusstsein: Alexander von Humboldt und das unvollendete Projekt einer anderen Moderne (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2002), 157 ff.; on the significance (comparative) descriptions obtain within scientific exploration travels and expeditions of the eighteenth century, see Roy Bridges, “Exploration and Travel Outside Europe (1720–1914),” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 53–69. François-René de Chateaubriand, “Voyage en Amérique,” in Œuvres romanesques et voyages, vol. 1, 595–972, 617–63. This is documented by the table of contents of the French edition of the Voyage en Amérique; see Chateaubriand, Oeuvres romanesques et voyages, vol. 1, 1418. See Chateaubriand, “Atala,” 16–17 and 22. François-René de Chateaubriand, Atala, trans. James Spence Harry (New York: Cassell Publishing Co., 1884), 1–2; further information on the colonization history of Louisiana and the alliance of the French with the Native American tribe of the Natchez is provided at the end of the prologue; see Chateaubriand, Atala, 3–4. Denis Diderot, “The Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville,” in Political Writings, trans. and ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wolker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 31–75, 36–7.

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24. On the distinction between philosophes and travelers drawn by Bougainville as well as by Rousseau in the Discourse on the Origine and Foundation of Inequality, see Antoine, Les récits de Chateaubriand, 7–8. 25. See Chateaubriand, Atala, 2: “A thousand other rivers, tributaries of the Mississippi – the Missouri, the Illinois, the Arkansas, the Wabache, the Tennessee – enrich it with their mud and fertilize it with their waters. When all these rivers have been swollen by the deluges of winter, uprooted trees, forming large portions of forests torn down by tempests, crowd about their sources. In a short time the mud cements the torn trees together, and they become enchained by creepers, which, taking root in every direction, bind and consolidate the debris.” 26. François-René de Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem: A Translation into English by A.S. Kline (London: Poetry in Translation, 2011), 293–301. 27. This is documented by the repeated mentions of the “scene(s)” of nature (see Chateaubriand, Atala, 2) and the explicit reference to possible eyewitnesses (Chateaubriand, Atala, 3). 28. Chateaubriand, Atala, 2: “The two shores of the Mississippi present the most extraordinary picture [tableau].” 29. On the different meanings of the term “tableau,” which in Humboldt’s writings refers to various forms of representation such as paintings, tables, diagrams, or statistics, see Ette, Weltbewusstsein, 206–7. 30. On the impact empirical evidence gains within the transition leading from natural history to modern natural science based on observation and experience, cf. Martina King: “‘Ich habe im Sommer des Jahres 1838 eine Reihe von Beobachtungen angestellt’ – Naturwissenschaftliches Erzählen im frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” Diegesis 6, no. 1 (2017): 1–26. www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal. de/index.php/diegesis/article/view/261/367, accessed March 1, 2020; on the term ‘empirical evidence constraint’ [Empirisierungszwang], see Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 16–21. 31. See Chateaubriand, Atala, 2: “while the mid-stream bears away towards the sea the dead trunks of pine-trees and oaks, the lateral currents on either side convey along the shores floating islands of pistias and nénuphars, whose yellow roses stand out like little pavilions. Green serpents, blue herons, pink flamingoes, and baby crocodiles embark as passengers on these rafts of flowers; and the brilliant colony, unfolding to the wind its golden sails, glides along slumberingly till it arrives at some retired creek in the river.” 32. For a concise account of the origin and significance of the comparative classification system developed by Linneaus within the history of science, see Eggers, Vergleichendes Erkennen, 51–72. 33. See Chateaubriand, Atala, 2. 34. Ibid., 3–4: “A multitude of animals, placed in these retreats by the hand of the Creator, spread about life and enchantment. From the extremities of the avenues may be seen bears, intoxicated with the grape, staggering upon the branches of the elm-trees; cariboos bathe in the lake; black-squirrels play among the sick foliage; mocking-birds, and Virginian pigeons not bigger than sparrows, fly down upon the turf, reddened with strawberries; green parrots with yellow heads, purple woodpeckers, cardinals red as fire, clamber up to the very tops of the cypress-trees; humming-birds sparkle upon the jessamine of the Floridas.” 35. See Chateaubriand, “Atala,” 30. The references to the naturalists are formulated in the preface in direct response to critical objections expressed by a

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37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

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contemporary critic regarding the scientific accuracy of the enumeration of animal species. See François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe: A Translation into English by A.S. Kline (London: Poetry in Translation, 2005), VI, 2, 168; on the geocultural implications underlying this critical gesture, see also Hoffmann, “Chateaubriand,” 157–8. Chateaubriand, Atala, 3. On Cuvier, see Eggers, Vergleichendes Erkennen, 60; on Buffon see Alain Guyot, Analogie et récit de voyage: Voir, mesurer, interpréter le monde (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012), 88 ff., see likewise Eggers, Vergleichendes Erkennen, 79. For an extensive analysis of the metaphysical legitimation of the aesthetics of nature in the Génie du christianisme see, among others, Wolfgang Matzat, Diskursgeschichte der Leidenschaft: Zur Affektmodellierung im französischen Roman von Rousseau bis Balzac (Tübingen: Narr, 1990), 85–131; on the representation of the American forests as “sanctuaries” in Atala and its legitimation within the poetics of Christianity, see also Antoine Guyot, “Libertés factuelles et contraintes fictionelles: les descriptions américaines de Chateaubriand et leur mise en récit dans Atala, Les Natchez et le Voyage en Amérique,” Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé: Lettres d’humanité, 55: Chateaubriand. Esthétique et sagesse chez Chateaubriand (1996), 357–72. On the opposition of scientific and poetic claims in the representation of nature, see notably Hoffmann, “Chateaubriand,” 145–6. On Linnaeus and Buffon, see Eggers, Vergleichendes Erkennen, 53–4 and 80–1. On this notion of the comprehensive unity and homogeneity of the “one” world, which is based on the assumption of the uniformity of the human race, relates back to traditional notions of the “book of nature,” and is to be charted in the mode of “physical world description,” Ette, Weltbewusstsein, notably 32, 42 ff.; see also the final chapter of Humboldt’s late essay Kosmos: Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos, ed. Hanno Beck (Stuttgart: Brockhaus, 1978), 442–6. In the prefaces to Atala, the close connection which, within the landscape descriptions, exists between the religious foundation of aesthetics and the simultaneous recourse to scientific approaches to nature is expressed by the alternating references to the poetics of the Génie du christianisme and to scientists or explorers such as Jonathan Carver or John Bartram; see Chateaubriand, “Atala,” 15 and 30–1. The reference to Rousseau’s state of nature is particularly evident in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s narration Paul and Virginia; see Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres: La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989), 36; on the reception of Rousseau’s concept of nature in early French Romanticism, see also Matzat, Diskursgeschichte, 127 ff. On Chateaubriand’s reception and discussion of Rousseau’s theory of the state of nature, as it is presented in Chateaubriand’s travel narratives dealing with the American journey, see the explicit remarks formulated in the preface to Atala, which presents the narrative as an “epic of natural man” [“épopée de l’homme de la nature”]; see Chateaubriand, “Atala,” 19; see also in detail Todorov, Nous, 377–94. For a suggestive reading of the specific functions fulfilled by Rousseau’s description of the state of nature, with regard to the political and cultural implications underlying acts of comparison, see Saussy, “Axes,” 70–1. On these inconsistencies and incoherences, see also Todorov, Nous, 379 ff.

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48. These triadic comparisons are not only to be found in the Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, but also occur in the narrative accounts of the journey to America; on the Itinéraire see Todorov, Nous, notably 399 ff.; see likewise Michel Butor, “Chateaubriand et l’ancienne Amérique,” in Répertoire II (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964), 152–92, notably 177 ff. 49. See Todorov, Nous, 398–401. 50. Chateaubriand, Atala, 2. 51. See notably Oliver Lubrich, “‘Überall Ägypter’: Alexander von Humboldts orientalistischer Blick auf Amerika,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 54, no. 1 (2004): 19–39. 52. On this debate, see the comprehensive account in Gordon M. Sayre, “The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand,” Early American Literature 33, no. 3 (1998): 225–49. 53. François-René de Chateaubriand, Chateaubriand’s Travels in America, trans. Richard Switzer (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1969), 120. 54. Chateaubriand, Itinéraire, 473–4: “The great monuments are an essential part of the glory of all human society. If we do no more than maintain that a nation has the right to leave or not to leave a name to history, we are prevented from condemning those edifices that sustain the memory of a people beyond its own existence, and makes it live contemporaneously with the generations who come to dwell in abandoned fields. . . . the pyramids reminded me of less grandiose monuments, which nevertheless were also sepulchers, I mean those turf monuments that cover the ashes of Indians on the banks of the Ohio.” 55. Chateaubriand, Travels, 48: “The tumuli are tombs of circular form. Some of these tombs have been opened; there has been found inside each a grave formed of four stones, in which there were human skeletons. This tomb was surmounted by another tomb containing another skeleton, and so on to the top of the pyramid, which might have a height of 20 to 30 feet. These constructions cannot be the work of the present nations of America; the peoples who raised them must have had a knowledge of the arts superior even to that of the Mexicans and the Peruvians. . . . Was it the Carthaginians or the Phoenecians who, long ago, in their commerce around Africa and the Cassiterides, were drawn to the American regions?” 56. The proximity between America and the high culture of ancient Egypt, notably with regard to the mythologies spread among the American indigenous, is also highlighted by Butor who, however, still underscores the “youth” of American culture, see Butor, “Chateaubriand,” notably 175 ff.; in a similar vein, Guyot interprets the metaphorical rapprochement between America and Egypt formulated in the prologue to Atala as the expression of a beginning civilization represented by the Indigenous, see Guyot, “Libertés factuelles,” 363. 57. This reversal of the temporal and cultural perspective of comparison is explicitly formulated in the last chapter of Voyage en Amérique; see Chateaubriand, Travels, 178–9: “We are everywhere reduced to the worn forms of an old civilization. . . . There have been found among the savages of Canada, New England, and the Floridas, beginnings of all the customs and all the laws of the Greeks, the Romans and the Hebrews. A civilization of a nature different from ours could have reproduced the men of antiquity or have spread new enlightenment from a still unknown source. Who knows we wouldn’t have seen one day land on our shores some American Columbus coming to discover the Old World?” – For a concise account of the complex political interrelations that, in Voyage en Amérique, are set up between modern

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58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

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America and post-revolutionary France, see notably Hoffmann, “Chateaubriand,” 148 and 151. Chateaubriand, Atala, 82 ff. Chateaubriand, Travels, 185: “The English and Spanish languages serve in Africa, in Asia, in the islands of the South Seas, and on the continent of the two Americas to interpret the thoughts of several million men; and we, disinherited of the conquests of our courage and our genius, scarcely do we hear spoken, except in a few villages of Louisiana and Canada under foreign domination, the language of Racine, of Colbert, and of Louis XIV; it remains there only as a witness to the reversals of our fortune and the mistakes of our politics. Thus France has disappeared from North America like those Indian tribes with which she sympathized and of which I glimpsed a few remains.” Thomas Grosser, “Der mediengeschichtliche Funktionswandel der Reiseliteratur in den Berichten deutscher Reisender aus dem Frankreich des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Europäisches Reisen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, ed. Hans-Wolf Jäger (Heidelberg: Winter, 1992), 275–310. Cf. paradigmatic Grosser, “Funktionswandel.” On this broad cultural concept of narrative, see notably Albrecht Koschorke, Wahrheit und Erfindung: Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Erzähltheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2012), notably 9–25. See Antoine, Itinéraire, 20 ff. See King, “Naturwissenschaftliches Erzählen,” 22–3. See Ette, Weltbewusstsein, 157 ff. See Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 121 ff. On the reflexive dimension of the text, which derives largely from the narrative form of dialogue, see Diana Goodman, “The Structure of Political Argument in Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville,” Diderot Studies 21 (1983): 123–37; on forms and functions underlying utilitarian arguments in the Supplement, see Claudia Moscovici, “An Ethics of Cultural Exchange: Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville,” Clio 30, no. 3 (2001): 289–307. On his double identity, see the preface to Atala: Chateaubriand, “Atala,” 20. See Chactas’ remark in Chateaubriand, Atala, 7: “The destiny which has brought us together, my dear son, is a singular one. I see in you the civilized man become savage: you see in me the wild man whom the Great Spirit (I know not from what motive) desired to civilize. Having each entered upon the career of life from opposite directions, you came to repose yourself at my place, and I have seated myself in yours; so that we must have acquired a totally different view of things.” See Todorov, Nous, 388–9. On this description of the colonial situation, which is marked by a reciprocal dynamics consisting in ‘nativizing’ the French and ‘frenchifying’ the Indians, see Hoffmann, “Chateaubriand,” 153. On the gesture of the “armchair anthropologist,” which is characterized by a “sedentary confinement that insulates him or her almost completely from any kind of sensory contact with the surroundings” and which, until the twentieth century, describes the central methodological stance of anthropology, see Tim Ingold, “Anthropology Is Not Ethnography,” Proceedings of the British Academy 154 (2008): 69–92, 82. See Chateaubriand, Atala, 80–1. Ibid., 85–6: “Unfortunate Indians! – you whom I have seen wandering in the deserts of the New World with the ashes of your ancestors; – you who gave

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me the hospitality in spite of your misery – I could not now return your generosity, for I am wandering, like you, at the mercy of men; but less fortunate than you in my exile, I have not brought with me the bones of my fathers.” 75. See Ingold, “Anthropology,” 81 ff.

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Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. London et al.: Routledge, 2009. Radhakrishnan, Rajagopalan. “Why Compare?” New Literary History 40, no. 3 (2009): 453–71. Sass, Hartmut von. “Vergleiche(n): Ein hermeneutischer Rund- und Sinkflug.” In Hermeneutik des Vergleichs: Strukturen, Anwendungen und Grenzen komparativer Verfahren, edited by Andreas Mauz and Hartmut von Sass, 25–47. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. Saussy, Haun. “Axes of Comparison.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 64–76. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Sayre, Gordon M. “The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand.” Early American Literature 33, no. 3 (1998): 225–49. Todorov, Tzvetan. Nous et les autres: La réflexion française sur la diversité humaine. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989. Volney, Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf. Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte, pendant les années 1783, 1784 et 1785, reprint. Paris: Volland, 1787.

10 Comparison as Context in Sir William Jones’s Translations of Eastern Literature Catharina G.M. Janssen

Introduction Sir William Jones (1746–1794) – judge, linguist, polymath – is famous for his influence on the study of Eastern languages, especially his translations from Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit.1 In the 1770s Jones published most of his translations, with the aim to get his British and European audience interested in these literatures, that were not read much yet in the West. In his 1978 seminal work Orientalism, Edward Said states that Jones’s goals when studying and disseminating knowledge about Eastern languages and cultures were to rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with Occident . . . which, with an irresistible impulse always to codify, to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient to “a complete digest” of laws, figures, customs, and works, he is believed to have achieved.2 Jones’s practice of comparing East and West thus seems to become a vehicle to reduce the merits of, for example, Eastern literature by describing them in terms dependent on Western images. This passage, however, relates strongly to the project of translating Hindu law texts, with which Jones was involved during his judgeship in India from 1783 until his death in 1794. Said illustrates this claim with examples of Jones’s work after his arrival there. Yet Jones published the majority of his translations from Eastern languages, with which this chapter will be mainly concerned, before he took up his judgeship.3 This chapter will argue that with the mentioned comparisons between Orient and Occident, especially in his earlier work, Jones aimed to accomplish another important goal: rather than to ‘subdue the variety of the Orient,’ he intended to increase the variety in Western literature. Throughout his translations, cultural and literary comparisons are incorporated to serve as an endorsement of the quality of the Eastern originals. These were needed to make Eastern literature accessible and more relatable to the eighteenth-century European reader, who has little to no experience with this type of literature. His comparative practice served as a gateway into

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the new world Jones hoped to unlock for the West. A discussion of the comparative method used to encourage his contemporaries to read Eastern literature and study Eastern languages will be the focal point of this chapter. Jones was one of the first Englishmen, and more generally one of the first Europeans, to translate works from Eastern languages to enjoy their literary value, and especially for the study of Sanskrit in the West, he played a pioneering role. To help his audience, who were unfamiliar with Eastern literature and its poetics, understand and appreciate his translations, Jones included comparisons to Western authors or to specific pieces of literature in the commentaries accompanying his work. As will be demonstrated throughout this chapter, Jones’s aim with these translations was to get his contemporaries, both academics and a more general audience of non-specialists, to understand, appreciate, and study Eastern literature. Jones argued that the European literature of the eighteenth century could be elevated and rejuvenated by the fresh impulses of these newly found works. To convince his audience of this, Jones used a comparative approach, not out of an intention to show a perceived otherness or inferiority of Eastern poetry, but to promote its merits. These comparisons did not work to subdue the variety of the Eastern literature Jones translates, as remarked in the earlier quote by Said, but ultimately aimed to increase the variety in literature read in the West, by promoting understanding of the former. After presenting an overview of the various facets of this comparative practice, and interpreting their meaning, this chapter will discuss their effects through the discussion of contemporary reactions to the published translations.

Sir William Jones and His Most Famous Comparison Although Jones studied law and worked as a lawyer and a judge, a thread throughout his whole life was his study of languages. From a young age, Jones started to study Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, and he published his first translation from Persian in 1770, a historical text about Nader Shah translated into French.4 The following four years saw one work per year appear from his hand, about and translated from Eastern languages: A Grammar of the Persian Language (London, 1771); Poems (London, 1772); History of the Life of Nader Shah (London, 1773); and Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum Libri Sex (London, 1774). After these publications a focus on his law career prevented further publication for the better part of a decade. A rather hasty publication of The Moallakát, promising introductions and annotations that never followed, appeared in 1782, the year before Jones left for India to serve as a judge at the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal. His presence in India subsequently encouraged him to study Sanskrit, because of his involvement in the project initiated by governor Warren Hastings, of translating Hindu law texts to make them available to the English

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without the involvement of native interpreters. This project resulted in the posthumously printed Institutes of Hindu Law, or, Ordinances of Menu (Calcutta, 1794). In 1784, soon after his arrival in India, Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which had as their aim to study all facets of Asia, from its literature and art to its history and natural landscapes. Jones’s knowledge of Sanskrit led to his last and most influential literary translation, Sacontalá,5 which will be discussed in the following. Working in a time of changing attitudes towards Eastern languages, Jones was able to play an important part in presenting Eastern languages to the West. In Great Britain specifically, East India Company involvement in India had led to a growing popular interest in Eastern literature and culture. Moreover, an increasing necessity to be able to understand Eastern languages was felt by the British abroad – a requirement Jones responded to with his Persian Grammar (London, 1771), which specifically claims to be useful for Company employees in their business with Indian natives, since Persian was the administrative language on the Indian subcontinent. When Jones’s comparative method is mentioned, this will immediately call to mind his comparative linguistic approach.6 This is made famous in his Third Anniversary Discourse held for the Asiatic Society of Bengal and printed in the Asiatic Researches, in which Jones claims that: The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps, no longer exists.7 This observation has led to the mention of Jones as the father of comparative (Indo-European) linguistics, an epithet so persistent it even appears in the title of Cannon’s 1990 biography for Jones, who calls him “The Father of Modern Linguistics.”8 Although this comparative approach is the one with which Jones became most famous, the following discussion will show comparison has played an important part in his earlier works as well. The comparisons employed there provide both a qualitative commentary and an interpretative method for his audience to understand the works to which they were being introduced.

Poems and Jones’s Agenda Throughout his work, Jones stressed the importance of scholars studying Eastern languages and their literatures, and his clearest and most direct

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explanation of this goal can be found in his Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations, which is appended to the first volume of translations Jones published in English: Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (London, 1772), henceforth Poems. In the preface to this work, Jones describes his aim with the work as “to invite my readers, who have leisure and industry, to the study of the [Eastern] languages.”9 In the final lines of the appended essay, Jones explains this invitation further: I must once more request, that, in bestowing these praises on the writings of Asia, I may not be thought to derogate from the merit of the Greek and Latin poems, which have justly been admired in every age; yet I cannot but think that our European poetry has subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and incessant allusions to the same fables; and it has been my endeavour, for several years, to inculcate this truth, That, if the principal writings of the Asiatics, which are reposited in our public libraries, were printed, with the usual advantages of notes and illustrations, and if the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in our places of education, where every other branch of useful knowledge is taught to perfection, a new and ample field would be opened for speculation; we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes, and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate.10 This extract can be interpreted as Jones’s manifesto for the study of Eastern languages and an explanation for his efforts to publish Eastern literature. In the essay and this paragraph specifically, Jones called upon a European reading audience to expand their views towards the littleknown poetry ‘of the Eastern nations.’ Notably, this message was not just intended for his English audience, hence the reiteration and expansion of the message in Latin two years later in Commentarii (1774). European literature was saturated by Greek and Latin classics, and it needed a new impulse to produce interesting new works, according to Jones. Jones made clear that encouragement to read Eastern literature instead of the classics is no reflection on the value of the latter: they will remain “the standard of true taste.”11 This is exactly what made them the measure against which to judge other literature. In his comparisons, therefore, a constant reference to the style and subject matter of classical works can be found, with two distinct, but closely related aims. A part of the included comparisons is aimed at explaining the text at hand, in an attempt to place the new source within the European reader’s frame of reference. By comparing the style of the translated poetry to that of a well-known classic, Jones supported the reader towards a better understanding of the context and genre of the text they had in front of them.

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The comparison worked as an anchor to determine the function of the text in its original setting. The second function of the comparison was to give the reader an idea of the quality of the text. Inexperience with the source literature made it difficult for an eighteenth-century reader to decide how to judge the quality of Eastern poetry or the status of the author in his own society and literature. Jones included comparisons with European authors to indicate the status of an author within the canon of their own language area, to help his reader comprehend their reputations. These two contextual intentions of the added comparisons by no means excluded each other and often worked together to establish a certain view of the translated work, as will be argued in the examples in this chapter. In the preface to Poems, Jones explained his aims with the volume, that does not exist of translations in the literal sense of the word, but chiefly of poems put together by Jones. Jones has chosen two fully translated poems: A Persian Song of Hafez, which has been printed before in his Persian Grammar (1771), and A Turkish Ode on the Spring by Mesihi. Both are accompanied by a transliteration to assure their authenticity and encourage their use as steppingstones into the study of the primary sources. To those Jones added three poems put together from pieces, themes, and impressions he gained from his extensive study of Arabic and Persian poetry; “only a pasticcio,” as the reviewer for the London Review ventures to call Solima, an Arabian Eclogue, the first poem in the volume.12 Jones reassured the reader, though, that “all the figures, sentiments, and descriptions in it, were really taken from the poets of Arabia,” an assertion made to combat any hint of forgery.13 This practice served the same goal as his comparative practice, since by picking and choosing the most accessible fragments and mixing them into poems adhering to European aesthetics, Jones hoped to convince his audience of the merit of the Eastern literature he introduced.14 This same reasoning lies behind the inclusion of translations from Italian in the volume: An Ode of Petrarch, to the Fountain of Valchiusa and Laura, an Elegy, consisting chiefly, but not exclusively, of translated fragments of Petrarchan sonnets. Jones explained their function in the preface: [These are] added, that the reader might compare the manner of the Asiatick poets with that of the Italians, many of whom have written in the true spirit of the Easterns: some of the Persian songs have a striking resemblance to the sonnets of Petrarch; and even the form of those little amatory poems was, I believe, brought into Europe by the Arabians.15 Italian poetry was better known and less foreign to Jones’s audience than its Eastern counterparts, and its appearance alongside of and comparison

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to the Eastern poems provides a bridge from the well-known and accepted towards the new and unknown. With his decision to translate parts of the sonnets and make them into a new, longer poem, Jones was able to choose examples that were most like the Eastern poetry to which he was comparing these poems and make the similarities the more poignant and obvious. The reader will be able to compare the style and subject matter of the poems and become convinced of their similarities themselves, because they are presented with the full text of the poems, and helped by Jones’s choice of words in his translations. Furthermore, in the preface to Poems, comparisons are made between Eastern and Western classics, in order to make the unknown poems Jones presents more palatable and to explain their importance and value: The heroic poem of Ferdusi might be versified as easily as the Iliad, and I see no reason why the delivery of Persia by Cyrus should not be a subject as interesting to us, as the anger of Achilles, or the wandering of Ulysses. The Odes of Hafez, and of Mesihi, would suit our lyrick measures as well as those ascribed to Anacreon.16 In this passage the two approaches to comparison Jones used are mixed together. In the first example given, the subject matter of Eastern poetry is compared to that of classical poems, accomplishing the aim of establishing a place within a genre for these unknown poems. The Greek epics of Homer, Iliad (about The Anger of Achilles) and Odyssey (The Wandering of Ulysses) are equated with The Heroic Poem of Ferdusi, which refers to the Shahnameh (The Book of Kings, c. 977–1010), describing the mythology and history of the Persian Empire. The comparison applies to both the verse of these poems and their subject matter: The Delivery of Persia by Cyrus, is given as an example from the Shahnameh. Through Jones’s equating of the topics of the epics, the reader is given an anchor to place the genre of the work, but is also told that the Persian variety is as interesting and important as its well-known Greek counterparts. The second method of comparison emphasized the quality of the individual Eastern authors, compared to their Western counterparts; fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez, and Mesihi, a late-fifteenth, early sixteenth-century Ottoman-Turkish poet, are equated to sixth-century BCE Greek poet Anacreon, because all three of them wrote lyric poetry. The quality of the poems by the Eastern authors is the same as that of the well-known and appreciated ancient Greek poet, according to Jones, and therefore they should be read and appreciated as much as Anacreon. By comparing their quality (“would suit our lyrick measure as well”), Jones provided a further endorsement for the work, instead of just showing the reader what to expect from the poetry, as in the previous example of the epics. The quality of Eastern poetry might be difficult to recognize for a reader not familiar with its conventions, so by providing a Western

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equivalent Jones guided his readers into understanding the competence of the authors mentioned. Jones further set out “to prove . . . the liveliness of his [Hafez’s] poetry” and “the delicacy of his language” even though this is difficult, because “many words which are soft and musical in the mouth of a Persian, may appear very harsh to our eyes.”17 Although he was aware of the ignorance about Eastern languages of most of his audience, he included a complete transliteration of ghazal 254 by Hafez, so the reader could have an idea of the sounds and rhythm of the poem, before providing a “word for word” translation.18 To allow the English reader to appreciate the quality of the poetry, he then continued with a comparison to Shakespeare, stating that “[t]his little song is not unlike a sonnet, ascribed to Shakespear [sic], which deserves to be cited here, as a proof that the Eastern imagery is not so different from the European as we are apt to imagine.”19 The complete text of Shakespeare’s sonnet 99 is printed next. In the last sentence quoted prior, the prejudice Jones tries to conquer is clearly stated: the idea that Eastern poetry can only be appreciated because of its otherness, whereas Jones argues its imagery is recognizable too and can therefore also be appreciated by a European audience. Compare the first lines of both poems: O sweet gale, thou bearest the fragrant scent of my beloved; thence it is that thou hast this musky odour. Beware! do not steal: what hast thou to do with her tresses?20 The forward violet thus I did chide: “Sweet thief! whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells, “If not from my love’s breath?21 The similarities are clear: both poets chide a natural phenomenon, respectively wind and a flower, for stealing their loved one’s sweet scent; both go on to compare a loved one to several types of flowers, even though these differ in the different contexts (except for the rose, which is mentioned by both), and both draw the conclusion that the flowers ultimately pale compared to their loves. Jones therefore concluded that, if a European audience can appreciate Shakespeare’s sonnet, surely they can also see the beauty in Hafez’s ghazal.

Commentarii and Adaptations The same ghazal by Hafez is translated in Jones’s largest and most theoretical work on Eastern poetry, Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum Libri Sex.22 The work discusses and expands on the same subject matter as Poems, but is entirely written in Latin. In the introduction Jones explained he made this choice to be able to disseminate the knowledge of this poetry all over Europe, and not just in England. A description of many aspects of Eastern poetry can be found in the Commentarii,

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from poetic imagery to meter, and from funeral poetry to love poetry. All through these different themes, Jones included examples of Eastern poems, mainly but not exclusively from Arabic and Persian, first in their original language and script, then transcribed in the Latin alphabet, and finally translated into Latin.23 Examples from Eastern poetry are compared to their Western counterparts throughout. In the chapter on reliquae figurae (further stylistic devices),24 Jones discussed the aforementioned ghazal 254 by Hafez. It was introduced in a discussion of apostrophe – “cum rem vita ac ratione carentem poeta alloquitur” (“when a poet addresses an object that lacks life or reason”)25  – and the poem by Hafez is deemed the best example.26 Jones gave the original Persian in couplets, which he then translated one by one into Latin, creating an almost interlinear, literal translation.27 After this translation, Jones compared the imagery used – “Quam pulchrae imagines!” (“What beautiful images!”) – to that used by the Greek lyric poet Alcaeus (ca. sixth century BCE). The discussion of the poem ends with a translation of the entire poem in Greek, in the manner of the lyric poet Anacreon.28 This style of translation, first literal or even interlinear, then literary in the style of a particular poet, is a method Jones used throughout his Commentarii. As a literal translation of poetry could be difficult to appreciate, the comparison with and even adaptation of a recognizable poetic style was meant to make it easier for the reader to understand the poetic form of the original. Jones did not imitate the style of the original poem, since this would also be foreign to the reader, but chose a style with which they would be familiar and which is comparable to the style of the original to give them a version they could recognize and therefore appreciate. Moreover, the multiple published versions of the poem were intended to make it easier for the reader to start studying the poem in its original language, which as mentioned is Jones’s ultimate goal. This particular ode by Hafez appeared in five different versions throughout Jones’s work: in Poems a transliteration was followed by a literal English translation;29 the original Persian, an interlinear literal Latin translation and a poetic Greek translation in the style of Anacreon can be found in Commentarii,30 where they were once more accompanied by the transliteration. The reader is also shown the imagery of the poem could be compared to Alcaeus,31 who would be well-known to an international and classically trained audience. And the comparison was made with Shakespeare, even better known to the English audience, in Poems as discussed earlier. All this information provided the poem with a thorough and comprehensible context, creating a starting point for the study of the original.

Sacontalá and Shakespeare Shakespeare as a comparison returns in the introduction to Jones’s most famous translation, and the only translation from Sanskrit

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he published, Sacontalá, or the Fatal Ring (Calcutta, 1789).32 When explaining the background of the play to his readers, Jones framed its author Kālidāsa, transcribed by Jones as Cálidasá, a classical Sanskrit playwright who wrote in the fourth and fifth centuries, as “the Shakespeare of India.”33 This epithet proved both useful and persistent, as will be discussed later.34 Jones added this explanatory title because he believed the Sacontalá, and possibly his other works, to be of similar quality as those by the famous English bard, and Kālidāsa’s status in Indian literature similar to Shakespeare’s in English. Moreover, presenting his readers with this comparison should help them understand the text before them and its genre. Jones explained in the preface that when he set out to translate the text, he did not understand what it would be. The nátacs, as his teachers introduced the genre to him, were unknown to him, and when he started to translate Abhijñānaśākuntalam (The Sign of Shakuntala), as the play is called in Sanskrit, he expected it to be a “dialogue on moral or literary topics.”35 This proved a wrong supposition, since natakas are better described as heroic romances.36 The reference to Shakespeare should spare his reader the same confusion, and help them understand that it is a play by a playwright as competent and famous as the English bard. The two aims of his comparative technique are therefore both at work in this short comparison, which consists of hardly more than the mention of a name: the genre of the text is established within the reader’s frame of reference, and Jones has provided a measure for the fame of Kālidāsa in his own language, and therefore for the quality of his work. The effectiveness of this comparison can be seen in the reviews for this work, as most of the reviewers picked up on the mention of Shakespeare. They attempted to persuade their readership of the value of the work by mentioning this epithet. James Anderson, the reviewer for The Bee, paraphrased Jones’s characterization as follows: Some of these [dramatic performances in the Sanscrit language] possessing beauties, as he [Jones] alleges, (and he will be allowed to be a competent judge), that would have done no dishonour to Shakespear [sic] himself.37 This not only shows that Jones’s comparative method is indeed used as a tool for determining the quality of the unknown author, but also that Jones is considered an authority in the field, and his comparisons are considered helpful and trustworthy devices when determining the relevance and quality of a translation. In the anonymous review for English Review, it is mentioned that “Cálidás, the author of this drama . . . is still considered as the Shakespeare of India.”38 The way this remark is phrased, implies that Jones’s comparison is taken as fact, and it almost appears as if this were a long-standing comparison.

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Anderson continues the comparison in his review for The Bee: The incidents that occur in the unravelling of this plot, are various; and though, to the fastidious European critic, the machinery employed, will be condemned as absurd; yet the poet, in painting the emotions of the human heart, has throughout filled his piece with such delicate touches of nature, as renders it highly interesting. Delicacy and the softest sensibility of heart are the prevailing characteristics of this piece; and these are expressed with a native ease and pathos that are rarely found in European compositions.39 By comparing Sacontalá to ‘European compositions,’ Anderson was able to decide the play has even more pathos. He determined the value of the Eastern poet, by comparing him to an established baseline of European compositions, and used this to recommend the play to his readership.

