Europe and the World in History: European Culture and Identity since Homer Volume 3 9781350058569, 9781350058552

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CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 3

Ilsen About Born in Paris (France) in 1975. A Research Associate at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (the CNRS) and a member of the Georg Simmel FrancoGerman Social Sciences Centre at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), Paris. His research interests focus on the history of identification systems in Europe. Schirin Amir-Moazami Born in Heidelberg (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1968. Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Her research interests focus on Islam in Europe and the management of religious and cultural diversity. Ana Lucia Araujo Born in Santa Maria (Brazil) in 1971. Professor of cultural history at Howard University, Washington DC. Her research interests focus on the history of the collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade. Alessandro Barbero Born in Turin (Italy) in 1959. Professor of medieval history at the University of Eastern Piedmont Amedeo-Avogadro (Vercelli). His research interests focus on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as modern and contemporary military history. Lucien Bianco Born in Ugine (France) in 1930. Director Emeritus of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), Paris. A specialist in the history of the Chinese peasantry in the twentieth century and in the origins of the Chinese Revolution. Simone Blaschka-Eick Born in Hannover (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1972. Director of the German Emigration Centre, a museum in Bremerhaven. A specialist in nineteenth-century social and economic history from a transatlantic perspective. Timothy Brook Born in Toronto (Canada) in 1951. Professor of East Asian history at the University of British Colombia. His research interests focus on the history of China, particularly the Ming dynasty. Christine Cadot Born in Beauvais (France) in 1974. Associate Professor of political science at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis. Her research interests focus on public policies relating to collective memory – and their limitations – in the context of the construction of the European Union.

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Franco Cardini Born in Florence (Italy) in 1940. Professor of medieval history at the University of Florence. His research interests focus on the history of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim relations. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch Born in Paris (France) in 1935. Professor Emerita of history at the Paris Diderot University, Paris 7. A specialist in African history and the social issues of colonization. Mamadou Diouf Born in Rufisque (Senegal) in 1951. Professor of history and African studies, and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, New York. His research interests focus on the history of the French colonial empire. Andreas Eckert Born in Bremen (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1964. Professor of African history at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research interests focus on African history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular reference to the history of the state and of work. Ottmar Ette Born in Zell am Harmersbach (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1956. Professor of Romance languages at the University of Potsdam and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests focus on francophone and hispanophone literature and languages. Pierre-Olivier François Born in Nancy (France) in 1971. A journalist and a TV documentary film-maker. Willem Frijhoff Born in Zutphen (the Netherlands) in 1942. Professor of cultural history at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests focus chiefly on the history of cultures, universities and mentalities. Alan Frost Born in Cairns (Australia) in 1943. Professor of history at La Trobe University. His research interests focus on the history of the colonization of Australia. Bogumil Jewsiewicki Born in Wilno (Poland, now Vilnius, Lithuania) in 1942. Professor Emeritus of history at Laval University, Quebec. His work focuses on the history of francophone Central Africa and the social functions of memory. Bruce F. Kawin Born in Los Angeles (the USA) in 1945. Professor Emeritus of literature the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research interests encompass American and British literature and film history. Jürgen Kocka Born in Haindorf (Germany, now Hejnice in the Czech Republic) in 1941. Professor Emeritus of history at the Free University of Berlin and a member of the BerlinBrandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. A specialist in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century social history of Europe and the United States. His research interests focus mainly on the world of labour, the history of work and capitalism.

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Olivier Lazzarotti Born in Saint-Mandé (France) in 1959. Professor of geography at the University of Picardy Jules Verne. A specialist in the connections between heritage and tourism. Christian Th. Müller Born in Berlin (Germany) in 1970. Lecturer and researcher at the University of Potsdam. His research interests focus on military history and the cultural history of violence. Herfried Münkler Born in Friedberg (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1951. Professor Emeritus of political science at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is a specialist in Niccolò Machiavelli and the history of political theories. Marina Münkler Born in Bad Nauheim (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1960. Professor of literature at the Dresden University of Technology. Her research interests focus on medieval literature, particularly travel narratives. Bodo Mrozek Born in Berlin (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1968. A historian at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies. A specialist in popular culture, he teaches music studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem Born in Ipamu (formerly the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1944. Professor of history at the University of Kinshasa. His research interests focus on Congolese history. Pap Ndiaye Born in Antony (France) in 1965. Professor of history at Sciences Po, Paris and Director of the Palais de la Porte Dorée (National Museum of the History of Immigration). A specialist in the social history of the United States and France, particularly the history of minority groups. Akiyoshi Nishiyama Born in Odawara (Japan) in 1969. Professor of history and Dean of the Faculty at Kyoritsu University, Tokyo. A specialist in the history of Germany and of its links with Japan, his work focuses primarily on the history of education. Pascal Ory Born in Fougères (France) in 1948. Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He was recently elected as a member of the Académie Française (the French Academy) and his research interests focus on the cultural and political history of modern societies. Teresa Pinheiro Born in Lisbon (Portugal) in 1972. Professor of cultural history at Chemnitz University. Her research focuses mainly on the history of European expansion and on Iberian cultural memories. Dominique Poulot Born in La Rochelle (France) in 1960. Professor of cultural history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. His research interests focus primarily on the history of European museums and heritage.

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Olaf B. Rader Born in Bad Freienwalde (Germany, formerly the GDR) in 1961. Professor of medieval history at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests focus primarily on the history of the Holy Roman Empire. Kapil Raj Born in Amritsar (India) in 1949. Director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), Paris. His research interests focus on science in a globalized world − cultural interaction and the circulation and construction of knowledge from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Shalini Randeria Born in Washington DC (the USA) in 1955. An anthropologist and the Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Her research interests encompass the anthropology of globalization, law, social movements and colonial and post-colonial studies. Wolfgang Reinhard Born in Pforzheim (Germany) in 1937. Professor Emeritus of modern history at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. His research interests focus on the history of Europe in the Modern Era and the history of European colonization. Bernhard Rieger Born in Erlangen (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1967. Professor of history at University College London. His research interests focus on European history since the late nineteenth century, particularly social and economic relations. Maurice Sartre Born in Lyon (France) in 1944. Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Tours. A specialist in the Middle East under ancient Greece and Rome and in Mediterranean history. Thomas Serrier Born in Le Mans (France) in 1971. Professor of German history at the University of Lille. His research interests focus on German–Polish history, the history of the Central and Eastern European border regions and collective European memories. Suresh Sharma Born in Karnal (India) in 1945 (d. 2019). A historian and anthropologist, former Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. His research interests focused on Indian society and the thought and discourse of Mahatma Gandhi. Sanjay Subrahmanyam Born in New Delhi (India) in 1961. Professor of modern history at the University of California, UCLA. He also holds the Chair of ‘Early Modern Global History’ at the Collège de France. Philipp Ther Born in Mittelberg (Austria) in 1967. Professor of contemporary history at the University of Vienna. His research interests focus on the sociocultural history of Germany and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Enzo Traverso Born in Gavi (Italy) in 1957. Professor of contemporary history at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury European cultural and intellectual history. Jakob Vogel Born in Hamburg (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1963. Professor of European history (of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) at the Centre for History, Sciences Po, Paris, and Director of the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin. His research focuses on national and colonial European history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Catherine Wihtol de Wenden Born in Soissons (France) in 1950. A political scientist and Research Director Emerita at the Centre for International Studies, Sciences Po, Paris. Her research interests focus on international migration in a global perspective.

Introduction Europe and the world, the world in Europe JAKOB VOGEL

Cartagena de Indias, Kolkata, Gorée Island – these names possess a rare evocative power. Few places reflect the interwoven histories of Europe and the world, in all their complexity and diversity, as clearly as the ports of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the China Seas or the Atlantic. When Europe was engaged in trading with other parts of the world during the Early Modern Era, these localities served as crossroads. They were also springboards for colonial expansion and imperialism, and were frequently used as departure or arrival points for the ships of the slave trade, operated by Europeans for several centuries. Some of their colourful old colonial-era buildings display the ‘World Heritage’ sign awarded by the United Nations, endowing them with the status of realms of memory belonging to a European history shared with the outside world. Europe’s story cannot be told without including the places that she and the rest of the world share. It is always when we travel outside the continent that we become aware of being European – something we can all still experience today. As the chapters that follow demonstrate, it is naturally by being in contact with ‘nonEuropeans’ that ‘Europeans’ became aware of their shared culture. This is clearly indicated by the strict separation between ‘European’ and ‘indigenous’ districts that remains imprinted on the physiognomy of numerous colonial cities. Outside the continent, national or social differences fade into the background. The remaining vestiges of the European presence in the world are still regarded more or less everywhere with a certain ‘colonial nostalgia’. Nevertheless, accounts of violence, exclusion and oppression emerge just as regularly in memories shared by Europeans and non-Europeans alike. The dual faces of the history of European expansion continue to spark heated controversies, yet for some time now, historians and social science researchers have been demonstrating that the practice of making a distinction between them is based on misunderstanding. They too reveal the complexity of European memories; contested and ambivalent, they do not lend themselves to a simplistic approach. Deciding what forms part of ‘European’ memories or, conversely, ‘indigenous’ traditions has always been a risky, questionable and unreliable enterprise. Is ‘European civilization’ based on ‘Christian roots’ or on the secular culture of the Enlightenment and the sciences? This was always a question of personal viewpoint. The same is true of the hybrid cultures in the contact zones located between Europe

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and the non-European worlds that characterize port cities the world over. It remains just as difficult to decide in which category to place the zones of influence situated on the edges of the continent, the shores of the Mediterranean, the areas facing Russia or those located around the Black Sea. The case of the ‘holy sites’ of Christianity situated on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, in what are now Israeli/ Palestinian territories, is a crucial reference point for large numbers of Europeans; this example alone is enough to demonstrate that we cannot limit ourselves to the geographical confines of the ‘continent’ when determining the European memory space. The chapters comprising Volume III of this work explore the routes that link European memories to world history, with all their detours and intertwinings. They highlight the impossibility of defining European memory spaces solely from within Europe. The external gaze has always been important for the image Europe has of herself and wants to present to the world. Of course, from the perspective of Javanese, Chinese or Arab princes, public officials or intellectuals, she has not always served as the beacon she thought herself to be – yet it is from Europe that many nations have broken away to construct an emancipated future. In declaring their independence, the former European colonies resolutely established their present within a history distinct from that of Europe. When the former settlers who had come from England, Spain or other European countries began to describe themselves as ‘American’ in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was a sign that they were distancing themselves from the European perspective. The history of the major discoveries and conquests, seen from the European standpoint and to which the continent of ‘America’ owes its name, was no longer their history. In the same way, the process of decolonization that subsequently took place gave rise to a different conception of history, with Europe no longer being the dominant point of reference. That process, incidentally, was stamped with a European seal – the national paradigm. There are four different stages in our search for links between European and world histories. Part I, ‘Conquests’, follows the traces left in the world by European expansion beyond the borders of the continent, which was often accompanied by violence. This is the history of conquests and of supposed ‘discoveries’, of slavery and humanitarianism, which for a long period lay at the heart of narratives on Europe’s global role. Part II, ‘Imposition’, focuses on the lasting imprints left by the Europeans’ presence in the world. This is manifested in both an immaterial and a material manner – the former through the names of cities, countries and continents, and the systemization of time and knowledge, the latter through the remaining vestiges and scars of colonialism. Yet it would be a mistake to view these imprints left on collective world memories from an exclusively European perspective; nonEuropeans, too, have constantly participated in that history and those memories. The multiple − even, in some cases, contradictory − forms that these exchanges sometimes took are the subject of Part III, ‘Exports’. Here we see just how many elements absolutely fundamental to ‘European culture’ have been shaped outside the continent, so that this is far from being a one-way road, running from Europe to the rest of the world. It is only by distancing herself from a supposed ‘Other’ that Europe and her memories have taken their characteristic forms – a process in which

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intermediary figures and intellectuals (from Mahatma Gandhi to Léopold Senghor and from Mao Zedong to Karl Marx) played a major role. Part IV, ‘Exchanges’, retraces the history of those cultural links that are an ageold reality for Europeans, who have been continually obliged to redefine their place in the world, despite the fact that certain authors attribute them to twenty-firstcentury globalization. These complexities make the task of the historian struggling to untangle what is ‘ours’ from what is ‘foreign’ an arduous one. Literature, art and film, as well as food consumption – the introduction of the potato, spices and coffee, for instance – reveal the extent of the difficulties involved in accurately outlining the contribution made by the ‘Other’ to European history. Naturally, having undertaken a quest of this nature, we can only pursue a few of the innumerable traces that Europe has left on world history. The result is a collection of histories, woven from the same tensions and contradictions as those found in the port cities mentioned earlier – on the one hand, shanty towns and signs of social segregation, exploitation and violence; on the other hand, the markets, museums and colours of colonial architecture.

CHAPTER 1

Cartographic memories of the world TIMOTHY BROOK

The world is not a place to see or remember now without a map. A transcription of the world such as it is, a map is also a producer of a collective imaginary and a repository of our memories. What we actually remember is the accumulation of images that maps have given us. Our first unmediated image of the world dates back only to 7 December 1972, when a satellite beamed back a photograph of the earth from space: the now completely familiar blue globe floating in a black void. On its surface, under wisps and swirls of clouds, the familiar coastlines of continents marked the primal separation of land from sea. There is possibly no one above a certain age who does not recognize this sight. In fact, those who lived before that date already knew what they would see, for they already had a memory of what the world looked like, the origins of which stretch back to the sixteenth century. Space seemed unprecedented as a point of perspective, but cartographers had invented that point before it could be visited. A revived Euclidean geometry in combination with the growing accumulation of new information reaching Europe about parts of the world previously unknown made it possible to imagine what the eye could not see four centuries before astronauts photographed the earth. The rapid expansion of maritime trade across the world forced the creation of this new point of perspective and this new model. Were Europeans in 1600 shown the 1972 photograph of the earth, they would not have been hugely surprised by the shape of what they saw. They already understood the earth as a sphere and would have recognized most of the landforms on it. They had not seen the earth from space, but they had seen maps that cartographers drew by projecting themselves into space. Not only had they seen them, they were buying them in inexpensive copies to hang on their walls or as globes they set on their tables. To people in 1300, by contrast, this photograph would have come as a surprise. Not a complete surprise: some European viewers understood that the earth was round, as we shall see, and they would have been able to decipher what to them was the familiar shape of the Mediterranean Sea, but how the rest of the world extended beyond it would have been entirely new.

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For the world is not there for us to see. That view, so Medieval cosmographers insisted, was vouchsafed only to God, just as it is vouchsafed in our day only to astronauts. On a clear day we see a distance of less than 5 kilometres. To move from the large scale of what lies directly in sight down to the smaller scale on which maps are drawn requires creative invention. We can all sketch large-scale maps on the basis of our daily movements, but designing the world is where cartographic history begins and ends. This is why when we call up a memory of the world, what we are actually recalling is a visual encounter with an image that sixteenth-century cartographers invented for us. Maps create memories as much as they capture them. The two processes are often impossible to pull apart: we see what we remember, and we remember what we see, and neither act can ever take us back to a beginning.

CIRCLE AND SPHERE To tell this story, let us begin with how European cartographers pictured Europe and the world in 1300, using the example of a world map drawn on vellum and deposited in Hereford Cathedral in England. The man who drew the Hereford Map – possibly Richard of Haldingham and Lafford, who signed it – has drawn the world as a circle ringed by water. Within that circle lies all manner of memories, some biblical, some Classical, some of more recent acquisition. Eden, a paradise walled and moated against human entry, is located at the topmost point on the circle directly under a panoptical God, which is why east is at the top. Opposite it across the circle are the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar, below which a conspicuously naked Satan spouts three tongues of fire from his head. Already this tells us that, while the Hereford cartographer conceived of his project as mapping the world, he has in fact drawn a map of lieux de mémoire, embracing both biblical and non-biblical sites, for both were how Europeans made sense of the world. The Hereford Map’s centre point is another powerful site of memory, which European cartographers regularly chose as ground zero, and that is the holy city of Jerusalem. The world extends from that pivot in three unequal wedges, the legacy of continents attributed to Noah (the Ark is shown stranded well to the north-east of Jerusalem). Shem’s Asia fills the top half of the circle, while the lower half is divided at the Mediterranean between Ham’s Africa and Japheth’s Europe (a conventional format known as a T/O map, which then served as a mnemonic device for an entire biblical cosmology). Jerusalem was a Christian memory far more than it had ever been a Christian place, much less the centre of the Christian world. Crusaders for two centuries had struggled to make Jerusalem that centre but to no effect. Perhaps a memory of that perennial hope/failure moved Richard of Haldingham and Lafford to draw the world in this guise. Although the T/O Jerusalem formula was iconic in 1300, a growing interest in recovering the lost knowledge of earlier Mediterranean cultures was nurturing a different memory of the world. The Greek theologian Maximus Planudes (ca. 1260–1305) just at this time was turning to the surviving records of Claudius Ptolemy, the Cairo-based Greek geographer of the second century, to map the three zones of Japheth, Ham and Shem in an arrangement that gave equal visual weight

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to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. This was not the view of the world arranged along an axis from the Gates of Hercules to the Garden of Eden. Indeed, it could exist without invoking the Bible, although it was not Planudes’s intention to secularize the image of the world. The Ptolemaic map also attempted to provide a projection, that is, a systematic formula for transcribing the curvature of the earth’s surface as it might look from space. It had to be a partial rendering, for Planudes had no information about what lay on the parts of the globe not facing him. But by bending the surface of the earth away from our view at its edges, he found a visual means to remind his viewers that the earth was spherical. This was where cartographers trying to incorporate the flood of new information flowing in from the world in the sixteenth century began their struggle to lend the world visual form.

WATER AND LAND By 1500, voyaging was changing people’s image of the world. Heretofore world maps were essentially of the land edged by water, as the Hereford Map is. Starting in the later part of the fifteenth century, mariners were drawing maps from the water and treating land as the edge of nautical space. As land and water changed places, the navigator’s need for accuracy rose, demanding an entirely different way of reading space. Richard of Haldingham and Lafford had been concerned with what we might call theological accuracy: he sought an image of the world that placed all the lieux de mémoire within European culture into a legible matrix. A navigator, on the other hand, required the kind of accuracy that would enable him to remember how to approach a shore without running aground. The ocean is an impossible place for remembering locations, whether distant or just off the bow. But water has the advantage of mobility. So long as a navigator can establish his virtual location by means of compass readings and the measurement of distances, he can treat his vessel as a mobile viewing platform and take readings of his position from multiple angles. Drawing a web of lines (called rhumb lines) radiating at regular angles from points on a great circle (these points began to be marked on maps as compass roses), he can triangulate his position in relation to any observable point along a coastline. The result is the portolan chart. By 1500 European and Ottoman seamen had mapped the European coastline and were beginning to move out into the Atlantic and do the same. The 1513 chart of the middle and south Atlantic by the Ottoman navigator Ahmed Muhiddin Piri (1465/70–1553) shows just how precisely the portolan technique could be used to produce a unified image of the entire Atlantic. Like the Hereford Map, the Piri Map archives cultural memories, some old, some more recent. There are seated African sultans and headless men with faces in their torsos who recall old tales of exotic, distant lands. These are deep cultural memories that refuse to dissipate with time. But there are also modern ships crossing the Atlantic and dhows sailing among parrots in the Caribbean, which enshrine newer memories. Piri’s accomplishment obscures from us his real challenge: it is not physically possible to attach one portolan chart to the next and come up with a complete

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image of the world that was accurate at every point. In fact, the more coastlines you attach, the worse the result. The problem is sphericity. How was the cartographer to reduce the three-dimensional reality of the globe to a two-dimensional format without hopeless distortion? European cartographers through the sixteenth century struggled to find the geometrical solution to this problem. The mappa mundi that Martin Waldseemüller (1470–1519) produced in 1507 was a bold attempt to do this. Planudes’ reconstruction of Ptolemy depicted only the hemisphere occupied by Europe and the Indian Ocean, whereas Waldseemüller wanted to trace the entire earth as it might be seen from a fixed point in space (loosely above Cairo) onto a curving form that contained all the new knowledge he had of the world. Of the twelve sheets that had to be laid together to assemble this massive wall map, the middle sheet in the second column from the left depicts the familiar shape of Europe and North Africa that Europeans would know by heart, so much so that it is perhaps forgettable by comparison with what was on the other sheets. To the right, Asia extended until it came to an end as abrupt as the top of the circle on the Hereford Map. Beyond it lay a scattering of islands in the western half of the Pacific Ocean. Waldseemüller wrapped the Pacific around to the left-hand edge of the map, where it abutted the wraith-like form of the two American continents. This was six years before a European actually saw the ocean from its eastern edge, when Vasco Balboa (ca. 1475–1519) crossed the Isthmus of Panama. That is to say, this was not the world anyone could remember but world of the future. If it is remembered today, it is so by Americans, since this is the first map to use the name America, which appears on the lower left-hand sheet. Waldseemüller’s map was one solution to how to combine the parts of the unknown world into a known whole, but it did not solve the navigators’ problem, which was how to design a flat map on which a ship’s course could be plotted. The problem was severe. Set a constant compass course, and your ship will trace not a straight line but a spiral that ends, regardless of your angle, at either the North or South Pole. Unless you travel due west, east, north or south, every course must end theoretically at one of the poles. Navigators had figured out how to map coastlines, but this new task was beyond them. Waldseemüller turned to this problem in 1516 with his Carta Marina, laying out the world on a rectangular grid, such that lines of longitude appear parallel to each other, as lines of latitude are, whereas in fact they curve and converge at the poles. Waldseemüller’s bid inspired an entire generation of cartographers to revise and rework his model. The one who mastered the geometry of this problem was Geert de Kremer, better known by the Latinized version of his name, Gerardus Mercator (1512–92). The secret was not to locate every place on the map at its correct distance from every other place, as Piri tried to do, but to situate them at the correct angle from every other, with precise geometric regularity. The method has been described as projecting the world onto a cylinder, then unrolling the cylinder so that it can lie flat as a rectangle. As a result, a constant ship’s course between any two points on the Mercator projection could be drawn as a straight line that can be followed on a constant compass heading. Mercator continued the portolan practice of drawing compass roses and rhumb lines on the watery zones of his world map when he

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first printed it in eighteen sheets in 1569, but it was just decoration: a memory of the portolan tradition designed to make his map look familiar. Even though this projection is just as distorting as Waldseemüller’s adaptation of Ptolemy, Mercator’s is the wall map of the world we remember today.

MAPPING THE WORLD FROM BOTH ENDS Given the state of knowledge at the time, China and the Americas were the zones that European cartographers depicted with least accuracy. Their shape would continue to daunt cartographers for decades, for no memories existed of what these regions looked like. To draw the Americas, Europeans charted their way along their coasts and up their rivers, gradually bringing these continents into view. For China, which resisted this kind of foreign incursion, another solution emerged: borrow Chinese maps. The Jesuit missionaries who first entered China towards the end of the sixteenth century acquired Chinese maps and shared these with European merchants and states wishing to trade in East Asian waters. As a result, Chinese maps began to arrive in Europe, and some even appeared in print in European publications. It was difficult to interpret them spatially, not just because almost no one in Europe could read Chinese but because no one understood Chinese cosmological geometry. The fundamental rule of Chinese cosmology was that Heaven is round and Earth is square or at least rectangular. This notion meant that Chinese mapmakers tended to square off terrestrial shapes, including China itself, even when those shapes were not rectangular. Remembering their world as square, they drew it this way. This is a conspicuous feature of the maps that left China during the Ming dynasty. Having no sense that they might want to filter out the symbolic shaping of China, European cartographers reproduced what they saw. Curiously, the result – noticeable in the Chinae regnum map in Cornelis van Wytflief ’s Histoire universelle des Indes occidentales of 1607 – was not a true topographical image but a Chinese memory of how their country was supposed to look. As fuller nautical information about the China coast reached Europe, European mapmakers changed China to an oval shape, though some, like the English geographical annalist Samuel Purchas (ca. 1577–1626), insisted this new shape was wrong and that the correct shape of China was the Chinese version. Influence between China and Europe went the other way as well. Jesuit missionaries and ordinary travellers brought European maps with them as they fanned out across Asia. There these images interacted with indigenous mapping practices and ramified into a new, hybrid global image. Just as European map publishers wanted their readers to see an image of the world that included China, so too Chinese publishers in the opening decades of the seventeenth century reproduced European maps to engage the curiosity of their readers. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), head of the mission in Beijing, actively used cartography to entice interest, reproducing several mappae mundi in different editions and distributing them to friends and publishers alike. He is most celebrated for his 1602 printing of a common sixteenth-century alternative to Mercator’s work, known as the pseudocylindrical projection, in which the lines of longitude curve in towards the poles to create a compromise between a square

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and a circle. On this and other maps, he made a point of flipping the Eastern and Western Hemispheres so that China – which he labelled with its dynastic name of Ming Great State – was closer to where Chinese viewers would expect to find it. The result was nothing that Chinese had ever seen. Some were intrigued, but most were not persuaded, because this map reminded them of nothing they knew, except China, and even it lacked its proper shape. A Complete Map of the Earth’s Mountains and Seas (Shanhai yudi quantu) appears as the first map in the geography section of The Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers (of Heaven, Earth, and Humankind) (Sancai tuhui), an encyclopaedia completed sometime between the beginning of 1607 and the end of 1609. The map has been engraved on two half-woodblocks, so that when bound into a book it opens across two facing folio pages. It is drawn as a circle, an archetypal European design; in China only Heaven is round. The original that the publisher has copied has not been identified, but it looks to have been derived from Waldseemüller’s 1507 mappa mundi. The maps coincide in many ways, including the absence of the Indian subcontinent. But particularly striking is the rendering of the Americas. The shape of the continents in the Three Powers is particularly close to Waldseemüller’s rendering – with several telling additions. The most intriguing is Rio de la Plata (which the label translates directly into Chinese as Yinhe, river of silver) in South America. This is a river to which Ricci draws particular attention on his mappa mundi, being associated with the silver mines of Potosi in Peru. Potosi produced the silver that was flooding eastward down the Rio de la Plata to Europe and westward overland to the Pacific and thence to Manila for trading with China. This was the engine of global economic connectivity in exactly this period, and the Chinese cartographer thought it important enough to mark on his map of the world. As the engravers of the Three Powers were drawing this version of a European map of the world, other Chinese were responding to the arrival of European cartography in other ways. Unique in this regard is the Selden Map, which bears the name of the legal scholar and Orientalist John Selden (1584–1654), who bequeathed the map to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is the work of an anonymous cartographer, drawn probably for a Chinese merchant based in Java in the year 1608. Intended for display rather than navigation, this large maritime chart depicts East Asia from Japan in the upper right-hand corner to Sumatra in the lower left. The China portion has been copied from a popular 1599 household encyclopaedia, and so would have been completely familiar to a Chinese viewer, and of little interest. Instead, the map directs viewer’s attention to the zone in the lower half depicting the lands and islands bordering the South China Sea. Traced around its edges and along corridors radiating out from it are the routes that cargo ships sailed, drawn to scale as segmented lines and marked with compass bearings. Here the Selden Map defies the standard rule of cartography, which is that maps copy other maps. The cartographer has defied the power of cultural memory to produce an image that preserves commercial memories of sailing the waters of East Asia rather than recapitulate the political memories of some earlier Chinese map. To even imagine this possibility, he probably saw a European portolan chart before designing his own, though his intuitive method for rendering data about sailing routes into a

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single visual format was his own. This is the point at which the separate traditions of European and Chinese cartography begin to construct a common visual image of the world.

MEMORIES OF THE MONGOLS The Selden Map pictures the world as a network of maritime routes into which have been blended memories of European and Chinese representations. Curiously, one Chinese memory that the Selden cartographer includes is Xanadu, the fabled Mongol capital that Samuel Coleridge celebrated in his poem, ‘Kubla Khan’. The Selden Map depicts Xanadu – Shangdu in Chinese – in the north-east corner of China below the Great Wall. It particularly stands out for having a label in the shape of a double gourd rather than the circle the cartographer uses for all other place names. Khubilai Khan ordered this city built in 1256 but abandoned it nine years later in favour of Khanbalik, now Beijing. By 1608 Xanadu would have been nothing but a pile of ruins that no Chinese traveller would have bothered to visit. By retaining it, this map embeds the centuries-old memory of the Mongol conquest of China. Martin Waldseemüller does something similar on his Carta Marina. Xanadu is not marked but Khanbalik is, the capital to which Khubilai moved after abandoning Xanadu. Waldseemüller’s source was Marco Polo, who spent years at court there and brought his tales with him back to Europe, circulating them to readers about 1300 – just when Richard of Haldingham and Lafford was drawing the Hereford Map, as it happens. Waldseemüller labels the city as Cambalu Metropolis (City of Khanbalik). Visually, it is overwhelmed by the improbable picture to its left of Khubilai’s grandfather, Chinggis (Genghis) Khan, holding court outside his yurt. Three centuries had passed since Chinggis’s forces threatened Europe, yet when Waldseemüller had to fill in the empty spaces of eastern Asia that his new quasicylindrical projection generated, he drew Chinggis Khan and the city his grandson Khubilai built – perhaps because he had nothing else he could plausibly put there. The Mongols had a strong place in European memory. Even though they had been driven out of China for well over a century by the time Christopher Columbus set sail, he carried Polo’s Travels with him as the best source available on China. How striking that the same memory was shared at both ends of the Eurasian continent. Perhaps the Mongol traces on these maps served to remind their viewers just how vast and historically deep the world was. As this sort of culturally inflected cartography declined in favour of a more purely mathematical rendering of the world, such memories began to fall away.

THE GLOBE The geometry underpinning the creation of world maps did not produce only twodimensional maps. As European cartographers were working out the world on a flat plane, they were also creating three-dimensional globes. For Richard of Haldingham and Lafford, there was no contradiction between the roundness of the world and the

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flat surface on which we stand. For Martin Waldseemüller and his generation, this was a mathematical problem that they had to solve, and did, by publishing maps of the world on paper gores or segments. These sheets could then be cut out and pasted to a papier maché sphere. It was a remarkable achievement to be able to produce a three-dimensional object that could be constructed but not remembered, as it had no precedent. The globe was a format representing something that they thought could never be seen. But it quickly became the version in which we remember our planet. Once the globe had been invented, that 1972 photograph from space could not tell us anything new. It merely confirmed what we already knew from having seen globes all our lives. And yet something changed. This new version of the globe came at a cost to our memories. As Oscar Wilde famously quipped, ‘a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at’. On this scientific globe there would be no place for Utopia, no Eden or Pillars of Hercules, no Khanbalik or Xanadu. The satellite photograph ended the illusion that there were still places where we might discover Chinggis Khan’s yurt or Muhiddin Piri’s headless men with faces in their torsos, or otherwise flee from the reality of a limited planetary space we all had to share. Those old memories of what the world might hold had to be set aside for what is actually there.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brook, Timothy, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer, London, Profile Books Ltd, 2013. Brotton, Jerry, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, London, Allen Lane, 2012. Harley, J. B. and David Woodward (Eds.), The History of Cartography, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987. Hessler, John, Seeing the World Anew: The Radical Vision of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 & 1516 World Maps, Delray Beach, FL, Levenger Press, 2012. Monmonier, Mark, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004.

CHAPTER 2

Sharing out the world HERFRIED MÜNKLER

The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) established the practice of European powers setting out dividing lines to demarcate their territories worldwide. These lines were to reflect their rivalries over the next four centuries. In the preface to his book Civilization: The West and the Rest, in which he examines the rivalry between civilizations, Niall Ferguson wonders whether the world would have turned out quite differently if it had been the Chinese, rather than the Europeans, who had assumed the role of discoverers and conquerors. Although there can be no serious scientific answer to this question, it is enough to make us aware that there is nothing self-evident about the global supremacy enjoyed by Europeans from the late fifteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. In the fifteenth century, the Chinese were in a much better position to discover and conquer the world; they had a substantial fleet, commanded by Admiral Zheng He, which traversed the Indian Ocean up to the East African coast. China then let its fleet deteriorate, while the Europeans, at the opposite end of the Eurasian landmass, embarked on their voyages of discovery and their conquests. In this way, they became ‘discoverers’ rather than ‘discovered’ peoples. Portugal and Spain played a pioneering role in the conquest and division of the world’s territories. Bold seafarers and skilled navigators, the Portuguese advanced ever further along the African coast, until they had circumnavigated that continent; meanwhile, Spanish troops, violent and avid for gold, conquered Central and South America and destroyed the great Inca, Maya and Aztec Empires. Spanish – and, for a while, Portuguese – therefore became global languages. The Spanish in particular sent a continuous flow of gold and silver from Latin America to their homeland; this became a key factor in maintaining European economic predominance. The Europeans and the indigenous peoples of America used precious metals in entirely different ways; rather than stockpiling gold and silver or using them as primarily as indications of their power, the former transformed them into a means of payment that facilitated the exchange of goods.

A GLOBAL COMMERCIAL RIVALRY After a century, however, the two powers in the Iberian Peninsula ceased to play a leading role, and the Dutch and English took over. They established a network

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of trading posts and bases throughout the world and managed to keep the costs of operating this system as low as possible. Other powers, led by France, appeared on the scene and entered the Atlantic (and Pacific) commercial trade networks, thereby introducing a global dimension into the competition between European powers. In order to avoid a state of permanent conflict between them, the world was carved up into zones of influence and colonies. This process began with the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed on 2 July 1494; the Spanish pope, Alexander VI, had drawn a line dividing the world into two separate zones, one belonging to Spain, the other to Portugal. As a result of the treaty, this demarcation line, or raya, was set at a point 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. The outcome of this, which was not foreseeable at the time, was that the eastern section of South America – Brazil − would become Portuguese, while Central America and the rest of South America would be re-established as Spanish. The numerous subsequent treaties dividing these territories among the powerful nations in the western regions of Europe served a purpose as the reflection, at a global level, of the rivalry that existed between them. These treaties were one way of avoiding wars or containing them, the other approach consisting of ‘lines of friendship’ separating ‘the domain of European peace and European international law from a foreign space where warmongering and juridical anarchy reigned’.1 These lines of friendship became relevant when the Netherlands and England, both Protestant powers, grew in importance during the process of discovery and conquest; unlike Spain and Portugal, these countries rejected the notion of papal arbitration. The signing of treaties therefore gave way to the planting of flags on vast territories that became scenes of conflict in the form of so-called commerce raiding, with the aim of gaining control over land and riches. The principle of recognizing the supremacy of a particular power over a territory with a view to curbing antagonism between European nations and avoiding war was upheld at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1885. This reined in the rivalry between the great powers by formalizing various nations’ claims to territories in Africa, which thereby became their ‘possessions’. That colonial presence has left its mark on the political map of Africa. Eric Lionel Jones argues that it was through the rivalry between these powers, which was invariably settled by war, that Europe came to dominate the world order. Yet those wars also brought about its downfall, and in this way, during the twentieth century, the Old Continent lost its dominant position among the world powers.

NOTE 1. Wilhelm G. Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1984), p. 184.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ferguson, Niall, Civilization: The West and the Rest, New York, Penguin Press, 2011.

SHARING OUT THE WORLD

Jones, Eric Lionel, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981. Münkler, Herfried, Imperien. Die Logik der Weltherrschaft – Vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten, Berlin, Rowohlt, 2005.

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CHAPTER 3

The Crusades A controversy ALESSANDRO BARBERO

Viewed from a Western cultural standpoint as either heroic expeditions or criminal folly, the Crusades – which saw Christians from France, Flanders, Italy, the Holy Roman Empire and England set off in order to conquer Jerusalem and swathes of territory in the Middle East – remain a source of divisive memories for Europe’s inhabitants today. On 18 March 2011, the European Court of Human Rights rejected a request from an Italian citizen of Finnish origin, Soile Lautsi, who had asked for the removal of a crucifix from her children’s classroom. The decision caused a considerable stir as two years earlier the court had deemed her request acceptable and had ordered the Italian government to pay her damages. Cases of this type occur frequently in certain European countries, particularly Italy, Spain and Switzerland, and generally arouse intense public feelings in favour of displaying the crucifix in schools. In addition to claims that it serves as an expression of national identity, the argument most often advanced is that the cross is a universal symbol of tolerance and love, and as such, it could not possibly give offence.

THE CROSS: A DIVISIVE SYMBOL The reality is that the cross has always been a profoundly divisive symbol. The fact that Christ underwent the ordeal of crucifixion long fuelled the suspicions of the Roman authorities against the Christians, as they were capable of following a leader who was manifestly a criminal. The Christians themselves were so well aware of this that the cross rarely featured in their iconography during the first couple of centuries of Christianity. Signs of its establishment as a universal symbol of the Christian religion did not emerge (timidly) until the time of the Emperor Constantine, when Christians were no longer subject to persecution. The creation of the crucifix confirms the fact that from the Middle Ages onwards, Jesus and the cross were conceived as being in a close symbiotic relationship − but solely by Christians. Muslims, who revere Jesus as a great prophet, find the idea of his

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death on the cross so repugnant that, according to Islamic doctrine, the son of Mary was spared that ordeal and ascended, living, into heaven. Consequently, Muslims who send their children to school in Catholic countries are consistent in venerating the memory of Christ while deeming the display of the crucifix to be blasphemous. In 1095, Christian pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem took to sewing a cross inside their garments. Pope Urban II had called on the faithful to embark on a new type of pilgrimage, and the symbol they adopted assumed an unquestionably bellicose air as an expression of the crucesignati’s determination to achieve their aim at all costs by means of the sword. The cross was a declaration of war and a symbol of conquest; indeed, following the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the pilgrims erected a cross on the Dome of the Rock − which Saladin was quick to remove when he reconquered the Holy City several years later. In the fifteenth century, the memory of that profanation still appalled the Egyptian chronicler Ibn Taghribirdi, who described it as follows: ‘[. . .] what is forbidden is made licit [. . .]. The cross has been set up in the prayer-niche. Pig’s blood would be suitable for it now.’1

THE CRUSADE: A MODERN TERM Our history textbooks describe the enterprise initiated by Urban II in 1095 as the First Crusade. No one gave it that name at the time. Those who embarked on the journey felt themselves to be pilgrims and were described as such. The term ‘crusader’ is an alteration of the Italian and French words crociato and croisé, which referred to those who had sewn a cross into their garments as a signum. It was no doubt quickly established in the vernacular languages. One of the characteristics of medieval culture was a sensitivity to visual symbols – this was perhaps even more pronounced than in our own – and the cross became a highly popular logo. No one, however, thought to give a name to their voyage or their war. Once Jerusalem was conquered, the crucesignati proclaimed it the capital of a Christian kingdom in the Holy Land and their leaders immediately began wrangling over the crown. In the meantime, the fight was far from over, as they were surrounded by Muslims intent on throwing the infidels into the sea and winning back their Holy City. Christian volunteers with crosses sewn into their clothing continued to arrive there but in a disorderly fashion. It was not until half a century later, in 1145, that Pope Eugene III invited the faithful to take up arms once more and embark en masse on another campaign, as the victories won by Zanki, the Emir of Mosul, were giving him cause for concern. The history books refer to this as the Second Crusade, but in this case too, the expression was not in use at the time. The volunteers who set out on this voyage proudly referred to themselves as ‘pilgrims’ in their songs. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an increasing number of relief expeditions, and it therefore seemed necessary to find a specific name for something that was evidently a phenomenon in its own right, was distinct from all others and had become a regular occurrence. The notion that the pope could call on the faithful to go

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to war against the enemies of God and the Church of Rome whenever the need arose had become established in the collective mindset. Those who took part in the campaigns knew that they were entitled not only to spiritual rewards in the form of indulgences but also to practical, juridical and fiscal privileges. Soon the papal exhortations extended beyond the defence of the Holy Land to the propagation of Christianity in Eastern Europe and the fight against heretics; there were even calls for action against Christian kings who challenged Rome’s directives. The people of that era, however, associated the Crusades primarily with expeditions across the Mediterranean Sea, just as we do today. The desire to accomplish the pilgrimage to Jerusalem so that one could say the words ‘I came to you’ to Christ on Judgement Day and the wish to confront the wicked infidels merged with the dream of a new world in the collective imaginary. That world was a frontier beyond which everyone could experience a rebirth; the Holy Land, then known as the ‘Outremer’ (‘the land beyond the sea’ in French), was our medieval ancestors’ version of the Far West. This explains why the vocabulary associated with the Crusades consistently emphasizes the idea of a voyage. The most frequently recurring terms in the official papers, which were written in Latin, are passagium generale and iter Hierosolymitanum. In French, which was spoken by English and Norman, as well as French knights, and was therefore the language most frequently heard during the Crusades, the phrases used were le saint veage and le pelerinage de la croiz. When, then, did they become known as the Crusades? The answer to that is, much later on, and in a roundabout manner. In the early thirteenth century, terms such as crozada and croiserie began to emerge in sources written in vernacular languages, although they had no equivalent in Latin, the official language of administration and culture. The usage of the term cruciata spread between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but for some time it referred solely to ecclesiastical taxes levied with the authorization of the pope in order to finance the expeditions. The term cruzada was still being used this way during the sixteenth century, in the country most deeply engaged in the permanent war against the Muslims – the Spain of the Catholic Monarchs. It was also the meaning of the word ‘crusade’, originally spelt ‘croisade’, when it appeared in English in the late sixteenth century, as indicated in the Oxford English Dictionary. Its current written form was not established until the eighteenth century, when the term was adopted in all European languages, with the meaning we have given it today. As is often the case with the profession of history, one cannot name or conceptualize an event or a historical phase until it has ended. It was in the early eighteenth century, when the last manifestations of the spirit of the Crusades were abating, that historians quantified the number of campaigns that had taken place; the commonly accepted total given in textbooks today is nine, counting as the last of these the ill-fated expedition to Tunis led by Louis IX in 1270.

A NEW IDEA: THE HOLY WAR Yet in this case, were his contemporaries aware that the speeches delivered by Urban II and the conquest of Jerusalem marked the beginning of a new era? One might be tempted to answer that they were not. The pope’s initiative was launched during a period when the conflicts with the Muslim world had been growing increasingly

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radical in character for quite some time. In Spain, the Reconquista was already well under way and the permanent war taking place on the frontera was attracting the attention of the rest of Europe. In the East, the Turkish advance was threatening the Byzantine Empire, the last Christian power in that distant region. In 1071, Sultan Alp Arslan triumphed at the Battle of Manzikert and captured the Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes. Over several generations, Christian communities and foreign pilgrims in the Holy Land were the target of repeated surges of intolerance. In 1009, the mad Caliph Al-Hākim had ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which however was soon rebuilt by the Byzantine emperor, Constantine. Nevertheless, the pope’s intervention did indeed initiate a new era. In the words of the monk Guibert de Nogent, a contemporary witness and author of one of the most important chronicles of what we now term the First Crusade: instituit nostro tempore praelia sancta Deus – God has instituted in our time holy wars.2 Guibert de Nogent had a talent for formulating effective statements, as demonstrated by the title of his chronicle, which has now become famous: Gesta Dei per Francos (The Deeds of God through the Franks). Its aphoristic character aside, it touched on a fundamental point; until then, in the Christian world, there had been talk of ‘righteous’ wars but never of a ‘holy’ war. And even the establishment of the concept of a righteous war had not been a smooth process; the first martyrs included soldiers who endured torture or death as they believed that warfare was not the business of Christians. It was not until the early fifth century that Saint Augustine reached a conclusion that still has some currency today, for want of a better alternative: ‘we wage war in order to obtain peace.’3 Yet throughout the Early Middle Ages, the Church imposed a penalty on any soldier who killed in combat, even in a righteous war waged on the orders of a Christian sovereign. Everything changed with the pilgrimage of 1095–9. When he guaranteed that those who joined the campaign would be absolved of their sins, Urban II was certainly not thinking to override the powers that had always been exercised by the clergy. Nevertheless, the crucesignati understood that anyone who killed in the name of the cross was not committing a sin – quite the reverse, he was fulfilling the divine will. Two generations later, the most cultured clergy assimilated this. In his praise of the Knights Templars, that great propagandist of the Second Crusade, Bernard de Clairvaux, wrote: ‘But the Knights of Christ may safely fight the battles of their Lord, fearing neither sin if they smite the enemy, nor danger at their own death; since to inflict death or to die for Christ is no sin, but rather, an abundant claim to glory.’4 This really was the Holy War – where you could achieve a martyr’s glory by killing, as well as by being killed.

THE LONG ERA OF THE CRUSADES In the history books, the era of the Crusades ends with the fall of the last Christian city in the Holy Land, Saint Jean d’Acre, in 1291. It seems normal to us that, until that date, popes and kings were obsessed by the defence of Jerusalem and later by

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its reconquest, following Saladin’s capture of the city in 1187. We are not surprised to learn that the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa took up the cross at nearly seventy years of age and met his death by drowning in a river in Asia Minor, thousands of kilometres from the Empire he had ruled for thirty-eight years. We accept as normal the fact that Saint Louis (Louis IX of France) crossed his kingdom on foot, dressed as a pilgrim, and set sail from Aigues-Mortes in order to invade Egypt at the head of an army that he led to its doom, and that, despite this disaster, he made a similar attempt twenty years later; this time he invaded Tunisia, being constantly on the lookout for a gap in Muslim defences. When we learn from Jean de Joinville’s account that the second pledge made by the king was greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, and that few of his vassals agreed to accompany him, we might assume that the era of the Crusades was drawing to a close and that the death of the king, struck down by illness during that Crusade, seems a fitting epitaph for a bygone period of history. And yet the Crusades most definitely did not end in 1291, which complicates the matter. Steven Spielberg played with this concept in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; however, what was not known at the time, and what we now do know, was that Jerusalem would never again be conquered by Christian powers − at least, not until 1917, when General Allenby entered the city (‘Jerusalem is rescued by British after 673 Years of Moslem Rule’, proclaimed the New York Herald triumphantly). The truth is that the Crusades continued; for the most part, they were conducted against that growing Islamic power, the Ottoman Empire, despite an almost uninterrupted string of defeats, from Nicopolis in 1396 to Varna in 1444. But the idea that had the greatest hold over the public mind was that Christians had a duty to reconquer Jerusalem, despite shifting political parameters and the emergence of new cultural trends, as medieval civilization was reaching its culminating phase, known to us as the Renaissance. In this way, the Crusade was included among the obsessions of the great fourteenthand fifteenth-century female mystics, who embodied a new way of understanding religiosity, in a feminine form. At the time of the Great Schism, Catherine of Siena was writing to the pope and the cardinals, tirelessly reiterating the Christians’ need for peace so that they could make the journey to Jerusalem. During the Hundred Years’ War, Joan of Arc wished to drive the English from France so that King Charles VII would finally be free to devote himself to his chief duty – the Crusades. With the birth of humanism came the desire to emulate the ancient Greeks and Romans, and Petrarch invited Christians to engage in the Crusades just as the Greeks had engaged in the Median Wars. At the Burgundian court, pledges to depart for the Holy Land were made during sumptuous knightly banquets, described by Johan Huizinga in The Autumn of the Middle Ages as the swansong of a civilization. Yet during the same period, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who had become Pope Pius II and who represented humanist culture in its most modern and outwardly most cynical form, threw all his energies into organizing a crusade. He died in the port of Ancona while waiting for the fleet bound for Jerusalem. Inquisitors such as Tomás de Torquemada contemplated involvement in crusades, as did Christian humanists like Nicholas of Cusa and the new philosophers, such as Marsilio Ficino, who were influenced by

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pagan traditions. Moreover, certain masterpieces by Piero della Francesca, including The Flagellation of Christ, held in Urbino, cannot be understood unless one is aware that they are underpinned by the dream of reconquering Jerusalem.

DISSENTING VOICES Astonishingly, few critical voices were raised. Erasmus of Rotterdam readily emphasized the fact that the Christians of his day were worse than the Turks and that the wars led by Christian princes against the sultan were not always exemplary. However, he too agreed that a mass departure for Jerusalem would be worthwhile if the Christian world finally proved capable of regenerating itself. Three centuries earlier, Francis of Assisi had gone further still; he arrived at the encampment of the Crusaders who were besieging Damietta, but with the aim of presenting himself, unarmed, before Sultan al-Kamil and his religious counsellors and engaging in debate with them. Being a man of his time, he naturally took it for granted that we were right and they were wrong, as proclaimed in the chansons de geste that he loved so much (paien unt tort, e chrestien unt dreit5). However, his initiative indicated that religious conversion should be achieved through dialogue, not the sword. In his own way, the Emperor Frederick II concurred. Sent to the Holy Land by the pope, he immediately began negotiations with Sultan al-Kamil – the very same ruler who had courteously dismissed Francis of Assisi, describing him as a ‘holy man’ – and obtained the agreement that Jerusalem would be declared an open city, under Christian administration. But both Frederick and al-Kamil became the targets of general opprobrium for having dared to make a pact. This was not what the majority of the public wanted from its sovereigns, in either the Christian or Muslim worlds. Critical voices, then, were always in the minority. Juan de Segovia (d. 1458), a professor of theology at the University of Salamanca who translated the Qur’an, argued that while Muslims might lawfully resort to Jihad, Christians should point out a different route by offering a unilateral peace agreement, to be followed by a conference composed of learned men. The Catholic kings, however, were too preoccupied with the development of the Reconquista to pay him any attention. The last Muslim stronghold in Spain, Granada, fell in 1492 − a fateful year that saw the Jews driven from Spain and Christopher Columbus set sail, dreaming, among other things, of returning from the Indies laden with enough riches to finance a new expedition to the Holy Land. It should be noted that there were no Crusades conducted against the indigenous American peoples. Through the Papal Bull Veritas ipsa issued by Pope Paul III in 1537, the Church decreed that the indios were human beings endowed with rights and could not be held at fault for not being Christian, a stance adopted almost from the outset. It should also be said that the forces of Christianity had already mobilized against that formidable foe, the Ottoman Empire, on two fronts, the Mediterranean and the Balkans. Meanwhile, a third front, which had opened as a result of the Reformation, was tearing the religion apart from the inside, bringing the era of the Crusades to an end.

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CRUSADES AND JIHAD And what of the war waged by the enemy? The Muslims had no clear idea of the forces driving their adversaries. They were unaware of the word ‘crusade’, which was not translated into Arabic until the nineteenth century; as they saw it, in addition to their natural impiety, the barbarous infidels were primarily motivated by greed and a desire for conquest. Nevertheless, the Islamic world also experienced the confrontation from a religious perspective. When a politically divided community noted with alarm that the enemy had penetrated the heart of the Dar al-Islam, the Caliph of Baghdad and the Seljukide Sultan reacted by calling the faithful to Jihad. A parallel between the Crusades and the Jihad therefore established itself in our culture, with both being seen as a Holy War. However, care should be taken when using that term. The jihad fi sabilillah, or ‘striving in the path of God’, which theologians call ‘the Lesser Jihad’ to distinguish it from the struggle to achieve self-control and inner purification known as ‘the Greater Jihad’, is certainly a war conducted against the enemies of the faith under the auspices of God. In Islamic culture, however, the legalistic debate over Jihad has more similarities with the Western, Christian debate over the ‘righteous war’ than the glorification of the Holy War that characterized the era of the Crusades. The parallel with the Christian Holy War becomes more valid if one is referring to the emotional impact on the faithful produced by the proclamation of Jihad, in both the past and the present. And it was this impact, rather than a sudden shift in favour of the notion of a Holy War, that motivated the Muslim sovereigns’ proclamation of Jihad in their (ultimately victorious) effort to cast the infidels into the sea.

CONFLICTS AND CONQUESTS During the period of the Crusades, Muslim intellectuals perceived that the Jihad’s new popularity had become a characteristic of their time. The early twelfth century saw the publication of a treatise, the Book of Jihad, by the Syrian preacher al-Sulami. In it, he lamented the fact that following the glorious era and great victories of the ‘rightly-guided Caliphs’ − the first successors of the Prophet − the obligation to fight for one’s faith had been forgotten, until Frankish aggression had revived it. This does not differ greatly from the approach characterizing the current revival of the Jihad; the need to vanquish the foe was seen as the means of attaining a more important objective, this being the reawakening and moral regeneration of the Muslim world. Moralists were just as uncompromising towards lazy and corrupt Muslim governments as they were towards foreign enemies − indeed, more so. In this sense, the effect produced by the Crusades endured. The Ottoman sultans did not make the mistake of neglecting the Jihad but continued to pursue it in order to prove to the public that they remained mindful of their duty. They encouraged the general feeling that beyond the frontiers of the Well-Protected Domain − presented as the confines of the Ummah, the global Islamic community − lived devious and dangerous enemies, ever ready to attack. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, medieval chronicles were ceaselessly copied and

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quoted, Muslim historians wrote accounts of the wars against the Franks and extolled their heroes, from Saladin to Baybars, and there was widespread fear in the Middle East of a repetition of these conflicts. In 1701, just as the first European history books presenting the Crusades as an insane enterprise belonging to a remote and barbarous medieval past were appearing in the West, eminent figures in Jerusalem were contesting the decision to allow the French Consul in Constantinople to stay in the Holy City. They sent a formal petition to the sultan, knowing that Jerusalem was the focus of the infidels’ attention and fearing that the latter would seek to occupy their city once again, as they so often had in the past.

SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CONCEPTIONS OF THE CRUSADES The fears expressed by those dignitaries were not too far from the truth; it had not been so long since the memory of the Crusades had acted as a living force in Christian Europe. The fact that religious motivations were merging with political ones and that in an ever-increasing number of cases overt calls to pursue the Holy War were actually intended to defend national interests may appear to us as a sign that the authentic spirit of the Crusades had been lost. However, that is due to our mistaken belief that we are able to decide what is authentic. The people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the coexistence of those two motivations as entirely normal. Martin Luther had initially regarded the expansion of the Ottoman Empire as a divine punishment inflicted on Christians for their sins and had proposed allowing it to continue unchallenged; however, he changed his mind during the first Siege of Vienna in 1529, deciding that war should be waged against the Turks in order to defend Germany and Christianity. The Rey Católico, Philip II, was thinking of Spain’s imperial interests when he asked the pope to authorize the cruzada, the tax raised to fund the Holy War, and when he launched the fleet of galleys which, together with Venetian ships, won the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. In 1611, the French scholar Jacques Bongars published his history of the Crusades, to which he had given the same title as the work by Guibert de Nogent, Gesta Dei per Francos. After this, French historiographers set about proving that the glorious saga of the Crusades was primarily a French claim to fame. Yet for the Habsburgs, who in 1683 defended Vienna against the Turks for a second time, fighting on the front line was also a matter of ensuring – at ever-greater cost – the pre-eminence of the Holy Roman Empire among the Christian powers. The war against the Turks became conflated with the memory of the medieval Crusades; Torquato Tasso’s poem ‘Jerusalem Delivered’ enjoyed cult status during the Baroque period, its success prolonging the legend of the Crusades over several generations. By demonstrating the indissoluble link between chivalry and crusading, the Italian poet created a far-reaching cultural reference at a time when European society was dominated by aristocratic dynasties that laid claim to a medieval chivalric tradition and had assimilated its values.

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PART HORROR SHOW, PART FOLLY: THE CRUSADES AS SEEN IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT The consensus then abruptly collapsed. In the Age of Enlightenment and of the philosophes, Europe’s most intellectually influential voices proclaimed a hitherto unthinkable idea − the Crusades had been a mad, absurd and criminal endeavour. They were proof of the abyss into which superstition, fanaticism and ignorance had cast medieval man and where they could still cast modern man if the latter did not learn to follow the path of reason. In his Histoire des croisades, the first version of which was published in 1750 and was subsequently included, with additions, in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, Voltaire disdainfully declared Palestine to be a ‘little province’ of no merit that compared unfavourably to Switzerland. In his view, the notion of invading it en masse, driven by religious fervour, was part of ‘an epidemic of fury [. . .] which was always marked by every cruelty, every perfidy, every debauchery and every folly of which human nature is capable’.6 The entry on the Crusades in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1754) expresses astonishment at the ‘imbecility and false zeal’ that caused people and sovereigns alike to forget their own interests and depart in droves for an insignificant little country in order to slaughter its inhabitants, all for ‘a piece of rock not worth a single drop of blood’. Diderot calculated that the Crusades had cost Europe two million men, who had left for the East and never returned. This figure caught the public imagination, was reprised by subsequent historians and continues to circulate online, in a simplified version according to which the Crusades left two million dead. Across the Channel, the same tone was adopted in historiographical studies by the intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment. In his History of England (1762), David Hume declared that the Crusades had ‘engaged the curiosity of mankind, as the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’.7 During this period, Peter the Hermit, who was scarcely mentioned at all by contemporaries and is a largely legendary figure, surged to the forefront as a prominent promoter of the Crusade. In the words of Voltaire: this man, who was a native of Picardy, [. . .] was so incensed at the exactions which he had met with in Jerusalem, talked of them at his return to Rome in such strong terms [. . .] that pope Urban II thought him the most proper person he could pitch upon to second the grand design which the popes had a long while conceived of arming Christendom against the Mahometans.8 If Voltaire was correct in stating that this ‘pilgrim of Amiens stirred up the crusades’,9 then the theory that their history (and that of the human race in general) was nothing more than a succession of absurdities was certainly proved to be true. However, although Peter the Hermit was a fanatical lunatic, the Age of Reason had no great respect for the other protagonists in the Crusades, from Urban II to Godefroy de Bouillon, and including Richard the Lionheart and Louis IX. They were seen as either Machiavellian, calculating figures, bandits greedy for the spoils of war, or naïve characters unaware of their true interests, who sacrificed their

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people for ‘the desperate adventure of possessing or recovering a tomb-stone two thousand miles from their country’,10 as Edward Gibbon wrote in the last volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788). Underlining the horrors of the Crusades or turning them into an object of ridicule was not the best way of gaining insight into their historical complexity. On the other hand, this stance could lead to an unprecedented respect for the other side’s viewpoints. Although Voltaire had written a tragedy entitled Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète (1736), in which Mohammed is presented as an unscrupulous character, he had disguised his target, as he himself later admitted, in order to attack Catholic fanaticism and had had no intention of criticizing Islam or its Prophet. In his Œuvres philosophiques he stated: ‘If his book is bad for our time and for us, it was very good for his contemporaries, and his religion even better. It must be granted that he drew almost all of Asia out of idolatry.’11 But the censors were not so easily taken in, and Mahomet le Prophète was banned after its third performance. It is paradoxical, albeit totally understandable, that in 2005, in the midst of the controversy over the caricatures of the Prophet published in a Danish newspaper, there were violent attempts to block performances of Voltaire’s tragedy in a French theatre.

THE RETURN OF THE CRUSADES: ROMANTICISM AND COLONIALISM The ironic perspective of the Enlightenment was a temporary phenomenon, however. During the French Revolution, the Vendée insurgents and the Sanfedisti of the Kingdom of Naples had no hesitation in proudly referencing the Crusades, calling for the extermination of the enemies of the faith in the name of the Cross and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. During the same period, François-René de Chateaubriand was writing Le Génie du christianisme, published in 1802, in which he extolled the heroes of the Crusades and their self-sacrificing, adventurous spirit. He travelled to Jerusalem himself shortly afterwards; there, he visited the tomb of Godefroy de Bouillon to pay his respects and felt himself to be the last heir of the Crusaders – the French Crusaders, as he took care to specify. Medieval chivalry was rehabilitated through the sensibilities of the Romantic era and these warriors, driven by an ideal, aroused great enthusiasm. Moreover, they seemed perfectly suited to fulfilling the new need for national heroes. England witnessed the birth of the legend of Richard the Lionheart, who had already been viewed with indulgence, even by Gibbon, and was transfigured forever through the works of Sir Walter Scott. He has continued to be celebrated in popular novels, the history paintings so beloved by the nineteenth century, young people’s literature, films and television programmes. As confirmation that times really had changed, in 1806 the Institut de France offered a prize for an essay proving that the Crusades had exercised a beneficial influence on Europe in terms of civilization, progress and freedom. A remnant of Enlightenment rationalism suggested that this influence had been unintentional,

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the motivations of those who instigated the Crusades having been anything but reasonable, yet this made little difference. The winner of the competition, a German professor, demonstrated that Voltaire had understood nothing of the matter and that the Crusades had had a decisive influence; they had put an end to feudal anarchy, brought about the rebirth of the state, enabled middle-class civilization to flourish, led to the decline of the papacy and even to the emergence of the third estate.12 European imperialist forces soon discovered even more directly relevant reasons to rehabilitate the Crusades. For his part, Napoleon does not appear to have capitalized on this theme during his Egyptian campaign. But it was enthusiastically exploited by the press during the Greek Revolution of 1821, the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and even the Crimean War of 1854, when the Turks were our allies. On that occasion, however, the Russians were most convincing in their role as the enemies of God – so much so, indeed, that in England the war was preceded by a national day of fasting, while an epic poem entitled La Croisade de Sébastopol, which cast Napoleon III in the role of the new Crusader emperor, was published in France. From then on, and until the end of the nineteenth century, the press, preachers and artists evoked the memory of the Crusades at each new stage of European penetration into the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East − when France presented herself as the champion of the Lebanese Maronites; when Ferdinand de Lesseps opened the Suez Canal; when the frontiers of the Orthodox countries in the Balkans were redrawn at the Berlin Congress to the detriment of the Ottoman Empire; and when Gordon Pasha died at Khartoum while fighting the Mahdi. In short, the Crusades had come to be regarded as a sign heralding that great surge of positive energy leading to human advancement − in other words, colonialism, as seen in the nineteenth century. When evoking the Crusaders’ victories in his Histoire des croisades (1829), Joseph-François Michaud unhesitatingly stated ‘Egypt, Syria and Greece [sic] became Christian colonies, the peoples of the East and West walked together to civilisation.’13 The Salles des Croisades, adorned with the coats-of-arms of aristocratic French families whose ancestors had fought in the Crusades, was created by Louis-Philippe at Versailles and opened in 1843. In fact, being able to boast of a Crusader ancestor had become a highly sought-after status symbol for a European aristocracy whose origins were generally much more recent. One of the consequences of this was a thriving trade in false papers and coats-ofarms; many of these cases only came to light, amid general consternation, in the twentieth century. The late nineteenth century saw a new rival enter the race for colonies and embark on the rediscovery of a crusading past: Germany. German archaeologists looking for the remains of Frederick Barbarossa carried out excavations in Tyre, and Kaiser Wilhelm II made a famous journey to Jerusalem and Damascus, where he presented himself as the successor to the Crusader sovereigns. The English press ridiculed him as ‘Cook’s Crusader’, yet Onward Christian Soldiers was becoming one of the most popular hymns in England

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and the 1910 edition of the Encylopædia Britannica described the Crusaders in glowing terms: ‘Humanity is the richer for the memory of those millions of men, who followed the pillar of cloud and fire in the sure and certain hope of an eternal reward.’ Barely four years later, the First World War broke out.

WORLD WARS AND CRUSADES Unsurprisingly, given this type of political climate, press articles, speeches and propaganda posters abounded with references to the Crusades from 1914 onwards. The Germans were less ready to make capital out of such references – after all, they had encouraged their Ottoman allies to declare Jihad. Anyone opposed to the coalition of the major colonial powers, France and England, was inevitably tempted to flirt with Islamic irredentism; Wilhelm II had his reasons for paying his respects at Saladin’s tomb during his famous visit to the Middle East. At a later date, Mussolini, keen to convince Libya’s indigenous population of his reverential attitude towards the Prophet, set up a ceremony where a Berber leader solemnly presented him with what was allegedly the Sword of Islam, although it had actually been made in a workshop in Florence. In 1940, Il Duce was planning to brandish it in a newly conquered Alexandria. Conversely, the England of 1914 identified with the Crusades to an unprecedented degree, a sentiment fuelled by a skilfully orchestrated propaganda campaign but also active in the collective unconscious. Saint George was said to have come to the aid of the Crusaders at the Battle of Antioch in 1097, leading an army of celestial knights; in 1915, it was likewise rumoured in England that the angels themselves had intervened on behalf of the ‘Tommies’ at the Battle of Mons. The news spread across the land, circulating through church sermons and press articles, and was treated as a proven fact; meanwhile, the writer Arthur Machen, who had unwittingly initiated this mass delusion through a work of fiction, repeated to anyone who cared to listen that he had fabricated the whole story. No other country attained this level of collective irrationality, and no episode comparable to the legend of the angels of Mons subsequently emerged. By the end of the war, in democratic countries, the use of the word ‘Crusades’ had become no more than a linguistic detail, albeit fraught with unanticipated consequences. But in the interwar period, the world was not solely composed of parliamentary democracies. New regimes, both right- and left-wing, were looking for language with which they could reinforce their propaganda − and there were new enemies to be presented to the public. Every time a rightwing dictator took up arms against communism, references to the Crusades automatically came to the fore in posters and newspaper headlines. El Caudillo, Francisco Franco, had the blessing of the Church in his crusade against the Republican government, falsely presented to the world as a manifestation of the ‘red’ threat. Hitler saw his invasion of the Soviet Union in the same light; not for nothing was it given the name of Germany’s most famous Crusader: Operation Barbarossa.

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THE CRUSADERS: NOT EVERYONE’S HEROES After over a century of restored popularity, the Crusaders unquestionably enjoyed a positive image as heroes in the West. In other cultures, however, that image could send out a different signal. Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) presented a negative picture of the Teutonic Knights and of the clergy who blessed their insignia, a black cross strongly suggestive of the Nazi flag. But it was above all in the Muslim world, oppressed by colonialism, where resistance to the occupiers could translate into a call to Jihad against the new crusaders. During the nineteenth century, the first modern works on the history of the Crusades were published in Arabic, and it was then that the word ‘crusade’, a neologism, suddenly appeared in the Arabic language. The charismatic leaders of the fight against the colonizers, such as Algeria’s Abd el-Kader and Libya’s Omar al-Mukhtar, drew inspiration from the Jihad. The Arab world compared the fledgling state of Israel to the Crusader states, while Franco-English aggression against Egypt during the Suez crisis (1956) evoked memories of the Third Crusade, which had been conducted by the same countries. Secular dictators like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Bashar al-Assad and Saddam Hussein liked to compare themselves to Saladin, revealing the influence exerted over them by Western culture, which had recognized his stature. The bronze monument to Saladin erected in front of the Citadel of Damascus in 1992 reminds us irresistibly of the statue of Richard the Lionheart outside the Palace of Westminster and of those of Louis IX, which stands in front of the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur and Godefroy de Bouillon – who was apparently Belgian – located on the Place Royale in Brussels. Yet the Arabs were not alone in hearing the call to fight the crusaders. Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Turk who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II, declared that he had wanted to kill the leader of the crusaders, while on the occasion of his visit to Turkey in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI was accused of preparing a crusade. As the conflict between the West, led by the Americans, and Islamic fundamentalism became widespread, the implicit ambivalence in those contrasting perceptions of the legacy left by the Crusades resurfaced, fraught with consequences. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War and later president of the United States, aroused no controversy when he chose Crusade in Europe as the title of his memoirs. When George W. Bush declared that it was time to launch a crusade against terrorism following the attacks of 11 September 2001, he may simply have been using a cliché. Yet the American president’s words were a godsend for Osama bin Laden, who saw them as the confirmation that Islam was facing the umpteenth reincarnation of that same barbaric foe, already vanquished once before and always ready to resume hostilities. The al-Qaeda leader compared Bush to Richard the Lionheart and his European allies to Frederick Barbarossa and Louis IX, an incisive observation as sarcastic as it was scholarly. Since then, it has become common practice in all fundamentalist discourse to refer to the new crusaders with derision and to call for their expulsion from Islamic lands once more. In short, the Crusades are no longer a shared European memory, although the way they were remembered in Europe differed from one era to the next. In 1964 a young Jacques Le Goff could make a joke of the meagre results

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yielded by the Crusades: ‘their only fruit [. . .] was the apricot’; half a century later, however, it is clear that there are two sides to every campaign and that the legacy bequeathed to us by the Crusades is a poisoned fruit.

NOTES 1. Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2. Guibert de Nogent, ‘Gesta Dei per Francos’, in Recueil des historiens des croisades, Historiens occidentaux, vol. IV (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1879), p. 124. 3. Augustine, Letter 189:6, quoted from Letters of Saint Augustine: The Words of the Most Celebrated Theologian of the Latin Church, translated from the Latin by John Leinenweber (Liguori, MO: Triumph Books, 1992), p. 211. 4. Bernard de Clairvaux, In Praise of the New Knighthood, III, 4, translated by Conrad Greenia, The Cistercian Fathers Series: No. 19, The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Volume 7, Treatises III, Cistercian Publications, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1977. https​:/​/ hi​​story​​.hano​​ver​.e​​du​/co​​urses​​/exce​​rpts/​​344​be​​rn2​.h​​tml 5. La Chanson de Roland, v. 1015. 6. Quoted in Jean Richard, The Crusades, c.1071-c.1291, translated from the French by Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1996]), p. 475. 7. The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688, by David Hume, Esq. (London: T. Cadell, 1841), vol. I, p. 250. 8. The Works of M. de Voltaire, translated from the French by T. Francklin, D. D. , with Notes, Historical, Critical and Explanatory by T. Smollett, M. D., and others, London, Crowder, Longman, Wilkie, Carnan and Newberry, Robinson, Baldwin, Johnson, Newberry, Goldsmith, Evans and Fox, vol. II, 1778, pp. 82–3. 9. Ibid. 10. Quoted in David S. Katz, The Shaping of Turkey in the British Imagination, 1776– 1923 (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 28. 11. Quoted in Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernards’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 252. 12. A. H. L. Heeran, Essai sur l’influence des croisades (Paris: Treuttel and Würtz, 1808), pp. 287–91. 13. Joseph-François Michaud, Histoire des croisades, vol. VI (Paris: Michaud, 1829), p. 175.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cardini, Franco, Studi sulla storia e sull’idea di crociata, Rome, Jouvence, 1993. Carpegna Falconieri, Tommaso di, Medioevo militante. La politica di oggi alle prese con barbari e crociati, Turin, Einaudi, 2011. Cobb, Paul M., The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Dupront, Alphonse, Le mythe de croisade, Paris, Gallimard, 1997. Hillenbrand, Carole, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Holsinger, Bruce, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism and the War on Terror, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007. Rousset, Paul, La Croisade. Histoire d’une idéologie, Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1983. Siberry, Elizabeth, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000. Tyerman, Christopher, The Invention of the Crusades, London, Macmillan, 1998.

CHAPTER 4

The merchant and the missionary MARINA MÜNKLER

While Marco Polo achieved widespread renown for introducing Europeans to China, Matteo Ricci, who established the first Jesuit mission in the Middle Kingdom, is known only in scholarly circles. In China, however, the two Italians are celebrated with the same enthusiasm. As confirmed by numerous films and television series, Marco Polo (ca. 1254–1324) is still a strong presence in popular memory; in contrast, Matteo Ricci (1552– 1610) remains largely confined to the memory of European Jesuit missions. Yet Ricci, who is buried in Beijing, occupies just as important a place as Marco Polo in Chinese cultural memory. Both are included in the China Millennium Monument in Beijing (inaugurated in the year 2000), where they embody an exchange based on mutual esteem. There have certainly been European symposia and exhibitions devoted to both Marco Polo and Matteo Ricci. Such events include the 700th and 750th anniversaries of the birth of Marco Polo in 1954 and 2004, and the 400th anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci in 2010. They continue to inspire a considerable amount of research, yet Ricci is absent, so to speak, from popular memory, although he did give his name to a lunar crater. Until the nineteenth century, however, they were both regarded as the principal conveyers of Chinese culture to Europe. They were born over 300 years apart, yet both spent long periods of time in China and both admired Chinese civilization. Of course, they did not experience the same culture there; while Marco Polo had acclaimed the China of the Yuan Dynasty established by the Mongols (1280–1368), it was the China of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) that aroused the admiration of Matteo Ricci. They also embodied different viewpoints. Marco Polo was the son of a Venetian merchant who had traded with far-flung countries and was interested primarily in the foundations of social wealth, including the trade negotiations, currencies and taxes established in the dynasty founded by the Great Khan. The Jesuit missionary, on the other hand, saw Chinese culture, and particularly Confucianism, as the anchor point of his Christianizing mission, which led him to explore that culture at a deeper level than his medieval predecessor had done. Both have remained in Chinese cultural memory as the first Westerners to have accorded

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China the admiration due to her and to have introduced her to Europe through their writings. While Matteo Ricci is the object of unqualified acclaim in academic circles, doubts have been cast on Marco Polo’s credibility on several occasions over the last few decades. In 1996, British sinologist Frances Wood went so far as to claim that he had never actually been to China. As she lacked convincing arguments to support her theory, it was refuted by specialists. Nevertheless, it excited much media interest and continues to circulate. It had already been maintained that Marco Polo had met with a certain amount of incredulity, as the knowledge he was transmitting was superior to that of the Europeans, but the simple fact that his account had been translated into Latin and several European languages was sufficient in itself to disprove that theory. That ambitious work, written by an eyewitness, aroused the interest of elite groups who were attracted both by the riches of the East and by the East itself. The curiosity awakened by his missions also played a major role, prompting the Dominican chronicler Francesco Pipino of Bologna to translate Le Devisement du monde – also known as Le Livre des merveilles du monde or Le Million – into Latin in 1307. Thanks to this translation, Marco Polo was one of the few medieval authors to be read in the Modern Era. In fact, it was his book that inspired Christopher Columbus with the desire to seek out a new westward route to the ‘Indies’, specifically Cipango (Japan), which he believed to be located to the east of Cathay, outside the kingdom of the Great Khan, and whose immense riches Marco Polo had described. With the aid of maps, Matteo Ricci developed the theory that Marco Polo’s ‘Cathay’ was actually China.

THE POLICY OF ACCOMMODATION It was the Portuguese who discovered the maritime route to China in 1514, but the country they reached could no longer be recognized from Marco Polo’s descriptions. While the Mongols of the Yuan dynasty had welcomed foreigners, particularly traders − they saw commerce as one of the pillars of their vast kingdom and were happy to have newcomers participate in its affairs – the Ming dynasty adopted a more inward-looking approach and viewed foreigners with considerable suspicion. In this context, the missionaries who arrived in China in the wake of the Portuguese, among them Matteo Ricci, developed the so-called accommodation policy; this required specific knowledge of Chinese culture based on mastery of the language. Missionaries such as Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666) therefore made efforts to adapt to China, both by importing highly prized knowledge in mathematics, astronomy and cartography, and by engaging with specific elements of Chinese culture, such as Confucianism, in order to familiarize the country’s elites with Christianity. At the same time, they were keen to demonstrate to Europeans that the Chinese were a highly cultured people. Matteo Ricci’s studies on China (presented in his De Christiana Expeditione apud Sinas, first published in Augsburg in 1615) gave seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans access to knowledge of a Chinese culture that was equal − even superior − to their own. The works of Ricci and Schall aroused an enthusiasm for China in Europe; this manifested itself from the late seventeenth century to the latter half of the

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eighteenth century. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) saw Confucian China as a role model for a Europe torn apart by religious strife following the Thirty Years’ War. The philosophers of the Enlightenment showed an even greater interest in Confucian moral thinking as described by Matteo Ricci. In his Oratio de Sinarum Philosophia practica, Christian Wolff (1679–1754) used Ricci’s work to argue that it was perfectly possible to conceive a rigorous and effective ethical system without religion – which was the opposite of what Ricci himself believed. Voltaire went further in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), presenting China as the shining example of a state founded on reason. Nevertheless, as the Christianization process developed, a break with Ricci’s thinking occurred. The Papal Bull Ex illa die, promulgated in 1715, forbade Jesuit missionaries from taking part in traditional Chinese rituals, seen by certain conservative theologians as a sign of idolatry. The Catholic Church, therefore, rejected the policy of accommodation advocated by Ricci. In 1717, the Kangxi emperor responded by banning the Christianization process in China. It was not until the last quarter of the twentieth century that there was a return to the methods promoted by Ricci, a move instigated by Pope John Paul II. This perspective has been even more strongly supported by Pope Francis, the first Jesuit to occupy the papal throne.