Translating Without Context: The Moallakát The effect and necessity of these comparisons becomes clear once more when the aforementioned reactions are compared to the reviews of Jones’s translation of The Moallakát, or Seven Arabian Poems, Which Were Suspended on the Temple at Mecca (1782). In this volume Jones translated the mentioned seven Arabic poems into English prose. Each poem is accompanied by a short introduction, in which the ‘argument’ of the poem is explained, giving short summaries of the long poems. Jones also included a transliteration of all poems into the Roman alphabet at the end of the work, again hoping to encourage students of Eastern languages to improve their Arabic by using these as an example. Unlike Poems and Jones’s other translations hitherto, The Moallakát is not accompanied by an introduction or explanatory essays. These were supposed to follow soon according to the advertisement, but were never printed. Reviews of the work show that without guiding notes, the poems were misunderstood, even though Jones claimed that “the Discourse and Notes are ornamental only, not essential”;40 their ‘otherness’ is simply too great when the reader misses an anchor from their familiar literature with which to compare them. The anonymous reviewer in The British Magazine, for example, calls them “less entertaining than curious.”41 This opinion is shared by the reviewer for The New Review: With regard to the poems themselves, they are rather to be considered as literary curiosities, and as connected with the study of languages which have been hitherto too much neglected, but from the revival of which is much to be expected, than as very pleasing things in themselves.42

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These and the other published reviews clearly show that the reviewers find it impossible to judge the translated poems without any further explanatory notes. The anonymous reviewer for The European Magazine, for example, decided to hold off judgement until the notes were published, because without them, he found he is unable to give a proper review: When these [notes and essays] shall be published we shall be able to give an account, and to furnish a criticism on what has already been given to the public, with greater advantage than we can at present.43 Jones seemed to foresee this in his other translations, and prevented his readers’ confusion, by using his comparisons to Western literature as anchors for this new type of poetry. That the reactions to The Moallakát so clearly show that the reviewers are lost without these notes and comparisons proves that Jones was right in including them in his other works, and that they provided the context he aimed for. Unfortunately, the notes were never printed and therefore it is impossible to measure their influence. When comparing the reactions to The Moallakát to the reactions to Jones’s other translations, however, it is safe to conclude that The Moallakát would have been received more favorably and understood better if Jones had provided the same anchors as he presented for his other works. As the reviewer for The British Magazine put it: The Preliminary Discourse, and Notes, promised in the following Advertisement, may render this work interesting to those who are attached to Oriental studies: in its present state, we do not think it calculated to obtain very general approbation.44

Arabs the Dialogue Even though Jones attempted to provide contexts for his translations, and these seemed to achieve their goals, he did not consider these explanations and comparisons adequate. The only real way to understand Eastern literature is to study the texts in their original languages. He illustrated this in an elaborate metaphor in a dialogue called Arabs, Sive De Poesi Anglorum Dialogus (The Arab, or Dialogue about the Poetry of the English), appended to the Commentarii.45 Jones claimed to have written this dialogue some time ago “to have available whenever people make an inept judgement about the poetry of foreign people.”46 This statement shows he was addressing a known problem, that of misinterpreting poetry because of a lack of knowledge, which he illustrated in a humorous and entertaining way. In this five-page dialogue, a well-read British merchant tries to convince an Arab of the merit of English poetry. The Arab starts the discussion by emphatically stating he has no high

236 Catharina G.M. Janssen expectations of the poetic skills of the English: “cum credidero urbem hanc amoenissimam a maris hujus piscibus extructam fuisse, tum demum poetas, ut tu ais, venustos in Anglia credam floruisse” (“When I will have been convinced that this most pleasant city has been built by the fish of this sea, then I will also believe that elegant poets blossom in England”).47 The Englishman of course has to defend his heritage, and quickly comes up with a literal translation of the opening lines of Paradisus Amissus (Milton’s Paradise Lost) into Latin as a taster. The Arab responds by laughing and saying he has never heard something less tasteful. Some more Milton is translated, and Pope is used as an example, but the Arab cannot be persuaded. Finally, and just before the friendship between the two is jeopardized, he makes the following decision: Ohe, inquit Arabs, desine, si me amas: heaccine poesis dici potest? . . . Haec cum dixisset, videretque graviter ferentem [et] stomachantem Britannum, pollicitus est, se ad linguam Anglicam condiscendam aliquot menses impensurum, ut poetas, quos ille laudaret, sermone proprio loquentes posset perlegere.48 (‘Enough!’ said the Arab, ‘stop, if you have any love for me: is it even possible to call these poems?’ When the Arab had said this, and saw that the Briton took it seriously and was annoyed, he promised to spend so many months at learning the English language, until he could read the poets, whom the Briton had praised, in their original language.) By turning the tables around, Jones attempts to persuade his reader to study Eastern poetry. Much like the Arab in the dialogue, who recognizes he has to study English to be able to appreciate Milton, they might at first find it difficult to understand the poetic style of poetry with which they are not familiar. So instead of giving up on the poetry after a first encounter, this means they have to try harder to understand its background. In particular, Jones’s never-ceasing agenda for the study of Eastern languages plays a big part here; when one is able to read a text in its original language, he claims here through his comparison, appreciation of its aesthetic value becomes easier, or perhaps even natural. The dialogue can therefore be read as a simile to Jones’s own situation: he is the Briton, trying to make foreign poetry accessible to an uninformed reader. The Arab, who embodies the British or European readership, does not understand and ridicules his attempts, out of a lack of knowledge. He has his own frame of reference, poets he knows and loves and therefore uses as a measuring stick against which to judge the translations he is offered: “don’t you have a poet, who compares with Ferdusi?” and “Move on to the Lyris poets. Can you produce anything to compare with Hafez, a favourite of us both?”49 The Briton, who knows Milton’s poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso are in style and beauty comparable to

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Hafez’s lyric poetry, produces a translation from the former, but since the Arab lacks knowledge of the original and can only see the, perhaps somewhat clunky, literal translation and its lack of beauty, this makes him burst out laughing even more. In the same way Jones translated and compared Eastern poetry, to persuade the English audience of its beauty, but also in the same way they often misunderstand those texts. By showing that the aesthetic value of English canonical poets such as Milton is not self-evident either, Jones hoped to open the eyes of his reader to the possibility of appreciating foreign literature after putting in the effort of learning about it.

Conclusion Jones published his translations in a time of changing attitudes towards the study of Eastern languages, and also a time in which there was a greater need for this study than before, especially because of increased British involvement in India. He attempted to play a part in popularizing Eastern literature, because its style, he claims, is worth knowing and worth using. European taste, however, did not seem ready for these new influences, which is why Jones attempted to anchor them in the European literary background. He provided his readers with ways of interpretation they understand, by equating genres throughout Eastern and Western literature, and comparing the new arrivals with canonical names from European classics. Not only did this make the translations easier to understand, but Jones’s method also allowed his reader to make an informed judgement about the value of the texts. Jones’s comparative method ultimately makes his translations more European, whether it is just by anchoring them in a Western tradition to which they did not belong originally, or by actively adapting them to a particular style. His purpose in making these adaptations, though, is to get his audience interested in studying the originals and not “to subdue their variety,” as summarized by Said. Ultimately, Jones hoped to reach a point where translation and adaptation were no longer necessary, because the texts could be understood in their own languages and their own contexts. Like the Arab in his dialogue appended to Commentarii, all Europeans should spend so many months learning Arabic, Persian, or Sanskrit, until they can read the poems that Jones praised, in their original language.

Notes 1. For a biography and more comprehensive bibliography of Sir William Jones, see e.g. Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 78. 3. ‘Eastern’ here is Jones’s own term, which will be used throughout this chapter. It is taken from the title of his 1772 “Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations.” Jones uses this term interchangeably with ‘Asiatick’, as can be seen in the title of the volume to which this essay is appended: “Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages”; this refers in that particular case mainly, but not exclusively, to Persian and Arabic, but in other cases also to, for example, Turkish, Hebrew, and Chinese. ‘Oriental’ is another term used by Jones to represent the same languages. 4. Histoire de Nader Chah (London, 1770). 5. William Jones, Sacontalá, or the Fatal Ring, and Indian Drama by Cálidás: Translated from the Original Sanskrit and Pracrit (Calcutta: Joseph Cooper, 1789). 6. Cf. Thomas R. Trautmann, “The Lives of Sir William Jones,” in Sir William Jones 1746–1794: A Commemoration, ed. Alexander Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 91–122, 106–9. Trautmann argues that the language comparison that has landed Jones the title of father of comparative linguistics is in reality a discussion on the ethnological relationships between Europeans and Asians. 7. The common source Jones speaks of is in modern-day linguistics called Proto-Indo-European, and Sanskit, Latin, and Greek do all belong to the language family that sprung from it, as well as “the Gothick and the Celtick . . . and the old Persian,” as Jones goes on to hypothesize in the “Third Anniversary Discourse” of the Asiatick Society, delivered on February 2, 1786 and printed as William Jones, “The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus, Delivered 2d of February, 1786,” Asiatic Researches 1 (1788): 415–31, 422–3, original emphasis passim. 8. For a comprehensive overview of Jones’s argument and its implications for modern linguistics, see e.g. Lyle Campbell, “Why Sir William Jones Got It All Wrong, or Jones’ Role in How to Establish Language Families,” Annuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca “Julio de Urquijo” 40, nos. 1–2 (2006): 245–64. 9. William Jones, Poems: Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages: To Which Are Added Two Essays: I. On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations, II: On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative (London: P. Elmsly, 1772), vii. 10. Ibid., 198–9. 11. Ibid., vi. 12. “Jones’s Asiatic Poems,” review of Poems, by William Jones, The London Review of English and Foreign Literature 6 (1777): 17–25, 19. The review pertains to the second edition of Poems, in which additional Latin translations are printed, but the original poems translated in English remain the same. 13. Jones, Poems, ii. 14. A thorough discussion of the chosen poems and their interaction with each other can be found in Franklin, Orientalist Jones, 76–82. 15. Jones, Poems, iv–v. 16. Ibid., vii. 17. Ibid., 190. 18. Ibid., 191–2. 19. Ibid., 192. 20. Hafez, ghazal 254 in Jones’s “word for word” prose translation (Jones, Poems, 191). 21. Shakespeare, sonnet 99, vv. 1–3. 22. William Jones, Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum Libri Sex, cum Appendice; subjicitur Limon, seu Miscellaneorum Liber (London: J. Richardson,

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23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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1774) (“Six Books of Commentaries on Poems of the Asiatics”), henceforth Commentarii. Even though most of the cited and translated poetry is Arabic and Persian, the ‘Asiatics’ are not limited to these source languages: Turkish, Hebrew, and one example of a Chinese poem are also present in the work. Jones, Commentarii, 196–216. Ibid., 212. “Sed nullum hujus generis exemplum mihi occurrit insignius, quam illud Hafezi carmen, quo adolescentuli pulchritudinem, sub puellae scilicet persona, venustissime describit, versa perpetuo oratione ad auram, ad rosam, ad narcissum, ad herbas, ad cupressum, et, quod audacius esse videbitur, ad intellectum” (Jones, Commentarii, 212); (“But no example of this kind [of stylistic device] seems as prominent to me, as this poem by Hafez, in which he describes the beauty of a young man, obviously under the guise of a girl, in the most beautiful way, in verse, with an uninterrupted speech directed at the wind, at a rose, at a narcissus, at herbs, at a cypress, and, which seems to be quite daring, at wisdom”). My translation passim. Jones, Commentarii, 212–16. “Hanc odam (utpote quae ad Anacreontis laudem prope accedat) versibus Anacreontis Graece reddidi” (Jones, Commentarii, 215); (“I have translated this ode into Greek Anacreontic verses, seeing that it closely resembles Anacreontic praise”). Jones, Poems, 191–2. Jones, Commentarii, 212–16. Ibid. For a discussion of its great influence, see for example Dorothy Mathilda Figueira, Translating the Orient: The Reception of Śākuntala in NineteenthCentury Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 12–26 and Franklin, Orientalist Jones, 251–72, who describes what he calls the “Śakuntalā fever that gripped Europe in the early 1790s” most famously represented by Goethe’s quatrain Sakontala. Jones, Sacontalá, v. Cannon even claims the epithet has “persisted to this day”: Garland Cannon, “Sir William Jones’s Introducing Sakuntala to the West,” Style 9, no. 1 (Winter 1975): 82–91, 87–8. Jones, Sacontalá, vi. Figueira, Translating the Orient, 215. James Anderson, review of Sacontala, or the Fatal Ring, by William Jones. The Bee: Or Literary Weekly Intelligencer 2 (March 9, 1791): 111–20, 112. Review of Sacontalá: Or, the Fatal Ring by William Jones. English Review, or: An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature 19 (February 1792): 99–103, 100. Anderson, Review of Sacontala, 114. William Jones, The Moallakát, or Seven Arabian Poems, Which Were Suspended on the Temple at Mecca (London: P. Elmsly, 1782), “Advertisement.” Review of The Moallakát, by William Jones. The British Magazine and Review: Or, Universal Miscellany 3 (August 1783): 126–7, 126. Review of The Moallakát, by William Jones. New Review, with Literary Curiosities, and Literary Intelligence 1 (1782): 384–8, 385. Review of The Moallakát by William Jones. The European Magazine and London Review 4 (December 1783): 445–6. Cf. “Jones’s Seven Arabian Poems,” review of The Moallakát, by William Jones. English Review, or: An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature 2 (December 1783): 406–11, 406: “That Mr. Jones did not execute these intentions is object of regret; because

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44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

Catharina G.M. Janssen the poems he has taken the trouble to translate would thence have been better understood. In the present they are often obscure; and this fault detracts infinitely from their interest. .  .  . They may be read over for once; but no curiosity to return to them will be felt by cultivated readers.” Review of The Moallakát: The British Magazine, 126–7. Jones, Commentarii, 493–7. “Ut pateret, quam inepte de gentium exterarum poesi judicent ii, qui fidas tantum versiones consulant, colloquium, quod sequitur, olim contexui” (Jones, Commentarii, 493); (“To have it available whenever people, who consult very literal versions, make an inept judgement about poetry of foreign people, I have once upon a time composed the conversation, that follows”). Ibid. Ibid., 497. “Sed ullumne habes poetam, quem cum Ferdusio compares?” (Jones, Commentarii, 494); “Perge porro ad Lyricos. Ecquem proferre potes cum Hafezo, meis tuisque deliciis, comparandum?” (Jones, Commentarii, 495).

Bibliography Anderson, James. “Review of Sacontala, or the Fatal Ring, by William Jones.” The Bee: Or Literary Weekly Intelligencer 2 (March 9, 1791): 111–20. Campbell, Lyle. “Why Sir William Jones Got It All Wrong, or Jones’ Role in How to Establish Language Families.” Annuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca ‘Julio de Urquijo’ 40, nos. 1–2 (2006): 245–64. Cannon, Garland. The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. “Sir William Jones’s Introducing Sakuntala to the West.” Style 9, no. 1 (Winter 1975): 82–91. Figueira, Dorothy Mathilda. Translating the Orient: The Reception of Śākuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Franklin, Michael J. Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. “Jones’s Asiatic Poems.” Review of Poems, by William Jones. The London Review of English and Foreign Literature 6 (1777): 17–25. “Jones’s Seven Arabian Poems.” Review of the Moallakát, by William Jones. English Review, or, an Abstract of English and Foreign Literature 2 (December 1783): 406–11. Jones, William. The Moallakát, or Seven Arabian Poems, Which Were Suspended on the Temple at Mecca. London: P. Elmsly, 1782. ———. Poems: Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages: To Which Are Added Two Essays: I: On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations, II: On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative. London: P. Elmsly, 1772. ———. Poeseos Asiaticae Commentariorum Libri Sex, cum Appendice; subjicitur Limon, seu Miscellaneorum Liber. London: J. Richardson, 1774. ———. Sacontalá, or the Fatal Ring, and Indian Drama by Cálidás: Translated from the Original Sanskrit and Pracrit. Calcutta: Joseph Cooper, 1789. ———. “The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus, Delivered 2d of February, 1786.” Asiatic Researches 1 (1788): 415–31. Review of the Moallakát, by William Jones. New Review, with Literary Curiosities, and Literary Intelligence 1 (1782): 384–8.

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Review of the Moallakát, by William Jones. The British Magazine and Review: Or, Universal Miscellany 3 (August 1783): 126–7. Review of the Moallakát, by William Jones. The European Magazine and London Review 4 (December 1783): 445–6. Review of Sacontalá; or, the Fatal Ring, by William Jones. English Review, or, an Abstract of English and Foreign Literature 19 (February 1792): 99–103. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Trautmann, Thomas R. “The Lives of Sir William Jones.” In Sir William Jones 1746–1794: A Commemoration, edited by Alexander Murray, 91–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Part IV

Race, Civilization, and Religion

11 Colonizing Complexions How Laws of Bondage Shaped Race in America’s Colonial Borderlands Christian Pinnen In the fall of 1722, enslaved Africans became pawns between the French colonists and Natchez Indians. The natives contested the Europeans’ right to the space for settlement along the Mississippi River. The Natchez were concerned with the growing new French outpost on the banks of the Mississippi River and the concomitant expansion of French settlers and their plantations. Warriors attacked one of the outlying plantations on St. Catherine’s Creek but targeted enslaved Africans – killing one and wounding another – rather than white colonists. By doing so, the Natchez thrust the meaning of complexion, and definitions of slavery and freedom, to the center of imperial issues in the region. The Natchez people had obviously observed the treatment of Atlantic Africans by the French, and the natives were well aware of Atlantic Africans social standing as enslaved people in French society. The Natchez also clearly understood that the enslaved were essential for the French to sustain a successful colony this far north from New Orleans. They had become cognizant of the Africans’ status as unfree based on their complexion, not based on captivity alone. Immediately before the incident, the “savages were talking to the negroes who had stopped to eat,” possibly trying to entice them to leave their masters. When that failed, “about four savages fired on six negroes who had been cutting wood,” killing one, Bougou.1 The French recognized the danger and began to move their enslaved people closer to the plantation and eventually into the safety of the buildings. The French enslavers sheltered their investment and shielded the enslaved from further attacks, probably hoping this would remain an isolated incident.2 Yet, as we will see, this was only the beginning of a struggle that involved people of all complexions in Natchez. The next decades required a deft understanding of the pitfalls inherent in the system of complexions employed by the European settlers to create racial hierarchies. Seventy years later, a free woman of color took a more active role to maneuver within the fault lines of imperial conflict. As the Natchez District transitioned from Spanish to American rule in 1797, Amy Lewis bound her future closely to the Spanish governor, Manuel Gayoso de

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Lemos, and to Spanish law. Her owner had died and, in his will, freed her and their son in 1794.3 However, the owner’s sister – an Anglo-American settler – contested the will and attempted to re-enslave the two. Defending her freedom, Lewis entreated Gayoso to take her and her case with him to his new post in New Orleans. Lewis asserted that she saw no prospect of a speedy determination and the pangs of suspense being more terrible to her that [sic] the most dreadful certainty, she begs your Excellency to grant her permission, to remove her suit to the tribunal at Orleans where a more speedy decision may in all probability take place.4 Lewis lost the case, and when Gayoso left without her, she was promptly re-enslaved. Lewis tried to negotiate an advantageous outcome in a landscape in which the meaning of complexion, slavery, and freedom had been constantly shifting for decades. The last seismic move of the imperial landscape cast Lewis into the chasm of American slavery, from which she never escaped. A survey of the region and its inhabitants by natural historian Bernard Romans is sandwiched in-between these two episodes in the region that would become home to the Natchez District. The British victory in the French and Indian War in 1763 brought this territory under imperial control, and Romans published his combined notes in 1775. His Concise Natural History intends to introduce the reader to a vast stretch of land from the Atlantic Coast along the Gulf Coast west to the Mississippi River. Romans comments extensively on the flora and fauna of the area, but also includes the ubiquitous notes on agriculture found in many of the contemporary works on natural history. Colored by his belief that “the primum Mobile of the welfare of their inhabitants are the African slaves,” he argues: I cannot in conscience forbear to give my advice to all adventurers in Florida, who desire to improve a plantation for their benefit, not to forget these useful though inferior members of society; not but poor families may live in plenty, and by honest labour acquire a comfortable and easy situation in life as may wished for, but until their industry helps them to the means of buying one slave so on till they get more it will be vanity for them to hope for an accumulation of wealth.5 After establishing the absolute necessity for enslaved Africans to labor in the prospective slave labor camps, he embarks on a discussion as to why they were suited to do so. To the British traveler, enslaved Atlantic Africans were uniquely qualified and deserving of their fate. Race as we understand it plays a key

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role in the way Romans experiences his surroundings by turning his own whiteness into the measuring stick of other humans. However, for Romans race as a modern concept did not yet exist. Barbara Fields argues that race is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of *pi*) that can be plausibly imagined to live an external life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology.6 Likewise, Alexander Weheliye construes race, racialization, and racial identities as ongoing sets of political relations that require, through constant perpetuation, via institutions, discourses, practices, desires, infrastructure, languages, technologies, sciences, economics, dreams, and cultural artifacts, the barring of nonwhite subjects from the category of the human as it is performed in the modern west.7 Even today, then, race can be flexible in its definition, and it historically has been, and continues to be, reimagined for different circumstances and social definitions. Before the Age of Revolution separated most slaveholding European colonies from their mother countries, racial concepts were even harder to define. Of particular interest for the readers of this volume is the role of the historical actors in the comparative process. Enslaved Africans, European enslavers, and Native American people all employed comparative methods to decide the next steps in the century-long process of European settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley. The Natchez considered their options of how to engage with the French newcomers in their midst and settled on comparing how the Europeans treated and valued their enslaved Africans. After recognizing that the Africans’ economic valuation was – by comparison – larger than their human one, the Natchez made the choice to attack. As this chapter will lay out, this was deeply connected to French laws and the resulting definition of non-white complexions as inferior. The natives in Natchez, and around the region, quickly picked up on this fact by comparing their cultural idea of captivity with the concomitant treatment of enslaved Africans by the French based predominantly on the complexion of African captives.8 Amy Lewis used her knowledge of Anglo-American laws of complexion to compare those to the legal opportunities available to her under Spanish government. She demonstrably concluded that the Spanish law comparatively allowed her a more certain path toward freedom and hence pursued a course of action meant to appeal to Spanish administrators over fellow white Anglo-American settlers in Natchez. Her comparison

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of course relies predominantly on the previously established role of complexion in the enslavement of Atlantic Africans under the English settlers in the Natchez District. Anglo-American definitions of complexion, starting roughly after the French and Indian War ended in 1763, had begun a steady process of defining blackness as enslaveable, in conjunction with defining whiteness as inherently connected to freedom and liberty. Yet Anglo-Americans, as is evident in Romans’ history, still had to employ comparative methods to ensure people understood why precisely blackness was inferior to whiteness and to specify that only phenotype truly mattered. This involved a comparative process that stretched across the eighteenth century. I highlight the different legal machinations that drove definitions of race and slavery in British, Spanish, and American courts based on select cases. Closely reading the legal proceedings allows me to contrast the competing workings of each court system and how they both affected the enslaved and how the enslaved were able to influence jurisprudence. Between 1779 and 1798, many enslaved and free people of African descent sought to utilize the liminal periods of imperial change, and in those liminal moments we can dissect the inner workings of legal systems that tried in vain to dehumanize people to turn them into profitable investments. As the sparsely settled area around modern-day Natchez became British after the Seven Years’ War in 1763, little foreshadowed the boom – and busts – of the following decades. Britain recognized the value of the area but lacked the resources to exploit it after it consolidated its empire. Slumbering at the edge of British territory, Natchez never received enough people, money, or military protection to awaken to its full economic potential. Nevertheless, some British citizens from across the 13 colonies understood the future prospects. As the original British possessions tumbled toward the American Revolution, settlers there made the choice to try their luck in Natchez, rather than to risk being caught in the conflict between loyalists and patriots on the East Coast. Frequently, people in Natchez had to compare their present options to competing choices, and they did so often based on the preference they had for laws of complexion of the respective empire. This chapter marks an important departure in the histories of borderland slavery.9 It includes the lower Mississippi Valley in the debate by refocusing the analysis on Natchez. This seminal location allows for a comprehensive comparison of French, British, Spanish, and American legal systems. In a sense, the chapter follows Juliana Barr’s call to “unite the narratives of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Southeast and Southwest into a new colonial South – a colonial Sun Belt – sweeping from the Atlantic to Pacific.”10 This chapter does so by focusing on the cultural and legal consequences of imperial shifts in a small place and compares the effect of legal changes on attitudes of complexions in a diverse demographic consisting of Europeans and Atlantic Africans, but

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also Native Americans. Through these comparisons, it becomes clear that race was a very malleable concept in the borderlands of the eighteenth century and allowed for competing interpretations not just by various European people – but importantly – also by enslaved Atlantic Africans. In the eighteenth century, four powers tried to turn Natchez into a profitable enterprise. The French initially tried their hand in the district but were essentially defeated by a Native American revolt in 1729. After the Seven Years’ War, the British gained Natchez from the French as part of the peace treaty and included it into the colony of West Florida. Then, as the American Revolution raged in the East, Spain attacked and defeated the small British force in Natchez and added the district to their Louisiana colony in 1779. After the American Republic had outgrown its initial struggles, the United States received the Natchez District through treaty in 1795, which was formalized in 1798. In 1817, the region became part of the new state of Mississippi.11 The chapter will begin with an introduction to the term race, and why it is more plausible to use complexion in the eighteenth century. Complexion signifies a more malleable definition based on the presumed scientific specificity of the term race today. In the 1700s, skin color was simply not yet the one determining factor of one’s social status, but it was certainly well on the way. Significantly, however, across the European legal landscape exported to the New World, complexion and race invoked different responses and left different avenues for people of color to explore. In these creases, historians can find court cases that highlight the often fluid conditions encountered by black people across the Atlantic world. In particular in a place like Natchez, where imperial control frequently shifted. To introduce the reader to this fluidity, I will highlight several court and ecclesiastical cases to show how flexible the world of eighteenth-century Natchez could be when it came to concepts of race and slavery. The telos of histories on Natchez far too often explains the ascent of antebellum Natchez, rather than focusing on the previous periods as monumental episodes themselves. Reading the sources and investigating the dynamics of race and enslavement in the context of three different legal systems on their own terms – and before the first cotton boom – reveals a much less defined outcome of racial definitions and attitudes than might be suspected from the standard treatment of Natchez. Indeed, the basic histories of westward expansion in the Southeast, even the newest ones by Edward Baptist or Walter Johnson, for example, lead us to overlook these seminal years.12 Natchez, and by extension the lower Mississippi Valley (or the cotton frontier), is often viewed as what Adam Rothman justifiably called “Slave Country.”13 Yet the lower Mississippi Valley was not already a slave country, nor was it necessarily destined to become one, when the French began to settle it in earnest in the early 1700s. For the next century, the area was inhabited by a fluctuating group of people – Native Americans, Atlantic Africans, and Europeans – who in

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turn shaped social manifestations of race, slavery, and imperial expansion. Captivity, bound labor, and other modes of productions consistently whipped the region toward the nascent market economies of Europe, but there were multiple moments in which the eventual outcome was very much in doubt. It would be a mistake, then, to ascribe a hegemonic singularity to the borderland’s past in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. European theories about race, and how it allowed them to deploy enslaved African labor, did have a strong link to the region. Like many other descriptions of non-European regions, Romans’ travelogue levels a host of perceived ‘savage’ properties against Native Americans and Africans. To him, for example, “the women suffer no more by child birth than any other savage women [referring to both African and Indian here]; they retire into a place of solitude at the time, and after delivery return to their daily labour.” He readily admits that one woman died in childbirth just a few dwellings from his own. However, the common trope of the ‘savage woman’ who has no trouble giving birth as a marker of an inferior – more primal – being still appears as a powerful reminder to his readers that the people he describes are neither white, civilized, nor, by extension, Christian.14 These comparative tropes are important, as they connect Romans’ descriptions to European conceptions of complexion. Christianity here is particularly important, because it was not enough for Romans and his European audience to denounce what the modern reader would identify as a racial identification, in this case ‘red’ for Native American or ‘black’ for Atlantic African. Romans had to employ other cultural signifiers like ‘savage’ to clearly identify his subjects as non-white at every level of definition. ‘Savage’ denotes more than (nonwhite) skin color. Other civilizing factors actually enhance the Africans’ blackness, as becomes evident when Romans rhetorically asks: “Can one say the favourites of mankind (I mean liberty and property) are anywhere enjoyed in Africa?”15 To him and his Anglo-American readers, other hallmarks of civilization and their respective absences also add to a lack of civilization among African people, and in turn contribute to their blackness. In addition, a lack of Christianity allows the enslavement of Africans by righteous Christians without sinning in the eyes of God.16 I offer a glimpse into the ways in which people attempted to make sense of and read into their surroundings by utilizing comparative methods to establish a process for their decisions. They attempted to adjust to the intermingling of Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans in the lower Mississippi Valley and to reassure themselves of their respective standings in these newly forged societies. The Natchez warriors who opened fire in 1722 specifically targeted enslaved Africans, suggesting that they understood the emerging institution of racial slavery and showing their determination to be ‘read’ or ‘seen’ as not similar to the bound black laborers. Yet as European discourse on complexion continued

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throughout the eighteenth century, ‘savages’ – as Romans and his contemporaries called them – were not just defined by their skin color, but also judged inferior by their cultural markers, climate, gender roles, ability to fit into Christian society, and their willingness to display “cultural whiteness.”17 Skin color did matter, but only as part of the whole, and throughout the Enlightenment period it was “more a shifting mosaic than a fixed portrait.”18 By the 1790s, as Amy Lewis lost her freedom under the rule of American law, interpretations of complexions had begun to changed dramatically. As Sharon Block has found, “by the beginning of the nineteenth century, skin color began to consistently be privileged as ‘the’ sign of racial identity in literary, legal, and public arenas” and “skin color became the primary tool to mark slavery, freedom, and presumed innate racial qualities.”19 Ideas of race in a pre-modern sense are crucial to understand the complex relations between people in the lower Mississippi Valley. Throughout the eighteenth century, European academics residing in universities across England, France, Italy, and elsewhere attempted to develop a pseudo-scientific system to explain the blackness of Africans. Through the use and misuse of travelogues and what they reportedly observed – or subsequently read – European writers and academics built a picture of Africa that deeply influenced the discourse of ‘race,’ in particular in France. By 1787 blackness became, as Andrew Curran asserts, a ‘bodybased négritude’ in which the blood, the semen, and the organs of African people were all described as being black or black in appearance. Similarly, by 1704 African people were rendered accountable for their own enslavement, and by 1732 dictionaries began to establish the tautology of black equaling enslaved. Accounts also gender Africans as primarily male through the use of predominantly male pronouns.20 I hence will privilege complexion over race where appropriate, since there was not yet an inherent meaning of skin color, because it could denote “a sign of health, behavior, or emotions” for the Europeans.21 The English followed a similarly serpentine path to find a way to classify non-white people and their association with captivity. Michael Guasco argues that “when Englishmen thought and wrote about slavery during this period [pre 1619], they were typically much more concerned about the possibility of their own enslavement than they were with the condition of African or Indian peoples.”22 Only in time, throughout the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment period, did Englishmen work out the problem and began to identify blackness with slavery in their Atlantic colonies. Before then, they were beholden like any other Europeans to the “elastic way that skin color could operate in the eighteenth century and about the status Britons accorded to Christian profession.”23 Therefore, Romans’ attempts to classify humans into categories of whiteness and non-whiteness were par for the course in the eighteenth century. The way in which Romans and his contemporaries used the

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word race is important for modern readers. His writings, and those of many other contemporary Europeans, are littered with descriptions such as the following: I have in my dissertation on the origin of the savages which has swelled beyond my intention, made mention of a peculiar characteristic of the Negroe species, here let me be allowed to mention that they, like all others of the different species, and varieties of the human genus are born white, which colour soon changes, but on the moment of birth in both sexes the exterior parts of generation will shew, whether the person will be black, yellow, brown, red, or another colour known among mankind.24 Romans, like many of his contemporaries, including Voltaire, understood “blackness as an overall physiological phenomenon,” connected to blood and bile, and deeply influenced by Africa’s environment.25 Of course, all of these discoveries were unfavorably compared to the European counterparts; whiteness was deemed the standard, blackness the substandard.26 Hence, Europeans began to latch on to ideas that supported “the ways that power relationships could be produced through descriptions of bodily features,” not skin color alone. Because of that connection, the black race as “black human variety” slowly crystalized, but concurrently definitions of human whiteness arose as well.27 Europeans in the lower Mississippi Valley worked out the theoretical nature of complexion concomitantly to seeking new ways to exploit the labor of their subjects. The Natchez District’s development as a slave society seemed to continue unabated, but investigated closely, reveals fault lines enhanced by attempts of Atlantic Africans to challenge their enslavers. Natchez shared many characteristics with other European outposts of the eighteenth century in the Americas. Yet few shared the District’s multinational occupants and the resulting variety of legal systems that governed complexion and defined freedom. Natchez allows me to track the varying and frequently changing interpretation of race in a liminal space that generated more flexibility for Africans, Indians, and Europeans to negotiate their standing in society. The resulting complex histories reveal anecdotes of people of all complexions who sought to tie the meaning of complexion in each empire to their definition of freedom. Those definitions frequently conflicted, and these conflicts played out in courts, which allows historians a glimpse at the world these people sought to create. In the context of legal realities and theoretical approaches to define race in conjunction with law, I argue that the European actors in the lower Mississippi Valley used complexion in combination with socioracial categories to define a person’s status on a spectrum of the non-white shades.28 To do so, they deployed various comparative methods, but in turn, they allowed free and enslaved Atlantic Africans to

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countermand their efforts by adjusting the way they attacked the fault lines of imperial change. Entangled in the imperial struggles, black people were able to explore their own interest in the liminal period that characterized the first century of Natchez’s history. The vignettes at the start of the chapter bracket Natchez’s transitions among the French, British, Spanish, and eventually American empires: as the fate of these empires hung in the balance, the decisions of Atlantic Africans and African Americans offer glimpses into slavery in the American borderlands. The slaves wielded no legal or administrative power in Natchez, but as “environmental agents who stood between enslavers and land,” they did maintain an influence over the crops and the economic success of the colony in the Atlantic market.29 While Herman Bennett cautions us to carefully evaluate the actual agency of enslaved people, in certain moments Atlantic Africans could become actors, even if they were most frequently seen and treated as subjects.30 To preempt any confusion about the legal standing of enslaved people in West Florida – to which Natchez belonged – the British government published its first slave act in 1766. This “Act for the Regulation and Government of Negroes and Slaves” laid the basis for the nascent slave society in Natchez, and it regulated every aspect of slavery in the new province.31 The British took no chances in governing their enslaved by enacting a very stringent code based on those of the 13 eastern colonies. The 1767 law clearly made black people into enslaved laborers first, at least theoretically, forcing them to prove their freedom or face re-enslavement. Manumissions were legal, but there were stipulations that tremendously complicated the process.32 Hence, black people are largely absent from the public records. In conjunction with Romans’ natural history, there should have been even fewer traces of Atlantic Africans, but the resistance of people of color to European enslavers and their attempts to define them by their complexion are still clearly evident. At least two exceptions of Atlantic Africans who carved out a space for themselves in the borderland society existed. For example, John Fitzpatrick, who came to be known as the merchant of Manchac, had several encounters with Nelly Price. She was a free person of color who dealt with this frontier merchant on multiple occasions, incurring debts and continuously squabbling with him. Although their business relationship did not end on good terms, Price had established some measure of independence for herself, which extended well into the Spanish period. She did so even though the code of 1766 granted almost no rights to people of color that would protect her from a lawsuit. Nevertheless, Fitzpatrick had his share of trouble with the independent and determined black woman.33 After Spain conquered Natchez in 1779, the Anglo settlers living under the British code had to adjust to the new regulations governing the enslaved and the enslavers under the Iberian Dons.34 Black women in particular played an active role in the Spanish courts. Women like Amy

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Lewis and Nelly Price, for instance, maintained kinship and family ties in an economic environment that stacked the odds against them. They also operated within the accepted sphere of women in the eighteenth-century: family and household. By emphasizing their role as mothers and wives, black women in Spanish Natchez legally, culturally, and socially laid a claim to womanhood that under British law had been reserved for white women.35 Through this claim to white womanhood, black women also attempted to legitimize their relationships and by extension their ability to claim their freedom. They carefully compared ideas of gender to project a standard of womanhood appropriate for their complexion under Spanish law to in turn take advantage of these specific provisions.36 In the confusion that ensued after Spain’s takeover, laws became a contested sphere within the larger liminal period that engulfed the region. To borrow from Kelly Kennington, multiple legal systems at work in Natchez during the second half of the eighteenth-century reveal “some of the countervailing tendencies of the law of slavery” – in particular competing ideas about Spanish and Anglo-American law – “which at times upheld slaveholders’ power but could also recognize an enslaved person’s right to freedom.” Freedom suits were particularly important for enslaved women, who were able to pass their free status on to their offspring.37 Women forced courts to recognize their personhood, at least to a degree. When courts remained inaccessible, enslaved women and some men sought out the machinations of the Catholic Church for similar goals, even though results were less secure in this arena. In the borderlands, changing regimes sometimes made it difficult for legal officials to answer the pressing legal questions of the day – though this was not always the case. The changes in laws in Natchez meant that the enslaved had to adjust to the workings of several new legal systems: once from the British common law to the Spanish imperial codes in 1778, and then again to the American common law and its court systems by 1798. While it was not always easy for the enslaved to glean the mechanisms of the new systems, they generally also found that in these decades of confusion their access to freedom was greater and more quickly obtained. In essence, the shift from English common law to Spanish imperial law and back to American common law in Natchez represented a short window for the enslaved to pursue freedom before “king cotton” closed the door in the Mississippi Territory. In these windows they utilized their ability to compare the legal systems and attempted to use what they could from the various systems that could work in their benefit, widely participating in the way the law operated. Natchez is a strong example that highlights the efforts of the enslaved to negotiate for freedom. With the arrival of the Iberian dons, black people in Natchez became eligible to appeal to Spanish justice and legal protections.38 Natchez fell under these statutes by 1781. The district’s enslaved were among those who struggled under a growing plantation economy,

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and even though their enslavers favored the older – more restrictive – British slave code, Spanish law forced them to interact with their human property in front of Spanish courts. These interactions demonstrated in many ways how the enslaved sought to become free and define themselves as free people of color within the confines of the Spanish empire. This struggle was especially visible in the legal process. Understanding the difficult position of the Spanish government in an area dominated by English-speaking settlers, authorities tried to accommodate local law under the umbrella of the Spanish judicial system.39 But diverging ideas of complexion made it more difficult for Spanish jurisprudence to satisfy Anglo-American settlers. Spanish authorities exercised their power carefully and thereby created a legal system that was constantly in flux, at least until 1789.40 Enslavers had to navigate that legal system to legitimize their trade in enslaved Africans, and the Spanish acquiesced to ensure that their authority was accepted. Both sides consistently compared their own legal culture to that of the other, and thereby constantly renegotiated legal outcomes. This, of course, put them essentially on a similar footing as people of color, who did the exact same thing. The case of Amy Lewis shows this very clearly. In an ultimately unsuccessful suit, she attempted to use the newly available Spanish courts – who were comparatively less restrictive – to protect the freedom of her small family. After her enslaver passed away in 1793 and freed her in his will, his white relatives continuously challenged Amy Lewis’s liberty and tried to re-enslave her and her son. Yet Lewis proved adept at maneuvering in court to defend her rights, with the help of a Spanish lawyer eventually assigned by the governor of Natchez.41 Lewis was able to frustrate her master’s relatives and remain free, until Natchez switched hands and became part of the new Mississippi Territory in 1798. Lewis was re-enslaved and sold at auction, yet her son was freed. Why the son was set free remains unknown, but at age eight or nine, he faced an uncertain future in the volatile and expanding slave society of the American borderlands, a fate as heartbreaking perhaps as Amy Lewis’ own re-enslavement.42 Cases like Amy Lewis’ would no longer register much consideration by historians of slavery on the East Coast. Manumission practices in the early United States in particular have received plenty of attention in recent years, and we know much more as to why and how masters elected to free their property. These studies have driven home the idea that American common law and community-supported practices allowed white owners to present the enslaved people with their freedom, not return it. Black people were increasingly considered enslaved first, and only by the good graces of an enslaver – and subsequently the white community – could they receive and maintain their freedom.43 Essentially, they often served to reinforce boundaries of race and slavery, rather than to erode them. While manumission practices varied slightly over

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time, they were generally restrictive beginning in the second decade after the American Revolution and required continual efforts and white people to assist enslaved Africans in their quest for liberty, or to defend it if it was called into question. Even so, the effort undertaken by the enslaved often forced masters to adjust laws, in some cases to the benefit of their captives.44 The same may be said about Latin American slave regimes and manumission practices in those areas, where the literature is particularly rich. However, we still have an incomplete understanding of the effects of manumission laws in societies that mixed the legal traditions of northern Anglo-American slave societies with their Spanish counterparts. Spanish courts were important institutions for the enslaved, but not the only option accessible to them in pursuit of legitimizing their freedom or in securing the same for their family. Slave women often exploited their relationship to white men or white benefactors. Women of African descent were able to gain a measure of influence over their fate and a legal legitimacy under Spanish rule that they could not have achieved during the British period and would certainly not achieve again under the rule of American law. Most notably, women could use both Spanish imperial law and ecclesiastical rules to achieve their ends. While Amy Lewis used the Spanish court system to gain freedom for herself and loved ones, other women who struggled to gain access to the courts or provide convincing enough cases could utilize the Catholic Church to gain a measure of legitimacy for their relationships, and most importantly, to try and lay the groundwork for future liberty among their offspring. Although not well understood by contemporary Anglo-American enslavers, the process of legitimizing offspring was very important to enslaved women of African descent and their families. Much like the issue of race in the Anglophone world was a dualistic one – one was either black or white – mixed-race people threatened white supremacy and were hence legally black. Anglo-American law also treated all children regardless of complexion either as legitimate or not. The Iberian legal system worked differently. In the Spanish colonies, hijos naturales, or children born out of wedlock but acknowledged by their white father, were not seen as bastards, or hijo ilegitimo (or worse, hijo adulterino).45 Especially important for the enslaved partners in a relationship between free and enslaved parents was the connection the enslaved now legally held to their offspring. Enslaved mothers, for example, were given the right to care for their children, enslaved or free, until age three.46 This allowed for much closer relationships in the communities, in particular in frontier groups and societies still transforming into more rigid forms. The baptisms and the corresponding legal ramifications must have been confusing for white Anglo enslavers but presented opportunities for Atlantic Africans to profit from the confusion. Despite Natchez’s planters’ Protestant Christianity, their enslaved workers embraced Catholicism. It offered avenues to connect more deeply

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to white, and often Spanish, settlers and soldiers in the community. Black couples, single black women, and interracial couples chose the godparents for their children with great care. Even though these relationships did not grant an explicit avenue to freedom, they were more than a casual relationship. Powerful white or free black people could establish truth in courts, and potentially become all-important arbiters of freedom in the future. Linking children to those arbiters through compadrazgo (godparenthood), for example, was a calculated move on the side of the parents, and the Catholic Church offered splendid opportunities to create these all-important social connections for children.47 Compadrazgo was a concept whose complexities often eluded the Anglo-American enslavers, but evidence suggests the enslaved understood precisely what it could offer. The church records of Natchez indicate that white Protestants also picked godparents according to Catholic customs, but their stakes were not nearly as high as they were for the African Americans. Aside from the spiritual importance of infant baptism, and by extension the spiritual importance of the godparents in the Catholic Church, the social significance of baptism for the enslaved has to be highlighted. Specifically, people in the Spanish Empire did not have a legal identity without baptism.48 As David Stark puts it, “although ties of spiritual kinship were intended to serve a religious purpose, in practice compadrazgo often acquired a social character.” The enslaved sought to use the fictional kinship ties established through godparents to develop broader social networks, beyond the household or plantation of their enslaver.49 Once Spain and the Catholic Church came to Natchez, Atlantic Africans appeared in large numbers in the baptism records. We have no information about most of these people who registered the birth of their children with the Catholic Church beyond the ecclesiastical record, but we can glean quite a bit from the thin evidence. For example, “Isag” was baptized on November 28, 1791. He was the son of a white man named Doshy and an enslaved woman named Nenny. As godparents the two chose the soldier Jose Garcia and the black woman Rachel.50 Because the priest noted that Nenny was enslaved, we can infer that Rachel was free, since he made no mention of her as enslaved. The priest also did not record (as mentioned previously) that “Isag” followed his mother’s status; presumably “Isag” was not a slave. In Virginia or South Carolina, “Isag” would have unquestionably followed his mother’s status, unless his father had purchased the son’s or his mother’s freedom. No records exist to corroborate such a sale. The relationship between the parents themselves was also somewhat unusual in the larger Anglo-American society. By baptizing the child together as a couple, the father officially acknowledged his paternity, something that was rather rare in the Anglo-American colonies. He may have been a Spanish soldier, as the godfather also came from the ranks

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of the military. The godmother was likely chosen because of her status as a free person of color in the community. She lent weight to the status of the boy as a free person and could educate him in the intricate ways free people of color utilized courts and unofficial – yet potent – traditions to navigate slave societies. Pedro Bode, named after his father, was born on October 18, 1791. His mother was a slave, Margarita, owned by Madam Lamber. The status of the son Pedro is not explicitly mentioned, which suggests that he was free, as the preceding and following entries by the same priest define other children as enslaved. The priest here noted that Pedro was the legitimate son, a small but important caveat. This meant that Bode senior officially recognized his son, not only freeing him but also ensuring that Pedro junior would inherit part of his father’s property (depending on how many children Bode had), even if his mother remained enslaved. Both of his godparents, appropriately, were white members of Natchez society: Jose Lalana and Luisa Dorotea. Pedro’s parents tried to establish him as a free member of society from birth by creating important connections to white community members.51 As the Natchez District became American and governed by U.S. law, the chances for freedom or social connections through baptisms greatly diminished. Gone were Spanish courts and the access they granted for Atlantic Africans and gone was the power of the Spanish Catholic Church, if not the institution itself. The tone of manumissions also changed. Manumissions in American slave societies did not return freedom to the enslaved but granted it through the grace of the master. This was a marked departure from the Spanish tradition, where all people were first and foremost subjects of the king and so had access to courts.52 Amy Lewis made use of this access on multiple occasions and failed only to secure her own freedom when the district turned American in 1798. While we see a small flurry of manumissions after 1798 (13), those were dwarfed by the previous two decades (180+). Most of them were either purchases of children who were liberated by their black parents, or white enslavers liberating mixed-complexion children with strong evidence they were their own. For seven years the territorial codes allowed some amount of flexibility for masters, but not for the enslaved. Then a revised code went into effect in 1805, which saw only two people of color freed, until yet another slave code was passed. This new code went into effect in 1808. One case is particularly instructive as to how quickly the new laws limited the chance of freedom for the enslaved. Clarinda’s haunting story transpired just as the Mississippi Territory sharpened its manumission law for a second time in 1808 and compelled masters who manumitted their slaves to pay a security in case the slave became a burden to the public. Joseph Galvan, Clarinda’s master, did not consider this when he manumitted his slave on June 24, 1808.53 Five months later, Galvan rescinded his manumission. He stated that

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at the time of executing this emancipation [he] was unacquainted with the conditions prescribed by the statute of this Territory for liberating slaves and he now not being able nor inclined to give the security in such cases required, doth hereby renounce, revoke and make null to all intends [sic] and purposes the within manumition [sic].54 Despite his expressed “consideration of the faithful service” of Clarinda, the merit of her service was not sufficient to validate the price tag that came with freedom for an enslaved person after 1808.55 This represented a dramatic reversal of custom, not only from the Spanish period, but even from the first years of American legislation. Consequently, slavery became ever more restrictive for the victims of the Atlantic, and quickly accelerating domestic, slave trade. The new laws removed freedom to an all but a faint glint of hope on the horizon once cotton secured its throne. It may even be possible that Anglos’ revulsion at past Spanish leniency motivated them to makes laws harsher in Natchez, and by extension Mississippi, than in other places when they gained power. Throughout the periods of British, Spanish, and English government, complexion was a concept that people sought to define legally and culturally. They utilized their cultural understanding of complexion and compared it to that of their fellow people on the frontier. Within the attempts at definition, black people sought to establish themselves as legal actors to gain privileges, if not rights, that Europeans, particularly British settlers, sought to deny them. Natchez’s peculiar location within a geographic space that lacked clear imperial control for much of the eighteenth century shows how much flexibility was still inherently possible both culturally and legally. People of color appear in the records of Natchez fighting for their freedom and the liberty of their loved ones. Under the Spanish, they were able to utilize new laws and customs to do so, often to the chagrin of their enslavers. That changed dramatically after the Americans took over in 1798 and began to implement aggressively less beneficial codes that completely undermined Atlantic Africans’ chances for freedom. With that process, women also disappeared from the court records. Surely, forced relationships between white men and black women continued, but any benefits that enslaved women may have derived from them had disappeared. Where previously such relations, however traumatic they may have been, could lead to small inroads toward freedom, they only meant increased suffering after 1808. Pinkney’s Treaty and the eventual American takeover in 1798 solidified the powerful grasp of the American Republic on the Natchez District and sent its black people – free and enslaved – irrevocably toward the repressive regime of king cotton, which already loomed over the area. Ideas of complexion, then, contributed to the overall process of colonizing the borderlands. Because slavery was so important in the schemes

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of multiple European empires to wring a profit from their outposts and make the investment there worthwhile, laws governing the enslaved and their status based on complexion are necessary to compare. In doing so, we see how uneven the definitions of complexions were, and how legal treatment varied from empire to empire, and based on the social realities of the region where the laws were employed. Natchez allows us to glean a glimpse of the complex world of defining different people before blackness or whiteness became the single most important defining character of a person’s social status. The inherent fluidity of complexion in the eighteenth century belies the conceived, or rather constructed, tight racial definitions and subsequent exploitations of enslaved black people in the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. Dawson Phelps, “Narrative of the Hostilities Committed by the Natchez against the Concession of St. Catherine, Ocotber 21–November 4, 1722,” Journal of Mississippi History 7 (Spring 1945): 3–10, 5; George Edward Milne, “Rising Suns, Fallen Forts, and Impudent Immigrants: Race, Power, and War in the Lower Mississippi Valley” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2006), 120–1. 2. Phelps, “Narrative of Hostilities,” 5. 3. Carta de Libertad, Ashael Lewis, Natchez, undated (the Carte de Libertad was probably recorded on November 1, 1794), in Natchez Trace Collection: Provincial and Territorial Records (The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin: undated). 4. Amy Lewis to Manuel Gayoso de Lemos, Natchez, July 24, 1797. 5. Bernard Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (New York: R. Aitken Bookseller, 1775), 104–5. 6. Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review, no. 181 (June 1990): 95–117, 101; A more complete view of Fields’ idea about race can be found in Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014). Other recent works that address the larger issues of race, and the myths it entails, in America include Jacqueline Jones, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America (New York: Basic Books, 2013); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2017). 7. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. 8. On comparisons of French, Atlantic African, and Native American ideas of race and the subsequent cultural negotiations that occurred, see for example Guillaume Aubert, “‘To Establish One Law and Definite Rules’: Race, Religion, and the Transatlantic Origins of the Louisiana Code Noir,” in Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, ed. Cécile Vidal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 21–43; Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans, Early America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Cécile Vidal, ed., “Caribbean Louisiana: Church, Métissage, and the Language of Race in the Mississippi Colony during the French Period,” in Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 125–46; Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). This chapter in many ways follows the calls of Claudio Saunt and Juliana Barr to explore the history of the early American West in more detail and to complicate the history of Colonial America in ways that allow us to explain, in this case, the interplay of race, enslavement, and freedom. While the East Coast certainly holds lessons to be employed, the murky waters and often more complicated histories of the region between Jamestown and Santa Fe need more attention and do hold significant lessons for our understanding of slavery and its interplay with race in the founding of American society. See Claudio Saunt, “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography,” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2008): 745–78; Juliana Barr, “How Do You Get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A Colonial Sun Belt,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 553–66; Also see a more recent call by Karin Wulf to engage the complexities of early American history on a broader geographic scale. Karin Wulf, “Vast Early America: Three Simple Words for a Complex Reality,” Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (blog), (February 6, 2019). https://blog.oieahc.wm.edu/ vast-early-america-three-simple-words/. Barr, “Jamestown to Santa Fe,” 553–66. For a general history of Colonial Mississippi, see Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks, A Borrowed Land: A History of Colonial Mississippi (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2021). Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). See Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Romans, Natural History, 87; for a more in-depth reading of the racialization of gender in travelogues, see especially Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167–92; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Romans, Natural History, 107. Ibid., 107–8. On that process, in particular under the French, see White, Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians; Also see Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 2–6. Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science & Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013), 6. Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in EighteenthCentury America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 2. Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 8–10. Block, Colonial Complexions, 3. Michael Guasco, Slavery and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 9. Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 4. Romans, Natural History, 111. While Voltaire is often represented as one of the Enlightenment thinkers who criticized slavery, he also paints a picture of the inferior African, clearly

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26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

Christian Pinnen separate from the rest of humanity in his writings. See Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 14. Ibid., 2–4. Ibid., 6. See Rebecca Earle’s article on the casta paintings on colonial Spain for an informative way to drive at the mutability of skin color in favor of social representation. Rebecca Earle, “The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism,” The William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2016): 427–66, 432. S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 51. Herman L. Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 5–6. See G. Douglas Inglis, “Searching for Free People of Color in Colonial Natchez,” Southern Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 97–112, 100. Most notably, it established firm control over people of color, free or enslaved. Based on race, the British code clearly degraded the black population of West Florida. To the government, it was clear that their province needed “to employ a great many Negroes” and that “custom has prevailed to distinguish their color for the badge of slavery.” Lumped in with the Africans were Native Americans, who could also be held in bondage. The code further stipulated that the child would follow the status of the mother and that, once enslaved, only manumission by the master could free them from the status of “personal chattel.” For the Slave Code, see “Act for the Regulation and Government of Negroes and Slaves,” Pensacola, December 24, 1766, as reproduced in Lee Davis Smith, “A Settlement of Great Consequence: The Development of the Natchez District, 1763–1860” (Masters Thesis, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2004), 104. An enslaver who wanted to manumit his enslaved person, for example, needed to provide a security payment to the secretary’s office “in the sum of £100 sterling that such a slave or slaves so emancipated shall not at any time become a burden to the province.” See “Act for the Regulation and Government of Negroes and Slaves,” Pensacola, December 24, 1766, as reproduced in Smith, “A Settlement of Great Consequence: The Development of the Natchez District, 1763–1860,” 104. This part of the slave act provided almost no chance for a slave to receive liberty from a British enslaver because the people of West Florida were cash poor, and the sum of one hundred pounds was a very successful tool to prevent manumissions across the province. See Inglis, “Searching,” 100. See Inglis, “Searching,” 101–2. Also evident is the quickly growing number of free people of color. While the four surviving censuses of Spanish Natchez lack the traditional category for free people of color (libres), the first American census of 1801 listed 182 free people of color living in the three counties that were carved out of the Spanish Natchez District. One hundred and fifty-five of those free blacks lived in Adams County, where Natchez was located. It is clear then that free people of color were a growing part of Natchez’s society under Spanish control. The census does not list separate male and female columns, and it is therefore impossible to determine the gender ratio in the Natchez District. See Natchez Census, Natchez, undated, 1784, in Archivo General de Indias: Papeles de Cuba (AGI: PC), legajo 116, Natchez Census, April 14, 1795, AGI:PC, legajo 31, Census of the Natchez District, Natchez, January 18, 1787, in AGI: PC, legajo 200, Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collection,

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35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

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New Orleans, Louisiana, and Census of the Natchez District, Natchez, April 27, 1793, Microfilm 2528, Mississippi Department for Archives and History (MDAH), Jackson. This already points to an anomaly since the surrounding settlements of Mobile, Pensacola, New Orleans, and Natchitoches all had specific segments for people with African ancestry. During the British period only two known free people of color lived in Natchez. Territorial Census of Washington, Pickering, and Adams Counties, 1801, Microfilm 2528, Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH). See for example Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order. On gender and complexion, see for example Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Michelle A. McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600– 1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Kelly M. Kennington, “Law, Geography, and Mobility: Suing for Freedom in Antebellum St. Louis,” The Journal of Southern History 80, no. 3 (2014): 575–604, 577–9, quote on 577. Also see Kelly M. Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens/Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2017). The tradition of legal protection that the Spanish offered to the enslaved went back to the thirteenth-century code of the Siete Partidas and emanated throughout the Spanish colonies in the Atlantic world. The Spanish laws drew on the tradition of Las Siete Partidas and the Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de las Indias (Compilation of the Laws of the Kingdom of the Indies). These laws “drew together diverse legislation applying to Spain’s New World empire in 1681.” Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 24. Even when Spain introduced a new slave code in 1789 as a result of growing plantation economies throughout their empire, “the Siete Partidas juridical framework continued to shape interactions in Spain and its colonies among slaves, their owners, and the state.” Evelyn Jennings continues to note that “portions of the code governing slavery and the philosophy behind those regulations guided Crown policy for centuries.” Evelyn P. Jennings, “Paths to Freedom: Imperial Defense and Manumission in Havana, 1762–1800,” in Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed. Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 121–42, 123. Although the Spanish required all sales to be notarized, Natchez was not yet committed to the Spanish laws. According to Jack Holmes, “English local government customs were followed from the beginning of Spanish rule.” Jack D. L. Holmes, “Law and Order in Spanish Natchez, 1781–1798,” Journal of Mississippi History 25, no. 3 (1963): 186–201, 187. For a discussion of the Spanish process of selling a slave, see Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill:

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41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

Christian Pinnen University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 3–54. There has been no in-depth study of the legal changes from British to Spanish law in Natchez. Edwards’ study about the differences between local and state law in post-revolutionary North and South Carolina comes very close in describing the discrepancies between both systems in the Anglo-American law tradition. One can assume that the people of Natchez followed a similar path in understanding and utilizing the new Spanish law. When Manuel Gayoso de Lemos arrived in Natchez, he would alter that approach significantly. Manuel Gayoso de Lemos was both governor and judge in Natchez. See Bill of sale, Natchez, October 10, 1799, in Natchez Court Records: Land Deed Records (NCR: LDR), Adams County Court House, Natchez, Mississippi; Deed of manumission, Natchez, October 10, 1799, ibid. On the increasing tendency to view blackness as the only necessary marker for enslavement, see specifically Block, Colonial Complexions; Wheeler, Complexion of Race. See for example Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Ted Maris-Wolf, Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-Enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). Karen Y. Morrison, “Slave Mothers and White Fathers: Defining Family and Status in Late Colonial Cuba,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 1 (2010): 34–6; Karen Y. Morrison, “Creating an Alternative Kinship: Slavery, Freedom, and Nineteenth-Century Afro-Cuban Hijos Naturales,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 1 (2007): 55–80, 60–1. Morrison, “Alternative Kinship,” 60. See David M. Stark, “Ties That Bind: Baptismal Sponsorship of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Puerto Rico,” Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 1 (2015): 84–110. San Salvador, the Catholic Church in Natchez, kept somewhat detailed records that are utilized in historic analysis for the first time. Morrison, “Alternative Kinship,” 59. Conversely, some elite whites also agreed to become godparents in an effort to establish “social linkages between dominant classes and those being dominated.” In doing so, they could “incorporate the unfree and freed segments of the population into the larger community.” Stark, “Ties That Bind,” 88, 103– 4. Spanish inhabitants of the Natchez District followed that example, but Anglo-American whites were rarely found among the godparents of black children. To them, the association through the Christian community with the enslaved was a sign of equality, and they did not approach the issue from the paternalist ideas harbored by many whites in the Spanish community. Virginia’s colonial settlers showed a similar inclination as they excluded black people from the church community and denied baptized slaves the right to freedom even as brothers in Christ. See Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Puritans, by the eighteenth century, also excluded black people from the body of Christ in a similar vein. See Heather Miyano Kopelson, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Baptism of Isag, November 28, 1791, Natchez, Book of Baptisms, Sacramental Records from the Parish of San Salvador, Natchez, Mississippi: and the

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54. 55.

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Parish of the Virgin Mary of Sorrows, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1788–1818, transferred to the Archive of the Catholic Diocese of Jackson, Mississippi (SRPSS), Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH), Jackson, Mississippi. Original Spanish records, page 17. Accessed: November 5, 2020. Baptism of Pedro Bode, March 18, 1791, Natchez, Book of Baptisms, SRPSS, 17. Wolf, Race and Liberty. Manumission of slave Clarinda, Natchez, June 24, 1808, in NCR:LDR, Book E, Adams County Court House, Natchez, Mississippi. Galvan had just purchased Clarinda from William Cochran and had actually advertised for her as a runaway but enticed her to come back by promising no punishment. See Joseph Galvan, Mississippi Messenger, Natchez: June 30, 1808. Manumission of slave Clarinda rescinded, Natchez, November 24, 1808, NCR:LDR, Book E, Adams County Court House, Natchez, Mississippi. Manumission of slave Clarinda, Natchez, June 24, 1808, NCR:LDR, Book E, Adams County Court House, Natchez, Mississippi.

Bibliography Aubert, Guillaume. “‘To Establish One Law and Definite Rules’: Race, Religion, and the Transatlantic Origins of the Louisiana Code Noir.” In Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, ed. Cécile Vidal, 21–43. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2016. Barr, Juliana. “How Do You Get from Jamestown to Santa Fe?: A Colonial Sun Belt.” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 553–66. Bennett, Herman L. African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Bergad, Laird W., Fe Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia. The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Block, Sharon. Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Curran, Andrew S. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science & Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Earle, Rebecca. “The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism.” The William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2016): 427–66. Edelson, S. Max. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Edwards, Laura F. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Fields, Barbara J. “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review, no. 181 (June 1990): 95–117.

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Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London: Verso, 2014. Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Goetz, Rebecca Anne. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Guasco, Michael. Slavery and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Hanger, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Holmes, Jack D.L. “Law and Order in Spanish Natchez, 1781–1798.” Journal of Mississippi History 25, no. 3 (1963): 186–201. Inglis, G. Douglas. “Searching for Free People of Color in Colonial Natchez.” Southern Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 97–112. Jennings, Evelyn P. “Paths to Freedom: Imperial Defense and Manumission in Havana, 1762–1800.” In Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed. Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks, 121–42. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Jones, Jacqueline. A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books, 2017. Kennington, Kelly M. In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America. Athens/Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2017. ———. “Law, Geography, and Mobility: Suing for Freedom in Antebellum St. Louis.” The Journal of Southern History 80, no. 3 (2014): 575–604. Kopelson, Heather Miyano. Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Maris-Wolf, Ted. Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-Enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. McKinley, Michelle A. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Milne, George Edward. “Rising Suns, Fallen Forts, and Impudent Immigrants: Race, Power, and War in the Lower Mississippi Valley.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2006. Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975. Morgan, Jennifer L. “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770.” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167–92. Morrison, Karen Y. “Creating an Alternative Kinship: Slavery, Freedom, and Nineteenth-Century Afro-Cuban Hijos Naturales.” Journal of Social History 41, no. 1 (2007): 55–80.

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———. “Slave Mothers and White Fathers: Defining Family and Status in Late Colonial Cuba.” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 1 (2010): 34–6. Phelps, Dawson. “Narrative of the Hostilities Committed by the Natchez against the Concession of St. Catherine, October 21–November 4, 1722.” Journal of Mississippi History 7 (Spring 1945): 3–10. Pinnen, Christian, and Charles Weeks. A Borrowed Land: A History of Colonial Mississippi. Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2021. Rappaport, Joanne. The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Romans, Bernard. A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida. New York: R. Aitken Bookseller, 1775. Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Saunt, Claudio. “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography.” The William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2008): 745–78. Smith, Lee Davis. “A Settlement of Great Consequence: The Development of the Natchez District, 1763–1860.” Masters Thesis, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 2004. Spear, Jennifer M. Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans, Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Stark, David M. “Ties That Bind: Baptismal Sponsorship of Slaves in EighteenthCentury Puerto Rico.” Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 1 (2015): 84–110. Vidal, Cécile, ed. “Caribbean Louisiana: Church, Métissage, and the Language of Race in the Mississippi Colony during the French Period.” In Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, 125–46. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. White, Sophie. Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Wolf, Eva Sheppard. Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Wulf, Karin. “Vast Early America: Three Simple Words for a Complex Reality.” Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (blog), February 6, 2019. https://blog.oieahc.wm.edu/vast-early-america-three-simple-words/.

12 Tocqueville’s Compass On History, Race, and Comparison in A Fortnight in the Wilds Julian T.D. Gärtner Introduction1 A Fortnight in the Wilds2 is a short travelogue by Alexis de Tocqueville. During his nine-month journey, Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont travel to the area of the Great Lakes.3 Unlike his synoptic essays, this travel narration is less about the institutional and sociopolitical order of the United States than it is about human history and the ethnographic exploration of the “contact zone”4 of different people. His works are seldomly quoted as part of any line of racial thought, even though Tocqueville uses the term race synonymously with “human race,” “people,” or “nation” in its most common and widely used meaning at the beginning of the nineteenth century.5 Too often A Fortnight in the Wilds is still being regarded as a quasi-autobiographical souvenir, and too little emphasis is given to the structure of this first-person narration.6 This chapter will argue that Tocqueville’s narration stages his travel as an inquiry into human history. It is in the American wilderness that he thinks to find the sources of human diversity. According to Tocqueville, civilization emerges through a continuous contact and conflict of different races. In this light also, more recent events of the July Revolution appear as an eternal race struggle for political supremacy. Therefore, this chapter will not only address Tocqueville’s own position as a European traveler but also point out the various narrative and rhetorical ways comparisons are drawn in order to establish and reason for a historical narrative of race conflict.