THE GLORIOUS FAME OF MARCO POLO While the memory of Matteo Ricci has therefore enjoyed a something of a revival over the past few years, at least in religious circles, Marco Polo is omnipresent in Europe and the United States − and even on the moon, where he also has a crater named after him. Airports, travel agencies, tourist guides, hotels and restaurants, as well as a multitude of products ranging from pasta to footwear, all bear his name. Every year since 2009, New York has held a Marco Polo Festival, celebrating the contributions made by Italy and China to American culture and the links between the immigrant communities of Little Italy and Chinatown. And more importantly still in terms of popular memory are the novels such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), and the string of films and television series in which Marco Polo occupies a clearly defined place as a hero and an adventurer: The Adventures of Marco Polo (United States, 1938); Marco Polo (France/Italy, 1961); La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo (France, 1965); Marco Polo (a four-part TV film, Italy, 1982); Marco Polo (United States, 2006) and Marco Polo, a two-season, twenty-episode Netflix web series (2014). The fact that the image presented of him in these films bears no resemblance to what he has revealed in his book is of no importance. By a cruel twist of fate, it is the Venetian merchant, not the Jesuit missionary, who has fired the collective imagination.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Avarello, Vito, L’Œuvre italienne de Matteo Ricci: Anatomie d’une rencontre chinoise, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2014. Fontana, Michela, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court, translated from the Italian by Paul Metcalfe, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011 [2008].

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Gaunt, Simon, Marco Polo’s ‘Le Devisement du monde’: Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2013. Larner, John, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1999. Münkler, Marina, Marco Polo. Leben und Legende, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2015. Po-Chia Hsia, Ronnie, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552-1610, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010. Reichert, Folker E., ‘Columbus und Marco Polo – Asien in Amerika. Zur Literaturgeschichte der Entdeckungen’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 15 (1988): 1–63. Spence, Jonathan, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, New York, Viking Penguin, 1984. Vogel, Hans-Ulrich, Marco Polo Was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2013.

CHAPTER 5

Surveying the world TERESA PINHEIRO

Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama were celebrated by their contemporaries as heroes of the age of European expansion. Rediscovered in the Enlightenment, the two navigators were used to serve nineteenth-century colonialist discourse before their star faded with the end of imperial rule. They stand on high pedestals just a few metres apart, like two watchful brothers-inarms. Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama now adorn the Kornhausbrücke, the bridge linking the old city of Hamburg with the new, chic district of Speicherstadt, or ‘Warehouse City’. Columbus, who stands at the east end of the bridge, rests his left hand on an oar while in his right he holds an astrolabe; his sword is thrust into its sheath. At the opposite end stands Vasco da Gama, grasping his sword in his left hand. It might initially seem surprising that this sculptural ensemble should be encountered in the heart of a northern German Hanseatic city. When Columbus reached the West Indies in 1492, he was in the service of the Crown of Castile; six years later, Vasco da Gama discovered the maritime route to India, having been commissioned to do so by the king of Portugal. Therefore, as national heroes in Spain and Portugal, it is only natural that Columbus and da Gama have been central elements of the national narratives of those two countries since the sixteenth century and that they have continued to play a leading role in those narratives over the ages. But what role are those statues playing in Germany? Columbus and da Gama have also been immortalized in other European cities, as statues and in the names of streets, squares and buildings. Does the presence of the two navigators outside Portugal and Spain confirm the particular influence they have had on the development of a collective European identity? Do Columbus and da Gama embody the essential ‘excess of symbolic significance’1’ that makes them a European realm of memory?

THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN EXPANSION Portugal and Castile were pioneers of European expansion in the late Middle Ages. This may serve as an initial explanation as to why Columbus and da Gama became conveyors of European identity, not just for Spain and Portugal but for the lands

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beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Yet the process of expansion had begun with the conquest of Ceuta in North Africa in 1415, carried out by the troops of King John I of Portugal. Why, then, did Columbus and da Gama become its icons? During the first century of its history, the main aim behind European expansion was not to dominate the seas or explore the world, as the focus of the commemorative gaze later suggested. The objective was to discover a way of travelling by sea from Europe to India as an alternative to the overland route, which was dominated by Arab and Italian merchants. The fact that da Gama began his quest by sailing around the continent of Africa while Columbus went westwards was due to the stipulations set out in the Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479), whereby the world was divided into spheres of influence. According to the terms of this treaty, the territories situated to the south of the Canary Islands were the property of the Crown of Portugal. Once the treaty had been signed, Portugal conducted its expeditions along the western Coast of Africa, until Bartolomeu Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. Yet it was Vasco da Gama who entered the history books, for having led an expedition that set sail from Lisbon on 8 July 1497 and reached Kozhikode (Calicut) on 20 May 1498. The expedition led by Christopher Columbus was no doubt prompted by the same aim. Being prohibited from circumnavigating Africa by the terms of the Treaty of Alcáçovas, the Spanish had no choice but to take the westward route. However, the Iberian sovereigns’ reluctance to finance his expedition is proof that Columbus’s contemporaries did not see this as a realistic alternative. Having spent much time fruitlessly trying to interest King John II of Portugal in his project, Columbus made several attempts to gain the support of the Catholic Monarchs and was finally successful. Their advisers’ scepticism with regard to Columbus’s nautical calculations was unquestionably justified – and his erroneous reckonings certainly had the most momentous effect of any blunder in European history! Both da Gama’s discovery of the maritime route to India and Columbus’s arrival in the Americas certainly had far-reaching and varied consequences on the history of the two Iberian kingdoms. In the case of Portugal, they introduced an era during which that country had the monopoly on the spice trade between India and Europe, bringing the kingdom great wealth and influence. In that of Spain, the success of Columbus’s expedition was less obvious. First, Columbus had not reached India; secondly, neither the size of the continent of America nor the actual nature of that discovery were assessed at the time. Spain only established its empire in America after Hernán Cortés had conquered that of the Aztecs.

COLLECTIVE IBERIAN MEMORIES As Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies and da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India did not have the same political and strategic importance, their respective receptions in the cultures of remembrance of the two Iberian nations were markedly different. Shortly after da Gama’s arrival in India, historiographical accounts characterized by a nationalist tone presented the event as a groundbreaking act of

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epic proportions. Later, during the sixteenth century, Portuguese historiographers sought to elevate Portugal’s dominance in Asia to the same level as that of the major empires of the past. What is striking about those initial written accounts of territorial expansion is the conscious act of remembrance involved. This is the case, for instance, with the História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses (1551–61) by Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, who presents the conquest of India as a cornerstone of national Portuguese identity. According to de Castanheda, the superiority of the Portuguese stemmed from their transcendence of empirical boundaries; like other peoples, they conquered territories, not by taking overland routes but by travelling across unknown seas.2 Here, de Castanheda introduces an element that transforms Vasco da Gama’s voyage into one of the themes of European memory culture; the discovery of the sea route to India was epic in character, not on account of Portugal’s subsequent political domination or commercial pre-eminence in the spice trade but in terms of an epistemological revolution, of the transcendence of the limits of knowledge and experience and of the conquest of the seas, seen as an improvement on the contributions made in the Age of Antiquity. In Os Lusíadas, Luís de Camões expresses the same idea, using various ways to ensure its exportability as a European narrative genre; these include the adoption of the epic form. Portugal is presented here as Europe’s head: ‘As crown to this wide empire, Europe’s head, / Fair Lusitania smiles [. . .].’3 Moreover – and this plays a role in the conception of Vasco da Gama as a European realm of memory – while the epic poem certainly celebrates the valour of all Portuguese people, da Gama figures prominently there as a primus inter pares. Both in his ship’s journal and his letter to Luis de Santángel, Columbus took care to establish himself as a heroic figure in Spain, adopting a eulogistic tone. The navigator narrated the story of his voyages as if they were a holy blessing for the Catholic Monarchs and polished his self-portrait as a ‘Porter of Christ’.4 The biography written by his son, Fernando Colón, likewise emphasizes Christopher Columbus’s religious dimension, presenting him less as an intrepid navigator than as a missionary aware that he was working for the Church.

COLLECTIVE EUROPEAN MEMORIES That symbolic year, 1492, has played a central role in the European canon of remembrance since the sixteenth century. Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies is a paradigmatic embodiment of the desire to learn and to transcend one’s own horizons of perception – over time, his first voyage led to the realization that the Atlantic Ocean was clearly navigable. The memory of Vasco da Gama is also established within the discourse on Europe as a community of knowledge − for mastery of the oceans, especially the circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope, was only made possible through advances in nautical, cartographic and mathematical knowledge.

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This inscription into the European collective memory occurred in several stages. The impact of the discovery of the Americas on Europe was first expressed by writers such as Gonzalo Fernándo de Oviedo in his Historia general y natural de las Indias, Bartolomé de las Casas in Historia de las Indias and Peter Martyr d’Anghiera in De Orbe Novo Decades. D’Anghiera, for example, wrote: ‘Certainly the Spain of to-day deserves the highest praise for having revealed to the present generation these myriad regions of the Antipodes, heretofore unknown, and for having thus enlarged for writers the field of study.’5 As a European point of reference, then, Columbus serves the cause of science; his main conquest was his venture into new worlds, which broadened the scope of European knowledge. The discovery of the sea route to India had a significant impact on Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. We have one example of this in the Comedia Trophea, a play written by Bartolomé de Torres Naharro and performed in Rome in 1514. It recalls the ceremonial visit paid to Pope Leo X in celebration of the expeditions carried out under King Manuel I and features Claudius Ptolemy, who returns to earth to challenge the idea that the Portuguese king has discovered lands not mentioned by the geographer in his writings. In the first act, Fame tells an incredulous Ptolemy of the discoveries and conquests made by those in the service of the king of Portugal – notably that of India. Constantly interrupted by Ptolemy’s exclamations of astonishment, she concludes by declaring that such glorious acts cast the memory of the pagan kings into the shade.6

ENLIGHTENMENT MEMORY Over the centuries, Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama remained strongly associated in the European collective memory with the notion of transcending the boundaries of knowledge. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it was during the Age of Enlightenment that the two discoverers made their entrance into European cultural history. In a context characterized by the importance given to empirical rationality, by man’s position at the heart of the process that enabled him to free himself of his ‘immaturity’ (Kant) and by the drive to make the most of the world’s resources for scientific and economic gain, Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama became established as representational figures in the domains of European science and economics. In keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment, Columbus was seen as an investigator of the natural sciences rather than the ‘Porter of Christ’. Alexander von Humboldt’s praise of ‘Columbus’s vast scientific knowledge’7 perfectly reflected that spirit. Adam Smith likewise mentions Columbus and the discoveries of da Gama in the same breath, as major events in human history: ‘The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.’8 However, in Smith’s view, what distinguished these discoveries was

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not the victories they achieved in terms of scientific knowledge but rather the establishment of a system that encompassed the entire world: ‘The colonies of Spain and Portugal, for example, give more real encouragement to the industry of other countries than to that of Spain and Portugal.’9 In this way, Smith, an economist and a representative of the Scottish Enlightenment, was presenting the two navigators as European realms of memory; the European discovery of America and of the maritime route to India heralded the creation of a global economic system. With the emergence of the modern nation states during the nineteenth century, Columbus and da Gama became engraved on Europe’s collective memory – both literally and figuratively. During a century that witnessed a boom in commemorative monuments, statues of the two discoverers sprang up like mushrooms on European soil, particularly in 1892, the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas. Logically, this mania for monuments was especially pronounced in the countries connected with them – Spain, Portugal and Italy – but tributes were also paid to Columbus and da Gama elsewhere in Europe, in the form of monuments, street names and public ceremonies.

NATIONALIST MEMORY The monuments to Columbus and da Gama still standing in European cities reflect the significance of the latter half of the nineteenth century as the period during which the patrimonialization of the discoveries reached a peak. In Spain, two large monuments were erected in the country’s two largest cities to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies. At the opening of the Barcelona World’s Fair in 1888, the Columbus Monument was inaugurated on the Plaça del Portal de la Pau, a central square situated opposite the old port. The monument to Columbus in Madrid was erected on the Paseo de la Castellana in time for the jubilee on 12 October 1892. In Portugal too, the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the sea route to India provided an opportunity to establish the memory of Vasco da Gama in the public space. In 1880, the remains of the navigator – and, remarkably, those of Luís de Camões, who had erected a literary monument to him – were transferred to the Jerónimos Monastery in the parish of Belém in Lisbon, where they were solemnly inaugurated. The Vasco da Gama Aquarium opened its doors in 1898, during the anniversary celebrations of the discovery of the maritime route to India. At a time when Spain had lost its American colonies and Portugal’s colonial territories in Africa were being threatened by the British ultimatum of 1890, the 400th anniversary celebrations in both countries were devoted entirely to serving the national narratives hailing the discoveries made in the fifteenth century. Italy also participated in these commemorations – after all, Columbus may have been Genoese. A bust of the explorer was therefore ceremoniously inaugurated in Rome in 1892. Several other Italian cities, Genoa in particular, likewise erected

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monuments, statues and plaques honouring his memory during this period. In the case of Italy too, Columbus had to be acclaimed as a national hero, the aim being to celebrate the Italian contribution to Europe’s global supremacy. Portugal, Spain and Italy had their own historical reasons for presenting themselves as nations of discoverers in the era of nationalism. On the whole, this commemorative fever was quite logical. What is surprising, however, is that countries like Germany and Austria also honoured Columbus and da Gama by establishing realms of memory associated with them. It was in this context, for instance, that the statues of the two discoverers mentioned at the beginning of this text were installed on the Kornhausbrücke in Hamburg. They were created by the sculptors Hermann Hosaeus and Carl Börner at the request of the city authorities and inaugurated in 1903. When the statues were initially erected, they fulfilled one of the needs of the local politics of memory by emphasizing Hamburg’s identity as a Hanseatic city, her gaze directed across the sea. Yet the fact that Columbus and da Gama were chosen to symbolize the opening of the world − together with James Cook and Ferdinand Magellan, whose statues previously stood at the southern end of the bridge − reveals the nature of the discourse of memory characterizing that era. Both embodied the imperialist thrust of the European powers; this reached a peak in the late nineteenth century, at the time of the jubilee celebrations marking the discoveries of Columbus and da Gama. The statue of Columbus at Bremerhaven was inaugurated in 1897 in the same context. Looking beyond the dynamics of local remembrance, we can perceive in these initiatives the desire to establish Germany as part of the European colonial project. The appropriation of Columbus and da Gama, figures inscribed in the collective memory, effectively emphasized the imperialist ambitions of the German Reich, founded in 1871, under Wilhelm II. This interpretation is reinforced by the names given to streets in Germany’s industrial cities, which likewise defined themselves by their participation in global trade; Dresden’s Columbusstrasse, for instance, was inaugurated in 1892, just in time for the jubilee. Further examples include Munich (1893), Solingen (1897), Bremen (1898), Mülheim an der Ruhr (before 1902) and Düsseldorf (1909). A similar phenomenon occurred in Austria. Several monuments dedicated to Columbus and da Gama still stand in Vienna today, although, unlike Germany, the country did not participate in the race to build an empire, with Africa as the main prize. As was also the case with Germany, the Austrian monuments helped to construct a national identity that conformed to the colonial mindset of the time. The steps leading to the entrance of the neo-Classical Vienna Business School, for instance, are flanked by two statues, one of Adam Smith, the other of Columbus. These examples illustrate the latter’s potential as a focus for the collective memory. Austria–Hungary was certainly not a colonial power in any formal sense but was keen to participate in the European imperialist free trade system. In this way, like Germany, Austria confidently positioned itself among the European colonial powers. We can also look to Vienna’s Museum of Natural History for indications of the place

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occupied by the two navigators in the Austrian national consciousness. A symbol of the appropriation of the world by the scientific disciplines, the museum features four statues of the very same discoverers who stood at the Kornhausbrücke in Hamburg: Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook. These were the four canonical figures of the history of discovery in the early 1900s.

COLUMBUS AND DA GAMA – A FOCUS FOR COLLECTIVE MEMORIES IN A UNITED EUROPE? With the benefit of hindsight, we can identify the role played by Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the birth of a European imaginary associated with discoveries. But what place do they occupy in the specific construction of a European culture of remembrance in the context of European unification? The need to find points of reference that would enable European states to form an alliance and would also gain the support of their citizens prompted the launch of several initiatives originating from historical policies. Yet while the war, the Holocaust and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century have become European realms of memory − even foundational elements of a united Europe − Columbus, da Gama and other discoverers have played little part in the presentation of a European identity. The notion of expansion as a cornerstone of this identity appears problematic now that the process of European integration is underway in the postcolonial era. Nevertheless, warily revisiting the legend of the discoverer (but not of the conqueror), the European Space Agency chose to name its contribution to the International Space Station the Columbus Laboratory. Accordingly, the rhetoric adopted for the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of America in 1992 differed from that of the 400th anniversary, both at national and at European level. Spain, which had sought to present itself as a former nation of discoverers, came up against strong resistance from Latin America. In 2015, the city of Buenos Aires had its statue of Columbus dismantled and replaced by a monument honouring the independence fighter Juana Azurduy. The ceremonies commemorating the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the sea route to India likewise presented Portugal with the opportunity to portray itself as a nation of discoverers; yet the focus had shifted to the ocean and to the ecological threat facing the seas today. The unease triggered by the colonial legacy has not yet led to the dismantling of the monuments to the discoverers erected in the cities of Europe. But they certainly lost much of their importance in the period following the end of war – so much so that the statues of Magellan and Cook on the Kornhausbrücke in Hamburg, which were destroyed by a bombardment, have not been reconstructed. Those of Columbus and da Gama, conversely, have not only been preserved but were also renovated at considerable cost – just in time for the 800th anniversary of the port of Hamburg. The fact that sites of memory dedicated to Columbus and da Gama have survived outside Spain, Portugal and Italy confirms their continuing ability to stabilize local identities, particularly in port cities such as Hamburg and

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Bremerhaven. The latter example serves as proof that the appropriation of these discoverers is not necessarily at odds with the critical perspective on colonialism that forms part of modern European identity. The commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of the Americas included the unveiling of a plaque, placed just in front of the city’s monument to Columbus, describing the devastating consequences of these discoveries. This kaleidoscopic image reveals a multifaceted Europe confronting collective identity at local, national and supranational levels. The efforts made after the war to construct a European identity centred on the historical eras and heroes that would enable a community based on values to maintain its own idea of itself: the Age of Antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and, on the negative side, the wars, totalitarian regimes and the Holocaust in the twentieth century. The ambiguous character of European expansion – whose consequences remain evident today in the imbalances that exist in the world – continues to prevent us from having a critical, enlightened relationship with that period. As European realms of memory, Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama remain – temporarily, perhaps − in storage.

NOTES 1. Étienne François and Hagen Schulze, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. I (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), p. 16. 2. Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses (Coimbra: João Álvares, 1551–61), Introduction. 3. Wilhelm Storch, Luís de Camõens, Die Lusiaden (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1883), p. 83. The Lusisad or the Discovery of India, translated from the Portuguese by William Julius Mickle, Oxford, printed by Jackson and Lister, Book III, 1776, p. 92. 4. Titus Heydenreich, ‘Columbus I: Das Gedenkjahr 1892’, in Europäische Erinnerungsorte, ed. Pim de Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2012), p.29 sq.; Roland Bernhard, Geschichtsmythen über Hispanoamerika. Entdeckung, Eroberung und Kolonialisierung in deutschen und österreichischen Schulbüchern des 21. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2013), p. 42. 5. The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, translated from the Latin by Francis Augustus MacNutt, vol. I (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), p. 180. 6. Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, História da Expansão Portuguesa, vol. I: A Formação do Império (1415-1570) (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1998), p. 441. 7. Alexander von Humboldt, Kritische Untersuchungen über die historische Entwickelung der geographischen Kenntnisse von der Neuen Welt und die Fortschritte der nautischen Astronomie in dem 15ten und 16ten Jahrhundert (Berlin: Nicolai’sche Buchhandlung, 1836), p. 541. 8. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edinburgh, printed by John Brown, 1811, vol. II, book IV, p. 488.

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9. Ibid., book IV, p. 490.

BIBLIOGRAPHY François, Étienne and Hagen Schulze, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. I, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2001. Gerst, Thomas, ‘Deutschland und das 400-jährige Jubiläum der Entdeckung Amerikas’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, vol. 25: 1 (1988): 849–60. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

CHAPTER 6

Who discovered America? CHRISTINE CADOT

America was ‘discovered’ by Christopher Columbus – at least, according to Europeans. For Americans, however, this is just one of many narratives. Columbus’s caravel stands among the Mayflower (the ship that brought in the first European colonists) and the ships used by the Vikings. These multiple narratives reflect divergent memories. ‘Europe discovered America in 1492.’ At least, this is the seemingly standardized narrative most frequently encountered in Europe concerning its own expansion. In the United States, however, as in the rest of the American continent, there are multiple − and very often conflictual − collective memories relating to this narrative. In June 2006, and again in June 2020, the statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston’s Columbus Park was found decapitated. In 2006, some interpreted this act as a gesture of hatred towards the descendants of Columbus, who had been assimilated into the Italian-American community. Others saw it as a sign that Native Americans were mobilizing their forces in order to achieve recognition of their rights. This was not an isolated event. Throughout the American continent, statues of Columbus are regularly spattered with red paint, often in the first fortnight in October during celebrations associated with Columbus Day. These protests seem curious from a European perspective, as in Europe Columbus continues to be presented as the main actor in the narrative governing the ‘discovery of America’. In the United States, however, this narrative is just one among many. These multiple accounts enable us to chart the history of the long collective memory of the European origins of the United States in representations of the American nation − origins sometimes perceived in a negative light. This was particularly the case in the early nineteenth century, when American intellectuals called for the creation of a genuinely American founding narrative. This was not a definitive distinction, made for the same reasons and with the same heroes, and it had its own discontinuities and instances of dominance.

A SUCCESSION OF NARRATIVES American school textbooks published in the nineteenth century therefore featured a succession of narratives, each of them exclusive – only one legitimate account was in circulation at any given time. Until the 1830s, these narratives were directed

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towards the Columbus legend. This enabled the seizing of Native American land to be presented as legitimate through the terra nullius discourse based on virgin territory there for the taking or through the contract according to which, supposedly, the ‘natives’ voluntarily gave up their lands to the first colonists. As the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37) was coming to an end, there was a move away from the narrative based on Columbus. Under Jackson’s tenure, this had fulfilled its functions by legitimizing the deportation of the indigenous peoples to areas west of the Mississippi (the Indian Removal Act of 1830), in order to enable that other ‘conquest’ of the West to take place. While the Monroe Doctrine (1823) was establishing itself as the cornerstone of American diplomacy, the caravels used by Columbus − the ‘European’ − were gradually being expunged from school textbooks, giving way to images of the Mayflower, the ship used by Pilgrims fleeing a tyrannical Europe. Those on board were all white ‘Anglo-Saxon’, pre-republican Protestants. This was the face of the ancestors of a social group particularly favoured by nineteenth-century American migration policies – the WASPS, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – who chose to distance themselves from Europe. The figure of the Pilgrim was no more enduring than that of Columbus. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the social sciences introduced a new perspective on the supposed origins of the American nation, thereby revealing the need to favour WASP immigration, which corresponded to this view. The growing importance of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in intellectual and scientific circles implicitly disclosed the context of the seminal issue in this case – the fact that a Black population previously held in slavery had acquired American citizenship – together with the concomitant issue of the considerable mistrust felt towards Asian migrants. A racist discourse triggered by the birth of anthropometry and by Social Darwinism arose in the late nineteenth century, eclipsing the narrative based on Columbus and the Pilgrims. Emphasis was now placed on the idea of ‘pure’ ancestors, described as having been at the origin of true republican practices. The Viking ships consequently eclipsed the Mayflower, while the caravels used by Columbus were merely a distant memory associated with a degenerating Europe. Leif Eriksson was the hero that late nineteenth-century America had been waiting for. In the year 1000 or thereabouts, his ships had arrived at ‘Vinland’, a coastal area thought to be located between what is now the island of Newfoundland and Labrador.

IN SEARCH OF A SINGLE FIGURE Little significance was attached to the fact that this territory now belonged to Canada, not the United States. The important aspect lay elsewhere. This first settler community, which had converted to Christianity, was thought to have created an ideal republic, where everyone – even women – enjoyed citizens’ rights. They represented both the purity of the Viking race and the pride of Scandinavian migrants − importers of a blond, blue-eyed Europe. Through poems, schoolbooks, paintings and archaeological digs, Viking imagery featured strongly in late nineteenth-century American popular culture.

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The multitude of narratives and collective memories, their extinction, their reappropriation and their contested validity, reflects the power relations between American elites in force since the country achieved independence. These conflictual memories concern the narrative applied to an event that can only be legitimately represented by one figure and one single moment; a ‘discovery’ is only truly made once. But that memory has also been reconstructed and is still appropriated by social groups who redirect its initial significance, giving it a contemporary meaning that far transcends the event itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cadot, Christine, ‘Rediscovering Columbus in 19th Century American Textbooks’, in François Gemenne and Susana Carvalho (Eds.), Nations and Their Histories: Constructions and Representations, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 93–110. Cadot, Christine, ‘Statuaire et politique. Les luttes mémorielles autour des statues confédérées de Charlottesville’, in Violaine Roussel (Ed.), Art et contestation aux États-Unis, Paris, P.U.F. / La vie des Idées, April 2019, pp. 61–81. Kubal, Timothy, Cultural Movements and Collective Memory: Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Marienstras, Elise, Les Mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine. Essai sur le discours idéologique aux Étast-Unis à l’époque de l’Indépendance, 1763–1800, Paris, Complexe, 1992. Vincent, Bernard, La Destinée manifeste: Aspects idéologiques et politiques de l’expansionnisme américain au XIXe siècle, Paris, Éditions Messene, 2015.

CHAPTER 7

Around the world A human endeavour OLAF B. RADER

The idea of travelling around the world has always exerted a fascination on Europeans, from Ferdinand Magellan to James Cook, and continues to do so today. In 1873, Jules Verne dealt with the theme in a book that made its own round-theworld journey. In 1873, a book entitled Le Tour du monde en 80 jours was published in France. Its hero, the Englishman Phileas Fogg, circumnavigates the world by hot-air balloon, train and steamboat. The title was evidently intended to surprise readers, as until then the journey had always taken several years. In the last third of the nineteenth century, however, the development of methods of propulsion, the introduction of steam-powered trains and boats and the creation of new transport routes had shrunk the world to such an extent that a round-the-world trip could effectively be accomplished in eighty days. Jules Verne (1828–1905) was the author of several books demonstrating unwavering faith in the superiority of technology over nature; these have imprinted themselves in the European collective memory. In this work, he took up a theme that had long captivated human imagination − the circumnavigation of the world. This clearly surpassed all the voyages and far-flung military campaigns accomplished by Alexander the Great, Marco Polo and John Mandeville, among many others. Yet, from the days of Antiquity onwards, those convinced that the earth was round saw its circumnavigation as a great challenge. Needless to say, however, as 70 per cent of its surface was composed of water it could not be traversed without adequate means of transport.

ACHIEVING PRESTIGE It was not until the fifteenth century that Europe laid the nautical and naval foundations for future voyages around the world. Maritime expeditions took place from the beginning of the following century, the most famous being those conducted between 1519 and 1521 by Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521), who first attempted

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to circumnavigate the globe. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a succession of round-the-world voyages by Spanish, English, French and Dutch navigators, all of whom endeavoured to discover and conquer new lands during their journeys, and to introduce trade policies there. James Cook (1728–1779), surely the most famous explorer of the Early Modern Era, embarked on this type of voyage three times from 1768. The nineteenth century witnessed about thirty Russian expeditions. One of these, carried out on board the Rurik (1815–18), is inscribed in the European collective memory on account of the presence of author and naturalist Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838) and the texts he wrote during the journey. With their prestige and self-image in mind, the then-fledgling European nations used their ships for round-the-world voyages during this period, whatever the size of their fleet. This was the case with Prussia from 1822 to 1824, with Sweden from 1839 to 1842 and with the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1857 to 1859. We should doubtless attribute the same desire for national prestige to the first ‘around the world submerged’ voyage accomplished in 1960 by the USS Triton. It was completed in sixty days, the aim being to prove that the American army had the technological capacity to conduct undersea operations for an almost unlimited period of time. With his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Jules Verne may have provided a type of literary model; his Captain Nemo commands a submarine powered by electricity, capable of remaining undersea for an almost unlimited duration and of advancing at a speed of 100 kilometres per hour. Unsurprisingly, the name of the trophy awarded for the fastest sail around the world is the ‘Jules Verne Cup’. In January 2017, it was presented to Idec Sport, which set an exceptional record; skippered by Francis Joyon, the trimaran pursued a route across the Southern Ocean, circumnavigating the world in a little less than forty days. The feat of conquering the challenge by air was achieved relatively belatedly. In 1929, the airship Graf Zeppelin took thirty-five days to accomplish the round-theworld journey. Planes had been able to do this since 1924, provided they could make several landings in order to refuel; this only ceased to be necessary in 1986. The record for the shortest time is held by the supersonic French jet Concorde, which flew around the world in a little over thirty-one hours in August 1995. For its part, the International Space Station (ISS) achieves this in about an hour and a half – more or less the same length of time as the first space flight made by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961. From this perspective, the earth has certainly shrunk spectacularly.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Horwitz, Tony, Cook. Die Entdeckung eines Entdeckers, Hamburg, Piper, 2006. Love, Ronald S., Maritime Exploration in the Age of Discovery, 1415–1800, Westport/ London, Greenwood, 2006. Verne, Jules, Around the World in Eighty Days, translated from the French by Michael Glencross, London, Penguin Classics, 2004 [1872].

CHAPTER 8

Cannons, sextants and steam engines OLAF B. RADER

European expansion and maritime domination were made possible by knowledge accumulated through emulation between major powers. This established a world order with Europe at its head and is an early example of globalization. In February 1779, the crew of HMS Resolution, which had dropped anchor at the Sandwich Islands, were horrified when a group of islanders handed them the remains of the man who was possibly the Modern Era’s most notable explorer: James Cook (1728–1779). When Cook had begun the first of his three long maritime expeditions a decade earlier, one-third of the world had never been described or mapped, and Terra Australis, the hypothetical southern continent the size of Eurasia, was still thought to exist. Before Cook, no one had travelled so many nautical miles in waters unknown to Europeans, no one had mapped so many coastlines or gathered so much ephemera. But are these the factors that have made a lasting impression on the European collective memory? Georg Forster (1754–1794), who took part in Cook’s second circumnavigation of the world and wrote several works on the subject, believed that Cook would go down in history on account of his exploits. He was mistaken. While Cook’s name is still relatively well established in European consciousness, the same cannot be said of his expeditions and discoveries. And as for the Sandwich Islands, as he called them, these have now regained their original name − Hawaii.

DISCOVERIES AND MEMORIES This example illustrates the complexity of the link that exists between the success of the expeditions and their establishment in the collective memory. An explorer who has long sailed the seas can very easily sink into almost total oblivion when another figure makes history without really having experienced life at sea, such as the Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator (1394–1460). The world of European expansion was and still remains one of collective memory and of monopoly of interpretation. It is those explorers who gave names to new lands or islands,

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names designed for their own cultural environments. And what does the word ‘discover’ actually mean in itself? Was it enough to have reached a locality? Did the Scandinavians led by Leif Eriksson (ca. 970–1021) who arrived at the shores of North America in about the year 1000 ‘discover’ America? What was there to discover at the sources of the Nile, since the regions from which the White and Blue Nile originate were already known to the African peoples inhabiting them? A discovery, then, is clearly something different. It primarily involves disembarking on land and taking action there. But it also means apprehending the geographical context of the event in a broader sense and, above all, incorporating what one has seen and explored into the knowledge and categories that form part of one’s own culture. What may then develop as interactions between the old and new cultural environments, between the familiar and the recent ‘discovery’, constitutes one more step towards our understanding of the world. When the exploits carried out by explorers appear almost insignificant, the chief question is, who remembers them and why? Certain lands, and even continents, bear names that reflect their geographical descriptions. In some cases, too, names have become detached from their former possessors and their achievements. Do Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) and the expeditions he led still remain in the collective consciousness today? Is it generally known that America is named after this native of Florence? And is it also known that, in 1507, it was due to a misunderstanding that the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1470–1518/1521) gave the name ‘America’ to the distant lands recently discovered in the West? And what of other notable explorers? Christopher Columbus from Genoa (ca. 1451–1506) was in the service of the Spanish monarchs when he unintentionally opened the new lands of America to old Europe, thereby establishing a demarcation line between the period when the New and Old Worlds coexisted independently of one another and that of their enduring interconnection. However, the double continent he approached bears someone else’s name and the fact that one country, Colombia, and a lunar crater, Colombo, were named after him is but a modest expression of the impact of his expeditions. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (ca. 1480–1521) experienced a similar fate. Under the auspices of the Spanish Crown, he undertook the first circumnavigation of the world in 1519. He never actually achieved this aim as he was killed during the voyage. Nevertheless, given the contribution he made, naming the passage between South America and the Tierra del Fuego that links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans the ‘Strait of Magellan’ (Estrecho de Magallanes) seems a very meagre gesture of remembrance. Conversely, based on the use of his name in the domains of geography and biology, one might think that Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was the most important explorer of all. At least nineteen animal species, seventeen plants and mushrooms and thirty-five geographical features, including the Humboldt Current, have been named after him, in addition to several educational and research institutes. He has remained in the collective consciousness as the ‘scientific rediscoverer of America’ and was described as a ‘new Aristotle’ on a commemorative medal struck for the Paris Academy of Sciences. As the focus of gestures of remembrance, Humboldt

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easily eclipses Columbus, Magellan and Cook, which proves that methods used to maintain memories require a material force that may far transcend that of the events in question.

THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY Yet the question of technological factors is just as important as that of the links between strategies of remembrance and methods of perpetuating memories when evaluating the way in which Europe understood the world. Why was Europe able to develop the power that led to the entire world becoming subordinate in every possible way to the second smallest continent on earth in the space of just a few centuries? What conditions were necessary to create this state of affairs, besides certain economic processes and driving forces such as the primitive accumulation of capital, the role of piracy and the development of public limited companies? Or, more specifically, can the success of the great European powers in travelling across the world and, for the most part, dominating it be attributed to technological expertise in addition to economic conditions? The answer is clearly yes; European expansion was made possible by particular technological discoveries and an accumulation of specific knowledge. However, on closer examination it becomes apparent that some of these conditions, such as navigation skills and technological developments, needed to act in synergy with other factors, without which they would have remained unique phenomena that had no subsequent effects on the history of the world. The following two examples illustrate this fact. The first concerns the Polynesians, who, by using navigation techniques that remain unexplained to this day, were capable of travelling across the Pacific in their dugout canoes, over what amounted to half of the surface area of the earth’s waters, in order to reach one specific destination among over ten thousand islands. However, in the absence of additional ‘ingredients’, such as the economic mechanism underpinning trade with distant lands or the technical skills required to build larger boats, that art of orientation, although admirable in itself, simply remains a means of finding a needle in a haystack. It therefore had no influence on other historical processes. Our second example is China; well on the way to establishing herself as a leading maritime power in the late Middle Ages, she then abruptly halted her development. At the beginning of the Ming dynasty, between 1405 and 1433, the Chinese admiral Zheng He (1371–ca. 1433) had undertaken vast expeditions in the Pacific and Indian Oceans using a large fleet of junks capable of contending with the high seas. However, for reasons that remain obscure, China withdrew from the waters by order of the emperor, and her maritime traditions, hitherto highly developed in both naval and nautical terms, fell into decline. Was this partly due to the fact that the gigantic empire was sufficient to itself? Whatever the case may have been, if China had not withdrawn from the seas, she would probably have continued to develop her maritime activities and would doubtless have allowed the Portuguese and Dutch hardly any leeway in the seas of East Asia. In Europe, conversely, there was no power or authority likely to call a halt to the continent’s multiple maritime

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activities. Even if the Portuguese, Dutch and English had decided overnight to confine themselves to dry land, other nations or companies would have leapt into the breach all the more energetically. These activities required a combination of certain basic conditions. More specifically, the rivalry and competition between European countries and powers translated the huge potential that existed in terms of exploration and, ultimately, of conquest into material results − with all the significance that this would hold for Europe’s various national collective memories.

A FRUITFUL RIVALRY This fruitful rivalry first manifested itself in the competition between explorers, who generally set out in the service of a sovereign or a country. Although monarchs were initially satisfied with calling on the best navigators available, wherever they came from, they soon added a national dimension to the expeditions in order to establish their own interests, as was the case with Spain and Portugal. In this fight for prestige, the European monarchs increasingly sought to recruit one of their own subjects, rather than a ‘foreigner’, to serve a cause that involved being the first to reach a specific locality, explore it or take possession of it. In this way, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811) was commissioned by Louis XV in 1766 to lead the first French fleet to sail around the world. Yet his expedition, which lasted from 1767 to 1769, took place just as the Englishman James Cook was setting forth to serve Britain’s ambitions in far-flung lands. Appointed by Louis XVI to lead an expedition, the French navigator Jean-François de Lapérouse (1741–1788) was inspired by Cook’s voyage through the Southern Ocean. He set sail in 1785 and met his end, like Cook, on a Pacific island. There are multiple examples of this emulation between European maritime powers conducted through their naval fleets. Yet they were fundamentally reflections of the antagonisms that already existed between merchant navies, and above all between trading companies in pursuit of profits, such as those active in the East Indies. As there were considerable sums of money at stake, markedly radical measures were adopted in terms of both legislation and the use of force, in order to protect national interests. The English Navigation Acts of the latter half of the seventeenth century, for instance, imposed a highly restrictive rule whereby merchandise destined for England could only be conveyed there in English ships, also stipulating that goods from English colonies could only be exported to the home country. Until then, the Dutch had used their vessels to convey goods for other European countries, a lucrative business they refused to relinquish without a fight. They had ample opportunity to make themselves heard in the course of three Anglo-Dutch naval wars that followed one another in quick succession in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

MEDITERRANEAN ORIGINS But how did Europe develop these maritime skills in the first place? Several sources contributed to their expertise in this domain. The most important of these, together with Scandinavian and Hanseatic traditions, was the Mediterranean; over the centuries, the countries surrounding that sea had accumulated all the experience

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required for navigation. And although since the discovery of the New World and the maritime route to India the Mediterranean was increasingly viewed as an inland sea, certain communities, in the Italian coastal cities, for example, continued to accumulate a store of nautical knowledge and to develop economic and commercial mechanisms that later benefitted trans-oceanic navigators. While it may have been a coincidence that Christopher Columbus was a native of Genoa, the immeasurable contribution to European expansion across the oceans made by Italians from Mediterranean coastal cities was no chance phenomenon. Yet, as with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, that new opening was accompanied by a gradual shift involving the main trading routes, which saw former maritime and commercial powers such as Venice and Genoa diminish in importance. Instead, new global trading hubs such as Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England and France now emerged; these in turn amassed an immense store of knowledge and gave rise to important innovations. The first beneficiaries of the traditional knowledge originating from navigation in the Mediterranean were the Portuguese. Sailing in their caravels and carracks (naus in Portuguese), ships that were widely used at that time, they were able to broaden the horizon in terms of maritime links with Asia in the fifteenth century. The ‘crowned capitalists’ − a nickname subsequently given to the Portuguese monarchs by Frederick II, king of Prussia – also established a network of ports of call along the route to the Indies in order to consolidate and store their vast commercial gains. The fabulous riches of the East were likewise coveted by the fledgling Spanish monarchy, born of the union between the crowns of Aragon and Castile. Yet the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) had set the demarcation line dividing Castilian from Portuguese territories following Columbus’s discovery of the New World, so that Portugal’s Iberian rival was obliged to make its way westwards. By taking possession of vast territories in the New World and using them for economic gain, Spain created the conditions that enabled the period between 1550 and 1660 to be known retrospectively as its siglo de oro − or Golden Age.

MAXIMIZING THE EXPORTABILITY OF VIOLENCE: NAVAL ARTILLERY The late sixteenth century witnessed the emergence of fundamental technical changes in European navigation. In 1588, those manning the invincible Spanish Armada en route for England had been unhappy to learn that they could no longer use its galleons and galleys chiefly for the purpose of transporting soldiers for naval boarding operations and that ships had now become weapons in themselves. And indeed, vessels were carrying an increasingly large amount of artillery. As their sides were fitted with oars, the traditional Mediterranean galleys had little space for installing cannons, so most were placed on a type of forecastle. Conversely, the ships used in the Atlantic and the enclosed seas of the north could carry a much larger number of those projectile-spitting monsters, positioned across superimposed gundecks. Broadly speaking, then, this was a period when fewer soldiers and more cannons became the norm.

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Besides the fact that mutually hostile forces could fire cannonballs at one another from a distance during artillery duels, this development offered a further advantage. Cannons, cannonballs and powder could all be carried to the most remote regions on Earth without the need to ensure that there were vast supplies of water and food on board, as had been the case when transporting troops. Likewise, there were no more fears of massive losses due to deficiency-related diseases – cannons do not catch scurvy. From then on, they were used increasingly on naval ships and, gradually, on those of the merchant navy, too. Ultimately, this practice maximized the exportability of violence, as it were, and became a decisive factor in the success of European overseas expansion. Yet, the construction of sailing ships equipped with cannons was certainly one of the toughest problems faced by pre-industrial Europe. Heavy-calibre cannons with long barrels designed to facilitate long-range shooting weighed a considerable amount. In this way, a twenty-four-pound cast-iron cannon able to fire cannonballs weighing twelve kilos each amounted to around two or three tonnes. A hundred of these monsters alone therefore weighed three hundred tonnes or so – almost more than double the total displacement of the caravels formerly used by the Portuguese and Spanish. The weight of the cannons themselves, coupled with the necessary reinforcements made to the decks, meant that ships became increasingly heavy, which sometimes had an unfortunate effect on their manoeuvrability. At times the consequences were dramatic; the galleon Vasa, one of the great warships in the fleet that King Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden (1594–1632) commissioned in 1625, contained sixty-four cannons, distributed for the first time over two gundecks. In 1628, this prestigious construction capsized in the port of Stockholm due to a strong wind and sank, falling victim to the weight of its cannons and of the upper section of its hull, set at around twenty metres above sea level.

MASTS AND PORTHOLES As ever-larger vessels were being built, additional sails had been introduced in the fifteenth century in order to ensure ease of manoeuvrability. The single-masted sailing ship of the late medieval period gave way to vessels with two or three masts equipped with a specific type of rigging. The main mast and the foremast carried square sails, while the lateen sail on the mizzenmast kept the structure stable. An additional innovation, this time concerning planking methods, was also introduced. The vessels of the late Middle Ages, like those of the Scandinavians, were clinkerbuilt, meaning that the edges of the hull planks overlapped one another like roof slates. During the fifteenth century this practice was replaced by a new technique in planking, whereby planks with squared-off ends were placed edge to edge, resulting in a smoother hull. Sterns and the bows generally became lower, as extra height was only beneficial in cases of close combat and naval boarding operations. High sterns and bows were something of a hindrance in terms of navigation, insofar as they increased lateral wind pressure. It soon became the practice to build two or even three gundecks so that extra cannons could be brought on board. As these were placed near the waterline so as not to jeopardize stability, ‘portholes’ were included

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in the shipbuilding process from the early sixteenth century onwards. These small apertures, cut into the hull in front of the mouths of the cannons, were closed when the vessel was listing or in rough seas and opened during combat. Developments continued in the eighteenth century. The permanent disappearance of forecastles and aftercastles lowered the ships’ centre of gravity a little further and enabled them to carry more sails. The introduction of new types of sail, together with the optimization of ship motion behaviour, made it possible to sail closer to the wind. When in full sail – and some large warships carried as many as thirty-six sails – these vessels, whose hulls were now covered with copper plating as protection against shipworm and algae, could advance at a rate of nine to twelve knots per hour, a speed rarely attained by today’s sailing boats. On average, however, these colossal structures, which then weighed around 3,000 tonnes, travelled no faster than five or six knots an hour. In the late eighteenth century, they began to be mass produced in naval shipyards run on industrial lines. The Royal Navy had received a tremendous boost in the seventeenth century due to its victories over the Dutch, and in the following century it became the only navy capable of conducting operations all over the world. Moreover, as Britain’s GNP had tripled between 1688 and 1815 and the country had gradually become the workshop of the world, the fleet benefitted from substantial financial resources. From then on, until the nineteenth century, Britain was the country most actively engaged in exploring and conquering the world. Besides technological innovations – in construction and production processes – the eighteenth century witnessed revolutionary changes in the field of navigation.

THE ERA OF PRECISION ENGINEERING There are numerous museums today in which visitors can admire a multitude of brass navigation instruments that are both masterpieces of precision and objects of beauty. Anyone who has ever taken a mechanical alarm clock apart without managing to reassemble it will have some idea of the complexity of these miniature mechanisms. Now that GPS data is permanently available everywhere, it has become difficult for us to imagine that sailors were able to navigate with no land in view and to find islands in the middle of the ocean. Clearly, therefore, navigation can be regarded as an art; besides considerable traditional knowledge, it demands the mastery of a whole range of skills in the domains of mathematics, astronomy, cartography, geography and meteorology. It may seem a simple matter to determine a direction when the sun is visible. The compass, probably used first by the Arabs before being adopted by European navigators, provided greater precision in this area. At all events, descriptions of this instrument began to appear in Arabic texts during the thirteenth century. In its original form, it was no more than a magnetic needle, placed on a cork disc in a small bowl of water, whose point indicated the North. The use of this instrument, known as a bussola in Italian, most likely became widespread in the Mediterranean during the twelfth century through the Italian city of Amalfi, where ships’ captains

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had close connections with the Middle East. The compass soon became part of the basic equipment brought on board for any voyage of a certain duration. What was much harder to determine, however, was the position of the ship on a map of the world’s maritime expanses. For some time, navigators had already been capable of determining their location in relation to the latitudes, those imaginary lines forming circles around the earth parallel to the Equator. Latitude indicates the position of a point on the earth’s surface to the north or south of the Equator. This angle, φ, can be calculated fairly easily from the height of the sun at its zenith or from that of a known star, the Polar Star, for instance, situated almost directly above the North Pole. Simpler and less accurate instruments, such as Jacob’s staff or astrolabes, were used in former times. But demands for precision in navigation were reinforced in the eighteenth century by the production and introduction of highly effective instruments for measuring angles. These include the octant, initially made of wood, which was quickly replaced by the sextant still in use today. Basically, all that differentiates them is the width of their angular aperture, but the sextant has certain additional refinements, such as an artificial horizon and various filters to prevent the eyes from being dazzled by the sun. In calm seas, the sextant very quickly provides navigators with precise information, accurate to within one minute of angle − in other words, to within one nautical mile.

THE GREENWICH MERIDIAN The calculation for longitude presented a much more complex problem. In order to determine a location’s longitude – the imaginary lines extending from one pole to another – one has to take the earth’s rotation into account and calculate the time at the Prime Meridian, or Meridian Zero. This requires both advanced and highly complex astronomical observations − which Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) did not succeed in accomplishing − or else the use of a watch to ascertain the time, which must be accurate to within one second. It became impossible to establish a correct measurement in the absence of a reliable chronometer (a huge challenge in terms of mechanics given sea swells and strong variations in temperature and humidity) which would enable navigators to calculate a reference time at the point of embarkation. Hourglasses were no real solution, even if they were regularly turned by crew members. This lack of accuracy had been the downfall of several navigators who, believing themselves to be further to the east or west of their actual location, had run aground in rocky shallows. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich was created by the order of King Charles II in 1675 and openly competed with the Paris Observatory, founded eight years earlier by Louis XIV. This marked the beginning of an important phase in England’s quest to find a reliable means of measuring longitude. In the eighteenth century, a reward of £20,000 was offered to anyone who managed to solve this problem. It was established under the aegis of the Board of Longitude, composed of the most illustrious English mathematicians and astronomers of the day. The ingenious John Harrison (1693–1776), a cabinet maker, succeeded in creating several precision

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clocks – including one made of wood – that provided the basis of the solution. When James Cook returned from his second round-the-world voyage in 1775 he confirmed the quality of an experimental clock he had used, an exact replica of the example developed by Harrison in 1759. Most astronomers then regarded the problem of longitude as finally solved. The British, soon followed by all other navigators, were now capable of determining the exact locations of their ships. Compasses and other devices were replaced by a series of complementary instruments, enabling Europeans to navigate with mathematical precision and to locate any point on the Earth’s surface. Needless to say, this knowledge was jealously guarded. Maritime companies and national authorities treated the slightest advances made as a precious commodity. And, just as trading companies and national navies were competing with one another, astronomers and cartographers were likewise in continuous rivalry. The decision regarding the location of the Prime Meridian, clearly arbitrary, was based on a prerogative that reflected the prevailing rivalries and power relations. The Ferro Meridian had frequently served as the reference point for calculations and maps since Ancient times. It crossed the island of El Hierro (‘iron’ in Spanish), which is situated in the Canary Islands and was long thought to be the world’s most westerly point. The geographers and astronomers of Europe’s principal maritime powers, brought together in 1634 by Louis XIII, recommended the continued use of this meridian. In 1718, however, France opted to use the Paris Meridian, a meridian line running through the Paris Observatory. England, however, chose the Greenwich Meridian in 1738, while others continued to use the Ferro Meridian, including Austria–Hungary, which did so until 1918. This all resulted in competing calculations of longitude and the confusions these entailed. The International Meridian Conference held in Washington in 1884 put an end to this cacophony and confirmed British maritime hegemony by establishing the Greenwich Meridian as the sole international reference point, despite resistance from France.

STEAM POWER MAKES ITS ENTRANCE Although European navigators had learned to take advantage of the reliability of monsoon and trade winds, and were also capable of braving the most challenging gales to reach their destination, there was no turning back once the steam engine had made its admittedly hesitant entrance in the nineteenth century. From then on, problems presented by the doldrums and particularly unfavourable metereological conditions could be surmounted. Nevertheless, it took a long while for these coalfired machines to establish themselves, as certain technical developments were required before they could be used in a navigational context. Pioneers such as Denis Papin (1647–1714), who invented a paddle-wheel boat, and Robert Fulton (1765–1815), whose paddle steamer made journeys along the Hudson River, created new means of propulsion. However, these were ill suited to ocean navigation, as demonstrated by the significant losses recorded in the first half of the nineteenth century. This type of boat was used for a longer period as a provider of mail services, where punctuality was essential. With the introduction of

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the screw propeller in 1840, steamships became capable of travelling on the high seas, and technical improvements alone enabled them to compete with sailing ships, which had free energy at their disposal. The coal that had to be carried on board ships considerably reduced the storage space available for merchandise − moreover, it could not be procured everywhere, so journeys remained relatively short for quite some time. This explains why large, rapid sailing ships such as those of the French company Bordes et Fils or the famous ‘Flying P-Liners’ of the Hamburg-based company F. Laeisz continued to be used for long voyages in the twentieth century. They transported large quantities of goods to or from South America and Australia at considerably more favourable prices than steamships. This is not to be regarded as a case of the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, as these sailing ships made use of most modern technologies in shipbuilding. They were equipped with steel hulls and masts. The supremacy of the steamship was only fully established in the 1870s, when, for example, the Baltic saw its sailing ships disappear within the space of a few years and when the opening of the Suez Canal, which necessitated the use of an engine-powered vessel, brought about considerable changes to maritime routes. However, navies and passenger-carrying ships were the quickest to adopt this new propulsion system, which experienced considerable growth.

GLOBALIZATION This revolution in transport that occurred in the nineteenth century and enabled the exchange of goods, people and animals to be carried out in the fastest and least costly way gave new impetus to the ‘Columbian Exchange’, which had been slowed down by European expansion. This expression, coined in the 1970s by American historian Alfred W. Crosby, denotes a type of ‘environmental imperialism’, a process that began with the expeditions of Christopher Columbus and involved the mixing of hitherto distinct ecosystems. In this way, horses and cattle, apples, tomatoes, maize and potatoes − but also tuberculosis, yellow fever and syphilis − were now present throughout the world. The impact of the new merchandise and products on Eurasia and America, the exchanges of flora and fauna or of germs, together with their consequences, all amounted to a huge step towards globalization. Following the voyages made by Cook and Lapérouse, Australia and the Pacific region also became involved in those intense intercontinental exchanges, as did the eastern and western hemispheres in their entirety − by analogy with the ‘Columbian Exchange’, we might easily refer to ‘Cook-Lapérousian Exchanges’. The origins of these now inescapable processes date back to the expeditions led by Europeans, which were able to bear fruit, thanks to certain economic and technological factors. As it was Europeans who discovered and explored the world, and who endowed it with the names and concepts particular to them, they placed it within a European perspective, a European mental space. At a technical level, Europe was able to dominate the world through a combination of nautical expertise and the ability to transport firepower – in other words, navigational skills, precision mechanics and cannons. To this day, coastal Europeans remain proud of having imposed their

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presence through the seas and oceans, as is confirmed by the multiple ways in which this memory is kept alive. These range from the romance associated with sailing ships to the fascination exerted by the sea and include nautical fashion and the ‘Armada’ events featuring tall ship fleets. Yet history always offers alternatives; we referred earlier to the maritime activities of the Chinese in the early days of the Ming Dynasty. What would have happened if the highly sophisticated nautical and naval traditions of the Middle Empire had not been halted, and China had continued her development in this domain? No doubt she would have ‘discovered’ and named the world, viewed through her own prism. What would America be called today? The continent of Zheng He, or North-Ming and South-Ming? Who can tell?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bohn, Robert, Geschichte der Seefahrt, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2011. Crosby, Alfred W., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Westport/London, Greenwood, 2003 [1972]. Glete, Jan, Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500–1860, 2 vols, Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993. Love, Ronald S., Maritime Exploration in the Age of Discovery, 1415–1800, Westport/ London, Greenwood, 2006. North, Michael, Zwischen Hafen und Horizont. Weltgeschichte der Meere, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2016. Reinhard, Wolfgang, Die Unterwerfung der Welt. Globalgeschichte der europäischen Expansion, 1415–2015, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2016.

CHAPTER 9

The phantoms of the slave trade ANA LUCIA ARAUJO

The collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery was long suppressed but has now resurfaced in the public arena, both in Africa and in former slave trading societies in Europe and the Americas. This belated awakening reveals the difficulty involved in accepting responsibility for the buying and selling of human beings carried out in former times, as well as the social marginalization endured by a great many descendants of slaves. From the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, around ten million people from sub-Saharan Africa were brought to the Americas by European and American slave traders. Three continents were involved in the slave trade, which was pursued for over three centuries: most Western European countries, various West and Central African states and various regions in the Americas, which were provided with a slave workforce of African origin. For a few decades now, the history and memory of the Atlantic slave trade have become increasingly visible in the public arena, not only in Europe but also in Africa and the Americas. After their arrival in America, the Africans and their descendants worked on sugar cane, coffee, cotton, indigo and tobacco plantations or in gold, silver and diamond mines. Slaves in rural areas also worked with livestock and on farms that produced dried meat, while those in cities were porters, barbers or shoemakers, or sold goods. Female slaves in urban areas and on plantations were assigned to domestic tasks but were also sexually exploited by their masters. The abolition of slavery was initiated towards the end of the eighteenth century in the Northern colonies of the United States. In 1807, Britain banned the trading of African slaves for her colonies in the Caribbean. A year later, in 1808, the United States declared the importation of slaves from Africa to be illegal. However, the domestic slave trade continued over the following years. With the exception of Haiti, which abolished slavery in 1804, most countries in the Americas remained in favour of slavery during the first half of the nineteenth century, even after they achieved independence. In 1888, Brazil became the last country in the American continent to abolish slavery. There are multiple collective memories of slavery and

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of the Atlantic slave trade in Europe, Africa and the Americas, each forged in its own way over the course of time.

SLAVE NARRATIVES The collective memory of slavery and the slave trade is borne by social groups and societies established within specific frameworks. While that memory has existed continuously for almost four centuries, it is only during the last twenty years that the pro-slavery past has resurfaced in Europe, Africa and the Americas. The return of that traumatic history, which had remained for so long in the shadows of oblivion, is manifested in various cultural objects, as well as in marches, festivals, commemorations, monuments, memorials and museums. Through this process, the collective memory eventually acquires the status of a public memory and also, in some cases, an official memory. The existence of individual and collective memory associated with slavery leads us to infer that lived experience had been transmitted. Yet a great many of the slaves who worked on British and French colonial plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil did not survive long enough to have descendants to whom they could transmit their traumatic individual experiences in captivity. Despite that break in the chain of transmission, however, several former slaves who had lived in the United States and in Britain’s Caribbean colonies left written accounts of their lives. These slave narratives became a popular literary genre in Europe and America in the late eighteenth century. During that time, the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue destabilized the slavery system in France’s Caribbean colonies, while the abolitionist movement was rapidly gaining ground in Britain and subsequently spread to France, Spain and the United States. In the context of that movement, the freed African slave Olaudah Equiano (ca. 1745–97), also known as Gustavus Vassa, published his work The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. In this autobiography, Equiano describes his childhood in the Igbo-speaking region of south-eastern Nigeria and tells the story of his abduction. According to his account, this took place in 1753, while he was still a small boy aged around seven or eight. He goes on to describe the journey leading to his arrival in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados and the period he subsequently spent in the United States. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, who was also from Africa, had a similar experience to Equiano’s. In his autobiography, Baquaqua, who was born in Djougou, in present-day Benin, describes the process that reduced him to slavery, his memories of being a slave in Brazil and his escape to New York in 1847, by which time slavery had already been abolished in that state.

PRIVATE MEMORIES Many other individuals likewise preserved their memories of their time spent in captivity. As a group, the former slaves cultivated a collective memory manifested through oral, musical, religious and artistic traditions. In many cases, however, these

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memories remained confined to the private sphere, especially within families or relatively closed communities, on account of the racial segregation imposed in the United States in particular. In groups whose chain of transmission had not been totally broken, these memories endured. This is the case, for instance, with the African American Spirituals, sung by slaves, which describe the painful experiences of slavery. These recollections and collective memories also left their mark on AfroBrazilian and Afro-Cuban religions, such as Candomblé and Santeria. The collective memory of slavery is likewise present, for example, in Capoeira, a martial art combined with dance that emerged in Brazil during the era of slavery but has now spread throughout the world. Yet these memories and traditions were not always recognized in the public arena. In Brazil, for instance, Afro-Brazilian religions and practices such as Capoeira were treated as criminal until in 1930s.

FROM VICTIMHOOD TO EMANCIPATION In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries − particularly the latter − slavery and slaves were viewed in the public sphere in terms of submission and victimhood. In the United States, Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), together with their film, theatre and television versions, portrayed male and female slaves as joyful, loyal and submissive. The emergence of the public collective memory of slavery in the three continents that had taken part in the Atlantic slave trade was connected with the new global situation that arose with the end of the Second World War. The resolution of the conflict did nothing to change the fate of the soldiers from the African colonies who had fought alongside French and British allied troops, and African American war veterans returned to the United States where they continued to face racism and an existence without civil rights. Yet the fight against the Nazi regime in Europe had drawn attention to the social and racial inequalities associated with colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean and with segregation in the United States, a context that favoured the emergence of emancipation and civil rights movements. The commemoration of the Holocaust in the post-war period also played a part in highlighting the collective memory of slavery. In the speeches they made during this time, the activists fighting for their countries’ independence described slavery as opening the doors of the African continent to European colonizers. The year 1976 saw the publication of Roots, a novel by African American writer Alex Haley. It tells the story of the author’s ancestor, Kunta Kinte, who was captured in Senegambia and transported to the United States in the eighteenth century, and of his descendants. The book was made into a television series in 1977. This enjoyed great success, not only in the United States but also in the rest of the American continent, Europe and Africa. With its descriptions of the suffering undergone by the young man from Africa, Roots had an emotional effect on the nation, particularly on the African American population, whose own sufferings, associated with racism and segregation, were still much in evidence. The series also inspired African Americans with a great interest in their genealogy, and they began to seek out the traces of their African ancestors.

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The wave of commemoration relating to slavery intensified in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. From then on, the national and collective identities of historically oppressed groups were asserted in a much more visible manner. Afrodescendant populations began formulating demands for the public acknowledgement of their ancestors’ contribution to the construction of European and American societies, which had profited from slavery and the slave trade.

COLLECTIVE MEMORY, PUBLIC MEMORY Although the collective memories of the communities with slave ancestors were previously confined to the private sphere and the family circle, over the last two decades they have emerged into the public arena. In this way, collective memory has become public memory, having now been politicized in order to construct, affirm and reinforce the identities of groups of individuals, most of whom identify themselves as the descendants of slaves. An identity of this type is forged from a number of elements (including ancestry, skin colour, physical features, social position and religion) which, within the framework of post-slavery societies, are designated as racial factors. These social groups, which bear multiple and in some cases conflictual memories, often form associations through which they fight for the acknowledgement of the memory of slavery in the public sphere. Once that acknowledgement has been achieved, the collective memory they bear develops into an official memory. The collective memory of slavery has also surfaced in West Africa. The House of Slaves on Gorée Island, which lies off the coast of Senegal, has been famous since the 1960s. But despite its popularity, the House remains a contested realm of memory. Its former curator, the late Boubacar Joseph N’Diaye, described the building as a slave warehouse and gave visitors detailed accounts of all the horrors endured by the slaves who, he claimed, had been confined in this building. Thanks to N’Diaye’s descriptions, the House of Slaves is now one of the world’s best-known realms of memory associated with slavery. According to N’Diaye, between ten and fifteen million African slaves passed through the House before being taken on board ships bound for the Americas. These figures, in fact, correspond to the total number of people deported from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade. The House’s famous ‘Door of No Return’ actually opens onto rocks, making it fairly unlikely that this was the exit used for the embarkations. Moreover, it had not been owned by a European trader but by a ‘Signara’ − an Afro-European slave trader named Anna Colas. Yet despite these contested claims, heads of state, among them François Hollande and Barack Obama, continue to visit the House, thereby contributing to its legendary status.

SIMPLIFIED NARRATIVES In the 1970s, Ghana began promoting her heritage sites associated with the Atlantic slave trade. Today, Black tourists, mainly from the Americas, visit the castles at Elmina

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and Cape Coast to pay tribute to their ancestors, deported as slaves to the American continent. Combining the public memory of slavery with the tourist industry, the Ghanaian tour guides recount the history of the Atlantic slave trade with a view to satisfying an international public, emphasizing the sufferings of the Africans under the European yoke while avoiding any mention of African participation in the commerce of slavery. These simplified narratives are formulated in order to prevent the outbreak of conflicts between local communities, which include the descendants of slaves brought from the north of the country to the coastal region. Certain elements have also been omitted due to the specific demands of the tourist business, which provides guided visits to the castles. Like the House of Slaves on Gorée Island, the castles at Elmina and Cape Coast have been receiving high-profile visitors since the 1990s, such as former US presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who made the trip with his family. In 1992, the commemorative events connected with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas highlighted the central role played by the slaves brought from Africa in the construction of the American continent. In 1994, following a proposal made by Haiti, UNESCO launched an international project entitled ‘The Slave Route: Resistance, Liberty, Heritage’ at Ouidah, Benin. During this period, the Republic of Benin (formerly known as Dahomey) was seeking ways of developing its economy through the tourist industry. It was in this context that the role of the Atlantic slave trade became a central element in public debates. Descendants of Dahomey’s royal family, which had once provided the slave trade with prisoners captured during military campaigns, were still in the country. The descendants of slave traders and other intermediary actors were likewise to be found among local leaders and the general population. Also living in the country were the descendants of slaves who had returned from Brazil and had settled there during the nineteenth century. The Benin government therefore launched a plan to hold a festival of Vodun art and culture. The festival offered an opportunity to unify these different groups while avoiding political conflicts. Eventually, the festival and the Slave Route became connected. The festival organizers created a Slave Route, a pathway made of beaten earth linking the centre of Ouidah to the beach. Around a hundred monuments were placed along the route, forming a visual presentation of the Atlantic slave trade. In the years that followed, other monuments commemorating the slave trade were also inaugurated at Ouidah, among them the ‘Door of No Return’, financed by UNESCO. The city of Ouidah became an example both of UNESCO’s influence in the region and of the merchandising of the collective memory and legacy of the slave trade.

A COMMEMORATIVE WAVE IN EUROPE The UK was the first country in Europe to acknowledge publicly the major role it had played in the Atlantic slave trade. The first British initiatives commemorating the slave trade emerged in the mid-1990s. In 2007, however, the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery prompted a wave of commemorations instigated by Black campaigners who had formed a loosely organized movement. In many cases, either

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they or their parents had been born in the former British Caribbean colonies. These groups, from communities that had arisen out of slavery, remained economically, socially and racially excluded from British society. The former slave trade ports, including Bristol and Liverpool, gradually acknowledged their role in the Atlantic slave trade, agreeing to reveal this dark aspect of their pasts in their urban landscapes. The most important initiative originating from that commemorative wave was the International Slavery Museum, inaugurated in Liverpool in 2007. The museum’s mission is not only to present the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery but also to raise public awareness of the problems of modern slavery and of racism. France’s slave trade past resurfaced in a more visible manner in 1998, during the celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the second abolition of slavery in the French colonies (the first abolition had been decreed in 1794, during the Revolution, but Napoleon had re-established slavery in 1802). Before these commemorations, the collective memory of slavery had been more associated with the ‘great emancipator’ Victor Schœlcher, so that there was a general unawareness of the part played by slaves themselves in the official abolition of slavery. During this period, Black communities of both African and Caribbean origin condemned the obliteration of slavery in the public space, and the racism and social exclusion that they continued to endure in metropolitan France. This pressure produced tangible results and the official acknowledgement of France’s role in the Atlantic slave trade and in maintaining the system of slavery. In 2001, the French Parliament adopted Law no. 2001-434 of 21 May 2001 (known as the ‘Taubira’ Law), recognizing slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. This was followed by academic symposia, publications and public discussions on the place of slavery and the colonial past in the history of the French nation. In 2005, the deaths of two teenage boys of African origin who had been chased by the police through a suburb of Paris triggered a series of riots in various parts of the country. During the same year, Article 4 of Law no. 2005-158 of 23 February, which proposed acknowledging the ‘positive’ role played by French colonialism, was the focus of much public debate and was eventually withdrawn by Jacques Chirac. During this period, Black activists formed associations and campaigned for the slave trading past of several French cities, including Nantes and Bordeaux, to be brought to public attention. More recently, Le Havre, Honfleur, Rouen and La Rochelle have also developed initiatives to reveal their links with the Atlantic slave trade. The Taubira Law also led to the creation of a Committee for the Memory of Slavery; in this way, the public memory of slavery became official. The Committee proposed 10 May as the National Day for the commemoration of the abolition of slavery in metropolitan France. Several other initiatives were also launched with a view to adapting and correcting the French national narrative regarding slavery and the slave trade. These included proposals to alter school syllabuses, the development of national commemorations and the building of monuments, as well as exhibitions on slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Since the early twenty-first century, other European countries have also publicly acknowledged their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. In the Netherlands, the discussion on the country’s slave trading past culminated in 2002 with the inauguration of a large monument to the slaves in Amsterdam. More recently, in

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2013, the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the Dutch colonies in the Americas gave rise to major public debates, often including condemnations of racism and the social exclusion of Black communities in the Netherlands. Not long ago, the slave trading past resurfaced even in Switzerland, with discussions on the part played by Genevan traders. Despite this groundswell, Spain and Portugal have avoided publicly acknowledging their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade until recently. However, this situation is beginning to change. In 2009, a group of archaeologists discovered an old slave burial site in the southern Portuguese city of Lagos. In 2016, the Núcleo Museológico Rota da Escravatura (the Slavery Route Museum Nucleus) was inaugurated in the same city, in a building known as the ‘Slave Market’. This is the first time that Portugal has engaged in a project that places its historical involvement in the slave trade in the public arena. The situation in Spain is somewhat similar. In 2010, the Comisión de Igualdad (Commission for Equality) approved two laws − a ‘Bill for the recognition of the Black Spanish community’ and another for ‘the commemoration of slavery, and the recognition and support of Spain’s Black, African and Afro-descendant communities’. The two laws were intended to pay tribute to the millions of individuals who fought to abolish slavery throughout the world, to ensure that Spain’s Black population was officially recognized and to fight racism and xenophobia. They also included plans to erect a monument in honour of the victims of slavery. Although no monument commemorating slavery and the Atlantic slave trade has yet appeared in Madrid, Barcelona and Lisbon have begun to develop urban itineraries highlighting the sites associated with the slave trade.

THE ‘MIDDLE PASSAGE’ The collective memory of slavery resurfaced in the United States during the 1990s. About 150,000 slaves from Africa − around 40 per cent of the total number of slaves brought to the United States – arrived at the port of Charleston in South Carolina. Charleston is now a tourist destination, and public acknowledgement of its slave trading past remained problematic until the late 1980s. The Old Slave Mart was one of the very few sites to highlight the history of slavery and of the slave trade in the city. However, this state of affairs has begun to evolve. First, the end of the Cold War and the promptings of UNESCO have promoted public discussions of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. Second, pressure from African American campaigners has forced Charleston to acknowledge its past role in the slave trade. A number of initiatives have now been developed on Sullivan Island, where the slaves and crew members were put into quarantine after disembarking in South Carolina. The first plaque indicating that the island had been the point of entry of the slaves brought from Africa to the United States was unveiled in 1999. It emphasizes the resilience of the Africans and of their descendants and acknowledges the contribution African cultures have made to the United States. In 2008, as part of her ‘Bench by the Road’ initiative, the writer Toni Morrison inaugurated a memorial bench in tribute to the slaves brought to the Americas and

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their descendants, who until then had had no space of their own in which to honour their ancestors. In 2009, the exhibition ‘African Passages’ opened at Fort Moultrie. It presented works of art and artefacts associated with the ‘Middle Passage’, the name given to the Atlantic crossing to the Americas while also telling the stories of the African people who passed through the island. Charleston is now deeply rooted in the public memory as a disembarkation point for African slaves arriving in the United States. In 2014, after lengthy debates, a monument in tribute to Denmark Vesey, the freed slave who led the slave rebellion in 1822, was unveiled in the city. A plan to create a large international African American museum on the waterfront at Gadsden is likewise underway. The public memory of slavery also emerged in the northern cities of the United States. In 1991, hundreds of skeletal remains were discovered during the construction of a new federal office building in New York. Following an examination of the bones, it was concluded that the site was a former burial ground containing the remains of around 15,000 enslaved and free African Americans and Africans, who had been buried during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Located in a port city that had imported around 8,500 African slaves, this burial ground is the largest of its kind in the United States. A number of disputes regarding the future of the site arose between federal government members, academics and activists identifying themselves as the ‘descendants’ of the individuals buried there. The debates centred on the way in which the slave trading past should be brought into the open and how the African American ancestors should be commemorated in the public space. In this way, the burial ground became a contested site of memory of the slave trade. Its unearthing and development are inseparable from issues of race and identity, which are not linked directly to the site’s historic past but to the lack of visibility of the city’s slave trading past in the public arena and to the social exclusion of the Black population. A memorial was inaugurated on the site in 2007, highlighting the fact that slavery had existed not only in the South but also in a city like New York, right up to its abolition there in 1827.

‘THE CEMETERY OF THE NEW BLACKS’ A similar discovery was also made in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1996, an archaeological excavation carried out in a private property in a former port area unearthed a burial site containing bone fragments from dozens of slaves. The archaeologists identified the site as the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos (‘The Cemetery of the New Blacks’) − a mass grave where over 6,000 Africans who had died before they could be sold in the Valongo slave market had been buried. Yet despite that important discovery, the local authorities continued to neglect the cemetery and the port area. Fifteen years later, the situation had evolved. The ruins of Rio de Janeiro’s Valongo Wharf, where several thousand Africans had disembarked, were rediscovered in March 2011 during renovation work in the city’s old port in preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. This second discovery triggered intense debates between Black campaigners, academics and politicians over how to transform the site into a memorial. Proposals to submit the site for inscription onto UNESCO’s

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World Heritage List attracted the interest of several companies and organizations. However, the wharf is situated close by the Morro da Providência (Providence Hill), the location of Brazil’s largest favela, most of whose inhabitants are Afro-Brazilian. Black organizations feared that an architectural intervention of this type on the wharf would have a negative impact on the neighbouring community. The discussions became acrimonious as a result of the different collective memories involved, which were now in conflict. Yet despite these quarrels, Valongo Wharf and the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos were gradually integrated into Rio’s urban landscape. Their existence is now beginning to be included the official national narrative, as, little by little, Brazil is being obliged to acknowledge publicly its role in the Atlantic slave trade. The wave of commemorations of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade is far from subsiding. Dozens of new forms of commemoration, as well as monuments, memorials and exhibitions, are created each year. The list of books and films on the theme of slavery continues to grow. 12 Years a Slave, a film by American director Steve McQueen, took the Oscar for Best Picture in 2014. The Birth of a Nation, by another American director, Nate Parker, was released in 2016. The film tells the story of Nat Turner, the leader of a slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831. During the same year, an updated version of the television series Roots was broadcast in the United States to mark its thirtieth anniversary. This growing visibility of slavery no doubt means that post-slavery societies are finally facing up to this painful memory. It may also be an indication that Afro-descendant populations continue to endure social and economic exclusion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Araujo, Ana Lucia, Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic, New York, Cambria Press, 2010. Araujo, Ana Lucia, Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage and Slavery, New York, Routledge, 2014. Chivallon, Christine, L’Esclavage, du souvenir à la mémoire: Contribution à une anthropologie de la Caraïbe, Paris, Karthala, 2012. Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, edited and with an Introduction by Vincent Carretta, London and New York, Penguin Classics, 2003 [1789]. Eyerman, Ron, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Haley, Alex, Roots, Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1976. Kowaleski Wallace, Elizabeth, The British Slave Trade & Public Memory, New York, Columbia University Press, 2006. Lugão Rios, Ana Maria and Hebe Maria Mattos, Memórias do cativeiro: família, trabalho e cidadania no pós-abolicão, Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 2005. Reinhardt, Catherine, Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean, New York, Berghahn Books, 2006. Shaw, Rosalind, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

CHAPTER 10

The Black Atlantic ANA LUCIA ARAUJO

Ouidah (Benin), Liverpool (England) and Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) played significant roles in the history of the slave trade, as did Nantes and Bordeaux in France and Cádiz in Spain. Today, each of them is confronting its past in its own way. A number of projects highlighting the history and memory of slavery and of the Atlantic slave trade have been implemented in former slave trade ports over the last few decades. This is the case with Ouidah, in the Republic of Benin, one of the major African slave trade ports; since the 1990s, it has also been one of the principal centres dedicated to commemorating the slave trade in West Africa. These multiple manifestations of public memory have occurred in a context characterized by the conflictual memories of different actors. Some groups belong to families previously associated with the slave trade; these include the descendants of the royal family of Dahomey, whose ancestors, having taken captives during their wars with neighbouring kingdoms, sold them into slavery. Other groups representing the ‘Afro-Brazilian’ community comprise the descendants of slave traders and those of former slaves who had returned from Brazil. The construction of monuments and memorials supported by these groups with their opposing memories has enabled us to compare the diverse histories of the Atlantic slave trade. However, the projects implemented have considerably minimized the scale of the slave trading carried out within Africa itself and the commerce conducted by the Arab traders who provided slaves for the regions of northern and eastern Africa, among others. Several European countries left traces of their presence in Ouidah during the Atlantic slave trade. Britain and Portugal built forts there, effectively linking ports such as Liverpool and Lisbon to the British and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. Liverpool, like Ouidah in Africa, was one of the first cities in Europe to face up to its past involvement in the slave trade, at the instigation of campaigners whose ancestors had been born in former British colonies in the Caribbean and Africa, and whose position in British society still remains marked by social and racial exclusion. These groups engaged in public debate, condemning racism and the obliteration of traces of the Atlantic slave trade in the city. A Transatlantic Slavery Gallery was installed in Liverpool’s Merseyside Maritime Museum in 1994. Preparations for commemorative activities marking the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain (1807) subsequently highlighted the role that country had played

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in the Atlantic slave trade. The International Slavery Museum was inaugurated in Liverpool in 2007. This was the first institution in the world to analyse the issues of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery from an international perspective while taking present-day legacies into account, particularly those of the local Black communities. Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, was also one of the largest slave trading ports and is now considered to be the centre of Black culture in the Americas. Yet unlike Liverpool and Ouidah, the city only very recently decided to bring the memory of the Atlantic slave trade to light. While the African influence there is certainly celebrated as an element central to the city’s identity, particularly through tourism initiatives, the former port area remains poor and dilapidated. In some cases, sites formerly associated with the Atlantic slave trade have now been replaced by restaurants and luxury hotels. The historic city centre, known as Pelourinho (The Pillory), is an officially recognized site of memory of the slave trade and was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1985. It receives thousands of tourists every year. However, most of the sites associated with slavery in the historic centre or in other parts of the city have been abandoned by the public authorities. With a few exceptions, no plaque or inscription highlights the significance of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the history of this port city. The first monument associated with slavery was inaugurated in Salvador in 2008; this statue pays tribute to Zumbi, the leader of the Quilombo dos Palmares, the largest (and longest-lasting) fugitive community of slaves ever to have existed in Brazil. Paradoxically, Salvador continues to celebrate its African heritage, while it avoids associating this with slavery and the Atlantic slave trade – probably because drawing attention to that memory would also risk highlighting the racism and racial inequality that continue to dominate the city. Whatever the nuances, contexts and obstacles involved, the former slave trading ports of the Atlantic now have no choice but to confront their pasts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Araujo, Ana Lucia (Ed.), Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, New York, Routledge, 2010. Hourcade, Renaud, Les Ports négriers face à leur histoire: Politiques de la mémoire à Nantes, Bordeaux et Liverpool, Paris, Dalloz, 2014.

CHAPTER 11

Humanitarianism in question VALÉRIE ROSOUX

Inspired by the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan, the Red Cross was founded in Geneva in 1863 with the aim of tending to the war wounded, regardless of their affiliation. Now a global presence, it faces a dilemma – to what extent is it possible to remain neutral? ‘The guns crash over the dead and the wounded, strewn pell-mell on the ground. Brains spurt under the wheels, limbs are broken and torn [. . .] the soil is literally puddled with blood.’1 This is Henri Dunant’s description of a horrific battle scene he had witnessed in 1859. Dunant, born in Geneva and a European before the concept was coined, was a businessman, a Christian humanist and a pacifist. In his book A Memory of Solferino, he describes a scene in which 9,000 soldiers of both sides are lying in a haphazard mass and dying from their wounds while peasants tend to them regardless of their uniforms, on the principle that all are brothers – Tutti fratelli. The book aroused considerable emotion and raised awareness of the destruction linked to advances made in weapons technology, leading to the creation of the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded. Originally inspired by the figure of the Good Samaritan, the Red Cross, an international organization, was a reflection of nineteenth-century philanthropic discourse. The wounded combatant was no longer seen in terms of affiliation but belonged to all humanity. Established as a type of alternative crusade, it invoked the same values – based on Christianity – and adopted the same emblem – the cross. It was born of the wars that tore the continent apart and was initially presented as the expression of Europe’s conscience – or even of her moral superiority. Its aim was to help the victims of armed conflict, although this did not include any attempt to prevent war, which was regarded as inevitable. This ambition was both generous and paradoxical, as it involved, in some sense, civilizing warfare.

THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT The first international conference took place in Geneva in 1863. The future headquarters of the United Nations, Geneva, was emerging as the ‘city of peace’,

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spearheading Switzerland’s drive both to champion neutrality and to act as a pioneer in the domain of international humanitarian law. Its agreements centred on establishing the right to asylum and the protection of sick or wounded soldiers and prisoners of war. Institutions were established in response to the codification of the law. In addition to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), created in 1863, various national societies were founded, many of them incorporating at local and national levels former civil society initiatives intended to aid war victims. One of the first challenges for this new multitude of institutions was the creation of the Red Crescent in 1876 at the instigation of the Sublime Porte. In the context of the wars then ravaging the Balkans, the establishment of a Muslim institution was initially regarded as heretical because it was incompatible with the very notion of Christian charity underpinning Dunant’s initiative. However, the movement extended its activities in the early twentieth century due to the Balkan conflict and, above all, the First World War. The aid provided gradually extended to civilian victims of international conflicts, civil wars or natural catastrophes. The work involved no longer resulted solely from emergency situations but also included everyday practices such as the donation of blood and the hiring of medical equipment. The National Red Cross Societies comprise 105 million voluntary workers active in 186 countries, making it the largest humanitarian network in the world. Can we, then, still speak of it as a European realm of memory? The Red Cross emblem has now become universal. The faces of its employees, from Nicaragua to Japan and including Palestine and South Africa, attest to an influence that far transcends the territories of Europe. Yet the operations conducted by the Red Cross on the continent continue to reflect some of the twentieth century’s most sensitive issues. In addition to the witness accounts and audiovisual archives accumulated by the ICRC, there is much evidence of a vivid memory of the initiatives carried out by the Red Cross. The passing of generations has not completely compromised the transmission of individual recollections involving the tracing of a captured relative, or the mail services established between captives and their families, or the protection of starving and/or displaced civilians during one of the world’s conflicts. These memories are not always accompanied by gratitude. There is still palpable incomprehension and anger with regard to the movement’s powerlessness in the face of the Nazi regime. The ICRC’s failure to act in the case of the round-ups and deportations of Jews and the barbarity of the concentration camps remains tantamount to a tragedy within the institution and even more so within the families who received no help.

REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS That episode left its mark, yet it continues to come up against one of the chief principles of the Red Cross: neutrality. Its aim from the outset was to come to the aid of all victims, without judgement or condemnation. This is a prudent standpoint in terms of diplomacy. The argument used is a familiar one; no one can assist the victims of armed conflicts unless they are accepted by all the parties involved. However, this stance is open to challenge. In 2004, the silence of the ICRC over the

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abuses committed in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison relaunched the debate; are silence and neutrality appropriate responses to extreme situations such as torture? Do they not amount to passive complicity? The same question was asked following the attacks on healthcare facilities in Syria, Yemen and the Gaza Strip. There is certainly a real risk of constraints being imposed in retaliation to the public condemnation of such acts. Nevertheless – and this question far transcends the context of the Red Cross – surely this is the price to pay if we want to avoid being ‘either spectators or cowards, unable to look’.2

NOTES 1. Henri Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (published by the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1986). 2. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 34.

BIBLIOGRAPHY d’Andlau, Guillaume, L’Action humanitaire, Paris, PUF, 1998. Barnett, Michael and Thomas G. Weiss (Eds.), Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2008. Bugnon, François, Le Comité international de la Croix-Rouge et la protection des victimes de la guerre, Geneva, CICR, 1994. Forsythe, David P. and Barbara Ann Rieffer-Flanagan, The International Committee of the Red Cross: A Neutral Humanitarian Actor, New York, Routledge, 2002. Harouel, Véronique, Histoire de la Croix-Rouge, Paris, PUF, 1999. Senarclens, Pierre de, L’Humanitaire en catastrophe, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 1999.

CHAPTER 12

When Europe named the world WOLFGANG REINHARD

To colonize is to name. The founders of New England and the conquerors of the Indies, Central America, Asia and Africa all imposed names that were familiar to them on these territories. Having achieved independence, the former colonies either adopted or erased these associations with sovereigns or saints. The threads of a shared history are woven into the resulting configurations. Paris, a small town with 25,000 inhabitants, is the county seat of Lamar County in north-eastern Texas; the name of the state itself is said to have originated from a Native American word meaning ‘friend’. In 1840, the farmer and merchant George Washington Wright, originally from Carthage, Tennessee, provided land on which to build the town. This was given the name of Paris, for reasons unknown, although the anti-Hispanic aspect of that name is instantly evident; Texas had declared its independence from Mexico in 1836, becoming part of the United States in 1845. Paris now styles itself as the ‘best small town in Texas’. It is particularly proud of its 20-metre high replica of the Eiffel Tower, built in 1993 and crowned with a red cowboy hat, as the model of the Tower erected in Paris, Tennessee − one of the other twenty-four localities of that name in the United States − is only 18 metres high. ‘Paris, Texas’ achieved worldwide fame in 1984 when film director Wim Wenders chose it as the title of his Franco-German movie. This presents a poetic European vision of certain regions of America, the former ‘New World’ that had been the main colonial territory of the Old one. Yet the film contains only one reference to the small town of Paris, when it is briefly mentioned by the ‘hero’, who has emerged from the desert at the opposite end of Texas and is really seeking to reconnect with his past. He finds it in Los Angeles, California, which was founded by the Spanish in 1781 and given the name ‘El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles’ (the Town of the Queen of the Angels). The imaginative name ‘California’, given to the Mexican peninsula in the sixteenth century, was inspired by a chivalric romance then in vogue. We often utter place names without giving them a moment’s thought. But whether or not they carry an additional poetic and symbolic meaning, they form the linguistic

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legacy left by European expansion, enabling us to carry out instructive ‘excavations’ into successive layers of the collective memory. In this way, language in general and toponymy in particular develop into a form of archaeology through which we can explore European colonialism and, indeed, the more recent phenomenon of decolonization. Yet our finds may differ considerably according to era and to the colonial powers that baptized any given locality. That being said, the naming of a locality always reflects a claim to power, a colonizer’s desire to define that which is foreign or to surmount that foreign-ness in a conspicuous fashion.

NAME GIVING The Bible has already demonstrated that it was through the act of naming that man began to fulfil his destiny and dominate the Earth: Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. (Gen. 2.19-20) The decisive ritual of baptism is also associated with the giving of a name that indicates an affiliation. This explains why the names of characters in the Old and New Testaments were introduced throughout the world during the period of European expansion and missionizing. The statement ‘Only the world that has a name is our world’1 carries the implicit meaning, a name in our language. Even the ‘crime scenes’ of European expansion have been ‘baptized’ and ‘re-baptized’, often following a complex ritual. For, in the eyes of the Spanish, French and Dutch, the act of naming established a claim to legal ownership. In this way, the total number of new names bestowed by Christopher Columbus during his first voyage alone apparently amounted to 600. The Portuguese, on the other hand, contented themselves with using references to local merchandise: the brazilwood tree in the case of the American continent, ivory, gold, pepper and slaves in the coastal areas of Africa. Although the English and North Americans were more inclined to reuse local names, they modified them in most cases. These names were cultural inventions rather than objective reconstructions based on the natural world. We might even detect an ironic form of distancing at work regarding the findings made in the newly discovered lands; some explorers, for instance, expressed their vexation with the wild and monotonous regions of Australia by choosing names that transformed dried-up streams into rivers and mere hills into mountains. In the case of the colonizers, the appropriation of a country was achieved through the symbolic domestication of its spaces and the construction of a specific historical cosmos. In French Algeria, they imposed over two hundred name changes on localities between 1870 and 1914. No territory on earth offered the Europeans more opportunities for ‘baptisms’ than the ‘New World’, named America after the Florentine explorer Amerigo

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Vespucci. Long before then, however, they had already influenced geographical maps by re-using names from Antiquity for certain regions of the world. This was the case with Europa and the hypothetical Terra Australis Incognita posited by the geographers of ancient times, which lives on through the name Australia, and with Asia, Africa and India. It was probably also true of China, or Sina, possibly derived from the Qin dynasty, which established the Chinese Empire. However, since that period the name has not been used in China, which continues to refer to itself as Zhōngguó (Middle Kingdom). Following the practice of using a part to refer to a whole, often applied when determining names, the coastal areas opposite Europe, Asia and Africa came to denote entire continents, while the territories watered by the Indus became a subcontinent. As Columbus mistakenly believed that he had reached India, Hispanic America was known as Las Indias for centuries, the Caribbean islands being known as Las Indias occidentales. Most significantly of all, the word Indians became the generic name for the inhabitants of the New World, a European creation that was to have major long-term effects. It was the Europeans who conveyed to the different peoples of America, Africa and India the notion that they had a collective identity as American Indians or Americans, as ‘Negroes’ or Africans, as Hindus or Indians. Even the general term ‘Hinduism’, used to denote Indian religions, is a European creation, dating from the nineteenth century. When working on this naming process, Europeans drew inspiration from registers that differed greatly according to the era, beginning with plain, or even in some instances, poetic descriptions. Examples include Cape Cod, which owes its name to the abundance of fish in its waters, Salt Lake City and Teton Mountans, so named as their pointed form was thought to resemble female breasts. The poetry emerging in this context conveys a social imaginary. This is the case with ‘California’, the name of a fictitious island taken from a chivalric romance, and with the ‘Amazon’ river, so named as the legendary female warriors were said to inhabit that locality. Some examples are even utopian in character and indicate progressive thought, such as ‘Philadelphia’, which means ‘the city of brotherly love’. In many cases, place names refer to communities or to memories − did Captain James Cook name three hills ‘The Three Brothers’ after a ship in which he had served?

DISCOVERERS, COLONIZERS AND CONQUERORS Experiences undergone during voyages of exploration could also be used as names. Those of Ferdinand Magellan in Guam in 1521 caused him to dub it the Isla de los Ladrones (The Isle of Thieves). After Matthew Flinders lost six crew members, who drowned at ‘Cape Catastrophe’, he gave their names to a series of islands. Others sought to emphasize the appealing qualities of the lands they had just discovered through references to their hoped-for benefits. ‘Greenland’ was therefore chosen in order to indicate its desirability as a place in which to settle; Central America was known as the Castilla del Oro (the Golden Castle). In the same way, the name Río de La Plata (Silver River) was given to the main body of water in the future Argentina (Land of Silver), even though – or precisely because – the silver business was making little headway. But perhaps Buenos Aires (Good Airs) was intended as a welcome

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antonym to Malaria, the lethally contaminated air that awaited Europeans in many regions? It was not only the colonizers who liked to reproduce their homelands, as the Portuguese had done with the African coastal city of Lagos. Matthew Flinders, the English navigator mentioned earlier, methodically named newly discovered localities in South Australia after places in his native Lincolnshire. ‘New England’, created in the seventeenth century by English Puritans, has its ‘Boston’, ‘Dorchester’, ‘Watertown’, ‘Lynn’ and so forth. The newly created counties were likewise given the names of English districts. When John Harvard founded a university there in 1636, the locality in which it was built was named ‘Cambridge’; this was where Harvard had been a student, and, as many of the Puritans came from East Anglia, the university was closer to them than that of Oxford. The name ‘Winchester’ appears thirty-two times on the current map of the United States. Three localities, in the east of the country, were named directly after the English city; five, in the Midwest, were named after the city in Virginia. Eight of them, however, took their name from individuals, while two were even named after the famous rifle. Remarkably, the Native Americans driven out of the south-eastern United States in 1838 also transposed the names of their ancestral homelands onto the areas where they had been sent, designated as Indian Territory; however, it appears that the African slaves, present in such large numbers, had never been able to bestow place names on the New World. Even in the case of the revolutionary community they established in 1804, they chose the indigenous Taíno name Haiti.

WINNING THE GAME During their conquest of the continent, Americans in the north were able to draw on the names of the great cities of Europe, although this tended to remain the exception elsewhere. By about 1840, almost all the European capitals were represented in the state of Ohio alone. As well as the twenty-four towns named ‘Paris’, the United States is said to contain thirty-three ‘Berlins’ and five ‘Londons’ – there is even one ‘Moscow’. While the name of a city sometimes appears in the form of an addition, as with Nieuw Amsterdam, ‘New York’ and ‘New Delhi’, in reapplying names from their native lands the conquerors made use of the same principle. In addition to La Española (Little Spain), the name they gave to Haiti, the Spanish named Mexico Nueva España, Peru, Nueva Castilla and Chile, Nueva Extremadura – like many of the conquistadores, Pedro de Valdivia, who had begun the conquest of that country, came from this region of Spain. The states of ‘New Hampshire’ and ‘New Jersey’ were named by the British, as was the Australian state of ‘New South Wales’. Antarctica had even once had a fictitious ‘New Swabia’. When the first dominant forces in a locality were obliged to give way, their successors often conducted a renaming process. The British replaced that of Hollandia Nova, first given by the Dutch, with ‘Australia’, while Zeelandia Nova became ‘New Zealand’. There are even new names inspired by the ‘second generation’ of lands, such as ‘New Guinea’, which was discovered in 1545 by an explorer who thought it resembled the African

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territory of that name, and ‘New Mexico’, which originated from Spanish-Mexican expansion northwards in the seventeenth century.

REPRODUCING ONE’S CULTURE The Spanish had a strong predilection for saints’ names. The chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo described Spanish geographical maps as Calendars of Saints whose names were out of sequence. However, it was possible to use that calendar in its conventional form; this occurred, for example, when Sebastián Vizcaíno sailed the length of the Californian coast in 1602, giving each locality he visited the name of the saint whose feast day it was. The exception was ‘Monterey’, where he immortalized the name of his patron the Count of Monterrey, viceroy of New Spain. In general, the practice of choosing a name for a locality associated with the relevant saint’s day was much favoured. This was what Magellan did, for instance, on 21 October 1520, when he took his inspiration for the name Cabo Vírgenes (Cape Virgins) from Saint Ursula’s legendary 11,000 virgins. Christopher Columbus did likewise when he named the notorious ‘Virgin Islands’ after Santa Úrsula y las Once Mil Vírgenes. The most widely used names include ‘Santiago’ and ‘Santa Maria’, perhaps for lack of a better alternative. There are at least fifteen ‘Santiagos’ in Latin America and three more in the Philippines. In addition to the saints, other mysteries of the faith were immortalized, such as the Holy Cross (‘Santa Cruz’ and ‘Veracruz’) and the Eucharist (‘Sacramento’). Following a change of occupying forces, the lake known by the Catholic name of Lac du Saint-Sacrement became ‘Lake George’, after King George II of England. Lacking in saints, Protestants were more restricted in their choices; examples of these, however, include the settlement of ‘Providence’, founded by Roger Williams, and ‘Gnadenthal’ (Valley of Grace) in Pennsylvania. The Bible provided them with a further source of inspiration when founding their towns, as with ‘Bethany’, ‘Bethesda’, ‘Bethlehem’, ‘Salem’ and ‘Zion’, although they were equally content with more commonplace choices such as ‘Chapel Hill’. The Mormons, on the other hand, had difficulty imposing the names that appear in their sacred texts; their territory was therefore given the Native American name of ‘Utah’, rather than ‘Deseret’. Yet geographers, politicians and other Europeans who were less inspired by Christianity quite frequently felt the need to display their Classical background. This involved both Latin − as in ‘Australia’, ‘Batavia’ (‘Jakarta’), ‘Indiana’, ‘Montana’ and ‘Nigeria’, and Greek − as in ‘Arctic’, ‘Antarctic’, ‘Indianapolis’, ‘Indonesia’ and ‘Polynesia’. The practice reached a peak in the United States after the American Revolution, a phenomenon unmatched in scale anywhere else in the world. The Puritan myth gave way to that of republicanism, with ‘Athens’ and ‘Rome’ replacing ‘Zion’ in over fifty cases for each name. In addition to almost a hundred localities that were named ‘Troy’, other examples include ‘Antioch’ and ‘Palmyra’ and those inspired by the heroes of Antiquity, such as ‘Seneca’, ‘Hannibal’ and ‘Cincinnati’, together with many others. A total of 3,095 place names of this type have been noted; these are mainly to be found in the eastern regions of the United States, besides New England, and in the Midwest.

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IN THE SERVICE OF POWER The naming process carried out by Europeans did not only express a desire for dominion. In a good number of cases it celebrated power by immortalizing those who held it, particularly monarchs. La Isabela was named after the queen whom Columbus served; the ‘Philippines’, after Philip II of Spain; ‘Louisiana’, after Louis XIV and ‘Victoria’ after the British queen. The practice persisted with examples such as ‘Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land’ (1919) and the ‘Empress Augusta’ River in German New Guinea. Other dynasties were also included; ‘Orléansville’ in Algeria was named after the new royal French House of Orléans, although this was already represented through the cities of ‘Philippeville’, ‘Montpensier’, ‘Nemours’ and ‘Joinville’. In the same way, the brothers of George III were represented through their titles by the Australian counties of ‘Cumberland’ and ‘Northumberland’. Many government ministers likewise left their names imprinted on this region of the world, as with ‘Auckland’, ‘Grafton’, ‘Melbourne’, ‘Rockingham’, ‘Shelbourne’ and ‘Sydney’; the Lords of the Admiralty, Palmerston and Sandwich, were also represented in this way. Conversely, it was impossible to give the name ‘Colbert’ to any locality in Mississippi. Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’, gave her name to ‘Virginia’ in America, while the Province of ‘Carolina’ was named after Charles II and ‘Georgia’, after George II. William Penn’s Quaker colony was named – seemingly against his wishes – ‘Pennsylvania’. America subsequently immortalized the names of the heroes of its Revolution – ‘Washington’, ‘Jefferson’ and ‘Franklin’ – as well as those of foreigners, such as ‘Lafayette’ and ‘Steuben’. The names of other US presidents, including Jackson, Lincoln and McKinley, were also given to various localities, as were those of the war heroes Bolívar and Sucre in the case of Latin America. ‘Columbus’ first reappeared as the name of a city after America had achieved independence, with quantities of other prospectors and discoverers also being honoured in this way. Tasmania now bears the name of Dutch explorer Abel Tasman; the first European to discover it, Tasman named the island ‘Anthony-Van-Diemen-Land’ after his sponsor, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. He named other localities after the Governor of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Frederik Hendrik, and the directors of the East India Company. The Bering Strait was only named after its discoverer, Vitus Bering, at the insistence of James Cook, whose own name has been given to several localities in the South Pacific. The world’s highest mountain still bears the name ‘Everest’, after the British Surveyor General of India, George Everest. A change in colonial power, therefore, often went hand-in-hand with a change of name. In this way, ‘Fort Orange’ (named after the Dutch royal dynasty) became ‘Albany’, a Scottish peerage that had been granted to the country’s new master, the Duke of York and Albany. It was in his honour, moreover, that Nieuw Amsterdam had been transformed into ‘New York’. The same can also be said of Nova Scotia (New Scotland), although this only gradually lost its French name Acadie, as the Acadians were not expelled from the territory until 1755, although it had become British in 1713.

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TOPONYMIC DECOLONIZATION Local names frequently endured despite pressure to change them. This might be because such names were simpler or more familiar in character, or because the new masters could find no alternative. In this way, ‘Lima’ prevailed over Ciudad de los Reyes (the City of Kings − a reference to the Three Magi), and ‘Macao’ was favoured over Povoação do Nome de Deus de Amacao na China (the Colony of the Divine Name of A-Ma-Cau in China). The names of several Latin American and African countries, as well as twenty-four American States, derive from indigenous languages. In many cases, names of this type had initially denoted only a section of the territory involved, with some even originating from a completely different context. These include ‘Idaho’, claimed to have been a Shoshoni term meaning ‘gem of the mountains’, but apparently invented. The Europeans also energetically set about condensing indigenous terms. ‘Algiers’, for instance, is a derivation of al-Jaza’ir. Quinnitukut (the Country of the Long River) became ‘Connecticut’ and Hupokan (the Land of the Tobacco Pipe) was transformed into ‘Hoboken’, influenced by Flemish Dutch. In 1778, 300 settlers were massacred in Pennsylvania in the Valley of ‘Wyoming’ (originally M’chweaming, or Wide Plains). However, the name was favoured once it had achieved popularity through the sentimental poem ‘Gertrude of Wyoming’ and was even given to a territory in 1868. Independence was sometimes accompanied by a process of toponymic decolonization. For the most part, this involved re-establishing former names. In this way, ‘Batavia’, which had been named by the Dutch, regained its Malay name, ‘Jakarta’, while the Algerian cities of ‘Bône’ and ‘Orléansville’ dropped their French names and are now known as ‘Annaba’ and ‘Chlef ’. As part of the sweeping changes that took place in 1962, the name ‘Skikda’ was introduced to replace ‘Philippeville’, while ‘Nemours’ became ‘Ghazaouet’. In India, the British name ‘Bombay’ was replaced with ‘Mumbai’, while ‘Madras’, a name of Indian origin but laden with memories of colonial rule, became ‘Chennai’. In the Congo, which was known for a while as ‘Zaire’, the cities formerly named ‘Léopoldville’, ‘Stanleyville’ and ‘Élisabethville’ are now known as ‘Kinshasa’, ‘Kisangani’ and ‘Lubumbashi’. Conversely, the city of ‘Brazzaville’, which lies on the other side of the Congo River, has retained this name, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza being venerated there as the founder of the state. Even ‘Mount McKinley’ in Alaska, named after the assassinated president, has been included in this process and has been known as ‘Denali’ (Great Mountain) since 2015 – a rare case of linguistic decolonization unaccompanied by political change. The process of renaming countries is rooted in the concept of identity. ‘Sri Lanka,’ a Sinhalese name, replaced ‘Ceylon’, derived from the ancient Pali language, while ‘Myanmar’, which is more literary in register, replaced the colloquial ‘Burma’. ‘Northern Rhodesia’ became Zambia, named after the Zambezi River, and ‘Southern Rhodesia’ was changed to ‘Zimbabwe’, after the ruined city. While the impressive ‘Burkina Faso’ (the Land of Honest Men) was created specifically to replace ‘Upper Volta’, the names ‘Ghana’ and ‘Benin’, given to the countries previously known as the ‘Gold Coast’ and ‘Dahomey’, are both associated with history and traditions

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that belong to other territories. In addition to the ‘Congo’ becoming ‘Zaire’ for a while, the lakes that had been known as Lakes ‘Albert’ and ‘Edward’ were renamed after Mobutu Sese Seko and Idi Amin Dada, although these designations did not outlast the two dictators. The House of Windsor remained exempt from a name change, however, in the case of ‘Lake Victoria’. The process of toponymic decolonization was especially dynamic in cases where colonial rule came to a dramatic end. Conversely, place names remained relatively well established in the ‘successful’ colonies of America and Australia. Indigenous names were able to survive if they had already been appropriated in a process conducted by the prevailing colonial power. But elsewhere, too, indigenous inhabitants appropriated names created by the dominant colonial force in a completely natural manner, so that European names have not entirely vanished from the post-colonial world. The act of naming was not a one-way process, insofar as it involved quantities of actors and competing designations. In a sense, maps have had a stabilizing effect on these reciprocal appropriations, switches and reversals, so that most of these place names are now used unthinkingly, and their link with European colonial history seems all but dissolved.

NOTE 1. Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007), p. 225.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bitterli, Urs, Die Entdeckung Amerikas: Von Kolumbus bis Alexander von Humboldt, Munich, C.H. Beck, 1992. Carter, Paul, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, London and Boston, Faber, 1987. Harley, J. B. and David Woodward (Founding Eds.), The History of Cartography, vol. 6, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2015. Jansen, Jan C., Erobern und Erinnern. Symbolpolitik, öffentlicher Raum und französischer Kolonialismus in Algerien, 1830–1950, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2013. Martonne, Édouard de, ‘Les Noms de lieux d’origine française aux colonies’, Revue d’histoire des colonies, no. 29 (1936): 5–50. Reinhard, Wolfgang, ‘Sprachbeherrschung und Weltherrschaft. Sprache und Sprachwissenschaft in der europäischen Expansion’, in id. (Ed.), Humanismus und Neue Welt, Weinheim, Wiley-VCH, 1987, pp. 1–36, and in id. (Ed.), Ausgewählte Abhandlungen, Berlin, Dunkler & Humblot, 1997, pp. 401–33. Schlögel, Karl, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 2007. Seed, Patricia, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 14921640, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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Stewart, George R., Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, Boston and Cambridge, NYRB Classics, 1958. Tasman, Abel J., Die Entdeckung Neuseelands. Tasmaniens und der Tonga-und FidschiInseln, 1642–1644, Tübingen, Erdmann, 1982. Webersik, Gottlieb, Geographisch-statistisches Welt-Lexikon, Vienna, Hartleben, 1908. Zelinsky, Wilbur, ‘Classical Town Names in the United States: Historical Geography of an American Idea’, Geographical Review, 57, no. 4 (1967): 463–95.

CHAPTER 13

America The promised land SIMONE BLASCHKA-EICK

Until the early twentieth century, America provided millions of European migrants with an abundance of fertile land and nurtured the dreams of those seeking a better life. This seemingly virgin territory could be seen as a new world, a promised land. As a general rule, questions relating to ‘America’ are directed towards the idea of a mythical entity, rather than a geographical one. For that name conveys a promise known to practically all Europeans; besides standing for a comfortable existence, justice and security, it also offers opportunities to acquire riches and fame. Whether or not we believe that the promises offered by the myth of ‘America’ can be fulfilled, it is known to us all and carried within us. Before Europe discovered America, it already had a similar myth in the island of Atlantis. Mentioned for the first time by the Greek philosopher Plato in 360 BCE, it resembled the mythical ‘America’ in that both offered their inhabitants the certainty of leading a good and perhaps a happy life. Although there are still amateur archaeologists and historians who continue to seek the submerged remains of Atlantis, it certainly never existed. This differentiates it from the ‘America’ myth, which originated from an actual locality. Atlantis was a literary device invented by Plato as a vehicle for his reflections on an ideal world. Many followed him down this intellectual route; besides various Roman philosophers and Christian theologians, they include the Englishman Thomas More, whose renowned work Utopia (1516) likewise describes an ideal society. It was published twenty-four years after Christopher Columbus discovered the ‘New World’ − 1492 was the year that witnessed the birth of ‘America’, the myth. From this perspective, we might say that Europe – beginning with Plato – had already envisioned and hoped for something similar to this mythical ‘America’. And we might also say that ‘America’ is therefore an ancient European myth that had already been given a great many names but only materialized once it had been called ‘America’.

THE NEW WORLD Initially, however, explorations were prompted by the quest to find a trade route to India, rather than a new Atlantis. In 1492, the Italian navigator Christopher

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Columbus became the first European to discover the Bahamas, in what is now known as the Caribbean. He made three further voyages to the Americas, on those occasions in the service of the Spanish Crown. Whether this is due to the dramatic appeal of the story or to convenience, Christopher Columbus has been mistakenly celebrated for having discovered America in 1492. Even the name ‘America’, as we know, was not given by Columbus but by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. In 1507, the latter produced the first map of the newly discovered continent in the Atlantic and named it in honour of Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian navigator. Vespucci himself gave another name to the continent that had just been discovered: the New World. For, as he explained in a letter written in 1502 to his sponsor, Lorenzo de’ Medici, its ‘existence . . . [was] a total novelty for all those who hear[d] tell of it’. The letter was published in 1503 in several European countries, after which the term circulated around the continent, as Mundus Novus, Neue Welt, Nuevo Mundo, Nouveau Monde or ‘New World’. This name is now firmly rooted in everyday European parlance and is often used as a synonym for that mythical ‘America’. Columbus’s epic saga came to an end in the United States in 1992, with the 500th anniversary of his discoveries. Since then, although the navigator is still seen as the European who discovered the Americas, thereby instigating European colonization there, his name is often associated with the repression and quasi-extermination of several Native American tribes. Today, however, we search in vain for any allusion to this new interpretation of history on Lisbon’s Monument of the Discoveries (Padrão dos Descobrimentos). Since then, the Mayflower, the famous sailing ship that brought the first European settlers to the site of modern-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, has played a greater role than Columbus in the United States’ ‘homecoming myth’. The development that led from the epic narrative to the tributes paid to those intrepid settlers is also manifested in the place now occupied by Thanksgiving, one of the United States’ main public holidays. Not only do these festivities involve the giving of thanks to God for the bounties offered by the fertile land of America, they also commemorate the Native Americans who helped so many settlers by providing them with the supplies they needed in order to withstand that first harsh winter. This foundational and patriotic myth is reflected in the European myth associated with ‘America’; a number of hardships must be endured if one is to achieve prosperity and happiness.

THE LURE OF RICHES: GOLD FEVER Initially, however, those who benefitted from the discoveries made in America by Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and English navigators were not the hard-working European peasants, craftsmen and day labourers. The first to profit from European expansion and from the foundation of European colonies on the other side of the Atlantic were the royal houses of Europe and the Catholic Church. While the Church was beginning its highly efficient religious conversion of the inhabitants of South and Central America, the princes were busy securing riches and power.

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The immense wealth accumulated by the Mayas, Aztecs and Incas – their stores of gold and their silver mines – is one of the cornerstones of that first American myth. But while that early ‘gold fever’ had infected the nobility and the army, it was the adventurous sons of the middle classes, hardy artisans and peasants, who succumbed to ‘gold fever’ in California and Alaska during the nineteenth century. All these adventurers, conquistadores and gold prospectors had one point in common; they compensated for the marked lack of a female presence in those environments by bringing with them women and girls from indigenous communities or from Europe to act as prostitutes. How voluntarily they performed this function is a question that remains unanswered. In 1525 or thereabouts, Spain began sending precious deliveries of gold and silver to Europe. Hernán Cortés set about conquering the Mayas and Aztecs, Francisco Pizarro, the Incas. These riches were acquired through the extraction of minerals, silver and mercury, at the expense of the labourers involved. Depending on the region, African slaves or indigenous inhabitants, working either on a forced-labour basis or for remuneration, were used for this work, which carried huge health risks. In the long term, however, this exploitation of Central and South America did not prove profitable for the Spanish Crown. The vast amounts of silver brought into Spain caused the value of its silver coinage to drop sharply, triggering inflation during the sixteenth century. Spain subsequently became heavily in debt to the main European banks. In addition to these first highly unpleasant contacts with global capitalism, the country experienced the loss of its supremacy in Europe, as England had risen to become the new maritime power. Although the latter’s sailors, in the manner of pirates, had been looting Spanish ships on their way back from South America laden with gold and silver, England later inflicted a decisive defeat on the Spanish Armada at the Battle of Gravelines in the English Channel in 1588. She was later able to establish her colonial empire on the North American coast without interference from Spain.

TERRITORIAL CONQUEST When the American War of Independence broke out in 1775, there were thirteen British colonies on the North American coast. Unlike the Spanish monarchs, the British had no military objective in view when founding their colonies; their aim was to conquer lands in order to promote trade. The first English colony, founded on Roanoke Island in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh, who was in the service of Elizabeth I, was named ‘Virginia’ in her honour. However, the men and women who settled there may have been attacked by indigenous inhabitants as no trace of them remains. The first permanent English colony was established at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, by the Virginia Company of London, a commercial enterprise. Twelve years later, in 1619, the first ship transporting foreign slaves arrived at the town. In this way, after just a few years, the three population groups whose presence was to affect the events of the following centuries in North America were already coexisting in Virginia: European colonizers, African slaves and Native Americans. What we now call, in

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a positive sense, a multicultural society had established itself in a very short space of time. Yet there were far too many on the losing side in colonial North American society – namely, the African slaves and the Native Americans. The Spanish had defeated and plundered the Mayas, Aztecs and Incas; the British, however, proceeded differently in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Certain tribes were respected, being regarded as trading partners. They supplied British traders with beaver skins, for example, which were highly prized in Europe. Yet on the other hand, they possessed land that was much coveted by Europeans.

‘TO EXTIRPATE THESE SAVAGES’ In order to appropriate that land, the British let European colonists advance ever further into Native American territory, after which they negotiated land transfers. Some tribes moved westwards, others made the best of their reduced territories, in some cases attacking European colonists as a form of defence. Yet it was not those skirmishes that led to such a dramatic decline in the indigenous population of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries − it was the influenza virus, against which they had no immune defences. According to some estimates, over 100,000 Native Americans died of infectious diseases in the southern regions of New England between 1570 and 1670. Neither did they have a means of defence against alcohol, another ‘present’ from Europe; being completely unfamiliar with it, they were unable to evaluate its effects. Following negotiations he had conducted with the Iroquois in 1754, Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, wrote: ‘If it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed means.’ There is one thing that this brutal statement clearly shows − most Europeans were certainly aware that they were engaged in a relentless competition with the Native Americans. The question of which side would drive away the other was yet to be settled, even though Franklin’s text was still referring to the role played by God. Neither the English colonial powers nor the future United States pursued a systematic policy of extermination. Indeed, for a considerable period they oscillated between moving the indigenous populations to western regions and conducting negotiations with a view to buying territory. In the nineteenth century, however, it became apparent that this was not enough to satisfy the millions of European immigrants avid for land. Entire tribes began to be deported to reservations. Resistance was brutally suppressed; from then on, more Native Americans died as a result of violence than from influenza or the effects of alcohol. What did the European colonists think of this? What did it feel like to know that, although one’s desire to own a farm had been fulfilled, it had been at the expense of others? Most of them took possession of these lands once the army had driven out the indigenous population, enabling them to avoid the naggings of a guilty conscience. They were all part of the same community and could even claim to be ‘pioneers’ as they sang their own praises; in their eyes, this was an empty, deserted

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country. Their arrival alone had brought about the birth of civilization ex nihilo. They studiously avoided reflecting on the life led by the Native Americans, who, apart from a little agriculture, used most of their territory for hunting and therefore refrained from transforming the natural world. In most cases, the only trace of the indigenous inhabitants that the colonists found on their arrival were the trails made by the former, which they often turned into roadways. And it was only after the Europeans had cultivated the land and built houses and churches that the country acquired genuine value in their eyes. The pride they took in this process of ‘civilizing’ the land is an essential element of the American myth. Combined with an ignorance of foreign cultures, it manifested itself in a type of behaviour for which Americans and Europeans still attract criticism from the rest of the world. Scholars were practically alone in advocating humanism in the nineteenth century and in promoting a concept such as ‘respect for foreigners’ – values of this type were not included in mainstream education. Even though the idea of Christian love for one’s neighbour remained a key principle, in the eyes of some Europeans the Native Americans were ‘savages’ who had no right to that brotherly love. Nevertheless, most of the colonists were able to believe, justifiably, that they themselves had done no personal harm to any indigenous inhabitant – the army had carried out that work for them. When one is absolutely determined to turn one’s dream into reality, one cannot stop at the threshold of someone else’s nightmare, and this may explain what happened. The colonists were seeking a free land that promised their family a prosperous existence for generations to come and would enable them to live without feudal ties. And that is exactly what millions of them found. Some, however, had emigrated to America with a different intention – they were seeking a place where they would be free to practise their religion. The British provided them with that opportunity at the beginning of the colonial era.

THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM Founded by William Penn in 1682, the colony of Pennsylvania was the first to establish freedom of religion in its constitution. William Penn himself was a Quaker, and his differences with the Anglican Church had already cost him a period of imprisonment in London. Only his wealth and the fact that the king of England owed him money enabled him to avoid what would surely have been a more lasting form of persecution. In 1677, during the voyage he had undertaken through various regions of Germany, Penn had addressed local Pietists and Mennonites, hoping to inspire them with enthusiasm for the colony he was intending to create, so that they would emigrate there. Pietists and Mennonites did not follow the official form of the religion established by the Protestant Church and were therefore persecuted during the period of uncertainty that followed the Thirty Years’ War. In the end, thirty-three German Mennonites and Pietists decided to emigrate to Penn’s colony and disembarked at Philadelphia on 6 October 1683. Just five years

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later, these groups, who had grown up under an absolutist feudal system, wrote their first political manifesto with Dutch Quakers. This denunciation of slavery shows that their humanism was deeply rooted in their religious convictions: The very fact that these traders of human beings call themselves Christians is particularly grave, as we have heard that the Africans have been brought here against their will and that many of them have been robbed. No one has the right to treat them as slaves simply because they are black [. . .] We are told that all men should be treated exactly alike, regardless of age, origin or colour. From the outset, therefore, settler groups in America included individuals committed to creating a more humane, freer society – one that would inevitably differ from that of Europe and its prevailing political reality. This quest for freedom is enshrined at the heart of the American myth and for a considerable period, America symbolized that freedom alone. Today, for many Americans, that association is no longer self-sustaining; things have changed. American imperialism has been condemned with ever-increasing vigour, notably with regard to the Vietnam War, the controversial Pershing missiles stationed in Germany and the detention and torture camp established at Guantánamo Bay in the wake of 9/11. In 1688, however, the phenomenon that was to be perceived as the decline of the American ideal of freedom belonged to the far distant future. This was a time when millions of Europeans were still waiting for the opportunity to live their ‘American Dream’.

THE AMERICANS In the eighteenth century, however, many who were keen to emigrate found the very high cost of the crossing to America prohibitive. The Redemptioner System, whereby emigrants sold themselves into a form of indentured servitude for a minimum of three years to farmers, plantation owners or American stores in exchange for the payment of their journey across the Atlantic, rapidly gained in popularity. This was far from being a fair arrangement. It often happened that the ships’ captains, in league with certain Americans, swindled the emigrants who had obtained passage through the system by forcing them to sign a new contract during the voyage. This would consign them to a much longer period of servitude than had originally been stipulated. Those who refused were threatened with abandonment on an island. Yet very few were dissuaded from trying their luck in the new land, even in view of the injustices and constraints of the Redemptioner System, so strong was the attraction exerted by ‘America’ at that time. Whether it was due to this system, forced displacement or standard emigration, the number of inhabitants in the colonies was constantly rising. By the end of the colonial era, shortly before the War of Independence broke out, the Thirteen Colonies contained around 500,000 slaves and two million people originally from Europe. An increasing number of colonists were describing themselves as ‘Americans’, and fiscal and legal disputes with the mother country were becoming more and more frequent. This was primarily due to the fact that Americans – who

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remained British citizens – were denied the rights enjoyed by those who lived in Britain. Nothing could heal the breach that had opened between the colonists and their original homeland. The first armed confrontations between British soldiers and Americans took place in the early summer of 1775, marking the start of the War of Independence. On 4 July 1776, when the Thirteen Colonies proclaimed their independence and their right to create a federation of States, the Americans were not alone in rejoicing – a large number of Europeans did so too. In anticipation of war, Benjamin Franklin had recruited freedom fighters from Europe. In this way, the Polish nobleman Tadeusz Kościuszko helped the Americans to win the war as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and chief of the Engineering Corps, having overseen the building of military fortifications. He donated the considerable sum he had received for these services to the anti-slavery movement. The support that he subsequently gave to the Polish Liberation Movement earned him a National Memorial in Philadelphia and national hero status in Poland. In many intellectual and middle-class circles, the Americans were seen as conducting a war against dominant forces and oppression in the name of the people and of freedom. The conflict became a type of substitute for the war that many would have liked to fight in Europe, and they followed it avidly, together with the Americans. The American side received financial support from the French, who were primarily motivated by the desire to undermine Britain, their traditional, longstanding foe. The Marquis de La Fayette, who had been successfully fighting with the American army against the British for two years, therefore had no difficulty in obtaining new funding for the American cause from Paris in 1779.

THE SECULARIZATION OF HAPPINESS The Declaration of Independence contains that new conception of the self connected with modern man ‘We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ These rights were officially confirmed in 1791, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights, which included those of freedom of speech, of the press and of religion. In this way, a form of miracle had developed during the years 1776 and 1791. The long-held European dream of creating a society that would strive for justice had been realized. And the result far transcended these hopes, for the ideas developed by French Enlightenment philosophers a very few decades earlier were included in the American Constitution: the separation of powers advocated by Montesquieu and Rousseau’s social contract. All of a sudden, something beautiful and true had emerged, this time not from a utopian novel or a philosophical work but from the constitution of a nation. Goethe was still sighing over this in a poem he wrote in 1827: ‘America, your lot is better / Than our old continent’s.’ Most Europeans saw this mainly as a promise that America offered one the chance to experience happiness on earth. This message spread like wildfire throughout Europe over the next few decades. In the nineteenth century, happiness meant

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leading a life free of material poverty. It was not until the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries that it became equated with self-fulfilment, whether as a ‘lonesome cowboy’, in a hippy commune or as a pop star.

THE FAR WEST Fortunately for the Europeans of the nineteenth century, the United States did not only have a constitution full of promises, it also had land – in vast quantities. And the further westwards they advanced, the more they found. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 form the time frame within which millions of Europeans were able to live their ‘American Dream’ free of restrictions. Those 140 years immortalized the myth of ‘America’. The period before 1776 was marked by a lack of attainable transatlantic tickets and of civil rights; after 1914, the obstacles took the form of immigration quotas and economic crises. Later, after the Second World War, most European countries, at least in the West, were doing reasonably well in the political, social and economic sense, so that only a limited number of citizens wished to emigrate. The Eastern European countries, for their part, were locked behind the Iron Curtain. Forty-four million Europeans crossed the Atlantic during the long nineteenth century (1789–1914), most of them bound for the United States. There were several reasons why emigration from Europe occurred on such a vast scale. They include the Irish Potato Famine, land shortages in England and Germany, the latifundia system in southern Italy, the pogroms inflicted on the Jewish population in the Russian Empire and a lack of industries in large areas of Austria–Hungary, to name but a few. The 5.5 million Germans who arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century constituted the country’s largest immigrant group of that period. Like the Swedes, they were content to settle with their families in the Midwest, which they deemed a reliable location. The English and Irish, on the other hand, frequently followed the ‘frontier’, that famous boundary-line between the land appropriated by the United States and that of the Native Americans, which was constantly shifting further westwards. This was where the ‘Wild West’ legend was born; there, one had to conquer one’s territory and then defend it, armed with a gun, against Indians, lynxes and bears, withstanding icy winters, prolonged periods of drought and endless solitude. For many white Americans today, this highly specific form of existential sensibility is symbolized by the right to bear arms – an attitude often met with incomprehension in Europe. Many immigrants were soon able to demonstrate their economic success to those who had remained in the mother country. If we are to believe a fairly standard anecdote, an individual from Germany who had possessed 0.75 hectares of land there, and whose family, moreover, had been obliged to earn their living by working in a cloth-weaving workshop, had become the owner of 64 hectares of land in the United States in the space of a mere 15 years. The acquisition of eighty-five times more land than one had previously owned constituted an astounding success story.

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Millions of letters containing cheering news of this type crossed the Atlantic and triggered a chain reaction; hundreds of thousands of families left for the New World in their turn, in order to settle there permanently. New localities and townships were established, their names linking them to Europe − New Ulm, Rome Township, Lafayette and so on.

FAITH IN PROGRESS The United States underwent a transformation in the late nineteenth century. From the 1870s, there was virtually no available land left for cultivation. The urbanization and industrialization of the country were proceeding unstoppably, providing opportunities for Europe’s poor. Young men could find employment on the gigantic construction sites of the rapidly expanding new cities, on the huge canal and railway construction projects that were underway or in industry, a sector experiencing phenomenally rapid growth. Although Europe was being transformed at an astonishing rate during this period, everything in the United States was larger, more powerful and faster. The groundbreaking inventions made there were crucial to technological advancement. These include the refrigerated railway wagon developed in Chicago in 1877 by the meat packer Gustavus Swift. From then on, perishable goods such as meat, milk, fruit and vegetables could be transported by train over a distance of several thousand kilometres. It was not long before it also became possible to load these commodities onto cargo ships equipped with refrigerated rooms. This meant that fresh produce could be exported and imported on a global scale, a development enabling today’s consumers to choose between American steak and Argentinian beef, for example. In 1879, Thomas A. Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, which was admired by the fifty million visitors to the Palace of Electricity at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900. Soon, every household was able to have light at all hours without the need for candles or fuel-burning lamps, which posed a fire risk. And in 1913, the first moving assembly line was put into operation at the Ford automobile plant in Detroit. The manufacturing process was streamlined, lowering the cost of expensive items such as cars, to the point where they could be mass-produced and well-known brands could be found throughout the world. In this respect, too, the United States set the tone, particularly after the Second World War; brands such as Coca Cola, Marlboro and McDonald’s were the symbols of Western consumer society for decades. The myth of ‘America’ then began to flourish in a new, modern context, as the idea of progress and faith in technology began to capture imaginations, rather than the extensive availability of land. In the eyes of many, the United States embodied a way of life that enabled everyone to cultivate prosperity. Later, the emergence of rock ’n’ roll, the hippy movement and pop music generated a new sensibility unfettered by tradition, and it seemed as if the Americanization of the Western world was an unstoppable phenomenon. Yet the double-edged sword of the American way of life soon became apparent. Whereas a number of European countries had established social security systems, none was developed in the United States. Those accused of leading the Haymarket

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Riot that had taken place in Chicago in May 1886 had been executed, an example of the brutal approach that had dominated social relations. May 1 was chosen as International Workers’ Day in memory of that event. The United States was quick to rely on quite a different form of social security – upward mobility, a system that was open to all and no longer functions. Young women, who worked as maids in the early 1900s, now sought employment as sales assistants or secretaries – white-collar jobs that did not involve heavy physical activity. This was a dream for many young men and women. An increasing number of parents considered that a college education would provide their children with more opportunities; farmers and labourers began to pay for their offspring to have a better start in life than they themselves had been given. More than one young man dreamed of making the most of this great opportunity. The huge economic boom experienced in the United States produced the first dollar millionaires; these included the Vanderbilts, a family of Dutch origin, and the Heinz dynasty, inventors of ketchup, whose founder had come to America from Germany. These families gave the impression anyone could make the career journey ‘from dishwasher to millionaire’. Yet, whether this involved a small jump to the rank of a secretary or office worker, or a great leap to that of a millionaire, for many Europeans the myth of ‘America’ also symbolized the opportunity to improve their lives.

SEIZING ONE’S CHANCE Most immigrants to the United States settled in areas where they could be close to their compatriots, which surely eased the experience of parting from their native lands. In this way, the inhabitants of New York’s Little Italy district spoke Italian, shopped in Italian stores and, in most cases, married their compatriots or the latters’ children. While the numerous Little Germanies that had existed in many American cities before the First World War disappeared, the sites of memory of other immigrant communities remain to this day. Besides Little Italy, there is the French Quarter in New Orleans, for instance − although some of these districts are no longer home to communities and chiefly serve as tourist attractions. Examples of German heritage are now mainly to be found in the form of festivals such as Cincinnati’s Oktoberfest and the Wurstfest (sausage festival) held in New Braunfels, Texas. European visitors are astounded to discover the habits and customs attributed to their continent. In his film The Immigrant (1917), which includes scenes on board on a transatlantic steamship before its arrival in New York, Charlie Chaplin presents sharply observed portrayals of the stereotypes associated with certain young Europeans who emigrated to the United States shortly before the First World War. These include a crafty Southern European, who robs two women from Eastern Europe, wearing headscarves and travelling alone, and a young, bowler-hatted English gentleman seeking happiness in the form of romance as well as his fortune. Others, for whom the passage remained prohibitively expensive, had to find a means of buying their ticket. In Elia Kazan’s film America, America, set in 1896, Stavros, a young Greek man, agrees to marry in order to use the dowry money to pay for the journey. He is determined to go to America at all costs.

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For at that time, there were two things that the United States was offering in abundance: opportunities and employment. Since 1886, these possibilities, whether significant or small, have been symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, which was given to the United States by France and which inspired the famous poem by Emma Lazarus, ‘The New Colossus’ (1883): ‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .’ Not everyone could seize their chance and live their dream, however. Those remaining, for lack of opportunity, in rough districts such as the vicinity of Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan might well languish in poverty. More than one such individual returned to Europe, frustrated and humiliated. The number of those who returned to the Old Continent rose steadily in the early twentieth century, as living conditions in the United States were becoming increasingly arduous. In 1929, ‘Black Thursday’ caused widespread job losses. The 1930s, catastrophic for America, were followed by the Second World War. During the conflict, the country became a refuge for European Jews and subsequently a new homeland for around 200,000 Holocaust survivors. German-speaking intellectuals who had fled the National Socialist dictatorship, such as Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, settled at Pacific Palisades in California during the war. The drop in the numbers of European immigrants to the United States became increasingly marked after 1945; they were replaced by emigrants from Asia, Mexico and Cuba, who arrived in the country and formed new communities there.

REALM OF NOSTALGIA, REALM OF MEMORY In 1893, while mass German immigration to the United States was gradually declining, German author Karl May published his novel Winnetou: The Red Gentleman. There, he presented a portrait of righteous Germans, who assisted courageous Native Americans against villainous and greedy Anglo-Americans. The book stood against the victory of technology and the galloping industrialization then taking place in Germany, championing the world of nature and freedom. An almost indigestible slice of kitsch, it was nevertheless read by generations of German children and young people through to the 1970s, enabling them to escape the humdrum activities of their everyday lives and enter a realm of nostalgia called ‘America’. This had little to do with the myth of the same name, as its protagonists found their happiness in a dreamlike world, rather than in reality. The Emigrants, by Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg, is completely different. A fictional saga written between 1949 and 1959, it tells the story of a group of Swedish emigrants who leave for Minnesota in the mid-nineteenth century, describing the many privations they undergo from their departure to their arrival in the United States and the life they lead there. This is a literary example of a family who had the chance to experience the myth of ‘America’ and ultimately achieved success. In his Introduction to the first volume, Moberg wrote of Swedish emigrants: ‘At home, their names are forgotten – their adventures will soon belong to the saga and the legend’1 He was long thought to be right. In the late 1980s, however, moves were made to revive these memories and museums devoted to them have sprung up all over Europe. They include the Utvandrarnas Hus in Växjö, Sweden, the Ulster

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American Folk Park in Omagh, Northern Ireland, the Galata Museo del Mare in Genoa, Italy, the Deutsches Auswandererhaus in Bremerhaven, Germany, and the Cité de la mer in Cherbourg, France. These museums are the counterparts to the largest one of its kind devoted to immigration: Ellis Island. From 1892 to 1954, that small island situated opposite Manhattan was the entry and immigration control point for emigrants arriving from Europe. Twelve million people gained access to the United States in this way. For those unable to get through the control system, Ellis Island was the ‘Isle of Tears’ − for all the others, it became the ‘Gateway to America’.

DISENCHANTMENT WITH THE MYTH As the United States was rising to the status of a global power after the 1914–18 war, America gradually became a polarizing subject. While the European left wing was expressing its anger on a daily basis over the trial of two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, admirers of the United States spent their evenings dancing to a new type of music − jazz. The often dogmatic anti-Americanism expressed by European intellectuals goes hand-in-hand with major protest movements. This was seen with the marches and other demonstrations against the Iraq War or the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA). The American way of life has spread throughout the world, a phenomenon that has met with resistance. France has established measures to protect the French language against the introduction of Americanisms, while middle-class German ‘lefties’ are happy to announce that their children never drink Coca Cola – yet many dream of seeing their offspring graduate from one of the Ivy League universities, such as Harvard or Yale. Europeans are no longer spellbound by the myth of ‘America’; freedom, prosperity and democracy are also to be found in Europe, which has the additional advantage of better social security systems. Conversely, the continent faces the problem of having become not only a refuge but also a mythical realm in the eyes of large numbers of migrants from Africa and the Middle East; such is their determination to access that realm that they are prepared to risk their lives in the process. And what is Europe’s dream today? After Atlantis and America, what will be next?

NOTE 1. Vilhelm Moberg, The Emigrants, translated from the Swedish by Gustaf Lannestock, Saint Paul, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1951 [1949], p. xxviii.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blaschka-Eick, Simone, In die Neue Welt! Deutsche Auswanderer in drei Jahrhunderten, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 2015. Cullen, Jim, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. Hoerder, Dirk and Diethelm Knauf, Fame, Fortune and Sweet Liberty: The Great European Emigration, Bremen, Temen, 1999.

CHAPTER 14

The clock and the calendar WOLFGANG REINHARD

Europe measured time in order to dominate it. The irreversible passage of linear time – the result of monotheism and mathematics − has conquered the world. Initially conceived as a way of containing people within a religious framework, the measurement of time later provided them with a means of organizing their lives. The heroine of Michael Ende’s novel Momo (1973) is a child who thwarts the plans of the grey-clad men working as agents for the Timesaving Bank. These individuals, who chill the air wherever they go, live by consuming the time they have stolen from others after teaching them the concept of saving it. They instruct people to ‘work faster, and stick to essentials’, discarding any ‘useless pastimes’. These would include activities such as chatting with a customer or with one’s elderly mother, taking time to reflect on one’s day or playing with one’s children. Time being equated with money, saving it enables one’s capital to grow. In this way, people accumulate more and consequently have more to spend. Yet the time-savers found their days actually appeared shorter: ‘Meanwhile, he was becoming increasingly restless and irritable. The odd thing was that, no matter how much time he saved, he never seemed to have any to spare [. . .].’ They even dread wasting the time they do have: In their view, even leisure time had to be used to the full, so as to extract the maximum of entertainment and relaxation with the minimum of delay. [. . .] Daydreaming they regarded almost as a criminal offence. What they could endure least of all, however, was silence.1 Time and money are seen as the most important resources in our modern market economies, a fact highlighted by Michael Ende in this nostalgic critique of today’s ‘time is money’ ethos. But what is time? Clearly, like Saint Augustine, we all know what time is without being able to explain it. Time is a black hole into which our thoughts disappear without trace. As it has no empirical envelope, it does not exist. What we do succeed in measuring objectively are processes, not time itself. Once again we find ourselves echoing Saint Augustine, who observed that time could not exist without motion or change. However, we do have subjective experience of time, notably in the form of death, and in the course of our development we have acquired a very pronounced

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awareness of it. As these experiences and that awareness are shared, they possess the relatively objective character of cultural phenomena.

CULTURES AND THE CONCEPT OF TIME Various cultures have created divinities in charge of time – when God Himself was not identified with it or seen as residing in the timeless eternity of a permanent present. Different societies develop different time cultures. Accordingly, the behaviour of citizens from the GDR differed from that of West Germans in this respect, as well as in others. And within any given culture, there is always an example of polychronicity; cultures simultaneously display a variety of possible approaches to time. We can reduce these approaches to sets of contrasting pairs, such as natural and social time; pre-modern work based on tasks to be accomplished and modern work, rapidly carried out against the clock; cyclical and linear history; lifespans perceived subjectively and universal time measured objectively; and even pre-colonial and colonial time. Together, these form a set of constructions reflecting the understanding of time in Western culture. Indian thought, for instance, included a multitude of different concepts of time, not simply the idea that it was cyclical. According to the generally accepted Hindu representation, cycles of creation and destruction known as kalpas repeatedly followed one another over a period of 4.32 billion years. This conception did not include a return to an identical situation but entailed a change occurring through rebirth linked to good or bad karma, or the attainment of Nirvana, according to Buddhist thought. In this way, an inconceivable ‘indifference with regard to historical facts’2 led to temporal incertitude. In traditional Chinese thought, the cosmos likewise remained outside of history, importance being accorded to universal harmony rather than to evolution. Cycles came to be part of both linear cosmic time and historical time, and might be subject to manipulation in the name of convention. The circles of trigrams and hexagrams in the Yi-king (combinations of three or six solid or broken lines) could equally represent night and day, or a year, or even a completed natural cycle. In India, as in China, neither the beginning nor the end of time was an object of preoccupation. So although it is over-simplifying matters to focus on cyclical representations of time as constituting an ‘ideal type’, it does enable us to highlight cultural difference.

NEWTON’S UNIVERSAL TIME The idea whereby the experience of time was constrained by the very structure of a language when the latter, like Chinese, has no verb tenses has been refuted. Several languages, indeed, offer a number of different means of indicating the same point in time. The basic mechanisms for treating time are similar in all cultures, although they exhibit considerable intercultural diversification.

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In this way, through its well-known need to measure and quantify, Europe was able to produce a concept of time that would revolutionize the world. This was Isaac Newton’s mathematical, linear time, flowing indifferently into eternity, with no empirical reference to any outside element. Its flow was even reversible, although not in the case of living beings; these developed their own version of time, in the form of their lifespans, established as an episode within universal time. As a result of European expansion throughout the world, the latter found itself subject to Isaac Newton’s concept of universal time. In 1538, Martin Luther was lamenting the fact that the world was ruled by the calendar. His target was not the liturgical calendar, with its religious and saints’ feast days − a European variant of the standard calendar that he himself had already simplified in a draconian manner − but the emergence of the engagement calendar. Now that time has been measured, this rules us relentlessly with its mass of dates and deadlines, dictating not only our present but also our future. A large number of calendars were already being printed in Luther’s day. Eighty million are now produced in Germany each year, although some, given as promotional gifts, may remain unused. There are also vast numbers of wall calendars and tear-off calendars, which appeared in the nineteenth century. In effect, the new European conception of time constituted a fundamental contribution in terms of the principle of causality − as it involved both past and present − and in terms of forecasting and planning − as it involved both present and future. Other cultures’ conceptions of time were regarded as irrational and inferior. The notion of ‘dreamtime’, introduced in the 1890s to denote the Australian Aboriginal people’s conception of time, was presented in a derogatory manner, as dreams were given no consideration during this period. The claim that so-called primitive peoples had no understanding of temporality served political purposes, insofar as it chimed with the notion of terra nullius (‘no one’s land’), a conception of space that formed the basis of colonial occupation. The Timesaving Bank is not all-powerful, however. Europe and the rest of the world remain polychronic in character. The Irish proverb ‘When God created time, He created a lot of it’ is known even to continental Europeans. As for the worldwide colonization of time, this was not accomplished in a systematic manner. In some cases, members of other cultures were able to reject the European approach or to establish hybrid systems featuring a combination of their own time culture and that of the Europeans.

NATURAL TIME AND CULTURAL TIME All cultures organize their experience of time. They can begin by observing the rhythms of the sky and base their systems on (1) the solar day, (2) the lunar cycle, (3) the year and its seasons. This produces different results, even with regard to the definition of a day, the start of which can be identified in various ways. For Hindus, it begins at sunrise − for Jews and Muslims, at sunset, while according to our coordinated universal time, now in force throughout the world, it begins at midnight. ‘God made days and nights but man made the Calendar.’3 Our own

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scientifically based calendar has only an indirect link with stellar observation, as it proceeds from a simple mathematical convention regarding the organization of the year. Other elements of the calendar are purely cultural in origin: (1) the subdivision of the day into hours, minutes and seconds, now based on the ancient Eastern duodecimal and sexagesimal systems; (2) the seven-day week, which also has a symbolic history; (3) the twelve signs of the Zodiac; and (4) the subdivision of time into eras, the system governing the way in which elapsed years are counted. Like the Babylonians, pre-Modern Europe divided day and night into twelve hours, whose length varied according to the duration of the solar day. The mechanical clock marked the victory of the system whereby the twenty-four hours of the day were divided into two twelve-hour periods, yet this was not permanently established until 1800. However, it was not until the twentieth century that the twenty-four-hour clock became widely established, although most clock faces still display numbers one to twelve. Anglophone countries have retained the twelve-hour clock, using ‘a.m.’ and ‘p.m.’ to indicate time before or after midday (ante and post meridiem). As set out in the Books of Genesis (1.1–2.4) and Exodus (20.8-11), the sevenday week ending with the Sabbath, the day of rest, was inherited from Judaism and inspired by the Babylonian model. As this method of structuring time proved practical, it was adopted by the ancient world. Ancient Greek astrologers used it as the basis of a system featuring the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. As Sunday was the day of their Lord’s Resurrection, Christians established it as the first day of the week. It remains so in the case of the United States, as well as in the Arab world, India and China, all of which adopted the Western week. In Germany and elsewhere, conversely, the first day of the week is Monday, according to a decision made by the UN in 1978. Moreover, since 1993, calendars have featured week numbers. In 386, the Emperor Theodosius brought the Sabbath day of rest forward to Sunday; the sanctification of this new ‘Sabbath’ was one of the central points of nineteenth-century British evangelical missionary programmes. The Arabs had adopted the seven-day week before the time of Mohammed. But the latter established Friday as the day of worship, for it was on this sixth day that Allah had created Man. Subsequently, Friday also became the day of rest. The calendar year, with its months, presented calculation problems that were dealt with in extremely diverse ways, for neither the solar year nor the lunar month is easy to convert into days. A year is made up of 365.2422 days and comprises 12.368 months, one month in turn comprising 29.53 days. It is said that most people initially used lunar calendars. The only one to have survived is the Islamic calendar, divided into twelve months that are alternately twenty-nine and thirty days long (sura 9.37). This was introduced in order to eradicate pre-Islamic customs, particularly the tendency to worship the Sun. The lunar year was shorter than the solar year, its dates always falling comparatively earlier. This is why Muslims apparently live longer lives – in theory, as for practical reasons, they too have to refer to the solar year, at least for recurring fiscal and economic deadlines.

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THE DEPARTURE POINT Most cultures have created a combination of solar and lunar years. World history has been marked by the calendar reforms that took effect in 46 BCE and in 1582 CE, respectively. The astronomers consulted by the dictator Julius Caesar adopted the Egyptian solar calendar, adding a leap year. According to the Julian calendar, the average year comprised 365.2500 days. As this was a little too long, Pope Gregory XIII’s astronomers reduced it to 365.2425 days, the result of their calculations having remained the most usable option to this day. Despite its cultural origin, the Gregorian calendar had sound, practical advantages. The need to count the years from a point of departure – namely, the birth of Christ – had been established since the end of Antiquity and was seen as specific to monotheistic religions, whose conception of time is markedly linear. By 2016, it was already the 5776th year since the creation of the world according to the Jewish calendar, while the Muslims were in the year 1437, calculated from the Hegira, the migration of the Prophet to Medina. The Mayan calendar, too, had its starting point, while the Greeks used their Olympiads as the basis of their calculations; the Romans’ point of departure was the foundation of their city, and that of the Chinese, the sixtyfirst year of the reign of an emperor born in 2637 BCE. Yet dates of this type had no claim to historical significance; they contributed to forging an identity through fiction and myth. The Chinese and Japanese combined their five elements with twelve Zodiac signs, making successive cycles of sixty days (the notion of a week being unknown to them) and sixty years (2016 being the thirty-third year of the seventy-eighth cycle). But their dates are primarily defined by the regnal years of their emperors. As ‘absolute’ historical dating is only possible with reference to an era, dates have become a crucial aspect of events.

RITUALIZING AND DOMINATING TIME The Christian calendar included a great deal of ‘social time’. Besides Sundays, it featured a large number of non-working days in the form of public holidays. This was not the only culture, however, whose calendar also marked out festive days. While the New Year was celebrated everywhere, the Christian calendar was primarily concerned with religious feast days and with glorifying Christian history and that of human redemption. The Roman emperors certainly celebrated the jubilee years of their reigns, yet these were inherited from the Jewish system of Sabbatical years, with its recurring seven- and fifty-year cycles. The Holy Year observed in the Catholic Church, established in 1300, likewise followed this model. It was initially celebrated every century, the interval later being reduced to every twenty-five years. It is also observed on other special occasions, offering the faithful additional opportunities for salvation. Another traditional function fulfilled by practically all calendars was the indication of favourable and unfavourable days, whether for cutting one’s hair, building a house, conducting business or having sexual relations, and a host of other activities. Calendars were not only the products of ancient astrology, they

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were also its instruments, beginning with the concept of the astral week. Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday are regarded as unfavourable days in the Islamic world, whereas Monday, Thursday and Friday are considered lucky. In India, it was the Brahmins who traditionally determined the nature of the days, while in China, these predictions even had an official character, for the state had the monopoly on calendars. Three million of these were printed in 1328, as they served as an instrument for controlling the masses. In the early seventeenth century, errors in the Chinese calendar led to a constitutional crisis in the Middle Kingdom, enabling Jesuit astronomers from Europe, presenting themselves as saviours, to gain considerable influence there. Today, astrophysics and quantification prevail over astrological superstition and qualitative intuition; empirically verifiable measurements and calculations – in short, mathematics, the quintessence of rationality – hold sway. However, far from being the result of perfecting the clock on the one hand and Newton’s discovery of measureable time on the other, these two victories are probably the result of the European need to exert control over time. While adages urging people to use their time wisely featured in both Graeco-Roman and Japanese culture, Europe used a unique method to intensify this message from the Middle Ages onwards. The monastic practice of the liturgy of the hours, the need for regulation in those new centres of activity, the cities, the frugal Puritan attitude to time and the empirical natural sciences that had been emerging since the seventeenth century all involved measuring time with ever-greater precision. The Graeco-Roman and Islamic worlds, as well as China, all had highly sophisticated sundials and water clocks, in addition to mechanisms that charted the paths of the stars. But the huge need for ever more accurate timepieces that was to develop in the West, from the pendulum clock to the marine chronometer, the quartz clock and later the atomic clock, was clearly not experienced by those civilizations. The European clocks that Jesuit missionaries brought to China as gifts made a strong impression there, as the marvellous timekeeping devices invented during the Song dynasty had long been forgotten. A binary opposition has mistakenly been constructed between the ‘natural’ rhythms regulating the work carried out by Early Modern peasants and artisans, based on the seasons and the presence of daylight and centring on tasks to be accomplished, poultry and cows, and that of factory workers, subject to the artificial rhythms of clocks and machines. For the rhythms governing the work of harvesting and making deliveries to market were just as determined by time as those governing industrial production. As Japanese peasants regarded time as precious, they saw their labours in terms of moral value, a relationship that was relatively easy to transfer to the discipline of factory work. Franceso Datini, a merchant from Prato well known for the archival material he left in the form of business and private papers, was already practising time saving in the fourteenth century; the Emperor Charles V collected watches, and from 1748 onwards, punctuality was the order of the day in princely German courts. Dante had used a clock mechanism to describe the workings of the universe, an analogy subsequently echoed by Nicholas of Cusa, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff. Thomas Hobbes, Frederick II of

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Prussia, as well as Goethe and other German writers of the Classical period, all used the clock metaphor to denote the emerging modern state.

SAVING TIME The ever-increasing ‘tyranny of the clock’, originating from Europe and the United States, now dominates our lives. People have even saved time by no longer having to get their watches out of their pockets; all they need is a quick glance at their wristwatches, where the time will be digitally displayed, accurate to the second and with no need for a watch-face. As time is in short supply, one should seize as many opportunities as possible. And anyone who has lived their lives to the full by seizing those opportunities supposedly has nothing to fear from death − which reduces one’s options to zero. Acceleration therefore serves as a ‘secular functional equivalent’4 to the religious representations of eternal life, appearing as a modern response to death. The beginnings of the process resulting in this accelerated pace of life had already been perceived by Luther and Goethe. Today, even hopes of profit are pinned on fast money acquired through short-term speculation, rather than accumulation. The de-centralization and pseudo-privatization of working relationships in the non-stop society lead to the internalization and hence to the intensification of time discipline. ‘Free time’ itself only exists as a period exempt from the constraints of measured working time; it is therefore the product of the latter and still an integral part of time discipline. Europe’s poorer classes, as well as her colonial subjects, were to be bound by this time discipline − the first direct form of European dominance over time and, therefore, over human beings. Even a moderate colonial power could not function in everyday life on a long-term basis without a new temporal regime, whose discipline was transmitted through school, the barracks, the factory and, if necessary, prison. Modern bureaucratic domination is based on objective, unified and linear time, intended to lead to the same outcome for all. Bureaucratic temporalization turns birth and gender, life stages and death into social data controlled by power; rites of passage are de-ritualized and transformed through bureaucracy, the new milestones being the attainment of legal adulthood, retirement, the completion of a term of office and so on. In the words of an Australian author,5 ‘time is boss’ − although the Aboriginal peoples knew how to avoid the colonial temporal regime through passive resistance. As time and number series are closely linked, the practice of carrying out calculations using Hindu-Arabic numerals and the decimal system became widespread, likewise forming part of Europe’s domination of time. Non-European music may even have been subject to the influence of European chronometric aspects − measures, rhythms and tempos.

CALENDARS AND HOLIDAYS Time discipline involves both this type of coordinated regularity and the implementation of a standard system. Global standardization entailed the adoption

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of the Gregorian calendar, the second means by which Europe expressed her domination of time. European colonies and protectorates had no choice in the matter, even in cases where national calendars coexisted alongside the European model, notably in India. Indeed, the religious character of this calendar made it a symbol of cultural identity. Evangelists in Europe were already seeing it as an instrument of papal power, despite the favourable opinion expressed by Johannes Kepler; it was not adopted by German Protestants until 1700, while the English and the Swedes took even longer to do so, finally accepting it in 1752. In the bi-confessional city of Augsburg, in the Holy Roman Empire, the quarrel over the calendar had almost led to a civil war in 1584. A number of days had been eliminated through the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in England in 1752; this resulted in violent riots, as people suspected Parliament of seeking to deny them wages in this way. In 1872, Japan effectively used the new calendar in order to make savings on two months of salary payments to its civil servants. As a rule, the calendar reform went hand-in-hand with political modernization. Examples include China in 1912 and 1949, the Ottoman Empire in 1917 and Turkey in 1926. Russia followed suit, in 1918 and once again, as the Soviet Union, in 1922, leading to the celebration of the October Revolution on 7 November. After the First World War, Orthodox countries made the transition to the new calendar, which was now also in force in most of the Islamic world. However, the old lunar calendar remained in use there for religious purposes, as did the traditional Jewish calendar in Israel. Orthodox Churches, for their part, still use the Julian calendar as the basis for calculating their feast days. It is not unusual to see two systems of date calculation coexisting in the great ancient cultures of the world; in this way, older calendars are used alongside the official Gregorian calendar in a more or less informal manner according to the needs of their religion and customs. The Chinese New Year is an example of this, as is the attribution of a Zodiac animal sign to each year. The attempt to use the Gregorian calendar without reference to the Christian era proved impractical. For, like the calendar itself, this had long ceased to be a symbol of Christian culture but had become a neutral feature throughout the world. The GDR, however, adopted the secular form ‘before and after our era’, while the American abbreviation CE could become ‘Common Era’ as a replacement for ‘Christian Era’. In the United States, a concern for political correctness has also resulted in a revision of the terms used for public holidays. Cards wishing their recipients ‘Happy Holidays’ rather than ‘Merry Christmas’ are now sent during the festive season, and prominence is also given to the Jewish festival of Hanukkah and to Kwanzaa, the celebration of African American culture. The worldwide secularization of the official calendar following the European model has led to the replacement of religious feast days with secular holidays, although in some cases the latter benefitted from the popularity and widespread adoption of certain Christian festivals. The Christmas tree and Father Christmas became obvious cultural assets, notably gaining popularity in China and with some members of the Muslim community. Public holidays had been imposed since the seventeenth century, beginning with monarchs’ birthdays, a practice

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established in Antiquity. After the French Revolution and the emergence of the nation state the tradition was democratized and consolidated, and the holidays increased in number. In pre-Modern times, festive cultures throughout the world were essentially local in character, although national victories and heroes played a not inconsiderable role. Days of commemoration such as those associated with ‘national shame’ remain a specifically German phenomenon to this day. Yet the practice of introducing new national holidays no longer really functions nowadays. The preference is for occasions such as International Workers’ Day, celebrated on 1 May since 1890, or ‘Mothers’ Day’, created in 1908 and celebrated in many countries on the second Sunday in May. For reasons both political and economic, there has been a marked increase in the growth and commercialization of such events in recent times. The Gregorian calendar remains unsatisfactory from a rational standpoint, with its months of different lengths, the shift in the days of the week that occurs with each new year, the way in which the weeks are distributed across the months and the ever-changing date of Easter. Yet all attempts at reform have met with failure, beginning with the radical division of the months into ten-day weeks implemented through the French Republican calendar in force from 1792 to 1805. The plans to create a World calendar made by the League of Nations (1937) and later by the UN (1954) were equally unsuccessful. No alternative era was able to establish itself as a starting point, neither during the French Revolution nor under the Italian fascist regime. Only North Korea continues to calculate its dates from 1912, the year of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the founder of its ‘dynasty’.