Travelling the History of the Human Race Contrary to what the title of A Fortnight in the Wilds might suggest, it is not so much about a sojourn in the wilderness as a journey to the geoimaginary boundary between civilization and wilderness. It is the goal of Tocqueville’s enterprise to obtain information about the origin of the diversity of human societies in history. The route of the journey takes him from New York northwest via Buffalo to Detroit across the Flint River,

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which marks the threshold between wilderness and civilization in the narrated world, to Saginaw and back. While the travel narration covers the approximately two-week period from July 18 to 29, 1831, and tells it in a chronological order, the narrator’s comments overlook several thousand years of human history. The narration stages Tocqueville’s journey as an actual movement ‘through’ human history as if the long-lasting processes of history could be observed directly during the relatively short journey: “We [Tocqueville and Beaumont] passed through places celebrated in the history of the Indians . . . but everywhere the savage’s hut had given way to the civilized man’s house.”7 In this quote, the history of the people of North America is reduced to a directional process ‘from’ wilderness ‘to’ civilization according to the formula ‘from huts to houses.’ The narration is underpinned by a linear and violent narrative of progress. By speaking as a homodiegetic narrator,8 Tocqueville stages his journey to the northwest as if he travelled through a historical space and observes these long-lasting, grand historical processes with his own eyes. He is thus part of the narrated world and moves through human history. In other words, the further he approaches the border to wilderness, the more he goes back in history. He moves on historical paths, and in this sense his route is already inscribed with trajectories of human history. The ‘streets’ and ‘bridges’ of the Americans as well as the ‘paths’ and ‘tracks’ of the Indigenous are based on the distinction between wilderness and civilization. Over the course of his journey, Tocqueville repeatedly describes the path of American civilization as destructive, for example, because of its topographical or hydrological interventions in nature such as deforestation, the draining of swamps, or the creation of long-distance canals. This “noise of civilization”9 is also in contrast to the “silence of the forest”10 and the harmony in which the Indigenous people live with nature. Nevertheless, Tocqueville also recognizes the advantages of civilization in terms of communication and transport, such as postal services and newspapers, fashion, and the opening up of roads. While the Indigenous people travel by foot, on horseback, or with canoes, the Americans in the narration travel with carriages and ships. In this way they are also travelers in the narrated world and are thus constituted in a comparable way as actors in this narrative of human history. Tocqueville follows in the footsteps of the peoples of North America, and he expresses his interest as follows: “[o]ne of the things that pricked our [Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s] most lively curiosity in going to America, was the chance of visiting the utmost limits of European civilisation, and even . . . visiting some of those Indian tribes.”11 His special interest for the ‘Native Americans’ is in discrepancy to the difficulties of an encounter with the Indigenous peoples of North America and the decimated number, he finds. Instead of the “Indian tribes” he initially had expected, he encounters Americans all along his way. Although equipped with “a compass as well as provisions,”12 Tocqueville is repeatedly dependent on

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the help of others. For example, he asks Mr. Biddle about the best way to the wilderness. The leaseholder answers him based on “the map [of] the St. Joseph River,”13 but the information of Tocqueville’s host proves to be of little help. Mr. Biddle does not understand Tocqueville’s interest, for “nothing is harder than to find anyone able to understand what you want.”14 The communication with Sagan Cuisco and his brother is even more difficult. They are two Chippeways with whom Tocqueville can only communicate silently by hand signals. However, in contrast to his host, they successfully show him the way into the wilderness by the simplest means, “a line in the sand.”15 They are familiar with the area and become important characters of passage for Tocqueville. While Mr. Biddle has an abstract, cartographic yet useless knowledge of the area, the Indigenous individuals can draw upon a tacit knowledge of the local terrain and know their way around. Mr. Biddle and Sagan Cuisco are staged as contrastive pairs. It shows that the constellation of characters and their description have to do with the broader narrative of the story. In their different relationships to the land, two different ways of possessing it show: on behalf of the United States, Mr. Biddle administers the territory entrusted to him like a false host or unlawful conqueror as if it was a terra nullius. In contrast to this appropriative attitude, Sagan Cuisco rather behaves in the conservative manner of an old-established local. Tocqueville’s ostentatious lack of orientation and navigation also characterizes him as a foreign traveler from Europe. While the Americans in the narration travel for reasons of migration and acquisition of wealth, the Indigenous people travel for the sake of hunt or flight. Tocqueville’s journey takes place under the sign of gaining knowledge. The narration not only sketches antagonistic and stereotypical characters in such a way as to make them comparable, but the historical narrative of racial conflict is also reflected in their constellation – the different characters are also representatives of their respective races. A Fortnight in the Wilds tells human history as a history of races. The term race is omnipresent in the short narration. It is a historical term that is used synonymously as ‘people’ or ‘nation’ and refers to whole populations that become actors in the history they advance. Races are often referred to in the collective singular form as “the American” or “the Indian.”16 The narration draws a connection between them in a comparative way: under the aspect of ‘humans’ they are alike, but under the aspect ‘races,’ ‘nations,’ or ‘peoples’ they differ – based on this assumption of similarity, comparisons between the races become possible. The narration is by no means unbiased in this regard. It emphasizes the Americans as a “nation of conquerors”17 and the Indigenous people as “an ancient people, the first and legitimate masters of the American continent.”18 It judges both strongly and assigns them clear functions in the narrative. Further, the narration discusses the encounter between Americans and Indigenous people as a violent contact and establishes a direct link

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between the spread and expansion of the one and the flight and expulsion of the others. Tocqueville reports, “[t]en years ago, we were told, [the Indigenous people] were here; there, five years; there, two years. . . . In the same spots and in its places another race is increasing at a rate that is even more astonishing.”19 The narration is presented in the direct speech of an anonymous American speaker. When Tocqueville asks him for the whereabouts of the Indigenous people, the American gives him information in years instead of miles. The American tells ten years of the history of expansion and expulsion of the Indigenous people in only one sentence. The narration frequently repeats the speech of individuals which are solely characterized by their racial affiliation but otherwise remain vague. When the narrative instance allows an Indigenous speaker to judge civilization as “what the whites call the delights of social life”20 and an American to claim about Indigenous people, “[i]t is a race that is dying out; they are not made for civilization; it kills them,”21 then not only opinions are expressed. It’s ‘the American’ and ‘the Indian’ who speak as stereotypical representatives in a racial conflict. The narration stages a local racial discourse as a hearsay and presents it as if it was the generally prevailing opinion, for example: “[h]ow many times during our travels have we not met honest citizens who said to us . . . the number of Indians is decreasing daily. . . . This world here belongs to us [the Americans].”22 In a certain way the narration repeats the violence of contact on a verbal level the narration produces in the first place. Rather than an account of an actual cultural contact, the American character represents the ‘vanishing Indian’ vis-à-vis the ‘prosperous American’ in order to establish “an explanation and narrative of reality . . . as the normative one” in an act of “epistemic violence.”23 It is a statement of entitlement and supposed legitimacy that deliberately aims to suppress native knowledges, perspectives, and narratives; however, this interpretation of history is clearly being marked as biased and one-sided in Tocqueville’s narration. In this way the travelogue also creates discursive strawmen to distance itself from these local racial discourses and conflicts. “He [the American], the daily witness of such wonders, does not see anything in all this. This incredible destruction, this even more surprising growth, seem to him . . . the unalterable order of nature.”24 Unlike the American, who recognizes the fixed order of nature in these daily events, Tocqueville sees the long-lasting confrontation of two races in this growth and destruction. The narration connects observations of a conflict between the races to the bigger narrative of human history as a race conflict – and this is also connected to the narrative levels of the story.

The Narrative Construction of Steamship Superior The basic tension between wilderness and civilization also has a decisive influence on the narrative set-up of A Fortnight in the Wilds. It is often

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normalized as a one-dimensional and autobiographical first-person narration despite its well-planned arrangement.25 The narration is arranged into an observational apparatus in which civilization and wilderness are always already related to each other as comparison-inducing structures.26 The linear course of the itinerary is repeatedly halted by narrative commentaries on human history as well as ethnographic observations. In this first-person narration, two narrative levels can be distinguished, namely the extradiegetic level of the ‘narrating ego’ and the intradiegetic level of the ‘experiencing ego.’ These are also important for the contents conveyed, because the previous commentaries on human history can be attributed to the narrator of the extradiegetic level, i.e. the ‘narrating’ Tocqueville. This narrator speaks from a later point in time and therefore a more ‘advanced’ standpoint. He tells the story from the deck of a historical steamship called Superior in zero-focalization, as can be concluded from a brief note at the beginning: “Written on the Steamship ‘The Superior.’ Begun on (1st August 1831).”27 Moreover, he moves ‘from’ wilderness ‘to’ civilization. The steamship can be seen as a signé of an everadvancing civilization, and Tocqueville writes on the superior position of its comfortable deck, so to speak. Civilization is already inscribed in this extradiegetic level of the narration. The dichotomy with the wilderness becomes even clearer, taking into account that the ‘experiencing’ Tocqueville of the intradiegetic level travels ‘from’ civilization ‘to’ wilderness in contrast – in other words, there’s a countermovement being staged in the travel narration. This intradiegetic narrator travels by foot or on horseback. He has to face climatic challenges such as humidity and heat as well as alimentary shortages and defend himself against dangerous animals. On this narrative level, the narrator speaks from a simultaneous point in time. It is here that ethnographic observations emerge from internal focalization. Wilderness is inscribed into this narrative level. Consequently, on the narrative levels, opposing travel movements take place from wilderness to civilization or from civilization to wilderness. Therefore, the signature of the conflict of the two forces is already engraved in the relationship of the narrative levels and the narration as a whole. This relationship also corresponds to the reciprocal processes of knowledge production of race in the narration – the narration seems to be a construction no less complex than the steamship. It’s a story ‘of’ human history that allows the author to synthesize and generalize knowledge about humans theoretically, and it is also a story that deals ‘with’ human beings and integrates facts in concrete observations.28 But in the same sense, both modes of knowledge production are permeable, also the sea and the overland journey merge. Connections between the sea-bound journey of the framework story and the inland journey of the story are repeatedly established through explicit comparisons. The travel over waters and the travel over land are thereby dramatized as a search for historical knowledge. With “a strong

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breeze was blowing from the northwest and gave the waters of Lake Erie the very look of a stormy ocean,”29 the cruise on the Great Lakes and their rivers becomes a trip on a metaphorical ocean (Figure 12.1). Also the descriptions of landscapes continuously make connections between the sea and mainland, for example, when the edge of the forest appears “more like the shores of the sea,”30 or the trees are compared to ships masts, “each tree grows quickly upwards .  .  . straight as a ship’s mast,”31 and the prairie becomes an ocean, “[o]n the opposite bank of the stream the prairie stretched like a boundless ocean on a calm day.”32 This comparative relationship between the solid land and the unsteady sea is found throughout the travel report, and it is even addressed in a commentary: “[b]ut that is not the only occasion on which we noticed the strange analogy between the sight of the ocean and that of a wild forest.”33 Ocean and forest are objects of comparison. They can become similar in numerous aspects such as their size, coherence, or the quality of the impression they give. But the decisive differences between ocean and forest are found in regard to the human observer: while the forest with its “limitless horizon”34 offers no orientation whatsoever and makes progress impossible, the conquest of the sea is focused on a fixed point

Figure 12.1 The Superior was only the second steam-powered vessel traversing the Great Lakes Source: Courtesy of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio

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and offers hope, “[b]ut in this ocean of leaves who could point out the way?”35 Just like the narrative levels, the objects of comparisons blur. The comparisons unsettle the firm stand of Tocqueville as an observer and traveler, but it’s not a pure odyssey. In his compass already mentioned, both – the nautical navigation over the ocean and the geographical navigation through the forest – converge. This practice of comparing also establishes a connection between the passage over the Atlantic and (European) human history. Based on the next quote, one might think that wilderness is almost meant for human conquest when it says, “[t]he noise of civilization and of industry will break the silence. . . . Embankments will imprison its side, and its waters . . . will be thrown back by the power of ships.”36 There is an apparent contradiction between this rather distanced and impersonal view of the future and Tocqueville’s very own position as a passenger of a steamship. He actively partakes in the promulgation of civilization. Just like ships push through the water, the processes of civilization violently put nature into global contact. When Tocqueville concedes, “we are perhaps the last travelers, who will have been allowed to see it . . . so great is the force that drives the white race,”37 he stages himself as the last traveler at the end of history, which corresponds to the tragic arc of the narration. The history of civilization is a violent process in which races can be identified as the initiators. The identification of human history with the history of race is revealed in a comparison that seems as if Tocqueville could measure the passing of historical time at the pulse of his body: “man listens to the even beating of arteries that seem to mask the passing of time flowing drop by drop through eternity.”38 Here the vascular flow of blood merges into the temporal flow of history. Tocqueville speaks from the racialized point of view of a white European observer and by that creates the narrative of a racial history. Moreover, meteorological, botanical, and zoological comparisons can be found throughout the narration in order to find natural laws in human history. The decline of the Indigenous population, for example, is described as “vanishing like snow in the sun”39 in meteorological terms of season and weather. So is the American pioneer’s progress, “all trees seem to have been struck by sudden death. In full summer the withered branches seem the image of winter,”40 as if an analogy existed between the relationship of the Americans and the Indigenous in the same way like between the heat of the sun and snowmelt. When an entire society is described as “a growing seed entrusted to the wilds,”41 the comparison evokes rhizomatic notions of order, that can also be transferred to genealogical social and family structures in “[s]everal exiled members of the great human family.”42 Further, botanical observations are also used to group ethnographic observations. For example, in reference to several Iroquois, the narrator points out the difference between civilization and wilderness by placing them in the context of the city and not the forest, when he claims “one would be wrong to try and judge the Iroquois race

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by the shapeless sample, this stray sucker from a savage tree that has grown up in the mud of our cities.”43 In turn another botanical comparison already alludes to a zoological context, “already the white race is advancing across the forest . . . and in but few years the European will have cut down the trees . . . and forced out the animals.”44 In further ethnographic observations, the zoological context becomes even more striking. As Tocqueville encounters further Indigenous people, he distances himself from the idea that they were not human by saying “[a]t first sight one was tempted to think” by emphasizing the visual dimension of his impression and to relativize the end of the sentence, “that each of them was but a beast from the forest, to whom education had given the appearance of man but who had nonetheless remained animal.”45 The transformative power of practices of comparing also comes into action when of all animals the wolf is chosen as the object of comparison. This also speaks for the marginalization of Indigenous people outside the social contract of civilized society. The eating habits of Indigenous people is being compared to the way wolves devour their prey. “Wolves behave the same way in like circumstances,”46 and finally the Indigenous hunter is equated to the way wolves chase as in “one of the wolves who follow riders in the hope they fall from their horses.”47 It can therefore be assumed that the narration implements patterns of categorization and observation from natural history. The tension between civilization and wilderness is the generative signature of the production of race and also underlies the following ethnographic tableau.

Race on Display Although the title of Tocqueville’s narration promises an uninhabited wilderness, he encounters and observes a whole series of people during his journey. “As you go on in this diary and follow me among the European population of the frontiers and the Indian tribes themselves,” Tocqueville announces the next steps of his travel report, “you will both get a more worthy and fairer conception of the first inhabitants of America.”48 Over the course of the chronological succession of the itinerary, the narration unfolds the sequence and structure of an ethnographic tableau of the North American races. Thereby it refers to a central visual and organizational concept that has been widely used to illustrate (e.g. botanical, zoological, or ethnographic findings) since the early modern period. It is, however, more than a mere surface on which information is compiled in an overview. Rather, it is a compressed organizational medium of knowledge.49 In this respect tableaux are by no means incoherent sequences or juxtapositions but planned arrangements that stimulate comparison. A Fortnight in the Wilds takes up on this scientific format of organizing and ordering in the form of a literary tableau. The ethnographic passages of the narration represent a total of four different races. It is a sequence of

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schematically narrated sections, which are presented separately over the whole length of the narration. However, due to their structurally similar construction, they form a comparative overall relation. The literary tableau is an established genre, and the narration can also draw on ethnographic knowledge of literary predecessors. At a land auction in Buffalo, Tocqueville observes a group of Iroquois who receive compensation payments from the American state for their land. He sums up: “I was full of memories of M. de Chateaubriand and Cooper. . . . I expected to find them [the Iroquis] men whose bodies had been deployed by hunting and war.”50 However, Tocqueville’s expectations are disappointed: instead of athletic hunter-gatherers he sees impoverished and emaciated beggars in the Iroquois. They don’t match the models popularly pre-figured by Chateaubriand and Cooper.51 Then Tocqueville’s announcement of a ‘more worthy and fairer conception’ also deals with current modes of aesthetic representation. It is the focus on race in the framework of human history that is specific for Tocqueville’s travel report. Over the course of the journey, a chronological tableau unfolds (Figure 12.2). It exhibits different races and accords them to their supposed position or stages in human history. The ethnographic descriptions are less about individual bodies but rather a matter of drawing valid and more general conclusions for the sake of a human history of races. The American pioneer is introduced on a third, the hypodiegetic level, as “[t]his unknown man is the representative of a race to whom the future of the New World belongs, a restless, calculating, adventurous race.”52 The American is presented in the narrator’s perspective. His body is examined in the peculiar stiffness of a narrative pause and virtually fixed in position. The homodiegetic narrator studies him with a sharp gaze like a model or preserved specimen.53 The narration carries out a descriptive pattern of physiognomy in which external features are extended into internal character traits. The gaze wanders from features related to the entire body, such as the appearance, build, and stature, to movements and way of speaking as well as features such as the facial expression. Then the narration puts forward virtues and temperaments. Underlying this is the premise of a continuity between them that constitutes the essence of different races. However, the American shares certain commonalities with Indigenous people. According to the narration, he “is a wandering people whom rivers and lakes cannot hold back,”54 and thus he’s presented as a nomadic people in a similar way. The Iroquois are presented in a similar way in the narration.55 The tableau develops its full comparative potential in a sequence of passages that are narrated in a structurally similar fashion. Unlike the ‘civilized’ American shown in the wilderness, the Iroquois already mentioned are displayed as ‘savages’ in civilization. Again, the scheme begins by pointing out features concerning the whole body and then to inner virtues and temperaments. The Iroquois’ assessment varies greatly from that of

Source: Graph by the author

Figure 12.2 The narrative structure of Toqueville’s A Fortnight in the Wilds

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the pioneer. This has not solely to do with Tocqueville’s disappointment about their supposedly degenerate appearance, but it is also due to the narrative procedure and context of civilization in which they are shown. For example, a Chippeway in the wilderness is presented in a far more positive manner.56 He is also introduced as the representative of a whole race because “[h]is face had all the characteristic traits that distinguish the Indian race from all others.”57 Unlike before, the narrator comes to the more well-meaning conclusion that “gaiety changes the physiognomy of the savage man.”58 The narration shows different races in the contexts of civilization and wilderness and exhibits them like in front of the background of a picture. But instead of repeating the dichotomous order of races with fixed affiliations to one of the two states, it is more interested in the processes of change that they impose. This becomes manifest in the fourth stereotypical character of the ethnographic tableau59 as well: “He told me that he was a bois-brûlé, that is to say the son of a French Canadian and Indian woman.”60 Tocqueville’s categories seem no longer to hold true in relation to “this race of half-castes.”61 Tocqueville initially mistakes the bois-brûlé for an Indigenous person, and is misled by the physiognomic features of the stranger.62 Tocqueville goes on to describe him and attributes the bois-brûlé a particularly affable temperament. In an amusing way the half-Frenchman starts singing a popular French chanson. Nevertheless, he is not only a ridiculous character but also represents a travesty of the established order. Unlike any other character, he comes closest to Tocqueville’s own position when he describes him as “the savage, my compatriot.”63 The Flint River represents “the ultimate boundary between civilization and wilderness.”64 The crossing marks the destination of the journey as well as the climax of this meticulously planned narration. It’s not coincidental that the passage takes place on July 25, 1831. Exactly halfway through his two-week journey, Tocqueville reaches the beginning of human history. He estimates it to be six thousand years long: “[t]he wilds were there surely just the same as when our first fathers saw them six thousand years ago.”65 The narration climaxes less in an encounter with a high civilization, but the crossing of the river rather marks the change into a different order, when it says, “[t]here, in fact, the order was reversed.”66 At this point, the narrated time of the commentaries and the time of the journey culminate. This is how the narration creates an imagined state of human life in nature prior to the emergence of an organized form of society or state power. Saginaw is not only the epitome of a place before human history but also a heuristic construct. It allows for the observation of a society composed of different human races before the imagined caesura of civilization and wilderness: “One found French Canadians there, some Americans, some Indians, and some half-castes.”67 Just as Saginaw is a narrow crossing point where people of all races meet, the narration gathers representatives of all races in the smallest space

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in its ethnographic descriptions. Once again, a “Frenchman,”68 an “emigrant from the United States,”69 “the Indian,”70 and a “half-cast”71 are put together to form a panoramic overview. This is a mise en abyme of the larger ethnographic tableau that presents four racial stereotypes in comparison. But it is rather a ranking in order to make a concluding point about races: “Colour of skin, poverty or affluence, ignorance or enlightenment have already built the indestructible classification between them . . . education and birth divide and isolate them.”72 The narrator locates the diversity of humans – and thus race – already in the state of nature. Although these descriptive patterns are obviously cultural constructs and only induced by the narrator in the first place, he claims that they were natural. It doesn’t come as a surprise that he would also offer a biased conclusion of the comparative setup of his tableau: “[s]everal exiled members of the great human family have met together . . . but they cast only looks of hatred and suspicion on one another.”73 The narrator discusses differences between people as irreversible and genuinely problematic. According to this view, diversity is qua natura essential to races and a conflict therefore predestined. Behind these abstract assumptions lies a broader discussion of Rousseau’s philosophy of natural law.74 He is almost mentioned by name in the following comment: “Some philosophers have believed that human nature, everywhere the same, only varies according to the institutions and laws of different society.”75 The narrator counters the assumption of similarity from the philosophy of natural law with a statement about the history of civilization, “[t]hat is one of the opinions to which the history of all world seems to give the lie. . . . In history all nations, like individuals, show their own peculiar physiognomy.”76 Instead of the universalistic similarity of all human beings, he pleads for the historical particularities of different races or nations. It shows that here practices of comparing are deployed to substantiate and illustrate differences rather than similarities. More that they endow evidence they point out preconceived divisions.

Norman Villages in North America A journey through the forests of North America is certainly a thrilling undertaking. However, it causes Tocqueville unexpected excitement when he sums up his experience as “happy as a pair of schoolboys leaving college to spend their holidays at their father’s house.”77 Very little of the seriousness of the expedition is shown in these words. It is with almost infantile anticipation that Tocqueville and Beaumont go about their trip. In fact, Tocqueville’s journey through North America can also be regarded as a return to the familiar.78 When he travels the region of the Great Lakes, he imagines to be crossing France – Normandy, more precisely. As Tocqueville reaches Fort Malden on July 19, 1831, he notices that “[t]his place founded by the French still bears many traces of its

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origins. The houses are placed and shaped like those of our peasants.”79 He assigns Fort Malden to the more agricultural and developing regions of France and compares the place to French villages in Normandy, “[o]ne might think it a village near Caen or Evreux.”80 Their layout resembles French villages and regions that are characterized by their remoteness and uneventfulness. But in Tocqueville’s perception, they become the scene of human history. He transforms them into eventful contact zones when he tells the story of the “campaign of the Belgians”81 or notices a village was “founded by the Jesuits in the middle of the forest.”82 He also remembers a battle on a river, where “Commodore Perry won a celebrated naval victory over the English”83 as well as the conflict “between the two greatest European nations.”84 When he is observing a meadow, he even recognizes the “fields of waterloo.”85 A multitude of historical events come together in this landscape otherwise described as a remarkably barren and insignificant area. According to Tocqueville, this region is supposed to be a wilderness without contact to civilization that provides him fundamental insights about human history. Contrary to this, it is a space overcrowded with the violent and disruptive memories of major historical events also linked to Europe. The comparative relationship to Europe and France is inscribed into this journey to America from the beginning. Phenomena in America are – if not directly compared – seen in comparison to European human history. Tocqueville concludes from his previous travel experiences in Europe an overlapping of geographical distance and historical time: “I had noticed in Europe, the more or less withdrawn position in which a province or town is placed . . . [it] often cause[s] a difference of several centuries between various parts of the same area.”86 According to him the geographical distance between places in Europe would correspond to the historical difference of centuries. Factors such as the location, the level of prosperity, and the size of the city or region would influence the level of civilization of the population living there. In short, he sketches a graduated model or stage model. He also wants to put this concept of the history of European civilization into use for North America: “I supposed that a country peopled as in America . . . ought to show all conditions of existence and provide a picture of society in all ages.”87 Tocqueville soon comes to correct his preconception when he realizes that “[o]f all the countries in the world America is the least adapted to provide the sight I wanted to seek. In America, even more than in Europe, there is one society only.”88 Even stronger than in Europe, instead of ‘the many’ societies in America ‘the one’ society has formed – implicitly meaning the white majoritarian society. Tocqueville supports this argument with a diffusionist idea, that while European civilization had developed locally, American civilization had always been in contact with the center and other cultures. He claims that “[i]n Europe each man lives and dies on the same ground he was born,”89 whereas “[i]n America nowhere does

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one meet the representative of a race that has multiplied in isolation. . . . They come bringing with them . . . civilization.”90 It seems one can learn about the history of humankind travelling through America just as well as in Europe. But in America, contrasts gather in shorter time and smaller spaces: “Ones goes without transition from the wilds into the street of the city.”91 According to Tocqueville, differences in America become visible in days instead of centuries and in street blocks instead of regions. In America human history is more gradual than in Europe. It becomes clear that the history of European civilization is the normative measure in this comparison. The human history of America seems to be only an extension or variant of Europe’s. This also shows in how carefully the narrator chooses the words “European civilization,”92 “European race,”93 or “the white race”94 in regard to the Anglo-American population in order to emphasize similarities in civilization and to insinuate a shared belonging to the same race. In contrast to this he wishes to distance himself by using the word “the American”95 in order to point out exceptional and diverging historical developments. It’s not only in the depiction of landscapes that Tocqueville believes to recognize the characteristic traits of Normandy. In his ethnographic observations, he notices a similarity between Americans and the inhabitants of Normandy, too. Tocqueville describes his host as “I shall not say a solid peasant, for there are no peasants in America, but anyhow a solid gentleman,” by which he casually assigns him to the agricultural stage according to the earlier model and continues, “whose features had that openness and simplicity one associates with the people .  .  . of Normandy.”96 In the appearance of his American host, Tocqueville claims to recognize the character traits of the people of Normandy. The supposed simplicity of the farmer does not only lead to conclusions about Tocqueville’s position as an aristocrat,97 but the narration also stages the inverse gaze: “Our travelling clothes and rifles made us not look like business men, and to travel to see the sights was something completely unwonted.”98 This time the American farmer closely examines Tocqueville as a curiosity. To the American farmer, Tocqueville’s endeavor seems like a rather top-heavy undertaking. That’s part of the reason why Tocqueville travels in cognito so “they stopped treating us as extraordinary beings.”99 At one point, Tocqueville wants to learn more about the American land seizure at the frontier.100 In a direct dialogue Tocqueville asks: “It is generally believed in Europe that the wilds of America are being populated with the help of emigration from Europe. How . . . have [we] not met a single European?”101 His American hosts confidently replies that “[i]t is not like France here”102 and continues to say, “it is only Americans . . . who could have the courage to submit to such trials.”103 It shows that it’s a staged dialogue of two representatives of different nations. In this seemingly casual conversation, the narration negotiates the link between European and American history in favor of a postulated independence of the latter.

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Moreover, the landscape descriptions of North America have even more to do with Europe beyond this. It is more than a picturesque trope when Tocqueville compares fallen trees in the supposed virgin forest with “so many ramparts behind which several men could easily take cover.”104 Tocqueville associates the height of natural barriers of the forest thickets to manmade barricades as he saw them in France during the July Revolution of 1830. The silence of the North American forests for Tocqueville is also the place to speak about European and French conditions in an indirect manner. When he speaks of the processes of rotting in the North American forest as “trunks that can no longer support the weight of their branches,”105 he is actually referring to the decline of French civilization and the upheavals surrounding the appointment of Louis Philippe I as king.106 This event also marks the fall of the Bourbons in France.107 Just as there are split, overturned, and snapped-off trees, there are also artificially maintained and overthrown dynasties. Therefore, Tocqueville’s humanizing descriptions of the forest –  “[t]here are those that, fallen yesterday, still stretch their long branches on the ground and hold the traveler up by an obstacle he had not expected”108 – also read as discrete analogies to the political situation in France. Tocqueville makes mention of the events himself: “[i]t was in the midst of that profound solitude that we suddenly thought of the Revolution.”109 Therefore, it is no coincidence that the travel narration ends on July 29, 1831 – this day marks the first anniversary of the revolution. Tocqueville realizes that “I cannot describe the impact with which memories of July 29 took possession of our minds.”110 From this point of view his trip to America seems like an escape from civilization and the turmoil in France. Even in the middle of the wilderness, the events of civilization break in and come back as violent memories. The narrator draws a parallel between the natural rotting of the forest with the fall of French aristocracy. He doesn’t speak about the political solution in terms of the conflict between two races like other historians before him, but in the practices of comparing, genealogical and physiological semantics come up that might suggest a certain organic dimension to the political events. It is as if the future of French civilization can be observed in the woods of North America. Here the depths of human history touch upon the presence in time and also the end of the narration.

Conclusion A Fortnight in the Wilds opens up Tocqueville’s further works under the aspect of travel literature. It is a narration in which he demonstrates the imaginative quality involved in his comparative approach to (social and political) sciences with which his Democracy in America is commonly associated. Tocqueville follows his historical interest. He is convinced that he can gain profound insights into the emergence of the diversity of human societies in the wilderness. His travelogue is connected to a

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bigger narrative of the history of humanity that sees diversity at the core for continuing race conflicts. In the narration, practices of comparing go beyond rhetorical figures and pictorial tropes. They shape the narrative and play a constitutive role in the construction of race. In the multilayered travel report, the narrative levels are already related to each other in a comparative fashion. Comparisons sustain the supposed existence of races and make broader arguments in discussion with scientific, philosophical, and literary representations and predecessors. Tocqueville is deeply concerned with the question of race that for him plays a key role for the future of European and American history. In the wake of the July Revolution, his journey to the United States also reflects on recent developments and crises in French society and its (former) colonies in the Americas. The July Revolution is only the latest of a series of events, such as the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution, that rocked Bourbonian rule and the order of the ancien régime. In times of turmoil, human history and narratives of past or historic civilizations and races is a nineteenth-century means of coming to terms with new events and recent changes on the basis of past experience.