STANDARDIZING TIME Despite its great practicality, establishing that other feature of Europe’s domination of time, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), was a laborious task and was only partially completed. They might have been subject to the ‘tyranny of the clock’, but central localities nevertheless all had their own solar, local times. This situation was slow to evolve due to spatio-temporal contraction, for on the one hand, the new railway networks were unable to function without timetables that would remain valid over long distances, and on the other, the new means of communication, particularly radio communications systems, used time-varying signals. In 1875, seventy-five different local times were in use on railroads in the United States. The year 1883 saw the establishment of four railroad time zones, the calculations being based on GMT. An international standardized time, based on the Greenwich Meridian, was adopted at an international conference held in 1884; known as ‘Coordinated Universal Time’ (UTC), it divides the world into time zones that each cover fifteen degrees of longitude, the system being equally valid at sea. Naturally, the imposition of a uniform time system ran into difficulties, especially in relation to political symbolism. Germany had five different time zones − Berlin, Karlsruhe, Ludwigshafen, Munich and Stuttgart – until it introduced Central European Time (CET) in 1893. This is now used by most EU states. Conversely,

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China replaced the five time zones established there in 1911 with a single, national time zone. And as soon as Crimea became Russian territory in 2014, it had to adopt Moscow Standard Time. Despite their notoriously far-reaching character, colonial administrations found the process of imposing standard time lengthy and difficult. This sometimes led to unique, specifically tailored solutions. These include the halfhour’s difference between the standard time zones introduced in India in 1905; they were not imposed until after independence and were resisted by Mumbai, which kept its own local time until 1950. In Islamic countries, the cultural renaissance movement known as the Nahda contributed to the introduction of standard time. Yet again, therefore, Europe’s domination of time resulted in compromises and hybrid versions! The strict linearity of Newtonian time, produced by machines, not only enabled time to be dominated but also opened new horizons. The notion of empirically verifiable progression led to the replacement of teleology or finality by causality. The kairos of Classical Antiquity, a right or opportune moment, has metamorphosed into a calculable opportunity in life, a chance to be consciously seized; confidence in customary processes became faith in progress. Political developments then gave rise to five-year plans. Utopia, like dystopia or CounterUtopia, was no longer associated with the idea of ‘no-place’ but with a future that was entirely possible. Man had acquired the power to shape the future – or so he believed. Moreover, Europeans gained the ability to plan the past as well as the future. The new, scientific relationship with the cultural content of the memory of one’s own society, as well as that of other peoples dominated by Europe, and the demythologizing of the past through the process of temporalizing myths provided them with quantities of knowledge. These could be used to turn the past into a museum piece, in order to serve specific purposes. For, paradoxically, scientific history has more power over the past than earlier societies, with their myths. Yet it also teaches us that it is impossible to go backwards. Therefore, in its relationship with time as in other contexts, humankind has no choice but to appropriate the European legacy and come to terms with it.

NOTES 1. Michael Ende, Momo, translated from the German by J. Maxwell Brownjohn (London: Penguin Books, 1984 [1973]). 2. Rudolf Wendorff, Dritte Welt und westliche Zivilisation. Grundprobleme der Entwicklungspolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984). 3. E. G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 4. Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, translated from the German by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 5. Giordano Nanni, ‘Time, Empire and Resistance in Settler-Colonial Victoria’, Time and Society, 20, no. 1 (2011): 5–33.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Demandt, Alexander, Zeit. Eine Kulturgeschichte, Berlin, Propyläen, 2015. Ende, Michael, Momo, translated from the German by J. Maxwell Brownjohn, London, Penguin Books, 1984 [1973]. Ginzel, Friedrich Karl, Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie. Das Zeitrechnungswesen der Völker, 3 vols, Leipzig, J.C. Hinrichs, 1906–1914, repr. in Zwickau, 1958. Landwehr, Achim, Geburt der Gegenwart. Eine Geschichte der Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 2014, pp. 30–40. Ogle, Vanessa, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015. Rosa, Hartmut, Alienation & Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality, Malmö/Aarhus, NSU Press (NSU Summertalks vol. 3), 2010. Wendorff, Rudolf, Tag und Woche, Monat und Jahr. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Kalenders, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993. Whitrow, Gerald J., Die Erfindung der Zeit, Wiesbaden, Fourier, 1991.

CHAPTER 15

Modern science A European revolution? KAPIL RAJ

In the twentieth century, just as Europe’s power was declining, the discipline of the history of science became the focus of a discourse celebrating European intelligence. The Americans and the British used this as a means of imposing the notion of European superiority on collective memories. Europe’s crucial role in the emergence of modern science through the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seems so obvious to us today that it might come as a big surprise to many that the construction of this memory is barely seventy years old, the handiwork of the discipline of the history of science that began to be institutionalized only a century ago. This is not to argue that Europeans, particularly from the north-western segment of the continent, did not have a sense of scientific superiority – the trope of European scientific superiority is commonly encountered in European thought from the eighteenth century onwards. Indeed, cultural and moral superiority was very much in play in the European colonial enterprise, forming the ideological basis of religious and political assimilationist policies of proselytization and the Westernization of colonized peoples, particularly by the French. However, the Mission civilisatrice, as it is called, did not significantly mobilize science in its legitimizing discourse, even though it massively deployed scientific expertise, material technologies and science-based racial theories.1 It must also be pointed out that this self-representation of loftiness was not uncontested, nor was it always considered to be a God-given virtue. At least one nineteenthcentury author, the geographer and traveller Winwood Reade (1838–1875) – whose writings had a tremendous formative influence between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War on some of the world’s foremost intellectuals, writers and politicians, including Cecil Rhodes, Winston Churchill, H. G. Wells and George Orwell – traced the origins of scientific thought to ancient Egypt, Babylon, India and Greece, with Islam having played a central part in transmitting this knowledge to Europe. In contrast to Islam, Christianity, according to him, was actually an impediment to the progress of science.

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To be sure, Europeans had been heroizing their savants and philosophers since at least the mid-nineteenth century, long before the institutionalization of the history of science. Thus, for instance, the French Ministère de l’instruction publique and the Académie des sciences made a seminal contribution in raising Descartes, Fermat, Lavoisier and Cauchy to the rank of national heroes by publishing their works in monumental editions. Similarly, the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij van Wetenschappen (The Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities) heroized Christiaan Huygens through the publication of his complete works, and the Germans stirred up a veritable mania with Paracelsus that reached a peak in the 1930s and 1940s. What is important to note here is that this hagiographic trend was more embedded in individual nationalist and national-imperialist agendas than in any integrated European project. In fact, it was mainly from outside Europe, especially from Asia, that this effort was perceived as European – or Western. This chapter argues that although the idea of European scientific superiority has existed for a couple of centuries, and various European countries widely deployed scientific expertise and technologies in the pursuit of empires, its articulation with history and memory was reworked in a novel way after the Second World War by the emerging discipline of the history of science. In fact, this new memory of science was systematically created by professional historians of science as Eurocentric, at the expense of all other regions of the world – one which owed nothing to any other part of the world – precisely in the context of Europe’s diminishing role both in an emerging post-colonial world and of a bipolar world dominated by US–Soviet rivalry. It was really after the Second World War that the history of science as a discipline crucially contributed to the creation of this memory. In what follows, we shall trace the history of this process within the history of science in order to show how this European memory emerged and the strong national tensions prevalent in it even to this day.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE – ORIGINS AND ORIENTATIONS Let us start with a clarification. Although histories of science have been around for centuries – the writings of men like Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1779), J. B. Priestley (1733–1804), Jean Sylvain Bailly (1736–1793), Jean-Baptiste Delambre (1749–1822), William Whewell (1794–1866), Paul Tannery (1843–1904) and Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) immediately spring to mind – these were the works of individuals written from diverse perspectives mainly about their own domains of predilection. They were not the reflection of an institutionalized discipline able to forge common tools, techniques, methodologies, intellectual orientations and problematics, train career professionals and have a broad public impact ‘through the rather hopeful courtesy of publishers and the BBC, to capture the ear and eye of la grande publique [sic]’, as Alfred Rupert Hall (1920–2009), one of the leading lights of the discipline in the second half of the past century, put it.2 The origins of the discipline can be read through the evolution of the contents of its first learned journal, Isis, which remains to this day the main reference for

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the field. Founded and published in Belgium, from 1913 to 1924, Isis eventually followed its founder, the chemist George Sarton (1884–1956), when he was forced to immigrate to the United States during the First World War, finally settling at Harvard. Its purpose was to provide a synthetic understanding of science in light of the constant fragmentation through the increasing specialization of contemporary science.3 The history of science as published in Isis was thus addressed primarily to scientists on an expectation of contemporary usefulness — the motive resided in the belief that history possesses an educative, heuristic or polemical value. It was conceived as a meta-scientific project in which the sciences themselves participated: ‘For most scientists at that time,’ writes the historian of science Peter Dear, ‘the past of their disciplines was an integral part of the science itself ’.4 The appraisal Sarton sought to present in the pages of Isis was the sum total of all human knowledge where ‘human’ and ‘knowledge’ were each conceived of as a harmonious whole, a unity, in which ‘the progress of each branch of science is a function of the progress of the other branches’.5 The history of science in the first decades of Isis thus included, besides mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, mechanics and so on, the history of archaeology, ethnology, geography, medicine, the occult sciences, Buddhism, Tantrism, navigational astronomy, commercial arithmetic, cookery, arts and crafts, and so forth. It also included contributions on India, Japan, the Arab world, China and ancient Egypt, to name but a few. To be sure, the majority of articles concerned the history of modern science partly because, as Sarton towards the end of his life explained, its development is so important and of such exuberance in every direction that the briefest account of it requires considerable space. Moreover the authors of papers on oriental science [. . .] prefer to publish them in special journals where the philological basis of their work can be appreciated by competent scholars. [. . .] I tried to correct that situation [. . .] to make our readers realize that an account of science and culture in the fourth century B.C., or in the fifth century or in the ninth after Christ was essentially incomplete, if the Chinese, Arabic, Hindu, Japanese elements were left out.6 In spite of a positivist approach to the history of ideas far removed from presentday concerns, the philosophy behind the journal and the early decades of the field was resolutely that of the unity of mankind. ‘The progress of science’, wrote Sarton, ‘is not due to the isolated efforts of a single people but to the combined efforts of all peoples.’7 The aim of the discipline and its flagship journal was to offer an account of how peoples all over the world had contributed to one great project that could elevate them above their petty nationalistic and religious differences. In fact, Sarton made it his own life’s ambition to write a history of science that reviewed the cultural and scientific contributions of every civilization from antiquity to the present. Already fluent in French, English, Flemish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Spanish, with varied notions of Turkish, Hebrew and Chinese, he embarked on learning classical and modern Arabic, to be able to access the primary sources for his

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work. The three-volume, 4236-page Introduction to the History of Science, which took him almost thirty years to write, finally only brought him to the fourteenth century, forcing him to abandon the project in 1947. Thus, Europe, albeit occupying a preponderant role in its past 400 years or so, was still just one among many others in the larger history of science whose presence was needed for a balanced professional picture. Sarton’s drive and vision were crucial in shaping the discipline and, indeed, in creating an international community of academic historians of science which largely stood by its founder’s principles. Of course, not everyone followed these desiderata, and some contributions to Isis were explicitly chauvinistic, one, for example, arguing for Britain’s crucial contribution to knowledge in the modern world.8 However, it must be pointed out that Sarton’s views were not idiosyncratic. They were widely shared by intellectuals of the time. For instance, while identifying Europe as the birthplace of modern science, the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), in his Lowell Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1925, immediately added: ‘[I]ts home is the whole world. [. . .] It is transferrable from country to country, and from race to race, wherever there is a rational society.’ Here again, the attempt was to emphasize, for the sake of rationality, the universality of western science, ‘which can be passed from West to East without the wanton destruction of [the latter’s] own inheritance which they so rightly prize’.9

RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIES AND THE REDEFINITION OF SCIENCE Over the years, two scholarly interventions, independently of Isis, permanently dented this universalist, cumulative vision, presenting in its stead alternative narratives of the history of modern science more narrowly restricted to northwestern Europe. The first was the contribution of the Soviet physicist Boris Hessen (1893–1936), a member of the country’s delegation headed by Nikolai Bukharin, to the Second International Congress of the History of Science held in London in June–July 1931. Indeed, Hessen’s paper, ‘The Socio-economic Roots of Newton’s “Principia”’, was to embed the famous natural philosopher’s intellectual quest in the nascent capitalist and industrial base that characterized the ‘English’ mode of production of the time as well as in the social upheavals that were coeval with the publication in 1687 of the Principia – notably the Glorious Revolution of 1688.10 His dramatic contribution was to introduce a version of Marxist historiography to the awareness of the nascent community of historians of science thus far ensconced in a history of ideas approach to the subject. It firmly grounded Newton’s scientific activity as a superstructure based on the capitalist revolution located in Protestant Western Europe, mainly England. Hessen’s dialectical materialist interpretation was to have a profound influence on a number of influential historians, sociologists and philosophers of science of the past century, men such as J. D. Bernal, Joseph Needham, Robert Merton and Stephen Toulmin, to name but a few, and more than

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eighty years after its publication, his dramatic propositions still stir debate. The point to be noted here, however, is that while this debate has been primarily focused around the possible influence of external factors – mainly social, political and economic – in the shaping of knowledge, the implied shift in Hessen’s proposition from the universalism of the early decades of the historiography of science to the location of its modern history in north-western Europe has passed more or less unnoticed and certainly unquestioned. As a matter of fact, if anything, the incipient Eurocentrism of Hessen’s Marxist interpretation was to be further reinforced in the decades that followed, starting with the writings of another intellectual of Russian origin, Alexandre Koyré. Although Alexandr Vladimirovich Koyrakskij, alias Alexandre Koyré (1892– 1964), was born in Russia, he was exiled at the age of sixteen for his socialist revolutionary sympathies and never returned. He initially trained in Göttingen and shortly afterwards in Paris as a historian of religion, which he subsequently taught at his French alma mater, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and intermittently through his life at various US universities. His first influential work in the history of science was Études galiliéennes (1939) where he first announced the idea of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, a notion he was to develop in his later teaching and writing.11 Koyré based his conception not merely on the development or growth of knowledge but rather on a transformation of thinking about the universe, une veritable mutation de l’intellect humain [a true transformation of human intellect] (à la Gaston Bachelard, whom he explicitly acknowledged).12 Une telle mutation [One such transformation], he continued, – une des plus importantes, si ce n’est la plus importante depuis l’invention du Cosmos par la pensée grecque – fut, certainement, la revolution scientifique du dix-septième siècle, profonde transformation intellectuelle dont la physique moderne [. . .] fut à la fois l’expression et le fruit [– one of the most important, if not the most important since the concept of the Cosmos was developed by the ancient Greeks — was, certainly, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, a profound intellectual transformation, of which modern physics [. . .] was both the expression and the fruit].13 While Koyré, unlike Boris Hessen, explicitly rejected the notion that this metamorphosis was based on a social change or on the technological ambitions implied in the notion of man as maître et possesseur de la nature [master and possessor of nature], he argued that it was based instead on un changement d’attitude métaphysique [a shift of metaphysical attitude] reflected in geometry as the language of the new physics. In other words, it was a new conceptual bedrock in which the new theories of the period were grounded that constituted the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. The changes involved in this new world view me semblent pouvoir être ramenés à deux éléments principaux, d’ailleurs étroitement liés entre eux, à savoir la destruction du Cosmos, et la géométrisation de l’espace [seem to my mind to comprise, essentially, two main elements, which are in fact closely linked; namely, the destruction of the Cosmos, and the geometricization of Space].14 The new physics of the period thus consisted of la mathématisation de la nature et sa [. . .] valorisation de l’expérience et de l’expérimentation [the mathematization of nature and the [. . .] importance of experience and experiment].15 This notion was a

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real departure from the general consensus of contemporary historians of ideas for whom revolutions were not part of their vocabulary when referring to renewal or change. The Koyréan Revolution was not only based on a deep conceptual change. At least as importantly, it focused on mathematical and experimental physics to the exclusion of other domains of specialized knowledge which in fact constituted an important, if not the major, portion of scientific activity during the period. These notably included botany, medicine, geography, practical arithmetic, navigational astronomy, ethnography and so forth. This exclusion was to have another consequence: in minimizing the role of these other fields, Koyré went a step further than Hessen in contributing, albeit implicitly, to the consolidation of Europe’s place in scientific activity at the expense of other parts of the world – where the mathematization of knowledge was not a fashion but where most, if not all, of the above-mentioned fields of knowledge prospered at least as much as in Europe. For instance, geography, cartography, botany, medicine, practical mathematics and ethnography flourished in vast areas of South Asia, China, Japan, Oceania, the Americas and Africa in the Early Modern Era.

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AND THE REDEFINITION OF EUROPE . . . A victim of the Second World War, Koyré’s thesis not did have an immediate impact. It began its scholarly life only in the late 1940s and 1950s, in the wake of Western Europe’s Pyrrhic victory in the Second World War, and the dawn of a post-imperial future with an ever-diminishing role for the Old Continent on the global scene.16 It was in this context that the ‘revolutionary’ vision started prevailing, and the discipline of the history of science underwent a dramatic shift. The popularization of Koyré’s work was largely due to Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) whose Origins of Modern Science appeared in 1949. In this, the eminent English historian proclaimed that the Scientific Revolution ‘outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom’.17 And whatever doubt remained about the geographical location of this sea change was put to rest when, in a chapter devoted to its place in history, he wrote: The Scientific Revolution we must regard, therefore, as a creative product of the West – depending on a complicated set of conditions which existed only in Western Europe [. . .]. And when we speak of Western civilisation being carried to an oriental country like Japan in recent generations, we do not mean GræcoRoman philosophy and humanist ideals, we do not mean the Christianising of Japan, we mean the science, the modes of thought and all that apparatus of civilisation which were beginning to change the face of the West in the latter half of the seventeenth century.18 If, then, there was one event that identified science with Europe, it was the Scientific Revolution.

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Nevertheless, the iconic text for the generations of students that followed was neither Koyré’s nor Butterfield’s, but that of another British historian of science, Alfred Rupert Hall. Indeed, his Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800, published in 1954, was the text around which post-Second World War history of science first coalesced. While giving historical flesh to Koyré’s ideal construct of the Scientific Revolution, this book was even more decisively Eurocentric than Butterfield’s. It explicitly expressed at the very outset a comparative European superiority over the rest of the world: ‘European civilization at the beginning of the sixteenth century was isolated [. . .]’, but ‘[d]uring the next centuries the trend of the Middle Ages was to be reversed; Europeans were to teach the East far more than they learned from it’.19 In this sense, both Butterfield’s and Hall’s theses were different from those of Hessen and Koyré who, while identifying a socio-economic system for the one and an intellectual climate for the other as the wellspring of the radical transformation of the seventeenth century, were not expressly interested in emphasizing Europe’s superiority. This is not to say that others before them had not identified the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in European history as a decisive turning point in the history of science. It is, to say the least, ironical that the consolidation of an explicitly Eurocentric history of science began at exactly the moment when most of the world was breaking free of its hold from centuries of European colonialism, painting the Old Continent into a corner of a world picture where US–Soviet rivalry and the Cold War occupied centre stage. In an unexpected twist, then, the systematic construction of a Eurocentric history of science was coeval with attempts that were to coalesce into a post-colonial theory which called into question and reassessed self-congratulatory European histories and historiographies; Eurocentrism in the history of science, and post-colonial attempts to unravel it were strictly contemporaneous! A further irony is that this ‘new’ history, which significantly contributed to the creation of a new European geography and identity, was largely made from outside Europe – the work of North American historians eager, on the one hand, to figure as part of a long, radiant and dominant European heritage, and, on the other, to consolidate the recently wrought Transatlantic, or Western, Alliance against the Soviet Union and communism in general. In the foreword to The Copernican Revolution (1957), the first book by Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science, James Bryant Conant (1893–1978), a former president of Harvard University, Head of the National Defense Research Committee during the Second World War and Administrator of the Manhattan Project (who later, as the first US ambassador to West Germany (1953–7), was one the principal architects of West European integration, overseeing the establishment of the allied military forces there with Germany’s admission into NATO), quite explicitly made these links in a text which anticipated C. P. Snow’s famous Rede Lecture by over two years: ‘In Europe west of the Iron Curtain’, he wrote, the literary tradition in education still prevails. An educated [person is someone] who has [. . .] retained a working knowledge of the art and literature of Europe. [. . .] But there seems little or no concern with changing educational methods

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so that the non-scientist will acquire a better understanding of science. [. . .] Something more than an understanding of scientific theories is required to make educated people ready to accept the scientific tradition alongside the literary tradition [. . .]. This is so because the difficulties of assimilating science into Western culture have increased with the centuries. A powerful instigator of what has been called the ‘history of science movement’, Conant continued in the same preface: ‘Various proposals have been made [. . .] in particular, more emphasis on the history of science has been recommended and in this recommendation I have heartily joined.’20 In fact, in 1935, barely a couple of years after becoming the president of Harvard, Conant had already established a doctoral-degree granting ‘Committee on the History of Science and Learning’ – under the direction of George Sarton. Conant himself was to compile a textbook of edited primary sources by Boyle, Black, Lavoisier and Pasteur. During the war, he also commissioned a Harvard faculty report on the teaching of the history of science in secondary school and university education.21 As a result, a number of history of science programmes were set up in the post-war years, more than fifty of which exist at the present, the highest number in any one country and more than those in all of Europe put together — about two dozen on the continent and a dozen in the UK. The Scientific Revolution was to become the cornerstone of the discipline, and the number of articles on the subject in Isis alone rose exponentially over the decades, needless to say at the expense of contributions on the extra-European spaces of the Sarton decades. It has also spawned a large number of books and edited volumes, and continues to do so, the past two years having seen the publication of at least five new single author monographs.22 It is in this context that one must understand the famous dithyramb of the US historian of science and Newton scholar, Richard S. Westfall (1924–1996) honouring the Scientific Revolution as ‘the most important “event” in Western history, and a historical discipline that ignores it must have taken an unhappy step in the direction of antiquarianism. For good and for ill’, he continued, ‘science stands at the center of every dimension of modern life. It has shaped most of the categories in terms of which we think, and in the process has frequently subverted humanistic concepts that furnished the sinews of our civilization’.23 Beyond the narrow limits of the history of science, the Scientific Revolution, based in Western Europe now increasingly referred to simply as ‘The West’ in order to accommodate the North Atlantic space, was also to become the central notion in the shaping of a coherent historical discourse which helped endow the EuroUS axis with an identity worthy only of the greatest existing civilization. It thus helped to galvanize a North Atlantic identity in the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and to legitimize Euro-American techno-political collaboration. Crucially, it was instrumental in defining the contours of this new European space ‘west of the Iron Curtain’ as Conant had pithily put it. Set around West Germany, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and, perhaps, Sweden as the core, the new space marginalized much of the rest of Europe, especially its Mediterranean regions, a subject to which we shall return shortly. It also had a performative role

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in transforming the rest of the world into a potential recipient of aid for scientific development based on a diffusionist model, first within the newly reconfigured world order of the United Nations and its subsidiary organizations, and then in spearheading US international policy to contain and counter Soviet influence during the Cold War.

.  . . AND THE REST OF THE WORLD While the dissemination of Koyré’s revolutionary notion of scientific change was impeded due to the war, Hessen’s thesis of the determining role of socio-economic factors in the emergence of a radically new dynamic of scientific advancement had taken root among a group of British radical academics who at the same time maintained a strong belief in the universality of science and the unity of mankind and who were to have a significant influence in the post-war period. For instance, the biochemist Joseph Needham (1900–1995) was instrumental in adding the scientific dimension, the ‘S’, to the United Nation’s new Organization for Education and Culture, resulting in the institution of UNESCO. As the first head of its Division of Natural Sciences (1946–8), he was the architect of scientific policies and active international cooperation for the post-war world.24 Based on the premise that science is a universal public good, but ‘for historical reasons, since modern science grew up in the civilisation of Western Europe, there is a “bright zone” covering North America and most of Europe’, Needham laid the blueprint for a long-term policy by channelling international funds through UNESCO for international communication and cooperation with ‘scientific men isolated in the periphery’, Rumania, Peru, Java, Siam, China, India and South-Eastern Europe figuring among some of the countries cited. To these he added ‘large sections of what was the “bright zone”, such as Italy, Austria and Germany, [but which] are now in a state of almost complete abeyance as regards scientific work [and] SouthEastern Europe [which] had never attained a level which justified its inclusion as part of the “bright zone”’.25 However, for Needham, the communication was not always unidirectional, from centre to periphery: other forms of multilateral cooperation were also to be promoted. For instance, the division of the earth into zonal regions [sic] with common problems should be borne in mind. For example, there is an arctic-antarctic frigid zone, a double temperate zone, a tropical wet zone and a tropical arid zone. Instead, therefore, of establishing an Institute and Survey in the Amazon Basin solely oriented towards local problems, it might be desirable to establish there a centre of international work oriented towards all tropical humidity problems in general.26 Although it was unanimously approved at the first General Conference of the Organization and laid the framework for the United Nation’s vision of scientific relations, Needham’s project was effectively scuttled by the United States’ refusal to finance it for fear of the probable channelling of funds to communist and left-leaning states. In its stead, and in the wake of increasing rivalry with the Soviets for world domination, the Americans were to devise their own policy, the so-called modernist

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theory based exclusively on a diffusionist policy of acculturation into scientific and Western values. George Basalla’s famous article ‘The Spread of Western Science’ succinctly presented this theory in twelve pages of Nature in 1967.27 In this piece, the author started with the bold assertion: A small circle of Western European nations provided the original home for modern science during the 16th and 17th centuries: Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian countries [read NATO countries in Europe!]. The relatively small area covered by these nations was the scene of the Scientific Revolution which firmly established the philosophical viewpoint, experimental activity, and social institutions we now identify as modern science. How then, he asks, ‘did modern science diffuse from Western Europe and find its place in the rest of the world?’ The rest for him of course includes Asia, Africa, the Americas, but also Eastern Europe. While the three-stage model that he proposes sees almost all parts of the world achieve an independent scientific tradition only at the end of the third phase after centuries of acculturation through European colonial presence, the United States already attains maturity in the early sixteenth century and is henceforth part of the Western World. The model, largely inspired by W. W. Rostow’s modernization theory based on stages of economic growth, comprises seven ‘tasks’ which include eradicating traditional ‘philosophical and religious beliefs’, establishing ‘native’ scientific organizations patterned on Western ones and importing Western technologies. While Basalla’s model has been widely critiqued by scholars the world over, his cartography of modern science and Europe’s place as the home of the Scientific Revolution have been unquestioningly accepted, perhaps precisely because of the attraction of modernization theory to leftists and liberals, a definite majority among the world’s intellectuals. So much so that even the fringes of the European continent have accepted the carving up of Europe, a number of prominent historians of science and technology having instituted a group called STEP – ‘Science and Technology in the European Periphery’!28 However, not the least of the contradictions in this scheme is that under the garb of a deeply Eurocentred memory of science lies an aggressively nationalist narrative, particularly among the core nations of the Scientific Revolution: the history of modern science as seen from within Europe remains to a great degree a celebration of national heroes. It is thus often told in national terms, in a fashion similar to that of history as a discipline.29 European historians of science seem to be trapped within the firm grip of the nation, each striving to corner for their country the credit for having discovered or invented this or that law or object.30 Popular media programmes on radio and television are a good example of this, as are museum exhibits. What then is really surprising is that the history of science has been the motor and legitimating organ of systematized and institutionalized Eurocentrism, fuelled principally by US academia in the post-colonial Cold War world, with a Europe torn between its vanity and its inexorable national factionalisms — a trait disconcertingly

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echoed in all other spheres of European life. There seems to be an urgent need to call for a wider debate on this question, especially in today’s post-Cold War and post-post-colonial world, in order to rekindle more mature memories and accompanying historical narratives of knowledge that are driven less by short-term civilizationist ideologies and more by the realities of global intercultural encounters between specialist communities which made modern science possible, as shown by a small but growing body of recent archival-driven scholarship. This does not in any way suggest a naïve vision of a ‘universal’ science, rather one that squarely admits its complex and negotiated history riven with asymmetrical power relationships, but which nonetheless confers agency in processes of co-construction and circulation. ‘If history creates complexities’, Salman Rushdie wrote once, ‘let us not try to simplify them.’31

NOTES 1. See Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 2. A. Rupert Hall, ‘Can the History of Science be History?’, British Journal for the History of Science, 4, no. 1 (1969): 207–20, on p. 219. 3. George Sarton, ‘L’histoire de la science’, Isis, 1, no. 1 (1913): 3–46. Sarton moved the publication of Isis to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1924 and its printing in 1941 in the wake of the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940. It continues to be printed and published in the United States to this day. 4. See Peter Dear, ‘The History of Science and the History of the Sciences: George Sarton, Isis, and the Two Cultures’, Isis, 100, no. 1 (2009): 89–93. 5. Sarton, ‘The New Humanism’, Isis, 6, no. 1 (1924): 9–42, on p. 10. Compare, however, Paul Tannery, Mémoires scientifiques, t. X (Toulouse: E. Privat, 1930), p. 106. 6. Sarton, ‘Why Isis?’ Isis, 44, no. 3 (1953): 232–42, on pp. 241–2. 7. Sarton, ‘The New Humanism’, p. 11. 8. C. D. Whetham and W. C. D. Whetham, ‘Three English Men of Science’, Isis, 1, no. 2 (1913): 215–18. 9. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The New American Library, 1948 [originally published in 1925]), p. 3. 10. Boris Hessen, ‘The Socio-economic Roots of Newton’s “Principia”’ [Original Russian title: ‘The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton’s Mechanics’], in N. I. Bukharin et al., Science at the Cross Roads (London: Kniga, 1931) no pagination. See also Simon Schaffer, ‘Newton at the Crossroads’, Radical Philosophy, 37 (1984): 23–8. 11. Although Koyré is credited with being the first person to popularize the notion of the Scientific Revolution, the phrase had already been coined at least a century

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before. See I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 12. Alexandre Koyré, Études galiléennes (Paris: Hermann, 1939), p. 11, my italics. 13. Ibid., p. 12. 14. Koyré, Du monde clos à l’univers infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1973 [1957]), p. 11. 15. Ibid., p. 14. 16. In fact, the English translation appeared only in 1978: Alexandre Koyré, Galileo Studies (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978). 17. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science 1300–1800 (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1949), p. viii. 18. Ibid., p. 163. 19. Ibid., pp. 1–2. 20. James B. Conant, ‘Foreword’, in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. xiii–xvii. See also George Reisch, ‘When Structure Met Sputnik: On the Cold War Origins of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, in Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, ed. Naomi Oreskes and John Krige (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), pp. 371–92. 21. See Christopher Hamlin, ‘The Pedagogical Roots of the History of Science: Revisiting the Vision of James Bryant Conant’, Isis, 107 (2016): 282–308. See also James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 22. See John Henry, ‘The Scientific Revolution: Five Books about It’, Isis, 107 (2016): 809–17. 23. Richard S. Westfall, ‘The Scientific Revolution’, History of Science Society Newsletter, 15, no. 3 (1986), p. 1. 24. Joseph Needham, ‘The Place of Science and International Scientific Co-operation in Post-War World Organization’, Nature, 156, no. 3967 (1945): 558–61. 25. Needham, Science and UNESCO. International Scientific Cooperation. Tasks and Functions of the Secretariat’s Division of Natural Sciences, UNESCO Archives: General Conference, 1st Session, Paris 1946, Publications. Vol. 3: Prep.Com./ Nat.Sci.Com./12, 64p., on pp. 7–8. [French translation: L’Unesco et la science. Coopération scientifique international. Taches et fonctions de la Section des sciences du Secrétariat, Conférence générale, 1ère session, Paris 1946, Publications (français), Vol. 3, pp. 8–9]. 26. Ibid., p. 45 [p. 50]. 27. George Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science’, Science, NS, 156, no. 3775 (1967): 611–22. 28. The association ‘Science and Technology in the European Periphery’ was set up in 1997 by historians of science and technology from southern, eastern and northern Europe in order to study their specificity. See Kostas Gavroglu et al., ‘Science and Technology in the European Periphery: Some Historiographical Reflections’, History of Science, 46, no. 2 (2008): 153–75. I thank Catarina Madruga for the reference.

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29. From the already large bibliography on the ubiquity of the nation in the writing of history and notable attempts to transcend it, see in particular Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 30. On this subject, see Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Pierre Costabel, ‘La loi de Boyle-Mariotte’, in Idem (Ed.), Mariotte, savant et philosophe (†1684). Analyse d’une renommée (Paris: Vrin, 1986). 31. Salman Rushdie, ‘“Commonwealth Literature” Does Not Exist’ (1983), in Idem, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1991), pp. 61–70, on p. 65.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Basalla, George, ‘The Spread of Western Science’, Science, NS, 156, no. 3775 (1967): 611–22. Conant, James B., On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1947. Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Koyré, Alexandre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1957; Du monde clos à l’univers infini, translated from the English by Raïsa Tarr, Paris, Gallimard, 1973 [1957]. Needham, Joseph, ‘The Place of Science and International Scientific Co-operation in PostWar World Organization’, Nature, 156, no. 3967 (1945): 558–61. Raj, Kapil, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism . . . and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104, no. 2 (2013): 337–47. Sarton, George, ‘The New Humanism’, Isis, 6, no. 1 (1924): 9–42.

CHAPTER 16

Archaeology A colonial science? MAURICE SARTRE

A European invention, the discipline of archaeology has extended across the world. Yet, even when excavations are carried out by local archaeologists, it continues to be seen as the emanation of foreign powers. I’m curious to know what these excavations represent, for these workers. Do they have the feeling that we’re stripping them of their history, that Europeans are stealing something from them, once again? [. . .] Europe sapped Antiquity under the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Egyptians. Our triumphant nations appropriated the universal with their monopoly on science and archaeology, dispossessing the colonized populations by means of this pillage of a past that, as a result, they readily experienced as alien: and so brainwashed Islamic wreckers drive tractors all the more easily through ancient cities since they combine their profoundly uncultivated stupidity with the more or less widespread feeling that this heritage is an alien, retroactive emanation of foreign powers.1 In this way, the main characters in Mathias Énard’s novel ponder over the meaning that ruins such as those of Palmyra might hold for those who live and work among them. With these few words, the author reaches a conclusion that archaeologists usually avoid, although recent events have demonstrated its relevance.

BORN IN EUROPE, ADOPTED EVERYWHERE The discipline of archaeology, which originated from Europe, no longer needs to prove its scientific credentials and the usefulness of its purpose. Based on the notion of heritage developed from the latter half of the eighteenth century, it primarily enabled Europeans to exhume the vestiges of what they regarded as the roots of their civilization − Graeco-Roman culture − from their own soil. For archaeological activity began in the Mediterranean regions, later spreading to the rest of Europe. Those unaffected by the influence of Rome soon learned to use this tool to explore an indigenous history, while prehistoric archaeology extended the field of research into the very remote past.

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Once it had emerged in Europe, archaeology rapidly extended its activities beyond the borders of the continent. All visible vestiges of the past to be found anywhere on Earth were an object of study. Examples include the ancient Greek and Roman antiquities in Asia Minor and the Levant, with discoveries later extending to North Africa and those of Ancient Egypt, rediscovered in the late eighteenth century. Subsequent explorations involved a wide range of civilizations, from those of Angkor to Machu Picchu, and from the ‘biblical’ cities of Mesopotamia to the Mexican pyramids. Refinements in procedures later enabled less visible, and even invisible, elements to become a focus of attention. Today, Europeans are far from having a monopoly on archaeology, which is practised worldwide. Countries throughout the world have their own national ‘Antiquities Service’ and their own archaeologists responsible for overseeing the discovery, conservation and presentation of historical remains. Nevertheless, archaeology is still seen by many as a symbol of colonial domination, although the situation naturally varies according to locality and culture. Europeans regard the traces of the past discovered in Europe as confirmatory evidence of the continent’s history, and every individual, wherever they may live, sees the past as a whole entity from which they originate. This has given rise to highly charged ideological debates. In nineteenth-century France, for example, quarrels arose between those who considered the Francs to be the sole ancestors of the French and those who saw themselves as the descendants of the Gauls, and between those who regarded the Roman conquest as having destroyed the Gauls’ creative momentum and those gratified at the thought of the ‘barbarians’ having had the opportunity to share Graeco-Roman culture. However, such debates are a thing of the past and a calmer view of distant historical eras now prevails. Archaeological activities outside Europe have been undertaken by local actors, with or without assistance from Europeans, and are used to highlight a prestigious past that the rediscovery of these treasures has enabled them to appropriate. Examples that spring to mind are the great royal cities of Thailand and the spectacular remains of Ancient Khmer and Balinese art, not to mention the civilizations that developed in Japan, China, Korea and India, and those of the Andean countries and Central America. The identification of local populations with these monuments is rarely problematic, except in cases where such objects reveal a situation seen as an example of colonialism. This is the case, for instance, with the presence of Khmer art in Vietnam or Thailand. In Latin America, even in areas where indigenous peoples are in the minority, part of the national consciousness has been constructed around the remains of the pre-Colombian era, as if the descendants of the colonists had ultimately appropriated the cultural heritage of the colonized indigenous inhabitants. Elsewhere, the question did not arise. The fact remains that in many cases archaeological activity is still in the hands of foreigners − European or North American − in several regions of the world.

THE SPECIFIC CASE OF THE MIDDLE EAST The issue is far more complex in the Middle East and on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. The population there remained generally stable, with a few

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instances of immigration; Greeks came to the Middle East, Romans, then Vandals, to North Africa, while Arabs settled more or less everywhere after the conquest. These migrations produced only marginal changes in the quantitative sense, yet the cultural and religious upheavals were such that the current population – besides the educated elites – have difficulty identifying with these territories’ pre-Islamic occupants. Although the Muslim conquest did not prevent colonial powers from subsequently exerting their domination (first the Turks, then the French, Italians, English and Spanish), it resulted in the imposition of Arabic as a language and Islam as a religion. Both were widely dominant, as culture and religion merged, or, to put it more precisely, culture was never neutral from a religious viewpoint. A dual problem arose in this particular context, concerning the Europeans on the one hand and the now emancipated nations on the other. Until the mid-twentieth century, Europeans had an almost total monopoly on archaeological activity in these lands, regardless of whether they were part of the Ottoman Empire, colonies, territories under mandate or independent states. In that capacity, they gave priority either to unearthing remains from the Graeco-Roman period or, sometimes with Bible in hand, to those of more ancient periods that reflected the Judeo-Christian dimension of European culture. In this way, each excavation created a potential European realm of memory outside Europe. The sole exception was the Ottoman Empire; in the nineteenth century, it established an Antiquities Service and a National Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, with teams of Turkish diggers who worked on various sites within its territory: Hattusa, the Hittite capital, Nemrut Dag and Sidon. Yet the Empire’s Arab population remained unconvinced. The main actors were either Ottoman Greeks such as Theodore Makridi Bey or men who had studied in the West, like Osman Hamdi Bey, the son of a Grand Vizier of Greek origin; all were Ottoman and therefore colonizers. Their activity in Arab lands consequently differed very little from that of the Europeans. In Turkish territory, on the other hand, it unquestionably fostered a feeling of affiliation between distant civilizations (above all those that preceded the Greeks, for obvious reasons) and the present.

ACCEPTABLE MEMORY Arab nationalism in newly independent states was all the more aggressive if the regime in place was authoritarian. Nationalist leaders in each country selected what they deemed an acceptable memory of its history. In many cases, they were able to convince most of the population that everything prior to Islam did not belong to their past. How many times have those working on archaeological sites in the Middle East been told ‘that’s not our history’ by local inhabitants in relation to a Byzantine mosaic, a Greek inscription or a Roman temple? And yet these were the works of their ancestors – Mathias Énard’s analysis, quoted earlier, is short but unerring; being a European concern, archaeological activity in the Middle East ultimately appears as a retroactive emanation of colonial dominance. When they targeted Mosul’s museum, members of Isis described it as the ‘museum of the

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English’, as it had been constructed by the latter and contained items unearthed during British and European excavations. There has been a considerable increase in associations between local archaeologists and foreign projects (in the case of Syria almost all are now carried out jointly), and national archaeological services are taking on a substantial amount of the work involved. Yet at best this only served to convince fundamentalists that archaeologists from these regions were the agents of foreigners − at Palmyra, Khaled al-As’aad paid for this with his life. Apart from radical Islamic circles, which reject on principle any memory other than that of an Islam with imaginary origins that calls for the destruction of all traces of idolatry (including the Egyptian pyramids), the perspective on the past is always complex and contradictory. Despite its idolatrous character, Egypt’s rich pharaonic civilization is willingly accepted as an ancestral legacy, since the Egyptians alone can be credited with creating it. In the same way, the Lebanon has no problem with proclaiming itself ‘Phoenician’ in origin, thereby establishing a connection enabling it to emphasize its unique position within the Arab world. Other countries, such as Algeria and Tunisia, have understandably chosen to showcase indigenous, preIslamic monuments such as the royal mausoleums of Numidia. In Syria, attention is readily drawn to the era of the Aramean kings (from the twelfth to the sixth century BCE), while at the same time every effort is made to pinpoint the emergence of an Arab presence at the earliest possible date. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein appropriated ancient Mesopotamian history and its heroes in order to present himself as the new Nebuchadnezzar; he even had the latter’s Babylonian palace entirely reconstructed. While this clearly reflected the megalomania of a tyrant, it could have been an effective way for the nation to appropriate a realm of memory that had hitherto been foreign.

APPROPRIATING THE PAST In Syria, the appropriation of realms of memory deemed more authentically ‘Syrian’ on account of the absence of Greeks and Romans – the sites of Ebla, Ugarit and Qatna – is not accompanied by a history education that highlights historical continuity through the stability of humankind. The term ‘Arab’ is certainly misused, even in the case of ancient historical eras, but ultimately every Syrian Muslim believes that he at least descends from the conquerors of 634–8 and therefore has no link with the history of previous times. Moreover, nationalists use history in a way that creates almost insurmountable contradictions. For example, Rome, a colonial power, apparently produced only misfortune and decline; yet Palmyra prospered under this ‘yoke’ and its glories remain visible to this day. In order for Palmyra to become an acceptable realm of memory, therefore, it was necessary to emphasize – with some justification − the original character of its civilization in relation to the Roman Empire. Above all, the attempt made by Queen Zenobia to establish herself as Empress of Rome had to be presented as a rebellion to liberate Syria, even the whole Arab world, a standpoint contradicted by all documentary evidence. European archaeology emphasizes the Graeco-Roman period, often the most spectacular and therefore the most profitable in terms of the tourist trade. The

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pre-eminence of Europe in this domain, established among peoples who do not recognize themselves in that past, does not facilitate its appropriation by those who are nevertheless its heirs, if not always its descendants − Turkey’s very rich ancient heritage primarily reflects Greek civilization! European realms of memory extend beyond Europe, and archaeology has proved invaluable as a means of revealing and highlighting them. But every colonial history involves two or more partners, and all the difficulty here lies in having everyone come to an agreement, first to share a history and then a collective memory.

NOTE 1. Mathias Énard, Compass, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017 [2015]), p. 59.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cornelis, Sabine, ‘Archéologie: une discipline coloniale?’, Les nouvelles de l’archéologie, 128 (2012): 40–1.

CHAPTER 17

Colonialism The neglected story CATHERINE COQUERY-VIDROVITCH AND BOGUMIL JEWSIEWICKI

The colonial period remains a painful and contested episode in the collective European memory. Europe still bears the marks of her imperialist impulses, which continue to haunt her relationships with her former colonies. Colonial memory has often erased the multitude of experiences involved. Above all, it has obliterated the fact that the colonized populations were not simply victims but also historical actors in their own right. Recollections of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial past vary over time and from one national context to another. Nevertheless, Europeans share a corpus of memories featuring various interconnecting aspects. Based on fragments of the social imaginary of former times, disseminated by mass culture and combined with material traces of colonialism in everyday life, cycles of oblivion and recollection relating to racism and slavery have left their mark on European society. There, the quest for redemption regarding the violence of the colonial past is often met with a refusal to repent and the desire to rehabilitate colonization. The patrimonialized memory of the two world wars – both tragedies that were ‘made in Europe’ – continues to be a massive presence, whereas that of colonization has made little impact on Europeans’ everyday lives. Yet Hannah Arendt placed it alongside fascism and communism as the third incarnation of totalitarianism, and the world still bears its marks today. In previous times it formed part of the everyday lives of both Europeans and colonized populations. It was present through the events and participants involved in the act of colonizing, through violence both exerted and undergone, through colonial goods and through imagery combining exoticism with the self-satisfaction felt by the white man.

RACISM AND COLONIZATION In the West, slavery was conflated with colonization until the nineteenth century. Their condemnation was based on Christian morality and humanitarianism. Conversely,

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in the industrial period, the fight against slavery (in Africa, India, Indonesia and so on) served to justify imperialist colonization, which, it was claimed, would free the ‘inferior peoples’. The exception was the independent United States, where slavery was retained and systematized. The collective memory of colonization has gradually acquired an autonomous character, and a comparison between the memory of colonized populations and that of the colonizers has become imperative. By what lengthy and difficult process did colonization become a European realm of memory? Why have these European memories − both those of former colonial powers and those of non-colonizing powers – suddenly erupted? The term ‘anti-colonialism’ was coined during the decolonizing process as an antidote to colonialism − in the nineteenth century, one was either a colonist or an anti-colonist – but how did it manifest itself? Why was it necessary to wait for the post-colonial era before the fiction built around the ‘first peoples’ ended and before the memory of colonization was revealed to be indissociable from racism? The fight against racism now involves acknowledging the autonomous collective memories of the experiences and thoughts of formerly colonized peoples. A colonial realm of memory is formed through the work of memories based on historical facts relating to the industrial era and resulting from certain states’ appropriation of populations, territories and resources located outside the boundaries of their sovereignty. This system of sharing out the world was established after the Atlantic slave trade but predates globalization. It was based on the organizing principle of racial hierarchization, whose manifestations include disparity in terms of technological progress. With a few rare exceptions, there is a territorial discontinuity between the colonies and the colonizing states, the former, which were pre-industrial societies, having been ‘discovered’, then ‘civilized’ by the latter. Alongside the memory of the presence of colonialism, which took multiple forms in Europe, one finds racism and anti-racism, slavery and its abolition, the human conquest of nature − countered by ecosystem conservation − and human rights and their older form, Humanism. Memory primarily works within a national framework, but the intertwining of national memories forms a collective European memory.

THE BIRTH OF ANTI-COLONIALISM In the Europe of the first half of the last century, overseas colonization was seen as the solution to international and national difficulties. After the end of the First World War, a new division of colonies occurred with the establishment of the League of Nations, and exchanges of colonial possessions were planned. At that time, the European powers, Japan and America, which had become independent at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, pursued policies of colonial expansion. The rest of the world, meanwhile, submitted to some form of colonial domination. Within fifteen years of the end of the Second World War, however, the status of being a colonial territory became the exception rather than the rule, and colonial possessions were seen as a burden rather than an indication of power. Young Europeans swapped pith helmets for an anti-colonialist stance. Racism was now

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regarded as reprehensible and condemned, with punishments gradually being introduced through laws. Until the 1950s, opposition to the colonial enterprise was expressed within the frameworks of communism, socialism and humanism, and consequently had very little impact on public opinion in Europe. ‘Third-Worldism’ then became its general vehicle of expression, and an anti-colonial European memory emerged. Unlike the positive perception of colonialism conveyed by the myth of the white man’s civilizing mission, which was expressed within national frameworks, the critical perception was internationalist in character before it became European. It has difficulty detaching itself from the original anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, anti-fascist and pro-human rights perspectives. Twenty-first-century humanitarianism continues to leave little space for an autonomous memory of colonization and decolonization. While historical discourses accord it a prominent place, no directive, either political or ethical, has enabled these to be linked with a set of representations and emotions indispensable to the life of a realm of memory. Once memory has made its home there, it becomes difficult to define the meaning of the word ‘colonization’. In an increasing number of instances, it is used to describe any situation involving exploitation, dependence and the rejection of acknowledgement. Unlike historical discourse, which abhors anachronism, memory work seeks pertinence in the here and now, and uses the term in a broad sense. Could the pre-industrial European empires – the Ottoman, Russian and AustroHungarian – be classed as colonial? The formation of nation states, their territorial development and their re-incorporation into other empires (if we count the USSR as an empire), processes which occurred throughout the twentieth century, scarcely correlate with the notion of colonialism established in the contemporary European memory. Ukraine’s incorporation into the Russian Empire, and subsequently into the USSR, is now defined in the country’s official historiography and collective memory as colonization. The Roma were formerly reduced to the status of slaves in certain Balkan countries (which were themselves incorporated into the Ottoman Empire); does this make them the victims of internal colonization? Is their persistent marginalization the effect of their transition from the status of slaves to that of colonized peoples, as was the case with Afro-Caribbean populations, or does it simply stem from racial prejudice? How should we define the memory of serfdom, which was only abolished in Central and Eastern Europe once colonial expansion overseas was in full swing, while Haiti moved directly from the condition of colonial slavery to political independence in 1804? And finally, could we define the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas and Australia, dispossessed of their lands and reduced to the status of second-class citizens, as colonial subjects?

MULTIPLE AND CHANGING MEMORIES When memories are being crafted, image and sound prevail over the written narration of historical events, and chronological order is disrupted by representations of the past that address the senses. The meaning of the focus of remembrance is never self-evident; it has the significance that is ascribed to it. In the post-colonial space,

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both the descendants of the colonial subjects and those of the colonizers lay claim to pertinent memories of colonization. The outdated character of some of these memories may be due to internal claims of autonomy or sovereignty. In Britain and Spain, for instance, the collective memory of colonization and decolonization appears detached from the reality of nineteenth-century colonialism, for different reasons. In the Commonwealth, the memory of the British Empire obscures that of colonization through the emblematic presence of the monarchy. The recomposition of British society through immigration is recognized and accepted in the twenty-first century. In Spain, the fact that the Spanish language and culture is shared with much of Latin America makes it easier to forget that these countries were its former colonies, while the decolonization of Africa appears incidental. The complete decolonization of Portugal’s colonial empire took place in conjunction with the end of its dictatorship. From 1933 to 1974, under António de Oliveira Salazar and the Estado Novo regime, the colonial domination it exerted contaminated the home country. The collective colonial amnesia encouraged by this regime allowed the colonizing population to see itself as the founder of Angola and Mozambique. This is the clearest illustration of the theory propounded by Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, according to which the colonized are transformed into the colonizer and vice versa, so indissociable do the two become. In Italy, colonization was linked to the Southern Question, which has haunted the country since its unification. The idea of colonization as a solution to the Southern Question was formulated in the context of the Northern Italians’ view of themselves as culturally superior to the Meridionali. Elsewhere, even in Britain, colonial conquest was presented as an assertion of power as well as a solution to domestic difficulties. This was the case in the 1860s, when Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘new imperialism’ appeared as a solution to internal problems. More Scots than English made a career out of colonial enterprises. Missionaries from Belgium’s Flemish Catholic community, most of whose members were poor, noticeably outnumbered the Walloons in the Belgian Congo. In Italy, as in Belgium, the subordinate social position of ordinary actors involved in colonization, whether Southern Italian or Flemish, has had a strong influence on the memory of colonialism in terms of national geography. Like the Meridionali in Italy, the members of Belgium’s Flemish community are more resolutely anti-colonialist today, as they reject any political responsibility for colonization. Contemporary German collective memory is anti-colonial − at least in the former FRG, as in the GDR the theme of colonization was confined to the ideological discourse of ‘anti-imperialism’. Prior to the atrocities of the Second World War and the Holocaust, German colonialism seems to have been experienced, at least by post-war generations, as a collective fault that demanded national repentance. This motivated the giving of aid by the FRG to African countries, especially Germany’s former colonies; exhibitions and other cultural presentations raised public awareness of the atrocities committed during the colonial period. Through the declaration of 10 July 2015, Germany acknowledged the Herero genocide waged in Northern Namibia from 1904 to 1905. Article 1 of German Basic Law, approved in 1949

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– ‘Human dignity shall be inviolable’− did more to foster that awareness than an intergenerational transmission of memories of the colonial past.

APPREHENDING THE MEMORY OF COLONIALISM With a few exceptions (notably French overseas departments), the process of revising the patrimonializing of overseas colonial memory chiefly involved removing (and often contesting) colonial-era toponyms, together with certain monuments celebrating colonialism. In Europe, a few gestures were made to heal the wounds left by colonization. For instance, the Abbé Grégoire, Victor Schœlcher and Félix Éboué were all entombed in the Panthéon in Paris, while in Germany the atrocities committed in Namibia were acknowledged in the form of public manifestations, which were chiefly cultural in character. All these gestures place colonization in the same single category, where it is mistakenly conflated with the concepts of racism and human rights issues. Certain museums in Denmark and the Netherlands have recently changed their information panels and the names of some of their exhibits containing the word ‘negro’. In the same way, the French research group ACHAC, which is very active in France and aims to extend its presence across Europe, incorporates colonialism into a wider context, which includes racism and migration flows from non-European territories. One of its objectives, seemingly, is to disseminate the idea that it is impossible to understand today’s France without taking its colonial legacies into account. The aim is to use the historical memory of colonialism to help construct an accurate collective European memory, or accurate national memories within Europe. Sometimes, explicit references are made to the history of colonization, as was the case with the recent exhibition entitled ‘C’est notre histoire!’ held at the House of European History in Brussels in 2007. During the period of conquest and the foundation of colonial empires, education served as a vehicle for pro-colonial propaganda, glorifying explorers, feats of arms and the ‘dedication’ shown by those who brought civilization and Christianity to ‘inferior’ peoples, enabling them to achieve progress. Decolonization gradually effaced this concerted expression of national self-satisfaction. Nevertheless, a history of colonial regimes slowly made its entrance into curricular programmes, and once it was finally established, as in the case of France, it quickly became the target of hostile reactions. Supporters of colonialism from colonizing countries campaigning for its rehabilitation were backed by powerful lobbies. This was demonstrated by Article 4 of the Law of 23 February 2005, requiring teachers to present a ‘positive’ history of colonialism, especially in North Africa. Colonialism was denounced in certain former Eastern bloc countries, particularly the Baltic States and Ukraine. The construction of museums of Soviet or communist colonization was accompanied by the destruction of monuments, toponymic ‘cleansing’ and a radical revision of history. Many of these countries reverted to the school textbooks in use before Soviet ‘occupation’, which were therefore fifty years out of date, while they waited for new books to be written and approved. Elsewhere in Europe, the moral responsibility for the atrocities committed became a political

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issue, notably in Britain and France, as well as in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany; the process of deconstructing the collective memory of colonization as a civilizing act was underway. Apart from the historiographic approach applied by the Subaltern Studies Group, there are few examples where the memory and history of colonization have been constructed from the viewpoint of the colonial subject. This is true of both colonizing and colonized countries. South Africa is an exception, but apartheid was an internal system. This perspective has sometimes been adopted by activists involved in autonomy and independence movements in their native lands, an extreme example being that of Roger Casement. An Irish nationalist executed in 1916 for collaborating with the Germans, he was one of the most prominent denouncers of the atrocities committed in the Congo. Flemish missionaries in the Belgian Congo and academics like the Breton Yves Person in France fought to have the value of local cultures acknowledged. In doing so, they were vicariously promoting the right of their own region and /or culture to achieve recognition.

‘THE HYPOCRITICAL NAME OF CIVILIZATION’ The basis of modern anti-colonialism was developed by European socialists in response to the apologists for colonization, the latter’s stance being underpinned by the notion of the ‘3 Cs’ (Civilization, Commerce and Christianity). The best known of these was David Livingstone, whose Christian faith, scientific background and fight against ‘Arab slave-traders’ endowed him with an aura of authority. In 1885 (the year of the international Congo Conference held in Berlin), Georges Clemenceau made the following reply to Jules Ferry’s assertion that colonization – a ‘superior civilizing duty’− was the only means by which France could resume her rightful place among the great nations of the world: I have seen German scholars scientifically demonstrating that France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War was inevitable, because the Frenchman’s race was inferior to that of the German’s. Since then, I admit, I think twice before turning toward a man and a civilisation and pronouncing that man and that civilisation to be inferior. He continued: Do not let us try to endow violence with the hypocritical name of civilisation. Do not let us speak of rights, of duty. The conquest that you advocate is purely and simply the abuse of the power that a scientific civilisation has over rudimentary civilisations, enabling it to appropriate human beings, torture them, and extract all their strength in order to benefit the so-called civilising force.1 In one fell swoop, this speech denounced racism, a civilization’s claim to moral superiority and the pretentions of science. It had little impact on public opinion at the time, however, as the ‘colonizers’ prevailed. Although the abuses of the colonial system were attacked, until the mid-twentieth century this rarely occurred in the case of the system itself. Whenever the latter was targeted, the notion of superiority of

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race or civilization was brandished; this was used as a justification for colonization, as it implied that the colonizer was duty-bound to act as protector. Colonization was seen as a remedy for slavery, whose abolition was one of the aims of the League of Nations. The tenacious myth of the ‘civilizing mission’ explains the persistently indulgent attitude shown to the colonial enterprise. Today, however, public opinion condemns the colonial system. Yet, while any desire to re-establish French Algeria, the Dutch East Indies or the Belgian Congo would be a minority opinion, the idea that these now-independent states have ‘wrecked’ the results of the ‘civilizing mission’, and that their populations are unable to master their collective emotions and govern themselves properly, is widely shared. This carries an implicit message; peoples who had previously lived outside the civilized world had been taken out of a state of nature – for better or for worse – by the actions of Europeans. Once the Europeans had left, these peoples proved to be incapable of governing themselves for lack of collective aptitude in the domains of democracy, entrepreneurship and so on. The speech given by then President Nicolas Sarkozy in Dakar in July 2007, when he stated in front of a learned assembly of Senegalese academics that ‘the African has not fully entered into history’, was simply an expression of that persistent notion at the core of the collective European memory.

FROM TARZAN TO BANANIA: COLONIAL PROPAGANDA In the case of the ‘colonizing’ Europe of the twentieth century, there was no fundamental change to the context in which the collective memory was constructed, whether colonialism was seen in a positive or negative light. That memory − used in the broad sense to include the notion of exoticism − was fashioned by the illustrated press, photojournalism and documentaries, which succeeded the school textbook and the novel. All European states relied heavily on propaganda in their quest for legitimacy, particularly those with totalitarian regimes; the tools used for this purpose were the textbook and the photographic image. Representations of everyday life in the colonies were used as pro-colonial propaganda, such as the brand images for Banania (a chocolate drink popular in France), which have imprinted themselves on family memories. The original promotional image of an attractive Antillaise surrounded by bananas was replaced in 1917 by that of a smiling Senegalese infantryman. In order to encourage parents to finance mission initiatives, priests would give children images of ‘souls to be saved’ in exotic lands. Postcards, postage stamps, advertisements for colonial ‘products’, colonial exhibitions, diaporamas, human zoos and zoological gardens also played their part. The colonial subject came to be regarded as a natural history exhibit, like a plant or an animal, and was established in the shared imaginaries forming part of the cultural memory of European modernity. The quest for the recognition of the colonial enterprise was expressed in a manner that included both colonizing societies and the new elite formed under colonial domination. Colonial landscapes were presented as localities imported

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from the homeland and implanted in the midst of the local inhabitants and exotic fauna and flora. In the homeland, this represented an invitation to travel; in the colonies, it promised assimilation. This explains the timeless popularity of Hollywood incarnations of these lands, such as The Jungle Book, Tarzan (the last remake of which was released in 2016) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, showcasing both the inherent power of the white man and the risk taken by a ‘civilized’ being when he enters the natural world, whether this is represented by fauna or by humankind in its ‘wild’ form. This social imaginary places ‘exotic’ man in a time period distinct from that of the white man – our own. Various scholarly and fictional treatises describe the consequences of moving from one side of this frontier to another (those who cross it were said to lose their mind); they attest to the strength of the idea that the colonized subject was excluded from history, then a feature of the social imaginary.

THE PERSISTENT NOTION OF EXOTICISM Despite Jan Vansina’s groundbreaking analysis of the long-standing oral historical methodology applied in African countries, published in 1961, Hegel’s opinion has weighed heavily on representations of Africa, Oceania and indigenous inhabitants. He saw them all as existing in a separate time period, while ours alone was universal and advanced towards the future. At the university level, neither universal nor comparative history, being conceived from a Western standpoint, has yet succeeded in including all the contributions made to the construction of the current world. Rather than establishing a historical experience as universal, the favoured form seems to be a ‘history of equal parts’; the aim is to present ‘alternative modernities’, rather than modernity itself. The general public has been aware of the historical discourse criticizing colonialism since the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet this has not caused the collective memory of colonization to fade, and it is still seen as a duty towards those who are lagging behind on the road to progress. In this regard, the attitude to nonEuropean immigration appears to be conditioned by the persistent representation of formerly colonized populations as inferior. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the standard of living was improved by the contribution of colonial goods such as sugar, tea and spices, and later by everyday products manufactured using raw materials extracted from or cultivated in the colonies. Colonialism entered social imaginaries through the imagery of colonial exoticism, certain artistic trends – such as Orientalism – and literature. But also, and above all, it became part of the collective memory of modernization, with Europe seen as the leader of this process. Although anti-colonial activists might be doing their best to combat the notions that have become embedded within that memory, the association – visual at least – between products once seen as exotic and the face of a smiling ‘negro’ nevertheless remains persistent. The same is true of the fantasy concocted around the body of a young ‘indigenous’ inhabitant offering themselves to a ‘superior’ being. The Romantic representation of the conquest of ‘virgin’ territories (i.e. hitherto unknown to Westerners) by courageous, enterprising

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individuals with scientific knowledge who embodied the ‘genius of the white race’ may be compared to a set of Russian dolls, as it contains within it the conquest of peoples belonging to ‘inferior’ civilizations. The latter were then placed under the tutelage of the West, the conveyor of peace, civilization and progress. Although the historical discourse has now been transformed, explorers such as Henry Morton Stanley and Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza remain somewhat positive figures in that collective memory. The ambiguous attitude of certain formerly colonized states towards these figures also plays a role; Savorgnan de Brazza, for example, has recently been celebrated as a founding father in the Republic of the Congo. That memory, composed of residual elements of former representations conveyed through literature, monuments or toponyms, does not stand up against historical discourse. Conversely, it is reinforced by media portrayals of the conflicts decimating societies in the former colonies, especially in the case of Africa, by waves of immigration to Europe and, periodically, by demands for ‘reimbursement’ evoking the notion of the ‘colonial debt’.

COLONIALISM REDUCED TO A FOOTNOTE The idea that colonization concerns the colonized societies as much as those of the colonizers is gaining ground in Europe, as is the realization that the shadow it casts over the past cannot be ignored, regardless of locality. Several colonial museums have changed their names. In France, the term ‘natural history’, a field of study that had encompassed man in his ‘wild’ state, has given way to that of ‘life and earth sciences’. Yesterday’s Academies of Colonial Sciences are today’s Academies of ‘Overseas’ Sciences. Amsterdam’s Colonial Museum had already been renamed the Tropenmuseum (Tropical Museum) in 1949. In France, the former Musée des Colonies, later known as the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, became the Musée de l’Immigration in 2007. This transformation acknowledges the heritage value of the contribution made by immigrants. Africa is mentioned in the first section of the permanent exhibition (inaugurated in 2014), but no particular prominence is accorded to either colonialism or slavery. The proclamation that colonies no longer exist turns colonialism into a mere footnote to national histories; this diminution is also a feature of some African historiographical narratives written by African academics. The use of the adjective ‘tribal’ to describe the artistic creations or culture of colonized peoples has gradually disappeared. In France, opposition to the term ‘tribal art’ influenced the name chosen for the museum known as the Musée du Quai Branly. That institution contains collections formerly housed in the Musée de l’Homme, part of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. The building stands in a garden reminiscent of a jungle landscape, so that visitors cannot escape the memories of Tarzan, Mowgli or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that are ceaselessly reactivated by popular culture. Yet throughout Europe, formerly colonized peoples, whether from overseas or national territories (indigenous inhabitants), came to be regarded as full members of humanity, like Europeans, their rights henceforth guaranteed by international and national laws.

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‘DECIVILIZING THE COLONIZER’ Examples of racism and its memories have been tracked throughout Europe since the 1970s, a hunt reinforced by African Americans’ struggle to achieve civil rights and its echoes in political life and the media. This brings to mind the images of African American and white protesters chained together in New York and Washington, the figure of Martin Luther King and the gesture made by Muhammad Ali, who threw the gold medal he had just won at the Rome Olympics into the Ohio River after staff at a restaurant in Louisville had refused to serve him. Later, powerful images of the anti-apartheid campaigns in South Africa were disseminated throughout the world. In the late twentieth century, public opinion seemed to recognize the unacceptability of excluding individuals, as well as Black and indigenous peoples, from history. Since the late 1990s, Europe has witnessed the rise of extreme right-wing groups that combine the racism of previous eras with Islamophobia and an antiimmigration stance, which they use to justify the rehabilitation of colonialism as a civilizing enterprise. Conversely, academics emphasize the dominant role played by Europeans in ‘inventing’ the concept of racial inferiority. And from the sixteenth century onwards, indeed, European writing effectively ‘created’ Africa. The methods used were classified and deconstructed by V.Y. Mudimbe. Ten years earlier, Edward Said analysed the European construction of Orientalism in a similar manner. The stereotypes associated with Africa and the East, including Asia, have been penetrating European social memory and fuelling the memory of colonization as a civilizing enterprise since well before the colonial era. Africa was particularly marginalized, as the image of the continent had been formed just as the Atlantic slave trade was developing. For Westerners of that era, a slave could only be Black, to the point where the word ‘negro’ became synonymous with that of ‘slave’ in the eighteenth century. In terms of French historiographical texts, Marc Ferro has delivered the strongest denunciation of colonialism and the structures justifying it, first in a work where he presents globalization as a contemporary incarnation of colonization and later as the editor of a collective work entitled Le Livre noir du colonialisme, which follows a similar format to the Black Book of Communism. There, Ferro recalls the political equivalences between Nazism, communism and colonial imperialism recognized by Hannah Arendt half a century earlier. Colonization and colonial memory have unquestionably made their mark on the European experience. The memory of slavery and that of colonialism has recently become indissociable, particularly in the case of the media. In 1950, Aimé Césaire described how ‘colonization works to decivilize the colonizer’, causing a ‘universal regression’ to take place. During this period, intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Memmi emphasized the corruption of the colonizer, who imposes an oppressive system on others. And yet the wave of anti-colonialism did not succeed in establishing the fact that colonized populations were just as obviously historical actors as the proletariat. Anti-fascism, the basis for many young Europeans’ engagement with anti-colonialism and later with Third Worldism, likewise formed part of the initial stages of the engagement with communism and − after 1956 − with human rights. Intellectuals were united in their outrage at the French army’s use of torture in

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Algeria, yet they were motivated by the concept of human rights rather than anticolonialism. The profound forces driving European abolitionists and anti-colonialists during this period were based on the notion of moral duty towards others and therefore on Christian ethics.

FROM THE SLAVE AS VICTIM TO THE COLONIAL SUBJECT AS A HISTORICAL ACTOR Yet the cultural memory of racial hierarchization prevents Europeans from recognizing themselves in a group whose appearance does not seem to correspond to their own. The colonial subject is broadly perceived as masculine in the public imaginary, while in the European public sphere there is growing awareness of specific forms of inequality, notably gender-related. The historiography of colonization would gain from addressing those sensibilities that would enable women, and then communities of various sexual orientations, to recognize themselves. In Europe, self-blame and feelings of culpability in relation to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and more recent genocides have given rise to a universal (but multifaceted) figure: the victim of racism and de-humanization. In this respect, the colonial subject suffers from the ‘chauvinism of the universal’ (Bourdieu), initially in the form of communism and later of anti-colonialism, considered by Westerners to be universally shared. The indigenous populations (who were then synonymous with colonial subjects) evoked by Sartre in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) were based on the proletariat − ‘natives of under-developed countries, unite!’ The impact of these figures as a model of representation has grown steadily weaker as those who represent themselves in this way are becoming ever fewer in number. The implosion and loss of legitimacy of communist discourses and systems have contributed to this. The figure of the oppressed individual has certainly retained the ability to attract support but lacks a strong image and a model. The principal problem for the twentieth-century European conscience was the general feeling of having to atone for the moral failure represented by the Holocaust. Since slavery has been recognized as a crime against humanity, the slave has subsequently become the universal victim in his turn. That change in the object of memory has been reinforced by globalization, particularly that of the media. Yet this European feeling of wrongdoing is not invariably shared by African and Asian societies, where it is sometimes even regarded as a Eurocentric fixation. Ultimately, slavery appears as the domain in which experiences of de-humanization are the most widely shared across the world and throughout the history of human society. In the public sphere, the reduced visibility of the European memory of colonization stems from the limited representation of the colonial subject as a historical actor. The rhetorical radicalism of Fanon and Sartre found no political response in Europe, as the colonial subject was not accepted as an active participant in Europe’s past. It was the slave who was established as the universal representation of all the wretched on the earth. The historical figure of the enslaved individual is now able to serve as the embodiment of every fight against inequality; his de-humanization had been

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justified through racial hierarchization, his commodification established in both the social imaginary and the legal system, and, as ‘personal property’, his assigned status had been that of a production tool. Having slave ancestors has ceased to be a badge of shame; it has become a status to be proclaimed with pride by all who feel neither acknowledged by nor accepted into society, an indication of a duty to remember as well as to mobilize. In the case of France, historical experience, contemporized by the voices of citizens originating from the West Indies and the islands of the Indian Ocean, reinforces the tendency to conflate the colonial subject as a focus of remembrance with that of the slave. This method of discarding the memory of colonialism, celebrating instead the abolition of slavery, amounts to a rejection of that dual national debt – slavery and colonization – and has prompted the rediscovery of different forms of resistance, these being the figures of the ‘Maroon’ and the ‘Black resistance fighter’. Yet Aimé Césaire chose to write a Discourse on Colonialism, not slavery. As one of the great figures of history, Nelson Mandela put paid to this refusal to accept the colonial subject as a historical actor. European collective memory recognizes the colonial subject only as a victim − of American imperialism for some, of colonialism for others. Even Raoul Peck’s films do not portray this figure as a historical actor, although the director is of Haitian origin. As collective actors, Senegalese infantrymen are on the point of achieving that recognition. The media has played a key role in this regard. Rachid Bouchareb’s film Days of Glory (2006) and the much-publicized reaction of then president Jacques Chirac established these figures as part of a sensitive area. The memory of slavery allowed a historical actor to emerge, whereas the decolonization process simply produced new states. As they lack the figure of the colonial subject who would bear them, multiple national and European memories of colonization and decolonization arise and disperse, are absorbed by those with a stronger presence and later resurge, only to be lost once more, then rediscovered.

ANTI-COLONIAL MEMORIES We know little about the connection that Europeans who originated from elsewhere maintain with the colonization of their native countries and global colonialism through their collective memory. Migrants from previously colonized countries often regard immigration to the former motherland as an obvious move and a quasiright by virtue of the ‘colonial debt’. Many have applied for citizenship of that erstwhile motherland, as former subjects of the same ruler. European citizens from the splinter-states of the old empires that became ‘overseas territories’ often retain more vivid recollections of racially based inequality; their memory is anti-colonial. Moreover, new situations have arisen from the reversal of economic fortunes. What memory of colonization was maintained by the unemployed Portuguese who emigrated to independent Angola or by the Spanish who settled in Latin America? Was their arrival experienced as a new wave of colonialism or, conversely, as a revenge against the ex-colonizers? How do Europeans who recently arrived here from countries that have not been colonized view colonialism? Do Germans of Turkish origin, for instance, carry

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within them the memory of an empire (the Ottoman) that previously included a substantial part of Europe, Eurasia and the Mediterranean region? Do they consider themselves the former colonizers of Europe? And do those members of the German population who consider themselves Kurdish see themselves as the heirs to that empire, or do they, on the contrary, view themselves as having been colonized by Turkey?

ENDURING TABOOS We native Europeans often think that those of our fellow citizens who originate from elsewhere, particularly from former colonies, are seeking support of some kind, which would be justified by their collective memory of colonization. However, it should be obvious to one and all that the majority are autonomous actors, citizens with full rights who have an influence over Europe’s future development. Their connection to colonialism through their collective memory is important – and this is now being expressed. The Sindika Dokolo Foundation, for example – named after the Congolese businessman and art collector – is to open a museum in Portugal that will house around 5,000 examples of contemporary African art from his collection. Dokolo believes that ‘art plays a decisive role in the liberation of peoples and minds’, and that answers to questions will come from post-colonial creation in Germany, Belgium, France and Britain. The exhibition entitled ‘Decolonial Desire’, held in London in late 2016, presented work by Portuguese artist Vasco Araújo that explored the traumatic experience of the colonial encounter. This haunts the world from the other side of the (Black) Atlantic, where the ‘righteous city’ desired by the Puritans – who had fled religious intolerance in Europe to seek refuge in North America – owed its economic survival to the toil of slaves and colonial subjects. Washington’s National Museum of African American History and Culture finally opened its doors a century after the project had first been mooted. This serves as a reminder that slavery was followed by multiple forms of internal colonialism in areas that became national spaces, in both Europe and America. That world-famous theatre of remembrance and heritage, the National Mall in Washington, DC, provides proof that slavery and colonialism were the last of all the traumatic experiences that produced our globalized world to achieve recognition. Similar work on the human cost of colonial expansion is slow to emerge in European historical studies. In the cases of Germany, Belgium, Britain and France, the spaces where ‘taboo subjects are treated [. . .] such as the colonial past and its links with current social fractures’2 now seem to be created mainly by artists.

NOTES 1. Speech made in the Chamber of Deputies during the session of 31 July 1885. 2. Kader Attia on the La Colonie cultural centre (Paris), which he co-founded, http:​/​/ www​​.afri​​cultu​​res​.c​​om​/ph​​p​/ind​​ex​.ph​​p​?nav​​=arti​​​cle​&n​​o​=138​​37.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bertrand, Romain, L’Histoire à parts égales: Récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident (XVIe –XVIIe siècle), Paris, Le Seuil, 2011. Césaire, Aimé, Discours sur le colonialisme, Paris, Réclame, 1950. Cooper, Frederick, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine, Enjeux politiques de l’histoire coloniale, Marseille, Agone, 2009. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, translated from the French by Constance Farrington, New York, Grove Press Inc., 1963 [1961]. Ferro, Marc (Ed.), Le Livre noir du colonialisme. (XVIe–XXIe siècle): de l’extermination à la repentance, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2003. Lourenço, Eduardo, Do Colonialismo como Nosso Impensado, Lisbon, Gradiva, 2014. Mbembe, Achille, Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée, Paris, La Découverte, 2010. Memmi, Albert, Portrait du colonisé, précédé de Portrait du colonisateur, Paris, BuchetChastel, 1957. Moses, Dirk (Ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, New York, Berghahn Books, 2008. Mudimbe, V. Y., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988.

CHAPTER 18

Nobody in the Congo loves Tintin BOGUMIL JEWSIEWICKI AND ISIDORE NDAYWEL È NZIEM

An emblematic example of the crimes committed during the colonial era, the Belgian Congo has inspired much literature, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo. The Congo made its entrance into European history through the diplomatic conference that took place in Berlin from 1884 to 1885 and which historians and journalists often mistakenly see as the event that instigated the colonial ‘division of Africa’ by European powers. Several colonies were indeed created following that conference, which primarily involved discussions over the general rules that should govern the acquisition of these territories by European states. However, it is the ‘Congo Free State’, designated as the personal property of Léopold II of Belgium, which has had the strongest impact on European and international memory. In the early twentieth century, the atrocities perpetrated under Léopold’s regime, which used forced labour to extract rubber, triggered the first major scandal linked to European colonialism. At the time, British author Arthur Conan Doyle described the crimes committed there as ‘the greatest to be ever known’. Rubber was also extracted from the French colony established on the opposite bank of the Congo River; the disastrous effects of this exploitation were condemned by the writer André Gide following his expedition to Africa in 1925. His secretary Marc Allégret created a cinematic and photographic record of these experiences.

THE BLOODSTAINED FACE OF IMPERIALISM Over a decade earlier, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness had already given its readers a glimpse of the treatment inflicted on the Congolese people through one of its central characters, Kurtz, an ivory trader based in the equatorial forest far from ‘civilization’. As he lies dying, Kurtz cries out ‘The horror! The horror!’ – his response to the world he is about to leave. Conrad knew the Congo, having travelled up the river on a steamer named the Roi des Belges; in his novella it becomes transformed into a stage set where he presents both the dark face of imperialism and − to use

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Rudyard Kipling’s famous phrase − the ‘white man’s burden’. Reflecting both the spirit and the social imaginary of its time, Conrad’s work has served as the basis for analyses of the connections between colonialism and imperialism, notably that of Hannah Arendt. A number of novelists have been inspired by Heart of Darkness, while Apocalypse Now has become the best-known of the numerous film, theatre and television adaptations of the story, the scene shifting from Africa to the Vietnam War. In the early twentieth century, the international condemnation of the atrocities committed in the Congo under Léopold II’s regime was largely based on reports from British and American Protestant missionaries. The eruption of the scandal compelled the Belgian government to order a parliamentary enquiry and ultimately prompted Léopold’s decision to relinquish control of the territory to the Belgian government, which established it as an official colony. However, the outrage was primarily triggered by photographic evidence. The images of severed hands and mutilated individuals shocked and mobilized international public opinion. The American writer and journalist Mark Twain declared the camera to be Léopold II’s chief enemy. Belgian colonial propaganda never succeeded in removing these images from the Western imaginary, despite the violence and bloodshed that have periodically occurred in the Congo since its independence in 1960. Several authors and film-makers have taken that colonial episode as an example in order to denounce the role played by Europeans in the establishment of a system characterized by extreme brutality, which continues to haunt memories in the Congo and throughout the world. The most influential of these is doubtless the book by American writer Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998).1 This bestselling work brought the atrocities back into the spotlight and established the protests of the early twentieth century within the history of the global human rights movement.

TINTIN AS PROPAGANDA However, the European memory of the Congo is not confined to the atrocities committed in the early days of the colonial era and their portrayal in photographs, films and literature. With Tintin in the Congo, which has sold over ten million copies since its publication in 1931, the cartoonist Hergé filled the imaginary of younger generations in the West with other representations. His Congolese characters are naïve and their witchdoctor is malicious, but Tintin manages to outwit him and becomes the hero of the village, where at the end of the story he gives maths lessons to the African children at the mission school. Éditions Casterman stopped publishing the comic book in the early 1960s, as it had come to be perceived as a condensed form of colonial propaganda; publication resumed in 1970, then halted once more. Nevertheless, the comic book forms part of the Congolese literary heritage and imaginary. In a message of congratulation addressed to Richard Nixon after the successful Apollo mission of 1969, Congolese president Mobutu Sese Seko recalled that Tintin had been the first human to set foot on the moon. During that same

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year, there were calls in the Congo for the comic book to be reprinted. Since 2007, in response to the plan to make a series of films based on the adventures of Tintin, complaints of racism have been lodged in a number of European countries and libraries have been removing the comic book from their shelves. The new English edition includes a note warning the reader of the racial stereotypes featured in the work. Whether seen as victims or as ‘noble savages’, the Congolese of the collective European memory are clearly not the active agents of their own destiny.

NOTE 1. New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Autesserre, Séverine, ‘Dangerous Tales: Dominant Narratives on the Congo and Their Unintended Consequences’, Africa Affairs, 443 (2012): 202–22. Dunn, Kevin, Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity, New York, Macmillan, 2003. Kabamba, Patience, ‘“Heart of Darkness”: Current Images of the DRC and Their Theoretical Underpinning’, Anthropological Theory, 10, no. 3 (2010): 265–301. Ndaywel è Nziem, Isidore, Histoire générale du Congo: De l’héritage ancien à la république démocratique, Brussels, Duculot, 1998. Reybrouck, David Van, Congo. Une histoire, Arles, Actes Sud, 2012. Vellut, Jean-Luc (Ed.), La Mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial, Ghent, Snoeck, 2005.

CHAPTER 19

Convict Australia ALAN FROST

From the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, several European countries sent convicted prisoners to their colonial territories. Although the term ‘penal colony’ generally conjures up sinister images, in Australia these are seen as the cradle of the nation. Many European nations sent criminals to their distant territories. Reminders of past inhumanity and detested colonial rule, these penal stations linger in the collective memories of both metropolitan and local cultures. However, no other penal settlements offer any real parallel with Britain’s convict colonies in Australia, which had nothing like the futility of Portugal’s Colonia do Sacremento or the death rate of France’s Devil Island. Much more than this, though, there is the social reformation that occurred in them. The majority of those transported to Australia did not re-offend. On regaining their freedom, many lived comfortably. Some became property owners; some became rich. Together with those of free immigrants, their children and these children’s children coalesced into a prosperous society which, by the turn of the twentieth century, was adopting the eight-hour working day, adult franchise (for women as well as men) and compulsory education. Quite simply, modern Australian is the result of the most successful penal experiment in history. The British instituted the punishment for felonies of transportation in 1718, and in the next 65 years sent some 50,000 men, women and children who had been so sentenced for 7 or 14 years or life to its North American colonies, where their labour was sold to merchants for the remaining period of their sentence. Transportation involved the loss of citizenship. It was also a means of diminishing a social problem by exporting it. In 1786, when the American colonies had won independence and refused to take any more convicts, the British government decided to establish a convict colony in New South Wales (Australia). Between 1788 and 1868, more than 160,000 men, women and children ‘left their country for their country’s good’, being sent to New South Wales, Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) and Western Australia. They laboured either for the government or for private employers, or, when their sentences had expired or they had obtained a ‘ticket of leave’ as the result of good behaviour, worked for wages, farmed or ran businesses.

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In the mid-1820s, when their populations had increased by births and immigration (now free as well as convict), the British government decided that New South Wales and Tasmania should henceforth be free colonies and began to give them representative government and civil law. The transition was not without its difficulties. In the colonies, ‘Exclusives’ (wealthy free settlers) refused to mix socially with ‘Emancipists’ (freed convicts) and wished to deny them the right to vote and to serve on juries. Former convicts who returned ‘home’ were spurned. There was some memorialization of the convict system in the nineteenth century, particularly of the brutalities of life in the places of secondary punishment set up to punish those who offended again in the colonies, in ballads such as ‘Moreton Bay’ – ‘I’ve been a prisoner at Port Macquarie / At Norfolk Island and Emu Plains / At Castle Hill and at cursed Toongabbie / At all these settlements I’ve been in chains . . .’ – and in novels such as Ralph Rashleigh and For the Term of His Natural Life. In general, however, as they grew more prosperous and moved towards nationhood, Australians did not care to be reminded of a past which constituted a ‘plague spot’ on the ‘face’ of society. Historians skated over the convict decades, with one declaring that ‘better, a thousand times, would it be for the world, if the entire record were buried in eternal forgetfulness’. Reflecting these sentiments, prominent families obliterated the names of parents or grandparents from convict ledgers. Governments allowed the convict sites to fall to ruin. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that Australians became genuinely interested in their nation’s beginning. Historians held the convict past squarely in view. The Fellowship of First Fleeters was founded in 1968. Those unable to claim this illustrious inheritance were nonetheless pleased to live in houses whose bricks or stones were marked with the broad arrow. Thomas Keneally published his acclaimed novel set in the convict era, Bring Larks and Heroes, in 1967. Old Sydney Town, a partial recreation of its namesake between 1788 and 1810, opened in 1975, with staff dressed in period costumes (including red-coated soldiers with muskets), mock labouring in chains and simulated floggings. Governments restored some buildings and arrested the decay of others at Norfolk Island and Port Arthur (Tasmania), which became notable tourist sites. This resurgence interest culminated in the national commemoration in 1988 of the First Fleet’s arrival at Sydney 200 years before, its centrepieces a re-enactment of that voyage and a parade of Tall Ships. It may seem ironic that Australia made its convict origins the centrepiece of its national celebration, but it was also appropriate, for the labour of the convicts did contribute significantly to the growth of the nation. And yet, when we walk among the convict ruins, it is their successes that we are mindful of. The headstones of Norfolk Island’s cemetery are scattered in sand below the ridge against which the southeast trade winds huddle trees westward, before which the Pacific swell crashes ceaselessly. There is the grave of Thomas Headington, who was convicted at the Abingdon Assizes in July 1785 of robbery with violence, who was transported in the First Fleet and went to Norfolk Island in March 1790, where he died free on 13 January 1798. There is the grave of John Butler, ‘Who was Executed on 22 of Septr 1834 for the mutiny on this island, aged 28 years’. And

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there are the graves of members of the Adams, Christian, McCoy, Quintal and Young families, descendants of the Bounty mutineers, who came to the island in 1856. As we walk, it is impossible not to hear the whisperings of these unquiet graves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bateson, Charles, The Convict Ships, 2nd edn, Sydney, A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1959. Frost, Alan, ‘A Place of Exile: Norfolk Island’, in Graeme Davison (Ed.), Journeys into History, Sydney, Weldon Russell, 1990, pp. 75–85. Frost, Alan, The First Fleet: The Real Story, Melbourne, BlackInc, 2011. O’Brien, Eris, The Foundation of Australia, 2nd edn, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1950. Robson, Lloyd, The Convict Settlers of Australia, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1965. Robinson, Portia, The Hatch and Brood of Time: A Study of the Firt Generation of NativeBorn White Australians, 1788–1828, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1985. Shaw, A. G. L., Convicts and the Colonies, London, Faber and Faber, 1966.

CHAPTER 20

Dakar The patchwork of memories MAMADOU DIOUF

The capital of a former French colony, Dakar also bears the traces of its pre-colonial history and of the patchwork formed by its different communities. French territorial expansion over Africa’s Atlantic coast to the south of the Sahara began at Saint Louis in Senegal in the sixteenth century, when the city was founded. It lies over 200 kilometres to the north of Dakar, and any exploration of Dakar’s colonial memory should begin there. Saint Louis is situated by the Senegal River, which also marks the beginning of the territory whose capital it was to become. It holds three sets of collective memories, originating from its connections with the Islamic Sahara-Sahel region, with the Atlantic and with Africa, and extending across the geographical areas and political and identity-related traditions that form part of its environment. Dakar, on the other hand, marks the end of the journey that culminated in the formation of the colonial empire of French West Africa (FWA) in 1895. The city is located on the Cape Verde Peninsula, which projects into the Atlantic Ocean and is the westernmost point of the African continent. It was founded in 1857 by Émile Pinet-Laprade − chief commander of Gorée (1859–64) and governor of Senegal (from May to July 1863, then from May 1865 to August 1869) − and provided the basis for consolidating the colonial space. Being a command centre, Dakar was endowed with the infrastructures that befitted an imperial capital: a port, a railway, public buildings, political and military institutions, commercial establishments for the reception of colonial raw materials and for the redistribution of imported manufactured goods, healthcare facilities and educational establishments for indigenous and French inhabitants. The city became the headquarters of the government of FWA in 1902. In the early twentieth century, just as Pinet-Laprade had predicted in 1862, Dakar became ‘the political, commercial and military centre of our establishments on the West coast of Africa’.1 Open to the four corners of the world, thanks to its deep water port, which connected Europe, the East Indies, the Americas and Africa, the city forged a dense network of relationships. These generated a new form of political economy and reconfigured the three historical

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narratives in place there, which converged, intertwined and impacted on one another.

THE LEBU REPUBLIC The first narrative revolves around the preservation of Lebu autonomy within the Wolof kingdom of Kajoor. Farmers and fisherman, the Lebu share characteristics with the Wolof people, whose language they speak with a specific intonation pattern. What distinguished them from the Wolof was their prowess as fishermen and their irreverent attitude to the traditional notion of social order. The kingdom of Kajoor, which broke away from the Jolof (or Wolof) Empire in the sixteenth century, extended from the area around the mouth of the Senegal River and encompassed the Cape Verde Peninsula. Relations between the Lebu and the damels (the rulers of the Kajoor Kingdom) were always discordant, punctuated by insurrections that culminated in the establishment of an independent ‘Lebu territory’ and the creation of the ‘Lebu Republic’, whose villages were located on the tip of the Cape Verde Peninsula. Two ruptures establishing a distinct Lebu identity occurred through this narrative; it emphasized the republican character of the political institutions symbolized by the election of the chief of the collectivity (the Seriñ Dakar) and also underlined the contrast with the Kajoor Kingdom’s authoritarian and repressive monarchy. The reference to the republic seems to echo the various forms of ‘civilizing mission’ undertaken from the trading post at Gorée – an island that played a central role in the initial stage of the Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – which was occupied successively by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French. At the same time, the narrative confirms the decisive approach of Gorée’s colonial administration in its collaboration with and support for the Lebu collectivity’s fight to establish itself and achieve independence. It stood apart from the other ethnic groups (tribes) in Senegambia, precisely on account of its presence and role in the colonial administrative structure. The designation ‘collectivity’ indicates that the Lebu narrative is associated with those of the city, through the colonial administration and French and Lebanese entrepreneurial activity, as well as through the workers who arrived there from other colonies in FWA.

INTERWOVEN MEMORIES The second narrative is the product of three events. The first of these was the policy of land seizure initiated by the colonial government in order to dispossess the Lebu of their territory and the latter’s resistance from 1862 to 1906, when the administration obtained the right to register land. The second was the establishment of Dakar as an administrative district with full status and access to a form of French citizenship adapted to Muslim citizens; introduced in 1887, it excluded French colonial subjects from the Code Civil. The third event was the development of political activities and the configuration of a public space bringing together various resources originating from diverse memories. In their struggles, both those concerning the territorial issue and their participation as military recruits or volunteers in colonial expeditions, the

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Lebu experienced the essence of ‘true Frenchness’2 − a status they had begun to claim in 1859. Their multiple political interventions and the petitions they addressed to the colonial administration express their active contribution to the colonial memory of the city of Dakar. This involved both a process of indigenization that transformed imperial memory into a local narrative and the subversion of the operations connected with policies of assimilation, using the language and history of a local modernity. The result is a visual and aural composition in which indigenous peoples, colonizers and intermediaries all participate. The Lebu have reshaped the physical landscape and the city’s memory by co-creating the discourses and practices of assimilation.

SHARING THE PUBLIC SPACE The third and final narrative centres on the creation of Dakar’s urban space. From 1858, the Lebu villages in the district that was later to become Dakar Plateau were gradually evacuated, under pressure from the colonial administration and French and Lebanese business interests. The reports written by the colonial authorities based on Gorée Island chronicle that urban growth. The accounts revolve around the issue of territory and of land ownership, which remains the core element of contemporary disputes between the post-colonial state and certain divisions of the Lebu community. They draw on rewritings of history and spiritual, economic and political references. The questions centre on the property rights of the Lebu, the rights originating from the French conquest of the Cape Verde Peninsula, the status of that territory when under the control of the Kajoor Kingdom or the ‘Lebu Republic’ and the differing interpretations of landownership to be found within the colonial regime itself. At various times the scales were weighted in favour of one or the other of the parties involved, depending on the circumstances and the balance of power − a situation that resulted in unstable equilibrium, paradoxical proposals and policies that were liable to be challenged. Surely, these define the areas for dialogue and negotiation that shape a shared public space. The uncertainty around landownership did nothing to prevent the spatial and demographic growth of the city of Dakar. The object of several master plans, it was endowed with local political and economic institutions. The new land registration system was adopted in July 1906 and modified in July 1932. The city began to take shape; a ‘new alignment plan’ defined its street layout, space was reserved for its public areas, which were ‘distributed throughout the principal districts’ in the case of markets, churches and public institutions – barracks and hospitals being located on the highest ground to the north of the Plateau. The plans for Dakar’s development were governed by the dual concerns of hygiene and commercial interests. In some cases, the Lebu villages on the Plateau were gradually evacuated and destroyed; in others, the plots on which they stood were rented out or sold to foreigners. The Plateau likewise assumed a distinct form, reflecting the spatial segregation characteristic of colonial urbanization. A few areas occupied by the Lebu survived the evacuations. The colonial government used the prospect of disasters

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and epidemics as a pretext for ‘driving Dakar’s indigenous inhabitants back toward the suburbs’3 and destroying their homes. Even more drastic sanitary measures were taken after the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1914. They led to the creation of the indigenous quarter known as the Medina, to which many of the former inhabitants of the villages on the Plateau were transferred. A new memory comprising both Lebu and colonial temporalities began to flourish there, turning the revised narratives of the former into an appendix of, or commentaries on, the latter, and vice versa.

A COMPOSITE PICTURE The urban landscape visibly reflects the overlapping histories of various origins indicating political, religious, ethnic and cultural identities. These vivid traces serve as languages that have the ability to domesticate the city and endow it with the weight of a particular meaning, forming a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, of the appropriation and expropriation of the history of the city and of its memory. There, we encounter the Empire through its diverse communities and the specific engagement each of these has with the colonial city. The streets of the Medina are identified by number (Street no. 1, 2, 11 and so on), disrupting the historical continuity between the new housing developments and the indigenous villages on the Plateau – a history and a memory left unresolved or on hold but inevitably colonial. The names given to the streets and squares in the Dakar Plateau district, however, form a book of colonial history, a record of military expansion, of victories for the principle of hygiene and of the transformation of the physical landscape by the public works undertaken there. The names of these main streets have changed, adapting to metropolitan political regimes or to the intensity of the fight against clericalism; one street alone bears the name of a missionary who served as the Prefect Apostolic in Senegal from 1845 to 1848. The names of the secondary streets lying between these main thoroughfares read for all the world like a directory of the army and naval officers who conducted the colonial wars between 1857 and 1900, colonial health officers and civil engineers. One street alone, the rue de Tann, still bears the memory of one of the Lebu villages that formerly stood on the Plateau. The names of the other adjacent streets serve as trophies brandished on the public square and a geographic repertory of victorious combats and military posts constructed to the detriment of the indigenous inhabitants: Kaolack (Saluum); Niomre (Njambuur); Caronne and Thiong (the Lower Casamance region); Dialmath (the Middle Senegal region) and Medine (the Upper Senegal region). Whether rooted in Europe, Africa or Dakar, colonial memory is composite in nature, and the principal elements of its configurations are ceaselessly rearranged. In this way, it is projected into multiple manifestations that continue to refashion the identities and cultures involved in these operations, in all their uniqueness and pride. These identities are experienced through clothing, Christian choirs and Muslim religious associations, through the spluttering engines of the cars rapides, or minibuses, and the horse-drawn carriages and carts that also play their part in constructing the multicoloured memories of the Empire.

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Films such as Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret (1963) and Djibril Diop Mambety’s Contras’ City (1968) and Touki Bouki (1973) illustrate the accumulations, juxtapositions and multiple recompositions of the colonial memory and the traces of the historical layers and narratives that accompany them. That memory follows the outlines of a fractured space, vested with histories that are fading as they have remained unique, being prisoners of a structure and a political economy, not of systemic confrontation but of transaction. Dakar, the capital of the colony of Senegal and of FWA, hesitated over whether to remain French during the decolonization period and was subsequently obliged to become the capital of a new independent state. Today, the city is trying to return to its initial relationship with time – world time – claiming New York and Paris as its suburbs4 and remobilizing the cosmopolitan, multifaceted memory of a colonial trading post.

NOTES 1. Claude Faure, Histoire de la presqu’île du cap Vert et des origines de Dakar. Avec une reproduction du plan directeur de la ville de 1862 et un plan de la ville actuelle (Paris: Émile Larose, 1914), p. 164. 2. Armand-Pierre Angrand, Les Lébous de la presqu’île du cap Vert. Essai sur leur histoire et leurs coutumes (Dakar: E. Gensul, ‘La Maison du Livre’, 1951), p. 94. 3. Faure, Histoire de la presqu’île du cap Vert et des origines de Dakar, p. 113. 4. Positive Black Soul, New York-Paris-Dakar, rap album released in 2003.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Faure, Claude, Histoire de la presqu’île du cap Vert et des origines de Dakar. Avec une reproduction du plan directeur de la ville de 1862 et un plan de la ville actuelle, Paris, Émile Larose, 1914. Lengyel, Emil, Dakar: Outpost of Two Hemispheres, New York, Garden City Publishing Company, 1943.

CHAPTER 21

Capitalism Beyond good and evil JÜRGEN KOCKA

Capitalism was born and flourished in Europe, yet its fiercest criticism has also come from within the continent. Although it has enabled Europe to become economically and financially dominant, capitalism is imprinted on the collective memory with all the ambivalence it arouses. According to the European representation of capitalism, both the system and its condemnation emerged at the same moment, a discourse that endures to this day. As long as capitalism continues to be a European realm of memory it will also be marked by collective memories of immorality and culpability, of suppression, crises and injustice. This has been the case throughout the centuries, from the Early Middle Ages to the present day, the sole exception being the Age of Enlightenment. Yet if we study the history of structures, processes and actions rather than that of memories and representations, it becomes clear that capitalism has been a crucial contributory factor to Europe’s power, eminence and success. It is also the very system that has enabled her to play a role on the world stage. In terms of the temporal structures characteristic of capitalism, it is important not only to envisage the future but also − and always − to remember the past. It is that dynamic interaction between the history of the collective memory of capitalism and the actual history of European capitalism that we will be studying here.

DEFINITIONS OF CAPITALISM With this aim in mind, we should first clarify the concepts on which our developments are based. The noun ‘capitalism’ did not become established in European languages until the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, it was quite clear to social science and cultural studies researchers, who used the term from then on, that it could also be applied to conditions, developments and behaviours that had existed prior to the emergence of this concept. They did so, as did we. The capitalist system already existed in the form of mercantile capitalism in the first century CE, particularly in the Arab world, China and Europe, although only as small islands,

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so to speak, in a sea of non-capitalist relations. Financial capitalism operated in vast areas of Europe from the Early Middle Ages onwards, beginning with northern Italy. In the Modern Era, the agrarian capitalism of western and eastern Europe, and the plantation capitalism mainly imposed by European colonizers in America, Asia and Africa, produced the image of suppression and exploitation still associated with the system today. All these different forms were in place before industrial capitalism became the main driving force behind the worldwide expansion of the capitalist system, a phenomenon that began in England in the eighteenth century and then spread to the rest of Europe and North America. Since then – and this remains true of our era of globalization − these different types of capitalism have operated through combined action. This approach presupposes that we are using a definition of ‘capitalism’ which may not be broad enough to encompass every one of its forms – as Fernand Braudel demonstrated, this would be counterproductive – but is extensive enough not to be limited to industrial capitalism and mass paid labour. In the capitalist system, according to the definition that governs our analysis, economic actors have ownership rights enabling them to make major economic decisions in a relatively autonomous manner, free from centralized control. Second, the markets, mechanisms for allocating resources and coordinating endeavours, are central to the system, as are competition and prices. Commodification, including that of work and the tension between capital and labour associated with it are characteristic of capitalism. Third, it is essential to have capital to invest in the present with a view to achieving the highest profits in the future. The granting and use of credit form part of the system, as do the connection with uncertainty and risk, and the quest for profit and capital accumulation. Transformation, growth and expansion are sometimes objectives and at other times consequences, although these vary considerably in scale in a context where the economic situation is characterized by successive highs and lows and is regularly beset by crises.

MERCHANTS AND BANKERS: THE MISTRUSTFUL MIDDLE AGES ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ (Mk 10.25). This moral Christian message, disseminated through sermons, images and texts, had a profound effect on the representations of educated sections of society and on the mindset of the general public in medieval Europe. However, the useful role played by merchants and the moral value represented by work and property were certainly acknowledged − and the message was open to markedly flexible interpretations. Yet it remained centred on the conviction that one could not worship both God and Mammon, that the love of money was the root of all evil and that in making gains in one area, one invariably made a loss, or many losses, in others. The affluence enjoyed by merchants aroused mistrust; the quest for profit and the competitive attitude this suggested shocked sensibilities. Christian morality emphasized brotherly love for one’s neighbour and virtuous

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abnegation, leading to suspicion of private interests. Money-lending, described as usury, was a particular object of distrust – at least when it involved charging one’s ‘brother’ interest, as stipulated in Deuteronomy (23.20-21), although this did not necessarily apply to foreigners. In response to the de facto expansion of mercantile practices linked to financial capitalism, the ban on Christians granting one another credit and charging interest, which had been in force since the twelfth century, was reinforced and codified. This explains why Europe’s Jewish populations were strongly associated with these activities, as the ban on charging interest decreed by the Christian Church did not apply directly to them. With the advent of Renaissance Humanism, the reservations expressed by Christians regarding the central elements of capitalism were further reinforced by the influence of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the case of the educated population, whose minds were full of references to the philosophers of Antiquity, particularly Aristotle. In the name of the virtues of bourgeois republicanism and the principle of the common good associated with this, authors such as the English philosopher James Harrington were still attacking private wealth in the seventeenth century, together with the ‘sales culture’ at work in the commercialism that was taking hold in western Europe.

THE RISE OF MERCANTILE CAPITALISM However, neither widespread mistrust, nor rejection on moral grounds nor criticism from intellectuals halted the rise of capitalism in medieval Europe or presented any major obstacles to its progress. In Europe, as in other parts of the globe, such as the Arab world, China and Southern Asia − albeit a little later – the system established itself mainly in the form of mercantile capitalism. Long-distance trade prevailed, and both maritime and land trade routes were used. Some sea routes started from cities in northern Italy, southern France and Catalonia, and led to Egypt, Byzantium or further still, to southern and eastern Asia; others started from the Strait of Gibraltar and ran in a north-westerly direction towards Europe, while yet another route led to Russia, Poland and Scandinavia via the northern seas. The overland routes included the trans-alpine trade routes, which led to south-west Germany and from there to western and north-eastern Europe or across the continent towards Asia. While this trade contributed to the development of trans-border networks, merchants also came together to establish groups, caravans, fleets and, in some cases, longer-term corporatist leagues backed by prevailing powers, as was the case with the ‘Hanseatic League’ from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Traders then used family ties or their communities of origin, whether ethnic or cultural, in order to establish trust, collectively defend themselves against theft and attacks and solve economic problems by non-economic means. Most of them were also Christian believers. Some were mindful of their religion’s reservations regarding the pursuit of visible profit and wealth. They manifested this concern by leading lives and performing symbolic acts compatible with their faith, through donations and charitable works, and also, in many cases, through the ‘last penitence’. This was carried out at an advanced age and involved the transfer of considerable assets to monasteries and churches.

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Yet their behaviour was primarily capitalist; prepared to take enormous risks and capable of prevailing when faced with harsh competition, they were in constant pursuit of substantial benefits and vast riches, using various legal means to contract and grant loans that would yield payments and profits. Discreet financial backers were in plentiful supply and activities took place simultaneously in different sectors. These were often carried out on a short-term basis, for just a few years, and more rarely − but in an increasing number of cases – with a view to enterprises and fortunes extending beyond a human life span. Large, even vast sums of money were amassed. These fortunes initially belonged to just one individual during his lifetime; subsequently, they were passed on to the next generation within the same family and later still the focus was on establishing a company that would be inherited by successive generations. The fortune belonging to Florence’s Medici family certainly experienced considerable fluctuations according to circumstances, yet it continued to be handed down from one generation to the next. The Fuggers, an Augsburg family, strove to establish a ‘house’ that would continue for generations, an endeavour that proved successful. However, substantial amounts of profits gained were used for consumption, particularly that of luxury items, and for the purchase of estates (in some cases as a stable investment), feudal titles and aristocratic privileges. Accumulation had not yet become the main yardstick of success. Since the Middle Ages, capitalists had also acted as donors, patrons of the arts and benefactors, often in order to have a positive impact on society’s perception of capitalist behaviour.

TECHNICAL IMPROVEMENTS This consolidation of commercial capitalism in the early and late Middle Ages would have been impossible without the introduction of new methods and new legal forms. Double-entry accounting, enabling juxtaposed assets and liabilities to be compared at a glance, was introduced in the trading cities of northern Italy in the fourteenth century at the latest and was long known as the alla Veneziana method in that country’s northern regions. Banking vocabulary still reflects its Italian origins through terms such as ‘bank’ and ‘discount’ – sconto being a loan granted by Lombard bankers. In this way, dictionaries preserve a transnational collective memory. New operations were introduced into commercial practices; these included the granting of cashless loans, foreign exchange transactions and the issuing of notes payable. They extended the spatial and temporal reach of the commercial world, although the endeavour required both effort and the adoption of methods used in Arab countries, which were already more advanced and with which the West had a great deal of contact. New legal forms were created for shareholding, partnership and capital consolidation, so that capital shares could be held on the basis of limited liability, although probably without the possibility of trading. Roman Law is essentially favourable to contracts, and the return to this tradition, with its formal rationality, contributed to these developments without being a key factor. Medieval mercantile capitalism developed further, particularly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when enterprises were established as separate legal persons,

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distinct from the households of their proprietors and administrators. In many cases, various holders were involved in their operations, and these individuals were liable to change. This development, whose significance cannot be overestimated, had not occurred in the more ancient form of capitalism that existed in China and the Arab world. For instance, the Grosse Ravensburger Gesellschaft (the Great Ravensburg Company), which mainly dealt with the production of textiles, was run by over 100 families. It conducted its business all over Europe and was active from 1380 to 1530.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF FINANCIAL CAPITALISM Two specific features of European mercantile capitalism illustrate its particular dynamism, with a difference of degree, at least, between Europe and other world regions. First, mercantile capital was periodically introduced into the sphere of production. Examples include the mining sector, which required substantial capital, the textile sectors with their home-based operations and the metal business – as well as investing in this sector, merchants were also beginning to coordinate and direct it, as traders in the proto-industrial system. Second, European mercantile capitalism was moving towards financial capitalism. From the outset, banking activities – currency exchange, transfers and loans – had a speculative dimension and in most cases merchants were involved in carrying out these transactions. When these operations increased during the late Middle Ages, traders began to specialize in such activities and became bankers, without, however, completely abandoning their mercantile pursuits. Banks were first established in Genoa in the twelfth century, appearing in Venice and Tuscany in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries respectively. The Florentine banks – which already numbered eighty in the 1350s – were the leading establishments of their kind in Europe, a status they retained until the end of the Middle Ages. In 1341, the third largest bank in Florence, the Acciaiuoli Bank, had sixteen branches in various countries, eleven partners, thirtytwo managers and a large number of employees. In the fifteenth century, the Bardi, Peruzzi and Medici families, with their vast transnational enterprises, attained the same standing. Their capital – money that had been deposited with them as well as accrued revenue − was chiefly used to acquire shares and to advance loans, not only to trading and manufacturing enterprises but also to governments, cities, fiefs and manorial estates, and subsequently to the highest-ranking European rulers, both spiritual and temporal. As there were no regular tax revenues at that time, those powerful figures were constantly short of money, making it difficult for them to wage war, display their rank in a fitting fashion and support the expansion of their territories. There was a close link between state formation and the rise of financial capitalism. The small elite groups comprising wealthy middle-class citizens who could be regarded as working in high finance gained political influence in this way. Yet this also meant that the fate of their enterprises became dependent on powerful figures and subject to the vagaries of their fortunes. Already, before 1500, the specific dynamics of European capitalism depended on those of European states. These dynamics,

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in contrast to those of China, for instance, were characterized by the existence of a large number of rival territories. This pluralistic European society, with its rival states and their ‘thrusts in opposite directions’ (Otto Hintze), offered capitalists specific margins for manoeuvre and opportunities for influence. It provided the ideal fertile ground for capitalist accumulation and dynamic capitalist activity.

A SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN CAPITALISM AND VIOLENCE Many factors contributed to European global expansion, which began at the dawn of the Modern Era. These included the financial resources and ambitions, but also the rapacity and enterprising spirit of western European capitalist traders and financiers. Capitalism assumed a new form from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; this was demonstrated in maritime commerce, in the colonies and – consequently – in European economic life. During this era, it was characterized by a new symbiosis between commerce and violence, chiefly outside Europe, manifested through several wars and pillaging expeditions, as well as through the plantation system. Although slavery was certainly not a capitalist invention, the capitalist economy operating in plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean and the southern regions of North America led to the considerable expansion of the slave trade and slavery. According to Karl Marx, modern capitalism came into the world ‘dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’, and with violence and oppression. The link between colonialism and capitalism provides the clearest proof of this. Researchers are now actively engaged in studying this phenomenon, which gives capitalism, in its dimension as a realm of memory, a particularly murky character. In Europe, the capitalist system entered the world of production and fashioned it well before the industrialized era. It took the form of agrarian capitalism in the mining sector in western and eastern Europe, while in most of the continent’s industrial regions it manifested itself in a proto-industrial system of running household workshops and cottage industries. This development boosted the European economy by generating significant gains in productivity and also increased the survival rates of a rapidly growing population. At the same time, however, it gave rise to new types of inequality, dependence and exploitation, which were not imposed without violence or social conflicts. Mercantile capitalism and colonization formed a tightly connected network that generated innovations. First, companies acquired a more defined form as one of the central institutional elements of a capitalism that was consolidating its presence. The Dutch East India Company, or the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), established in 1602, was the largest of a whole series of joint-stock companies created for the purpose of conducting colonial trade and whose activities encompassed several countries, notably the Netherlands, England and France. The VOC’s capital amounted to the impressive sum of 6.45 million crowns, invested by 219 shareholders on the basis of limited liability. They received regular dividends but had little say in the management of the company, which was owned by its directors. This vast commercial enterprise, which had a number of branch

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offices, particularly in Asia, was run by 350 employees from a central office in Amsterdam, using a complex, methodical system involving commissions and reports. The VOC dealt with the purchase, transportation and sale of a large number of goods, periodically forming partnerships with manufacturing companies such as saltpetre and silk-weaving factories in India. The close cooperation between politics and capitalism, states and markets, was manifested in a particularly striking fashion through the fact that the government of the United Provinces had granted the VOC not only a regional monopoly but also the right to ‘wage war, conclude treaties, take possession of land and construct fortresses’. The company used these rights to engage in armed conflict with its rivals − many of whom came from other countries − moving with ease from capitalist activities to warfare. There were certain years when the greater part of the VOC’s income clearly originated from the pillaging of rival or enemy ships.

THE LURE OF PROFIT AND THE TASTE FOR RISK The VOC remained active until 1799, while its shareholders changed, as it was now possible to trade shares in the newly emerging stock exchanges. Facilities dealing with the trading of bills of exchange had existed in Antwerp since 1460, in Amsterdam since 1612 and in London since 1698 (the Royal Exchange, a precursor of the English Stock Exchange, had existed since 1571). Monopoly companies engaged in colonial activities accounted for a substantial amount of the shares traded on the stock market. In this way, capital increasingly took on the character of merchandise, and the speculative elements closely associated with it were reinforced. The prospect of spectacular profits increased at the same time, as did the risk of major losses. These two aspects were soon to affect not only a small number of merchant capitalists but also several small- and large-scale investors representing vast swathes of the population who had learnt how to try their luck, bet, invest and speculate in the stock exchanges of western European cities during the seventeenth century. In 1720, for example, the collapse of the English South Sea Company had been preceded by frenzied speculative activity. The British government had granted the company a monopoly to trade with South America; the public, expecting colossal profits from this, embarked on a race to buy shares. In a single month, share prices leapt from £120 to £950. Several investors entrusted their money to the company, whose share price had been rising all summer, only to lose it all when the bubble burst and the stock went into free fall. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the victims, declared: ‘I can calculate the motions of the erratic stars, but not the madness of the multitude.’1 Further examples include the ‘tulip mania’ of the 1630s. This led the Netherlands to raise the price of tulip bulbs, which were sought-after luxury goods, to an extremely high level, resulting in excessive speculation and a bubble that burst in 1637, ruining a great many people. Jan Bruegel the Younger later lampooned the absurdity of that capitalist disaster in his painting of tulip bulb traders and buyers, depicting them as monkeys in human clothing. This crisis in mercantile capitalism is still a focus for literary works today and lives on in the collective memory. The social consequences of

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these types of disaster remained very limited. Yet for the first time, through the stock market and speculation, a large section of the population had a practical experience of the hopes and disappointments so often associated with capitalism. The development of the banking sector and the stock markets lay at the heart of financial capitalism, then experiencing vigorous growth. This responded to an increased need for loans, as trade was expanding, but also to the financial support needed by the prevailing powers, by city and regional authorities and above all by states that were engaged in territorial conflicts with rivals and needed to reinforce their position within their borders. The centre of financial capitalism, whose network was becoming increasingly dense, shifted to the west of Europe, first to Antwerp and Amsterdam, then to London. In the Netherlands and England, the influence exerted by capitalist principles extended beyond the economy; they crept into society, social life, consumption, leisure behaviour – with gambling and competitions – male– female relationships and the distribution of political power. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Netherlands and England were the wealthiest and most capitalist countries in the world. They were also ahead of the others in terms of political liberty, the development of constitutional government and the dynamics of civil society.

PRAISE FROM THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT Contrary to what is generally believed, it was not the Reformation that prompted a re-assessment of the scepticism or even hostility towards capitalism expressed in theologies, philosophies and state theories for centuries. That development occurred only with the Age of Enlightenment. Following the ruinous wars of their times, authors such as Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Baruch Spinoza worked on redefining the virtues of civil society in terms of human rights, freedom, peace and prosperity. In L’esprit des lois, written in the mid-eighteenth century, Montesquieu categorically rejected the dominant viewpoint in Old Europe, presenting free trade as a civilizing force that helped humankind to move beyond a barbarous state, to ‘avoid violence’ and to ‘cultivate habits of tolerance’. Other notable authors who defended this viewpoint were Scots, French and Dutch: Bernard Mandeville and David Hume, Nicolas de Condorcet and Adam Smith. The thrust of their arguments was that the promotion of the common good would be achieved through the reasonable pursuit of private interests; an advantage gained by one individual did not automatically disadvantage another, and the world of business was not necessarily at odds with morality. According to this reasoning, the market contributed to replacing the war of passions with the accommodation of interests. It promoted virtues such as effort and perseverance, integrity and discipline – in other words, middle-class values. Capitalism was relied on not only as a means of increasing prosperity but also for its ability to contribute to the creation of a better way of living together as a community and to promote respect for individual freedom and responsibility without the supervision of an authoritarian state and with the prospect of compromise and peace instead of conflict and war. The term ‘capitalism’ itself

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was not then in use. Adam Smith spoke of a ‘commercial society’. According to this representation of capitalism, conceived in the spirit of the Enlightenment, it essentially promised to be a civilizing influence. However, it was clear to those authors that the markets would not bring about these developments; they would need an institutional, moral and political framework, which the markets themselves would not produce. In terms of the way it was perceived by intellectuals and the general public alike, the latter half of the eighteenth century were the glory days of capitalism. Yet there was an immense gulf between reality and discourse, that is, between the actual contradictions of the existing capitalist system and the utopian idealization of ‘sweet commerce’ and the ‘commercial society’.

CRITICISM OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM A hundred years later, the wind had turned. According to analyses by Werner Sombart and Max Weber written in the 1900s, there was no doubt as to the superiority of the capitalist system in terms of economics. However, in the works of these authors it was no longer described as a vehicle for human advancement, moral improvement and refinement − quite the reverse. Liberals like Weber feared the growing rigidity of the capitalist system, which was liable to become a threat to freedom and to human spontaneity insofar as it compelled economic actors to submit to the harsh rules governing the dynamics of capitalism or to leave the field. Conservatives and liberals alike were alarmed by the relentlessly corrosive force of capitalism. Contracts replaced good faith, society ousted community, traditional links dissolved in the operations of the markets and the thirst for profit jeopardized long-standing loyalties. On the right of the political spectrum, the criticism of capitalism was sometimes associated with aggressive intolerance and anti-Semitism; on the left, the socialist criticism became the driving force that drew the masses. First, it attacked the exploitation of labour power by capital, growing social inequality, the marginalization of the working classes, alienation and the total reliance on wages for survival. Second, it predicted that capitalism would be brought down by its own internal contradictions, eliminated and then replaced by a new system: socialism. The discourse on the rise of capitalism that had formerly prevailed was pushed to the background by a discourse on decline that had begun to predominate. Ultimately, the reason for this development was the fact that the authors of the eighteenth century had experienced variants of capitalism in the pre-industrial era, while in the meantime it had firmly established itself as industrial capitalism. It constituted the horizon of experience for observers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wage labour had then become a troubling mass phenomenon, which had led to new, much-criticized dependencies and the re-organization of society into classes. Moreover, industrialization had considerably increased the speed at which technological and organizational innovations were introduced, blatantly revealing the process later defined by Joseph Schumpeter as ‘creative destruction’ at work in the capitalist system. This involved the continuous creation of new activities and the devaluation and eradication of previous practices. It generated new opportunities,

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produced winners and facilitated upward mobility. Conversely, however, it also gave rise to the experience of loss as a mass phenomenon. In this way, capitalism made a large number of enemies. Its circumstantial crises likewise contributed to its de-legitimization. Capitalism imprinted itself more deeply than ever on the lives, perceptions and thoughts of the majority of the population, thus affecting the roots as well as the principles of popular culture. It had established rapid change as a lasting phenomenon, to the dissatisfaction of a great many people. It had rocked the boat.

AT THE HEART OF THE DEBATE The term ‘capitalism’ itself was a product – and then an instrument – of this critical re-assessment of values. Although the terms ‘capital’ and ‘capitalist’ had already been in use for a while, the noun ‘capitalism’ only became established in French, German and English in the latter half of the nineteenth century, against a background of social criticism. In 1850, Louis Blanc denounced capitalism as ‘the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others’. In 1851, Pierre Joseph Proudhon railed against landed property on the Parisian housing market, describing it as a ‘fortress of capitalism’. In 1872, the German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht lambasted the ‘Moloch of capitalism’, rampant on the ‘battlefields of industry’. In the 1890s, the English social scientist John A. Hobson began emphasizing and criticizing the connection between capitalism, imperialism and the risk of war.2 The term ‘capitalism’ was born with his critique. This concept was created as a means of differentiation. It was used to underline and critically analyse contemporary elements, in contrast to older, pre-capitalist elements (often recalled with nostalgia), and to a future, which, it was hoped, would bring better things and was labelled ‘socialism’. This contrast with a past that was selectively remembered and with an imagined future was essential to the genesis and establishment of the term ‘capitalism’. That being said, the meaning of the word soon transcended its usage as a means of criticism in public debate, and it also became a concept for analysis in the field of social science. A century has passed since then. In terms of the history of capitalism that century has brought more than Marx, Weber and their contemporaries could have anticipated and what it has brought was not expected. These phenomena include radical innovations; today’s digital revolution; the historically unprecedented development of the consumer society; new forms of inequality; the globalization of capitalism; new crises with appalling social and political repercussions, particularly during the 1930s, leading to fascism and global conflict; and the rise of a powerful, anti-capitalist alternative in the form of Soviet-state socialism, with its mass dissemination and practical implementation, which took anti-capitalist criticism to extremes and extended across borders, before losing the battle to capitalism and collapsing. Capitalism has not disappeared − but it has been transformed. Although it has never been confined to a few countries, regions or continents, it is chiefly through the acceleration of globalization that occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century that it became a world phenomenon. In this way, the criticism of capitalism and that of globalization has become closely interlinked. With the environmental and climate catastrophe now

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emerging throughout the world, another issue has appeared on the agenda. Still largely absent in the preceding centuries, it casts doubt on the future viability of capitalism, with its characteristic focus on growth.

A STIGMATIZED TERM Since the interwar period, ‘capitalism’ has become an everyday polysemic term, at least in Western languages. After the Cold War ended, it could once again be used more frequently in a non-Marxist, non-polemical context and even given positive connotations. However, the condemnatory discourse from which it emerged has left its mark on the word. The criticism of capitalism displays certain continuities; these include Catholic social teaching, with its warning against the worship of markets and its rejection of ‘radical capitalistic ideology’, a remarkably enduring doctrine. Capitalist practices were also sharply criticized by Pope Francis, who based his perspective on his experience of Latin America. And the categorical, fundamentalist criticism of capitalism continues today, holding it responsible for all the world’s ills, or for those of Western modernity, but without clearly defining it. Capitalism can still be attacked from both a left-wing and a right-wing perspective; the former includes the rejection of the inequalities and dependences associated with it, the latter, a tendency towards intolerance and anti-cosmopolitanism often linked to anti-Semitism. In this way, the criticism of capitalism continues to demonstrate considerable political adaptability. The classic socialist criticism of the capitalist society as a place of worker alienation and the reason for the pauperization of the working class has lost ground in Europe. The ‘labour question’ no longer has the urgency it had in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, it has recently resurfaced in the form of a condemnation of job insecurity and the vulnerability that accompanies it. At a global level, criticism has re-emerged in relation to the huge increase in so-called informal employment, a system run along capitalist lines in developing countries. Another aspect that has come to the forefront is the fully justified condemnation of ‘organized irresponsibility’ linked to deregulated financial capitalism, whose reach is spreading ever wider and which is becoming increasingly autonomous. Criticism is also directed at the socio-economic inequality in our societies, which has begun to rise more sharply than it has for centuries, at the accelerative pressure exerted by the capitalist system and at the clearly inexorable strain imposed by capitalist principles in social, cultural and other domains of human existence where they have no business to be. Capitalism has come under fire, too, for its inability to sustain the natural and cultural resources that it expects and requires but which it also exhausts and destroys.

BETWEEN ACCLAMATION AND CONDEMNATION: PERSPECTIVES ON CAPITALISM The contributions made by capitalism are certainly acknowledged in serious debates, particularly following the collapse of its alternative, state socialism, in the

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late twentieth century. An accurate appraisal of the system would have to include its historical importance with regard to the long-term improvement in life expectancy, living standards and quality of life for the majority of the population. Likewise, over the centuries capitalism has undeniably been a source of well-being and of freedom, despite the fact that it has also been a terrible force of exploitation and destruction, often at odds with moral principles. Capitalism is closely linked not only to the history of catastrophes but also to that of progress. Yet its current image and the memory of its history are essentially sombre, pessimistic and negative. This is more true of Europe than of a number of other regions in the world, particularly North America. Europe is a classic example not only of a capitalist continent but also of the condemnation of capitalist practices. The lived experiences of capitalism and the judgements passed on it were and remain highly diverse, even contradictory. Nevertheless, we can summarize the situation in Europe by saying that its victory over the centuries has essentially taken place within an intellectual climate and a general mindset critical of the capitalist system. We should also wonder why condemnation of capitalism, so widespread among Europeans, did not do more to prevent its active implementation and dissemination throughout the world. European criticism of capitalism has contributed to the intellectual preparation for profound reforms to the capitalist system and to their judicious implementation. These have made the system more civilized and more compatible with human needs. They have also ensured its acceptance in society and therefore, ultimately, its survival. In this respect, however, there remains much to do in Europe, and this is especially true in the case of other regions in the world. Whatever specific definition one adopts, the concept of capitalism encompasses a large number of very different concrete phenomena. In this sense, it is an abstract construction that chimes with fundamental concepts – attempts to grasp the present by differentiating it from the past and future, and to present it as liable to be transformed and in need of transformation. Analysis and criticism are closely connected in this case. Capitalism remains the bearer of several historical references and different, contradictory collective memories. Not only does it serve as a means of bringing the past into the here and now and as a tool for providing us with insight into the present, but it is also a background onto which very different doubts and fears, expectations and sometimes hopes are projected. In this way, they can be articulated, presented and established in a discourse of conflict. It is in no danger of passing into oblivion.

NOTES 1. Quoted in Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 16941994 (New York: Ithaca, 1996), p. 44. 2. Cf. Jürgen Kocka, ‘Capitalism: The History of the Concept’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright, vol. 3 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), pp. 105–6.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aliber, Robert Z. and Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Hoboken, John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, New York, Knopf, 2014. Braudel, Fernand, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols, Paris, Armand Colin, 1979. Kocka, Jürgen, Capitalism: A Short History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2016. Kocka, Jürgen and Marcel van der Linden (Eds.), Capitalism: The Reemergence of a Historical Concept, London, Bloomington, 2016. Muller, Jerry Z., The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, New York, Knopf, 2002. Piketty, Thomas, Le Capital au XXIe siècle, Paris, Le Seuil, 2013. Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1942. Sée, Henri, Les origines du capitalisme moderne, Paris, Armand Colin, 1926. Sombart, Werner, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 2 vols, Leipzig, 1902 (3 vols, Munich/ Leipzig, Duncker and Humbolt, 1924–1927). Weber, Max, General Economic History, translated from the German by Frank H. Knight, New York, Greenberg, 1927 [1923].

CHAPTER 22

The fortunes of the revolution ENZO TRAVERSO

The word ‘revolution’ has now been freed of its subversive connotations and is used in a whole range of contexts, yet it has a specific significance in European history. Ever since the French Revolution, it has embodied a break in a political system that changes the course of events. Two centuries later, the fall of communism had a profound effect both on its power as a utopian ideal and on its place in the collective memory. The major revolutions have changed the face of history and had a global impact, yet they have rarely produced realms of memory shared on a supranational scale. The ‘People’s Spring’ of 1848 was a synchronized wave of revolutions that broke out from Palermo to Paris and Frankfurt, but the traces it left were essentially national in character. And although the 1960s witnessed street battles in several continents, the words ‘May ’68’ instantly evoke exclusively national events. This seems to confirm Pierre Nora’s observation that, like Verdun and Auschwitz, memories shared at an European level are chiefly negative. Both an omnipresent heritage and an elusive object of memory, revolutions have now once more become, in the well-known words of Edmund Burke, ‘the spectre haunting Europe’ − an expression reprised by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. We do not know whether they herald the future, but they certainly tell us of the past. Of course, the word ‘revolution’ still forms part of our vocabulary, but it has undergone a semantic metamorphosis, the intention being to neutralize it, freeing it of its subversive connotations. Its colour is now more ‘orange’ than red, its method peaceful and its texture ‘velvet’. Flowers − most recently jasmine – are held aloft in today’s revolutions, rather than weapons. Having been domesticated in this way, the word has not escaped a market-oriented form of reification, clearly illustrated by the new tablets and smartphones, each more ‘revolutionary’ than the last, launched by Apple every year. This is not an irreversible change, but it characterizes our ‘regime of historicity’ (François Hartog), that is, the relationship society has with the past, the present and the future, as this new twenty-first century unfolds.

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CONCEPTS This change is particularly significant as the principal legacy that revolutions have bequeathed to Europe (and the world) is a concept. Although the word ‘revolution’ is an ancient one, it only acquired its modern meaning, in all European languages, with the French Revolution of 1789. Borrowed from astronomy, it was formerly used to denote a rotation, that is, the re-establishment of institutions following a period of upheaval. In this way, the British defined the peaceful installation of a constitutional monarchy in 1688 as their ‘Glorious Revolution’; however, the turmoil of the 1640s leading to the Protectorate established by Oliver Cromwell, which ended in 1660, is known merely as a ‘civil war’. The American colonies’ fight for independence in 1776 was also experienced in this way; freed of an unjust, oppressive rule, the colonists regained their legitimate rights. Initially described as a ‘war of independence’, it did not become known as the ‘American Revolution’ until over a decade later. In 1789, on the other hand, rather than retracing its steps, history made an enormous leap forward, so that a revolution effectively became a break in a political system. This gave rise to new institutions – the sovereignty of the people – and thrust the world into the future. The idea of progress became embodied in the social forces which ensured that this was achieved in both the moral and material sense, all taking place on fertile ground prepared by the Enlightenment. History had a telos – a purpose – and revolutions were the locomotives (another expression used by Marx) that would enable human beings to accomplish this. They broke the linearity of history by introducing a powerful burst of speed that propelled the world into a new, ascending temporality; there, nothing remained in its place, and, by virtue of a hidden, liberating form of tropism, everything seemed directed towards a utopian horizon.

RUPTURES Everyone, defenders and detractors alike, were united in viewing the revolution as a social and political rupture, even though their opinions of it radically diverged, and it has imprinted itself on European historical consciousness in this form. From the outset, revolution and counter-revolution have been bound by a symbolic link that defines the issues associated with them. Throughout the nineteenth century, revolution appeared to its contemporaries as a unique amalgam of innovation and chaos, the arising of a new power and the collapse of a society amid disorder and violence. This dual perception created a split that would become the permanent basis of the political landscape of modernity. Both topological and ontological in character, the distinction between left and right established in 1789 extended beyond the borders of France to redefine the political map of Europe during the nineteenth century. In the 1790s, Jacobinism developed into a European movement against the forces of the Ancien Régime. Faced with internal threats from the war in the Vendée, and external ones from a coalition of aristocrats, the French Revolution exported itself, or, to use Arno J. Mayer’s concept, externalized itself. It did this by extending its values and its social victories (such as the Code Civil), by becoming

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first a model to follow (as with the Jacobin movements that sprang up in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Poland and so on) and later a new form of despotism to destroy (as with the awakening of national consciences faced with Napoleon’s domination). For a century, therefore, interpretations of the French Revolution oscillated between two poles: innovation and promises of a better future at one extreme, chaos and barbarism at the other. Johann Gottfried von Herder had seen the rhythm of history operating within it, while Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel recognized it as a great turning point in history. For Kant, it was the signum prognosticum of an emancipated world governed by reason, the herald of the cosmopolitical order regulating a society that had finally attained adulthood. Despite its violence, revolution remained a key stage in moral progress. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1822–30), Hegel defined the French Revolution as a ‘magnificent sunrise’ that had given rise to the hope of a new state founded on rational principles. Yet for counter-revolutionaries, 1789 was no more than a historical aberration, the eruption of dark, fanatical and destructive forces that sought to disrupt the natural progress of the world. In the 1790s, Edmund Burke contrasted the ‘historic rights’ of the people, which he saw as being best protected by the British monarchical system, with the notion of the ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ proclaimed by the French Revolution, deeming it to be an abstract and artificial form of rationality. For Joseph de Maistre, the overthrow of the absolutist system and the execution of Louis XVI were events as aberrant as the fructification of a tree in winter. His providential view of history even led him to accept the Terror as a form of divine punishment against a sinful humankind and the portent of apocalyptic vengeance. The same split reappeared in 1848, the year of the ‘People’s Spring’, when the promise of freedom represented by the revolution was democratic, national and − for some of its participants such as Karl Marx and Louis Blanqui − already socialist in character. Reflecting on the defeat of the European revolutions, Marx elaborated his theory of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, an institutional form established by the insurgent people, capable of creating a new type of power and of defending it against the attempts made by the formerly dominant classes to restore the old regime. This is what Carl Schmitt later described as a ‘sovereign dictatorship’, a constituent power that he contrasted to the standard system of ‘commissarial dictatorships’. Juan Donoso Cortés, a prominent reactionary thinker of the early nineteenth century, likewise advocated a form of dictatorship. A Spanish diplomat who was based in Berlin during the events of 1848 and in Paris during the early days of the Second Empire, his particular version involved violent repression. This would ‘purify’ society by ridding it of the virus of socialist and anarchist atheism – presaging the even bloodier forms of dictatorship pursued by the fascist regimes of the following century. Carl Schmitt, who saw Donoso Cortés as his precursor, was accurate in his assessment. This division remained in place until the First World War, reinforced and exacerbated by the traumatic experience of the Paris Commune. It was clearly revealed on the occasion of the centenary of the French Revolution, when Paris hosted the World’s Fair. The Third Republic commemorated 1789 as the dawn

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of a new era, viewing it as the bedrock on which its own institutions were based – through this approach to the Revolution the Terror was eradicated, the focus being on the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Historiographical studies, however, were dominated by one of the most prominent figures in counter-revolutionary thought. In Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1876–93), Hippolyte Taine used the sciences then in vogue to support his analysis of the French Revolution. He drew on zoology (‘the animal instinct revolts’) and on theories of race (comparing revolutionary crowds to ‘unchained negroes’) and heredity (presenting the revolution as a civilized society’s atavistic reversion to an archaic state of barbarism). The Jacobins and Communards are portrayed as insane. At the same time, the famous Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso was drawing a distinction between ‘revolution’ and ‘revolt’, two profoundly different social phenomena, one being ‘physiological’, the other ‘pathological’. Despite its name, he saw the French Revolution as belonging to the second category and providing criminal science with an inexhaustible supply of material to study.

METAMORPHOSES The year 1917 ushered in a new stage in the history of revolutions and completely transformed them as an object of memory. For a great many observers, the October Revolution, like that of 1789, heralded the emancipation of humankind. The Bolsheviks recognized the Jacobins as their predecessors in a chain of historical events interpreted by Albert Mathiez in the 1920s. Unlike its French ancestor, however, the Russian Revolution did not succeed in extending its impact across the whole continent. Attempts to follow its example had failed everywhere, from Berlin to Munich, and from Budapest to Vienna and Milan, where the Biennio Rosso – a period of two ‘red years’ from 1919 to 1920 – were followed by Benito Mussolini’s march on Rome. Instead of externalizing itself – a task for which the Bolsheviks had created the Communist International in 1919 – the Russian Revolution was forced to turn inward and defend itself tooth and claw in a violent civil war against an international coalition with marked similarities to that of 1792. This inwardlooking period gave rise to Stalinism, yet Bolshevism had issued a strong call and its impact extended across the entire twentieth century, a period during which, despite conflicts and ruptures, the terms ‘revolution’ and ‘communism’ became almost synonymous. In 1920, Bertrand Russell defined Bolshevism as combining the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam; it was driven by social forces comparable to those that had been set in motion in 1789, and the attraction exerted by its messianic dimension seemed almost as irresistible as that of Mohammed in the seventh century. What changed after 1917 was the character of counter-revolution. The collapse of the European dynastic order established by the Congress of Vienna meant that the philosophy that had inspired legitimism and had been supported by the Christian faith, anti-republicanism and conservatism for a century had become obsolete. Since the late nineteenth century, the right wing had started to become ‘revolutionary’ and popular in character.

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The ‘nationalization of the masses’ (George L. Mosse) took a major step forward. Nationalism adopted symbols and rituals borrowed from a Jacobin model − the people in arms – that had previously been abhorred. Its leaders were often of plebeian origin and had discovered politics through street combats; revolutionary vocabulary suited them better than parliamentary rhetoric. In terms of ideology, it was in Germany that a movement known as the ‘Conservative Revolution’ took shape in the aftermath of the war; its most popular figure was the writer Ernst Jünger, and it also included respected scholars such as Oswald Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck and Werner Sombart. Nostalgia for the old order of things had ceased to be a driving force, and modernity was no longer railed against in the name of cultural pessimism. Instead, these adherents to the movement sought a combination of the anti-Enlightenment values inherited from legitimism and technological modernity, which fascinated them. During the 1920s, the ‘Conservative revolutionaries’ gradually moved towards fascism. The aim of the latter was to build a new order, even a new, ‘totalitarian’ civilization, which would be opposed both to liberalism, perceived as belonging to the nineteenth century, and to communism. This new order was resolutely modern, as the ambition of fascism was to create a ‘new man’, who would represent a new, dominant race forged in the trenches. In Rome in 1932, Mussolini celebrated the tenth anniversary of the ‘fascist revolution’, which, in imitation of the French Revolution, had invented its own secular liturgy composed of symbols, rites, images and slogans – even its own cult of the Supreme Being, embodied this time in a leader who was able to draw crowds and who was very much alive. Revolutionary rhetoric was less pronounced in the case of national socialism and was totally absent from Francoism, although it characterized the early years of the Falangist movement, which was subsequently absorbed by national Catholicism. No fascist movement or regime now linked itself to legitimism alone.

REVOLUTION THROUGHOUT THE WORLD The post-war years were characterized by the rise in colonial revolutions. From China to Vietnam, and from Cuba to Algeria, the revolution remained a locomotive of history, but after 1945 it ceased to exist in the collective imaginary as a typically European phenomenon. While it still retained its violent, murderous dimension, this was now eclipsed by a narrative of emancipation that gave it a positive connotation. Frantz Fanon presents violence as having emancipatory potential in one of the most memorable analyses of the decade, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This was published just before Algeria won its independence and included an even more highly charged preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. During that period, too, the word ‘revolution’ came to be applied in a multitude of different contexts – industrial, technological, military, aesthetic, cultural, sexual and so forth. In some cases, these were longstanding usages; the expression ‘industrial revolution’ had been in existence since the mid-nineteenth century, while The Sexual Revolution was the title of work by Wilhelm Reich that had been published in 1936. However, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that they entered everyday language and also generated a considerable body of scholarly work.

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From the eighteenth century onwards, the revolution had developed as a global historical event. The year 1789 marked the apogee of the Atlantic Revolutions, a period that witnessed the spread of revolutionary activity and the circulation of people and ideas. It had been launched in America in 1776 and ended, via France, in Haiti in 1804. The idea of revolution, however, was elaborated in Europe and its ‘canon’ was established in the Old World. This comprised an emancipatory narrative, a social transformation project, a system of dual power, insurrection and a new constituent power or proletarian dictatorship. The Paris Commune, to use only the most significant example, shaped the international revolutionary imaginary, as seen with its ‘descendants’, from the Morelos Commune established in Mexico during the Zapatista rebellion to the Canton Commune of 1926. Since 1917, moreover, Bolshevism had been exporting a military model of armed revolution that became normative. A large number of revolutionary leaders and thinkers from colonial territories – from Ho Chi Minh to Zhou Enlai, from C. L. R. James to Camilo Torres, from José Rizal to Manabendra Nath Roy and from Amílcar Cabral to Henri Curiel and Frantz Fanon – had developed their ideas in Europe, and it was by encountering this European revolutionary model, adapting it or questioning it, that they were able to define their own route. Regenerated and re-explored from the ‘margins’, Marxism served as the ideological umbrella covering most of the revolutionary movements of what was formerly known as the Third World but is now sometimes termed the Global South. This observation does not imply that our perspective on colonial revolutions is Eurocentric; they cannot be reduced to exogenous or derivative phenomena. It simply underlines the role of the Old World as a crucible of ideas and a point where both individual and collective trajectories converge. For most of the twentieth century, it was in Paris and London (and to a lesser extent, Moscow) that Asian, African and Latin American revolutionaries met, discussed and shared their ideas and experiences.

1989: THE CURTAIN FALLS This series of events ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘velvet revolutions’ that took place in the Soviet bloc countries. Rather than creating a utopia, they launched into a dogged attempt to recapture the past, an unprecedented historical phenomenon. Their perspective was national and their project did not extend beyond a return to representative democracy and a market economy. Their actors no longer sought to invent a form of ‘Socialism with a human face’ as had been the case in 1968; they simply wanted to rid themselves of the feeling that they were a ‘kidnapped West’. In a sense, they were drawing the curtain over a century of revolutions whose burial took place in Paris with almost perfect timing and amid much solemnity. According to François Furet, described as the ‘king’ of the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution of 1789, these events brought an end to two centuries of pernicious ‘revolutionary passions’, the source of both the Terror and the Gulag. In the course of the following three decades − in other words, the span of a generation − the revolution ceased to be a ‘horizon of expectation’. Nowadays it remains an analytical category, but is no longer a regulative idea, and,

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having been disincarnated in this way, it has been deprived of an environment likely to sustain it as a living concept. It has therefore become a ‘realm of memory’, the image of a past that no longer lives and breathes in the present. Although this is naturally not a definitive diagnosis, it describes the current state of affairs.

ICONOCLASM Revolutionaries sought to build a new order and create their own system of values, but revolutions always began by destroying the symbols of the old dominating forces. Iconoclasm is a natural part of their identity, and in many respects it forms the basis of their contradictory relationship with the materiality of realms of memory. In order to triumph, they have to destroy institutions and their symbols, buildings and sites. In most cases, their pars construens has transcended and escaped them, and no longer belongs to them. We can certainly confirm that the French Revolution introduced irreversible transformations into European societies, but it was not responsible for establishing the Code Civil or abolishing feudalism in Central Europe; that task fell to Napoleon. Of course, the Napoleonic Wars took place in a context that emerged from the events of 1789, but the 9 Thermidor had marked a break in the process and the declaration of the Empire had brought the First Republic to an end. The Arc de Triomphe belongs to the history of the French Revolution in the same way as the Stalin Constitution of 1936 belongs to that of the Russian Revolution. Both are associated with the long-term revolutionary process, but they no longer belong to the revolution as an explosive event, a disruption of the historical continuum, a violent transition from one social and political order to another – indeed, they contradict that notion of eruption. The Musée Carnavalet in Paris is one of the French Revolution’s realms of memory in the sense that it transforms it into a historical object and provides it with a place in the national heritage, not in the sense that it inscribes it into a collective memory. On a different note, the image of the aligned profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin illustrate the history of the USSR more than they convey the memory of the revolution. It would doubtless be easier to find counter-revolutionary sites of memory, such as the Saint-Michel Fountain in Paris, with its sculpture of the Archangel slaying a serpent, a symbolic representation of the suppression of the revolution in June 1848, and the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur, built to commemorate the destruction of the Paris Commune. Unlike these monuments, revolutionary realms of memory are primarily symbolic and intangible in nature; they come from the void, heavily laden with meaning, left by its destructive impetus.

‘VANDALISM’: DEMOLISHING THE PAST Several examples illustrate this observation. When, in 1889, the Third Republic established 14 July as a national holiday – now a day featuring military parades – the very nature of the revolutionary event itself was eclipsed. For the rioters of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the Storming of the Bastille was originally a necessary

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practical measure, as they needed gunpowder for their weapons – but it quickly became transformed into a symbolic act of destruction. The fortress contained just seven prisoners, who were immediately freed, yet it had been a material manifestation of aristocratic domination since the Middle Ages. Work began on its demolition the very next day, but the process was not completed until 1806. The attack on the Bastille was widely copied, resulting in the destruction of innumerable churches and châteaux throughout the country. As highlighted by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, the impact of that event stemmed from its collective, anonymous character, linked to crowd action rather than to one charismatic revolutionary figure. It immediately stood out on account of its iconicity (its symbolic power), its theatricality (its character as a public spectacle) and its emotivity (its ability to affect the imagination and arouse a spontaneous sense of identification), all of which made it an example to be followed. The iconoclasm of the French Revolution – paradigmatic of all modern revolutions – has been the object of heated controversies since the 1790s. From a republican perspective, it is a legitimate and irrepressible outpouring of popular anger, while conservatives condemn it as a form of vandalism (a concept born just as the buildings of the Ancien Régime were being systematically destroyed). The destruction of ecclesiastical and aristocratic properties often took on the character of an entertainment and developed into a type of local carnival, where social hierarchies were mocked and overturned following the traditional practice. On 14 August 1792, in an attempt to channel and contain that mass expression of protest, the Assemblée Nationale issued a decree calling for the systematic destruction of all monuments erected in the names of ‘prejudice’, ‘tyranny’ and ‘feudalism’. The same split inevitably reoccurred during the Paris Commune, whose Executive Committee voted on 12 April 1871 to demolish the Vendôme Column, described as an abominable ‘monument to barbarism’ and a symbol of the brute force that had always oppressed and crushed the people. Gustave Courbet, who had been appointed a Delegate of Fine Arts for the Commune, was regarded as responsible for that act of ‘vandalism’ and spent several months in Sainte-Pélagie, a prison in Paris. Built in 1810 to commemorate Napoleon’s Grande Armée on a site that had contained a statue of the Sun King (which was demolished in 1792), the column underwent a number of alterations during the Restoration, the July Monarchy and the Second Empire. It had first been topped by an equestrian statue of Henri IV and later by a new statue of Napoleon I dressed as Roman emperor, before being demolished under the Paris Commune. It was subsequently reconstructed at the beginning of the Third Republic, between 1873 and 1875. Yet again, a monument had become the target of a mass iconoclastic movement borne by a revolution that sought to disrupt temporal continuity, marking a break with the history of dominating forces.

THE REVOLUTION AS A MUSEUM An interesting theoretical reflection on its own iconoclasm developed through the Russian Revolution, during which the systematic character of the destruction of Orthodox churches and tsarist palaces echoed that of France in the 1790s. The occasion for this arose in 1924, when the Soviet regime decided to transform the Peter and

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Paul Fortress in Leningrad – formerly known as Saint Petersburg and renamed after the leader of the October Revolution – into a museum commemorating that event. The building was the burial place of the tsars of imperial Russia, who had also used it as a prison. After 1917, it was used successively as a jail for counter-revolutionary officers, Bolshevik Party offices and finally, during the civil war, it housed a military garrison. The museification of a site so laden with memory inevitably presented the problem of the connection with Russia’s past. This was the very period when the name of the former capital was being changed to Leningrad, when the remains of the charismatic leader of the 1917 Revolution, who had just died after a long illness, were about to lie embalmed in a mausoleum in Moscow and when Leon Trotsky, the Commander of the Red Army, was being ousted from power. At that moment, a transition was taking place between the eruptive temporality of the revolutionary event (the break created by the October Revolution and the civil war) and the stabilizing temporality of the regime (Stalinism). We might, like Trotsky, perceive this as a Soviet Thermidor. But the issues involved in this transition were not only political; it also included those of memory. For many observers, there was nothing self-evident about the shift from one form of temporality to the other; it entailed a change in the revolution’s connection with the past. In the eyes of the Russian avantgarde, particularly the Futurists and the Suprematists, the revolutionary spirit was by its very nature incompatible with museums. Rather than creating such places, the revolution should be destroying them. Whereas museums preserve what is dead, the revolution sought to break with the past and propel humankind towards the future; rather than backtracking, one should maintain the impetus it generated. The debate was lively and the transition was not made without tensions. For the bases of the Soviet regime had been put in place by the revolution itself – the one-party system had been established under Lenin and Trotsky – moreover, its spirit lived on until the late 1920s. Petr Stolpiansky, the museum’s first curator, did not want to present a linear history of the revolution, but instead to convey its message by placing the visitor before a series of connected ‘dialectical’ images, using a montage technique borrowed from Sergei Eisenstein. Similarly, while there is no doubt that the creation of Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square marked the beginning of a sacralization of power typical of totalitarian regimes, the magnitude of the debate that preceded the embalming of the Bolshevik leader should not be underestimated. Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin were opposed to this decision, which would transform Lenin into a ‘relic’ and an object of religious worship. Leonid Krasin, on the other hand, saw socialism as the achievement of a Promethean dream of immortality. Influenced by the teachings of Russian philosopher N. F. Fyodorov, he had formed the ambition of conquering death and bringing about the resurrection of the dead, to be accomplished by socialism using scientific means. The cult of icons – Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexander Bogdanov and Krasin regarded communism as a new religion – merged with a futuristic outlook fuelled by the utopian dynamism of the revolution. In 1927, the tenth year of Soviet power, Eisenstein undertook the task of achieving a synthesis between the iconoclasm and the collective memory of the revolution, between its meaning as a caesura in history and its invention of a new tradition. October: Ten Days That Shook the World opens with the destruction

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of the statue of the Tsar in February 1917 and ends with the storming of the Winter Palace in October. The actor in those two sequences was the surging crowd. It is doubtless though those images, established in the collective unconscious of at least two generations, that the revolution became a realm of memory. Other revolutions have displayed the same iconoclastic fury. Arriving in Barcelona in December 1936, George Orwell observed teams of labourers at work in several districts, systematically demolishing churches. In October 1956, Hungarian insurgents toppled the statue of Stalin that dominated Budapest’s city park. Decades later, it was the Berlin Wall’s turn to fall. Yet, as we have seen, the revolutions of 1989 were not intended to build a new order. In Berlin, the former Palace of the Republic, unanimously regarded as atrocious, was demolished to make way for a reconstruction of the Hohenzollern princes’ castle – a case of history returning from the past. A statue of Marx and Engels near the district of Nikolaiviertel survived; on its base someone had sprayed the words: ‘We are not guilty’ (Wir sind unschuldig).

SYMBOLS The process of transforming an event into a symbol involves multiple intermediary stages during which its meaning may be modified, then fixed. Despite their stated universalism and global dimension, in many cases revolutions eventually become part of a national heritage. Although the event that took place on 14 July was unquestionably revolutionary, the world now sees it mainly as a French national holiday. There was no such metamorphosis in the case of the Paris Commune, which continues, well beyond France’s borders, to symbolize revolution in the collective imaginary. Its memory remains singularly resistant to all forms of institutionalization or semantic revision; no one could imagine a military parade in memory of the Paris Commune. There are practices and objects, however ephemeral and transitory they may be, that cause the revolution to be remembered as a transhistorical and transnational experience, and sometimes acquire a traditional character. Some symbols – the barricade, the red flag, certain songs – are particularly expressive in this respect. The origins of the barricade are uncertain, but it is primarily identified in the collective memory with the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and with the Paris Commune. Its usage gradually declined during the twentieth century, when it made only sporadic appearances – in Berlin in January 1919, in Barcelona in 1936 and 1937 and again in Paris in May 1968 – and its nature changed, as its function became purely symbolic. The reason why barricades have had such a profound impact and have permanently established themselves in the collective memory is because they are anonymous and spectacular in character. They were not created by a single leader but through spontaneous acts carried out by crowds, displaying an ability to organize themselves in an emergency that totally astonished observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw them as naturally submissive members of the population. Barricades were spectacular as they paralysed cities and redesigned their landscapes. In this situation, it was the lower-ranking sections of society who abruptly overturned the social hierarchies, thereby reorganizing the urban space.

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Yet barricades transcended purely sociological divisions, taking on a genuinely public character. The crowds manning them included women and children, who stood alongside manual workers and were joined by other groups, from students to artists. They fulfilled a dual function, both practical and symbolic. They gave shape to rebellion by shielding the insurgents, blocking off districts, neutralizing the interventions of repressive forces and establishing a balance of power. They also brought people together, thereby creating a revolutionary crowd. A field of action, the barricade generated its own, emotionally intense form of sociability, with an atmosphere of festive conviviality – the social order overturned – that could change very quickly to scenes of combat and personal sacrifice. Death on the barricades was imbued with a sacred aura, the revolutionary equivalent of the battlefield death of the patriotic narrative. For this reason, despite, or perhaps because of its ephemeral character, the barricade has given rise to a lasting visual tradition, from painting to photography and the cinema. Unlike the barricade, whose origins it shares, the red flag did not experience a decline in the twentieth century. Between 1848 and the Cold War, it fulfilled two radically opposing symbolic functions. For conservatives, it evoked the blood and hatred spread by the ferocious Bolsheviks; for left-wing movements, it symbolized the fight for an egalitarian society.