Notes 1. This article has been written within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 “Practices of Comparing. Changing and Ordering the World,” Bielefeld University, Germany, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), subproject B03, Comparing and knowing the world: European world travel narratives from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, “A Fortnight in the Wilds,” in Alexis de Tocqueville: Journey to America, ed. J. P. Mayer (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981), 350–403. 3. See Oliver Zunz and Arthur Goldhammer, Alexis De Tocqueville and Gustave De Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), which provides authoritative information. 4. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York/London: Routledge, 2008). 5. Fredrickson argues that the term race has already been present in France in the early modern period. While lower nobility and other underprivileged groups were increasingly rising to official positions in seventeenth-century France, a distinction was introduced between noblesse de robe and noblesse de race. In the struggle of the different estates, higher nobility made reference to their ancestry in the sense of a ‘secret’ or ‘arcane’ knowledge. While their political positions and privileges were secured by the grace of birth and descent, the other estates’ demands relied on personal efforts and achievements. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly botanists like Linné, zoologists like Buffon, or anatomists like Blumenbach and other early scientists deal with the origin and variety of humankind. While the credibility of the biblical chronology gradually faded away in the face of an unknown age of humankind as a whole, race is put into the perspective of the different currents of natural history (historia naturalis). Race

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6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Julian T.D. Gärtner became a classificatory category that is applied not only to animals but also to other phenomena such as human variety. Already in the eighteenth century race is introduced as an explanatory term for world history as well as human history. Henri de Boulainvillier dramatizes the history of France as a continuous race conflict between a noble Franconian on the one hand and a plebeian Gallic race on the other. According to this historical notion of race, present conditions can be attributed to and explained by a more comprehensive and overarching process of human history. The past serves as a collection of examples and a role model for expectations, images, and actions in the present. The idea of separate races that divide a nation also echoes in the nineteenth century in Augustin Thierry’s and his brother Amédée Thierry’s works. They see French history as a never-ending conflict of a conquering and a conquered race. Arthur de Gobineau’s essay about the inequality of human races could be called a race history in the literal sense: he introduces the biological concept of evolution to history. According to Gobineau, the mixture of different races is to be the source of all cultural progress and degeneration. See George Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 49–96. Gobineau is a contemporary of Tocqueville, and he also worked as his secretary. In their correspondence the two have divergent opinions about the meaning of race that I hope to elaborate in future research. However, I see Tocqueville belonging to the same paradigm as Boulainvilliers, the Thierry brothers, and Gobineau. See George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 229–90. Pierson’s seminal work of 1938 features a historical reconstruction of the whole voyage rich in detail. A Fortnight in the Wilderness is framed as an exhausting expedition with several uncertainties. Pierson retells the decision for this excursion as a short quarrel between Tocqueville and Beaumont in order to develop their friendship rather than elaborating on the form of the travelogue. Only recent scholarship pointed out the narrative dimension of it, see Joseph Galbo, “Ethnographies of Empire and Resistance: ‘Wilderness’ and the ‘Vanishing Indian’ in Alexis De Tocqueville’s ‘A Fortnight in the Wilderness’ and John Tanner’s ‘Narrative of Captivity’,” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences: Annual Review 4, no. 5 (2009): 197–214. Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 350. For the most part of the chapter I use the narratological groundwork developed in Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) in a quite orthodox manner. This has also influenced more recent discussion about the term “narrative” and the connection between literature and knowledge. I use the word “narrative” in a more loose fashion influenced by Albrecht Koschorke, Fact and Fiction: Elements of a General Theory of Narrative (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 399. Ibid., 387. Ibid., 350. Ibid., 360. Ibid., 335. Ibid., 359. Ibid., 384. See Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 104–32. According to Painter, this use becomes prominent through Jean de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782 and translated into French shortly after. In his third letter “What

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

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then is the American, this new man?” he describes the American population as heterogenous yet being of purely European descent. Painter sees Tocqueville in the same line of thought and argues that he identifies the American primarily with a northerner, usually a New Englander of British and Puritan descent. Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 364. Ibid., 351. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 354. Quotations come from Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 76. Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 351. Important work on the ethnographic dimension of Tocqueville’s narration has been done in Galbo, “Ethnographies,” 197–214. For questions concerning practices of comparing, please consult Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, eds., Die Welt Beobachten: Praktiken Des Vergleichens (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2015). Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 350. Here I’m circumscribing Tim Ingold, “Anthropology Is Not Ethnography,” Proceedings of the British Academy, no. 154 (2007): 69–72 in narratological terms. Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 334. Ibid., 381. Ibid. Ibid., 390. Ibid., 384. Ibid., 354. Ibid., 384. Ibid., 399. Ibid. Ibid., 398. Ibid., 350. Ibid., 361. Ibid., 391. Ibid., 395. Ibid., 353. Ibid., 375. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 385. Ibid., 374. Ibid., 372. This was put forward most influentially by Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). Recent research has shown the connection between scientific and literary tableaux in Annette Graczyk, Das literarische Tableau zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2004). Graczyk names Quesnay, Condorcet, and Mercier as important sources. Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 352. Ezra F. Tawil, “Remaking Natural Rights: Race and Slavery in James Fenimore Cooper’s Early Writings,” in The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 69–91 offers a close reading of Cooper’s work with

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52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Julian T.D. Gärtner a focus on race. As far as I can see, the term race does not play a role in Chateaubriand’s travel report Voyage en Amérique or in his novellas Atala and Les Natchez. Please see Benjamin Hoffmann, “Chateaubriand and Nostalgia for French America,” in Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century, trans. Alan J. Singermann (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 124–80. Nevertheless, ethnographic practices are omnipresent and powerful imagery is coined in these works. Therefore, please consult Kirsten Kramer’s contribution in the present volume. Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 364. Ibid., 362–3. Ibid., 364. Ibid., 351–2. Ibid., 372–6. Ibid., 373. Ibid. Ibid., 388–92. Ibid., 388. Ibid. For a further critical approach, see Adam Gaudry and Darryl Leroux, “White Settler Revisionism and Making Métis Everywhere: The Evocation of Méttisage in Quebec and Nova Scotia,” Criticial Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 116–42. Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 388. Ibid., 389. Ibid., 390. Ibid., 381. Ibid., 392. Ibid. Ibid., 393. Ibid. Ibid., 394. Ibid., 395. Ibid. For a most insightful discussion of this aspect, please see Ewa Atanassow, “Fortnight in the Wilderness: Tocqueville on Nature and Civilization,” Perspectives on Political Science 35, no. 1 (2006): 22–30. Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 392. Ibid. Ibid., 360. Tocqueville travels to Sicily in 1827. Besides his journey to America, Tocqueville will also share the travel experiences to England, Ireland, and Algeria with Gustave de Beaumont. See Zunz, “Tocqueville and Beaumont.” Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 359. Ibid., 358. Ibid., 357. Ibid., 358. Ibid. Ibid., 352. Ibid., 358. Ibid., 355. Ibid., 358. Ibid., 355. Ibid., 356. Ibid.

Tocqueville’s Compass 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110.

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Ibid. Ibid., 354. Ibid. Ibid., 399. Ibid., 354. Ibid., 366. This is a reoccurring situation in nineteenth-century travel literature. Please see Harry Liebersohn, Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 366. Ibid. See Douglas Hurt, Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830: A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 369. Ibid., 367. Ibid., 368. Ibid., 382. Ibid. A similar point is also made by Liebersohn, “Aristocratic Encounters,” 61–112 in his chapter on Tocqueville. For further reading on Tocqueville’s but also French aristocratic reactions to the American project, please consult Lucien Jaume and Arthur Goldhammer, Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). See Andreas Hess, Tocqueville and Beaumont: Aristocratic Liberalism in Democratic Times (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2018). Tocqueville, “Fortnight,” 382. Ibid., 403. Ibid.

Bibliography Atanassow, Ewa. “Fortnight in the Wilderness: Tocqueville on Nature and Civilization.” Perspectives on Political Science 35, no. 1 (2006): 22–30. Bancel, Nicolas, Thomas David, and Dominic Thomas, eds. The Invention of Race: Scientific and Popular Representations. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2014. Beaumont, Gustave de. Marie, or, Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America. Edited by Barbara Chapman and Translated by Gerard Fergerson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Blanckaert, Claude. “Les conditions d’émergence de la science des races au début du XIXe siècle.” In L’ idee de ‘race’ dans les sciences humaines et la littérature, edited by Sarga Moussa, 133–49. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007. Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer. Edited by Susan Manning. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Epple, Angelika, and Walter Erhart, eds. Die Welt Beobachten: Praktiken Des Vergleichens. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2015. Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Fredrickson, George. Racism: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Galbo, Joseph. “Ethnographies of Empire and Resistance: ‘Wilderness’ and the ‘Vanishing Indian’ in Alexis De Tocqueville’s ‘A Fortnight in the Wilderness’

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and John Tanner’s ‘Narrative of Captivity’.” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences: Annual Review 4, no. 5 (2009): 197–214. Gaudry, Adam, and Darryl Leroux. “White Settler Revisionism and Making Métis Everywhere: The Evocation of Méttisage in Quebec and Nova Scotia.” Criticial Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 116–42. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Graczyk, Annette. Das literarische Tableau zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft. Munich: Fink, 2004. Hess, Andreas. Tocqueville and Beaumont: Aristocratic Liberalism in Democratic Times. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Hoffmann, Benjamin. “Chateaubriand and Nostalgia for French America.” In Literary Reinventions of America at the End of the Eighteenth Century, translated by Alan J. Singermann, 124–80. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Hurt, Douglas. Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830: A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Ingold, Tim. “Anthropology Is Not Ethnography.” Proceedings of the British Academy, no. 154 (2007): 69–72. Jaume, Lucien, and Arthur Goldhammer. Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Koschorke, Albrecht. Fact and Fiction: Elements of a General Theory of Narrative: Elements of a General Theory of Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Liebersohn, Harry. Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. Pierson, George Wilson. Tocqueville in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York/ London: Routledge, 2008. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes: Native Americans of the Northeast. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 76. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988. Tawil, Ezra F. “Remaking Natural Rights: Race and Slavery in James Fenimore Cooper’s Early Writings.” In The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance, 69–91. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tocqueville, Alexis de. “A Fortnight in the Wilds.” In Alexis de Tocqueville: Journey to America, edited by J.P. Mayer, 350–403. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981. Youngquist, Paul. Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2013. Zunz, Oliver, and Arthur Goldhammer. Alexis De Tocqueville and Gustave De Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.

13 Climates, Colonialism, and the Politics of Comparison The Construction of U.S.-American Tropicality in Colonial Medicine and Public Health, 1898–1912 Julia Engelschalt Introduction In 1912, United States President William H. Taft addressed the attendees of the Fifteenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography with a lesson in medical history: I do not mean to say that our sanitary science in this country began with the Spanish War; I do not mean to say that it had its origin in the Tropics. . . . And yet it is true that out of a war, very short of duration and of comparatively little importance in the number of men engaged, . . . there came to this country a series of problems, the most important of which included questions of sanitation, the method of transmission and the cure of tropical diseases, . . . and the establishment in the tropics of governmental institutions of medical research by Army, Navy and civilian physicians.1 Indeed, although it officially lasted only four months from April to August of 1898, the “splendid little war”2 against Spain had profound consequences for subsequent developments in American medicine and public health. With the acquisition of several former Spanish colonies in the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico) as well as in the Pacific region (the Philippines, among others), the United States joined ranks with the traditional European imperial powers and, like them, faced the task of establishing colonial rule in parts of the world located in what had for centuries been known as the ‘torrid zone’ or the ‘tropics.’ Since the beginning of European overseas conquest, colonizers had felt a certain degree of discomfort regarding the foreign lands they encountered. Images of lush, idyllic nature, first in the Americas and later in Africa and South Asia, were frequently juxtaposed with the threat of deadly disease awaiting unseasoned travelers to the southern hemisphere.3 Against the backdrop of evolutionary theory and “race science”4 emerging over the course of the nineteenth century, civilizational and racially deterministic arguments further underscored this conceptual

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ambivalence. “The tropics,” according to David Arnold, “existed only in mental juxtaposition to something else – the perceived normality of the temperate lands.” This mindset of “tropicality,” then, can be described as “the experience of northern whites moving into an alien world – alien in climate, vegetation, people and disease.”5 It is thus hardly surprising that U.S. Army surgeon Nicholas Senn, reporting from Puerto Rico in August of 1898, would have lamented “the depressing effects of the tropical climate on the unseasoned troops,” arguing that “the unavoidable privations incident to warfare are multiplied many times when the seat of war is a strange and remote country presenting a climate and environments unaccustomed to by the invading forces.”6 If military and, later, civilian physicians were thus at the forefront of safeguarding white American troops and civilians from tropical health hazards in combat as well as during the early years of overseas colonial rule, they did so on the basis of a well-rehearsed repertoire of tropicalist discourse,7 which was closely linked to the neo-Hippocratic idea of disease as being an effect of climatic and other environmental conditions.8 However, since the 1870s, insights from the emerging science of laboratory bacteriology into the causation of infectious disease had called into question precisely such climate-based explanatory patterns in favor of the so-called germ theory of disease, i.e., the notion that microorganisms were the relevant causative agents in the etiology and spread of infectious disease. To complicate matters further, the year 1898 also marks the inauguration of tropical medicine in Great Britain, where Sir Patrick Manson, one of its main advocates, expressed his conviction that, Heat and moisture are not in themselves the direct cause of any important tropical disease. The direct causes of ninety-nine per cent. of these diseases are germs. . . . To kill them then is simply a matter of knowledge and the application of this knowledge – sanitary science and sanitation, in fact.9 Historical research focusing on the American encounter with tropical climates commonly tends to emphasize the progressive “exoneration of the tropical milieu” by American colonialists.10 Along those lines, scholars such as Warwick Anderson, Alison Bashford, and Leigh Boucher et al. have highlighted the process of medical racialization of native populations as well as the co-construction of American whiteness and racialized otherness in colonial settings.11 Similarly, Paul Sutter and Catherine Cocks note a shift in the perception of tropical environments – from risk-laden, lethally infectious spaces to health and vacation resorts – which gained momentum particularly in the aftermath of the successful sanitation campaign, which accompanied the construction of the Panama Canal in the first decade of the twentieth century.12 Those and

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other insightful studies are united by their emphasis on the “newfound confidence [of medical and public health experts] about mastering the tropical environment.”13 They pay less attention, however, to the striking persistence of tropicalist ideas in American medical thought in the early nineteenth century.14 One of the characteristic features of the tropicalist mindset, as David Arnold has pointed out, was that it inevitably “involved comparisons between the temperate and tropical zones.”15 Based on this observation, the present article analyzes the comparative practices used by military and civilian medical and public health experts in the construction of American tropicality during the first decade of overseas imperialism. In that context, much like in European colonialisms, comparisons were never neutral, but guided by the discursive premises and practical agenda of empire.16 Historian Ann Stoler urges us to analyze those “politics of comparison” by asking, “What did agents of empire think to compare and what political projects made them do so?”17 At the same time, Stoler recognizes the power of comparisons to engender changes in the political projects of colonial regimes, which “were not hegemonic institutions but uneven, imperfect, and even indifferent knowledge-acquiring machines.”18 The aspect of unevenness and imperfection also points to another important aspect to be considered with regard to the politics of comparison, i.e., the possibility of more than one agenda driving the comparative practices of the actors in question at any given moment. The following analysis is divided into three parts. Firstly, I demonstrate how, drawing heavily on pre-existing European tropicalist discourse, experts in the newly acquired American colonies constructed the tropics as radically different from their temperate homeland. Secondly, comparisons played a pivotal role in experts’ grappling with the question of whether white people could live and thrive in tropical environments. Particularly comparisons drawn in the context of empirical research led other (and sometimes the same) experts to acknowledge the natural and climatic diversity of the new colonies. Comparative practices based on empirical biomedical research were embedded within an inner-scientific politics of comparison, which required accurate measurement and the collection of reliable data. Finally, the need for practical solutions to public health challenges both in the tropics and on the mainland called for an increasing emphasis of the similarities between the colonial laboratories and the American metropolis. These three types of comparative practices are distinguished here for analytical purposes; however, they do not necessarily follow a specific chronological order, but tend to resurface across the period in question, and may even overlap within the writings of one and the same author. In order to make sense of the comparative practices at work in the context of American tropicality, I suggest that we understand them as expressions

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of a complex web of intersecting politics of comparison – imperial ideology, inner-scientific rules and norms, and the demand for effective public health reform – which structured and, at the same time, complicated the ways in which medical agents of American empire grappled with their new tropical territories.

The Otherness of Tropical Climate and Nature “It is a fact learned by observation, rather than a question for discussion, that the Caucasian cannot live and labor and healthily and properly develop in tropical countries,” historian Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote in his much-read book, The New Pacific, first published in 1899.19 Bancroft, who had published extensively on the westward movement of the American frontier, regarded overseas expansion as a natural extension of that process. More importantly for our context, his overview of the various regions that were within the purview of American expansionism is replete with elements of the European intellectual repertoire of tropicalist discourse.20 While adamant in his pro-expansionist stance, as the prior statement indicates, Bancroft was equally skeptical about the possibility of permanent white settlement in tropical regions. His account is emblematic of a great number of contemporary publications in which authors generally accepted the fact that overseas expansion had indeed happened and could not be reversed. Interestingly, regardless of what type of colonial rule individual authors envisioned for the newly conquered territories, their respective opinions on the impact – be it harmful or beneficial – of tropical climates on white colonizers’ physical and civilizational well-being converged around a general assumption of tropical otherness.21 This radical otherness is often construed, if not emphasized, by the omission of an explicit second comparative element. In other words, the ‘temperate zone’ is not necessarily mentioned explicitly in such comparisons. Note, once again, how the aforementioned Army surgeon Senn complained about the “depressing effects of the tropical climate,” in this case, of Puerto Rico.22 To the author and his presumed readership, the reference to the ‘tropical climate’ is sufficient to infer a difference between tropical and temperate climatic zones without the former being specified or the latter being explicated. Senn’s entire memoir, MedicoSurgical Aspects of the Spanish-American War, provides detailed descriptions of the weather and scenery in mainland Army camps located in the temperate part of the United States; yet the author is strikingly silent on the specifics of the tropical scenery he encounters in Cuba or Puerto Rico. Similarly, when in 1902 the United States Senate Committee on the Philippines conducted hearings on the state of affairs in the archipelago, several individuals reporting to the committee frequently presented their findings as pertaining to the tropics at large. For instance, William

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H. Taft, then governor of the Philippine Islands, repeatedly voiced his opinion that “the tropical sun induces leisurely habits,” both in natives (thus explaining their alleged civilizational backwardness) and in colonial personnel. As latecomers to the imperialist stage, medical agents of American empire thus expected their new tropical possessions to fit into the existing tropicalist body of knowledge about the tropics. Then again, they were also confronted with a variety of problems which they had not anticipated. Previously established preventive measures against infectious disease, for instance, did not seem to easily lend themselves to being transplanted into the tropics. Major Azel Ames, a brigade surgeon in the U.S. Volunteers who had served in Puerto Rico during the war of 1898, was bothered by a baffling pattern of contagion that differed in several respects from his mainland experience: For the first time in the cognizance of American sanitary officers, the spectacle was presented of the non-populous regions feeding the disease to the cities and towns, a condition of things which it will readily be seen, greatly increased the difficulty of control. Where, as in the United States, the usual primary centers of the contagion are a few large cities or manufacturing towns, the task of restricting it is obviously much easier, and its spread is much less rapid, than when a score or two of small and scattered communities, without sanitary regulation, are sending it daily to the market-towns and cities about them.23 The excerpt is part of a glowing report on the successful American vaccination campaign against smallpox in Puerto Rico. Despite that success, Ames was having trouble reconciling his expectations with the reality which presented itself to him: a world turned upside-down in which rural and more or less ‘natural’ spaces (and their inhabitants) are described as almost actively sabotaging the health of larger Puerto Rican towns. While large urban areas and port cities were commonly regarded as hotspots of infectious disease during the period of industrial growth in the late nineteenth-century United States,24 in this context they are used as a yardstick of civilization against which the conditions in Puerto Rico must be measured. If the American anti-smallpox campaign yielded outstanding results in the face of such an incalculable risk environment, Ames seems to suggest, it had to be regarded as an even greater success than if the same vaccination program had been carried out under ‘temperate’ conditions. Like many of his colleagues, Azel Ames later used his colonial experience to insert his writings into a growing body of hygiene manuals and other popular-scientific publications which explicitly referred to the tropical world in order to promote cleanliness and hygiene among

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Americans.25 In Elementary Hygiene for the Tropics (1902), Ames begins his instructions by stating that, “in hot climates there are many things which cause sickness that are not found in colder countries,” which is why “the first or elementary things of hygiene in the tropics call for such special thought and study as are given in these pages.”26 Upon closer inspection, however, Ames’s real focus is on general rules of hygiene. References to the tropics are mainly used to underline those rules by pointing out that they are even more important in tropical conditions than in the temperate zone. This juxtaposition is exemplified in the following remark on the importance of fresh air, which peculiarly resonates with pre-bacteriological, miasmatic notions of contagion: “The bad odors, foul vapors, and disease germs which arise from damp and filthy soil to poison the air, are many. They are most and worst in hot countries.”27 A closer reading of the monograph reveals that the readership Ames envisions is not, or not exclusively, one that is located in tropical countries, or planning on embarking to the colonies in the future. The main tenet of Elementary Hygiene is that every individual is responsible for their own health and for maintaining a clean home; and that home is assumed to be located within, and consequently equated with, the temperate zone. In the prior quote, as in most other instances throughout the manual, the tropics are depicted as a climatically foreign and dangerous space, a climatic horror image reminding the reader of the potential costs of unhealthy habits. In this context, they serve as a rhetorical means to teach the audience a broader pedagogical lesson about the importance of domestic hygiene, which had been circulating within American society during the second half of the nineteenth century and gained momentum along with the emergence of laboratory medical science and the development of the germ theory of contagion in the 1860s and 1870s.28 There are at least two possible explanations for the proliferation of such generalizing, often implicit comparisons in American (military) medical literature throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. On the one hand, as previously stated, medical officers as agents of empire were guided by a specific politics of comparison, i.e., by pre-existing assumptions about the unhealthy character of tropical lands. In their encounter with the new American colonies, they were thus looking for confirmation of what was already and presumably known about the tropics and assessed their findings based on those expectations. In that sense, the tropicalist discursive repertoire both invited comparisons and, at the same time, made it unnecessary to bother with specifics. On the other hand, as historian Bobby Wintermute points out, it was widely assumed that “American civic and scientific know-how would provide the inhabitants of .  .  . tropic locales the basic requirements – health, education, and sanitation – necessary for political and commercial development.”29 Recent insights into the etiology of various infectious diseases certainly instilled a degree of professional confidence in the possibility of cleaning

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up the tropics; yet, the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ continued to cast an ambivalent light on the potential costs and benefits of that task. Moreover, that notion was built upon the assumption of the unhealthy character of tropical regions and the civilizational backwardness of its native inhabitants. Both sentiments – climatic anxiety and medical triumphalism – were two sides of the same coin and based on a politics of comparison which required the continuous discursive reiteration of tropical otherness.

Scientific Comparisons and the Acknowledgement of Tropical Diversity As we have seen, contact with the tropical world initially seemed to confirm many of the suspicions with which American doctors had landed in the new colonies. Yet their professional self-image as representatives of modern, scientific medicine also called for rigid empirical work on the ground. From the very beginning of American expansion into the tropical world, medical officers and researchers of the U.S. Army were eager to assemble numerous kinds of medical and climatological data in different localities, and to contrast and compare their findings obtained in different parts of the empire. One important influencing factor in this context certainly was what Theodore Porter has called the “rise of statistical thinking” over the course of the nineteenth century.30 In the United States, as in other industrializing societies during that period, rapid population growth and urbanization, along with the large-scale poverty it entailed, had raised philanthropic and often religiously motivated activity in public health during the first half of the century. Resulting political concerns about the well-being of the labor force sparked a heightened (mainly state-level) interest in comprehensive health surveys as a basis for social policy and public health reform after the Civil War.31 That process was still ongoing by the time the United States went to war with Spain in 1898, and colonial medical experts frequently complained about the lack of reliable data from the mainland against which to compare their tropical findings.32 In the history of science, the nineteenth century is commonly marked as the period of what Susan Faye Cannon has called “Humboldtian science,”33 characterized by an ever-growing interest in “numerical expression, arrangement, and comparison.”34 Rigorous control, isolation, and measurement of variables and parameters became standard procedure in the newly emerging field of laboratory medicine in the second half of the century.35 Both in medical research and in public health practice, American doctors and public health administrators were increasingly trained in the appreciation of those inner-scientific norms and in the practice of comparing data in the form of numerical figures, charts, and the like. These rules governing the discourse of the medical community can be

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described as a type of inner-scientific politics of comparison, which predetermined the perspective with which medical agents of empire viewed the new tropical colonies. At the same time, the colonial encounter also marks a moment when those well-rehearsed and widely accepted comparative practices were applied to new objects, an aspect which points to the productive potential of comparisons. Charles Mason, a U.S. Army surgeon first stationed in Puerto Rico and, later, in the Philippine province of Panay, offers an excellent example of how physicians grappled with the complex and diverse conditions they encountered in different parts of empire. In a special report to the Surgeon-General from 1900, Mason testified to being “struck with the relative infrequency here of certain diseases common in Porto Rico [sic], while certain other diseases met with [in Panay] were of rare occurrence there.”36 This point is illustrated by a chart (Figure 13.1) in which the occurrence of several diseases is compared for both islands. It includes microbial as well as parasitic diseases and two unknown types of fever. The respective local prevalence of each disease is given in non-numerical categories. Furthermore, Mason distinguishes two types of populations – Americans and natives – thereby reiterating the common notion that disease prevalence and immunity were differently distributed among human races. This aspect was of major concern to virtually all medical officers in the tropics because they were facing the twofold task of, on the one hand, protecting American troops from the negative impact of the tropics and, on the other hand, implementing public health among local populations as part of their “civilizing mission” which would eventually bring social uplift and civilizational progress to the new colonial subjects.37 Medicalized racial distinctions, as Warwick Anderson has demonstrated, played an integral part in the co-construction of racialized tropical people as well as of American whiteness.38

Figure 13.1 Relative prevalence of various infectious diseases in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, in Charles F. Mason, “Observations upon Diseases in the Tropics,” in Report of the Surgeon-General of the Army to the Secretary of War for the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1901 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1901), 234–35, 234

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Three years after his initial report, Mason commented on his own earlier findings by pointing out that they had been obtained during the Philippine-American War, and that the prevalence of individual diseases had changed since peaceful conditions had been established in the archipelago. Certain diseases, such as syphilis, occurred with greater frequency during peacetime in Panay (though not in Puerto Rico, where rates were consistently higher throughout the period in question), whereas malaria, for instance, did not seem to follow the same pattern.39 Here, tropical disease prevalence does not appear regionally or temporally fixed; instead, it very much depends on a variety of other influencing factors, some of which could be mitigated through common preventive measures or by avoiding “errors of diet, abuse of alcoholics, [and] chilling after overheating.”40 While climate certainly proved less susceptible to human intervention, its impact had to be assessed individually for each disease, over an extended period of time, and with regard to seasonal changes: Dysentery prevails throughout the year, but there is a marked increase in the number and severity of the cases at the commencement of the rainy season and a progressive increase in both respects until a maximum is reached toward the end of August.41 Originating from the very early period of American presence in the Philippines, Mason’s chart appears rather crude and general in that it lacks numerical figures. This may be due to the fact that his report was addressed to higher-ranking officials, who were less interested in specific information than in general tendencies. Particularly within the scientific community, however, data collection, measurement, and the comparisons resulting from those practices became increasingly refined over the following decade. Between 1910 and 1912, for instance, researchers at the Philippine Bureau of Science were immersed in an intense debate over the impact of tropical sunlight on (predominantly white) human bodies and health. Already in 1905, U.S. Army Major Charles Woodruff had put forward his theory regarding the effects of ‘actinic rays’ – known today as ultra-violet radiation – on physiological processes in the human body. Woodruff, who had served in the Philippines during the PhilippineAmerican War and returned to the archipelago for a second tour of duty in 1902, was a firm believer in the idea of racial degeneration and an ardent opponent of white settlement in the tropics.42 Drawing upon evidence from physics, chemistry, and biology, in The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men he argued that the particularly strong radiation experienced in tropical regions set in motion degenerative physiological processes on the cellular level. In doing so, he attempted to undergird the long-standing tropicalist narrative of the climatically dangerous tropics with the language of modern science.43

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The Philippines, where the United States established the most extensive system of research institutions, seemed like the perfect laboratory for the experimental testing of Woodruff’s theory. In the early 1910s, medical researchers and chemists at the Philippine Bureau of Science, such as Paul C. Freer, Hans Aron, and Weston P. Chamberlain, conducted elaborate experiments on organic chemical substances, animals, and even humans of various ethnic backgrounds in order to assess the validity of Woodruff’s claims. Moreover, besides drawing on existing basic research, the Bureau commissioned parallel experiments in various cities in the United States as well as in tropical localities, and compared the results to those obtained in Manila. Along with detailed descriptions of research designs, the articles published by those researchers in the Bureau’s own Philippine Journal of Science contain an abundance of detailed charts and graphs visualizing a seemingly endless number of factors and variables, both physiological and climatic, which were investigated. Hans Aron, a German-born chemist who was commissioned by the United States to work as a professor at the Philippine Medical School and conduct research at the Bureau, was particularly concerned with the interplay between sun-induced heat and sweat production in the human body. Besides a galvanometer designed by Spanish-Catholic friar J.S. Algué before the arrival of the Americans, Aron also developed his own apparatus, which he claimed was suitable to measure skin temperature in different body parts. Figure 13.2 is taken from his report on experiments conducted using those measuring devices. It offers a tiny glimpse into the meticulousness with which the author tried to obtain valid data, in this case, on the influence of sweat production. This one chart alone contains multiple comparisons, both in the way the experiment is designed – measurements are taken at different points in time, in different degrees of sunlight exposure, in subjects of different skin types, and on different parts of the body – as well as in the interpretation offered by the presentation of findings. One of Aron’s own conclusions is that “in the tropical sun a man with a colored skin is in a better position as regards heat regulation than is a man with a white skin.”44 At the same time, like most of his colleagues, Aron was acutely aware of the difficulty in generating comparable and conclusive data on the effects of sunlight because of the complexity of the subject and the great number of variables involved. This was true, not only for the physiological processes Aron was investigating, but also for the determination of individual climatic factors such as temperature, precipitation, altitude, and radiation. Despite all attempts to determine the exact impact of climatic factors on human bodies, researchers were uncertain of the conclusiveness of their findings. Hans Aron relativized his results in stating, “Certain features of any climate must always be met. The temperate climate is only suitable for man if he protects his body against it.”45 His colleague Weston

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Figure 13.2 Comparative increase in temperature of white skin and brown skin when exposed to sun, in Hans Aron, “Investigation on the Action of the Tropical Sun on Men and Animals,” in Philippine Journal of Science 6, no. 2 (April 1911), 101–31, 126

P. Chamberlain had examined American soldiers of different ethnic types over several years, but he could not confirm that his subjects’ physical reactions to sunlight exposure differed to any significant extent (while morbidity rates were higher among fair-skinned troops). In order to explain his inconclusive results, he pointed out that the Philippine archipelago displayed a great degree of climatic variation, and that “numerous regions in the temperate United States are characterized by many more hours of sunshine than are the tropical Philippines.”46 At the 1912 Congress of the Far Eastern Association for Tropical Medicine in Hong Kong, Paul Freer – the director of the Philippine Bureau of Science  – rather vaguely concluded from research results obtained over the past two years that “comparative measurements conducted with a sufficient degree of accuracy . . . give us a relative knowledge of the total influence of the rays of the sun.”47 Along similar lines, ten years before Freer, Francis Mason had mused that the term ‘tropical diseases’ was inaccurate “because there are few, if any, tropical diseases – that is to say, diseases which occur only

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in the tropics, and the relative prevalence of particular diseases is very different from that obtaining in temperate climates.”48 To sum up, American researchers across the colonies and on the mainland were immersed in an intense debate over the impact of climatic factors – particularly solar radiation – on human bodies of different ethnic types. Guided by the inner-scientific demand for solid, accurate, and mutually comparable data to support their respective research hypotheses, investigators in various fields used the new overseas territories as reservoirs of empirical material, which had not been available prior to the war of 1898. Moreover, these scientific politics of comparison – which, in themselves, did not originate from the colonial encounter, but were directed at new objects of research in its wake – had consequences beyond the purely discursive level in that they engendered the invention of new laboratory instruments with the capacity to procure methodologically sound, comparable measurements. Regarding the broader implications of their investigations, researchers were not quite as unanimous. The conclusions they drew changed considerably over time and occasionally appear as the products of personal opinion rather than of the experiments. Charles Mason, who had compared disease prevalence in Puerto Rico and the Philippines at the turn of the century, believed that acclimatization to the tropics was not possible and that “a soldier should [not] be kept continuously in the tropics longer than three years; two years would be better.”49 Almost a decade later, Weston Chamberlain was more optimistic as to the ability of white bodies to sustainably live in the tropics; according to him, “the direful effects of the Philippine climate . . . relate to the earlier days of the American occupation and are not seen at the present time.”50 Most importantly, however, these scientific debates indicate that, irrespective of their personal attitudes toward tropical regions and their native inhabitants, American researchers were increasingly aware of the complexity and diversity of the natural and climatic spaces with which they were dealing. This did not necessarily erase the perception of tropical otherness at large; in fact, some of the seemingly self-contradictory statements in the sources cited are most likely due to the fact that individual researchers were struggling to reconcile their scientific standards with the characteristic ambivalence of tropicalist discourse, which constantly oscillated between anxiety and triumphalism.