REVOLUTIONARY MEMORIES IN MUSIC The revolutionary memory also lives on through songs. These were born of calls to join the fight and subsequently became identity-markers at the risk of losing their original significance, the Marseillaise being a universally famous example. It was composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle during the night of the 25–26 April 1792, just after the French declaration of war on Austria, and was initially entitled Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin. Both revolutionary and patriotic, it immediately circulated widely. It was banned by the Bourbon Restoration but made its great comeback in 1848, reappearing again during the Paris Commune. The Marseillaise also accompanied the Russian Revolution of 1917, this time as a socialist anthem created by Petr Lavrov, a Russian philosopher and anarchist who had participated in the Paris Commune. The motherland was absent from this version, having been replaced by the ‘working people’ and the hungry masses. When he returned to Russia from his exile in Switzerland in 1917, Lenin was greeted by an orchestra that played the Marseillaise, followed by the Internationale; the two anthems coexisted during the Russian Revolution and the first years of Soviet power, the Soviet authorities finally opting to use the latter in the early 1920s. The poet Eugène Pottier had written the words to the Internationale while in hiding in Paris in June 1871, in the aftermath of the ‘Bloody Week’ during which he had fought alongside the Communards. However, it only began to be widely disseminated twenty years later, when Flemish composer Pierre Degeyter set the lyrics to a new melody and gave the work an emotional appeal that its words alone could not achieve. It was then sung at Socialist International congresses and anarchist demonstrations, before becoming the official anthem of the Communist International. The song has very strong messianic connotations – ‘This is the final

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struggle’; ‘The world is about to change its foundation / We are nothing, let us be all!’; ‘Decree the common salvation’; ‘The Internationale / Will be the human race.’ It celebrates struggle as an emancipatory, even a redemptive act, in an almost religious sense, giving a lyrical quality to the concept of utopia that remained part of the socialist culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through the ritualized character of its inclusion in all manifestations of the workers’ movement – from processions to members’ congresses, singing the Intermationale remains an essential element of the communist liturgy – it has become a realm of memory. And, unlike other symbols, it has escaped the disenchantment brought about by institutionalization and bureaucratization. During the 1960s and 1970s, the notes of the Internationale rang out over the austere décor adopted by communist regimes, but also at youth protest events in the West.

SUBLIMATED MEMORIES The revolution also haunts the collective memory through images and texts. Certain paintings, photos and films have acquired a metaphorical character, which, by transcending their original context without necessarily eclipsing it, have become timeless representations. This is the case with Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and with the lithograph by Soviet Suprematist artist El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919). Delacroix’s painting retains a strongly national character; the French tricolour flag features prominently in this image of the barricade, and the majestic female figure embodying liberty wears a Phrygian cap. All the ambiguity of French republicanism, with its combination of universalism and chauvinism, is already evident, concentrated within this work. Lissitzky’s poster is composed of abstract forms that carry a symbolic meaning. Two shapes (a triangle and a circle) and two colours (white and red) are shown in confrontation, transforming the hostility that pitted revolution against counterrevolution into an artistic work that transcended the confines of Russia. It is also the case with the films of Sergei Eisenstein, from The Battleship Potemkin (1925) to October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1927). Eisenstein extracted the very essence of the revolution in these depictions of the events of 1905 and 1917, revisiting the moment of high drama when the disadvantaged classes transformed themselves into historical actors and took control of their own destinies. Konstantin Yuon’s painting The New Planet (1921), which portrays the revolution as a new type of Big Bang, can be added to this gallery, together with Vladimir Tatlin’s project for a monument to the Third International. It had a spiralling tower – like a modern Tower of Babel – and was functionalist in spirit, being designed to contain a communications centre for the issuing of news bulletins via radio and telegraph, as well a conference hall. A material manifestation of the combination of aesthetic and political elements, it also symbolized the revolution as a conqueror of the skies. The memory of revolution has also been preserved in autobiographical narratives or novels, accounts written in either the intensity of the moment or retrospectively. Although they might contribute to forming the conceptualizations explored earlier, they are, inevitably, separate things. They include the witness accounts of the

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Paris insurrection of June 1848, seen from both sides of the barricades by Alexis de Tocqueville and François Pardigon and later recounted by Gustave Flaubert in L’Éducation sentimentale. There are numerous literary works devoted to the Paris Commune, the most famous of which is doubtless L’Insurgé by Jules Vallès. Other examples include John Reed’s first-hand account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, and George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The first pages of Orwell’s autobiographical book paint a striking picture of Barcelona in 1936, a city where social hierarchies had been completely replaced by an egalitarian system, and old forms of dominance, from dress practices to everyday vocabulary, had been abolished. Orwell notes all these changes, which were taking place in a revolutionary atmosphere that transfigured the urban landscape, giving it a ‘startling and overwhelming’ aspect.

DEFEATS AND DESOLATION Whether we view them as a violent rupture or as a gradually unfolding process, revolutions cannot be reduced to intense moments of exhilaration; in most cases, they end in failure. Their memory is imbued with a feeling of loss. As with the experience of war, that memory is maintained through the commemoration of fallen combatants and the sacralization of martyrs. Yet the memory of revolution, unlike that of war, is not always official in character and perpetuated through marble monuments. It is much more likely to take the form of a ‘Marrano’ memory − hidden or suppressed and cultivated as a counter-memory set in opposition to the officially authorized narrative. From this perspective, the mausoleums of Lenin and Mao Zedong are exceptions, as macroscopic in character as they are misleading. Flowers were placed at the foot of the Communards’ Wall in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris every year since the ‘Bloody Week’ in May 1871, but the act was carried out discreetly and anonymously. The first public commemoration of the Paris Commune took place in 1878, in the form of a fraternal banquet organized by L’Égalité, the newspaper founded by Jules Guesde. This remembrance became a tradition following the amnesty granted to the Communards in 1880. Large commemorative rallies took place in 1936, during the Front Populaire government, and again in 1971, the centenary of the Paris Commune. This was the liturgy of the revolution; it fulfilled, in a secular form, a function similar to that of the ‘two bodies of the king’ analysed by Ernst Kantorowicz in relation to medieval funeral rites. The commemoration of comrades fallen in combat serves to reaffirm the immortal nature of the ideal they followed, imprinted into the red flags of those paying homage to them. Yet the tributes paid to the memory of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde cemetery demonstrate that the political meaning of the commemorative tradition may vary. Their commemoration was the manifestation of a dissident communism during the Weimar Republic, forbidden under the Third Reich and official policy during the GDR period; after German reunification it took on a ‘refractory’ character once more. Artists portrayed the mourning of the revolution using classic forms, one such example being the woodcut by Käthe Kollwitz dedicated to the memory of Karl

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Liebknecht (1920). It shows a small, grief-stricken proletarian crowd gathered around the lifeless body of the leader of the Spartacist Uprising, who is lying on a table in the manner established by Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (ca. 1480). This feeling of desolation following defeated revolutions was also portrayed in films. In Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), Theo Angelopoulos devotes a magnificent sequence to the journey made by a barge carrying a disassembled statue of Lenin. As it travels down the Danube, the statue is watched by a crowd of people on the riverbank, many of whom cross themselves in a gesture of mourning. They remain silent and have no red flag, a sign that the mechanism behind the liturgy of the revolution, now bereft of its utopian élan, has been disrupted. The wistful, elegiac music by Eleni Karaindrou imbues this sequence with an air of melancholy. The colour red makes a re-appearance, however, in Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995), as a neckerchief containing a handful of Spanish earth, kept as a relic along with various old newspapers by a former member of the International Brigades. This is an emotive, private, intimate archive, transformed by Ken Loach’s film into a realm of memory of twentieth-century revolutions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bensaïd, Daniel, Moi, la Révolution. Remembrances d’une bicentenaire indigne, Paris, Gallimard, 1989. Furet, François, Penser la Révolution française, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘Folio’, 1978. Guéry, Alain, ‘Révolution: Un concept et son destin’, Le Débat, 57 (1989): 106–28. Haupt, Georges, ‘La Commune comme symbole et comme exemple’, in L’Historien et le mouvement social, Paris, François Maspero, 1980, pp. 45–76. Kaplan, Steven, Adieu 89, Paris, Fayard, 1993. Koselleck, Reinhart, ‘Critères historiques du concept de “révolution” des temps modernes’, in Le Futur passé. Contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques, Paris, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1990, pp. 63–80. Mayer, Arno J., Les Furies. 1789–1917. Violence, Vengeance, Terreur, Paris, Fayard, 2002. Mosse, George L., La révolution fasciste. Vers une théorie générale du fascisme, Paris, Le Seuil, 2003. Orwell, George, Homage to Catalonia, London, Secker & Warburg, 1938. Reed, John, Ten Days That Shook the World, New York, Boni & Liveright, 1919. Ross, Kristin, L’Imaginaire de la Commune, Paris, La Fabrique, 2015. Trotsky, Leon, History of the Russian Revolution, translated from the Russian by Max Eastman, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1932 [1930].

CHAPTER 23

The Kalashnikov An icon of war CHRISTIAN TH. MÜLLER

Invented by a Russian and introduced into the Soviet armed forces in 1947, the Kalashnikov was the iconic symbol of revolutions throughout the world. It now has a similar status in the domain of terrorism. Few infantry weapons have a reputation as legendary as that of the ‘Kalashnikov’. The AK-47 assault rifle (Avtomat Kalashnikova obraztsa 47), which was named after its inventor, Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (1919–2013), launched a whole family of automatic weapons. These are generally known as ‘Kalashnikovs’, an umbrella term covering the original Soviet weapons made in Izhevsk in the Urals, models produced by Warsaw Pact states (which were licensed to manufacture them) and reproductions made in the forges of Pakistani villages. Seventy years after its introduction into the Soviet armed forces, the Kalashnikov has become inextricably linked to the acts of violence committed throughout the world. Over 100 million of these light weapons have been sold. Used by over sixty armies, they have now become indissociable from the killings of hundreds of thousands of people that occur year after year. The Kalashnikov has therefore transformed itself into a type of weapon of cumulative mass destruction through its use in the ‘small wars’ conducted since 1945. The story of its creation has already passed into legend. After being wounded in battle in the autumn of 1941, Kalashnikov decided to develop an automatic infantry weapon for the Red Army. A talented autodidact, he spent several years developing a prototype, which he named ‘Mikhtim’ – an abbreviation of his first name and patronymic – and presented at a competition for a new rifle in 1946. The weapon went through an exhaustive series of tests, which included plunging it into mud and sand, and throwing it onto concrete from a height of several metres. The ‘Mikhtim’ proved equal to everything. What made it particularly reliable, however, was not its system of gas-operated reloading but the simplicity of its internal mechanisms and the use of rivets in its design.

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AN EXPORT SUCCESS STORY Introduced into the Soviet army in 1947 as the ‘AK-47’, by the late 1950s Kalashnikovs had become a highly successful military export. They defined the character of the Warsaw Pact armies, and almost all Soviet bloc countries were licensed to manufacture them. Although the AK-47 was first used during the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, its real test came with the Vietnam War almost ten years later. It then established its reputation as an infantry weapon, thanks to its considerable firepower, unparalleled sturdiness, ease of manipulation and unfailing reliability. Its use in the Vietnam War also revealed the emblematic power of the Kalashnikov, with its characteristic banana-shaped magazine; it then joined the icons of world revolution and wars of national liberation, taking its place alongside Che Guevara and the keffiyeh, or ‘Palestinian scarf ’. As a result, the word ‘Kalashnikov’ has become synonymous with ‘firearm’ all over the world and is one of the few to be understood in every language, like Coca Cola.

FROM CHE TO HEZBOLLAH Its symbolic meaning, on the other hand, is less obvious and has been subject to a variety of changes. Created by its inventor for the purpose of defending the Soviet Union, it formed part of the official propaganda machine and was celebrated in poems. Yet it was also the target of jokes; in one of these, a dig at the shortage economy of ‘real socialism’, a little old woman ends up with a Kalashnikov, when all she really wanted was a vacuum cleaner! Ever since the 1960s, the weapon has been seen throughout the world as the emblem of Soviet-backed revolutionaries and national liberation movements. It features on Mozambique’s flag and on the monument in Managua dedicated to the Sandinista Revolution. For this reason, the West, especially the United States, has often seen it as the bad guys’ weapon; indeed, it continues to be widely used in international terrorism, featuring particularly prominently in the activities of Islamic terrorists. Hezbollah even introduced a stylized image of a Kalashnikov into its flag in 1982. Yet it is chiefly the numerous conflicts in Africa and the Middle East that have seen the Kalashnikov play more than a purely symbolic role, due to its manoeuvrability and its low cost. These weapons also form the basis of civil war economies, where they not only represent the main ‘working tool’ of the war and crime-related ‘sectors of activity’ but also frequently appear in the form of merchandise. Examples of that ‘Kalashnikov culture’ include the Afghan ‘war rugs’ that reflect the experience of decades of conflict. Seventy years after its introduction, the Kalashnikov remains the best-known and most-manufactured handgun in the world. Once an icon of social revolution and national liberation, it has long been a realm of memory associated with international terrorism, arbitrary violence and social disintegration.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Kahaner, Larry, AK-47: The Weapon That Changed the Face of War, Hoboken, John Wiley & Sons, 2007. Kalashnikov, Mikhail, with Elena Joly, The Gun That Changed the World, translated by Andrew Brown, Cambridge and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2006 [2003]. Müller, Christian Th., ‘Die Kalaschnikow – Geschichte und Symbolik’, Zeithistorische Forschungen, 5, no. 1 (2008): 151–9.

CHAPTER 24

The Maoist illusion LUCIEN BIANCO

A small group of ‘Maoists’ associated with the May ’68 period were active in the revolutionary left-wing circles of Western Europe. They included the Gauche prolétarienne in France, the Red Brigades in Italy and the ‘Baader-Meinhof ’ group in the FRG. Once this fever had abated, some of the former leaders of those groups became media moguls, journalists, intellectuals or politicians. Explaining the implausible is an impossible task. How were Europe’s ‘Maoists’ able to venerate Mao Zedong, a character so far removed from their ideals? Those ideals themselves can serve as our starting point. Their elders had long believed in the Soviet Revolution before their eyes were opened. It was tempting, therefore, to transfer their hopes to that other major revolution, which had distanced itself from the Soviet model and even appeared to repudiate it. Better still, the ‘Lenin’ of the Chinese Revolution cast doubts on Lenin’s own life’s work; the ‘Cultural Revolution’ took on the character of a revolution against the revolution, the aim being to preserve the revolutionary spirit and ideals from becoming institutionalized, routinized and bureacratized. Maoist fever reached its zenith in the aftermath of May 1968, suggesting that its dreams far transcended its Marxist or revolutionary associations and became incorporated into left-wing libertarian aspirations. Although it flourished, thanks to the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist movement had in fact preceded this event, having emerged in 1963 as a result of the Sino-Soviet schism. Mao criticized Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘revisionism’, seeing him as presiding over a revolution debased by privilege and railing against what he termed ‘goulash Socialism’. In this way, the disciple rose up against the very same Soviet model that had disappointed its followers in Europe, an opportune convergence. Yet European Maoists remained unaware of a misunderstanding; Mao had first criticized Khrushchev for his denunciation of Stalin. Khrushchev appears as the reforming apprentice who does not go far enough (far enough, however, to encourage the Poles and Hungarians to try to cast off the yoke). Mao, a conservative, adapted a replica of Stalinism to be used in China, relying on his defence of the system he sought to introduce.

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HALLUCINATIONS When the Cultural Revolution broke out and was subsequently unleashed, the misunderstanding became even more blatant. In one sense, it is almost excusable that the Maoists detected no signs of a power struggle at the top; this was not only because no word of it appeared in the Chinese media but also, and above all, because the president of the Republic, Liu Shaoqi, offered no resistance whatsoever to Mao’s offensive. As a disciplined communist, he accepted his demotion and ensuing removal without a murmur. Mao, and Mao alone, sought to reassert his control and reinforce the absolute power he had held since the regime was founded − before it had been somewhat dented by those monumental errors, the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Great Leap Forward. In a democratic regime, these would have been enough to bring down a leader; in a totalitarian system, they merely diminished or at the very worst undermined the prestige he enjoyed among his deputies, the only people with full knowledge of the situation. Unlike his deputies, Mao never acknowledged his mistakes when it became evident that the Great Leap Forward was a catastrophe, degenerating into a famine that was to be the deadliest in human history. Mao remained traditional in the methods he used to promote the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ while also breaking new ground; Stalin would have deemed it folly to stir up the young in a similar manner. Mao manipulated the university and high school student ‘masses’, ‘whipping up’ their anger against university teachers and bureaucracy. He established an ad hoc body, the Committee of the Great Cultural Revolution, which informed the student leaders of the targets to be attacked. The focus soon shifted from teachers to party elites; previously, it would never have occurred to the students to condemn such figures, nor would they have dared. Finally, and most significantly of all, when young people continued to live by the slogan ‘To rebel is justified’ − issued by the Oracle as a rallying cry – Mao dealt with the disorder that was predictably unleashed and began to spread by calling on the army to quash the very section of the population whose fervour he had ignited. Those Europeans who were labouring under a hallucination remained unconcerned by that example of realpolitik. Unconcerned or unaware? Only the Maoists’ monumental lack of awareness and their refusal to be enlightened can account for their persistent blindness. It endured until Mao’s death, which finally brought the return of good sense, in the form of Deng Xiaoping. Yet that good sense lacked the ability to galvanize rebellious European youth, who instantly awoke from their intoxication. Nor were they alone in this; Maoist fever had affected very large sections of the intellectual left, to varying degrees. However, two books by Simon Leys, The Chairman’s New Clothes (1971) and Chinese Shadows (1974), should have enlightened those whose eyes did not remain stubbornly closed.

AGITATION IN THE WEST The Maoist fantasy did not only impact on the revolutionary left, but also on left-wing thought in general. However, it did not affect all of Western Europe

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in the same way. Countless intellectuals in France and Italy shared the fantasy, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Godard and Philippe Sollers, and from Alberto Moravia to Maria Macciocchi and Alberto Jacoviello. At first sight, or initially, northern Europe seemed better able to resist this delirium, although Maoist influence reached Berlin, Amsterdam and Copenhagen through spontaneist, anti-authoritarian movements − the pivot point between Marxism and libertarianism. Once that spontaneist movement, which could be libertarian or Third-Worldist (or both at once), had given birth to disciplined parties or even to a sectarian, revolutionary avant-garde, which happened fairly quickly, Maoists in West Germany and Norway had no further need to envy France’s Maoist Gauche prolétarienne. In the 1970s, the terrorist groups who adhered to the thoughts of Chairman Mao were primarily active in Italy, home of the Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigades, and West Germany. During their first trial in Frankfurt am Main, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, two co-founders of the Rote Armee Fraktion (the Red Army Faction), brandished the Little Red Book, described by Lin Biao as a ‘spiritual atom bomb’. Enthusiasm for Maoism mainly aroused incomprehension in Eastern European dissident circles in view of the fights conducted by their counterparts in the free world, which carried no real risks. Nevertheless, Baader, Ensslin and one of their companions eventually committed suicide in their prison in Stuttgart in 1977, following a failed attempt to free them made by four Palestinian hijackers who had diverted a Lufthansa plane. In a few cases, the idea of Maoism as an alternative to ‘real socialism’ also provided inspiration in Prague and Warsaw, as with the Polish dissident Kazimierz Mijal, who lived in exile in Albania during the period when Enver Hoxha had aligned himself with Beijing.

THE MEMORY OF AN ILLUSION What remains of that ardour today? Archival images shown in documentaries on the 1968 protests, featuring demonstrators in Berlin brandishing the Little Red Book or the portrait of the ‘Great Helmsman’? A few scenes, familiar to cinephiles, from Godard’s La Chinoise? One or two impassioned quotes that either raise a smile twenty or thirty years later, or promptly bring discredit to their authors? Or those absurd squabbles over whether some individual, now a spry septuagenarian, had been a ‘Stal’, a ‘Sponti’ (part of the ‘Mao-Spontex’ movement) or a ‘Provo’ in his student days? These returns to revolutionary pasts may be variously characterized by amusement, nostalgia, insinuation or antagonism. They are the pasts of today’s media owners, now sober progressives, and of respectable, reforming politicians, such as the German Green Party’s Joschka Fischer and Jürgen Trittin, who served in Gerhard Schröder’s cabinet as foreign minister and environment minister, respectively. Of course, the list also includes José Manuel Barroso, that fiery young revolutionary who later became a centre-right prime minister of Portugal, president of the European Commission and, eventually, a banker at Goldman Sachs. In the East, after 1989, the perplexity formerly aroused by Western Maoists, which had

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been tinged with condescension, was partially overcome in due course. The memory of former solidarities and clandestine networks, which were particularly active in connecting East European dissidents and Western anti-Soviet revolutionaries, played a part in this development. In the case of Western Europe − Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands − any attempt to produce a single assessment of these younger years and their impact on a collective future would be problematic, due to the highly diverse personal trajectories involved. This is particularly true given that admiration for China was sometimes evident even in circles diametrically opposed to the small Maoist groups in existence. After all, it was the committed Gaullist Alain Peyrefitte who wrote When China Awakes . . . the World Will Tremble (1973). Certain former Maoists have now publicly regretted their old adherence; others have dealt with their youthful errors by fighting communism and Marxism with a combination of tenacity and resentment. Meanwhile, some, such as the philosopher Alain Badiou, have never repented. Should this confirmed Latinist be reminded of the saying errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bourseiller, Christophe, Les Maoïstes. La folle histoire des gardes rouges français, Paris, Plon, 1996. Lovell, Julia, ‘The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective’, The China Quarterly, 277 (September 2016): 632–52.

CHAPTER 25

Three Africans and Europe PAP NDIAYE

Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, a member of the Académie française, Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese revolutionary, and Amílcar Cabral, an independence activist from Guinea-Bissau, all had associations with Europe, taking part in intellectual and political life there while retaining their firm stance against colonial dominance. Their different destinies provide material for contrasting memories of African independence. Today’s historians no longer view the national histories of European countries as totally separate from the rest of the world. In France, the distinction between ‘national history’ and ‘colonial history’, for instance, has lost its relevance, as they are so inextricably interlinked. A great many publications have been devoted to Europe’s ‘racialization’ of the world, which began in the late seventeenth century, to the European presence in Africa, to the processes of resistance and accommodation that have taken place between colonizers and colonized and to the European gaze cast on Africa. There are fewer works, on the other hand, dealing with the African presence in Europe. That presence was accentuated in the twentieth century on account of the First World War, which brought hundreds of thousands of African and North African soldiers and labourers to France; a small number of these remained in the colonial metropolis after the Armistice. In addition to work-related migration, which rose considerably after the Second World War, thousands of Africans settled in Europe to study or for political reasons. With the aid of scholarships, selected African students were able to study at European schools and universities. This was the case with two of the three major political figures whose European journeys we will be charting here: Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Amílcar Cabral of Cape Verde. The third figure is the Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba, whose connections with Europe were forged at a later date but are equally significant. In order to understand the political journeys of these three African leaders, it is important to analyse the European aspects of their lives and also to examine the traces they left in Europe, thereby contributing to its Africanization.

SENGHOR AND CABRAL, INTELLECTUAL JOURNEYS Senghor was born in 1906 in the small Senegalese town of Joal to a family of the Serer ethnic group who followed the Christian religion. In the early twentieth century, the

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French were already solidly established in Central and West Africa. Created in 1895, FWA (French West Africa) comprised the colonies of Senegal, French Sudan, French Guinea and the Ivory Coast; those of Niger, Mauritania and Dahomey, followed by Upper Volta and Togo, were soon added. Together, they formed France’s colonial empire in the region, a new capital city being created in 1902. This was Dakar, which contained the residence of the Governor-General and was situated about a hundred kilometres north of Joal. Senghor followed the standard path of all good students in the region, moving from the local primary school to Dakar, where he attended the François Libermann school and seminary run by the Spiritan Fathers. After taking his Baccalauréat, the young man was awarded a scholarship on the recommendation of his teachers, enabling him to study in Paris. He moved to the French capital in 1928 and remained there on an almost permanent basis until 1945. The young Senegalese student briefly attended classes at the Sorbonne before embarking on a course of study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in preparation for the competitive entrance exam to the École normale supérieure (taking a foundation course, or hypokhâgne, followed by two further years, or khâgnes). In 1935 he passed the Agrégation in French grammar on his second attempt, becoming the first African to obtain this qualification. Amílcar Cabral was born in 1924 in Guinea-Bissau (a Portuguese colony located south of Senegal) to Cape Verdean parents. Together with Angola and Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau constituted Portugal’s empire in Africa − a declining empire that lacked the resources enjoyed by the French and British. Like Senghor, Cabral pursued his secondary education on home soil, in this case Cape Verde, his parents having returned there. In 1945, he left to study at the Higher Institute of Agronomy in Lisbon and remained in the Portuguese capital until 1952. The drought that struck the archipelago of Cape Verde in the 1940s and led to tens of thousands of deaths motivated his desire to become an agronomist. The colonizers were keen to ensure that students from the colonies acquired practical skills through subjects such as agronomy, medicine, veterinary medicine and engineering sciences. This would further the development of the regions involved while averting the risk of political repercussions arising from disciplines more likely to lead to subversive activity. Nevertheless, during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, groups of young African intellectuals in Lisbon, Paris, London and Brussels were very active politically.

‘ASSERT OUR BEING’ The members of this new generation of Africans who had settled in France, Britain, Belgium and Portugal were in contact with political, trade union and community life in the colonial metropoles. Senghor was associated with the SFIO (the French section of the Workers’ International) and shared left-wing worries over the rise of fascist regimes in Europe. He was galvanized by Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and by colonial issues in general, with a view to promoting Pan-African solidarity and, in a broader sense, solidarity with the colonized peoples of Asia and persecuted

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minorities like the Jews. The Chants d’ombre contain several political references. Here, through Senghor’s African roots, the reader gains a clearer insight into situations characterized by dominance, not only in the French colonial space but elsewhere, such as the United States, one expression of this being the Harlem riot (1935). At the same time, Senghor was also developing a reflection on Black peoples through the concept of Négritude, a neologism forged by his friend Aimé Césaire, whom he met at Louis-le-Grand. Négritude was initially an identity movement based on promoting the worth of Afro-Caribbean cultures, which were generally despised or disregarded, and on re-asserting their essential beauty. These young Black students pursued their studies in prestigious Parisian institutions, attending preparatory classes for the Grandes Écoles, the École normale supérieure, the Sorbonne and the Institut d’éthnologie. There, they were intellectually armed and acquired a thorough knowledge of traditional French culture. Yet they also spent time together, attending lectures on Black culture and the history of pre-colonial Africa. They celebrated the specific virtues of the Black world and consequently opposed assimilation theories that sought to transform ‘advanced’ members of the Black population by causing them to forget their cultures of origin, as if these presented an obstacle to civilization. Césaire explained Négritude in terms of ‘resistance’ to assimilation and alienation. It was a way of reflecting on one’s Black identity with pride, of wresting it from racist biological and cultural judgements. Négritude drew inspiration from the pan-Africanist articles by Jane and Paulette Nardal that were published in La Dépêche africaine and, particularly, in the short-lived Revue du monde noir. These writings emphasized the unique cultural characteristics and beauties of the African civilizations. Rather than returning to ancient civilizations, the aim was to establish cultural africanité both within the modern world and within a universalistic humanism. In Senghor’s words: At that time [between 1932 and 1935] along with several other black students, we were plunged into a sort of panic-stricken despair. The horizon was blocked. No reform was in sight and the colonizers were justifying our political and economic dependence by the theory of the tabula rasa . . . . In order to establish an effective revolution, [. . .] we first had to divest ourselves of our borrowed attire − that of assimilation − and assert our being, that is to say our negritude.1

THE CENTRE FOR AFRICAN STUDIES Ten years later, like Senghor, Amílcar Cabral also broadened his intellectual and political horizons by settling in Europe. There, he met the individuals who would later spearhead the decolonization process in Portuguese-speaking Africa: Mário Pinto de Andrade of Angola (the future president of the MPLA − the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola), who studied philosophy at the University of Lisbon, Vasco Cabral of Guinea-Bissau (a future government minister and vice president of his country) and Agostinho Neto, who became the first president of the

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Republic of Angola. These African students first met at the Casa dos Estudantes do Império. This was a form of centre for students from the colonies, but as it was also frequented by the children of the colonizers it did not appear sufficiently African in their eyes. They therefore founded the Centre for African Studies in 1951, a type of informal institute where they could discuss African politics and history. Cabral and his friends avidly read the review Présence africaine, which its founder, Alioune Diop, sent to them from Paris and to which they contributed from time to time, as ‘the voices of Black students’. They translated the works of the Négritude movement, including Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache, written in French and with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘We came to Négritude a little late, but we were still youngsters in 1936’, explained Andrade, adding that Cabral immersed himself in the poetry of Senghor and David Diop.2 In 1954, as the Portuguese police were closing in on him, Mário de Andrade moved to Paris, where he became subeditor of Présence africaine: ‘In our eyes, Paris really was an African capital city’, he explained.3

PARIS: THE CAPITAL OF AN AFRICAN WORLD And indeed, Paris was clearly different from Lisbon. First, during this period the French capital was home to a cosmopolitan and much more consequential African world than the community inhabiting the capital on the Tagus. It included African American writers, artists and intellectuals such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Founded in 1950, the Black African Students Federation in France (FEANF) played an important role in the political development of African students, campaigning for the independence of African nations. Le Monde expressed its worries in 1958: ‘The problem of Black students in France has long extended beyond the domain of social welfare and entered that of nationalist demands.’ 4 Second, it was far easier to express political opinions in Paris than in Lisbon, where the Salazar dictatorship exerted tight control over society. The regime’s political police, the PIDE, kept a close watch on the country through its network of informers, opponents being arrested or exiled. Salazar, who liked to see himself as the heir to Vasco da Gama’s legacy, regarded the country’s colonial empire as essential to its greatness. And in fact, the Carnation Revolution of 1974 brought an end both to the Salazar regime and eventually to Portugal’s empire overseas. The African students in Lisbon were obliged to conduct their political discussions in semi-clandestine conditions and to beware of informers. They had difficulty accessing the opposition press, such as Avante!, an underground communist newspaper. However, they were able to take advantage of the presence of African sailors in Lisbon, whom they met at the Clubo Maritimo and from whom they discreetly obtained newspapers and magazines from Brazil. There is no doubt that African activists in France who were critical of colonization were watched by the police, including Senghor, whose mail was opened by the colonial authorities. Nevertheless, in terms of freedom of expression, their situation was totally unlike that of their comrades in Portugal. In

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this sense, the political situation in Brussels was similar to that of Paris, although there was less evidence of a cosmopolitan African presence, and few Africans lived in the city before the late 1960s, when Congolese migrants and students settled in the Matonge district. It is not surprising, therefore, that Lumumba did not settle in Belgium. The situation of these young African intellectuals who settled in Europe was difficult, both materially and psychologically. They lived frugally (Senghor had to plead for his scholarship payments to be made) and were the target of countless humiliations on account of their skin colour. Yet they succeeded in accomplishing something remarkable and subversive – creating a Black intellectual and cultural society within imperial capitals. This provided them with a means of giving one another mutual support, even of relieving depression and of making sense of their particular situation as a Black community in Europe – in short, as a racialized minority group. Reflecting on the Black condition was truly emancipating for them, in the sense that it freed them from unbearable inner contradictions, that dual identity described thirty years earlier by William E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. There was no place in France for educated Black men unless it involved assimilation, yet assimilation never enabled them to become completely French. In this way, the transformation whereby being Black became a source of pride had immense intellectual consequences, which they did not clearly envisage at the time − the imposing edifice built from justifications for colonialism was beginning to be challenged.

SENGHOR’S FRENCH LIFE Senghor’s ‘French life’ basically continued without interruption. In 1945, he was elected député of one of the two Senegalese constituencies (the other député being Lamine Guèye, leader of the Senegalese Socialist Party), by virtue of the double college system limiting African political representation at the Assemblée nationale. The eighteen million African inhabitants of French West Africa were represented by just six députés. Senghor knew how to gain the support of those keen for change; as he travelled through the regions of Senegal, he gradually differentiated himself from Lamine Guèye. His political philosophy was composite in character. It incorporated both Négritude − promoting the value of the Black contribution to world civilization − and ‘African socialism’, combining the best of Western technologies with African community structures. He had a way with words and was also adept at using symbols, talents that struck a deep chord with African elites and made a considerable impression on the Senegalese people. In October 1948, Senghor left the SFIO to found his own party, the Bloc Démocratique Sénégalais, which was much more successful than the French-backed SFIO in the legislative elections of 1951. From then on, Senghor was the strong man of Senegalese politics. As a député, his favour was sought by those needing to shore up fragile majorities; in 1955, he was even appointed secretary of state, serving in Edgar Faure’s second Cabinet. In short, Senghor was a French politician who

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divided his time between France and Senegal, a situation made much easier, thanks to the introduction of faster and more frequent flights in 1952. He was, therefore, a notable public figure; his situation was quite unlike Cabral’s, thanks to the centrality of his political position, Cabral having much less room for manoeuvre in that sense.

LUMUMBA: THE JOURNEY OF AN INDEPENDENCE ACTIVIST The first difference between Patrice Lumumba’s journey and those of Senghor and Cabral was that his education was not completed in Europe. Born in the Belgian Congo in 1925, he attended the Catholic mission schools there, yet despite being a brilliant student he did not pursue further studies in Belgium and remained an autodidact. His connection with Europe was that of a young African who educated himself by reading Enlightenment texts and, like other Congolese, lived under a harsh colonial regime that quashed any prospects of development. Although Lumumba never lived in Europe, he visited the continent on several occasions in the course of his political career. He was employed as an accountant for the post office at Stanleyville. A trade union member, he campaigned for the reformist Belgian Liberal Party. In 1955, together with a group of his compatriots who were also regarded as ‘advanced’, Lumumba was invited to make his first visit to Belgium. At that time, he was seen as something of a reformist supporter of the Belgian presence in the Congo. Lumumba’s second visit to Europe was completely different. This took place on the occasion of the 1958 World’s Fair, hosted by Belgium and inaugurated in Brussels by King Baudouin. Coming into contact with anti-colonialist circles in the Belgian capital, Lumumba hardened his stance. Without being as ‘African’ as Paris, Brussels was home to a very politically active African community, whose main focus was its criticism of Belgian colonial rule in Central Africa. The international political context was conducive to radicalization; Guinea proclaimed its independence that very same year, having voted ‘no’ to the new French constitution in General de Gaulle’s referendum, and Ahmed Sékou Touré became the country’s first president. A year earlier, Kwame Nkrumah had been proclaimed the first president of an independent Ghana. The issue of reform was no longer relevant − it was time for an outright break with the colonizer. Immediately afterwards, Lumumba created the Congolese National Movement (MNC), thereby providing proponents of independence (and other parties) with a political structure. Lumumba’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment in January 1960 were immediately followed by his release, enabling him to take part in the famous Belgo-Congolese Round Table Conference, held in Brussels. This event, which was immortalized by the singer Le Grand Kallé, saw the Belgian government surrender its arms, and the date for the Belgian Congo’s declaration of independence was set as 30 June 1960. Lumumba’s third (and final) visit to Belgium was therefore made on the occasion of his country’s independence. The speech he delivered on 30 June as the newly elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was much more

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radical than expected. In the presence of King Baudouin, who had just spoken in favourable terms of Belgian colonial rule, Lumumba denounced the violence, humiliations, dispossessions and segregation undergone by the Congolese. From then on, the Belgian government was determined to bring him down. It used political and military pressure, supporting the secession of the state of Katanga and encouraging Mobutu’s coup d’état in September. These pressures finally led to Lumumba’s arrest and assassination on 17 January 1961.

GLORIOUS AND INCENDIARY MEMORIES For his part, Senghor made no mention of independence until the late 1950s; instead, he called for true ‘autonomy’, so that his country would no longer be ‘subject to ideas from Paris’. He preferred the notion of a ‘confederation’, bringing together France and the nations of West Africa, to that of independence. To achieve this, the Franco-Senegalese politician took his campaign to Senegal itself, mustering local political forces under the aegis of the Bloc Populaire Sénégalais. In 1958, this merged with Guèye’s socialists to become the Union Progressiste Sénégalaise. In 1958, when the referendum on the new French constitution was held throughout the French community, Senghor was tempted, on a personal level, to reject it. Nevertheless, he believed that a majority ‘yes’ vote from Senegal posed less of a risk. He was still pursuing his plan for an African federation; in January 1959 he brought together, in Dakar, the Federal Council of former French West Africa, which had become a constituent assembly, to announce the creation of the ‘Mali Federation’. Its name was a reference to the glorious Mali Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Dahomey and Upper Volta broke from the Federation in March, however, leaving the Senegalese and French Sudanese involved in heated disputes with one another. On 20 August, Senghor chose to remove Senegal from the Federation and proclaim its independence, while French Sudan, which became the Republic of Mali, followed suit on 22 September. Senghor was elected president of Senegal on 5 September 1960. The institutions of the new Republic of Senegal were closely modelled on those of the Fifth Republic, with a strong president at the helm who was assisted by a prime minister − in this case Mamadou Dia, a workaholic who enabled Senghor to devote himself to foreign policy, his general vision for the country and his poetic works. While he was president of the Republic of Senegal, Senghor spent his summers at Verson, a small town near Caen, settling there permanently in his later years. This attachment to Normandy was due to his second wife, Colette Hubert, whom he married in 1957 and who owned a property there. Senghor was particularly appreciative of the late summer light in Normandy, its transparent quality reminding him of the light in Senegal after the winter rains. The presence of the African scholar in Verson attracted attention, and he received visits from a number of French politicians and public figures, both minor and major. At Verson, he revealed, it was impossible to devote himself fully to his poetry, his days being taken up with meeting people, social interaction and correspondence. He described Verson as the place for

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‘discursive reasoning’, in contrast to his house in Dakar, where poetry established its gentle rhythm once more. Honours were heaped on Senghor, who was not averse to them; on 2 June 1983, he became the first African member of the Académie française, three years after resigning from his position as president of Senegal. Cabral’s political journey was very different from Senghor’s, in the sense that he never held a position of power, in either the legislative or executive branch of government. He returned to Guinea-Bissau in 1952 after spending some years in Lisbon completing his professional, intellectual and political development, and worked as an agronomist in the city of Bissau. He was also politically active, and in 1956, he co-founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), together with five companions. As with other Portuguese colonies where independence parties were created (the MPLA in Angola and the FRELIMO in Mozambique, with which the PAIGC was allied), the political struggle turned into a military conflict due to the brutally repressive response of the Salazar regime and the impossibility of negotiating with it. Relying on neighbouring countries, such as Guinea, led by Sékou Touré, and on military aid from Cuba and the USSR, the PAIGC conducted a tenacious guerilla war. As the diplomatic representative of the movement during this period, Cabral travelled to a number of cities, including Paris, London and Milan, to denounce Portuguese colonialism and prepare for independence. He was assassinated in Conakry on 20 January 1973, in circumstances that have remained a mystery – Portuguese agents may have been involved. In September of that same year Guinea-Bissau became an independent country, but he had not lived to see it. Cape Verde achieved independence two years later. The memory of ‘Président Senghor’ is carefully preserved at Verson. Built ‘as a tribute to Verson’s most illustrious inhabitant’, the Espace Senghor was inaugurated by Senghor himself in 1995 and stands on the square that also bears his name. This cultural centre organizes events based on the French-speaking world and on Négritude, which therefore play a central, and ultimately unexpected role in the cultural life of this small Norman town. The city of Caen, just a short distance from Verson, is twinned with Senegal’s second city, Thiès, where Senghor once served as mayor. Several libraries in Normandy bear Senghor’s name, as do four schools (two lycées, one in Évreux, the other in Magnanville and two middle schools in Caen and Corbeil) and a dozen or so streets, making it a well-established French toponym. In Paris, the Léopold Sédar Senghor Footbridge extends from the rue de Solférino to span the Seine and is located near the Socialist Party headquarters and the musée d’Orsay. Ultimately, Senghor is a consensual literary and political figure, who seems to embody a respectful yet somewhat aloof proximity between France and Africa. This Franco-African fusion is symbolized by the sculpture Le Baobab et le Pommier (The Baobab and the Apple Tree) at Verson, which reflects both the distinct individual features and universal character of humanity. Amílcar Cabral’s institutional presence in Europe is more discreet and less consensual than Senghor’s. He remained a rebel to the end of his days, engaged in armed struggle with a colonial power. Portugal simultaneously rejected empire and dictatorship, and there are streets in Lisbon and its suburbs (Bobadela, Amadora

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and Agualva) that bear his name. An avenue in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis (home to a large Cape Verdean community) was officially named the Avenue Amílcar Cabral in July 2008, marking the thirty-third anniversary of Cape Verde’s independence. The inauguration was attended by African diplomats, Ana Maria Cabral and Iva Cabral, the widow and daughter of the pro-independence leader. There are also streets named after him in Niort, Port (Réunion Island) and Fortde-France (Martinique), as well as a square – the place Amílcar Cabral in Fameck, Moselle.

INSTITUTIONALIZED AND POPULAR MEMORIES Although his name has been given to streets in Montpellier, Niort, Guyancourt and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, there are no plans as yet to name a public thoroughfare in Belgium after Patrice Lumumba. In 2013, the Municipal Council of Ixelles, a district in Brussels, voted to reject the idea of doing so on the grounds that he was insufficiently ‘unifying’ as a figure and risked ‘dividing the community’. However, there was no lack of support for ‘Lumumba’ as the name of choice, particularly since there was a square that needed naming at Matonge, a district in Brussels with a substantial Congolese population. Sixty years after Lumumba’s first visit to Belgium, his name continues to ignite strong feelings there, as if the Congo’s independence were a deplorable event best forgotten and as if the name ‘Lumumba’ were synonymous with defeat for the plat pays and with an insult to the king.5 The Belgian authorities have never officially acknowledged the fact that the Belgian secret service was almost certainly involved in his assassination. Nevertheless, on 30 June 2015, a diverse crowd of three hundred people gathered on the famous, nameless square to commemorate the fifty-fifth anniversary of Congolese independence. There, they listened to a reading of Lumumba’s speech, in which he had urged his compatriots to ‘make 30 June 1960 an illustrious date that will remain indelibly engraved on your hearts, a date whose significance you will proudly teach your children, so that they, in turn, can tell their children and grand-children the glorious story of our struggle for freedom’. Cabral and Lumumba, on the other hand, have a much stronger presence in popular culture than the académicien Senghor, whose poetry inspired musical creations, but whose image as a person of note did not fire the enthusiasm of Europe’s youth. The band La MC Malcriado, comprising French musicians with Cape Verdean parents born in the Parisian suburbs (and which includes Stomy Bugsy), wrote a song entitled ‘Viva Amílcar Cabral’. A number of morna musicians from Guinea and Cape Verde, including Neta Robalo, have also paid tribute to him through their songs. Lumumba, too, has been commemorated by several musicians, a tradition that dates back to 1960 with Joseph Kabasele (known as Le Grand Kallé) and his famous Indépendence Cha Cha. More recent examples include musicians such as the rapper Lalcko, with his track Lumumba. Cabral and Lumumba are popular figures whose reputations have remained intact; their untimely deaths preserved

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them from the exercise of power and from the disillusion and aberrations associated with it. Like Che Guevara, they have remained romantic heroes and feature prominently in a globalized culture that has, to a certain extent, deterritorialized them; although their names are known to a section of Europe’s younger population, they have not been placed within the African and European history of disintegrating empires. It would be a significant historical achievement to re-establish these African independence leaders within a history that is both African and European.

NOTES 1. Quoted in Sylvia Washington Bâ, The Concept of Negritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973). 2. Présence africaine, 1953/1, 14, ‘Situation des étudiants noirs dans le monde’, pp. 221–40. 3. Mário de Andrade, interviews with Christine Messiant, ‘1948-1960, la première génération du MPLA’, Lustopie, 1999, p. 199. 4. Ibid., p. 205. 5. Thandiwe Cattier, ‘La place Patrice-Lumumba de Bruxelles existe . . . sur Google Earth’, Jeune Afrique, 25 September 2015.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Manceron, Gilles, Pascal Blanchard and Éric Deroo, Le Paris noir, Paris, Hazan, 2001. Oliva, Oscar Oramas, Amílcar Cabral. Un précurseur de l’indépendance africaine, Paris, Indigo, 2008. Omasombo, Jean and Benoît Verhaegen, Patrice Lumumba, acteur politique: De la prison aux portes du pouvoir, juillet 1956–février 1960, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005. Vaillant, Janet G., Vie de Léopold Sédar Senghor: Noir, Français et Africain, Paris, Karthala, 2006.

CHAPTER 26

Gandhi, Tagore and Kipling Europe as the measure SURESH SHARMA

With The Jungle Book, British writer Rudyard Kipling celebrated both the abundance of the natural world and the superiority of European culture. Conversely, two great Indian intellectuals, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, refuted the Eurocentric vision of history. The expressions ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’, in contrast to the notions of Asia or the East, are meant to signify a distinct kind of historical coherence. That coherence, asserted Hegel, places Europe as the ‘Centre and end of History’. And indeed, by the close of the long nineteenth century, the rest of the world had no choice but to learn to subsist in the shadow of Europe as the measure of all things and of all values. Modern Europe posited a sovereign universality that sought to define the present, past and future for all mankind. No particular could survive against that universal for long. The most that any ‘particular’ could seek was toleration as an archaic example of survival, something barely alive. Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), a social reformer alive to modernity’s phenomenal power to reshape things and life, was the first to learn and acknowledge that India was ‘Asian’. It was a recognition steeped in humiliation and deep irony – a reminder of Europe’s forgetfulness of its own past and origins. The notion of ‘Asiatic effeminacy’, meek and powerless, Rammohan conceded, may well hold true – but what would Europe be without Jesus, an Asiatic? The very name Europe, he could have added, is redolent of Asia. The appraisal of the sense and substance of Europe’s modern coherence by Gandhi and Tagore – despite their fierce disagreements over several significant fundamental points – stems from a common cognitive ground that is unusual in the modern context. Consider that ground in reference to modernity’s cardinal aspect : technology as progressive mediation between Man and Nature, and as the essential formative aspect of universality and freedom. That cardinal element strongly underpins apparently irreconcilable political positions: for example, that of Mao

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and Nehru, the Marxist revolutionary M N Roy and the Hindu nationalist Savarkar. One could also speak of the morphology of their shared ground as the fault lines that sharply divided them, in terms of the sociologist Patterson’s three constitutive elements in the distinctly European idea-imaginary of Freedom: sovereignal, civic and individual. For both Roy the ‘Revolutionary’ and Savarkar the ‘Reactionary’, sovereignal freedom was the vital pivot for the creation of an ideal new order and insistence upon the sanctity of individual freedom, subversive and mala fide. Their grave quarrel concerned the historically feasible line of political cohesion; ‘class’ – dynamic historical formation – in the case of Roy and Mao, and ‘identity’ – unchanging, constant and indivisible origins – in the case of Savarkar and Jinnah (a Muslim nationalist). Most crucial perhaps, is their shared certainty that true selfrecognition occurs in decisive combat against the ‘absolute other’. Nehru, in that context, represents a voice of another kind, claiming the inseparableness of civic, individual and sovereignal freedom. Prior to the nineteenth century, the word ‘Freedom’ would have made no sense to anyone in India, or anywhere outside Europe. Gandhi and Tagore were sensitive to the searing irony implicit in the passionate longing for Freedom that came to shape the life and thought of those colonized by Europe. Armed conquest and the coercive might of technology had been the means by which Freedom had been transformed into a universal value. But they knew Europe’s pre-eminence was rooted in ground far more enduring and subtle than mere recourse to coercion. The sheer ambiguity of that ground and its complex, fraught developments are very striking features of the projection, through conquest, of Freedom as a universal quest and the origins of that idea are steeped in slavery and feudal servitude. For both Tagore and Gandhi, Freedom was precious as a thing in itself. Their intense unease was with its Western enunciation. The critical element here is a definitive shift in the criterion of value. Modern change and progress take the world of matter and things as their starting point. And that entails a new kind of pursuit; the re-creation of the human presence in the continual reshaping of Nature and of things. The general conviction governing that approach is that the dynamics of progress would ensure ever-greater plenitude and fulfilment for all mankind. The ineffable appeal of that promise is a major feature of the discourse and history of resistance to Western supremacy. In reposing implicit faith in the truth of that promise, Mao and Jiang Kai-shek, Nehru and Jinnah, Ambedkar and Savarkar speak as one. One needs to ask at this point what objection there could possibly be to ever-greater plenty and fulfilment for all. Tagore’s principal reproach is that in making things the most important focus of value, human autonomy is negated. In the absence of that irreducible, autonomous interior space given to every human, freedom could simply never exist. In Gandhi’s rendering, the shift in the focus of value causes things to become the measure of value and worth, thereby forsaking the moral universe without which the longing for freedom as the ultimate value of being and becoming makes no sense. Swaraj, literally self-governance or self-determination, marks the philosophic threshold of Tagore and Gandhi’s enunciation of Freedom. Its usage in popular discourse marks the advent of mass politics and the affirmation of the ideal of sovereign nationhood. And it is precisely that sense of Freedom that shaped the

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movement against alien rule in India and the Colonized world. Consider the striking paradox. For heuristic convenience one could speak of the prodigious journey from Christendom to Europe in terms of the two great, cardinal principles originating from pagan times: the individual as the autonomous possessor of Reason and the near-sacred privilege of the territorial referent (the Nation State). Europe, in the memory of the world beyond it, essentially appears as a colossal coherent structure driven by efficient technology and rational organization anchored in nationhood. An individual, after all, however flawless his individuation, could never be fully emptied of filiations and cultural memory. The imperative that reigned supreme was collective survival and eventual parity. Gandhi considered the little Gujarati text Hind Swaraj (1909) as his ‘seminal text’. Hind Swaraj emphatically states that Freedom is not the mere absence of external restraints. Rather, it resides in the autonomous will and in the capacity to choose one’s limits. In positing the idea that things are the measure of value, modern civilization makes the human presence subservient to the ultimately insane logic of the machine. Tagore discerned blind negation in ‘sovereign nation-states’; an organizational structure equivalent to the technology of war. Japan’s aggressive nationalism convinced him that this new affliction had taken root and found a home in Asia. Satyagraha or ‘truth-force’, Gandhi’s chosen weapon of non-violence, caused Tagore grave anxiety. Like all forms of power, Satyagraha was prone to abuse. He first spoke of his dark fears on the use and abuse of Satyagraha in a letter to Gandhi written a day before the massacre of hundreds of unarmed protesters (13 April 1919). India’s truth, said Tagore, renounces ‘separateness’ from ‘others’. The call to the ‘sacrifice’ of non-cooperation signifies the ‘political asceticism’ of mindless ‘negation’, the unthinking ‘joy of annihilation’. ‘Sacrifice’ devoid of ‘affirmation’ is the fire that is bound to extinguish our ‘hearth and home’. In seeking Swaraj only for India, Satyagraha accords ‘organizations of National Egoism’ unmerited legitimacy. National Egoism in India and the West, noted the poet, has different flaws. In India, ‘specialization’ – the virtual reduction of Man to a machine – means that the ‘rule of things’ remains frozen and changeless. In the West, ‘specialization’ – the virtual displacement of Man by machine – means that the ‘rule of things’ is forever in motion. In the West, this has generated insatiable ‘greed and conquest’, and in India, abject ‘resignation’. Gandhi recognized in poetic clarity the distance and proximity at the origin of this serious debate. The ‘magnificent world’ of the poet’s calling is unhampered by the given and imposed. It contains intimations of truth, the touchstone of worth and value, as it could and ought to be. But could truth ever be secured by mere invocation? True, it is vitally important to express it in its unsullied, pristine form. Like ‘Solomon arrayed in all his glory’, it has the power to dazzle and awaken. But that glory wilts without the ‘lilies of the field’, which require constant tending with the ‘weeding fork’ as much as ‘sowing’. Non-cooperation was akin to the weeding fork. It signified India’s ‘withdrawal’ into itself against the ‘armed imposition’ of ‘compulsory cooperation’ enforced with ‘modern methods of exploitation’. Modern civilization favours the ability of ‘one country to prey upon the other’. Work and struggle are the flawed given realities that make human life meaningful.

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The flawed given reality called India, conceded Gandhi, was everything that had been given to him to work through and with. It is and would always be no more than a ‘fragment’. But life itself begins and subsists in and upon fragments. True, imagination has the power to transcend given realities. Its intimations persist and remain radiant even when all given realities seem ranged against them, but as a distant promise. The chief failing of Modern civilization is its refusal to look at the ‘machine’ as an embodiment of a certain configuration of cognition and power. ‘Machines’ that efficiently provide humans with whatever they feel the need for and relish are considered good. It could well be, speculated Gandhi, that a single ‘plow’ could be devised to ‘sow and cultivate’ and that it would provide abundantly for all humanity. Such a machine would entail a life of perpetual dependence for most of mankind. Infinitely worse, in vanquishing ‘work’ as a mode of engagement with the given realities of life and with what could be, that plow would portend the end of meaningful human existence. While Gandhi and Tagore have profoundly shaped the memory of the EuropeanIndian encounter with their visions, and not only on the Indian side, the British novelist Ruyard Kipling (1865–1936) has certainly had much greater influence, with his writings (and their respective adaptations, notably Walt Disney’s animated film The Jungle Book, released in 1967), on the popular vision of the cultural differences between Europe and the Indian subcontinent. Kipling’s faith in Europe as the agent of civilization was all but absolute. In his view, Europe’s pre-eminence and its most robust expression, the British Empire, represented the best possible condition for humanity. The making of modern universality lay in the negation and disappearance of that deep existential impulse to seek the unknown and universal. But for Kipling, deeper historical currents that define what is possible and worthwhile for life and thought seem matters of no concern. The great certainty that possessed him was that the fault- line between meaningful life and its absence-negation made possible by civilization runs along the West-East axis. His dream and hope was that this definitive line would endure. For in the East, human presence is a fragment, scattered and lost amidst the repetitive domain of ‘palm and pine’. The East is a world of frozen insuperable distances virtually devoid of that vital, life-giving distance between what is and could, or ought to be. The British Empire was the lone voice that beckoned the ‘East’ to the power and promise of that distance. Kipling sensed ‘the temple bells’ whisper in acknowledgment, ‘come you back, you British soldier’. George Orwell presciently noted Kipling’s lasting intellectual-literary presence as being due to ‘thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent’. Consider for instance the mysterious reverberation of Kipling’s vaunted phrases: ‘East is East, West is West’ and ‘The White Man’s burden’. In Kipling’s Jungle Books one senses a literary-intellectual reverberation of another kind. The profound recognition of a very different order seems to be at play there; a longing for the wild and an order well beyond the grasp of Europe, Civilization and human intervention. Universality, the loud signature tune of modern European civilization, resides in the Jungle Books not as Civilization’s gift or accomplishment, but as something that simply is; untaught and elemental. The power and truth of that primal presence clearly plays a

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role in the immense attraction of the Jungle Books for children everywhere. That momentous literary-aesthetic detail calls to an irony that is both instructive and mysterious. Civilization and the human presence in Kipling’s Jungle Books is an occasional, distant occurrence, destined, like lightning, to disappear. What prevails and anchors all the given realities of untamed nature is the ‘Law’ beyond all laws that humans have devised, or could ever clearly express. Unlike human laws, Law in the natural world resides in perfect finality in times of extreme distress and imminent collapse; when, for instance, the rains fail, the tiger Shere Khan (the hunter) and the deer (the prey) drink from the shrunken stream within sniffing distance of one another. As he nears adulthood, Mowgli, the lone presence of human origin reared and taught by mother wolf Raksha and Baloo the wise bear in the ways and Law of the jungle, is overcome by a restlessness he is utterly unable to understand; he is ‘not cold, not hot, not hungry’ and yet he is ‘angry with that which I cannot see’. Haunted by an unrelenting ‘double step’ which ‘is not there’ when he tries to see it, Mowgli feels singed by something akin to the fire he had seen in the village on the edge of his known world. Yet it rages entirely within him, not outside, as something indefinable. It is the kind of impulse that, in the words of Baghera the Black Panther, makes man willing to ‘‘drown himself to bite the moon’s light on the water’. In the glittering, gem studded ‘Ankus’ – an elephant goad, used to restrain or control – guarded by the White Cobra of long, vast memory, Mowgli confronts the formative disturbance unique to humans. His answer to the question regarding the criterion for action and judgement – ‘Ankus the blood drinker’ or ‘Man’ is that they are all one. In that there stirs, albeit faintly, the basic element of the debate between Tagore and Gandhi concerning the prospect of the human presence in the shadow of things perceived as the measure of Man.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Iyer, Raghavan, Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Vols I & II, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986. Kipling, Rudyard, Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Kipling, Rudyard, The Jungle Books, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2013. Patterson, Orlando, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Vol. I, New York, Basic Books, 1991. Prabhu, R. K. and Ravindra Kelekar (Eds.), Truth Called Them Differently, Ahmedabad, Navajivan, 1961. Tagore, Rabindranath, Nationalism, New Delhi, Penguin India, 2010. Tagore, Rabindranath, Religion of Man, Connecticut, Martino Fine Books, 2013.

CHAPTER 27

Meiji Japan and European influences AKIYOSHI NISHIYAMA

The Meiji era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been subject to various interpretations in Japan, opinions having changed with the advance of history. The Japanese ‘Enlightenment’ continues to exercise national consciences, some regretting the fact that there were times when Japan looked more to the West than to her Asian neighbours. The Japanese yen, together with many other banknotes in the world but unlike the euro, features portraits of historic figures on its observe side. All the great persons represented on this realm of memory belonging to ‘ordinary nationalism’ date from the Meiji era (1868–1912). ‘Meiji’, the name chosen by the Emperor Mutsuhito to designate his reign, is the Japanese word for ‘enlightened’. The three categories of individuals featuring on the series of notes from 1984 to 2004, and on the two preceding series, were intellectuals, writers and scholars from this period. The sole exception is the image of the gateway (shurei-mon) at Shuri Castle in Okinawa. Although this dates back to the fifteenth century, it serves as a reminder that the Ryukyu Kingdom was not annexed by Japan until the beginning of the Meiji era (1872–9), when Okinawa became a prefecture. It is therefore true to say that the symbolism used on contemporary Japanese banknotes is closely linked to that period of history. In the same way, the previous series of post-war notes mainly featured politicians from the Meiji period. Like the Meiji era, the Sengoku period (which spanned the sixteenth century) is popular as a setting for films and television dramas. They share a common characteristic, both having witnessed encounters between Japan and Europe, or rather the ‘West’, which were to have a marked influence on the former’s development. A symbol of that influence in the Sengoku period is the arquebus, which was introduced by the Portuguese, together with Christianity, in the midsixteenth century. Oda Nobunaga made extensive use of this weapon at the Battle of Nagashino (1575), when arquebus fire was able to repel traditional cavalry charges, thereby making an effective contribution to the unification process. The nineteenthcentury encounter with the West was marked by the fleets of ‘Black Ships’ from the

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United States, under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry, which arrived in Japan in 1853 and 1854 and forced the country to open her ports to trade. In the Sengoku era, strict control had been exerted over contacts with Europe (which were conducted solely through the Netherlands) and Christians had been banished. That second ‘opening’, however, drew Japan into the modern world, dominated by Europe, although the term ‘West’ now referred both to Europe and to the United States.

BUNMEI-KAIKA: JAPAN OPENS TO THE WEST In 1868, following a civil war, the Meiji Ishin (‘Restoration’ or ‘Renovation’) replaced the Tokugawa Shogunate with a centralized government headed by Emperor Meiji (1852–1912). The new state was faced with the legacy left at the end of the Shogunate as a result of Japan’s opening herself to trade: ‘unequal treaties’, extraterritorial consular jurisdiction and the loss of customs duty autonomy. The first aim of Emperor Meiji’s government was to have those treaties revised and to establish equal relations with the West. Japan was not able to achieve total customs duty autonomy until 1911, in other words, between the annexation of Korea in 1910 and the end of the Meiji era in 1912. This coincidence suggested that that the Meiji period, which had its own calendar based on imperial eras, was a crucial epoch in terms of the development of a nation state − even more so, in fact, than the Victorian age in Britain. The early days of the Meiji era were characterized by a massive inflow of Western knowledge and culture. Japan experienced political changes, such as the introduction of a centralized government in 1871 and the fiscal reform of 1873, but developments also occurred at an everyday level. Locomotives, non-traditional hairstyles for women and beef − hitherto a forbidden meat − became the iconic everyday symbols of bunmei-kaika (civilization and enlightenment). These developments gave rise to satirical works, including the highly popular books by Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894), such as Seyo dochu hizakurige (Along the Western Sea-Route by Shank’s Mare), a parody of the bestseller dating from the Edo period, Tokai dochu hizakurige. Whereas the original describes a pilgrimage to the Shinto shrine at Ise, Robun’s work centres on a contemporary pilgrimage to the Great Exhibition in London, taking the reader in the opposite direction from that of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, published during the same period. The World’s Fair held in Vienna in 1873 included a reconstruction of the Ise shrine. Displayed in the Prater, a public park, its exotic quality made a strong impression on Western visitors, including Austria’s imperial couple, the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Empress Elisabeth. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), the main representative of the Japanese ‘Enlightenment’ during that period, is one of the figures who appears on the country’s current banknotes. He believed that Japan was halfway through a historic, universal process leading from barbarism to civilization. In a number of his writings, therefore, he called on the country to take what European modernity had

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to offer and to ensure that individual independence through education became the vital principle governing national development. He argued that Japanese children should no longer be educated according to Chinese traditions but should receive knowledge of European culture. These views chimed with the exhortations of the American scientist William S. Clark, one of Japan’s famous oyatoi-gaikokujin (foreign advisers); in 1876, Clark had urged his students at the Sapporo Agricultural School: ‘Boys, be ambitious!’ Those words, together with statues of ‘Dr Clark’, who was almost forgotten in his native land, continue to make their mark on the physiognomy of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island. This was seen as the ‘Wild North’ in Meiji-era Japan, and its indigenous inhabitants, the Ainu, were subjected to stringent assimilation policies during the period when Clark was staying there. The European concepts of ‘East’ and ‘West’ began to be applied as a way of situating Japan in time and space, in other words, of viewing the country in terms of civilization. Named after its leader, Iwakura Tomomi, the Iwakura Mission (1871–3) involved visits to twelve Western countries and was launched by the Japanese government at a time of political instability. In the voluminous writings that resulted from this initiative, it was acknowledged that the East was making very few of the efforts, in terms of theory, that had enabled the West to make scientific and technological advancements. That being said, Japan was able to benefit from the in-depth examination and imitation of a foreign culture and was then able to appropriate it, just as she had appropriated the Chinese and Korean cultures.

BUSHIDO: AN INVENTED TRADITION During the first two decades of the Meiji era, European culture appeared so superior that there was even talk of replacing the Japanese language with English and converting the country to Christianity. From 1883 onwards, political leaders and diplomats held balls at the Rokumei-kan, a grand building designed by British architect Josiah Conder. The awkward behaviour of the Japanese guests, unaccustomed to European etiquette, prompted the mockery of Westerners, which in turn aroused the indignation of Japanese nationalists. This ‘westernization’ provoked a backlash in the form of a move to discover the essence of Japan, and it was this context that gave rise to an invented ‘tradition’, bushido. The Samurai class, which had been abolished in the Meiji reforms, became the model for a national moral philosophy. Bushido was presented as analogous to the British notion of the ‘gentleman’. Nitobe Inazo (1862–1933), who converted to Christianity after his studies at the Agricultural College in Sapporo where William S. Clark had been a teacher, wrote a book on the subject, entitled Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900). There, he revealed that bushido was a specifically Japanese combination of Buddhism, Shintoism and Confucianism, but that the virtues drawn from it – loyalty to the emperor, patriotism and other codes of conduct – were to be found in various episodes in the Bible, which made bushido (and hara-kiri) a civilized moral code.

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During the 1930s, which witnessed the mass mobilization of Japanese society, bushido became itself established in a military context and formed the basis of the ideology motivating the kamikaze pilots in the latter years of the Second World War. During the symposium on ‘overcoming modernity’ held in Kyoto in 1942, one participant declared that the modernization process imposed during the Meiji era had been an ‘erroneous path’, and that Japan’s wellbeing had been ruined by materialism and decadence. Outside, in the grip of the euphoria experienced in the early stage of the war, a crowd shouted ‘Down with the American and English devils!’ In the United States, the Japanese were regarded as a nation of barbarians. ‘Europe’s best pupil’ had become the worst enemy of civilization.

JAPAN: A ROLE MODEL? While the Showa era (1926–45) ended in a catastrophic defeat, the Meiji period experienced two victories that cast a positive light on its journey towards modernity: the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). National – or, more precisely, nationalist – historiographical accounts asserted that Japan had been the first constitutional state in Asia and that its victory against Russia had served as an encouragement to a large number of colonized peoples in Asia and Africa. Indeed, this was said by the Japanese prime minister on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 2015. Japan’s military victories at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused a stir throughout the world, giving rise to the ‘Yellow Peril’ discourse in Europe. Although this was actually aimed at China, it was popularized in Hermann Knackfuss’s famous painting, Peoples of Europe, Protect Your Most Sacred Possessions (1895), commissioned by the Emperor Wilhelm II at the time of the Triple Intervention, which obliged Japan to retrocede the Liaodong Peninsula to China. That episode led to an attitude of rejection towards Germany in Japan, yet the latter was often described as ‘the Prussia of Asia’ and had regarded Germany as its political, cultural and scientific role model. Although the Japanese victory of 1905 reinforced these fears, other voices were also heard. In Britain, for example, with which Japan sealed an alliance in 1902, H. G. Wells used the words ‘voluntary nobility’ in connection with the Samurai. In this context, Okakura Tenshin, who, together with Ernest Fenollosa, did much to revive the admiration for traditional Japanese arts, wrote at the beginning of his work The Book of Tea (1906) that the West was mistaken in seeing Japanese patriotism as uncivilized. He likens this to the attitude shown to Indian spirituality, derided as ignorance, and Chinese sobriety, regarded as stupid. As an Asian state whose expansion was proceeding apace, Japan also attracted the interest of East Asia’s reformist intellectuals. Tens of thousands of young students converged on the country from China, Korea and India, seeing it as opportunity to access modernity without the need to travel to the West. Translated into Japanese using Chinese characters, a number of modern concepts – constitution, equality, nation and philosophy – were in turn introduced into other East Asian languages. Japan was culturally much closer to them than Europe, and it was hoped that

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reproducing her policy of ‘imitation’ would help to accelerate the modernization process in their own countries. Japan also resonated with countries at the opposite end of Asia, such as Turkey and Egypt, which likewise saw her as an example of a different, non-European form of modernity. However, Japan’s modernization process was accompanied by territorial expansion. The two wars, although described as defensive, did not take place on Japanese soil but in Korea, Manchuria and the surrounding region. Behind these conflicts lay the imperialist aim of defending oneself against the expansion of the Other (particularly Russia) by proceeding in a similar manner. Wars also heightened feelings of superiority and led to a rise in Orientalist attitudes within Asia itself or rather within the territories conquered by Japan. In 1886, in a work that later became highly controversial (particularly after 1945), Yukichi Fukuzawa argued that Japan should develop closer ties with Europe and showed no solidarity with neighbouring countries ‘incapable of reform’ such as China and Korea. At an individual level, there were pan-Asianists in Japan able to provide support for exiled Asian revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen, but Asian intellectuals’ enthusiasm for the country was dampened by her hegemonic policies and growing nationalism. For instance, after his first visit to Japan in 1916, the pan-Asian, cosmopolitan Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore provocatively declared: ‘The new Japan is only an imitation of the West.’

JAPAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THE MEIJI ERA After 1945, the Meiji era became the focus of Japan’s critical confrontation with her past. Marxist historiography, which had become influential, saw the period as a transition between feudalism and a form of (semi) absolutism. The liberal social sciences underlined the absence of a bourgeois revolution and of an individualistic mindset, which was attributed to Japanese culture, or rather, tradition. The emphasis was therefore on the idea of ‘lacks’ or ‘deviations’ in relation to a ‘Western’ norm − in short, on Japan as an exception. In the 1950s, however, the period of modernization known as the Meiji Ishin began to be hailed as a success. That tendency was reinforced by the rapid regrowth of the Japanese economy and by the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security concluded between Japan and the United States, the latter being more geographically representative of the West than Europe. The Meiji period also pervaded national memory cultures at the popular level. It was recalled with nostalgia in the 1950s, and attempts were made to offset or even banish the darkness of the past, whose traces remained omnipresent, by remembering the ‘good old days’ of that era. Moreover, during the 1950s and 1960s the Japanese recovered a measure of their national pride, with 1952 marking the end of the period of occupation, the country’s accession to the United Nations in 1956 and the Japanese economic miracle. From then on, the Meiji era was no longer an object of nostalgia but was perceived as a historical success, to be repeated in the economic domain and in a peaceful manner (under the military protection of the United States). The official ceremony held to mark the centenary of the Meiji

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Restoration in 1968, the year of student revolution, was politically controversial. It was boycotted by left-wing historians, who saw it as a tool used to promote reactionary interests. That being said, the novels by the writer Shiba Ryotaro (1923– 1996) enjoyed great popularity. They depict the Meiji era up to the time of the Russo-Japanese War, presenting it as a period characterized by youthfulness and national expansion, and contrasting its ‘enlightened’ quality to the ‘darkness’ of the Showa period. These stories of Japanese national history have certainly been, and remain, more effective than academic knowledge. In this context, Asia disappeared from view; this phenomenon is confirmed, for example, by the fact that successful Japanese war films, or war films about Japan, are generally those centring on her conflicts with Russia or the United States, and not with China. The growing political and economic pressures arising from the post-Cold War context and globalization have prevailed over Japan’s optimism. Unsurprisingly, therefore, attention has once more turned to the Meiji period. At the same time, the modernity of the Edo period, which preceded it, has also been rediscovered. An era that witnessed the expansion of popular literacy, it paved the way for the rapid modernization of the Meiji period. Over the last few years, Meiji-era industrial sites, such as the Tomioka silk mill, built in 1872, have been inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The decision has triggered some controversy, as some of these factories made use of ‘forced labour’ during the Second World War, particularly in the case of Korean workers. This demonstrates how East Asian memories interconnect, extending beyond purely national contexts. It also indicates the extent to which the Meiji period is still seen as a successful move towards modernity, a modernity that Japan initially experienced but later contributed to shaping. Yet Europe − or rather the West − whether admired or rejected, has acted in turn as a role model, a background, a catalyst or a criterion for Japan’s national memory cultures and continues to do so.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Benesch, Oleg, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014. Gluck, Carol, Thinking with the Past: Japan and Modern History, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2008. Mishra, Pankaj, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia, London, Penguin, 2013. Nish, Ian (Ed.), The Iwakura Mission in America and Europe: A New Assessment, Richmond/UK, Japan Library, 1998. Souyri, Pierre-François, Moderne sans être occidental. Aux origines du Japon d’aujourd’hui, Paris, Gallimard, 2016. Weiss, Andreas, Asiaten in Europa. Begegnungen zwischen Asiaten und Europäern, 1880–1914, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016. Worringer, Renée, Ottomans Imagining Japan: East, Middle East, and Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

CHAPTER 28

Knowledge beyond Church and State WILLEM FRIJHOFF

The university, as a place of teaching and research, was not a European invention. However, Europe did create an autonomous institution that sought to transcend the Churches and States from which it originated and to become the source of transmission of her intellectual culture. The apparent paradox expressed in the name ‘the Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi’ − a very real institution − perfectly encapsulates the university’s potential as a universal realm of memory. There are three aspects to this potential. The first of these is its capacity for dissemination, the Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi being an extension of the former Paris-Sorbonne University, a source of its prestige. The second is its ability, as a historical model of higher education and research, to attract and persuade; the third is its ability to produce transnational bodies devoted to instruction and creation in the intellectual, cultural and scientific domains. Less conspicuously, that connection between the Sorbonne and Abu Dhabi is a reminder that the university as an institution originated from the Arab world, where it emerged before it was reinvented in Christian Europe.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE UNIVERSITY Before the genesis of the university in medieval Christendom, forms of higher education had existed in a large number of societies outside the Graeco-Roman world. Their standards were established and monitored by religious or temporal powers. The teaching of theology and law was just as essential for the ancient civilizations of China, India and Persia as for Israel and the Muslim world. The study hall (beit midrash) in the Temple in Jerusalem, together with similar institutions in Egypt, Mesopotamia and elsewhere, attests to the need to train scribes for work in administrations closely connected with religious institutions. The difference between these and the universities of Christian Europe is based less on academic level or educational objective than on the method used to certify knowledge. The medieval Christian university was a studium generale; the degrees awarded by these institutions had equal worth throughout Christendom, and their teachers, known as

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masters, had a universal licence to teach, known as the licentia ubique docendi. In reality, however, the constitutions of each individual establishment, local preferences for masters, doctrinal debates or an individual master’s or university’s network of influences or reputation could hinder this system. Added to these, of course, was the rivalry that existed between the studia particularia at the regional, or even local, level and those established by the religious orders for their own internal usage. The madrasas, higher schools of Islamic theology and law created in the cities of the Muslim world, were comparable to the first Christian universities. Founded in 859, the University of Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, lays claim to being the oldest in the world. Just as the first Christian universities were emerging, similar institutions were being founded in Cairo (Al-Azhar University, 975), in Tlemcen, Kairouan, Damascus, Aleppo and Baghdad – where the Al-Nizamiyyah university was established in about 1065. There cannot have been many differences between the teaching methods used in the schools of Talmudic study (yeshivas) in Córdoba, Lucena, Rouen, Narbonne and Mainz, Islamic madrasas, the imperial academies that trained Chinese Mandarins, and the arts or theology faculties of one of the emerging European universities. Neither the Islamic higher educational establishments nor the yeshivas survived their invasion by the Christian regime; this was the case, for example, with the madrasas of Moorish Spain that had been established in Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, Granada and Valencia.