Assumptions of Similarity: The American Tropics as a Lesson for Domestic Public Health American overseas expansion as an outcome of the Spanish-American War of 1898 was embedded within a discourse of medical humanitarianism, which can be traced back to the first international health conference held in Paris in the mid-1850s and flourished in the early twentieth

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century. However, those efforts at concerted action to combat disease internationally, and particularly in the colonized parts of the world, were far from altruistic, but governed by imperial powers’ growing sense of health risks resulting from intensifying international commercial entanglements and mobility.51 Within the United States, the institutionalization of municipal and state public health boards had made significant headway in the post–Civil War period, which had caused devastating losses due to infectious disease, and in the wake of a yellow fever epidemic along the Mississippi Valley in 1878–79.52 The American encounter with the tropics, therefore, was both predetermined by existing domestic public health infrastructures and practices, and experimental in the sense that the colonies served as real-life laboratories where those infrastructures and practices could be tested and improved under presumably extreme and uniquely risky conditions. Even the basic chemical and biomedical studies conducted by the Philippine Bureau of Science were thus fueled, not only by a sense of responsibility vis-à-vis the newly colonized peoples, but always also by the perceived need for practical solutions in the field of public health at home. In 1902, the United States Senate Committee on the Philippines conducted a hearing on the state of affairs in the colony. One of the interviewees was William Howard Taft, then governor of the Philippine Islands. The following remark is taken from his testimony regarding the impact of climatic conditions on health in the archipelago: The great trouble that Americans and Europeans meet is the continued high temperature. But that temperature, except in April, May and the early part of June, is never as high as it is in summer in Washington or Cincinnati or St. Louis.53 This passage is noteworthy in that Taft, at least during his time as governor, was known to be an opponent of long-term white settlement in the tropics. Indeed, another passage from the hearing minutes indicates that he supported the two-year period commonly allotted by medical experts as the maximum timespan before the onset of debilitating climatic effects. He does, however, emphasize during two consecutive sessions of his hearing that “the health of the troops, when not engaged in hiking – that is, when not engaged in exposing themselves to rough weather and continued marches – is about as good as it is in the Southern [United] States.”54 According to Taft, the comparison between the health of soldiers in the Philippines with those stationed on the mainland was “hardly fair” because their quarters were not maintained under the “same conditions,” i.e., he contended that garrisons were better equipped and thus safer at home than in the Philippines. Therefore, hypothetically speaking, if the same external conditions could be established in both locales, the tropics would – at least for a relatively short period of exposure – have to be

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regarded as similar to, and by extension not more threatening than, the American South with which Taft’s listeners were well acquainted.55 In other words, the striking element in Taft’s testimony is not the familiar reiteration of tropical otherness, but rather the assumption of comparability – in the sense of similarity – between the tropics and the southern part of the mainland. At the same time, by portraying the American South as similar to the overseas colonies, Taft’s statement may be read as a practice of othering or, as Natalie J. Ring has put it, as a continuation of a long-standing discourse of the “diseased South” which was just as much in need of treatment as the tropical colonies.56 By the 1910s, American medical and sanitary officers became ever more optimistic about the manageability of tropical environments – both at home and in the overseas territories – through preventive measures. This may at least partly be credited to the successful sanitation campaign accompanying the construction of the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914. William C. Gorgas, who had been a central figure in the fight against yellow fever in Cuba before becoming Chief Sanitary Officer in the Panama Canal Zone, is a good example of this enthusiasm for the effectiveness of cleanliness and prevention. In 1909, Gorgas wrote to University of Pennsylvania professor Leo S. Rowe: “I think that if the few countries in which yellow fever at present prevails would unite in concerted action yellow fever could be destroyed.”57 In his 1913 presidential address to the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons, he went even further in stating that public health was no more difficult to secure in the tropics than in the temperate zone, and that he expected “to see great empires again develop in the tropics as was the case in the earlier history of man.”58 The success of Gorgas and his collaborators in Panama quickly became a frequently cited example in contemporary public health discourse and was partly responsible for the fact that the tropics, particularly Central America, gradually lost their horrific image as a cradle of infectious disease and other health hazards.59 The construction of the Panama Canal was almost completed when, in 1912, William H. Taft – now as President of the United States – delivered the address already cited at the very beginning of this chapter. Following his remarks on the importance of the Spanish-American War of 1898, Taft continues by praising the successful efforts of medical experts in cleaning up the tropical territories for the benefit of both colonizers and colonized. Here, the tropics seem to have very little left of their threatening image. Instead, the otherness of tropical nature is reduced to a mere matter of scale: In the Tropics nature has a more rapid growth not only in vegetation and in animal life, but the diseases are shown on a larger scale and permit the study of their development with more certainty of conclusion than in the Temperate Zone.60

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White settlement in tropical regions, according to Taft, had become a possibility thanks to the untiring work of medical and public health experts and bureaucrats. Moreover, those same agents of empire had significantly contributed to the betterment of local populations. Yet, most importantly, American intervention in the tropics had “brought to the attention of the whole country the necessity for widespread reform in our provisions for the maintenance of health and the prevention of disease at home.”61 To be sure, the public health reform Taft envisioned was already well underway by the time he was delivering his address in the middle of his (unsuccessful) re-election campaign. The Public Health Service, a direct outgrowth of the Army Medical Corps, had been campaigning against pellagra, a dietary deficiency disease which wrought havoc among the Southern poor, since the end of the previous decade.62 Around the time of Taft’s speech, hookworm disease – a debilitating parasitic infection known at the time as ‘tropical anemia’ – had been identified as a major factor in the economic backwardness of the American South and would soon be targeted by the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission of the Eradication of Hookworm Disease.63 Nonetheless, Taft’s rhetoric is a prominent and telling example of the speed and ease with which colonial medical knowledge and its application in the field of public health helped to incorporate the overseas territories into the geopolitical imaginary of the early twentieth-century United States,64 while simultaneously keeping them sufficiently apart from the metropolis. Echoing the well-rehearsed ambivalence of tropicalist discourse, even in his elaborations on the successes of tropical medicine and public health and on the similarities between the colonies and the mainland, Taft reiterated, and thereby reproduced, a lingering discomfort with the otherness of tropical nature.

Conclusion As has been demonstrated, comparisons played a crucial role in the construction of American tropicality in the wake of the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the subsequent annexation of overseas territories such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Panama. In their encounter with tropical environments and climate, in their attempts to protect white troops from the allegedly unhealthful impact with local conditions, and in their efforts to improve health conditions among native populations, medical and public health experts were guided by various intersecting politics of comparison, three of which I have identified in the course of my analysis of administrative, military, and popular scientific source materials. Based on a pre-existing European discourse of tropicality, and heeding their own nation’s imperialist ideology, experts and bureaucrats tended to construct the tropics as radically different from their temperate homeland. Then again, inner-scientific norms of valid empirical research resulted in a growing sense of the diversity of different tropical

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localities. In this context, the methodologically based need for comparable data was so productive that it even affected the material aspects of scientific research and resulted in the construction of new measuring devices. Finally, in their role as testing grounds for domestic public health, the colonies had to be conceptually incorporated – at least to a certain extent  – into the United States by assumptions of similarity between colonial periphery and the American metropolis. What all three types of comparative practices have in common is that neither one of them fully denounced tropical otherness altogether. As a consequence, descriptions of the tropics in comparison to temperate regions continued to oscillate between climatic (and most often racially charged) anxiety, on the one hand, and triumphalism regarding the potential of (tropical) medicine and public health to eradicate disease in the near future, on the other. The embeddedness of medical and public health knowledge in processes of imperial rule helped to underscore an increasingly managerial, future-oriented, and science-based approach to domestic social problems, which came to dominate during the Progressive Era.65 As of the early 1910s, those efforts at controlling and shaping the future body politic through medical practices of social engineering increasingly targeted those regions of the mainland which had traditionally been perceived as backward and diseased, i.e., the Southern states. Given the discursive continuities outlined earlier, it seems that historical research on Southern public health would greatly benefit from paying close attention to the ways in which imperial comparative practices of tropicality – and the politics of comparison by which they were fueled – played out in the domestic sphere in the decades to come.

Notes 1. William H. Taft, “Address of the President of the United States,” in Transactions of the Fifteenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography, Washington, September 23–28, 1912 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 53–9, 53. 2. John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt, July 27, 1898, quoted in: Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 245. 3. For a useful general overview of the history of this idea, see George C. D. Adamson, “‘The Languor of the Hot Weather’: Everyday Perspectives on Weather and Climate in Colonial Bombay, 1819–1828,” Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012): 143–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2011.11.018. For a more U.S.-oriented perspective, see Catherine Cocks, Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 4. 4. Nancy L. Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Basingstoke/London: Macmillan, 1982). 5. David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion (Oxford et al.: Blackwell, 1996), 142–3.

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6. Nicholas Senn, Medico-Surgical Aspects of the Spanish American War (Chicago: American Medical Association Press, 1900), 135–6. 7. Eleonora Rohland, Entangled History and the Environment?: SocioEnvironmental Transformations in the Caribbean, 1492–1800 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT)/Universtiy of New Orleans Press, forthcoming 2020), 15; cf. also Angelika Epple, “Comparing Europe and the Americas: The Dispute of the New World between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Force of Comparison: A New Perspective on Modern European History and the Contemporary World, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 137–63. 8. Bobby A. Wintermute, Public Health and the U.S. Military: A History of the Army Medical Department, 1818–1917 (New York/London: Routledge, 2011), 125. See also: Adamson, “‘Languor of Hot Weather’,” and David N. Livingstone, “Human Acclimatization: Perspectives on a Contested Field of Inquiry in Science, Medicine and Geography,” History of Science 25, no. 4 (1987): 359–94. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1298069401/fulltextP DF/80961E714F15433FPQ/1?accounacc=14488. 9. Patrick Manson, contribution to “Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands: Discussion,” The Geographical Journal 12, no. 6 (December 1898): 599–606, 600. http://doi.org/10.2307/1774285, emphasis added. 10. Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007), 75. 11. Anderson, Colonial Pathologies; Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Basingstoke/ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, eds., Re-Orienting Whiteness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 12. Paul S. Sutter, “Tropical Conquest and the Rise of the Environmental Management State: The Case of US Sanitary Efforts in Panama,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 317–26; Cocks, Tropical Whites. 13. José Amador, Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890–1940 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), 3. 14. Dane Kennedy, “The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics,” in Imperialism and the Natural World, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 118–40; Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch, “Climate Works: An Anatomy of a Disbanded Line of Research,” in Wissenschaftlicher Rassismus: Analysen einer Kontinuität in den Human- und Naturwissenschaften, ed. Heidrun Kaupen-Haas and Christian Saller (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1999), 137–85; Lucian Boia, The Weather in the Imagination, trans. Roger Leverdier (London: Reaktion Books, 2005); and William B. Meyer, Americans and Their Weather (Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 2000). 15. Arnold, Problem of Nature, 158. 16. See, for instance, the contributions in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan S. Friedman (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). 17. Ann L. Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” The Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (December 2001): 829–65, 862. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2700385. 18. Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties,” 863.

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19. Hubert H. Bancroft, The New Pacific (New York: The Bancroft Co., 1900 [1899]). The book was reprinted and newly edited several times until the mid-1910s. 20. Benjamin Kidd, The Control of the Tropics (New York/London: Macmillan, 1898). 21. See, for example, Charles Morris, Our Island Empire: A Hand-Book of Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1899); Senn, Medico-Surgical Aspects; Ebenezer Hannaford, History and Description of the Picturesque Philippines (Springfield, OH: Crowell & Kirkpatrick, 1900). 22. Senn, Medico-Surgical Aspects, 135. 23. Azel Ames, “The Vaccination of Porto Rico: A Lesson to the World,” Journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States 12, no. 5 (May 1903): 293–313, 299–300. 24. The historiography on public health similarly emphasizes industrialization, both in the European as well as in the American context. Cf., for instance, Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times (London/New York: Routledge, 1999); and George Rosen, A History of Public Health, Expanded ed. (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1958]). 25. A significant number of tropical medical personnel later returned to the mainland to occupy high-ranking positions in public health practice and administration; cf. Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 227–33. 26. Azel Ames, Elementary Hygiene for the Tropics (Boston, MA: Heath & Co. Publishers, 1902), 5. 27. Ames, Elementary Hygiene, 30. 28. For an invaluable overview of the development of the sanitary and domestic science movement in the nineteenth century, see Nancy L. Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge/ London: Harvard University Press, 1998). 29. Wintermute, Public Health and U.S. Military, 121. 30. Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 31. Porter, Health, Civilization and State, 147–50. 32. See, for example, Charles E. Woodruff, The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men (London/New York: Rebman, 1905), 303–7. 33. Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Science History Publications/Folkestone: Dawson, 1978). 34. Michael Dettelbach, “Humboldtian Science,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287. 35. John H. Warner, “The Fall and Rise of Professional Mystery: Epistemology, Authority and the Emergence of Laboratory Medicine in NineteenthCentury America,” in The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 110–41. 36. Charles F. Mason, “Observations Upon Diseases in the Tropics,” in Report of the Surgeon-General of the Army to the Secretary of War for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1901 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 234–5, 234. 37. Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge/London: Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2009), particularly chapter 3, “Engineer’s Imperialism,” 129–82. 38. Anderson, Colonial Pathologies.

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39. Charles F. Mason, “Notes from the Experiences of a Medical Officer in the Tropics,” Journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States 13 (1903): 306–14, 309. 40. Ibid. 41. Mason, “Notes,” 308. 42. Kennedy, “The Perils of Midday Sun.” 43. Woodruff, Effects of Tropical Light. 44. Hans Aron, “Investigation on the Action of the Tropical Sun on Men and Animals,” Philippine Journal of Science 6, no. 2 (April 1911), 130. 45. Ibid. 46. Weston P. Chamberlain, “Observations on the Influence of the Philippine Climate on White Men of the Blond and of the Brunette Type,” Philippine Journal of Science 6, no. 6 (December 1911): 427–63, 433. 47. Paul C. Freer, “The Results of the Past Two Years’ Work in the Study of Tropical Sunlight,” in Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine: Transactions of the Second Biennial Congress held at Hongkong 1912, ed. Francis Clark (Hong Kong: Noronha, 1912), 186–214, 188, emphasis added. 48. Mason, “Notes,” 306. 49. Ibid. 50. Chamberlain, “Observations,” 462. 51. Thomas Zimmer, Welt ohne Krankheit: Geschichte der internationalen Gesundheitspolitik 1940–1970 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), 27–31; Alexandra M. Stern, “Yellow Fever Crusade: US Colonialism, Tropical Medicine, and the International Politics of Mosquito Control, 1900–1920,” in Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present, ed. Alison Bashford (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 41–59, 42. 52. Porter, Health, Civilization and State, 149–50. 53. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Philippines, Affairs in the Philippine Islands: Hearings before the Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate, April 10, 1992, 57th Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc. 331 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), 389. 54. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee, Affairs, 390. 55. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee, Affairs, 396. 56. Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 (Athens/London: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 93. 57. Correspondence from William C. Gorgas to Leo S. Rowe, November 23, 1909. Library of Congress Manuscript Division, William Crawford Gorgas Papers, Box 19. 58. William C. Gorgas,“The President’s Address: Sanitation in Panama as It Relates to Sanitation in the Tropics Generally,” in Transactions of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons: Ninth Triennial Session, Held at Washington, DC, May 6th and 7th, 1913 (New Haven, CT: Congress, 1913), 62. 59. Cocks, Tropical Whites, 4–5. 60. Taft, “Address of President,” 54. 61. Taft, “Address of President,” 53–4. 62. Cf. Elizabeth W. Etheridge, The Butterfly Caste: A Social History of Pellagra in the South, Contributions in American History, vol. 17 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972). 63. John Farley, To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913–1951) (Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 2004). 64. Olaf Kaltmeier and Eleonora Rohland, “Introduction: Geopolitics and Governance: Inter-American Spaces of Entanglement,” in The Routledge

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Handbook to the Political Economy and Governance of the Americas, ed. Olaf Kaltmeier, Anne Tittor, Daniel Hawkins, and Eleonora Rohland (London/New York: Routledge, 2020), 249–63; Angelika Epple and Kirsten Kramer, “Globalization, Imagination, Social Space: The Making of Geopolitical Imaginaries,” Forum for Inter-American Research FIAR 9, no. 1 (2016): 41–63. http://interamericaonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/03_fiarVol-9.1-Epple-Kramer-41-63.pdf. 65. Thomas Etzemüller, ed., “Social engineering als Verhaltenslehre des kühlen Kopfes. Eine einleitende Skizze,” in Die Ordnung der Moderne: Social Engineering im 20. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 11–39.

Bibliography Adamson, George C.D.“‘The Languor of the Hot Weather’: Everyday Perspectives on Weather and Climate in Colonial Bombay, 1819–1828.” Journal of Historical Geography 38 (2012): 143–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2011.11.018. Adas, Michael. Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission. Cambridge/London: Belknap Press at Harvard University Press, 2009. Amador, José. Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890–1940. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015. Ames, Azel. Elementary Hygiene for the Tropics. Boston, MA: Heath & Co. Publishers, 1902. Hathi Trust. ———. “The Vaccination of Porto Rico: A Lesson to the World.” Journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States 12, no. 5 (May 1903): 293–313. Hathi Trust. Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007. Arnold, David. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion. Oxford et al.: Blackwell, 1996. Aron, Hans. “Investigation on the Action of the Tropical Sun on Men and Animals.” Philippine Journal of Science 6, no. 2 (April 1911): 101–31. Hathi Trust. Bancroft, Hubert H. The New Pacific. New York: The Bancroft Co., 1900 [1899]. Hathi Trust. Bashford, Alison. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Boia, Lucian. The Weather in the Imagination. Translated by Roger Leverdier. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. Boucher, Leigh, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, eds. Re-Orienting Whiteness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Cannon, Susan F. Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period. New York: Science History Publications/Folkestone: Dawson, 1978. Chamberlain, Weston P. “Observations on the Influence of the Philippine Climate on White Men of the Blond and of the Brunette Type.” Philippine Journal of Science 6, no. 6 (December 1911): 427–63. Cocks, Catherine. Tropical Whites: The Rise of the Tourist South in the Americas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Cosmas, Graham A. An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the SpanishAmerican War. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1971.

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Dettelbach, Michael. “Humboldtian Science.” In Cultures of Natural History, edited by Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, 287–304. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Epple, Angelika. “Comparing Europe and the Americas: The Dispute of the New World between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” In The Force of Comparison: A New Perspective on Modern European History and the Contemporary World, edited by Willibald Steinmetz, 137–63. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. Epple, Angelika, and Kirsten Kramer. “Globalization, Imagination, Social Space: The Making of Geopolitical Imaginaries.” Forum for Inter-American Research FIAR 9, no. 1 (2016): 41–63. Etheridge, Elizabeth W. The Butterfly Caste: A Social History of Pellagra in the South. Contributions in American History, vol. 17. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972. Etzemüller, Thomas, ed. “Social engineering als Verhaltenslehre des kühlen Kopfes: Eine einleitende Skizze.“ In Die Ordnung der Moderne: Social Engineering im 20. Jahrhundert, 11–39. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Farley, John. To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913–1951). Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 2004. Felski, Rita, and Susan S. Friedman, eds. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Freer, Paul C. “The Results of the Past Two Years’ Work in the Study of Tropical Sunlight.” In Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine: Transactions of the Second Biennial Congress held at Hongkong 1912, edited by Francis Clark, 186–214. Hong Kong: Noronha, 1912. Gorgas, William C. “The President’s Address: Sanitation in Panama as It Relates to Sanitation in the Tropics Generally.” In Transactions of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons: Ninth Triennial Session, Held at Washington, D. C., May 6th and 7th, 1913, 54–62. New Haven, CT: Congress, 1913. Hannaford, Ebenezer. History and Description of the Picturesque Philippines. Springfield, OH: Crowell & Kirkpatrick, 1900. Kaltmeier, Olaf, and Eleonora Rohland. “Introduction: Geopolitics and Governance: Inter-American Spaces of Entanglement.” In The Routledge Handbook to the Political Economy and Governance of the Americas, edited by Olaf Kaltmeier, Anne Tittor, Daniel Hawkins, and Eleonora Rohland, 249–63. London/ New York: Routledge, 2020. Kennedy, Dane. “The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics.” In Imperialism and the Natural World, edited by John M. MacKenzie, 118–40. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Kidd, Benjamin. The Control of the Tropics. New York/London: Macmillan, 1898. Livingstone, David N. “Human Acclimatization: Perspectives on a Contested Field of Inquiry in Science, Medicine and Geography.” History of Science 25, no. 4 (1897): 359–94. Manson, Patrick. “Acclimatization of Europeans in Tropical Lands: Discussion.” The Geographical Journal 12, no. 6 (December 1898): 599–606. http://doi. org/10.2307/1774285. Mason, Charles F. “Notes from the Experiences of a Medical Officer in the Tropics.” Journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States 13 (1903): 306–14.

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———. “Observations Upon Diseases in the Tropics.” In Report of the SurgeonGeneral of the Army to the Secretary of War for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1901, 234–5. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901. Meyer, William B. Americans and Their Weather. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 2000. Morris, Charles. Our Island Empire: A Hand-Book of Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1899. Porter, Dorothy. Health, Civilization and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to Modern Times. London/New York: Routledge, 1999. Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Ring, Natalie J. The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930. Athens/London: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Rohland, Eleonora. Entangled History and the Environment? Socio-Environmental Transformations in the Caribbean, 1492–1800. Trier/New Orleans: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT)/University of New Orleans Press, forthcoming 2020. Rosen, George. A History of Public Health, expanded ed. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1958]. Senn, Nicholas. Medico-Surgical Aspects of the Spanish American War. Chicago: American Medical Association Press, 1900. Stehr, Nico, and Hans von Storch. “Climate Works: An Anatomy of a Disbanded Line of Research.” In Wissenschaftlicher Rassismus: Analysen einer Kontinuität in den Human- und Naturwissenschaften, edited by Heidrun Kaupen-Haas and Christian Saller, 137–85. Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 1999. Stepan, Nancy L. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. Basingstoke/London: Macmillan, 1982. Stern, Alexandra M. “Yellow Fever Crusade: US Colonialism, Tropical Medicine, and the International Politics of Mosquito Control, 1900–1920.” In Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present, edited by Alison Bashford, 41–59. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Stoler, Ann L. “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies.” The Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (December 2001): 829–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/2700385. Sutter, Paul S. “Tropical Conquest and the Rise of the Environmental Management State: The Case of US Sanitary Efforts in Panama.” In Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, 317–26. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Taft, William H. “Address of the President of the United States.” In Transactions of the Fifteenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography, Washington, September 23–28, 1912, 53–9. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913. Tomes, Nancy L. The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1998. U.S. Congress. Senate, Committee on the Philippines. Affairs in the Philippine Islands: Hearings before the Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate. April 10, 57th Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc. 331. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902.

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Warner, John H. “The Fall and Rise of Professional Mystery: Epistemology, Authority and the Emergence of Laboratory Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.” In The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine, edited by Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, 110–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. White, Hayden. The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore/ London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Wintermute, Bobby A. Public Health and the U.S. Military: A History of the Army Medical Department, 1818–1917. New York/London: Routledge, 2011. Woodruff, Charles E. The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men. London/New York: Rebman, 1905. Zimmer, Thomas. Welt ohne Krankheit: Geschichte der internationalen Gesundheitspolitik 1940–1970. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017.

14 Between ‘Cannibals’ and ‘Natural Freemasons’ The (Anti)Colonial History of Comparing Freemasonry to African Secret Societies Stephanie Zehnle It can be called a paradox or coincidence of history that modern European and American colonialism led to first contacts, contests, and confrontations between secret societies of extremely different cultural backgrounds: in various African, Indian, and South American colonies, the globalizing Enlightenment secret society lodges met local and indigenous secret societies. While the curious members and critics discovered and interpreted each other, modes of comparison were developed that went beyond mere terminology: which societies must be considered legal or criminal? How should a colonial state or Christian institution deal with arcane communities? Can persons be initiated into both Freemasonry and a local secret society? This chapter analyzes such colonial practices of comparison with regard to West African secret societies in the British colony Sierra Leone and the neighboring African American colony Liberia. British Freemasons dominated the intellectual environment in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone, and Black American Freemasons set up their own networks in Liberia. This racialized competition of Masonic Lodges was further complicated by the presence of traditional West African male secret societies in both colonies called Poro. Certain similarities between – at first glance – very different societies were then emphasized in order to question colonial hierarchies: if black men can become Masons, then indigenous African societies must also be accepted as legitimate lodges. For West African black intellectuals, comparisons were promoted on that ground and exploited in order to attack colonialist ideas claiming that black Africans and colonizers could never be equal in terms of cultures and mental capacities. By 1900, aspiring Sierra Leoneans and Liberians provoked the British colonial government by comparing Poro secret societies to Freemasons in order to demand equal rights for members of each group. This was even more controversial since British colonial staff generally formed the elites of the (white) colonial Masonic lodges. Assuming that both Freemasonry and the Poro societies stemmed from ancient Egypt, even white Masons admitted historical and ritualistic connections between

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both. Moreover, anthropologists and social scientists like Georg Simmel confirmed such theories with their systematic comparisons of structures and practices of secret societies across past and present, European and extra-European cultures. Whereas the colonial states increasingly criminalized and demonized so-called Native Secret Societies by judging them as ritual murderers and cannibals in colonial court cases, more progressive thinkers, missionaries, and politicians of all ethnic groups subsequently romanticized and rehabilitated these societies. Several black American and European missionaries as well as anthropologists challenged the colonial order by being initiated into the Poro. This chapter integrated such ‘colonial scandals’ across West Africa into the history of comparing secret societies in global anthropological discourses from ca. 1800 to 1950. This way we can explain why such comparative perspectives were intercultural and ethnocentric, colonialist and emancipatory at the same time.

Colonial Freemasons and Their Will to Compare Globally From the very beginning of secret society orders in the era of the European Enlightenment, the brotherhoods claimed global relevance and often expressed a rather cosmopolitan attitude. They aimed at transgressing political and cultural boundaries by experimenting with new forms of spirituality and intellectual encounters. When most European secret societies tried to overcome nationalistic divides on the continent, especially one secret society reached out for the globe: the Freemasons were engaged with establishing “transoceanic networks, institutions, and identities.”1 Together with the expanding British Empire, its colonial staff, soldiers and merchants Freemasonry expanded worldwide. And while colonialism and imperialism fostered global Masonic networks, these secret society networks, in return, “played a critical role in building, consolidating, and perpetuating the empire.”2 Institutionalized British Freemasonry consisted of the Grand Lodge of England (1717), Ireland (1725), and Scotland (1736). The first oversea lodge was then founded in Bengal as early as in 1728, and the issuing of travelling warrants allowed Irish Freemasons to hold lodge meetings anywhere in the world. This means that Freemasonry expanded by both new stationary institutions and ‘migrant lodges.’ Such migrant lodges were often linked to certain British military regiments, which were moved all over the globe and often left Masonic Temples and Libraries behind after their term of duty in a colony. Sometimes local and stationary grand masters were picked, who were allowed to found new lodges in their regions. For actors within Imperial networks, it was attractive to accommodate themselves in various geographical settings by their familiarity with Masonic rituals, symbols, feasts, and structures. The lodges offered spiritual guidance and social meeting places for spending evenings and weekends. Their core

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values suggested their global expansion from the very beginning: “From their own era they appropriated the basic tenets of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism: universal brotherhood, tolerance, and benevolence.”3 The Masonic slogan of tolerance was particularly understood as ‘religious’ tolerance in multi-religious colonial settings. This has been expressed emotionally by the British Indian poet Joseph Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Mother Lodge from 1894. Kipling emphasized that the colonial lodges did not remain elite clubs of white British men, including other groups, such as Native Americans, Atlantic Africans, and Asians.4 Kipling celebrated the cultural diversity of the Indian lodge, into which he had been initiated. Among his Masonic brothers were “Saul the Aden Jew” from Yemen, the Muslim “Din Mohammed,” the Hindu “Babu Chuckerbutty,” “Amir Singh the Sikh,” and “Castro . . . The Roman Catholick!”5 Moreover, he gave a romantic picture of how tolerant religious debates in the lodge were held among devotees of the above-mentioned religious groups in colonial India. For example, his lodge would always respect the various religious eating habits for their meals. In Kipling’s poem the lodge offered a safe space, not only for religious tolerance, but also for open religious comparison: “An’ man on man got talkin’, religion an’ the rest. An’ every man comparin’, of the God ‘e knew the best.”6 Notwithstanding that autobiographic and fictional elements may entangle in the poem, this text expresses how Freemasonry wanted to be understood globally in the late nineteenth century: religions and spiritual beliefs were important to them, but then again not too sacrosanct not to compare them in lively debates. “We’d say ’twas ’ighly curious,” Kipling resumed, returning to bed after a night of such comparisons “with Mo’ammed, God, an’ Shiva Changin’ pickets in our ’ead.”7 Although Kipling’s poem may appear hyperbolic, it nevertheless gives evidence that the colonial lodges created spaces of intercultural contact and free speech – even about rather delicate topics such as religion in India. Against the opposition of many white non-members and members, “British Masonry’s conception of brotherhood expanded, though, not to the extent that it threatened imperial power.”8 After 1900, the number of overseas lodges was especially increasing in Britain’s African colonies. Between 1913 and 1930, District Grand Lodges were founded in the West African Gold Coast, Nigeria, in East African Kenya, and South African Rhodesia, integrating thousands of black African members. But the earliest of these African lodges was founded in West African Sierra Leone, where it was first opened in 1821 in the capital city Freetown by British staff under the name ‘Lodge of Good Intent no. 721.’ Four years later the lodge bought a house for their meetings in a central road of the capital.9 It was again closed in 1864 due to a lack of members, who were rapidly falling sick or dying from tropical diseases, but it was reopened in 1882 when Africans and Europeans joined the same lodge together.10 At least in this decade, the 1880s, local African authorities compared local and

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European secret societies and considered the Freemasons of Freetown “the European equivalent . . . of the Poro men.”11 Although black African members were emancipated in the new lodges after 1882, every higher position was filled with Europeans. In 1910, when an English Duke and Duchess were welcomed in Freetown by black Freemasons, the pan-Africanist newspaper Sierra Leone Weekly News nevertheless criticized that only “the Junior positions were filled by African and European Brethren equally” in the lodges.12 But with the term ‘Africans,’ black journalists most certainly addressed Christian Krios and not indigenous Africans from that region. The Krios originated from African American and West Indian settlers, as well as from Liberated Africans from all Africa. Based on their English Creole language and British lifestyle, they became the black elite of that colony. For example, the treasurer of the Freetown lodge was for many years the Krio trader Moses Walter Nicol, the son of Liberated Africans.13 Moreover, Krio members have remained the most dominant ethnic group in the lodges until at least the 1970s.14 So the Sierra Leonean lodges combined several elites: Black Krios, white colonial staff, and also white Christian missionaries. At St. George’s Lodge in Freetown in 1909, a speaker dreamt of “a glorious future of Masonry in Sierra Leone”15 and emphasized that recently missionaries such as the British Methodist Reverend A.E. Greensmith had become brothers. This very same Greensmith had, despite being a professional practitioner of Christianity, also been initiated into an African Poro society in 1904, which had caused quite a scandal (see section Black (Lay) Anthropologists as Comparators). The social walls between black and white Masons, between African and European societies seemed to blur, and many British appreciated this new tolerance. In accordance with Kipling’s celebration of intercultural encounter, a British Mason, on occasion of leaving the colony after some years of duty, asked to overcome racial difference in the lodge. At his farewell banquet he explained that there were strong bonds between him and the African Masons and that when I shortly afterwards discovered that you [African Masons] were heart and soul a Masonry, then I knew, and have always remembered that as Freemasons we should be linked together by that one indissoluble link of affection and Brotherly Love; that bond which cannot fail to distinguish us from those who are strangers to our craft, and which should demonstrate to the world that when we use the name of ‘Brother’ among Masons, we mean it to be something more than mere figure of speech.16 To this British colonial official, the common membership as Masons counted more than even their common language English and the British Empire both belonged to. The first ‘mixed’ lodges of Sierra Leone were

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either named after their locations (‘Freetown,’ ‘Wilberforce,’ ‘Highland’ etc.) or after noble virtues such as ‘Loyal,’ ‘Tranquility,’ or ‘Progressive,’ After a long phase of colonial rule without the opening of new lodges, the political empowerment of the non-Krio Protectorate inhabitants by the colonial government gave way for a new period of Krio “freemasonization”17 after World War II: Then in the course of four to five years, from 1947 to 1952, the number of lodges in Freetown doubled, from six to twelve. This was the beginning of new political developments leading to independence in 1961.18 In the 1960s, conversations held at lodge meetings became synonymous with political clubs, so that ‘talking politics’ was generally described as ‘talking lodge’ by the urban public.19 Lodges became substitutes for ethno-political communities, which the Krio society traditionally lacked. The lodges were the forums in which they developed collective policies. After the Sierra Leonean independence of 1961, African lodges under Scottish constitution celebrated funerals of Masonic brothers as colorful spectacles wearing full regalia in public. Many African members, for whom the lodges had served as career networks, became school teachers or administrative civil servants in the 1970s.