THE QUEST FOR AUTONOMY As a place of instruction, therefore, the university was not a European invention. Yet its institutional form enabled it to become the hallmark, symbol and source of transmission of Europe’s intellectual culture, as it was constantly seeking ways of achieving autonomy and transcending the States and the Churches from which it originated. Two models provided the European university with the basis for its development: Bologna (established in about 1090) and Paris (1198). The colleges at Bologna were formed of associated groups of students (known as the ‘nations’), and emphasis was given to civil and canon law. The study of medicine was being developed in Montpellier during the same period. The University of Paris was formed into faculties by associations of masters, the arts and theology being the dominant disciplines. The Church exerted control over the masters through the bishops, whose decision it was to grant the licentia docendi. The history of the universities is marked by a long struggle against domination, initially by the Church and later by the state. First, the temporal powers (emperors, kings and civil authorities) took the initiative to create new universities, gradually taking control of them from the Renaissance onwards. Their structures were then fixed and the canons of knowledge established. The de-clericalization of universities opened them to a new, secular and middle-class clientele, enabling them to adjust the knowledge they imparted to suit social demands and to guarantee a more fluid transmission process. This all served as a prelude to the rise and emancipation of the exact sciences. Following the reforms and revolutions of the eighteenth century, the state claimed the monopoly

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over the management of the education system. This included universities, although it was sometimes obliged to delegate control to secondary authorities and to allow the creation of free universities – however, the latter were always monitored. The twentieth century witnessed the widespread dissemination of the European university. The mass university model was established all over the world, partly due to the emancipation of the middle classes, urbanization and the democratization of culture. The English collegiate system, created at Oxford in the twelfth century and based on the human sciences, was added to this foundational model. It established itself as a new approach, particularly across the Atlantic, where Harvard University was founded in 1636. Indeed, European-style universities were created in every locality where a state, backed by a Church, embarked on a colonizing enterprise presented as a civilizing mission. This occurred in Latin America in the sixteenth century, in English-speaking America in the seventeenth century and in Australia, Asia and Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These universities serve as realms of memory for learned culture with European roots, many assuming the role of active preservers of European cultural assets through their architecture, their libraries, their teaching practices and even their rituals. The memory of the university is more complex than the term ‘university’, with its global dimension, might suggest. Founded by Plato in Athens in 387 BCE, the Akademeia inspired the northern European university at a time when humanism was flourishing. In southern Europe, an academy was an independent association that brought together scholars and enlightened amateurs for the practice of the arts and sciences. These bodies existed alongside the universities, which remained faithful to the medieval model and were based on the supremacy of theology and law as academic disciplines. In northern Europe, conversely, the university broke new ground by appropriating the ancient model. Founded in 1502, the University of Wittenberg, soon to be closely associated with Martin Luther and the Reformation, was the first of its kind in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation to style itself as an academia. In this way, it manifested its ambition to return to an intellectual ideal and to an educational model dating back to the origins of European civilization. The academia was soon to promote the rejection of the politico-religious order in the Christian world, reviving the Classical tradition in the universities, which was expressed in the primacy of language − in other words, in the philological approach to the arts, philosophy and theology. It was only after that ideological reorientation that law and medicine, and later the social and exact sciences, were able to begin their triumphal progress in the European university system. They were subsequently followed by history itself, a later-comer to the European university syllabus.

A CONSTANT IN A TURBULENT HISTORY Aside from its members’ educational performances and academic output, the university owes much of its prestige to its venerable age, its intellectual openness and its transnational nature. These characteristics guarantee and safeguard the quality of its teaching and research. However, they also serve as justifications

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for inertia, resistance to change and lack of adaptability, even immobilism. The university’s strength can easily turn into weakness in the face of social and cultural movements. ‘Crises’ re-occurred throughout history – during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the third quarter of the twentieth century, to name just the most important examples. In France, during the Revolutionary period and the Napoleonic Empire, the university’s immobilism and weakened state provided an opportunity to dismantle the structures it had inherited from the Ancien Régime and rebuild the institution. The legitimacy of this major institutional, cultural and scientific cleansing operation was implicitly acknowledged in the Bourbon Restoration period. Yet the original names and structures of this new university remained in place, thereby confirming it as a continuation of the university systems of previous times, which had meanwhile been maintained in much of Europe.

A CENTRE FOR ENGAGEMENT University members themselves played a significant role in almost all the major revolts, revolutions and independence movements in Europe, either as politically committed intellectuals or as men of action. To use just one example, from the domain of human sciences, ‘scholasticism’, a philosophy developed by university ‘Schoolmen’, will be remembered as an enduring European influence. Initiated by Pierre Abélard (1079–1142), it attained its apogee in the works of Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274); both men were teachers at the University of Paris. Unlike Desiderius Erasmus, the iconic European intellectual of his day, Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli and Jean Calvin established new Churches, leaning heavily on their positions as university members. Having broken away from fossilized academic thought, the great intellectuals and initiators of the scientific revolution – Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume – prided themselves on their independence from the university or distanced themselves from the institution, being suspected of atheism. Yet almost all the great thinkers of the Modern Era owe much of their influence in Europe to their university positions, beginning with Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who held professorships at the universities of Königsberg and Berlin respectively. The careers of these personalities were often hampered by conformist university attitudes or by the state’s ever-tightening grip on the institution. Nevertheless, the interaction between the university as a European model and the European influence perpetuated by its most eminent members has always been one of the main factors contributing to the continuance of a sense of European identity and of its memory. After the Second World War, centrifugal movements threatened to destroy the structure of the European university, provoking considerable reaction. Participants from fifteen European countries attended the first conference of European University Rectors and Vice-Chancellors, which took place in Cambridge in 1955. A second conference, held in Dijon in 1959, saw the creation of the CRE: the Standing Conference of Rectors and Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities. In 2001, this was absorbed by the European University Association, which brought

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together forty-seven countries from Europe and its margins, including Russia and Turkey. The European University Institute, inaugurated in Florence in 1976, is an international centre that attracts leading young academics from all EU member countries. In the 1980s, keen to perpetuate the memory of European universities, the CRE commissioned a major history of universities written from the European perspective. Entitled A History of the University in Europe (1992–2004), it has been translated into several languages.

A PRESERVER OF EUROPEAN MEMORY The university prides itself on having continued to function without interruption since its creation in the Middle Ages and sees itself as the preserver of Europe’s memory. There is probably no other European institution that celebrates its continuance and the memory of its history with such constancy, self-awareness and splendour. From time immemorial, the dies natalis – the anniversary of a university’s real, legendary or mythical foundation – has been marked by an annual act of recollection and ceremonious self-celebration. The custom of celebrating twenty-fifth, fiftieth and hundredth anniversaries with much pomp – following the pattern established for jubilee years by the Roman Catholic Church – emerged in the Renaissance. On these occasions, a university affirms its eminent and specific place in society and culture through a great many academic rituals and traditional processions laden with symbolism, while cultivating its international network by inviting colleagues from other universities and conferring honorary doctorates on foreign academics. Few cultural and social institutions write and document their history with such precision; it is duly preserved in archives, historical studies and collections of commemorative works, as well as in images, medals and symbolic objects. As academics are writers by profession, their university life is frequently evoked in their reminiscences or in fictional or thinly disguised semifictional works, romans à clé or the British ‘campus novel’, many of which have been successfully adapted to television. Examples include Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night, 1935), C. P. Snow (The Masters, 1951) and Mary McCarthy (The Groves of Academe, 1952), as well as the trilogy by David Lodge (Changing Places, 1975, Small World, 1984 and Nice Work, 1988), Malcolm Bradbury’s satire The History Man (1975) and the student intrigues described by Donna Tartt in her bestseller A Secret History (1992). The university’s vocation as a European institution was strongly emphasized during the anniversaries of the two great original models, Bologna and Paris. The 900th anniversary of the University of Bologna was celebrated with dazzling pomp before an international learned assembly of scholars and university vice-chancellors. On 18 September 1988, the Magna Charta Universitatum was formally signed to commemorate the event. This document defines the four founding principles of the European university: autonomy, the primacy of pedagogical activity, freedom in research and training (the historical principle of libertas philosophandi, guaranteed by the forum privilegiatum, could even extend to the right to asylum) and the preservation of the European humanist tradition; the universities regard themselves as the trustee of that tradition while maintaining ‘a constant care to attain universal

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knowledge’. In a declaration made on 25 May 1998, on the occasion of its eight hundredth anniversary, the Sorbonne University in Paris initiated the creation of the European Higher Education Area, completed in 2010 and intended to harmonize the architecture of the European higher education system.

FROM THE UNIVERSITAS TO THE UNIVERSITY The memory of the University is strongly connected to its name. After periods characterized by wavering or by the use of alternative terms (academy, grande école, vocational college or institute), the name ‘university’ has now come back in force. This may have been influenced by the United States, where it serves as a generic term for any school or academic establishment offering higher education. The name is also applied to distance learning institutions such as the Open University, the political ‘summer universities’ or curiosities such as the Hamburger University founded by McDonald’s in 1961. Historically, the term universitas simply referred to the association of a group of individuals within a community or a corporation who were bound by a common interest. Examples include the universitas civium or burgensium − the middle-class community of a town − and the universitas mercatorum, an association of merchants. Originally, universitas did not refer to an establishment devoted to teaching and research but to the association of those involved in administration and teaching activities within the studium. However, in the early thirteenth century, the term began to appear everywhere at once as a way of denoting groups brought together by the same educational interests. These include the universitas scholarium of Vicenza in 1206, the universitas magistrorum of Paris in 1208, the universitas professorum of Bologna in 1215 and the universitas medicorum of Montpellier in 1220. In 1215, there were references to the universitas magistrorum et scholarium in Paris; this underlined the association between masters and students, based on their shared interests, thereby erasing the original meaning of universitas. The structure of the university developed through the adoption of that specific term, which was added to the multiple existing designations: schools, colleges, courses and professors. All came to be incorporated into that unique word, which characterizes the institution and soon served as a framework for its memory; any institution that based itself on one of the two original models, Paris or Bologna, was a university. Each university attuned itself to these models, bringing together masters and students, faculties and colleges, a constitution with detailed regulations regarding working practices, administration and disciplinary matters, and a governing board composed either of masters or of other suppôts de l’université – in other words, any official members of the institution, whether undergraduate or doctoral students, masters, full professors or simply officials. These structures became an inherent part of the memory of the university. The current mass influx of professional university administrators and managers with a background in policy implementation, public administration or the private sector, but with no organic connection to the university as an institution, has therefore prompted fierce and widespread criticism. This has been accompanied

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by student strikes and occasionally by assaults, which is precisely what occurred in the Middle Ages. State intervention was already evident in the eighteenth century. During that era, governments were anxious to develop their administrations and close national borders. The Prussian state created a demand for teaching posts and established notarial practice and public administration examinations, while public service entrance examinations were introduced in Denmark and Sweden in 1736 and 1759 respectively. National systems of accreditation were also established, such as the Agrégation, introduced in France in 1766. In some cases, governments even imposed new disciplines (such as the administrative sciences – Cameralwissenschaften − introduced at the universities of Halle and Frankfurt an der Oder in 1727), as well as pedagogical systems specific to a particular country. Moreover, all Churches, without exception, were always suspicious of university autonomy and strove to impose their own control over teaching or over entry into the pedagogical professions. State intervention in the management, financing and governance of universities is now a Europe-wide phenomenon. The reasons for this are both negative (the need to reduce the deficits caused by publicly funded higher education) and positive (the intention being to promote excellence, mobility and international cooperation).

CREATING THE NARRATIVE The university emerged as a European realm of memory in the sixteenth century. The history of universities has been a subject of study since the Modern Era, accompanied by an in-depth reflection on its essence. It was even one of the first forms of historical study itself, in its modern conception, although it was not exempt from collective prejudices or propagandist inclinations and sometimes fell prey to nationalist ambitions. Yet the need to return to sources had already been felt, together with the importance of treating the university’s historical development in as accurate and neutral a manner as possible. The first historians of the universities were well aware of the European university’s place within a global cultural tradition encompassing the whole of human civilization. Keen to accentuate the close link between Antiquity and their own time, the humanists even created a formal historical narrative on the subject. In 1567, Jacob Middendorp, Rector of the University of Cologne, published his famous, pioneering catalogue, De celebrioribus universi terrarum orbis academiis. An authentic list of universities, this was an authoritative document with a broad scope. It showed that many institutions similar to universities had existed in the Mediterranean region during the age of Classical Antiquity. Well before the arrival of Christianity, Beirut, Memphis, Heliopolis, Babylon, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Athens, Corinth, Rome and Constantinople, together with other localities, all had centres devoted to higher education under local governance. Some historians had no hesitation in dating the origins of the university back to the post-diluvian time of Noah. In his inaugural lecture, De Providentia Dei singulari circa Academiarum incrementum (1650), Henricus Flockenius went so far as to date the university system back to the ‘domestic academy’ that Adam, the first man, would have held in his home. There is an obvious conclusion to draw from this; the university is

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the basic institution of all humankind, regardless of nation, religion, language or race, and the expansion of this system forms part of human development and of a continuous tradition of recollection.

COUNTERING CHRISTIAN DIVISIONS The memory of a university network coextensive with Christian Europe is a Renaissance creation that does not correspond to history itself. By affirming the originality and continuity of its cultural memory, that creation banished memories of the ruptures that had torn the Christian world apart; these had resulted first from the Muslim invasion of the Christian East in the fifteenth century and later from the confessional divisions caused by the Reformation and the emergence of Lutheranism, Anglicanism and Calvinism. The university world had been particularly affected by these ruptures as the new Churches were religions of the word of God, founded by university members who favoured biblical studies and theological reflection. New criteria had to be found to emphasize the unity of the university system as a way of countering these divisions within the institution. Accordingly, in 1554, Wolfgang Justus, a professor of medicine at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder who witnessed these divisions for himself, based his argument on the standard of teaching as opposed to institutional criteria, making no distinction between universities in the strict sense of the word (academiae) and other ‘illustrious schools’. He dated the European university system back to ancient Rome, whose university had been born ‘on the ruins of that of Athens’, seeking a continuity in that system through the enduring use of Classical writings and the dissemination of ancient models throughout Christendom. According to Justus, Theodosius the Great had founded the University of Bologna in 432; another university had been created in Salisbury (Old Sarum) in England during the time of King Arthur in 470, which was followed by the foundation of the University of Cambridge by King Sigebert of East Anglia in 630. In his view, the modern system had been established by Charlemagne’s ‘transfer of learning’ from Rome to Paris in 792. The principle governing that translatio studii was to become a leitmotiv, a constantly recurring theme linked to the memory of university history. In the Modern Era, it served to justify claims of superiority over the universities of Southern Europe made by the Protestant universities of the North. The former were far more numerous but had remained Catholic and were consequently perceived as backward and working in the interests of the papacy. Today, in the twenty-first century, that leitmotiv relates to the transfer of the intellectual centre of gravity from Europe to North America and then to the re-appearance, in its turn, of the Americanized model in Europe.

A WAVE OF REFORMS Eighteenth-century Enlightenment sovereigns sought to remedy the university’s inertia, to overcome its traditionalism or simply to improve it through new courses or approaches. University teaching in southern and eastern regions of Europe underwent unexpected new developments. In 1714, following the fall of

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Catalonia, the Spanish Crown suppressed all its universities, replacing them with a new, government-controlled institution in the small town of Cervera. In 1724, Peter the Great created a completely new structure in the form of an institution at Saint Petersburg that combined a learned academy with a university. In 1729, Victor Amadeus of Savoy reformed the entire university system in Piedmont by adjusting the supply of university graduates to match government requirements and by creating new training courses for engineers, surgeons and civil servants. George I, King of Great Britain and Elector of Hanover, opened a groundbreaking university at Göttingen in 1737. The renown it achieved reflected the success of the response to the demand for university graduates. A number of countries participated in this wave of reforms: Portugal (1759), Spain (1769), Poland (1773), Austria (1774-1777), Naples (1777), Prussia (1779) and Russia (1782). They gave rise to the concept of the purely vocational educational institution, such as the Hohe Karlsschule, established in Stuttgart in 1781; indeed, the word ‘university’ was not even included in its title. In this way, the radical upheaval of the educational system by the French Conventionnels, who in 1793 and 1794 replaced the universities with a few discipline-specific grandes écoles, was simply the culmination of a long, critical period during which the very concept of the university became blurred, while its memory lost much of its European pertinence. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the university’s revival. Two university networks emerged in Europe and, by extension, elsewhere; the first of these comprised public (secular) and confessional institutions, the second, public and private. This re-invigorated university supported the rapid rise of the so-called hard sciences that were to shape modern societies, claiming its place in the collective memory as a contributor to the birth of the modern scientific era. The innovative character of the university lay in the autonomous nature of its research. The two original models, Bologna and Paris, were founded on the primacy of teaching activities. Research was initiated in the Middle Ages purely as an aspect of the educational system and subsequently developed into a personal activity pursued by the masters. During the sixteenth century, autonomous research became an imperative that was gradually incorporated into the system. Developments in university disciplines involved the biomedical domain (plant sciences, surgical science, anatomy, zoology, pharmaceutical science, odontology, veterinary medicine, etc.), the hard sciences, which had freed themselves from the Arts faculty (physics, chemistry and astronomy), and the technical disciplines, which attained the level of technologies (engineering, mining, hydraulics and architecture). Eventually, they came to include public administrative and management sciences, which were emerging in those eighteenth-century states that were developing bureaucratic structures, at least in localities where universities were not engulfed in Roman Law, as with Spain and Italy. Two new teaching and research models arose in the early 1800s. Created to serve the state, the Bonapartist ‘Imperial’ university (1808) took the form of an entire administrative structure and provided education at every level. This new educational model also included the grandes écoles that prefigured the great specialist universities. During the same period, in 1810, the king of Prussia founded a new

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autonomous university in Berlin, at the initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was inspired by the theories of Friedrich Schleiermacher but had also been able to benefit from the educational policies of the Enlightenment. Although dedicated to academic study and research (Forschung), it was also intended to provide a complete general and cultural education (Bildung). As the nineteenth century progressed, the Humboldtian model, with its research seminars, came to conquer the European university landscape. Despite its inevitable shortcomings, its success revealed the extent of the need for a new standard common to all European universities which would transcend the purely national functions that had dominated their operations. In the twentieth century – in Europe, but more manifestly still in the United States – its development culminated in a fundamental distinction between universities and research institutes, the latter requiring a level of funding that exceeds the resources normally available to universities. Nevertheless, in every continent, the extraordinary rise of the ‘hard’ and medical sciences during the twentieth century, together with the development of a huge range of institutes, courses, disciplines, approaches and subjects, occurred both within institutional frameworks and within the tradition governing the memory of the European university, even in prominent countries with their own centuries-old scientific traditions, such as China and Japan.

A MASCULINE TRADITION The university prides itself on its mission to universalize knowledge, a vocation expressed in its very name. However, its radius of action and its memory have always had their boundaries. The original university with its unmarried clerics (the dramatic story of Abélard and Héloïse comes to mind) long remained a closed, male world reserved for professional scholars. This deliberately excluded amateurs, dilettantes, autodidacts – and women. Amateur scholars met at learned societies and academies privately founded by benefactors, corporations or interest groups. Their link with the university was purely convivial in character, these societies bringing together amateurs and professionals in the shared pursuit of artistic and scientific practices and research. In the Modern Era, this broad, diverse community was known as ‘the Republic of Letters’ and functioned alongside the university, which it partially encompassed. It enabled those who were excluded from the university for religious, political or even academic reasons, or who remained marginal figures in one way or another, to become a part of that world within the limits then deemed appropriate and socially acceptable. Those forgotten, excluded or under-represented groups included women. It was only in the late nineteenth century that universities, intellectuals and governments managed to overcome their political or pseudo-scientific prejudices regarding female intellectual inferiority or gender inequality. Initially admitted as students, or to hear lectures as guest auditors, women very gradually succeeded in obtaining teaching posts in the early twentieth century. Hampered by its emphatically male tradition, the university continues to see its history, values and academic achievements as a valiant adventure lived by men, despite contributions made by women such as Marie Curie, who in 1906 became the Sorbonne’s first female professor. This lack

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is particularly strange, given that the excellence of the virtuous woman and the ideal of the learned female, embodied by Christine de Pisan, has been a European cultural topos since Giovanni Boccaccio’s homage, De claris mulieribus (ca. 1360). Lampooned in 1672 in a famous play by Molière, the figure of the femme savante was also celebrated, during the same period, by François Poullain de La Barre in L’Éducation des dames (1674), which followed on from his address De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673). Yet a few pioneering female figures emerged in the seventeenth century, among them the pious, multilingual Anna Maria van Schurman, who attended theology lectures at the University of Utrecht, Venetian-born Elena Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree (Padua, 1678), and Laura Bassi, who graduated from Bologna University with a physics degree in 1732 and then went on to teach at the same university.

COLLECTIVE MEMORIES OF EDUCATIONAL TRAVEL: THE STUDENTS’ EUROPE Over the centuries, intellectual exchanges have taken various forms, all of which have contributed to the creation of a shared European memory. From the earliest days of the university’s founding, itinerant teachers and students of slender means − relying, for instance, on study grants – journeyed along established routes that are now embedded in the collective memory. Known as the clerici vagantes, they have been immortalized in Carl Orff ’s Carmina Burana and were part of a transnational community of clerics, teachers, jurists and doctors. As material difficulties eased, more structured itineraries were followed and became fixed within the shared memory. In the Renaissance, the peregrinatio academica began to assume the form of a Grand Tour, incorporating universities in several countries. Participants embarked on the Tour in order to have classes with a renowned master, to receive a degree from a famous university or to perfect their studies – ‘to discover languages, countries, religions, history, customs and great men’ (Thomas Erpenius, 1621). The Grand Tour became a key element in the development of northern European political and academic elites. It gave rise to the tradition of the ars apodemica (advice on the art of travel) and the publication of several travel narratives or manuals. These guides took travellers on an intellectual voyage of discovery through the Europe of shared recollection, beginning with the obligatory visits to the Pont du Gard, the amphitheatre at Orange and Roman antiquities, those ancient sites of memory. The Grand Tour was one of various other forms of movement that took place within the European university framework. This was a space forged by the academic job market, both national and international, by the networks of the great religious orders, such as the Jesuits, by the book market operating in the large fairs at Lyon, Frankfurt and Leipzig and in Europe’s publishing capitals (Paris, Venice, Geneva and later Amsterdam, known by eighteenth-century booksellers as ‘the world’s shop’), by the correspondence conducted through the ‘Republic of Letters’ and by the scholarly sociability fostered in the academies. Yet it is student mobility that has played the most significant role in the university’s development as a truly European institution,

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with its enduring continuity and strong presence in the collective memory. Students travelled to any locality whose university was known for its excellence, where life was good, not too expensive, offered tantalizing extra-curricular activities and pleasures were easily accessible. The reputations created in this way have played a key role in constructing the world of European universities. Generally speaking, there have always been two patterns to these student movements. One was the move from north to south; this involved students from the English-speaking, Germanic, Scandinavian and Baltic countries moving to the Mediterranean lands − the cradle of ancient civilization and humanism. The other was a move from east to west, students from Central and Eastern Europe moving to countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean, which were renowned as centres of literary, medical and scientific innovation. Students from southern regions rarely crossed the Alps or the Pyrenees for cultural as well as religious reasons. These general movements continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a stronger emphasis on the east–west direction. In creating its Erasmus Programme (the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, 1987), and its mobility grant system, the European Commission sought to homogenize student mobility within Europe, alongside the construction of the European Higher Education Area. The scheme is named after the humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1469–1536); an icon of cosmopolitanism and mobility in the cause of scholarship, his intellectual career, travels, publications and correspondence highlight the major centres of learning of his day.

TOWARDS THE COMMODIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE? The latter half of the twentieth century was characterized by the irruption of the American higher education model on the European university scene. Set to dominate the global university landscape in the twenty-first century, the American university is fundamentally distinct from its older European sister, despite its name, its origins and the importance it accords to the human sciences. The European university landscape now in the process of Americanization is characterized, according to the historian Christophe Charle, by commodification, ‘managerization’ and massification, the decline of academic autonomy, the rise of competitive tendering and a huge increase in insecurity. Through the concerted action of national governments, the financial oligarchy and self-proclaimed experts, that accumulation of phenomena has placed the age-old European university model under huge pressure. Although not everything can be ascribed to American cultural dominance, the pre-eminence of the economic perspective, which turns knowledge into merchandise, research into productive performance, students into clients and the university into a business, is certainly attributable to the predominance of the New World. We could add to this the intellectual conformity and anglicization that are now being imposed on culture and are jeopardizing the cosmopolitan openness of the European university. Let us hope that the collective memory of the university, combined with its chronic

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shortage of funds, which intensifies demands, will trigger a reawakening and a return to the original model that has so often been Europe’s strength. We should not, however, return to a situation that was equally characterized by three forms of discrimination, based on different intelligences, social background and gender.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Babel, Rainer and Werner Paravicini (Eds.), Grand Tour. Adeliges Reisen und europäische Kultur vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, Ostfildern, Thorbecke, 2005. Bettahar, Yamina and Marie-Jeanne Choffel-Mailfert (Eds.), Les Universités au risque de l’histoire: principes, configurations, modèles, Nancy, Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2014. Charle, Christophe and Jacques Verger, Histoire des universités, XIIe −XXIe siècle, Paris, PUF, 2012. Jílek, Lubor (Ed.), Historical Compendium of European Universities / Répertoire historique des universités européenes, Geneva, CRE, 1984. Rüegg, Walter (Ed.), A History of the University in Europe, 3 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992–2004. Weber, Wolfgang E. J., Geschichte der europäischen Universität, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 2002.

CHAPTER 29

The language of opera PHILIPP THER

Born in Europe, opera has long been perceived here as a national art and has sometimes been the focus of nationalistic confrontations. In previous times, Verdi was performed in French to audiences in France, while Wagner was sung in Italian in Rome. New York’s Metropolitan Opera then decided that all operas presented there should be performed in their original language, enabling this European art to assume a universal character. ‘Nothing is more European than opera!’1 This declaration, made by José Manuel Barroso at a conference in Vienna in 2013, when he was president of the European Commission, elevated this musical art to the ranks of a European realm of memory. At a time when the euro is in crisis and the single currency is close to collapsing, taking the European Union with it, culture can act as a bonding agent and the opera as a basis of shared identity. But to what extent is opera genuinely European? Guides to the opera reveal that the world of musical drama is subdivided into national traditions. That development emerged in the eighteenth century, which witnessed the establishment, alongside the Italian opera, of the French musical theatre, the Spanish zarzuela, and, for a time at least, the English Beggar’s Opera and the German Singspiel.

THE WAR OF THE OPERAS The emphasis on the national character of operas took on another, more political dimension in the mid-nineteenth century. The coexistence of different traditions, mutually enriching in the spirit of Romanticism, changed into a situation of cultural conflict when the ‘war of the operas’ broke out. Its repercussions were certainly felt. These included the outrage triggered by the Parisian production of Tannhäuser in 1861, Wagner’s jeering after the victory over the French (1870–1) and the ensuing two-decade boycott of his works by Paris and Milan, the revenge exacted by the Berlin public on Camille Saint-Saëns during his tour of Central Europe in 1885 and the revenge on those reprisals exacted by the francophile public in Prague, who loudly acclaimed Saint-Saëns at the city’s National Theatre. Conflict also broke out in Eastern Europe. The image of the king and court of Poland presented in A Life for the Tsar (renamed Ivan Susanin in the Soviet era) by Russian composer Mikhail

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Glinka was deemed so provocative by Moscow audiences that they began to shout ‘Down with the Poles!’ and all but stormed the stage.2 The incident was triggered less by the fact that Glinka had juxtaposed Russian and Polish musical styles and more by the political context – the failure of the insurrection of November 1863 in the Russian section of partitioned Poland. It was not until the late nineteenth century that this nationalistic phase in opera history gave way to a Europeanized outlook. Evidence of this shift may be found at various levels – in the work of set designers, the focus on music and the importance accorded to conductors, the development of repertoire exchanges and the emergence of music tourism. At this point we should note that all national opera traditions are in fact ‘inventions’, as understood by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger − in other words, invented traditions in which music critics and scholars have played a major role. Furthermore, the programmes became more diverse in the 1890s, giving rise to a standard European repertoire. However, a national tradition endured until the mid-twentieth century; in Italy, France and Germany, operas were almost always translated into the languages of those countries.

AMERICAN MEDIATION New York’s Metropolitan Opera intervened at this point. The construction of this establishment had been sponsored by wealthy patrons such as the Vanderbilt, Roosevelt and Astor families. It was inaugurated in 1883, when it engaged an Italian ensemble. This was followed, in 1884, by a group of German singers and then, in 1891, by another Italian ensemble. By 1895, New York audiences had had enough of hearing Wagner in Italian and Verdi in German. Accordingly, the Met engaged two full ensembles and, at the beginning of the next century, a French choir. That enabled the two stars who conducted the orchestra, Arturo Toscanini and Gustav Mahler, attracted by the Met’s reputation and by much higher pay than was offered in Europe, to present works in their respective national languages. One might at first sight see this phenomenon as a new form of focusing on opera’s national traditions. However, New York effectively became the only locality where European diversity could be expressed in operatic performances. In 1897, that multilingual approach was exported to London by Jewish impresario Maurice Grau, who managed both the Met and Covent Garden, and it became the established practice in the Old Continent after the war. If, like José Manuel Barroso, we want to emphasize opera’s European character, we should not forget the role of cultural enlightener played by the Metropolitan Opera, which fully deserves its name. Opera also began to expand in South America, the Eastern Mediterranean area and the European colonies in the nineteenth century, a development that has had a lasting effect. However, in China as in Australia, it has almost always been regarded as a European musical genre. It is only through that more expansive, global vision that opera’s historical links with Europe are revealed.

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NOTES 1. Quoted in Wiener Zeitung, 4 April 2013: http:​/​/www​​.wien​​erzei​​tung.​​at​/na​​chric​​hten/​​ kultu​​r​/meh​​r​_kul​​tur​/5​​36879​​_Oper​​nfan-​​Barro​​so​-wa​​rnt​-v​​or​-K​u​​lturk​​uerzu​​ngen.​​html. 2. This episode was related by a brother of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, who in turn recounted it in a letter to the composer. Quoted from Handbuch der russischen und sowjetischen Oper by Sigrid Neef (Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1985), p. 193.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Stachel, Peter and Philipp Ther (Eds.), Wie europäisch ist die Oper? Die Geschichte des Musiktheaters als Zugang zu einer kulturellen Topographie Europas, Vienna, Böhlau, 2009.

CHAPTER 30

Hollywood and Europe, memory and film BRUCE F. KAWIN

Hollywood is a major purveyor of images that fuel the global imaginary and collective memory. Yet this American industry grew out of the immigration from Europe that took place in the first half of the twentieth century. The films that Europeans helped to make in Hollywood, which often drew on their memories of Europe and built on the cinematic styles they had practised there, were sites of memory for the film-makers and remain sites for filmgoers today – because movies can both preserve and invent images of the past, are essential components of world memory and are themselves remembered as elements of their times. With its silver and black surface, the Daguerreotype was once called ‘the mirror with a memory’. It was as if a photograph could remember what had faced the camera, what the plate had been exposed to. In today’s digital cameras, images (sometimes with sound) are recorded on a ‘memory card’. Memory is built into the concept of film, and film – on a reel, in a camera or in a projector – is the basis of cinema even if newer media, such as digital video, are now performing film’s original functions of recording, preserving and displaying images. A photograph preserves an image of the past, whether what is presented to the camera is fiction or an actual event. An example of fiction is the movie Casablanca (1942, United States), an example of an actual event is the video footage of the collapse of the World Trade Center. But there are factual elements in many photographed fictions. In Casablanca, for instance, Humphrey Bogart, playing Rick, says to Ingrid Bergman, playing Ilsa, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’ (He says it twice, midway through the film and at the end.) The image of Ilsa’s face (the fiction) is an image of Ingrid Bergman (the reality), a beautiful woman beautifully lit, an actress who was posed on an American set and photographed in 1942. She was alive when the film ran through the camera and the tape ran through the tape recorder. Now she is dead, as Bogart is, along with virtually all of the people who made that movie. Looking at the shot, we see the living Bergman. We imagine Ilsa based on this image of the woman who plays her and the script that puts her in this imaginary situation, the lighting that communicates how she feels, the direction that helps to shape her performance and the black-and-white image with its then-standard

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4:3 ratio of width to height that dates the movie as having originated in the early sound period (late 1920s to early 1950s) before colour and the wide screen became dominant. The dialogue, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ puts into words what Rick is doing within the fiction and what we in the audience are doing in the theatre or the living room: looking at her, at the imaginary Ilsa and the living Ingrid Bergman, a dead woman, the memory of whom has been captured by the cinema, by the camera, by film. She is dead now, but the film lets us see her as she once was; it remembers her as if it were a consciousness. It attests to her existence as if it were a document. It records the actress while generating an illusion of the character. As the emulsion of the film preserves an image of Bergman, allowing us to see her alive again, it also functions as a lieu de mémoire: a place for a memory of her, of Bergman and Ilsa and the war that was imagined this way in the middle of the real war. Remembering Casablanca allows us to see the past through the memory of film, but it also encourages us to imagine the past as the moviemakers have crafted it. Some people remember the Second World War as it was framed for them in Casablanca, even if they were alive during the actual war. Some people who have heard about the Holocaust but were born after it construct the Holocaust from movies about it, both fictitious and factual. A movie like Schindler’s List (1993, United States) may suggest to them how it felt to be in a concentration camp, generating emotions and images with the aid of actors, sets and scripted scenes. Most people can grasp a situation better when they are told a story, true or not. One can learn about the past in a different way from a documentary such as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955, France), which presents the camps factually and confronts the problem of remembering what happened there. The man who wrote Night and Fog, Jean Cayrol, lost his memory on the train taking him to Auschwitz, then managed to reconstruct it. Later he wrote for Resnais the greatest of all fiction films on the subject of true and false history, lying and remembering: Muriel, or the Time of a Return (1963, France). In Night and Fog the narrator brings up the difficulty of finding an adequate image and the related difficulty of comprehending what that image records and implies: the image, for example, of a pile of hair taken from women at Auschwitz, a huge pile that the camera tilts upward to photograph but that extends out of the frame. That is an image of attempting to comprehend an incomprehensible horror. This pile of hair, remembered on film, is presented to us to keep in memory. Because film is a memory machine. Film makes it possible for us to remember the past by viewing a record of what was before the camera: an actor, a non-actor, a drawing or a 3D model (in the case of animation), a set, an actual place, a jump, a dance, an enacted chase or killing, an embrace. One can make a movie to capture the past or to invent something that never happened. One can make a movie based on a memory, reconstructing a remembered world on a set, and what happens or is made to happen on that set can be a fiction or a rigorous attempt to represent the past. In this way a fantasy can, on film, become an event, and a memory of a filmed fictitious event can be considered one type of false memory.

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A movie can immerse us in a false memory or a true one or an integration of fact and fiction. To return briefly to films about the Holocaust, Son of Saul (2015, Hungary) is a fiction about a revolt that actually did take place at Auschwitz. It remembers the revolt for us but makes up the characters and shows us actors. It makes us think its events are happening now, as we watch them. A memory can make us feel that the past is happening again. By enacting a historical event in a movie, film-makers can turn facts into actions that we can remember seeing – that is into memories that are almost ours. Or that affect our sense of history. Consider how much of the past we know about because we have seen it in movies. Many of us imagine the long-vanished French court as it was dramatized by Dumas and the films made from his novels. Many visualize the Depression the way the movies did. We know almost nothing about the African American cowboys not because there weren’t any but because of the way Hollywood makes Westerns. (Furthermore, Hollywood may have made so many Westerns in order to invent or at least embellish an American history or national memory that had no relation to or dependence on European history.) To a great degree, we live in a world of texts that may exist alongside memory, be interwoven with it or replace it. Part of the desire to see a film is the desire to see the past. Movies set in the past have a place in memory but are usually recognized as fictions. When a movie treats a subject that we have experienced in our own lives, we may say that we went through something like what the movie showed – but what it showed does not become a personal memory. If anything, we have a personal memory of seeing the movie. Our sense of the past is made partly of what we remember and partly of what we learn, hear, believe, disbelieve, imagine, forget and so on; it is a mosaic, some of whose tiles are fictions. Nevertheless, so much of the last 125 years has been preserved on film that we may say that film remembers it for us and makes it easier for us to remember. To the extent that an event recorded on film is a kind of memory, or at the very least material for memory, a film whose story, characters and dialogue are made up is a false memory. But there can be truth in a lie, and a fiction film can be based on real, personal memories. This is particularly clear in the case of those twentieth-century European film-makers who found work in Hollywood, because their American films often reflected what they remembered of Europe and of European film-making techniques and because we remember much of the century when we remember these film-makers and their work. In short, memory and time are inherent in most films, but in the case of these film-makers memory was politically, socially, personally and artistically urgent. Thus these people and their films offer a resonant occasion to observe and consider memory in the cinema, both in the nature of film and in film history. An anonymous but probably true story about German-speaking directors in Hollywood comes from the early sound period. One of these immigrant directors instructed his crew that the shot they were preparing should be photographed ‘mit out sound’ – because the Germans and Austrians were famous for their use of the moving camera and their other purely visual achievements in the silent film, and in

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the early sound period it was difficult to move the camera and record sound at the same time. More could be done with the camera when shooting silent. The camera assistant then abbreviated the expression the director had used and wrote ‘M.O.S.’ on the slate. In Hollywood, to this day, MOS means ‘silent’ and indicates a silent shot, scene or reel. The film-maker in this story didn’t just prefer shooting silent; he remembered it. Beginning in 1933, when Hitler decreed that no Jew could work in the German film industry, many of the Europeans who moved to Hollywood were fleeing the Nazis. Most of those who came earlier, such as Paul Fejos from Hungary and F. W. Murnau and Paul Leni from Germany, had been recruited by American studios and producers based on the quality of their work. Carl Laemmle, the producer who ran Universal, was born in Germany and admired the work done at Ufa (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft), the immense German studio where psychological lighting, the moving camera and completely controlled filming environments reached their peak in the 1920s, often referred to as the Golden Age of German cinema. Beginning in the mid-1920s, Laemmle brought Austrian and German filmmakers to Hollywood so that they could make their kind of movies for Universal. Some of these movies, like Paul Fejos’s moving and entertaining romance, Lonesome (1928, United States), were produced by his son, Carl Laemmle Jr., who went on to produce Frankenstein (1931, United States), Dracula (1931, United States) and many other films. Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (1935, United States) are particularly important because of their Expressionist lighting, strongly influenced by German studio work, and the film-makers who had been born in England and worked on them, notably the director, James Whale; the star, Boris Karloff; and the art director, Charles D. Hall. (Colin Clive, who played Dr Frankenstein, had British parents but was born in France.) Hall, who was responsible for the cobwebbed staircase in Castle Dracula and the huge laboratory in Bride of Frankenstein, also designed the sets for most of the Hollywood features made by another Englishman, Charles Chaplin. At Universal, as art director on two features directed by Paul Leni, The Cat and the Canary (1927, United States) and The Man Who Laughs (1928, United States), Hall brought German/Austrian set design to Hollywood. Leni taught the cinematographer on those films, Gilbert Warrenton, how to use light and shadow much as they had been used at Ufa, where Leni had co-directed Waxworks (1924, Germany). One of the stars of Waxworks had been Conrad Veidt, the killer in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Germany) and the star of The Man Who Laughs. If one compares the lighting and design of Universal’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925, United States) with those of the later The Cat and the Canary and The Man Who Laughs, it is clear that the later movies reflected Ufa practice far more than did The Phantom of the Opera. The Leni films and the Universal horror films that followed established Hollywood’s own brand of Expressionism. Among the most outstanding examples of Hollywood Expressionism were The Mummy (1932, United States), made at Universal, and Mad Love (1935, United States), made at MGM. Both were directed by the great German cinematographer Karl Freund, who had controlled the moving camera in The Last Laugh (1924,

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Germany) and had shot Dracula for Universal. Mad Love was a remake of The Hands of Orlac (1924, Germany), which had been directed by Robert Wiene and had starred Conrad Veidt as a pianist who is given the hands of a murderer after his own are destroyed in a train wreck. Working with his memories of this movie, Freund remade Orlac’s story but with an emphasis on his insane doctor, played by Peter Lorre in his first American role. Freund also worked with memories of Frankenstein – but this time had Colin Clive be the one assembled rather than the doctor. Linking German and American influences the way Freund did is an example of how European and American styles were integrated in 1930s Hollywood, a time in which the film-makers learned from each other and learned to work together. By the mid-1950s, however, when too many Hollywood films had become formulaic and expensive, such innovative European movements as the New Wave developed in opposition to Hollywood. To take an extreme example of divergence, in the same year that Resnais experimented with the subjective flashback in Hiroshima mon amour (1959, France), a Hollywood studio released a linear and incredibly bad adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1959, United States), dismissing all the novel’s experiments with time and consciousness and saying, in a press release from the screenwriters, that they could not be adapted to film. Ironically, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and The Wild Palms strongly influenced French directors Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard when they were translated into French in the 1950s. But to return: with its violence, its chiaroscuro, its reflexivity and its immersion in the theme of madness, Mad Love was a superb horror film; it also addressed the nature of art and the madness of not being able to tell the difference between reality and illusion. It was a resonant example of how a European film-maker remade – and improved – a European film in Hollywood, using all the resources of a major American studio and preparing the way for the dark, romantic and dangerous worlds of film noir as well as of the best of the later horror films, such as those produced by Val Lewton at RKO in the 1940s. Even if Mad Love was set in a phony France (Americans and Europeans often worked together on transparently artificial versions of Europe, like the town of Visaria in Universal’s monster movies or like Lubitsch’s Monte Carlo, as well as on convincing ones), Freund brought his memories of German horror and of his own achievements in cinematography at Ufa to life in Hollywood in ways that created a new kind of horror film that was vastly influential and inseparably American and German. While directing Mad Love, Freund taught many of his techniques to Gregg Toland, who co-shot that film and who is best known for shooting Citizen Kane (1941, United States), a film that strongly reflects the integration of European and American visual aesthetics. Although film historians often concentrate on what directors bring to their films and how they influence each other, there is a far stronger chain of influence among cinematographers, who often train each other and advise directors what to do. Freund taught Toland, who advised Orson Welles on Kane, after which Welles trained Stanley Cortez, the B-movie cinematographer who shot The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, United States) in a manner that echoed Toland’s work on Kane. This is one of the most effective ways that European film-making

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techniques found their way into Hollywood practice, with the result that American film lighting, design and camerawork became even more richly expressive. Laemmle was not the only producer to bring Europeans to Hollywood. William Fox (whose company predated 20th Century Fox) hired screenwriter Carl Mayer and director F. W. Murnau from Ufa, where they had made such films as The Last Laugh and put them to work on the romantic melodrama Sunrise (1927, United States), which was strongly reminiscent of the work they had done in Germany, particularly in its acting, story, camerawork and design. Mayer wrote Sunrise before leaving Germany, with no influence from the American studio, and his script called for effects and camera movements the Americans did not yet know how to do, as in the shot in which the moving camera, hung from an overhead track, follows a married man as he goes to meet his lover at night. Before dying in a car accident in California, Murnau also directed City Girl (1930, United States) for Fox, a film homaged in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978, United States). The visual and emotional power of Sunrise, which was shot by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (for which they won the first Academy Award for cinematography), recreated in Hollywood – and endorsed as artistically viable there – the fluid and psychologically rich moving camera for which Murnau had become famous in Germany. But the story of Hollywood’s European-born film-makers begins long before Laemmle and Fox hired some of them in the late silent period and long before Hitler. The first established European film-maker to move to America was Alice Guy, the first woman to make films. She had worked for Gaumont in Paris, first as a secretary and then, in 1897, as a film-maker. She made hundreds of shorts before she married an Englishman named Herbert Blaché and moved with him to America. She founded a studio, Solax, in New Jersey in 1910 and directed over ninety films there. After her divorce from the unfaithful and relatively unimaginative Blaché, she closed the studio and returned to France in 1922. Other early arrivals included Erich von Stroheim, Frank Capra and Charles Chaplin, none of whom was a film-maker when he came to the United States. Chaplin, who came to America in 1910 as a member of a British stage troupe (another member was Stan Laurel), based many of his films on his memories of London. Indeed, Chaplin’s sets and plots are representative examples of how European memory helped to forge the movies’ pictures of America and the life in its cities. He directed films in Hollywood from 1914 to 1952, when he became a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee and lived thereafter in Europe. Frank Capra, who was born in Sicily and whose family moved to New York when he was six, began directing in the early 1920s, making narrative films about American politics and society that were both critical and idealistic, such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939, United States). He also directed a set of Second World War documentaries, Why We Fight (1942–3, United States). Another Italian who became a major film artist in the United States was the RKO cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who shot some of the greatest horror films and noirs, including Cat People (1942, United States) and Out of the Past (1947, United States). Both of those were directed by Jacques Tourneur, who had come from France as a child with

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his father, director Maurice Tourneur, in 1913. Maurice’s most famous silent films were The Blue Bird (1919, United States) and Treasure Island (1920, United States). Stroheim, who was born in Vienna and gave himself the ‘von’ joined the industry in 1914 as a bit player for D. W. Griffith. On Intolerance (1916, United States) he was an assistant director, and he acted in the Christ story. The first feature he directed was a strong melodrama set in Europe, Blind Husbands (1919, United States). After that he directed two masterpieces: Foolish Wives (1922, United States), also set in Europe, and Greed (1924, United States), a stunning but very long adaptation of a Naturalistic American novel, Frank Norris’s McTeague, which was drastically and ignorantly shortened by MGM. Stroheim then made a two-part film about European decadence, The Wedding March (1928, United States) and The Honeymoon (1928, United States). He edited them to releasable length with the help of Josef von Sternberg, another director born in Vienna who gave himself a ‘von’. A famous actor and an unemployable director, Stroheim gave his greatest performances in Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937, France) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950, United States). Sternberg, raised in both Europe and the United States, began making films in Hollywood. He is best known for directing The Blue Angel (1930, Germany) and making a star of Marlene Dietrich, whom he brought back with him to the United States and continued to direct, but before that he had made several important silent films, of which the most relevant here is The Last Command (1928, United States). In that picture the German Emil Jannings, who had starred in The Last Laugh and would soon play the professor in The Blue Angel, plays a former czarist general working incognito as an actor in a Hollywood movie that is set in Russia. Unlike Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch presented Hollywood with a Europe that was sexually sophisticated but not dark and upsetting (except in his final film, the antiNazi comedy-drama To Be or Not to Be [1942, United States]). Mary Pickford brought Lubitsch to the United States to direct her in Rosita (1923, United States), and he stayed to direct his great romantic comedies, including Trouble in Paradise (1932, United States), The Merry Widow (1934, United States) and Ninotchka (1939, United States). He fantasized, or perhaps remembered, an image of Europe the way he imagined it wanted to see itself. His popularity was so great that it accounted for most of Hollywood’s interest in attracting further European talent. What Lubitsch brought was not Expressionist lighting, design and psychology (which determined the Europe imagined by many American horror movies) but what was marketed as an adult European attitude, especially towards sexual activity, delivered in an elegant, suggestive and witty manner. Michael Curtiz, who began making films in Hungary in 1912 and came to the United States in 1926, directed such classic Hollywood movies as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, United States). He was a master of adventure, mystery, horror and romance by the time he directed Casablanca. He and William Dieterle, who made films in Germany before directing The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939, United States), were among the most successful European-born directors in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood.

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In 1935, while the refugees were beginning to join the industry but the war was still in the future, four key films were made in Hollywood, each of them a vivid example of the aesthetic collaboration between Europe and Hollywood, and the developing complementarity of their styles, that the immigrant film-makers brought about. They were Bride of Frankenstein and Mad Love, already discussed; Fury (1935, United States), which was directed by Fritz Lang; and ‘G’ Men (1935, United States), which confirmed the influence of Lang and of Austrian/Germanic lighting. Each of them looked, in part, like an Austrian/German film, while each was recognizably an American studio production. Lang’s two-part Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922, Germany), a brilliant study of crime and madness, had as strong an effect on the crime film, internationally, as his Metropolis (1927, Germany) had on science fiction. Its influence on Hollywood film-making in general is evident in ‘G’ Men (directed by William Keighley, from Pennsylvania, and starring James Cagney as a heroic FBI agent), where the night scenes and violent scenes, with their sharp blacks and whites, clearly look back to Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, as do many noirs. ‘G’ Men shows how many American films were beginning to look. The best of Lang’s own noirs was the painfully violent The Big Heat (1953, United States). It is interesting to compare his M (1931, Germany) with his first American picture, Fury, both of which climax in trials. In M a murderer of children, played by Peter Lorre, is captured and tried by criminals who realize they have to take into account that he is crazy and thus not entirely responsible for his actions. Fury demonstrates that a mob of Americans can turn insanely violent; the innocent prisoner they try to burn alive, played by Spencer Tracy, saves them by appearing in court just as they all are about to be sentenced for murdering him. They had been convicted with the aid of a newsreel, a film document, that recorded their actions – in the context of this story, history. One of the most striking things about Fury is the important role it gives to cinema as a medium that can show and prove what happened. Another is that it declines to idealize America. Alfred Hitchcock left the UK in 1940 with a contract from US producer David O. Selznick. Before that, he had made films in England and studied at Ufa, where he learned much from Murnau. His first American movie was Rebecca (1940, United States). He went on to become the world’s greatest director of romantic crime dramas. His pictures were noted for integrating Hollywood technique with Germanic lighting and camerawork and a montage style that resembled that of Russian film director V. I. Pudovkin. Jean Renoir had left Europe for the United States in 1941 after the invasion of France, along with Eugène Lourié, who had designed many of his films, and Marcel Dalio, who had starred in Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game (1939, France). Lourié continued as Renoir’s art director on his Hollywood films – which included The Southerner (1945, United States) – and on the beautiful movie Renoir made in India before returning to Europe, The River (1951, India). Back in the United States, Lourié directed The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953, United States). Dalio, whose parents died in a concentration camp while he was in Hollywood, had memorable roles in Casablanca and To Have and Have Not (1944, United States), in both of which his character supported the Free French.

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Throughout the war, some of the most effective anti-Nazi movies were made by Europeans in Hollywood, from Lang’s Man Hunt (1941, United States) and Ministry of Fear (1944, United States) to Sirk’s Hitler’s Madman (1943, United States). Douglas Sirk had made films at Ufa but left Germany in 1937 to join his second wife, a Jew who had fled to Rome, after he was denounced by his first wife, who had become a Nazi. In the 1950s Sirk made very popular ‘women’s melodramas’ (so-called), notably All That Heaven Allows (1955, United States). The German film industry had made much of its reputation, thanks to the achievements of people who left, and Hollywood profited from their exile. To take only one example, consider the makers of People on Sunday (1930, Germany). The movie was written by Kurt Siodmak (Curt Siodmak in the United States), Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer and Billy Wilder; shot by Eugen Schüfftan; and directed by Rochus Gliese, the Siodmak brothers, Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann. Gliese was in Hollywood only briefly (it is said that he helped to direct Sunrise), but all the other primary makers of this film moved to Hollywood and stayed. Schüfftan, who had invented a special-effects process that allowed full-sized actors and miniature sets to be photographed together, notably in Metropolis, fled to Hollywood in 1940; he was the cinematographer on Eyes Without a Face (1960, France) and The Hustler (1961, United States). Curt Siodmak wrote the great The Wolf Man (1941, United States) as well as Donovan’s Brain (1953, United States) and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956, United States). Robert Siodmak integrated German Expressionism with tight Hollywood technique in dark crime films, particularly Phantom Lady (1944, United States), the first movie called a ‘film noir’ by the French critics who invented the term. Ulmer, who was born in what is now the Czech Republic and became known as ‘King of the Bs’, directed an Expressionistic horror film, The Black Cat (1934, United States), and the most pessimistic of all noirs, Detour (1945, United States). Zinnemann’s most famous films were made in the 1950s, notably High Noon (1952, United States) and From Here to Eternity (1953, United States). Wilder, an established screenwriter before he left Germany, spent two years learning English so that he could write in it, then several years co-writing scripts for Lubitsch before he began to direct. Most of his Hollywood films were comedies for adults, but Wilder also integrated the tense, lean American thriller with Germanic shadows, pessimism and disturbing psychological insight in Double Indemnity (1944, United States), widely considered the definitive film noir. After the war, Wilder was sent back to Germany to document the camps and to help Germany’s ruined film industry. More than half of his family had died in Auschwitz. Wilder went as a colonel in the US Army; this Jew who had left Germany filmed the evidence of what had happened to those who had not left. And that was just the makers of People on Sunday! Between 1933 and 1940, hundreds of Europeans found the money to move to Hollywood and possible connections to studio jobs there, often thanks to Marlene Dietrich (along with other Europeans already established in Los Angeles) and agent Paul Kohner. Kohner helped to establish the European Film Fund for film-makers who wanted to escape the Nazis. One of the first such refugees to become a Hollywood success was Henry Koster, who later directed Harvey (1950, United States) and The

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Robe (1953, United States). Another was Rudolf Maté, who had been born in what is now Poland and had shot The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, France) and Vampyr (1932, Germany) for Carl Dreyer. In Hollywood Maté directed the relentless noir D.O.A. (1950, United States). René Clair, who had made comedies in Europe, made comedies in Hollywood, including I Married a Witch (1942, United States. One of the most politically influential producer-directors was Otto Preminger. Preminger, born in what is now Ukraine, helped to bring down both the censorious Production Code – in The Moon Is Blue (1953, United States) – and the blacklist – in Exodus (1960, United States), on which he gave screen credit to the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo; in coordination with this, Kirk Douglas gave Trumbo screen credit on Spartacus (1960, United States), and the combination virtually finished off the blacklist. Many actors moved to Hollywood to work, both before Hitler and in response to him. Among the most significant were Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo from Sweden; Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt from Germany; Charles Laughton and Stan Laurel from England; Hedy Lamarr, a Jew born in Vienna; and Paul Muni, a Jew born in what is now Ukraine. Veidt, who played the knife-wielding monster in Caligari, came to the United States for The Man Who Laughs, then went back to Germany. Returning to the United States with his Jewish wife when Hitler came to power, he played a new kind of monster: the Nazi one could really hate. In Casablanca he played the Nazi villain, Major Strasser. That same year Veidt had a double role in Nazi Agent (1942, United States), where he played twin brothers, one of whom is a powerful Nazi; the other, a patriotic American immigrant, kills and impersonates him. Significantly, this film was anti-Nazi but not anti-German. Some European film-makers grew up in Hollywood; Jacques Tourneur has already been mentioned. Marcel Ophuls spent many years in California while his father, Max Ophuls, was directing such Hollywood films as the romantic drama Caught (1949, United States). Later, in Europe, Marcel made two crucial documentaries, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969, France, Switzerland, West Germany), about occupied France, and The Memory of Justice (1976, France, West Germany, United States, United Kingdom), about war crimes and the trials of those who committed them in Germany, France, the United States, Algeria and Vietnam. As we have been seeing, European film-makers working in Hollywood decisively influenced the genres of horror, romance, comedy, adventure, melodrama, mystery and noir. But how are these film-makers, who worked so often with their memories of European culture and film technique, themselves remembered? Part of the answer is in international attempts to revive film noir. Another is in homages. And there are more. Film noir was one result of the major achievement of European film-makers in Hollywood: grafting European techniques onto American ones, leaving the Hollywood styles still dominant but vibrantly changed – an integration most evident in the design and lighting of Hollywood films from The Man Who Laughs through Psycho (1960, United States). The attempt to make what Hollywood called ‘new noir’ began with Chinatown (1974, United States). It was directed by Roman Polanski, who had made his first movies in Poland and the UK. Later neo-noirs

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include Body Heat (1981, Lawrence Kasdan) and Sin City (2005, Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez). In a career-long homage to Sirk’s elegant melodramas, the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made numerous movies in which such iconic Sirk elements as gleaming mirrors, frames, windows and floors, which often determine the image’s composition, are prominent, notably The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972, Germany). His Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Germany) could be considered a meditation on All That Heaven Allows. Jean-Luc Godard made a powerful homage to Lang as a master whose achievement and identity are beyond genre, beyond his German work and beyond his American work. Godard did this in Contempt (1963, France), in which Lang plays himself. Within the fiction of Contempt, the film Lang is directing is The Odyssey, and Godard’s film ends with Lang’s filming Odysseus as he regards the immense blue sea. The closing view of the sea, which fills the frame, is a vast presentation of nature and the range of art. Most of the European film-makers who worked in Hollywood are remembered for their artistic achievements, their international careers, their effect on so many genres – and, above all, the individual films. These movies have influenced pictures made from the days of Chaplin to the present, in Europe and elsewhere, regardless of whether they were commercial or arthouse films. In Germany, for example, their influence remains evident in the commercial films of Uwe Boll, such as Assault on Wall Street (2013, Canada/Germany), and in the art films of Tom Tykwer, such as Cloud Atlas (2012, Germany/United States/Hong Kong/Singapore; co-directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski). Echoes of their movies are felt in today’s horror films and neo-noirs, which are produced across Europe – in fact, worldwide. To engage the styles of these movies, whether to mirror or to transcend them, is a goal of many of the world’s postmodern film-makers. And everyone remembers Hitchcock. We remember these film-makers and their films because, in short, ‘the fundamental things apply as time goes by’. Finally, these Europeans are remembered for their voyages to find an industry where they could tell the truth – or invent – to the best of their abilities, even if they had to work in a foreign language. They did not always find complete social freedom – in some places there were signs insisting that only English be spoken on the set – but they did find a place they could live, an industry they could join and a site for their memories: the ones they would draw on and the ones they would create.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cherchi Usai, Paolo, and Lorenzo Codelli (Eds.), Before Caligari: German Cinema 1895–1920, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Eisner, Lotte H., The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1969.

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Kawin, Bruce F., Faulkner and Film, New York, Frederick Ungar, 1977. Kreimeier, Klaus, The Ufa Story. Translated by Robert and Rita Kimber, New York, Hill and Wang, 1996. Mast, Gerald and Bruce F. Kawin, A Short History of the Movies. 11th edn, Boston, Longman, 2011. Saunders, Thomas J. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1994.

CHAPTER 31

How cooking became an art PASCAL ORY

The domain of cookery has always contained personal memories of tastes, products and culinary gestures. Gastronomy emerged in France during the Age of Enlightenment, conquering the public space with the invention of the restaurant and establishing its presence as a central element of European culture. Every eating practice is a realm of memory in itself. This is true at an individual level, as people develop their own food memories, formed of preferences and dislikes resulting from their experiences of taste − primarily those of their childhood. Yet it is even more true at a community level; there, procedures (‘recipes’) are transmitted from one generation to the next, adapted by families where what we propose to term ‘private cooking’ here is a predominantly female activity. These dishes, drinks and eating practices are the result of geographical and historical factors, which, in combination, have provided societies with the plants and animals compatible with their physical and symbolic environments and have recently been reinforced by globalization. To the best of our current knowledge, very few of these edible elements are native European species. If there is any domain in which acculturation reigns supreme, it is surely the world of cooking; there, recipes as strongly identified with a given region of Italy or Spain as polenta or paella involve the use of corn or rice, which are of American and Asian origin. Similarly, any French recipe described as à la Provençale indicates the inclusion of tomatoes, a plant brought to Europe from America in the early sixteenth century. The list goes on. This circulation process can be explained through a variety of factors. In some cases, the predominant considerations are economic in character, involving climate, soil types, roads and modes of transport and the degree of technological expertise available. In other cases, the factors are chiefly political, involving the degree of autonomy enjoyed by the communities in question, the nature of the ruling regime and whether colonies or protectorates have been established. And they may equally well be predominantly cultural, involving religious tradition or dogma, the status of existing elites, modes of transmission and so forth. That geographic acculturation is accompanied by a temporal form of the process, with every type of practice relating to rearing livestock, growing crops, fishing or

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hunting being transmitted in a highly dynamic manner. This is because the repetition of those procedures (which took place via predominantly verbal channels over the ages until the dawn of the twentieth century) always included the possibility of amending the techniques involved.

THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT In these contexts, any space established as ‘European’ should be characterized by dietary diversity rather than uniformity. Yet Christianity – a concept that arose in the Middle Ages and gradually gave rise to that of Europe – served as a bonding agent, providing an increasing number of people with a sense of identity. And when the principle of ‘gastronomy’ crystallized towards the end of the Age of Enlightenment, it was in lands that had been profoundly shaped, over the centuries, by Christianity. Like any other religious phenomenon, it inevitably guided the food practices of its followers. Liquid or solid food (the connection between the archaic word ‘aliment’ and ‘element’ is rarely noticed) plays a significant part in the symbolic systems that govern humanity’s connection with the universe. This is demonstrated by the place it occupies in religious codes – which have been somewhat summarily reduced to ‘dietary taboos’ − and rituals. Sacrifice has played a leading role; it had been predominant in the polytheistic religions, yet, in the form of the Eucharist, it also lay at the heart of the new Christian liturgy. We know that this sacrament is based on the solemn exhortation made by Christ himself: ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me’ (Lk. 22.19). That extreme use of symbolism will always play a part in defining Christianity’s puritanical tendency. This is characteristic of all religions of salvation, which are quick to connect eating with the trivial, corporeal domain and even with sin and degeneration. Various European creators, from François Rabelais to Marco Ferreri, and from Paolo Veronese to Georg Philipp Telemann, have presented forms of what we might term prandiality in their works, with different intentions in mind; they owe this subject matter, among other things, to that Christian reference. Inevitably, the Eucharist had an effect on the significance of bread and wine in everyday Christian life. The Christian adoption of wine would act as a remarkable force of refinement on the important Graeco-Roman wine-growing legacy. In the Middle Ages, wine was recognized as a social beverage, as it were, through the rule of Saint Benedict, who regarded it as fortifying, a view also held in ancient times. This, coupled with its use for liturgical purposes, justified an interest in cultivating grape vines that forged a lasting connection between the futures of wine-growing regions and the monastic orders. A few popular myths even arose as a result. One of these is the tale of the Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon, who did not, in fact, invent the ‘méthode champenoise’, although, as the cellar master of a monastery, he did contribute to perfecting the techniques and rules governing the creation of the sparkling beverage, making it the preferred festive drink of elite groups the world over.

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THE POLITICAL ELEMENT However, in the course of a millennium, the regular clergy in Christian lands were to develop an expertise in certain areas quite removed from any religious consideration and where they functioned more as an elite group with a strong identity of its own. These areas included pisciculture, the making of dairy products and confectionary, which they helped to modernize in economic terms and enhance in the cultural sense. If there is a prehistoric era of gastronomy − understood here as a food and drink culture whose aim is to construct its own taxonomy (nomos) or even hierarchical order − it lies in that domain of elite groups where the clerics would gradually be joined, then eclipsed, by the laity. It is no coincidence that the oldest remaining recipe book in the French language, the Viandier, is attributed to the ‘premier écuyer de cuisine’ of the French kings Charles V and Charles VI, Guillaume Tirel, known as Taillevent. Nor was it by chance that the quality and reputation of exceptional wines were associated with their presence on the Habsburg monarchs’ dining tables, brought there through various aristocratic influences. Examples include the very dry ‘yellow wine’ of Château-Chalon in the Franche-Comté region and the Hungarian dessert wine, Tokaji. Anecdotes aside – and some had more basis in fact than others − the origin or popularity of a product or recipe remained linked for a considerable time to its usage by some great figure, family, network, aristocrat or personage from the bourgeoisie. Situations of geopolitical dominance likewise shed light on certain developments. The international success of Madeira and port wine, for instance, is connected with the Treaty of Methuen (1703) between Portugal and Britain, the latter being on the verge of becoming the economic centre of the modern world. According to the treaty, in exchange for Portugal’s purchase of British-manufactured products, Portuguese wines would enter Britain on preferential terms. And it was colonization that gave rise to the popularity of North African and Indian cuisines in the societies of metropolitan France and Britain, leading in turn to their global dissemination. There is a theory that the division (apparent in contemporary texts) between the sophisticated image of French cuisine, which was either extolled or attacked, and the simplicity associated with British cuisine − likewise either extolled or attacked − can be viewed in a fundamentally politico-religious light. That theory has been defended, and not without sound arguments. The sobriety connected with the Protestant Reformation and the more sensual, reverse mirror image associated with the Catholic Revival − a confrontation presented by Karen Blixen in Babette’s Feast − was re-encountered through the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. This saw the victory of the Protestant ‘gentleman farmer’ over the French-style Catholic monarch. Patriotic eighteenth-century English caricatures presented a rustic dish of roast beef as one of the main symbols of the nation, in contrast to the refined, decadent food practices of elite French society. Historically, those countries characterized by a grandiose court culture have always developed sophisticated culinary systems, as demonstrated by the gastronomic history of China and Japan. By adding the Catholic version, France was establishing the conditions for her ‘gastronomic’ revolution, which took place precisely at the end of her Ancien Régime. This did not occur

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in the domain of private cooking but in what we will call ‘public cooking’ in this context. This was the type of cooking associated with the ostentation surrounding the governing classes and their institutions; notably, it was the domain of men, who initially had exclusive access to the public space. The idea of the nation in the sense that we understand it today, based on the principle of popular sovereignty, was an invention that emerged from the political modernity of the Enlightenment, later to be replaced by the cultural modernity of Romanticism. Both movements sought to highlight the ‘genius’ of a people, and, in this way, cooking was assigned the role of an identity-marker, along with dance, clothing and architecture. Folklore specialists set out to discover the legends, epic poems, songs and games specific to particular peoples, gradually becoming anthropologists in the process. In the nineteenth century, they played a role in standardizing recipes, most of which had circulated orally until then. It was in this context that France’s first major regionalist movement, the Félibrige, invented the Provençal custom of serving the ‘thirteen desserts’. This practice of devising traditions was to govern the demarcation of national, regional and local cuisines. Built around the development of tourism, a phenomenon that saw local economic interests combine their methods with a cultural approach, the notion of ‘speciality’ gradually became clearly linked to food, even in the semi-industrial domain of confectionary. These circumstances gave rise to the emergence, from Scotland to Russia, of true culinary nationalism. This explains, for example, how certain researchers were able to establish a link between the popularity of paella and Franco’s desire to emphasize the existence of a single Spanish identity through a series of dishes that had a unitary character − and paella had the additional advantage of featuring the colours of the Spanish flag. Originally a Valencian dish, it first achieved success at a national level – although not until the mid-twentieth century – before becoming internationally popular at the end of the same century. The growing rural exodus and the surge in migration was to transform an increasing number of Europeans into the bearers of a family culinary tradition, often linked with a community. Having lost the language or religion of one’s ancestors, one would at least be left with a few recipes and culinary skills; cooking is what remains when everything else has been forgotten.

THE INVENTION OF GASTRONOMY: A FRENCH REVOLUTION The invention of ‘gastronomy’ – the word and therefore the thing itself − occurred, in France, at the beginning of that era of emerging nationalism. The word was artificially resurrected from Graeco-Roman Antiquity (where it had failed to establish itself in permanent fashion) and was the title of a successful poem by Joseph Berchoux, a second-tier writer, published in 1801. It owes its meaning to its appropriation by a group of confirmed hedonists, who subsequently launched the words gastronome in 1803 and gastronomique in 1807. Within a few years, they had set out the whole rationale governing that new culture, disseminating it through its own specific communication channels, from books to periodicals, and including maps of local gastronomic specialities − the earliest of these dates from 1809.

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By now it will be evident that gastronomy was a matter for discourse; while it certainly generated practices, these were not, in themselves, of a culinary nature. The first image to depict a gastronome in action − in this case Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière − dates from 1804 and shows him seated at his desk rather than at table. He holds a goose feather quill in his hand and is receiving homage from various chefs, who are presenting their creations to him for inspection, just as artists submit their work to the judgement of a critic. This image clarifies the fact that the Age of Enlightenment was the period when taste, long regarded as the domain of the taste buds, was appropriated by the new system of aesthetics − a term coined in 1750 by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and reinforced, during the same period, by the sound theoretical principles behind Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s approach to art history. One of the many figures connected to this movement was that of the critic; the establishment of the Salons at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris provided fruitful opportunities for the exercise of literary powers through the writing of reviews, as with those of Denis Diderot. Grimod had gained his earliest experiences as a critic in the world of the theatre, and his writings, together with those of his emulators, form part of this phenomenon. In terms of form, that writing combines the three types of related literature that had preceded it in the days of Antiquity: dietetic, in the tradition of medical writing founded by Hippocrates; poetic, in the Bacchic tradition established by Anacreon and, finally, technical − in other words, the writings of cooks or their scribes, as with the culinary work allegedly written by Marcus Gavius Apicius. But the reason why that first generation of food writers was able to find a readership (and, first, a subject on which to discourse) was because they were able to make use of the ‘public space’ − as defined by Jürgen Habermas – to achieve their purposes.

THE BIRTH OF THE RESTAURANT That space was formed by the major commercial innovation of the late eighteenth century: the restaurant. These establishments might have been initiated, in about 1766, by an individual named Boulanger (an unlikely story) or by the little-known Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau; at all events, the fact remains the same. The crumbling of the Ancien Régime’s economic system can be gauged from the victory of the Parisian restaurateurs over the monopoly enjoyed by specialist cook-caterers (traiteurs). They countered the latter by offering a selected section of the public an entirely new type of space − a contrast to the inns with their communal dishes or to the large private residences where buffet meals, presented à la française, were served to seated guests. Their establishments offered diners the décor, service, kitchen and cellar of a grand private house, an experience not obtained through a personal invitation received and answered in the proper manner, as a form of private social interaction, but simply in exchange for money – the very definition of the modern world. As a result, the need arose for a discerning authority able to distinguish between the culinary offerings of restaurants now free to open, thanks to the Revolution’s abolition of the guild system; that was the function of gastronomy. The political change was to complete the process by prompting certain ‘officers of

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the mouth’, who had previously been in the service of aristocrats who had emigrated or become impoverished, to open their own eating establishments. The first to open such a restaurant, in 1782, was Antoine Beauvilliers, who until then had been in the service of no less a personage than one of the king’s brothers. All these developments took place in France, specifically in the fashionable Parisian district of Palais-Royal – scene of the uprising in July 1789 that would lead to the demise of the country’s absolute monarchy. This being Paris, not Versailles (which remained the official centre of royal power until October 1789), the restaurant was clearly part of the modern world. As the new French, then continental, governing classes began to establish themselves, gastronomy had its own role to play in the process.

AN ELITE CUISINE BECOMES DEMOCRATIZED Three different groups of modern gastronomes can be distinguished here, their importance varying according to country and era: the critic, the theoretician and the member of a gastronomic club. In 1803, Grimod published his first Almanach des gourmands; however, it was to be another twenty years or so before an elite readership discovered the gastronomic essay in its perfected form, with Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût. This work was presented by its author as a series of ‘meditations’. The parallel established between Brillat-Savarin and Grimod demonstrates that two different – indeed, contrasting − cultural worlds can converge in celebration through a shared taste for fine food. Grimod was the somewhat outlandish offspring of one of the richest families of the Ancien Régime. His Almanach was a gourmet periodical − a ‘Guide Grimod’ − that recommended vendors and restaurants for discerning readers of sufficient means, while his Manuel des amphitryons (1808) outlined the principles of appropriate dining conduct, a theme later to be developed by Brillat-Savarin. The latter’s work, more ambitious in scope, was destined to transcend generations, whereas the memory of Grimod, a minor creator, faded along with that of his writings. Brillat-Savarin was a classic example of the new elites promoted by the Revolution, including his provincial background, rare at that time and a world away from Grimod’s ‘Parisianism’. He was a magistrate and was elected to the Estates General as a representative of the Third Estate. Although his views were close to those of the ideologues of the Materialist school, as a moderate republican he was careful not to draw too much attention to those convictions in the course of his career, thereby guaranteeing himself an untroubled existence under various regimes. Written with panache, his treatise was translated into English in the mid-twentieth century by Mary Frances K. Fisher, who produced the finest academic edition of this work to date. German gourmets are aware that Brillat-Savarin’s treatise was preceded by that of the amateur art historian Karl Friedrich von Rumohr, writing under a pseudonym. His Essence of Cookery (1822) is not only a recipe book but also contains much food-related information and was written with the aim of championing German culinary identity. The work was not destined to achieve fame beyond the borders of the Germanic countries − a French edition did not appear until 2016 − partly

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due to the fact that it was less ambitious in its theoretical scope than that of BrillatSavarin. But it is also − and doubtless primarily − due to German cuisine’s lack of international prestige. It remained the case in nineteenth-century Germany that many of the chefs who enjoyed renown there were French. The issue in this instance, as in others, was that of hegemony. The year 1924 saw the publication of the best-known French gastronomic novel: La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet, known in English as The Passionate Epicure. Like Physiologie du goût, it is still being republished, and even became a French TV movie in 1972. Not insignificantly, it was written partly before and partly after the First World War, contains a comparison between French and German cuisines – we can easily guess which won – and was written by Marcel Rouff, a Swiss author of Jewish origin. A pioneering economic historian and a friend of Jean Jaurès, Rouff was one of the leading food critics of the interwar period and a specialist in French gastronomy. He became more French than the French, along with those other members of his generation, the Belgian writer Maurice Des Ombiaux, and ‘Ali-Bab’ and Édouard de Pomiane, both born to Polish emigrant families. The ‘trickle down’ of this elitist gastronomic system to less exalted levels of society took place in conjunction with the gradual democratization of public life. On the one hand, gastronomic sociability, which developed from the hedonistic ‘singing societies’ of Grimod’s time to the gastronomic clubs of the Third Republic, continued to cultivate a rationale based on ‘distinction’. On the other hand, however, books and the mainstream press popularized those new cultural practices, still not regarded as truly legitimate in relation to established culture. During the Second Empire, an authoritarian democratic regime, this was achieved through the introduction of gastronomy sections in the five-centime daily newspapers, and in the interwar period, through the development of the Michelin Red Guide with its restaurant reviews. This had originally been conceived as a guide for motorists. The same process was involved when a similar movement occurred in Italian society in the 1980s, including the part played by the Gambero Rosso reference guide.

CHEFS, ARTISTS, MANAGERS Amid all these intermediary agents, whose activities extended to television in the 1950s, what of the chefs themselves? It is striking to note that the concept of cooking as an ‘art’ in the aesthetic, rather than the purely technical sense of the word, was already firmly implanted in the minds of the first generation of French gastronomes. It is found in the works of both Grimod and Brillat-Savarin but was also reflected in the life of Antonin Carême, their contemporary and the first chef to turn cooking into an art form. An autodidact, Carême was born into a large family and was abandoned by his parents when still a young child. He began his career with a pastry-making apprenticeship. Cookery was the means by which he ascended the social hierarchy, yet, throughout his life, he also sought to demonstrate the cultural nobility of this occupation. His perspective effectively reinforced that of the gastronomes, looking beyond the constant misunderstandings that occurred on both sides. This ‘officer of the mouth’ was aware of the links between architecture and

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the decorative pâtisserie ‘set pieces’ of his day, and he also published architectural drawings intended as urban embellishment projects. Carême’s career path forms a pertinent summary of the history of his time − he worked in turn for Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, George, Prince of Wales and James Mayer de Rothschild − and he also invented the contemporary chef ’s toque, intended to confer nobility on those who wore it. Auguste Escoffier, a figure from the opposite end of the century, was active from the 1870s to the 1920s. He belonged exclusively to the world of restaurants but had connections with that new addition to the hospitality sector whose emergence could be said to mirror the restaurant ‘revolution’ that occurred in the eighteenth century: the grand hotel. His associate, the Swiss-born César Ritz, was the leading developer in this area. Escoffier settled for a time in London and also opened kitchens in luxury hotels in the United States. His teachings were reinforced by various publications, some of which are still used as reference works in the profession a century later and were followed by several generations of chefs, transformed into ‘brigade’ managers and disciples of the French style of preparation and cooking. Fascinated by the world of theatre, Escoffier established the imperious and enduring image of the great ‘public’ chef. Through the luxury hotels, he homogenized an international cuisine that was, in fact, clearly French in character; this is reflected in the professional culinary lexicon, which abounds with words and expressions in that language. This type of cooking formed a contrast to the new national and regional cuisines exalted by the gastronomic critics of the democratic age in each European country. These include ‘Curnonsky’, who championed the notion of the ‘terroir’ in France during the period of the Third Republic and collaborated with Marcel Rouff.