Krios Comparing Freemasons and Poro But how did these black Masonic elite refer to their ‘indigenous counterparts,’ the Poro? Since Krio Masons propagated Freemasonry a step towards racial emancipation, the question appeared as to why indigenous West Africans were not (usually) initiated as brothers, too. In this debate on obvious ethnic hegemony in the lodges, the Krio Masons would respond that ‘Natives’ were simply not interested in Freemasonry because “the Natives have their own secret society, the ‘Poro,’ to which they are always affiliate.”20 For Krios of the 1960s, “Freemasonry, through its association with Western civilisation, is seen as the hall-mark of superiority, in contrast to the ‘bush’ secret societies of the Mende, the Temne, and others.”21 It was even assumed that Freemasonry was introduced as a deliberate instrument to challenge the African secret societies so that “krios as nonindigenous Sierra Leoneans imported Freemasonry as their own secret society to counteract the rural societies such as the poro.”22 Although such a theory may be virulent in post-civil-war Sierra Leone, historical sources do not imply that Krios competed with the Poro directly. But who were the Poro and how did the Krio class perceive them? Most local non-Krio communities of Sierra Leone and Liberia have installed gender-based societies to take care of initiation of youth, marriage negotiations, agriculture, healthcare, crime, and death. Female societies were called Bundu or Sande, male societies Poro. The large part of

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their structure, rituals, and actions have remained arcane for non-initiates, and this secrecy has led to fundamental opposition against them by Islam, Christianity, colonial governments, and postcolonial states. They were often prohibited and further escaped into the periphery of the state.23 In colonial Sierra Leone, however, many Christian Krios started to defend and rehabilitate indigenous secret societies after 1900. They compared the Poro to Freemasons in order to ask for equal rights for members of both, or to criticize both from a Christian standpoint. Especially Krio women opposed the dominant role of Freemasons, from whose circles they were formally excluded due to their sex. At a Christian women’s Sunday School in 1902, the young Krio Mabel Hagan phrased her critique of Christian missionaries demonizing the Poro: Another question which has seriously exercised the minds of many is that of the interference of missionaries and others with the customs which relate to the secret societies of the Natives. These customs, many think, should be left intact. It is contended that it is unjust for the missionaries to condemn what they do not understand, and to think that because they do not and cannot understand a thing, therefore it is evil. There seems to be no reason why the Porroh and Bondo should be denounced as heathenish and devilish while Freemasonry and other European secret societies are not only tolerated, but highly respected and recognised. Why should Christian teachers insist upon the abandonment and renunciation of the Native societies as one of the conditions of admission into the Church, while Freemasons are readily received even into the Christian Ministry?24 The highly remarkable answer was given by a certain Sally Pratt, who defended Freemasonry arguing that “the principles of Masonry are not opposed to those of Christianity.” But the critical Mabel Hagan insisted and directly compared the secret structure of both societies: Is it so known? How is this knowledge arrived at? For none but masons know and understand the mysterious principles of their craft; similarly, none but members of the Porroh society understand the principles of their brotherhood. When replying, Sally Pratt reproduced the typical missionary devilization of the Poro as barbarian cannibals: “[A]t stated times human sacrifices are offered to heathen deities in accordance with the societies, and other atrocities are frequently perpetrated.” But Mabel Hagan insisted on fundamental similarities: But are they true? Do not these allegiations contain a great deal of conjectures and surmises? Of course, condign punishments is

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Speaking as a young Christian woman, Mabel Hagan emphasized that both secret institutions, Freemasons and Poro, were unknown to noninitiates, would strictly punish traitors, and were probably not compatible with Christianity. Even within church institutions, the unequal demonization of indigenous secret societies was criticized, since Freemasonry – with their Temples and official rituals – were visible for everyone in the colonial towns. The British and Krio Freemasons actively sought the comparison, however, reflecting on “the tracing of a connection between the African Superstitions and their Secret Societies and Masonry.”25 In a Masonic lecture of 1910 in Freetown, the British speaker “made it clear that ‘superstitions’ had some basis but that at the present day many of the real meanings of them were forgotten.”26 The idea that Masons should occupy themselves with the study of the Poro as sister organizations had become prominent after 1900. This 90-minute-long lecture argued that the Poro had roots as ancient as those of the Freemasons, which were now unknown, so that mere ritualism was practiced. And while Freemasons frequently compared themselves to African secret societies, colonial reports and investigations on hinterland societies referred to the Masons to capture the allegedly accepted and benevolent indigenous secret groups. In 1906, the colonial medical officer in Panguma, C.B. Hunter, undertook some research on so-called Snake Societies. He concluded that rumors had it that in the society witches created evil medicine out of snake poison to attack others. In fact, Hunter explained, “it is purely a freemasonry or friendly society, and carried on for the purpose of members assisting each other, in a charitable way, when in trouble of any kind.”27 So parallel to the concept of the illegal and harmful secret societies that were criminalized, colonial officials have also held the idea of indigenous charity organizations like Freemasons – the organization of reference in elite discourses. In this argument Freemasons and Poro alike were reduced to mere mutual aid societies. The year 1912 then marked a major caesura in the policies of Sierra Leone towards indigenous secret societies: rumors about so-called human-leopards, notorious cannibals, killing people in acts of ritual murder became so vivid that court cases were held against the societies, which were then criminalized in a series of laws.28 When African secret societies were declared illegal by the colonial state, white and black Freemasons distanced themselves from the Poro and silenced open comparisons. Denunciation as a Poro ritual murderer and cannibal became a

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dangerous tool29 of power politics in Sierra Leone, and that ended practices of comparison dramatically among most Krios in that colony.

White (Lay) Anthropologists as Comparators Although the two colonies Liberia and Sierra Leone fought the Poro societies politically and with legal means from 1912 onwards, more or less professional anthropologists aimed at their emancipation by declaring them comparable to European secret societies. Being a relatively young academic discipline, anthropology started conceptualizing male secret societies in different cultures with a comparative approach around 1900. Their mode of comparison was diachronic, too, so that they included past European cultures into their set of so-called primitives. The German anthropologist Heinrich Schurtz invented the term Männerbund (club of men) to express his idea of companionable men gathering in secluded spaces and being the origins of all culture. Some remains of such societies, Schurtz illustrated, would still be seen across rural Europe.30 Schurtz and his colleagues deemed male secret societies basal characteristics of every larger human group. Of course, such theories were published without the armchair author ever visiting one of the – usually colonized – oversea areas he described as examples. Schurtz never left Europe, but nevertheless claimed that Africa was the “model country of secret societies.”31 Drawing from Leo Frobenius’ anthology, The Masks and Secret Societies of Africa,32 Schurtz claimed that the West African Poro were a form of governance because they generated political unity across different ‘tribes.’ All over West Africa, Schurtz explained, the Poro formed a bureaucratic but secret system of male power politics: every tribe appoints 25 men over 30 years of age as Poro members, who then each send five delegates over 50 years of age to the Greater Poro Tribunal. It was then their duty to negotiate peace in wars and convict criminals of all sorts, while masked members would execute punishments by looting villages or killing traitors.33 Local anthropological research has never confirmed such modalities, and Schurtz has probably implemented his knowledge of European secret societies with their formal structure here. With the Freemasons and other Enlightenment societies in mind, rare eighteenth-century reports on West African Poro had already compared them to various ancient secret societies of Europe, Egypt, or Persia. The first popular mention of the Poro is probably the French soldier Sylvain Meinrad Xavier de Golbéry’s book about his West African journeys when stationed in Senegal around 1785.34 Golbéry referred to the Poro elaborately: “Those on the borders of the Scherbroo [an Island of Sierra Leone] still maintain the institution of Purrah, an association of warriors who lay claim to a very high antiquity.”35 Golbéry defined them as “an association or confederacy of warriors,” and compared them to the German Vehmic courts, which had been applied in later medieval times,

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and to ancient Egyptian initiation.36 But apparently, among all these transcultural comparisons, one essential reference was missing: European secret societies, whose rise in the eighteenth century Golbéry must have witnessed. Implicitly, these European societies were in fact used as a comparatum in this context: first of all, because Enlightenment societies typically propagated their historical roots in the Middle Ages and Egyptian – as well as Greek – antiquity. And second, Golbéry projected concepts of Masonic secret trials and capital punishment onto the African Poro. The latter would hold their fatal trials over crime under absolute secrecy secured by rituals of initiation. Curious non-members who dared entering the forests during the ‘trials’ were allegedly killed just as any delinquent member telling the secrets. A masked member would then come and execute him, so that the Poro institution appears as a form of an African judicial system judging over individual or collective crime. More than a hundred years later, Schurtz used Golbéry’s comparisons for his Männerbund book and defined Poro institutions as the natural forms of societies in humans generally. He used nineteenth-century West Africa to describe humankind’s social pre-history. European intellectuals built up secret societies in the eighteenth century, and at the same time these intellectuals first heard about African secret societies from traders and translators. And although Freemasonry was in fact a recent invention and Poro societies were traditional institutions, both were historicized the same way in white anthropology, linking them back to a North African origin in ancient Egyptian rites. The comparison of these different secret societies cannot be reduced to an exotic intellectual game of anthropologists: it scrutinized racial, political, and religious orders in a fundamental way. And therefore, Krio intellectuals welcomed this practice of comparing as a key element of their own emancipatory and anti-racist agenda at the turn of the twentieth century.

Black (Lay) Anthropologists as Comparators While European armchair anthropologists often exoticized the Poro from indirect sources of (spine-chilling) knowledge, it was mainly African intellectuals and missionaries who demystified West African Secret Societies and interpreted their social structure in a more rational manner. John Augustus Abayomi-Cole was one of their transnational ranks and eventually became a celebrated and influential missionary, intellectual, politician, spiritual church founder, and herbalist in Liberia. He was born in 1846 in Nigeria, where his Krio Sierra Leonean parents were stationed as missionaries.37 Abayomi-Cole received a Christian missionary education: he went to the British Church Missionary Society School and College in Sierra Leone and later worked for the U.S.-based United Brethren Mission. During this period he traveled to the mission base in Ohio and was ordained as a priest there by the American Wesleyan Methodist Church.

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Based on a lecture he gave in Dayton, Ohio, the mission later published his book Revelation of the Secret Orders of Western Africa in 1886. In Freetown, Abayomi-Cole could not learn about the Poro from his own relatives and friends, who were never initiated as Christian Krios. However, the missionary societies often sent African members into the villages so that Abayomi-Cole may have talked to Poro authorities or new African converts on his missionary tours. During his lecture in Ohio, Abayomi-Cole unfolded a meta-theory of secret orders, explaining their common and ancient roots in Egypt, Greece, and Persia. Accordingly, the Arabs then introduced them as two major types to West Africa: the Medical Societies like the Poro from Egypt, and the Mystical Societies like Kofong from Greece. The Krio missionary explicitly revealed his attempt to give evidence that Sierra Leonean secret societies “had their origin from ancient and civilized institutions and could be ranked with them.”38 From his perspective, there were no major differences between Freemasonry, ancient mysticism, and “the modern secret societies of heathenish and idolatrous Africa.”39 Moreover, Abayomi-Cole tried to prove that West African societies had been influenced by Jewish religion in their history, too.40 This argumentation was provocative in many ways. First, he demanded racial emancipation with his comparative method. Moreover, he implicitly denied that Christianity and Poro societies were completely incompatible, because both shared ancient Jewish origins. Against the opinion of most Christian institutions of nineteenth-century West Africa, who demonized and opposed the Poro but tolerated Freemasonry, Cole argued that these societies shared similar origins in the ancient Near East. Later in his career, Abayomi-Cole highlighted the medical and herbal treatments which the Poro offered to the sick more bluntly instead of analyzing the alleged Poro cannibalism and ritual murder as discussed in missionary circles.41 The chapter heading “Native Freemasonry unveiled” captures his main argument: the Poro were antique secret orders because their rituals resembled that of Zoroastrians, ancient Egyptians, and the Greek. Their official branch was accordingly organizing the land’s politics, law, and medicine. But in his 1886 publication, Abayomi-Cole also admitted that the Poro maintained a more secret branch that was dedicated to conspirative and illegal acts. This branch was activated in cases of capital crime and punished whole villages by selling the inhabitants into slavery, he reported. One must not forget that Abayomi-Cole spoke to American Christian missionaries in Ohio and was expected to confirm their negative opinion of the Poro as their religious opponents in West Africa. So therefore, he added, that he had once rescued a young boy who was to be drowned as a punishment because he had used the mystical Poro horn in front of (the non-initiated) women.42 Hence Abayomi-Cole’s first analysis was not overwhelmingly positive and contained many critical points directed at both the Poro and Freemasons. Throughout his descriptions, the author

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used Masonic terms like ‘lodges’ and ‘master’ in order to mark his comparative approach. Both societies would use secret and symbolic ways of communication. The Poro would, for instance, fix the number of sticks to a meeting tree, equal to the number of nights to go until the next lodge meeting. But for a Protestant Christian such as Abayomi-Cole, who was influenced by the temperance movement, the most striking similarity of Masonic and African lodges was the excessive consumption of alcohol.43 He finally outlined his total comparison of ‘civilized’ and ‘heathen African’ Masonry in order to criticize both from an American Christian perspective: If the reader is acquainted with the mysteries of civilized Masonry, he may by this time be able to conclude that there is no material difference between it and those of the heathen African nations; and that they are alike and equally contrary to the tender bonds of patriotism and religion, to the sanctity of the law, or the principles of strict morality.44 It may appear somewhat surprising that Abayomi-Cole concludes his lecture in such a critical Protestant tone by demonizing secret societies, because the main part of his analysis was more tolerant and open to learn about Poro rituals. However, he may have felt the pressure of his American audience and sponsors here, who – in the American Midwest – were still driven by anti-Masonic movements in churches and political parties in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, Freemasonry had arrived as a British institution that flourished after independence with separate lodges. Abayomi-Cole repeated the typical evangelical prejudices of the nineteenth century: Masons act against the nation, against God and common morals, and do not accept the rule of law. Accordingly, all secret societies would share the same ceremonies, laws, penalties, and were all the same “hunters after fantastic titles.”45 They were all deemed murderers who protected their members from the punishment of law – yet another element of U.S. anti-Masonism Abayomi-Cole was alluding to. He referred to the case of the American Freemason William Morgan from Batavia, who was allegedly killed by New York Masons in 1826 after he had announced to publish the secret activities of the lodges. Abayomi-Cole must have learned about this initial scandal that started the broad anti-Masonic movement in the United States, lasting from the 1820s until the late nineteenth century. The anti-Masonic hysteria of the 1820s and 1830s produced many political and criminal conspiracy theories. Likewise, religious propaganda demonized Freemasonry in the press. From this strong opposition the lodges recovered only slowly to become the classical institution for white, Protestant, middleclass American men later on.46 They offered networks to professional travelers and migrants (as in the British Empire), an “alternative religious

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framework”47 and simply conviviality. When being accused as an illegal, anti-democratic, and anti-Christian organization, American Freemasons left the arcane sphere and applied a policy of transparency: “It was still a secret society, but most men proudly wore the Masonic symbol (a square and compass) on their watch chains.”48 They reinvented public rituals, such as stone-laying ceremonies (for the Statue of Liberty in 1885) and funerals, and started building monumental and representative temples in the city centers. Compared to 1800, these revitalized lodges of the late nineteenth century were less elitist, but still somewhat unaffordable for common workers, so that they provided: [middle-class] average men with avenues for achieving distinction. . . . In a period of increased leisure time for middle-class men, the lodge was a respectable gathering place, filling the gap between the exclusive clubs of the wealthy and the saloons of the poor.49 Abayomi-Cole’s conspiracy concept of Freemasonry was adopted from the afterlife of the American Masonic hysteria and was pushed even further: British and French monarchs as well as U.S. presidents were all killed by Masonic networks, Abayomi-Cole claimed in his lecture. Following his comparison, it becomes clear that Cole rather rehabilitated the Poro as (for the large part) a benevolent society. The Freemasons, however, appear as the actual evil institution. Both the Freemasons and the African Poro would trace their origins to the mythical architect Hiram Abif, who allegedly constructed the temple of Salomon. The Poro, in their version, would believe that three refugees had constructed a hermitic hut made of a special wood to found the first lodge. Some Poro societies would dig out human bones from the graves for their rituals, and similarly Freemasons would keep human skeletons in their lodges. Nonetheless, the ‘civilized’ Masons were more evil, because they dared using the name of God for their blasphemous work, whereas the Poro would never insult the name of the creator. Christianity was of course portrayed as the ultimate good institution because it does not include secret but only public knowledge and revelation. In addition to that, true religious charity was destined for everyone, not for the exclusive circles of the powerful lodges, Abayomi-Cole explained. And swearing by God or death, which Freemasons would practice, was not permitted in Christianity anyway. Abayomi-Cole criticized Christian ministers in Africa who would also gain membership in secret societies – be they of European or African origin. And finally, male secret orders would alienate married couples from each other and parents from their children, whereas Christian churches integrated the whole family. Abayomi-Cole quoted the critique of secret societies by the American politician Horace Mann and finished his article with the words: “Secret things belongeth unto God.”50

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Abayomi-Cole’s book was well-received in Freetown as the work of a man from the colony. The review article in the pan-Africanist Sierra Leone Weekly News celebrated the book for the mysteries that the author managed to reveal about the indigenous societies. But the anti-Masonic tone of his last chapter was heavily criticized by the newspaper: He, however, we are afraid opens up a wide question when he asserts in his last chapter that Free Masonry is contrary to the tender bonds of patriotism and religion, to the sanctity of the law, or to the principles of strict morality, a question in which we doubt not there will be many ready to join issue with him.51 The antagonism between African-British-American Freemasonry and American missionary Protestantism cannot be downplayed in this context, because many of the black readers of this African newspaper were members of British colonial lodges in Sierra Leone and of African-American lodges in Liberia. After 1900, the rehabilitation of African secret societies by African intellectuals and lay anthropologists was discussed more openly, and Abayomi-Cole was again a key figure in this debate. For example, Abayomi-Cole initiated a vivid discussion in another Sierra Leonean newspaper with his letter to the editor on “the step taken by the Rev. Mr. Greensmith”52 in 1904. This comment referred to the scandalous case of the American Methodist Reverend A.E. Greensmith, who was initiated to the Poro society and harshly criticized by missionaries and the Christian public for this step (see also section Colonial Freemasons and Their Will to Compare Globally). In his letter, Abayomi-Cole opposed the Christian majority and argued for the legalization of Poro rituals. He criticized the government ordinance that prohibited most of their religious activities. The Nigerian newspaper The Standard agreed with Abayomi-Cole and encouraged anyone to properly study the secret societies of Africa, since the rumors at the moment were “about as authentic as the blood-curdling stories we used to hear and believe as children about the doings of the Freemasons.”53 After his return from Ohio to West Africa, Abayomi-Cole distanced himself from standard Western Christianity and became involved with different mystic topics and syncretized spiritual knowledge and practices from various cultures. He was engaged with traditional herbal medicine and the foundation of his own church mingling Christianity, ancient philosophy, Kabbala spirituality, Islam, and secret societies of various origins. He also founded agricultural associations in Sierra Leone and often organized oppositions against colonial policies.54 Due to this opposition against the British colonial government in Sierra Leone, AbayomiCole eventually left the country and continued his career next door as the Liberian Commissioner for the Interior (Native Affairs) from 1911 to 1914: Liberia decorated him as Knight Commander of the Liberian

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Order of African Redemption (1914) and an honorary doctorate (1926). He became a leading pan-Africanist after World War I and was involved in the National Congress of British West Africa held at Accra (1920) and Freetown (1923), thus paving the way to decolonization. When AbayomiCole gained support from the Liberian State and African churches alike, he dared not only to highlight similarities of Freemasonry and the Poro, but also of Christianity and Poro belief. In 1910, he did not feel the need to demonize the Poro anymore as he had in Ohio. Abayomi-Cole travelled the Liberian republic and held lectures on the similarities of Christianity and ‘fetish belief’ with an anti-elitist intent. “God is always in the bush,” he explained to his audiences, because Christian revelation was always linked with bush and forest.55 In the Liberian Republic, he relativized the role of Christian churches and reduced them to only some comparata among others under the tertium comparationis of ‘religious societies.’ Abayomi-Cole started to compare natural religions with the aim to combine them and create new spiritual movements. In Liberia, the coexistence of British Freemasons and local secret societies of the Poro was bedeviled by the activities of black missionaries and black Freemasons educated in the United States. Despite their egalitarian ideology, early U.S. Masonic lodges did not integrate black Americans into their clubs. As a result, the petition of some 15 free black men to a Boston lodge was rejected, so that they sought help with a British military lodge stationed in Boston, which initiated them in 1775, right before the Revolution. As black activists they soon founded the famous ‘African Lodge No. 1,’ which was hence called after its first Grand Master: Prince Hall.56 Prince Hall and his Masonic brothers linked several important black-led movements of their time: they were Abolitionists; they asked for legal, political, and educational emancipation within the U.S.; and they were early activists in the back-to-Africa movement even before the foundation of their own lodge and long before the foundation of the American Colonization Society in 1816. Prince Hall black Masonry was therefore important for the history of Liberia in two ways: for the movement that created and dominated the Liberian Republic, and for Freemasonry as a key element of Liberian black identity. Within the United States, black Freemasonry gained popularity first and foremost as a protected space where black self-organization and mutual aid was managed – and, at times, where social protest became manifest.57 The black lodges created “a sense of unity and racial pride as blacks struggled to find a national identity.”58 But their ideological Afrocentrism was very present in their writings, in which they argued that the origins of Freemasonry were located on the African continent (Egypt and Ethiopia). In 1853, a black Freemason claimed with regard to biblical Moses and Euclid “that to Africa is the world indebted for its knowledge and the mysteries of Ancient Freemasonry.”59 Therefore, the first black American lodges would name themselves and their buildings after Africa or the

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biblical Moses.60 Apart from their practical focus on the needs of black Americans and the use of Africa as a mythical and far symbolic reference, Prince Hall lodges also sought contacts with black lodges around the world – first and foremost with the Grand Lodge of Liberia: The position of Masonry in the Republic of Liberia is everything the black Masons could desire for their fraternity. The Grand Lodge and the Government of the Republic exist in an intimate embrace in which access to political power is tied to fraternal standing.61 The first Liberian lodges were founded by Prince Hall himself, and ever since Liberian members have crossed the Atlantic frequently in order to receive higher degrees. The first lodge of 1867 was opened as an elite black institution based on African-American settlers. Black migrants between both states further strengthened ties between the lodges.62 The Liberian President William Tubman received U.S. Prince Hall officials in Monrovia, while other African state leaders (e.g. Kwame Nkrumah) were also initiated as Freemasons due to their university experience in the United States. Muraskin called such networks an element of the more general “black American Masonic expansionism,” which was “expanding the area of identification” of Blacks worldwide.63 And while more and more indigenous Liberians tried to enter the centers of political power via Masonic lodges, urban Americo-Liberians were initiated in large numbers into the traditional Poro.64 Many in fact became members of Christian churches, Masonic lodges, and Poro groups at the same time – and Abayomi-Cole had developed the comparative arguments to legitimize this multi-group membership. When British Sierra Leone became more rigid about secret societies, Liberia offered the freedom of comparison just next door. Until the 1980s, Masonic lodges and Christian churches became the main social spots where Americo-Liberians socialized. By the 1950s, people from the hinterland increasingly used both means (church and lodge) to climb the social ladder.65 And comparisons of Freemasonry and the Poro are still common, claiming that Liberia’s backroom politics have either taken place “in conclave in a secret society or a Masonic lodge.”66 Since the Liberian public considered both secret societies – the Freemasons and the Poro – a means to acquire power and wealth, both societies have been reported to practice human sacrifice to reach such capacities: “Some people said that the True Whig Party officials used their own secret society, freemasonry, to collect human parts during election campaigns.”67 Apparently, anti-secret-society arguments remained the same over space and time: in the West, the churches demonized Freemasons and Poro as Satanic killers devoting humans in their bloody rituals, and Liberian gossip equated both evil societies anyway. Until 1980, all Liberian presidents had been active Freemasons, but in the putsch of that very year the

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military killed the president and destroyed the Masonic Temple of Monrovia located on a hill as the symbol of Americo-Liberian hegemony.68

Conclusions Comparisons between European or Western Freemasonry and West African Poro secret societies attacked the racial and religious basis of colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The modes and arguments of comparison were extremely sophisticated in this colonial discourse, because the debate was not only bilateral, between colonizers and colonized. European administrators, white missionaries, black Freemasons, African Christians, and many more contributed to this discussion. The comparative perspectives were hence intercultural – all actors tried to empathize with strange organizations and cultural backgrounds. Nevertheless, these treatises, newspaper articles, and lectures remained biased and hegemonic, because the authors never overcame the silence of the Poro authorities. These authorities and their initiates – voluntarily or not – were not included in these discussions, and thus their practices of comparing have largely remained unknown. Comparing Freemasons to the Poro was a colonialist and anti-colonialist act at once: it was colonialist whenever European, Krio, or Liberian Freemasons in West Africa attempted to legitimize themselves or exclude indigenous Africans from their institutions. But to compare Freemasons to the Poro was all the same emancipatory and anti-colonialist, because it challenged Western or Krio exclusiveness. The same arguments were at times used to demonize both organizations, and at times used to rehabilitate at least one of them. However, the sheer comparability undermined colonial hierarchies, always highlighting fundamental differences of African and Western social institutions. Comparing West African Freemasons to Poro secret societies is still common across West Africa – a tendency that Masonic officials try to falsify in vain. Today, West African Freemasons deny similarities with the Poro and try to be seen closer to Christianity, but the public ignores this effort. The Freemason District Grand Master of Sierra Leone and The Gambia explained “that freemasonry was not a secret society as is being perceived by members of the public.”69 Dr. D.J.O. Robin-Coker told his audience at the official launch of the lodge’s diamond jubilee celebrations that Freemasons had absolutely no supernatural powers. Unlike Masons, he added, the Poro of course possessed these magical skills.

Notes 1. Jessica Harland-Jacobs, “‘Hands across the Sea:’ The Masonic Network, British Imperialism, and the North Atlantic World,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 237–53, 237. 2. Ibid., 239. 3. Ibid., 241.

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4. Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 283. 5. Rudyard Kipling, “The Mother Lodge.” www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_ motherlodge.htm, accessed July 8, 2019. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 284. 9. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 146. 10. Ibid., 437. 11. Ibid., 146. 12. “Masonic Lecture,” Sierra Leone Weekly News, November 12, 1910, 8. 13. “A Memoir: Moses Walter Nicol,” Sierra Leone Weekly News, September 19, 1914, 2. 14. Abner Cohen, “The Politics of Ritual Secrecy,” Man: New Series 6, no. 3 (1971): 427–48. Cohen estimated “that nearly one in every three Creole men in Freetown is a Mason” (ibid., 431). 15. “Masonic Notes,” Sierra Leone Weekly News, March 20, 1909, 2. 16. Ibid. 17. Cohen, “Politics of Ritual Secrecy,” 438. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 445. 20. Ibid., 431. 21. Ibid., 436. 22. Paul Jackson, “Reshuffling an Old Deck of Cards?: The Politics of Local Government Reform in Sierra Leone,” African Affairs 106, no. 422 (2007): 95–111, 105. 23. Stephanie Zehnle, “Of Leopards and Lesser Animals: Trials and Tribulations of the ‘Human-Leopard Murders’ in Colonial Africa,” in The Historical Animal, ed. Susan Nance (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 221–38. 24. “Native Customs versus the Christian Religion,” Sierra Leone Weekly News, May 24, 1902, 2–3. 25. “Masonic Lecture.” 26. Ibid. 27. C. B. Hunter, “Snake Society [report],” September 3, 1906, UK National Archives, CO 267/488/357, 2. 28. Zehnle, “Leopards and Lesser Animals.” 29. Katrina H. B. Keefer, “Poro on Trial: The 1913 Special Commission Court Case of Rex v. Fino, Bofio and Kalfalla,” African Studies Review 61, no. 3 (September 2018): 56–78. 30. Heinrich Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde: Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902), 110 ff., 312 ff. 31. Ibid., 308. 32. Leo Frobenius, Die Masken und Geheimbünde Afrikas (Halle: Ehrhardt Karras, 1898). 33. Schurtz, Altersklassen, 411–12. 34. His book was translated into English and German, and Schurtz referred to this report; cf. Schurtz, Altersklassen, 412. 35. Sylvain Meinrad Xavier de Golbéry, Fragmens d’un voyage en Afrique fait pendant les années 1785, 1786 et 1787 dans les contrées occidentales de ce continent, comprises entre le cap Blanc de Barbarie . . . et le cap de Palmes . . ., 2 vols. (Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1802), vol. 1., 72. 36. Ibid., 79. 37. C. Magbaily Fyle, Historical Dictionary of Sierra Leone: New Edition (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2006), 1–2.

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38. John Augustus Abayomi-Cole, Revelation of the Secret Orders of Western Africa: Including an Explanation of the Beliefs and Customs of African Heathenism (Dayton, OH: United Brethen Publishing House, 1886), 8–9. 39. Ibid., 9. 40. Ibid., 34. 41. See for example his article John Augustus Abayomi-Cole, “Trees, Herbs, and Roots in West Africa,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 53, no. 2757 (September 1905): 1057–72, 1068–9. 42. Abayomi-Cole, Revelation, 52. 43. Ibid., 87. 44. Ibid., 94. 45. Ibid. 46. Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 3, 9. 47. Ibid., 5. 48. Ibid., 7. 49. Ibid., 14, 30. 50. Ibid., 99. 51. “‘A Revelation of the Secret Orders of Western Africa:’ A Review,” Sierra Leone Weekly News, November 27, 1886, 2. 52. Ajax (No 14), “Some Current Thoughts,” Sierra Leone Times, March 19, 1904, 3. 53. Ibid. 54. Fyle, Historical Dictionary, 1 f. 55. Correspondent, “Lecture in Liberia: God in Fetish,” Sierra Leone Weekly News, May 14, 1910, 3. 56. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “Hidden in Plain Sight: African American Secret Societies and Black Freemasonry,” Journal of African American Studies 16, no. 4 (2012): 622–37, 632 f. 57. Ibid., 622. 58. Ibid., 624. 59. Martin Robison Delany, Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry: Its Introduction into the United States, and Legitimacy among Colored Men (Pittsburg: W.S. Haven, 1853), 32. 60. Dunbar, “Hidden,” 628. 61. William A. Muraskin, Middle Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 185. 62. Ibid., 188. 63. Ibid., 189, 191. 64. Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (London: Hurst, 1999), 248. 65. Ibid., 45–8. 66. Ibid., 211. 67. Ibid., 254–6. 68. Stephen Ellis, “Liberia 1989–1994: A Study of Ethnic and Spiritual Violence,” African Affairs 94, no. 375 (1995): 165–97, 190. 69. Ibrahim Tarawallie, “Sierra Leone: Freemasonry Is Not a Secret Society,” Concord Times (Freetown), (June 12, 2009).

Bibliography Abayomi-Cole, John Augustus. Revelation of the Secret Orders of Western Africa: Including an Explanation of the Beliefs and Customs of African Heathenism. Dayton, Ohio: United Brethen Publishing House, 1886.

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———. “Trees, Herbs, and Roots in West Africa.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 53, no. 2757 (September 1905): 1057–72. Ajax (No. 14). “Some Current Thoughts.” Sierra Leone Times, March 19, 1904. Cohen, Abner. “The Politics of Ritual Secrecy.” Man: New Series 6, no. 3 (1971): 427–48. Correspondent. “Lecture in Liberia: God in Fetish.” Sierra Leone Weekly News, May 14, 1910. Delany, Martin Robison. Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry: Its Introduction into the United States, and Legitimacy among Colored Men. Pittsburg: W.S. Haven, 1853. Dumenil, Lynn. Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Dunbar, Paul Lawrence. “Hidden in Plain Sight: African American Secret Societies and Black Freemasonry.” Journal of African American Studies 16, no. 4 (2012): 622–37. Ellis, Stephen. “Liberia 1989–1994: A Study of Ethnic and Spiritual Violence.” African Affairs 94, no. 375 (1995): 165–97. ———. The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War. London: Hurst, 1999. Frobenius, Leo. Die Masken und Geheimbünde Afrikas. Halle: Ehrhardt Karras, 1898. Fyfe, Christopher. A History of Sierra Leone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Fyle, C. Magbaily. Historical Dictionary of Sierra Leone: New Edition. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2006. Golbéry, Sylvain Meinrad Xavier de. Fragmens d’un voyage en Afrique fait pendant les années 1785, 1786 et 1787 dans les contrées occidentales de ce continent, comprises entre le cap Blanc de Barbarie . . . et le cap de Palmes . . ., 2 vols. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1802. Harland-Jacobs, Jessica. Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927. Chapel Hill: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ———. “‘Hands across the Sea’: The Masonic Network, British Imperialism, and the North Atlantic World.” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 237–53. Hunter, C.B. “Snake Society [report].” September 3, 1906, UK National Archives, CO 267/488/357. Jackson, Paul. “Reshuffling an Old Deck of Cards?: The Politics of Local Government Reform in Sierra Leone.” African Affairs 106, no. 422 (2007): 95–111. Keefer, Katrina H.B. “Poro on Trial: The 1913 Special Commission Court case of Rex v. Fino, Bofio and Kalfalla.” African Studies Review 61, no. 3 (September 2018): 56–78. Kipling, Rudyard. “The Mother Lodge.” www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_moth erlodge.htm (last access: 08/07/2019). “Masonic Lecture.” Sierra Leone Weekly News, November 12, 1910. “Masonic Notes.” Sierra Leone Weekly News, March 20, 1909. “A Memoir: Moses Walter Nicol.” Sierra Leone Weekly News, September 19, 1914. Muraskin, William A. Middle Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. “Native Customs versus the Christian Religion.” Sierra Leone Weekly News, May 24, 1902.

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“‘A Revelation of the Secret Orders of Western Africa’: A Review.” Sierra Leone Weekly News, November 27, 1886. Schurtz, Heinrich. Altersklassen und Männerbünde: Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902. Tarawallie, Ibrahim. “Sierra Leone: Freemasonry Is Not a Secret Society.” Concord Times (Freetown), June 12, 2009. Zehnle, Stephanie. “Of Leopards and Lesser Animals: Trials and Tribulations of the ‘Human-Leopard Murders’ in Colonial Africa.” In The Historical Animal, edited by Susan Nance, 221–38. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2015.

Concluding Observations Modes of Comparing and Communities of Practice Angelika Epple and Antje Flüchter

As outlined in the introduction to this volume, the main endeavor of the analysis of comparative practices, presented here, is to look at what agents actually ‘do’ when they compare instead of conceiving of comparisons primarily as a hermeneutic tool. And indeed, the contributions to this volume have shown that comparing is an activity that helps to (re-) order the world, and hence may set into motion dynamic societal and epistemological changes. Rather than merely summarizing the rich findings of the contributions gathered in this volume, we would like to share some concluding observations that are informed by the perspective of the Bielefeld Collaborative Research Center (CRC).1 The chapters assembled in the four parts of our volume present a wide tableau of practices of comparing and a diverse set of objects that were compared, such as secret societies, marriage practices, climate zones, states, animals and plants, poems, etc., and not surprisingly with regard to the context of cultural encounters, many different social, ethnic, and racialized groups. The present volume addresses the question of how, and against the background of what general assumptions, the analysis of practices of comparing can offer new perspectives for an understanding of cultural encounters. On a very basic level, the shift to the perspective of practices of comparing points to the fact that all cultural encounters – be they conflictive, violent, or cooperative – question culturally determined practices of comparing. The broad spectrum of our case studies clearly shows that the tertia, the ‘grounds’ for comparison, and the relational contexts against which actors compare two entities, are not in any way predetermined but are a matter of choice. For European observers, some tertia ‘naturally’ lent themselves to comparing social groups, such as assessing the degree of civilization of a people by way of considering female gender roles (Gosh, Amsler, Camacho). At the same time, a tertium such as skin color was widespread, but differently perceived and weighted according to context. Thus, in the case of race discussions, for example (as referred to by Engelschalt, Gärtner, Mehlmer, Pinnen, and Zehnle), the labeling of comparata and hence the constructedness of race becomes apparent if we trace the changing tertia (skin color, legal status, or language).

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It is difficult to distill a homogeneous perspective from the variety of comparisons without curtailing their dependence on contingent factors. We, therefore, need to ask more concrete and detailed questions: who is comparing, what kinds of activities are involved in these practices of comparing, in what context do they occur, and what is their goal? How do practices of comparing performed by individuals interact with each other, and what dynamics do they unfold in the aggregate? These questions have arisen in our discussions with the contributors to this volume, as well as from conversations with our colleagues in the CRC.2 In the following, we would like to pursue these questions, first by distinguishing different ‘modes’ of comparing. Secondly, we would like to direct our focus towards the question of how the micro-analysis of individual practices could be raised to an analysis of comparative practices which address collective actors at the group level – or, as we would call it – ‘communities of practice.’

Modes of Comparing When actors compare, they set at least two different comparata in relation in order to negotiate differences and similarities between them. This comparative relation may be spelled out in different ways. This is what we call ‘modes of comparing.’ We distinguish between temporal and spatial comparisons; visual, verbal/discursive, and numerical comparisons; simple and complex comparisons; and reflexive comparisons. In order to identify temporal comparisons, we hone in on the spatial and temporal contexts in which actors embed comparative relations. For example, in one such specific case of temporal comparison, we can observe that actors may place comparata at different stages in a presupposed teleological model of temporal development. Bielefeld historian Willibald Steinmetz coined the term “progressive comparison” for this specific type of temporal comparison.3 However, the relation to different historical epochs is not neutral but can entail specific as well as quite different value judgments. In Julian T.D. Gärtner’s chapter, for Tocqueville, the North American wilderness appeared as a journey to the European past, and this temporal comparison implied different stages of civilization. A similar structure is insinuated by the historical memory used in the Spanish-Moroccan War, which refers back to the old Christian-Muslim opposition, as Sara Mehlmer showed in her contribution. In contrast, the triadic comparison of the (old) ‘Orient’ and Europe with (young) America analyzed by Kirsten Kramer, or the comparison of Sanskrit poems with Greek ones by William Jones, presented by Catharina G.M. Janssen, did not transport such a value judgment. When the Jesuits compared Christian faith with Chinese Confucianism, as highlighted in Nadine Amsler’s chapter, time and place of origin were relevant to mark the ancientness

334 Angelika Epple and Antje Flüchter of these creeds, but not for putting them into a civilizational relation that implied ‘higher development.’ In order to capture visual, verbal/discursive, or numerical comparisons, we explore how actors express these comparative relations. Most of the practices of comparing analyzed in this volume are verbal or discursive. There are, however, some indications that this line can be expanded to include a sensory mode, as shown by Kirsten Kramer (in her references to comparisons of natural phenomena based on perception). Numeric elements have only rarely appeared in the chapters of this volume. Still, in those few cases where they were used, it is evident that numeric comparisons imply more than the mere use of numbers. For example, sixteenth-century descriptions of states already included numbers, such as population figures and troop size (Bauer). However, comparisons at this time did not rely on a systematic acquisition of data, nor did these numbers relate to a scientific approach for which comparative practice played a generative role, as in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cases studied by Alexander Honold and Kirsten Kramer. This difference in comparative practice hence mirrors the shift from early modern empirical observations and symbolic uses of comparisons by numbers to their systematic application in scientific practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By focusing on the number of relations that actors establish between compared entities, we can highlight simple and complex comparisons, a terminology that does not entail a value judgment on our part. Both variants of this comparative mode have appeared in the contributions to this volume. For example, the comparative structure suggested by the eighteenth-century publishing house Renger in Volker Bauer’s chapter is rather simple. Here, the comparative relation has the effect of reducing the complexity of the different state structures presented in the Renger volumes. The same can be stated – to a certain degree – for other descriptive texts such as travelogues. Comparative relations concerning social practices in many of the chapters appeared to be rather more multifaceted. The most complex practices of comparing emerged from Christian Pinnen’s article about the negotiation of slavery and blackness in the South-Eastern French and Spanish American borderlands. The culturally and geopolitically entangled situation on the ground had given rise to a complex practice formation, in which different communities of practice – white colonists, enslaved Africans, white jurists, Natchez people – negotiated the meaning and definition of slavery and blackness by using different tertia. In Pinnen’s very informative case, the tertia were adapted to different audiences, i.e., to Spanish, French, British, and American legal systems, and served differing aims. In a region where the legal system repeatedly changed between Spanish and French imperial codes based on Roman law and AngloAmerican common law, situations of confusion arose time and again. By

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force of circumstance, comparing those different legal systems became a regular practice; apparently, however, with no established routine of using specific tertia (e.g., free/enslaved, complexion/skin color, family status, religion). Based on these observations and facing a variety of cases and situations, we assume that it is not sufficient to merely classify comparisons according to the distinction between simple and complex modes. Moreover, we hypothesize that there is a long-term development from simpler to more complex modes of comparison. On the surface, this seems rather intuitive. However, on a deeper level this process is, in fact, driven by the slow routinization of using specific tertia (in specific comparative ‘contexts’) to define the comparata (the entities compared). In other words, in medieval and early modern practices of comparing, which were ubiquitous in situations of cultural encounters, we can see that the structure of comparisons, in terms of the comparative relations mentioned earlier, was less coherent than at the beginning of modernity, towards the end of the eighteenth and the onset of the nineteenth centuries. Still, in the early eighteenth century, Renger’s volume compendium was intended to compare states but lacked conceptual clarity and systematic order, as pointed out by Volker Bauer. Nadine Amsler noted a similar lack of coherent tertia for the otherwise well-organized seventeenth-century Jesuits when describing Chinese groups. Of course, there is potential for many more modes of comparing yet to be identified. For instance, it would also be important to analyze the ‘doing of comparisons’ with regard to its effects, its societal functions, or even its intentions. However, this is very challenging, even more so if the distinction of, let’s say, different intentions were to be historically sensitive. In the course of considering modes of comparisons, which can be discerned over the long-term process of the routinization of practices of comparing, we already referred to ‘communities of practice.’ It has so far been the missing link in our analysis of the routinization of comparative practices, as routinization may only gain historical momentum when whole groups of actors employ the same tertia and comparata in their comparative practices.

Communities of (Comparative) Practice In order to approach the Bielefeld CRC’s overarching goal of exploring whether and how comparative practices exceed the ‘micro-level’ of individual acts and drive larger-scale historical transformation, we have borrowed educational theorist Étienne Wenger’s ‘communities of practice’ concept. Following Wenger, a community of practice is a group that shares a mutual engagement, an enterprise, and a repertoire of action and practices.4 The actors do not have to be conscious of being a member of such a

336 Angelika Epple and Antje Flüchter community, and they do not have to actively cooperate with each other or know each other. They become a ‘community’ simply by dint of carrying out the same practices. We are adapting this concept to our perspective on practices of comparing in order to be able to move beyond the level of individual comparative practices to a mid-range level of analysis that will allow us to observe larger-scale historical dynamics. We, therefore, speak of ‘communities of comparative practice.’ Applying this perspective to our volume, the relative cohesion of the various communities of practice, which are discernible in the chapters, differ in intensity. As shown in Amsler’s and Camacho’s studies, Jesuits share the connecting ideology of Catholicism – a mutual engagement – as well as a repertoire of values, thought patterns, and guiding principles due to their centrally organized education. Similar coherence can be assumed for experts of psychological warfare (Nietzel), medical staff (Engelschalt), war correspondents (Mehlmer), or lay anthropologists (Zehnle); also, somewhat cohesive, albeit rather less so, was the community of the ‘Republic of Letters.’ Its members were made up of European travelers, who also included astronomers (Honold), and even the ‘academic hack writers’ who worked for the German publisher Renger (Bauer). Furthermore, subalterns who used practices of comparing to gain some kind of agency within colonial regimes of oppression, such as the enslaved Africans in Natchez (Pinnen), certainly in many ways formed a community of practice. They compared in order to gain a measure of agency, rights, and freedom. To achieve these goals, they needed specific knowledge, for instance, about the respective legal system as well as the respective definition of slavery – knowledge that was rather fluid in the borderlands described by Christian Pinnen. This mirrors the predicament of enslaved Africans: to gain at least some agency and to establish a community (of practice) of their own; they had to become members of the hegemonic, white community of practice by arguing in its language and knowledge system. This dilemma is what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness,” a term coined for describing the situation and the internal conflicts of “black souls,” first in the colonial situation and later in the postbellum and Jim Crow society of the United States.5 This volume has brought together further powerful examples of how subaltern communities of (comparative) practice were able to negotiate an oppressive situation in their own favor, using comparison as a tool of empowerment, often neglected by mainstream postcolonial criticism. The members of African secret societies (Zehnle) compared themselves with Freemasons to obtain equality. Antonio Valeriano, a Nahua intellectual, tried to achieve far-reaching political goals by using comparisons in his letters to the Spanish king (Stear). Indians under British colonial rule also compared aspects of civilization and domestic space confronting British colonialism to gain agency (Gosh) – for Western readers this example is more difficult to fathom, as the group Subhasri Ghosh analyzes in her chapter argued in favor of child marriage.

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Another important finding when looking at the chapters in summary is the relevance of differentiations regarding the audience of various communities of (comparative) practice. The role of the audience is even more crucial if the comparative practice was aimed at achieving a specific goal, be it a position of dominance in the Cold War (Nietzel), the confirmation of a manumission (Pinnen), or an increase in sales figures of books (Bauer). It is, furthermore, informative to observe the different effects of comparing by one and the same actor, depending on his or her audience. An example is William Jones, whose translation of Hindu law was seen as subduing the variety of the ‘Orient’ by Edward Said, whereas Janssen highlights that his translation of Arabic and Sanskrit poets aimed at the opposite effect – that is, broadening the Western understanding of Eastern literature. The respective audience would determine, or at least influence, how the applied comparison was structured or which mode of comparing was chosen. In the particular situation of cultural encounter, the complexity of practices of comparing as a phenomenon as well as an analytical tool has emerged very clearly. The perspective of practices of comparing helps to overcome simple dichotomies of identity/alterity by highlighting the many possible shades of similarity. Comparing in situations of contact, conquest, or colonization is never neutral; nor, however, is it uniformly oppressive: it can also be broadening cultural and societal horizons or even create emancipatory effects. Different communities of practice compare differently. The modes, the effects, and the functions of comparing vary. The contributions to this volume have shown that the effects of practices of comparing are manifold. They can stabilize or undermine societies, norms, views etc., while at the same time being able to dynamize them. Cultural encounters, conflict, conquest, and colonization rely on complex, subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle practices of comparing. As has been proven throughout the whole book, ‘doing comparison’ is a powerful tool of colonialism as well as an instrument of empowerment.

Notes 1. For a brief introduction to the research aim of the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) 1288 Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the World, see the introduction of this volume and the CRC’s website: www.uni-bielefeld.de/(en)/sfb1288/, accessed June 26, 2020. 2. Angelika Epple, Antje Flüchter, and Thomas Müller, Praktiken des Vergleichens: Modi und Formationen: Ein Bericht von unterwegs (Bielefeld: SFB 1288, Working Paper 6, 2020). 3. Willibald Steinmetz, “‘Vergleich’ – eine begriffsgeschichtliche Skizze,” in Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens, ed. Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2015), 85–134. 4. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 5. William Edward Burghard Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1903]), 8.

338 Angelika Epple and Antje Flüchter

Bibliography Du Bois, William Edward Burghard. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1903]. Epple, Angelika, Antje Flüchter, and Thomas Müller. Praktiken des Vergleichens: Modi und Formationen: Ein Bericht von unterwegs. Bielefeld: SFB 1288 Working Paper 6, 2020. Steinmetz, Willibald. “‘Vergleich’ – eine begriffsgeschichtliche Skizze.” In Die Welt beobachten: Praktiken des Vergleichens, edited by Angelika Epple and Walter Erhart, 85–134. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2015. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Index

Abayomi-Cole, John Augustus 320–6 abolitionists 190, 325 acclimatization 300 Acosta, José de 20–2 adaptations 231–7 advertising 114, 159–60 aesthetic 87, 203–8, 229, 276; composition 212; experience 179; sensibility 19; value 236–7 African Secret Societies 10, 312–28, 336 African War 136–44 agency 75, 88, 253, 336 age of marriage 59–64 Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de 133–42 alcohol 297, 322 American workers 160 Americo-Liberian 326–7 anthropology 3–8, 126, 198, 208–13; geographic 187; white 319–20 anti-colonial 59–60, 327 anti-Muslim violence 132 appreciation 70, 211, 236, 295 appropriation 91–8, 198–206; of tradition 76 armchair: anthropologists 215, 320; author 319; traveler 205 assumptions of similarity 300–4 astronomy 8, 20, 175–7, 183–93 audience 22, 156–9, 237, 294, 334–7; American 322–5; Chinese 44–5; cosmopolitan 92–5; European 39, 47, 225–32, 250; international 152–3 authority 76, 255; argumentative 6; comparison and 87–98; husband’s 27, 73; moral 159 Azcapotzalco 87–98

being compared 41, 152, 275 belonging 134–5, 281 Bhudev, Mukhopadhyay 60–72 Bisayan 25–8 black legend 134 black women 253–9 borderlands 9, 245–59, 334 Bourdieu, Pierre 181 British administration 57, 73 Buddhist 39–42 cannibals 312–18 captivity 245–51 cartography 181, 204–6, 215 Catholicism 133, 256, 336 ceremonial 110–14, 122 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2–4 chastity 25–9, 60 Chateaubriand, François-René de 8, 198–214, 276 child marriage 6, 62–4, 336 China 5–7, 25, 38–48, 110–25 Christianity 19–29, 250–6, 315–27 Christianization 20–3 Christian Spain 132–9 civilization 135–44, 268, 292–6; culture and 298, 210; European 192, 209–11, 280; parameters of 71; promulgation of 274; stages of 20–5, 333; and wilderness 269–74, 278 civilizedness 5–6 civilizing mission 59, 75–6, 296 climate 62, 186, 251, 289–300; cultural 156; theory 186; zones 176, 181–7, 332 climatic factors 298–300 Cold War 7, 152–66

340

Index

Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco 90–7 collective memories 132–8 colonial discourse 58, 143–5, 327 colonial hierarchies 312, 327 colonial interests 140–4 colonial intervention 136–45 colonialism 7–8, 289–91, 312–13, 336; tool of 337 colonial medical 289, 295–318 colonial power 9, 89, 187–90, 211 colonial practices of comparing 5–8, 312 commensurability 111–19 commercial 58, 110–12, 126, 155, 182, 294–301 communication 22, 154–66, 269–70, 322 communist 153–65 communities of practice 332–7 comparability 302, 327 comparable data 300–4 comparata 5, 42–7, 200–8, 335 comparative experiences 156–62 comparative method 3, 21, 199, 226–37, 247–52, 321 comparative practices 2–10, 200–13, 291–304, 332–6 comparative process 247, 199 comparative relationship 273, 280 comparators 315–20 comparing 92, 125, 228–37, 247; acts of 3, 125, 199–200; and anthropology 208; concepts 153; East and West 225; modes of 41, 112, 141, 332–5; and narrating 212; operations of 3, 198–202; options of 144; practices of 1–10, 38–41, 120, 132–3, 166, 199–200, 275–83, 327, 332–7; process of 120 comparison: and authority 87–97; implicit 44, 95; implicit and explicit 112; of linguistic practices 98; long-standing 233; metaphorical 207; methods of 3, 230; narrative 207; nautical 206; north-south 188; points of 29, 156, 165; school of 200; standards of 211; temporal 6, 209, 333; triadic 210; verbal 334 competition 7, 152, 161–6, 181, 312 complexions 245–60; role of 248; system of 245 comprehensive system 175 concubinage 24–8

Confucian 5, 38–48, 333 conjugal property 27–8 connecting place 140–1 conquest 4–9, 23, 87–90, 132–42, 175–81, 199–202, 273–4, 289, 337 consanguinity 24–9 conspiracy theories 322–3 consumer goods 160–4 consumerism 70, 165 consumption 159–60 contact 90, 133–40, 156–9, 181–6, 211–14 contact zone 4, 198–202, 215, 268, 280 continuous comparison 97, 162 control 75–6, 97, 178–87, 246–59, 293–304 conversion 5, 21–9 correspondence 20, 89–93, 208 cosmological 179–83, 208–12 cosmopolitan 92, 313–14 court society 113–21 crisis 89–98, 121–2 cultural accommodation 21, 88 cultural context 4, 201 cultural diplomacy 152–64 cultural encounters 332–7 cultural hierarchy 28, 201 cultural knowledge 95, 180 cultural practices 38, 177, 200 cultural setting 114, 166 cultural studies 2, 200 cultural translation 6–9, 19 culture 59, 91, 134–5, 225–7, 312–19, 324; of comparison 7, 152; indigenous 21–3; legal 255; material 110; national 60; nature and 199–216; political 116–18, 165 cyclicality 179 Daoism 40–2 data collection 205, 297 descriptions 38–48, 198–211 descriptive narration 212–13 descriptive narratives 204–8 despotic power 122–3 despotism 116–25 development 6–7, 155–65, 193–210, 281–9, 294, 333–5 differences 1–3, 46, 70–6, 110–13, 134–40, 175–81, 201–7, 273–81, 321–7; and similarities 20, 112, 133, 175, 333 diplomacy see cultural diplomacy

Index discourse: of difference 59, 70–6, 138–44; political 6 discovery and conquest 175–8 discursive authority 88–9 discursive field 88–98 disease 89–96, 289–304 divorce 23–9, 64–5 doing comparison 1–4, 38–48, 335–7 domestic space 57–9, 71, 336 domination 20, 61–76, 134–41, 192–201 double colonization 75 dowry 25–8 Du Bois, W.E.B. 336 dynamization 200–1 dynasticism 121 earth and world 179–80 Eastern: languages 225–37; literature 225–37; poetry 226–36 East India Company 58, 227 ecclesiastical 96, 249–57 economy 163, 254 education 19–29, 38–44, 57–60, 72–3, 90–7, 275–9, 320–5, 336 egalitarian 175, 325 elite 23–9, 38–47, 114–24, 312–18 emperors 93, 115 empirical observation 184, 203–6, 334 empirical research 291, 303 empowerment 316; instrument of 336–7 Enlightenment 8, 57, 175–9, 198–216, 251, 279, 312–20 Enlightenment anthropology 199–206, 213–16 enslaved 9, 245–60; people 245; women 254 enslavers 245–59 entangled histories 2 entre nos 87–9, 98 environmental agents 253 epidemic 6, 88–97, 301 epistemic violence 271 equal treatment 176, 189 equator 175–6, 183–8 ethnic hegemony 316 ethnographic description 199–200, 276–9 ethnographic exploration 268 ethnographic tableau 275–9 ethnography 7–8, 19–28, 212 ethnological comparisons 213 Eurocentrism 4, 95–8, 125, 201

341

European: aesthetics 87, 229; colonialism 178, 201, 291; expansion 4; perceptions 4–7; world exploration politics 8, 198–206 evangelization 25, 38–44 feminine: dignity 72; prestige 72; virtues 60 fictional narratives 198–203 foreignness 133, 177 Foucault, Michel 48, 88 freedom 94, 117–18, 153–9, 245–59, 336; of comparison 326 Freemasonry 312–27 Freemasons see Freemasonry French and Indian War 246–8 French Revolution 175, 188, 283 gender 58, 251–4, 316; arrangements 47; relations 121; roles 251, 332 geocultural 198, 209–13 geographical difference see differences geographical distance 139, 280 geographical inequality 176, 186 geopolitical: conquest 202; dynamic of history 211; imaginary 303; situation 115 geospheric model 176–88 German perspective 7, 126 globalization 176–84; practices of 184 government 59–69, 153–9, 247, 324; colonial 6, 312–17; form of 112–24, 209; indigenous 87 Granada 133–42 Greco-Roman 6, 88–94 Haitian Revolution 9, 283 health 1, 9, 60–1, 251, 290, 293–4, 297, 300–1; see also public health Herder, Johann Gottfried 8, 126, 187 hereditary monarchy 118–21 heritage 90–8, 139, 236 hermeneutic 200; tool 2, 332 heuristic: construct 209–11, 278; function 201; instrument 40; method 4 hierarchy 114–24, 176–8; civilizational 29; colonial 312, 327; conceptual 200; cultural 28, 201; natural 186; racial 58, 245; regional 98 Hindu law 8, 64, 225–6, 337 histoire croisée 2

342

Index

historia 5, 20–9 historical continuity 138–42 historical memory 7, 333 historical novel 182, 191 historical transformation 1, 335 history: of civilization 214, 274–9; of cultural transfers 2; of science 206, 295; transnational 2 Hölderlin, Friedrich 8, 184–6 household 27, 61–7, 74–5, 94, 254–7 housewife 71–4 human: history 9, 26, 268–80; law 213; nature 20, 119, 279 humanism 90–5 Humboldt, Alexander von 184–6, 204–10 hygiene 10, 289–94 identity 3, 9, 48, 89, 201, 337; black 325; collective 89; cultural 214; hybrid 144; racial 251; self 60; Spanish 7, 135–44 ideology 58, 133, 156–61, 186, 247, 292, 336 illustrations 110, 228 imperial recuperation 136–42 imperial struggles 253 indigenous: leaders 6, 89–98; marriage 24–30; past 91–8; societies 19, 324 infrastructure 91–6, 247, 301 inner-scientific norms 292–303 intercultural: communication 98; contact 314; dialogue 213 international: information service 153; mass communication 155–9; propaganda 7, 152–64; relations 115, 157 interpretative method 227 invasion 88–90, 134–43 Iron Curtain 7, 155–9 Islam 7, 22–4, 120–1, 132–45, 317–24 Jesuits 5–6, 19–30, 38–48, 333–6 Jones, William Sir 225–6 July Revolution 9, 268, 282–3 knowledge: forms of 198, 213; historical 272; production 1, 198, 272; theorization of 88 Krio 315–27 labor 91–6, 252; bound 250; conditions 160; division of 155, 179; force 295; slave 246 laboratory 290–300

land 97, 114, 137, 177–82, 276–81; ownership 92 landscape 204–11; descriptions 203, 273, 280–2; geographical 190, 211–13; religious 40 Latin American slave regimes 256 latitude 176–93 law 39; of nature 180; rape 67; of slavery 254 Laws of Bondage 245 leadership 69, 89, 154–63, 178; crisis 89–92; local 90 legal systems 248–56, 334–6 Leninism 155 liberal arts 88–98 linguistic: expertise 28–9, 94; skill 98 Linnaeus, Carl von 199–208 literal translation 232–7 literary: discourse 173; practices of comparing 199 literati 38–48; women 45–6 manumission 253, 258; laws 256–8; practices 255–6 marital: practices 66; rape 67–70; relations 61 marriage 19–29, 316; patterns 121; practices 5, 19 Marxist principles 157 Mason-Dixon line 177, 190–1 Masonic Lodges see Freemasonry mass media 158 measurement 2, 175, 186–93, 291–300 medical agents 292–6; experts 9–10, 295–302; history 289; humanitarianism 300; racialization 290; triumphalism 295 Meridian 176, 185 metropole 95 Mexico-Tenochtitlan 6, 87–97 military 132–42, 258, 290–4; expansion 178; intervention 137–9; power 163; protection 248 Mindanaoan 23–9 missionary: ethnography 19; historiography 19; literature 19–27 modern French travel narratives 198 modernity: beginning of 335; formation of 216 modernization 57–60, 71, 158–62 modern Spanish colonialism 132–5 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat 7–8, 126, 180, 186–7, 213 Moor 132–45

Index moral: authority 159; code 38; history 21–9; oriental 118; superiority 59, 176–87 morality 5, 19, 41–8, 186 Muslim-Spanish relationship 133 Nahua 6, 87–98 narration 200–13 narrative construction 271 narrative imagination 179 narrative practices 8 Natchez 214–15, 245–60 Natchez Indians see Natchez national exhibitions 163 nationalists 60, 75 national myth 132–4 national unification 134–8 natural history 8, 20, 176, 198–213 natural law 21–30, 116, 199, 208–14, 274–9 natural state 209–13 nature: concept of 8, 202–16; configurations 212; and culture 198–202, 208–15; primacy of 209 nautical navigation 274 negotiation 10, 88–98; of marriage 316; of similarity and difference 3–9; of slavery and blackness 334 nepantla 95 noble 58, 87–98, 316 non-white complexions 247 North Africa 6–7, 110, 132–6, 320 North African Islam see Islam oppression 65, 155–9, 181, 336 ordering systems 204–12 order of nature 198–211, 271 Orient 70, 118, 134–42, 203–11, 225, 333 oriental despotism 118–25; discourses 135 Orientalism 8, 133–5, 225 othering 8, 118, 302 otherness construction see othering participation 200; political 89 patriarchal: domination 75–6; power 63 peaceful coexistence 135, 159, 165 people’s capitalism 160 periphery 8, 177, 304, 317 Philippines 5, 19–29, 289–303 philosophy 45, 179; ancient 324; history of 183–7; natural 19, 279 poetry see Eastern, poetry

343

polemics 5–6, 85 political structures 118, 125 political universalism 175 politics of comparison 2, 152, 201, 289–96; of masculinity 75; of propaganda 152 polygamy 24–9, 64–6 polygyny 43, 120–1 Poro 10, 312–27 postcolonial: approaches 2–4, 201; criticism 2, 336; stance 4 power 76, 114, 122; colonial 9, 89, 187–90, 211; conditions 182; dynamics 87; imperial 98, 178, 314; institutional 156; instrument of 4; limited 122; military 163; political 38, 110, 319, 326; relations 2–4, 201; relationships 191, 252; struggle 7; vacuum 89 practices of comparing see comparing practice-theoretical: approach 2–3; perspective 201; view 200 princely rule 110, 122 productivity 160, 201–6, 212 progress 25, 72, 160, 180, 269, 296 progressive discovery 8, 198–202 Project Troy 157 propaganda 5, 152; pattern 154; propaganda of comparisons 159; symbolism 165 pseudo-scientific 207, 251 psychological warfare 154–9, 336 public health 9, 289–96, 300–3; challenges 291; domestic 300; experts 291, 303; reform 292–5, 303 purity 23–5, 43, 133–5 Pynchon, Thomas 8, 177–89 Quijano, Aníbal 95 race 9–10, 243–59, 268–83, 332; human 268, 296; and slavery 248–9, 255; struggle 268 racial: biology 178; concepts 247; conflict 270–1; emancipation 316, 321; stereotypes 279 Randeria, Shalini 2 ranking 41, 114, 279 rape 67–70 reason 25–30, 119; principles of 41–2 reciprocity 66, 88, 95–7 regimes of comparatism 4 relación 5, 21–4

344

Index

religion 20–1, 72–5, 120, 243, 314; concept of 40; indigenous 19; natural 40–2, 325 religious discourse 97; propaganda 322 Renaissance 19, 48, 87–95 Renger 6, 110–26 revolution 155, 175, 247, 282, 325; American 247–56; see also French Revolution; Haitian Revolution; July Revolution rhetorical strategy 6, 88, 94 Romantic 135, 142, 179; aesthetic 208; imagination 139–40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 182–7, 208–14, 279 Rousseauist 199, 209–11 Said, Edward 8, 225, 337 sanitation 289–94 Sanskrit 225–37, 333–7 Santiago Matamoros 132–44 Schurtz, Heinrich 319–20 science 19, 73, 153–5, 181; of astronomy 175–6; history of 206, 295; medical 294; modern 297; natural 206 scientific: appropriation 202; comparisons 295; expeditions 203; exploration 8, 198–202; racism 143; thinking 7, 48 secret societies 10, 312–27; African 10, 312, 320–4; European 10, 317–20; indigenous 318 sects 39–48 security state 155 Shakespeare, William 231–3 similarities see differences skin color 120, 249–52, 332–5 slavery 155, 190, 245–59 slaves see enslaved; slavery social groups 112, 332 social institutions 38, 327 social order 66, 137 social state 209, 213 Soviet 152–65: patriotism 156; propaganda 154–6; socialism 156 space: race 165; technology 163–5 Spanish: “Africanists” 133, 142–3; identity building 135; orientalism 133 Spanish-American War 292, 300–3 spiritual knowledge 324; self 60

Stalinist 156–7 standards of comparison 211 Strait of Gibraltar 133–41 subaltern communities 336 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 2 superiority 6, 57, 72, 116, 124, 134, 163, 178, 316 supremacy 76, 116, 178, 256, 268 tableau 205, 215, 275–9 taxonomic classification 8, 199–207 Tepanec Empire 87–98 territories 8–10, 119, 178, 198–200, 205–11, 300–3 tertia 200, 207, 332–5 tertium comparationis 40–7, 200, 207–11, 325 Tétouan 141–2 Tezozomoc 90–4 theology 19–20, 45 Tocqueville, Alexis de 9, 268–82 transcultural: comparison 110, 118–23, 320; interactions 202; settings 166 translation 6–9, 45, 91–2, 225–37, 337 transliteration 229–34 travel: accounts 5, 126, 143; experiences 140, 280; literature 7–8, 198–204, 216, 282; narration 268–72; writing 8, 198–212 travelogue 9, 126, 198–203, 250–1, 268, 282, 334 Triple Alliance 87–93 tropical: climate 176, 290–2; diversity 295; environments 290–1, 302–3; medicine 290, 303–4; otherness 292–5, 300–4 tropicalist discourse 290–2, 300–3 tropicality 9, 289–91, 303–4 unequal similarity 7, 145 universalism 8, 42, 175 Valeriano, Antonio 6, 87–98, 336 Venus 176–7, 189–93 violence 134–8, 190; colonial 177; of contact 271 Voice of America 155–8 waiting room of history 2 Werner, Michael 2 West-African Poro see Poro

Index Western Enlightenment see Enlightenment Western literati see literati Western norms 71 whiteness 247–60, 290, 296 women 5–9, 23–9, 39–47, 57–76, 250–9, 317

345

workers 94–6, 160–3, 256, 323 world exploration politics 8, 198–206, 212 world travel literature 198, 212, 216 zoological context 274–5