NOUVELLE CUISINE, NEW CRITICS This dual system reached its apogee during the thirty years of economic growth and social development now established in France’s history as Les Trente Glorieuses (The Glorious Thirty), a term coined by Jean Fourastié. The synergy between the critic and the chef functioned to its fullest extent during this period. The theory behind the nouvelle cuisine movement was formed in the mid-1960s through the partnership between two journalists, Henri Gault and Christian Millau. They represented a new generation of food critics, whose reviews reflected a concern for literary style and were individual in character, unlike those of the lofty Guide Michelin with its scrupulously anonymous and omniscient inspectors. They therefore marked a clear break with some of the fundamental culinary tenets held by the Curnonsky generation. Gault and Millau were close to the ‘Hussard’ literary movement, which advocated hedonism, freedom from allegiance and an irreverent attitude, in contrast to the serious approach governing la littérature engagée. In this way, they battled traditions involving over-cooking, heavy sauces and ceremonious table service. The gastronomic principles that they championed were well suited to the spirit of the time and to the tastes of the new middle classes, who sought novelty (nouvelle

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cuisine), fresh produce (cuisine du marché) and healthy, non-fattening foods (cuisine minceur). In this area, too, the impact of the Gault-and-Millau generation can be attributed to its connection with a renewal of culinary practices themselves. It both observed and initiated these practices, which were identified, one final time, with French chefs or with those who had been assimilated into the French tradition, headed by Paul Bocuse, a native of Lyon. As was the case in Grimod’s time, the economic dimension completes this picture. By launching the rallying cry that hailed the idea of the owner-chef – ‘La cuisine aux cuisiniers!’ − Bocuse was highlighting a form of status that had nothing new about it, for Beauvilliers (unlike Carême and Escoffier) had personally owned his eating establishment. As a proprietor, a chef was master not only of his kitchen but also of his entire business. Nouvelle Cuisine emerged fifteen years after the Nouveau Roman, ten years after the Nouvelle Vague and at the same time as the Nouveaux Philosophes. As well as producing a new generation of chefs, who took over the culinary scene, the movement played two additional, strategic roles. It signalled gastronomy’s decisive entry into the domain of legitimate cultural practices, and it attested to a clear move away from puritanical attitudes (helped by prosperity), firstly in countries with a Catholic culture. It is therefore significant that the most enduring food movement of the late twentieth century originated in Italy. As its name indicates, ‘Slow Food’ is opposed to food processing and the industrialization of food production, which distance the consumer from regional products and their authenticity, diversity and quality. It was founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, who was born in the province of Cuneo in Piedmont. A left-wing intellectual, he promotes sustainable development and the protection of ‘small’ operators in the face of ‘big business’. His movement eventually took root in most Western countries, although it was in Italy that it succeeded in establishing itself as a force to be reckoned with by the agri-food industry and its economic interests. The University of Gastronomic Sciences was also founded in the movement’s birthplace, in 2004, as was the food market chain Eataly, which is rooted in the twenty-first century and whose aim is to become a global presence, promoting Italian gastronomy as the best in the world.

POSTMODERN GASTRONOMY Gastronomy’s postmodern phase, so to speak, is characterized by a baton changeover from France to Europe and from there, very rapidly, to the rest of the world. In the 1990s, an elderly Anglo-Hungarian physicist, Nicholas Kurti, and a young French physical chemist, Hervé This, laid the foundations for ‘molecular gastronomy’. Based on the analysis of the chemistry and physics behind the processes of preparing and cooking food, it led to a number of technical innovations. That link between scientific theory and culinary practices explains why the work carried out by This was soon reflected in various cuisines, including that of his family’s homeland, Alsace. But it was in Spain, more specifically in Catalonia, that his theories gained international visibility, thanks to the systematic approach applied by the chef Ferran

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Adrià. And it was in Spain, not in France, that the first international gastronomy congresses were launched − Gastronomika in San Sebastián and Lo Mejor de la Gastronomía in Alicante. This culinary avant-garde movement made stars of restaurateurs based in England (Heston Blumenthal) and Denmark (René Redzepi). Their establishments have been highlighted in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, an annual list launched in 2003 and sponsored by a brand of mineral water. These much-publicized rankings have put an end to French supremacy (eight restaurants in France made the list in 2003, and just three in 2016, as opposed to seven in Spain, for example). However, an examination reveals that half a dozen of the other establishments included there explicitly refer to their culinary style as French. The year 2011 saw the publication of the comprehensive work Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. Described as ‘the cookbook to end all cookbooks’, it was launched by the American mathematician and physicist Nathan Myhrvold, a serious amateur cook, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft and the founder of a thriving patent development company. Another of the book’s co-authors, Chris Young, has degrees in mathematics and biochemistry and once worked with Heston Blumenthal. Although molecular gastronomy soon showed its limitations, even at table, France’s demotion has continued. The new issues connected with European gastronomy were gradually diluted as the global picture became paramount. This has resulted in the Western eater being established as an eclectic amateur, moving constantly from one territory-specific dish or menu to another, rather than the universal adoption of ‘fusion cooking’, where dishes feature a mixture of contributions from the cuisines of the world. We are even witnessing the strong resurgence of the Protestant puritan ethic with the rise of vegetarianism, which is set to be one of the major issues of the twentyfirst century. The popularity of the vegetarian cause, particularly with younger generations in the West, reflects the decline of rural society, where the killing of animals had been established as part of everyday life. Today, however, urbanization and industrialization have caused communities to become disconnected from that utilitarian practice. Although they may not have fully adopted the cause, certain leading chefs (Michel Bras and Alain Passard in France, for instance), are now according great importance to the role of plant foodstuffs in their culinary creations.

A LEGITIMATE CULTURE Whatever the economic or culinary future of humanity may be, two aspects are involved here. In terms of form, the future of the gastronomic heritage now rests on the cultural policies that it has generated; in terms of substance, the late twentieth century saw the topics of eating and drinking acquire unprecedented visibility. This was linked with gastronomy’s victory in achieving genuine legitimacy in all areas, from the most scientific to the most artistic, and from the most mainstream to the most modernist of cultural forms. Paradoxically, a literary genre like the detective story can signal its cultural ambitions with discreet, recurring signs pointing towards gastronomic culture. For

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instance, the fictional private eye Pepe Carvalho, who was created by Catalan writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and made his début in 1972, is not only a gastronome but also a cook. Aspects of this formula were adopted by Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri for his own character, Police Inspector Salvo Montalbano. Yet the most recent literary forms to appropriate food or drink as indicators or metaphors are not the most conventional. This is the case, for example, with Günter Grass, whose novel The Flounder (1977), transforms the theme of food into a legend that spans the centuries. This process of de-trivialization is well underway in the theatre, the cinema and the visual arts, through the work of avant-garde creators such as Peter Greenaway (Britain), Daniel Spoerri (Switzerland) and Peter Kubelka of Austria, who taught the subject ‘Film and Cooking as Art’ at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In 2008, Emmanuel Giraud was the first culinary artist to be admitted to the residency programme at the Villa Medici. Nor has scholarly culture lagged behind. As with ‘molecular gastronomy’, the human and social sciences began to appropriate these subjects, which they no longer treated as peripheral themes. Examples include anthropology, with the groundbreaking reflections of Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked (1964), and psychoanalysis, through Lacanian theory, for instance. Philosophy itself has felt required to participate in this; the Materialist thinker Michel Onfray has treated the topic in many of his popular and controversial works, notably in his first book, Appetites for Thought: Philosophers and Food. There, he takes a fresh look at several renowned thinkers through their personal relationships with food. Unsurprisingly, the professional culinary world has transmitted the effects of this promotion – which had been sought by gastronomy from its earliest days and hitherto triumphantly refused − in its own manner. Consequently, the culinary library has expanded as classic works have been republished in unprecedented quantities, although this was an area that had previously been dominated by the ‘presentist’ perspective of recipe books. As a result, today’s chefs are asked to view their own practices in the light of those of their predecessors, regardless of era or locality. References to the culinary past have therefore become part of a strategy based on demonstrating superiority. When the young Alain Senderens set up his own business in the rue de Varenne in 1968, he chose to name it L’Archestrate, after the ancient Greek gastronomic poet Archestratus. Six years later, another new restaurant that opened in Paris displayed the name of the chef who had owned the city’s first fine dining establishment − Beauvilliers.

THE CULINARY ARTS Senderens subsequently failed in his campaign to have culinary creators perceived in the same light as practitioners of other art forms, and the opinion that the culinary domain has been ‘artified’ continues to divide researchers. Nevertheless, the analogy drawn between cooking and art, based on the ambiguity of that word, enabled France’s then minister of culture, Jack Lang, to incorporate the ‘culinary arts’ into his ministry − via the back door – a move later reinforced by the involvement in that domain of the Ministries of Agriculture, of the Environment, of Tourism,

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and, since 2014, of Foreign Affairs. The publication of the Inventaire du patrimoine culinaire de la France (2012) was made possible by the inscription, in 2010, of the ‘Gastronomic Meal of the French’ on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This is the only entry of its kind involving a European country, as ‘Gingerbread Craft from Northern Croatia’ concerns an item not intended for consumption. As we can see, although the gastronomic heritage was created, paradoxically, through the cultural modernity of the Age of Enlightenment and the Romantic era, it was in the postmodern period that this invented tradition acquired its prestige. The phenomenon gained a truly ‘European’ dimension, over two centuries, through the gradual emancipation of national cultures, which were initially dominated by the French model. And in each case, that emancipation was achieved through the assimilation of the three original principles of gastronomy: the legitimacy of the subject, the collective identity it expresses and the pertinence of individual characteristics. In this respect, the twenty-first century now underway remains the heir to the legacy left by the founders of gastronomy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bonnet, Jean-Claude, La Gourmandise et la Faim. Histoire et symbolique de l’aliment, 1730–1830, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 2015. Capatti, Alberto, Le Goût du nouveau. Origine de la modernité alimentaire, Paris, Albin Michel, 1989. Ory, Pascal, Le Discours gastronomique français, des origines à nos jours, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘Archives’, 1998. Ory, Pascal, L’Identité passe à table, Paris, PUF, 2013.

CHAPTER 32

The taste for luxury FRANCO CARDINI

Gold, spices and silk, muslin, cinnamon, sandalwood, incense and precious stones have all held a strong appeal for Europeans. Thanks to the Silk Route, late medieval Europe gradually discovered the marvels of the East. Our focus here is on the superfluous − those additional ‘extras’ that are neither useful nor necessary. These are things that many men and women feel incapable of relinquishing, precisely because, when all is said and done, they could do so quite painlessly. Jesus stated that one’s excess wealth should be given to the needy, and elsewhere in the Bible there is a warning against accumulating ‘treasures on earth’. Yet Jesus also invites those fasting to use precious unguents: ‘when you fast, put oil on your head.’ And when the disciples expressed indignation at the fact that a costly perfume, which could have been sold to benefit the poor, had been used to anoint him, he replied: ‘The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.’ Is it really the case, then, that restraint is always a virtue and that luxury is always sinful? Any reflection on luxury and its aesthetics should surely begin with gold, that radiant metal with the appearance of solidified light. ‘Making light, poor folk, is more difficult than making gold’, declares the apprentice in Paul Claudel’s L’Annonce faite à Marie, in defence of the architect and master glassmaker Pierre de Craon, who suffers from leprosy. He is an expert in the art of allowing natural light to filter through the stained glass windows of cathedrals, so that they sparkle like reliquaries set with precious stones. This was what Suger, the abbot of Saint-Denis, said in response to the Cistercian monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, when he applauded the effect of sunbeams piercing pristine, transparent glass, illuminating church interiors with a colourless and therefore pure light. This type of effect is also produced by the luminous stained glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle, which stands in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. Built for Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) to house religious relics, it was restored by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.

THE FASCINATION WITH GOLD Gold is light. Is it a coincidence that the Hebrew word or (‘gold’ in French) means ‘light’ − lux in Latin? Sociologists and philosophers whose areas of research include

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economics are known to view gold with disfavour − as are economists themselves – while Marxists and Keynesians are likewise known for their denunciations of the auri sacra fames (the accursed greed for gold). We are also aware that the tendency to hoard gold is generally condemned (not only by Marxists and neo-Keynesians) as economic atavism and is seen as an irrational act displaying a fetishistic, regressive trait. Psychoanalysts have added their own input. These include the Freudians, with their famous analogy between gold and human excrement (leading in turn to an association with anal eroticism) − although a dream interpreter from the Age of Antiquity (Artemidorus of Daldis) and a Saint (Francis of Assisi) had already made this comparison. Other psychoanalysts have established a connection between greed for gold and a feeling of insecurity. Furthermore, gold already had a bad reputation with most modern historians, particularly specialists in economic history, as its massive influx into Europe from the New World in the sixteenth century triggered the ‘Price Revolution’, which produced a number of disastrous consequences. Admittedly, a more nuanced picture could have been presented, as this phenomenon may also be viewed in a positive light and the problem was really caused by silver, rather than gold. Yet antipathy towards the noble metal already existed by the time the Spanish galleons were unloading their precious cargoes from the New World. For nearly three centuries, following the move defined as ‘Back to Gold’ by historian Roberto Sabatino Lopez – in other words, the West’s re-adoption of that metal as coinage − the florin was the constant focus of the greed of powerful figures and the target of moralists. The gold coin, which was struck in Florence, was described as ‘the cursed flower’ by Dante Alighieri and referred to as ‘messire Florin’ in pamphlets against usury. This ascetic Christian form of chrysophobia, fuelled by the Gospel writers’ focus on poverty, joined forces with the anti-wealth topoi of ancient times (primarily Stoic in origin), thereby providing arguments for the enemies of the yellow metal.

CONTENTIOUS GOLD Having become definitively associated with finance, gold was transformed into a symbol of the bourgeois class, so it was only natural that it should be prominently denounced once more. The harshest criticism, at least in the first half of the twentieth century, did not come from the Left. Ezra Pound is well known for his invectives against usury and the metal that symbolizes it. During the Third Reich, the Germans invested their assets in steel ingots that they deposited in banks, as with the traditional type made of gold. Although this practice formed part of a vast, complex industry, it was also linked to a specific attitude, which involved rejecting the metal associated with ‘merchants’, ‘capitalists’ and ‘Jews’, and elevating the metal of warriors. Despite its meta-historical veneer, that tendency of fascist regimes to contrast the metal of merchants with that of warriors did not elude history; on the contrary, it revealed its anchorage there. In fact, gold did not serve as an economic safeguard until the abandonment of commodity money in favour of a modern monetary system whereby a country’s currency was backed, through common agreement, by its gold reserves. Broadly speaking, this convention was upheld until at least the

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late twentieth century. During the 1340s, a period that witnessed the collapse of the Bardi and Peruzzi merchant-banking companies, no Florentine citizen would have declared – as was claimed in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash – that gold was a safe store of value. Indeed, he would have maintained that gold was unreliable, its laws incomprehensible, and that the only thing one could truly depend on was land. As it seems that economic history cannot provide us with reasons for the fascination gold has apparently always exerted over humankind, we must seek them elsewhere. But where? The answer leads us outside the domain of economics and even of history itself. The gold buried with Scythian and Germanic peoples, the gold used for sacred Aztec and Maya treasures, the gold carefully and skilfully melted, forged and placed in tombs as grave-goods, the gold that accompanied the Atrides during their last stay at Mycenae and the gold that was feverishly sought by the Conquistadores and produced the legends of Eldorado and the Seven Cities were all certainly precious from an economic standpoint. However, it had nothing to do with the economy as we understand it today, the exception being the role its destruction played in what anthropologists were to define as the ‘potlatch’ culture. In these symbolic acts of wastage, economic principles were sacrificed in the interests of serving a higher purpose.

A SYMBOL OF SECURITY Gold itself is one of the few constants in a human tradition that has assumed different forms according to locality and era. The roles assigned to it by all the cultures that have known it have not been commensurate with its market value − or at least, not commensurate with that alone. Indeed, the very concept of ‘market value’ does not lend itself easily to non-Western cultural contexts. Gold is a symbol; seen as the colour of sunlight since ancient Egyptian times, it is the sun buried beneath the earth, following its trajectory in the kingdom of the dead. All astrological and alchemical traditions – from Alexandria to India by way of China – drew an analogy between stars and metals, between what is above and what is below, between that which looks down on the earth from on high and that which lies buried within it. Moreover, in transforming metals, alchemy was quite simply re-establishing their archetypal nature, restoring their primordial purity. In this way, the gold used in Byzantine mosaics and halos fulfils much more than a purely decorative function. In the contemporary context of Carl Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, the psychiatrist was right in regarding the alchemical work as a ‘process of individuation’, symbolizing the rediscovery of a hidden self and, therefore, the restoration of the true Being within the individual − the psychical creation of spiritual Gold, the solar power of the psyche. Therefore, taking as an example a fairly recent episode, the reason why the gold rush linked to the dollar crisis of the late 1970s (which has affected us all in some way) is not regarded as ‘economically regressive’, is that it was not simply and solely a reaction to economic problems. It had a much further-reaching effect, extending to our need for individual and collective security in a chaotic era. We react to a crisis of values, to the obscure violence expressed through the mechanisms

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of the economy or to the fear of a catastrophe that seems imminent, be it nuclear or ecological, by quite naturally seeking that light of the spirit symbolized by the radiance of gold. This is an archaic response, in the profoundly religious sense of the term. Gold was extracted as nuggets, by mining, or obtained in the form of specks by patiently sifting through river sand. Although it was rarely found in Europe, the rivers of Asia and Africa abounded with gold, which arrived in the markets of NorthWest Africa from Nubia, Ethiopia and Mali.

FRONTIERS AND EXCHANGES The long phase of climatic cooling that occurred in the Northern Hemisphere and reached a peak between the sixth and seventh centuries drove nomadic herders out of the Eurasian macro-continent towards its margins. These had a milder climate and were inhabited by sedentary farming communities. The two empires adjacent to the macro-continent, the Roman and the Chinese, reacted in a similar fashion in order to direct or at least regulate these new migratory influxes, which they saw as incomprehensible and dangerous. The Chinese built the 6,700-kilometre-long Great Wall of China, conceived by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang in the third century BCE as a means of shutting out the peoples who inhabited the steppes. The Romans, for their part, built various valla (walls), which were often dozens of kilometres long; these served as ramparts reinforcing certain sections of the limes demarcating the limits of their empire that were seen as particularly vulnerable to attack. Naturally, these defence systems did not eliminate the possibility of communicating with those on the other side. Indeed, such contact was essential for the functioning of the so-called Silk Route network. As far as we know, merchants started to bring silk from China to the West in the second century BCE. Before that date, the precious material had been unknown beyond the borders of that vast land, but it soon became widely admired. By the end of the first millennium BCE, China had been unified under the Qin and later the Han dynasty. However, she had long remained isolated, surrounded by the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges and the vast Gobi Desert, and was fully self-sufficient. From the second century BCE onwards, mountain passes and routes were created through these inhospitable areas. The location of these early road systems was dictated by the relations between the Chinese, a civilization with a thousand years of agricultural experience, and the nomadic shepherds and horse-breeding communities who peopled the border regions. The northern regions were inhabited by a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes, named as the Xiongnu and the ‘Huns’ in Chinese and Western sources respectively. These tribes lived in what we now know as the ‘Mongolian’ Plateau, after the peoples who would later inhabit the area and who were likewise of Turkic origin. The present-day Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Gansu were inhabited by the Yuezhi, who were also organized into a confederation, but whose origins were Indo-European; Classical sources referred to them as Tokharians. Like many peoples of Central Asia, the Xiongnu and Yeuzhi had excellent equestrian skills.

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The system of fortifications that was to become the Great Wall had been built to prevent mounted raids. At the same time, as a military form of reinforcement against such attacks, the Chinese emperors created cavalry squadrons whose traditional uniforms – ankle-length jackets and tunics – were impractical for horseriding and were replaced by new items similar to those worn by the peoples of the steppes. Yet the problem of finding horses remained; being fertile, Chinese soil was used for growing crops, and it was no easy task to transform arable farmers into animal breeders. It was even more of a challenge to change the purpose of land that produced good yields for those who tended it. The Chinese therefore renewed their connections with the Xiongnu, and above all with the Yuezhi, so that they would supply them with horses. The requirements of warfare dictated the first commercial exchanges, creating the need for roadways. It was in this context that the Silk Route − or, more accurately, Routes – came into existence. They were used for the circulation of goods, but also served diplomatic and religious purposes. In this way, Buddhism, followed by Zoroastrianism and Christianity (primarily Nestorian) extended beyond their areas of origin. The multitudes of beliefs and cults encompassed by that vast trade network were to remain a constant feature and made a forceful impact on thirteenth-century European travellers such as Marco Polo, who were unaccustomed to such diversity and therefore wrote in great detail on the subject.

THE SILK ROUTE AND THE INCENSE ROUTE Although silk was the most precious and mysterious item that arrived in the West from the Far East, it was not the only one. Bronze ornaments and multicoloured carpets arrived in the Mediterranean from China – the ‘Land of the Seres’, or the people who produced silk and gave it their name – and also from India and Persia. But the ‘Silk Route’ was not the only itinerary to forge a connection between different peoples. The Romans were also familiar with the ‘Incense Route’ and the ‘Spice’ or ‘Aromatics Route’, which brought precious spices that had arrived by sea from India and the Far East all the way from the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean. The Romans also conducted trade relations, through intermediaries, with the Far East and the ‘Land of the Seres’. Alexander the Great had extended his activities to India, and his campaign had left its traces in Western culture. Silk, like other costly merchandise, reached the Mediterranean in ships that crossed the Indian Ocean with the help of the monsoon winds, making their way along the Arabian Peninsula or up the Nile − that being the Spice Route. However, although the Chinese extended their expeditions as far as the Persian Gulf, they never displayed the same enthusiasm or curiosity regarding the West as the West felt for them. And, while we needed much from them (their ‘spices’ were indispensable for our medicines, culinary practices and fabric dyeing), we had little to offer in return. To present another perspective, today’s Westerners may have forgotten the fundamental fact that in both the Age of Antiquity and the medieval period, Europe was no more than a small, under-developed annexe of Greater Asia. The Roman Empire itself, which we often mistakenly regard as ‘European’, had the

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Mediterranean as its centre of gravity and maintained close links with the continent of Asia. Furthermore, it was constantly obliged to measure itself against that great Asian empire, Persia. The so-called Byzantine Empire belonged mostly to Asia, being none other than the pars Orientis of the Roman Empire; arising at the end of the fourth century from the division of the legacy left by the Emperor Theodosius, it lasted until 1453, despite the rupture caused by the Western Crusades between 1204 and 1261.

THE CIRCULATION OF GOODS AND IDEAS Although the Europeans had little knowledge of Asia, it was more familiar to the Arab world, whose inhabitants were accustomed to travelling and trading. Merchants from the Persian Gulf began to visit China on a regular basis from the ninth century onwards, while ships from Java made their way to the Arabian Peninsula, helped by the so-called monsoon winds. Trade conducted through land routes also flourished. The ancient Silk Route crossed the Gobi Desert and the oasis of Turkestan and passed along the Himalayas, creating a link, as we have noted, between the fertile plains of the Yangzi Jiang and the Huang He in China, protected by the Great Wall, and Persian and Arab cities such as Shiraz, Ispahan and Baghdad itself. Small kingdoms were created between China and Persia, vassal states of one or the other of those two great empires, and goods passed from caravan to caravan. The system was organized so that the convoys only undertook brief journeys between two oases, their loads then being handed over to other, similar convoys. This meant that men travelled relatively small distances, but merchandise – together with ideas and beliefs − travelled a long way in a fairly short space of time. Silk production had been established in Byzantium in the sixth century, although it did not begin to flourish until the seventh century, when the Arabs first became involved in that activity. The production of paper, a substitute for parchment, also became widespread during the same period, thanks to the Arabs. Although the Chinese no longer had the monopoly on silk production, several other goods were transported along the Eurasian trade routes. The most costly and sought-after of these were gold and silver from Sumatra, Malaysia and Korea, sandalwood, bamboo and camphor wood (from which a highly coveted essential oil was extracted), fragrant items such as incense or musk and precious stones such as rubies and sapphires from Ceylon or India. There were also spices in abundance: peppers of different qualities (often used for bartering), nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum). These were used for making medicines, dyeing textiles and culinary purposes. The most precious items were transported by land, while less expensive foods were generally conveyed by sea, although in larger quantities. These included sugar cane, rice and cereals. It would not have been cost-effective to transport these on the back of a donkey or a camel.

MARCO POLO’S MATERIALS The Westerners who lived between the ninth and twelfth centuries of our Middle Ages knew virtually nothing about these great civilizations. Their direct knowledge

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of Asia was limited to the Anatolian Peninsula and to those areas closest to the coasts of Lebanon and Palestine. They were certainly intrigued by the lands that produced the spices which were very much part of their everyday lives, as well as the gemstones and valuable materials used so abundantly by the secular and clerical elites. As we have noted, the Ancients’ accounts of these countries were largely based on their imaginations. However, we should not underestimate the information received from the Arab traders who had seen these places for themselves. In his work The Travels of Marco Polo, the explorer includes an interesting account of asbestos; this mineral had been known since Antiquity, but according to legend it came from the skin of the salamander, an animal likewise resistant to fire. Pliny had already written of this, describing the salamander as a type of lizard, and Saint Augustine had used it as a metaphor for souls; if the salamander were able to live in fire, as recorded by naturalists, it meant that not everything that burned was consumed by flames, including souls in hell. Marco Polo wrote of this as Kublai Khan had apparently gifted the pope with some asbestos cloth; ‘Let me tell you finally that one of these cloths is now at Rome; it was sent to the Pope by the Great Khan as a valuable gift, and for this reason the sacred napkin of our lord Jesus Christ was wrapped in it.’1 Marco Polo found materials the most intriguing of all the different types of merchandise he saw. He particularly admired the crimson Turkoman silks. The name of that colour originated from the Persian word qirmizī, meaning ‘produced by insects’, and the dye was indeed extracted from the Kermes vermilio, or oak worm. He was also very interested in ‘buckram’, named after the city of Bukhara, a loosely woven, transparent material that could be found everywhere. The term seems to have been more commonly applied to the type of weaving involved than the fabric used, and Marco Polo explained that the best came from India. Other fabrics of plant origin that were traded include cotton (also used for wadding), linen and hemp, the city of Kashgar in one of the westernmost regions of present-day China serving as one of the Silk Route’s major trading posts. From China, too, came the ‘camlets’ from the camels of XiXia and Tenduc. These may have been fine fabrics woven from camel wool, or, in a more general sense, valuable wool fabric similar to pashmina and mohair. And there was silk, naturally, the cloth of gold and silk frequently mentioned in The Travels of Marco Polo, as well as those light, silken veils known as the zendadi. Certain precious silks produced by complex processes were named after the city from which they originated, such as damask (from Damascus) and ‘baldachin’ (from Baghdad). Other sought-after and expensive imported fabrics included brocade, muslin and samit. These products were known to Italian manufacturers, who copied them during the period from the twelfth century through to the fourteenth. They are mentioned, explained and described in detail in merchants’ handbooks such as Prattica della mercatura (The Practice of Commerce) written in the 1340s by Francesco di Balduccio Pegolotti, a business man in the service of the Bardi company, a Florentine banking house. Although he had not personally travelled to the Far East, Pegolotti

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conceived the work as a practical guide for those keen to develop trading activities between the Black Sea and China.

PEARLS AND PRECIOUS STONES Pearls were also highly coveted items – The Travels of Marco Polo contains a very vivid description of pearl-fishing – as were precious stones. In Baghdad, Indian pearls were pierced in order to be made into jewellery. Marco Polo also mentions turquoises from Kerman Province in Iran, and the valuable balas rubies and semiprecious blue stones flecked with gold known as lapis-lazuli (from lapis, the Latin for stone and zoloto, the Russian for gold), which came from Badakhshan and Tenduc. There is also jasper and chalcedony from Kashgar – the list goes on. Marco Polo found India to be the source of numerous precious stones that enriched Eurasian trade with their presence. In addition to his description of pearlfishing, he also provides a detailed account of how diamonds are obtained; worthy of a fairy tale, it is very similar to the description included in the ‘Sinbad the Sailor’ story-cycle in the Arabian Nights. Spices also had their place, and throughout his voyage Marco Polo makes frequent mention of saffron, cinnamon, rhubarb and galangal. Nor are plainer foodstuffs forgotten, among them provender, cereals and fruits of every kind. Although items of this type were not always included in trade with distant lands, they, too, often served as a means of indicating the resources possessed by the continent through which the Venetian explorer travelled, and he refers to them in his accounts. And finally, there is musk, obtained from a gland found in the stomach of a small ruminant (a type of gazelle); this substance played an important role in perfume making and is mentioned by Marco Polo on several occasions. As well as crossing the deserts and mountains of Asia to reach the West, goods were also conveyed through a vast, turbulent ‘desert’ of water regularly assailed by the raging monsoon winds: the Indian Ocean.

THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF THE INDIAN OCEAN The Indian Ocean, with its demons and marvels, enchantments and tides, has an area of nearly 75 million square kilometres. Shallower in some places, strewn with islands that are actually the highest summits of extensive underwater mountain ranges, it is much deeper in others; the ‘Wharton Trench’, which lies between Java and Australia, reaches a depth of 7,000 metres. These mysterious waters, whose colours range from deep blue to iron grey, are not only agitated by monsoon winds, but also become alarmingly turbulent at meeting points of hot, warm, cold and − in the extreme south − very cold ocean currents. A vast expanse, its northernmost point borders the 30th parallel north, where the Shatt-al-Arab River flows into the Strait of Hormuz, while its southernmost point, permanently covered in ice, extends beyond the Antarctic Circle to the 70th parallel south. In terms of longitude, it extends eastwards from the East African coast to the shores of Western Australia.

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It is certainly the smallest of the world’s three great oceans, and in many respects it is also the most inhospitable and the least inhabited. It was also the last to be explored by Western Europeans, the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, being the first to venture there in the late fifteenth century. Its eastern and southern areas were not explored until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nowadays, tourism advertisements present the Indian Ocean as an earthly paradise. Everyone is familiar, at least though films and photos, with those splendid archipelagos, particularly the coral islands, that lie between the coasts of Mozambique, Madagascar, Southern India and Sri Lanka − Cormoros, the Seychelles, Mauritius, Réunion Island and the Maldives, as well as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands located in the Bay of Bengal, to the East of India and the NorthWest of Sumatra. These fabulous islands and mysterious seas were only known to Hellenistic and Graeco-Roman Antiquity as the echoes of legendary voyages; remote lands where spices originated, such as the ‘Golden Chersonese’ and Taprobane Island, were difficult to imagine, let alone locate.

SINBAD THE SAILOR A history of the Indian Ocean could certainly begin with that Oriental Ulysses known to us as ‘Sinbad’ since the successful series of tales written by Hungarian author Gyula Krúdy between 1912 and 1917. Forming a type of ‘indirect autobiography’, the stories describe the exploits of an imaginary hero, a knight-errant at odds with conformity who combines aspects of the characters of Ulysses, Don Quixote and Don Juan. Yet his name, evidently of Indian origin, had been borrowed from the Kitab Sindibad (The Book of Sinbad), an Arabic text whose original Indian and Persian versions have been lost; the oldest that we possess suggest that it dates from the ninth or tenth centuries. Popularized versions of this work were produced in Byzantium, Castile, Catalonia and Italy; these take the form of a series of novels warning young people of the dangers of imprudence and the infidelity of women. But we have not yet come to ‘our’ Sindibad, with whom the Indo-Arabic adventurer of the Arabian Nights who served as the inspiration for Krúdy’s hero is often confused. ‘Our’ hero is the chief protagonist of the Asfàr Sindibad, or The Voyages of Sinbad, a small book likewise in Arabic and possibly of Indo-Iranian origin. Set in Baghdad in the reign of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786–809), the tales were incorporated into the Arabian Nights at a relatively belated date. This is a story of travel and high adventure; Sindibad, a wealthy merchant from Baghdad, receives guests from all walks of life in his opulent palace, entertaining them for seven consecutive days with tales of his extraordinary adventures at sea. These involve shipwrecks, desert islands, one-eyed monsters who naturally bring to mind Homer’s Polyphemus, the gigantic Roc bird with its huge eggs, the Valley of the Diamonds, the island whose inhabitants are transformed into birds, the island of pepper-gatherers, and the magnetic mountain. Aside from the mythical character of this narrative, and the fact that it drew inspiration from the condensed versions of The Odyssey which were circulating

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in the Arab world, it is now generally acknowledged that the unknown author’s sources include at least one travel journal written by a tenth-century Persian ship’s captain. And the information to be gleaned from this small work regarding winds, ocean currents and merchandise suggests that it provides a more or less accurate picture of voyages across the Indian Ocean, in the captivating guise of a legend. From the days of Antiquity, Egyptian, Phoenician and Chinese ships made use of the seasonal monsoon winds connecting the Horn of Africa − and consequently the Red Sea and the coastlines of the Arabian Peninsula − to India and Sri Lanka. In summer, these blow from the Arabian Sea in the south-west to the north-east of India, bringing humid air and rain, moving in the opposite direction in winter and bringing drier weather. The ships were at great risk, and there were frequent shipwrecks in those waters constantly agitated by ocean currents and winds; nevertheless, despite the distances involved, the monsoon winds made it possible to reach the African and Arab ports in the West and the Indian ports in the East in a fairly short space of time. In this way, goods from the East originating not only from India, but also from Java, Sumatra, Borneo and the south-east in general, arrived in merchant ships in Arabian, western Persian and Red Sea ports. Between the Age of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, those ships were primarily Chinese, and later Arab; they were laden with those precious, aromatic culinary products that we know as ‘spices’. Those same ships would set sail once more for the East, laden with gold, ivory and precious woods from the African continent. From the Gulf of Aden by way of the Nile, the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula, the Incense Route continued towards the Nile Delta and the ports of Syria and Lebanon to reach the Mediterranean, and from there, Rome. In the Middle Ages, the maritime commercial route functioned together with the land route through Asia − the Silk Road. Yet Western merchants were never able to control either one or the other.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY: EUROPE CREATES HER OWN ROUTES Radical changes occurred between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Due to the establishment of the Ottoman Empire and the constant control exerted by the Mamluk Sultanate of Cairo on the arrival of spices − and of foods from East Asia in general − in the Mediterranean via the Red Sea and the Nile, it became clear that the only way Europeans would be able to connect with the vast continent of Asia would be through Turkey. As a possible option, this was neither reliable nor inexpensive. All the numerous Crusade initiatives launched in the fifteenth century involved this need to sail around the two land masses controlled by the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires. The Portuguese relied on their diplomatic contacts with the Christian Negus of Ethiopia, who had already been visited by apostolic delegates from the Latin Church, such as the Friar Minor Alberto da Sarteano. Members of the nautical school in the Algarve founded by the renowned Infante dom Henrique, known as ‘the Navigator’, made bold attempts to sail around the African continent in order to reach the East by what became known as the ‘Eastern’ sea route. As

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we know, Christopher Columbus pursued the same aim, travelling in the opposite direction in a bid to reach the East by sailing westwards, and therefore crossing the Atlantic Ocean. An expedition that took place between 1497 and 1498 was led by Vasco da Gama, who reached Calicut (Kozhikode) on the Malabar Coast. This marked a turning point in the history of the Indian Ocean; meanwhile, in the extreme western section of the world, a new continent was being discovered. But that, as Rudyard Kipling was to say, is another story.

LUXURY AND EVERYDAY LIFE We have briefly described the basis of what we might define as the ‘institutional history’ of the origins of modern luxury. It is important to note here that luxury has nothing to do with economic prosperity. Luxury goods continue to circulate during times when poverty rates are high, these periods being characterized, in many cases, by an extraordinarily high concentration of accumulated and hoarded wealth. In the ‘darkest’ periods of our Middle Ages, between the fifth and tenth centuries, Europe continued to obtain gold, precious stones, costly silken and woollen fabrics, spices such as sugar (for medicinal purposes, as honey was normally used as a sweetener) and incense from the East, alongside ‘modest’ but indispensable goods like salt and iron. The Church needed rich materials and incense for liturgical celebrations, and the powerful emphasized their social rank through ostentatious display. European nobles sought assignments as mercenaries in Spain, Sicily and the Byzantine and Muslim East, especially from the eleventh century onwards, as a way of meeting their growing need for cash, which was in short supply. Yet things altered rapidly from this standpoint too; a change occurred in the European monetary system between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, with a move from the exclusive use of silver in currency to the minting of coins made of gold. The Roman solidus aureus (4.55 grammes) disappeared at the end of the fifth century. However, it was replaced by similar coins struck in the Eastern Roman Empire (the bezant and the hyperpyron), and in the Muslim lands governed by potentates (the dinar and the mancus). There were sharp disparities in medieval European society; this socio-economic stratification was also manifested by barriers of a symbolic character, the cut and colour of clothing being a typical example. Only royalty and the nobility had the right to wear rich apparel made of wool (and later of silk) in regal colours such as purple, vermilion and scarlet. They were also entitled to line their garments − generally on the inside, and more rarely on the outside − with sought-after furs. These included ermine and sable, which came from the forests of Russia via Constantinople and Venice, and later from the Baltic Sea ports. In the Middle Ages, only the knights, whose symbol was the sword, were entitled to own those with gold inlaid hilts, as well as sumptuous mantles lined with vair (Siberian squirrel). Women’s apparel was even more complex; it included transparent veils woven with gold or silver thread, as well as other types of head-dress, coloured and embroidered garments and splendid, costly belts. Their dresses featured long trains that formed a somewhat playful contrast with their daring décolletages. Thirteenth and fourteenth

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century preachers, many of whose treatises and sermon compilations have survived to this day, were full of violent invectives against the phenomenon that played havoc with all sense of proportion and moderation − modus in medieval Latin. When redefined and ironically given the feminine form, this term gave us la mode – fashion. All the municipal authorities in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance implemented sumptuary laws of varying degrees of rigour. These governed the wearing of gold and silver adornments (such as belt buckles or buttons), the length of trains, the addition of fur linings and so on, limiting their usage and even denying them to certain social classes, which were of modest standing but were growing steadily richer. In this way, great wealth remained a symbol of civil or religious authority rather than prosperity in the economic sense. As time went on, however, these laws were circumvented or contravened in an increasing number of cases. Meanwhile, luxury entered the culinary domain − not only through crockery and tableware made of fine glass and precious metals, but also through refined wines and dishes, which were often seasoned with rare spices. There was even a revival of the ancient Graeco-Roman practice of dissolving pearls in drinks and beautifying dishes with the addition of real gold flakes. In the light of certain theories, including the alchemical concept of aurum potabile, it was believed that gold, silver and pearls possessed the power to purify foods and render certain poisons ineffectual. This practice continues even today, perpetuated by certain famous brands of alcohol; Smirnoff, for instance, offers a special vodka flavoured with cinnamon and enhanced with 23–4-carat gold flakes, which sparkle as they float in the transparent liquid. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, certain dishes served at court banquets were covered with fine gold leaf; it quickly became the fashion to copy that costly habit, using substitutes such as bright yellow crocus pistils (saffron). In the same way, the tomato, the fruit of a plant later brought from the New World and long regarded as purely ornamental, was first used in a culinary context for the aesthetic appeal of its intensely red colour. It would be some time before it was established as a food in its own right. The connection between lifestyle, dress and food practices and social hierarchies endured for a considerable time; indeed, in some respects it lasted until the midtwentieth century, although naturally there were variations in terms of emphasis and inflexibility. At all events, the impoverishment of the nobility in the eleventh century, accompanied by the opposite process − the enrichment of the ‘middle’, ‘bourgeois’ strata of society, which occurred in a diverse, discontinuous manner, leading to complex phenomena of attraction, mimesis, resistance and fusion − did not blur the clear and long-standing distinction separating the aristocracy from the bourgeoisie. This was just as evident in the city landscape and architecture as it was in clothing. The aristocracy in Italy, Occitania-Provence and Catalonia were soon drawn to the cities, where they imported the architectural forms and customs of their class, giving rise to new ‘patrician’ styles as clearly seen in Genoa and Venice, for example. In central and northern Europe, however, the nobility preferred to remain ‘faithful to the land’ rather than moving to the city. Consequently, urban landscapes and architecture displaying an elevated, but still emphatically middle-class style began to emerge in Flemish and Hanseatic cities. Producers, entrepreneurs, merchants and

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even artisans presented their public face primarily through the headquarters of their operations: the loggia in Italy, the lonja in Catalonia and the Halle in Germany.

A HISTORY OF VANITIES And so the eternal, interminable history of vanity, luxury and pleasure goes on. These have been lambasted over the ages by religious figures and moralists, and extolled by the media and by those seeking riches and success. The fashion for luxury also extended to culinary tastes and appetites, where it was manifested in a variety of ways. For instance, the shift from fermented beverages to distilled alcoholic drinks that took place between the Middle Ages and the Modern Era was a significant turning point. This was also true of the introduction into Europe of tobacco and coffee, both momentous events. Coffee, that ancient ‘jewel’ of Africa and Asia, subsequently became so thoroughly ‘naturalized’ as a Latin American product that many people today would swear that the famous roasted Coffea arabica originated from Brazil, not Ethiopia. The follies of fashion – already targeted by a scandalized Dante Alighieri, who railed against the ‘shameless Florentine women’ readily ‘exposing their chest and bosoms’ – would always have a provocative and disruptive effect. This was the case, for instance, with the Galois and Galoises, young, high-born members of a strange, early-fifteenth-century French sect that combined asceticism with eroticism and urged its adherents to wear heavy furs and light great fires in summer, and in winter to fill their fireplaces with greenery and place only a thin covering on their beds. Later came the précieuses lampooned by Molière, and the dandyism arising, somewhat ambiguously, in the American colonies that rebelled against His Britannic Majesty in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The dandy is with us still, having experienced countless revivals and reincarnations. Other, more recent examples include William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, whose experiments encompassed the domains of fashion, the arts, the crafts and proto-design, and the Art Deco movement, which exploded onto the scene in the early twentieth century and endowed the New York skyline with one of its gems, the Chrysler Building. This sky-scraper stands as a testimony to a civilization which, for a few years, genuinely believed that the encounter between freedom, ephemerality and opulence was the effective formula for the attainment of lasting happiness. The Sainte-Chapelle and the Chrysler Building in New York may well be connected by the pursuit of that same cherished, extravagant dream – of capturing light within works made by human hands and of transforming wealth into a work of art.

NOTES 1. The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by Ronald Latham, London, Penguin Books, 1974, p. 90.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Airaldi, Gabriella (Ed.), Gli orizzonti aperti. Profili del mercante medievale, Turin, Paravia, 1997. Dini, Bruno, Saggi su una economia-mondo. Firenze e l’Italia fra Mediterraneo ed Europa (secc. XIII-XVI), Pisa, Pacini, 1995. Freedman, Paul, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2008. Heyd, Wilhelm, Geschichte des Levantehandels im Mittelalter, Stuttgart, J.G.Cotta, 1879. Montanari, Massimo, Alimentazione e cultura nel medioevo, Rome–Bari, Laterza, 1988. Muzzarelli, Maria Giuseppina, Guardaroba medievale. Vesti e società dal XIII al XVI secolo, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2008. Norrell, Mark A., Denise Patry Leidy, Laura Ross, Luca Molà, Maria Ludovica Rosati, Alexandra Wetzel, Paola Piacentini and Gabriella Di Flumeri Vatielli, Sulla via della seta. Antichi sentieri tra Oriente e Occidente (co-authored), Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni/Codice, 2012. Postan, M. M. and H. J. Habakkuk (Eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 3 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1966. Todeschini, Giacomo, I mercanti e il Tempio. La società cristiana e il circolo virtuoso della ricchezza fra Medioevo ed età moderna, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2002. Vanoli, Alessandro, Storie di parole arabe. Il racconto di un mondo mediterraneo, Milan, Ponte alle Grazie, 2016.

CHAPTER 33

Memories of home, Memories of the world The paintings of Johannes Vermeer TIMOTHY BROOK

The paintings of Johannes Vermeer have preserved memories of the European encounter with the wider world in the seventeenth century. In this current wave of globalization, the memories of those first commercial exchanges have a different resonance. Europe’s transformation in the seventeenth century has left its traces in the works of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632–75). Vermeer did not intend to document his century. Painting at home, using family members and friends as models and family possessions as props, he was recording memories of his own life. He understood that his buyers, Delft householders, did not want to buy images from his life, but scenes that reflected their own lives as comfortably housed burghers enjoying the fruits of Holland’s liberation from the Hapsburg Empire, its embrace of Protestant republicanism and the end of the Thirty Years’ War – but most of all, the enrichment of Europe through global maritime trade. Vermeer is not the artist who first comes to mind when we think of paintings that mark great events. We think of him as a meticulous painter of domestic scenes, of quiet conversation or solitary reflection, not as a dramatist of the conflicts and changes sweeping through his society. Consider by contrast Pablo Picasso. His Guernica has turned the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid into the leading site of memory of the Spanish Civil War. Vermeer’s paintings display nothing so dramatic or consciously world-historical. They do a different kind of work, commemorating the emergence of an urban middle class at the moment that it was fashioning for itself a new cultural identity and a private subjectivity celebrating the importance of the lives they lived. To catch this importance, artists needed a new language of painting. When persons and places are no longer symbolic stand-ins for idealized meanings taken from the Bible or classical mythology, visual accuracy becomes important. Vermeer

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was at the early phase of the rise of representational painting in Europe, when painters strove for a scientific precision that could fool the eye (trompe l’oeil). In the wake of the Renaissance, heaven grew smaller – and even disappeared for some – while the Earth grew immensely larger. Knowledge of unknown places within and beyond Europe arrived in a flood, challenging painters turned to look closely at what lay at hand and also at the greatest distance.

WOMAN WITH A PEARL NECKLACE Vermeer’s three earliest surviving works recycle mythical and biblical settings and are rather forgettable. Only when he chose to leave such scripted exercises and turned for subjects to the prosperous urban world did his work begin to stand apart. In Woman with a Pearl Necklace (ca. 1664) he depicts a woman gazing at herself in a mirror as she ties a string of pearls around her neck. The brush and basin on the table tell us that she is completing her morning toilette. She stands in perfect profile, so we cannot see what she sees, only what she does. Autoradiography reveals that Vermeer had propped a lute on the chair in the foreground and framed her head within a wall map, both signs of worldly frivolity designed to signal the vanity of her preparations. But he then painted these signs out, removing the moral lesson and presenting her in terms of her own experience. A folded letter on the corner of the table implies that she is preparing for a visit from an admirer, but such plots are no longer necessary for this aesthetic. The real subject of the painting is the young woman’s immediate experience. The quiet dramas of domestic life are now sufficient to sustain a painting. The model is Catharina Bolnes, Vermeer’s wife. Her presence makes this picture a site of personal memory for Vermeer, who through it recalls the infinite occasions when she prepared herself before descending to the public rooms of the house. His potential buyers were not privy to that personal memory; instead, the painting encourages them to remember theirs. The stillness and clarity of the scene invest Catharina with a dignity that seduces viewers, us included, into recognizing such private moments from our own lives. The situation is not quite as neat or compact as this reading suggests, if one looks more closely. One object on the table gives the game away, and that is the Chinese ginger jar, glinting from the darkness on the left. The jar was an expensive possession of the sort that only wealthier families could afford (it is not known who owned this jar, but probably not Vermeer, as it appears in no other of his paintings). The jar does the aesthetic work of balancing the painting and contrasting with its dominant yellows. But it also signals the linkage through the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) between Delft and economies as distant as China, where these jars were made. Everything in the painting, from the jar to the wealth and domesticity the woman herself staged, depended utterly on this trade. Indeed, the absent male may have been among the hundreds of thousands of Dutchmen who sailed abroad in this century, reminding us that bourgeois life was simply the other side of Europe’s colonial domination of the world.

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THE GEOGRAPHER With The Geographer (ca. 1669), Vermeer seems to tell a different story, and yet there are similarities between the two paintings. The overall design is repeated: a single figure in contemplation in a partial room lit by light coming in from windows on the left. The subjects in both are engaged in looking closely, the young woman at her reflection, the scholar at abstract ideas about mapping the visible world. Both are concerned with representations, she in presenting a perfect image of herself to her expected visitor, he in transcribing topography so closely that a viewer can read the world directly from his maps. What the young woman and the geographer are doing is also, in a sense, Vermeer’s project. He has used everything in his toolkit, including perspectival distortion, to produce what appear to be exact likenesses of both people. He maps his subjects as carefully as the geographer maps the earth. The geographer is almost certainly Vermeer’s neighbour, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723). Famous for his experiments with the microscope, van Leeuwenhoek was Delft’s pre-eminent man of science. He is surrounded by the tools and productions of his trade, including a framed print of Willem Blaeu’s Chart of All the Seacoasts of Europe (1600) on the back wall and Jodocus Hondius’s terrestrial globe (1618) on the wardrobe. The same globe appears in this later Allegory of Faith, redeployed under a woman’s foot as a sign of worldliness being spurned; there is no such condescension in The Geographer. Here it stands for the importance of mastering the flow of geographical data arriving daily into Europe. Knowledge and empire were being transformed by the capacity to sail efficiently and quickly to ports throughout Asia, which is why there were geographers, and why this subject, which other artists painted as well, would have appealed to buyers in Delft. It reminded them that they were at the forefront of the transformation induced by Europe’s encounter with the world. It also reminded them that they were its masters.

SITES OF MEMORY OF WHAT? Vermeer became a forgotten minor painter until his rediscovery late in the nineteenth century. Today his works occupy prominent places in our collective memory of European art without our necessarily having seen them in person. Many art lovers make it their life’s ambition to see every one of his paintings on public display. Vermeer pilgrims travel to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin to see Woman with a Pearl Necklace as well as The Glass of Wine, and they visit the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt to view The Geographer. They desire to be in their presence, and no curator would dream of putting them in storage. What do people remember when they look at these paintings? Vermeer seems to catch his figures with such intimacy that he persuades us into recognizing them as precursors to our world as much as denizens of their own. We think we know them and remember them in our terms. But that recognition can come at the cost of neglecting the real world in which Vermeer and his subjects lived, a world in which a ginger jar was not just a coveted object of beauty but a commodity entangled with

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the destructive history of European colonialism. Our remembering should be able to include what lies at the edge of the canvas as well as what occupies the centre. The Geographer brings this memory more blatantly to the foreground than does Woman with a Pearl Necklace. Vermeer drapes this man in the aura of discovery, but what he seeks to discover is not pure knowledge for its own sake, however much some like van Leeuwenhoek might have felt that at the time. His work is to find where trade routes run and how better geographical knowledge can speed up the return to capital that the VOC looked for, and on which Delft was built. From our place in history, as globalization remakes the world in ways we cannot predict, Vermeer can remind us of where this process began and how people in his time managed the transformation to craft meaningful lives for themselves, lives that look private but were completely entwined with the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brook, Timothy, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, New York, Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Wheelock, Arthur, Jr. (Ed.), Johannes Vermeer, Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1995.

CHAPTER 34

Museums and the risk to memory DOMINIQUE POULOT

In the eighteenth century, the museum established itself in Europe as the quintessential setting for the presentation of a national memory. In the twentieth century, the very idea of the single grand narrative was called into question, shaking the institution to its foundations and placing it at the heart of the public debate. A European invention, museums were founded at different times in different countries. In every case, however, their creation was linked to the spirit of the Enlightenment, to ideas of progress and transmission and later to the national communities that consolidated their position during the nineteenth century. Being both a place of conservation and display, the museum is seen as the quintessential European site of memory. Large numbers of visitors, particularly those from other continents, have discovered European art and culture there − from Henry James and the American protagonists of his novels making their ‘Grand Tours’ to twenty-firstcentury ‘selfie’-taking tourists. In his recent film Francofonia (2015), the Russian director Alexander Sokurov used the story of the negotiations between Jacques Jaujard, the director of the Louvre Museum, and the Nazi occupiers to create a powerful allegory of the museum’s battle against the destruction of civilization. The director had already based an earlier film, Russian Ark (2002), on the hypothesis that a museum − the Hermitage in this case – enables us to ‘read’ the history of a nation or, indeed, can represent that history in its entirety. One generation further back, in 1975, Peter Weiss began his major novel The Aesthetics of Resistance with a scene in the Pergamon Museum. The year is 1937, and the narrator and a communist activist friend are standing in front of the ancient bas-reliefs there, listening to another friend, an anarchist, as he gives his own, proletarian version of Hercules’s heroic fight, presenting it in terms of the resistance to the Nazi regime.1 In a brutal world, encounters with museum objects can teach us as much about courage as they do about culture. The history of European museums begins with the Fête des Arts parade held in Paris in 1798, when the spoils taken from conquered countries – the statues of Classical Antiquity, priceless paintings, rare animals, books and manuscripts – were brought to the new museums. The ceremony illustrated the transfer of

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the world’s masterpieces from Greece to Rome and from Rome to Paris, which had become the city of freedom and genius; with its writing of history from the victors’ perspective, the event brings to mind that analogy between barbarism and civilization that Walter Benjamin would later discuss in his work On the Concept of History. The extraordinary variety of European museum holdings and their oftenchaotic development reflect the continent’s cultural diversity, both by displaying the characteristics specific to each nation and through the constant circulation of the objects themselves, and of their curators, collectors and experts.

A REPRESENTATION OF POWER Scholarly studies of the collections highlight the legacy of the Renaissance. In 1908, Julius von Schlosser, curator of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, wrote a book on cabinets of curiosities – the Kunst-und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance. There, he describes a division between Northern and Southern Europe, characterized by the contrast between a fascination with mysterious curiosities possessing magical properties and an interest exclusively limited to the creations of Antiquity and to Classical scholarship. His approach was somewhat unconventional, given that this was a time when the majority of specialists were describing the advances being made by contemporary museums and criticizing the incohesive character of older collections. One such example is David Murray, whose encyclopaedia of museums was published during the same period, in 1904. Nowadays, however, the history of museums exerts a fascination all of its own; this is reflected in the cabinets of curiosity that have been reconstituted in various parts of Europe, such as the collection amassed by Ferdinand II and held at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck. This theme is kept very much alive today through the work of numerous artists and exhibition commissioners, who have (re)created their own updated versions of these collections; one such example is the contemporary cabinet of curiosities created in the Château d’Oiron during the 1990s at the initiative of the Curator Jean-Hubert Martin. The memory held by these curious collections tells us of the nomadic lives of Europe’s precious objects and of the changeable nature of the dividing lines between the familiar and the strange. It also reminds us that such collections remain a means of representing the power − magical or symbolic − that their owners exerted over the world. The place occupied by museums in European art publications specifically reflects the connection between the works accumulated there and the renown enjoyed by a territory and its prince, with further contributions to this illustration being made over time. The best examples of this may well be the Capitoline Museum holdings in Rome and the collection of antiquities bequeathed to La Serenissima − the Republic of Venice − by Cardinal Domenico Grimani in 1523. In the seventeenth century, therefore, various European states (primarily Italian) took steps to protect ‘public’ objects of this type, these being the legacy left by their leading artists. This was achieved by introducing a variety of legislative measures concerning the indivisibility of estates and by influencing the way in which major works of art were sold on the international market.

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The eighteenth century developed these initial preoccupations with heritage by adding the idea that the collections should be governed by a concern for efficacy. This meant that their purpose should be directed towards dispelling ignorance, perfecting the arts and awakening the public mind. Caspar Friedrich Neickel undertook the task of cataloguing all the museum collections in Europe, as well as those of the known world, an endeavour that resulted in his Museographia, published in 1727. This work launched the new term ‘museography’, which subsequently enjoyed success in both a practical and a theoretical context. Initially founded on the collection amassed by the physician Sir Hans Sloane, the British Museum was established by an Act of Parliament in 1753 and opened its doors to the public six years later. The obsession with bringing a country’s libraries, collections and learned societies together in one central location, from which enlightenment would be disseminated throughout the world, stemmed from the Great Library of Alexandria; this institution was an ideal admired by all the elites of Europe’s higher education establishments, their minds nourished by Classical studies. The famous library of the Ptolemaic kings, which was the ancient world’s version of an encyclopaedia, served as a type of studio of its time, in which the human mind could be developed. Initially, the connection between such an institution as the Temple of the Muses and ‘British’ political identity was far from obvious. In reality, the development of the British Museum runs parallel to the career of that famous song ‘Rule, Britannia!’ Written in the mid-eighteenth century, the song had urged the British people to defend their freedom against tyrants; during the following century, however, it assumed the form of a hymn to triumphant imperialism. Today’s British Museum is a neoclassical edifice designed by the architect Robert Smirke in 1823; now featuring an ‘Enlightenment Gallery’ installed in 2004, it likewise bears no resemblance to the very modest building that housed its initial collection.

THE LOUVRE DEVELOPS − UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT In mainland Europe, the Louvre inherited the commitment behind the creation of the Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. The aim of the Encyclopédistes had been to establish an archive of knowledge accumulated in the arts and sciences, as with the enlightened administrative projects of the 1780s. In 1791, the revolutionary authorities decreed that the building should be used to house the masterpieces that represented ‘the benefits of civilization’. The inauguration of the Louvre as a museum in 1793 demonstrated the desire to ‘democratize’ − a condemnatory neologism coined by the French Revolution’s ideological adversaries. And indeed, the Musée Central des Arts, as it was known, embodied the break with the secret nature of the Ancien Régime collections and the achievement of a new right in the utopian form of free instruction, which would make a positive contribution to society as a whole. Yet the fact that citizens were now able to visit the museum served the authorities’ preoccupation with monitoring the public mind, a price to be paid for that political imaginary.

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The global scope of the new Louvre museum set it apart from other establishments founded during this period, which were strictly national and more specialized in character. Examples include the short-lived Special Museum of the French School (1797–1802), installed at the Palace of Versailles, and Alexandre Lenoir’s Museum of French Monuments, which was located closer to the Louvre, on the opposite bank of the Seine; it was inaugurated in 1795 and closed with the Bourbon Restoration. With this institution, Lenoir created the concept of the historical museum; both educational and picturesque, it made a considerable impression in the Europe of nation states. Such a clear differentiation between a universal museum and national collections, identified in exemplary fashion by Jules Michelet in his Histoire de la Révolution française, was unusual. Michelet explains that the definition of what constituted a ‘national museum’ varied from country to country in Europe, noting that some collections were strictly limited to the creations of a specific political and cultural territory, while others were encyclopaedic or even universal in their scope.

1815: ‘MUSEOMANIA’ EMERGES IN EUROPE The brief cycle of French hegemony during the Revolutionary-Napoleonic period witnessed the reorganization of all the collections that had belonged to princes, the Church and above all to private individuals, from Spain to Sweden, from Germany to Italy – Britain being an exception. At its apogee, Napoleonic France reshaped the patrimonial landscape according to a principle of centralization based on conquest. In this way, Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera was inaugurated in the Napoleonic ‘Kingdom of Italy’ in 1809, this public gallery being the result of an unprecedented centralization of confiscated assets. Following the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire in 1815, Europe became gripped by ‘museomania’, in the words of Athanase Lavallée, secretary-general of the Musée Napoléon, which was dismantled after the fall of its namesake. For the return of objects to their countries of origin did not signal the demise of the museum in Europe, but rather its triumph. An exemplary case in point is that of the Germanic nations. A new museum was built in Berlin between 1823 and 1830; it was based on the rejection of the inspiration behind an institution such as the Louvre, founded on war, and instead espoused the values of peace. Its architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, adopted the feature of the rotunda, as seen in the Vatican Museum founded by Pope Clement XIV in 1771 and enlarged by Pope Pius VI. Before the Revolution, this was regarded as the quintessence of the cultural heritage of the Republic of Letters and a European academy of arts. With his design, Schinkel affirmed the hitherto unprecedented social mission of the museum; it was now intended to serve the Bildung – the self-cultivation promoted by the new generation of Prussian intellectuals and chiefly based on the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Known as the Altes Museum, it was the pivotal point of a restructuring programme in the Prussian capital that subsequently led to the creation of the Museum Island; this gave rise to a number of similar urban planning initiatives in other cities. The last of these to occur in the nineteenth century was the construction of two museums on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, a process that lasted from 1870 to 1890 and was beset by vicissitudes. These establishments were the manifestation of

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a cultural policy associated with the liberalization of the monarchical government. The new museum buildings, juxtaposed or grouped together to create symmetrical ensembles, formed areas associated with artistic or intellectual pursuits in capital cities throughout Europe. There was another European museum model, however, which was based on the reuse of existing buildings, a practice inherited from France. One example of this is the conversion of the Bargello in Florence in 1865, following the unification of Italy. This was accompanied by a patriotic resurgence of interest in the works of Dante. Until the mid-nineteenth century, a distinction was made between museums of archaeology and those devoted to artistic masterpieces. The cabinets of curiosity in Vienna and Munich, the northern European museums of antiquities, the National Archaeological Museum in Naples and the Egyptian Museum in Turin, on the one hand, and the Vatican Museum, the Louvre and the British Museum, together with the new German museums on the other, all coexisted within Europe. The ‘Springtime of the Peoples’ and burgeoning nationalist sentiments made a decisive contribution to an interest in museums that was developing throughout the continent. The barely completed National Museum of Hungary played a highly significant role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. In Paris, the painter Philippe-Auguste Jeanron served briefly as director of the Louvre during the Second Republic established in 1848; within a few months, he laid the foundations for an organizational structure that was to prevail for almost half a century. Yet the most remarkable novelty of the latter half of the century was the series of World’s Fairs that took place, and the legacy they left. The Great Exhibition of 1851, held at the Crystal Palace in London, has achieved exemplary posterity, having led to the foundation of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1852. Henry Cole, its director from 1853 to 1873, believed that the sight of great works would be sure to educate the public as well as the art school students associated with his establishment. However, a growing concern for truly artistic quality developed within the institution, at the expense of establishing a comprehensive collection of reproductions. Throughout Europe, museums of industrial art, art and industry and the decorative arts, initially conceived as encyclopaedic in character, experienced a similar fate.

THE ROLE OF COLLECTORS The ideal of an aesthetic education was essential to the development of national galleries, just as the reflections of educators and social reformers played a major role in that of local institutions, which were more or less directly linked to a concern for educating the people. This was reinforced, particularly in the UK, by preoccupations of a philanthropic and often moralizing nature. These led to the creation of educational museums featuring reproductions – engravings, photographs, casts and various facsimiles – established by preference in more disadvantaged districts; Whitechapel Art Gallery, for instance, opened in London in 1901. In general terms, the reason why philanthropists played such a significant role in the development of European museums in the nineteenth century − a phenomenon likewise illustrated by the civic museums in Italian cities and by the Swiss museums originating from

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municipal oligarchies − was because of scant investment on the part of the state. In France, for instance, the Second Empire’s record regarding the development of public collections would have been fairly lamentable without contributions from private collectors and the legacies they bequeathed to the great Parisian museums. And during the Third Republic, the patronage of the Rothschild family likewise appears to have been essential to the policy followed by the administrators of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, enabling the purchase of a greater number of works exhibited in the Salon; these were then distributed to provincial museums according to the local political clientele and the various opportunities that arose. Indeed, retrospective exhibitions and the World Fairs that offered a panoramic overview of the cultural heritage of different European states drew heavily on the collections of private individuals. In some instances this resulted in remarkable innovations, a case in point being that of the Parisian conductor Isaac Strauss, who presented the first collection of Jewish religious artefacts at the Exposition Universelle of 1878. The impact they made led to the creation of spaces specifically devoted to such items, as at the Cluny Museum for example, and, over time, to the introduction of a new tradition: the Jewish museum. Collectors’ museums of this type subsequently spread across the entire continent − North American tycoons played a significant role in the establishment of such institutions between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. One unusual case is that of the monarch collector. The Museum of the Congo, which later became the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren, was based on the colonial exhibition showcased at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1897. King Léopold II, who had had personal control over the Congo Free State, had amassed the collection, installed in 1910 in a building inspired by the Petit Palais in Paris. The archetypal museum of colonial exploitation, it was contained within a ‘little Versailles’, according to the monarch’s wishes. Recently closed for renovation, it reopened in 2018 and now includes examples of contemporary Central African art. A source of unease today, European colonial museums bear witness to a time when both conquest and research missions provided many pretexts, then deemed legitimate, for subjecting local populations to acts of pillage.

MUSEUMS AS INSTRUMENTS IN CULTURE WARS The history of museums has always been interwoven with threats to their collections. As Napoleon’s troops advanced towards Moscow, the city’s museum holdings were taken to places of safety, an episode that inaugurated a long series of similar evacuations. Yet the First World War placed the European museum in an unprecedentedly precarious position. ‘We others, civilisations, know now that we are mortal’, wrote Paul Valéry in La Crise de l’esprit (1919). During that period, the Louvre collections were hidden away south of the Loire, in Toulouse, and classified according to the urgency of the need to safeguard them. For their part, German art historians set about making an inventory of the artworks owned by the enemy and held in occupied Belgium and northern France. As a general rule, warring parties

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continually drew on museum culture by organizing exhibitions that exacerbated xenophobic sentiments intended to penetrate the public mind. The Bolshevik Revolution and the fascist regimes of the years that followed saw museums become instruments of propaganda, wholly unprecedented methods being used for this purpose. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy mobilized various means of transmission, from exhibitions to films, and from lectures to the radio, in order to ‘purge’, manipulate and recompose museums, turning them into effective tools of state ideology. The ‘Degenerate Art Exhibition’ held in Munich in 1937 pilloried certain types of contemporary artwork; meanwhile, in the same city, the ‘Great German Art Exhibition’ was extolling the national spirit as conceived by the regime. Italian exhibitions, both international and national, drew on the Renaissance and the Roman Empire as a means of bolstering the credibility of the fascist regime, and in 1936 work started on plans for a series of neoclassical museums to be built near Rome, a project that was interrupted by war. The leaders of the Russian Revolution readily borrowed the French revolutionaries’ idea of patrimonializing the masterpieces associated with the defeated regime, and conceived educational and scientific vocations for the museums that they took over or established. However, after an initial period characterized by an avant-garde approach to museology, the numerous additional Soviet establishments that were created all continued with the same museological format; based on standardized messages, they fulfilled their role in the ideological apparatus of the state, while collections were pared down and sold where necessary. The artworks exhibited, combined with other artefacts that were significant in terms of the production methods of their day, were intended to illustrate the successive phases of the class struggle. In liberal democracies, the museum world struggled to get the measure of such issues and was sometimes fascinated by the way in which its neighbours applied modern tools to serve their own purposes. These democracies also experienced movements based on reforming or challenging traditional forms of museums; some were more diverse or contradictory in character than others, depending on the country concerned. However, museums suffered primarily from the accumulation of financial and, indeed, institutional problems. In the words of Georges Huisman, director of the Beaux-Arts during the Popular Front government: ‘Having created museums for the elite in the eighteenth century, and for the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, we [must] now undertake to create museums for the people, who are unaware of them.’ This comment attests to the emergence of new preoccupations within communities of museum curators, whose field was soon to become a profession and who rejected – at least in some cases – an ‘ivory tower’ approach.

ACTS OF PILLAGE However, the widespread expansion of European museums continued to result from the seizure of objects, those acts of pillage made more or less acceptable by various forms of imperialism and colonialism. For it was through the principle of its unlimited

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growth − an idea given its clearest visual expression by Le Corbusier in the proposal he sent to the Cahiers d’art in 1931 – that the museum constantly reinforced its patrimonial and scientific legitimacy. For instance, the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, which gave rise to the Musée de l’Homme (a symbol of the progressive universalism of French science, a site of political and moral engagement, and subsequently of resistance to Nazism) benefitted from the Dakar-Djibouti collecting mission carried out from 1931 to 1933 and led by Marcel Griaule. However, Michel Leiris, the team diarist, condemned the mission’s lack of scruples in L’Afrique fantôme (1934). New types of exhibitions and interpretations began to appear. One such example is the association established in 1937, under the Popular Front government, between leisure activities, education and museums devoted to popular arts and traditions. This period even witnessed the emergence of hitherto unprecedented establishments, such as the Palais de la Découverte, founded by Jean Perrin. This new institution sought to differentiate itself from museums exhibiting collections of scientific instruments and educational dioramas, offering instead ‘a dynamic exhibition where important scientific discoveries would be demonstrated in a spectacular fashion’. During this time, the transnational circulation of museological models and references benefitted from the cooperation promoted by the International Museums Office, founded in 1926 (at the suggestion of Henri Focillon) under the auspices of the League of Nations, which published Mouseion. The first of its kind, that international museological review published information relating to the major conferences of the 1930s − the Rome conference was devoted to restoration, the Athens conference to heritage, while another, which focused on the theme of museology, was held in 1934 in Madrid, despite the tense situation in Spain. An additional, and not insignificant, force for change was the development of a museographical approach linked to the public interest that occurred across the Atlantic. This spread to Europe through various channels. Until then, North American museums had taken their inspiration from European models and were therefore the result of a one-way dissemination of expert knowledge. From then on, however, a fruitful, reciprocal exchange of ideas took place. It was on his return from the United States in 1922 that the Belgian curator Jean Capart defined the dual purpose of museology: scientific on the one hand, educative and communicative on the other. From 1936, however, European and American museum curators turned their minds to devising emergency measures under the looming threat of war. These included the transfer to Geneva, in February 1939, of the collections held in the Prado, an operation led by an international committee for the protection of the Spanish treasures established at the initiative of the painter Josep Maria Sert. The experience was to prove useful for similar evacuations that took place in the Second World War and paved the way for the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict adopted by UNESCO in 1954.

MUSEUM, MEMORY The catastrophic effects on cultural heritage produced by the military operations of the Second World War, the Nazi pillage of private collections, mainly Jewish,

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which were sometimes hidden in museums, and the spoils seized from German museums by the Red Army, all greatly disrupted the European museum’s mission as a custodian. It was therefore crucially important to guarantee its future security, particularly in view of the increased risks represented by the apocalyptic prospect of nuclear disaster, a threat regularly highlighted in the professional literature of the day. The revival of the hopes placed in those institutions called for reflections of a historical and sociological nature. Alma Wittlin (1899–1990) was a specialist in Spanish architecture who trained in Vienna and became a museologist following her arrival in England as a refugee. In 1949, she produced a work on the role of museums in a new Europe. Now a classic text, this combines a history of museum collections with sociological reflection and a humanist manifesto. Conversely, in his essay Valéry Proust Museum (1953), the German philosopher Theodor Adorno condemns the neutralization of culture brought about by museums, which he likens to sepulchres. However, he acknowledges that renouncing the experience of the traditional would mean yielding to barbarism. In his novel Heimatmuseum, Siegfried Lenz, a writer from the next generation, tells the story of a museum in the German ‘homeland’ whose effects had been so damaging that the only reasonable way of safeguarding the future of the local community was by deliberately destroying it.2 The story resonates strangely, given that the post-war period witnessed a great many provenance research missions and requests made on the grounds of legitimate suspicion to museums that held despoiled, confiscated or pillaged objects. In the case of France, out of the 100,000 works that disappeared between 1940 and 1945, over 60,000 were found, returned to their original owners or put up for sale by those in charge of the estates involved, while 2,000 were selected for inclusion in museum holdings. The establishments concerned have had to respond to international questioning on this subject, first through the fact-finding mission on the dispossession of the Jews in France (1997).

THE EUROPEAN MUSEUM: RECOMPOSED MEMORIES Presenting the history of their collections and the issues involved in their construction have become constant concerns for museums today. The restorations and reopenings of ‘historic’ museums provide regular opportunities to fulfil this aim, with varying degrees of spectacularity. From 1980 to 1990, multiple events were held throughout Europe to commemorate the founding of the various museums connected with the decade of the French Revolution and with the Napoleonic Empire. In France, the commemoration coincided with the completion of the Grand Louvre project, carried out at behest of the then president of the French Republic, François Mitterrand, and symbolically inaugurated on 10 August 1993. The return of the national collections following the fall of the French Empire was subsequently celebrated by each individual country in the relevant year, this being 2016 in the case of Rome, for example. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to the recomposition of museums in some sections of Europe and, symbolically, to that of Museum Island. This has provided

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material for another review of the memories of the European museum of the last century, its collections and the material remains of its original configurations. For his reconstruction of the Neues Museum (2009), the English architect David Chipperfield chose to preserve, as a palimpsest, the ruins caused by the war and left untouched in the GDR period. In this respect, his decision reflects a complex sentiment that eventually brought the museum and its ruin together in the European imaginary, through the recollection of its partial or total failure to resist acts of violence and to guarantee the future of its holdings. Further evidence of this was provided by the total disappearance of certain establishments and even of specific types of establishments − museums of atheism, for example − in the former communist countries of Europe before the development of new ones, a manifestation of the launching or pursuance of memory wars. The uncertainties weighing on the European museum today are of a different order, stemming as they do from its success. Now that it has become globalized as a structure, and its legitimacy has been unanimously acknowledged, save for a few exceptions here and there in other continents, claims to parts of its heritage have, in fact, increased. Through her own history, Europe herself has paved the way for these. This is the case, for instance, with the development of the dispute over the Elgin Marbles, held in the British Museum since 1816. This initially took on a distinctly English aspect through the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in 1812, in which Lord Byron condemns the defacements inflicted on Athens. While those advocating the return of the marbles insisted that they belonged to the monuments in Athens, those in favour of their remaining in the museum emphasized their status as independent works of art. They were installed in the Duveen Gallery, a process that began in the 1930s, was halted by the war – the marbles narrowly escaped the bombardments – and completed in 1962. This was the final act of their integration into the ‘white cube’, which was meant to distance them permanently from the Parthenon itself. Although the Greek call for the return of the marbles has always been linked to the conviction that a dispossession of this nature was the result of a colonial situation, the British Museum considers them to have been ‘naturalized’ through the influence they have exerted on art and scholarship in Britain and, from there, in Europe. More recently, legal and diplomatic battles have pitted certain European countries against others in the rest of the world, such as the United States. These include a notorious dispute between defenders of the Italian and Greek national archaeological heritage and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the former accusing the latter of having deprived their national and local museums of important objects through illegal means. Nevertheless, in the global scenario of repatriation claims, Europe emerges more as a guilty party than a victim. The assertion of universal significance presented in ‘The Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums’ was intended as a response to such claims. Initiated by the British Museum and released in 2002 by a small group of directors of leading European and North American museums, it invoked the notion of legitimate superiority. Applied in this sense, the idea of a ‘universal’ European museum is a much more recent

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invention than the expression used during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It forms part of a set of reflections that run counter to the notion of cultural identity, particularly in the context of the North American cultural wars that have been taking place since the 1960s. The idea is to defend the status quo regarding museum collections, using the argument that the presence of foreign cultural items in other countries is beneficial; this is seen as particularly true in the case of nonEuropean objects that have been brought to Europe, both for their role in serving a cosmopolitan vision of civilization and for the enriching effect they have had on the arts and sciences in their host countries. At the same time, the claim to universality asserted by a number of museums in other continents surely forms part of the fight against Eurocentrism, as manifested in the Louvre Abu Dhabi. On the other hand, the museum’s contribution to the emergence of a European identity has remained very limited. Many initiatives launched in this context have originated from civil society, distanced from the institutions and actors involved in the political construction of the European Union. This was the case with the projects for the Museum of Europe in Brussels, which resulted from the vision of a group of intellectuals, with its exhibitions offering diverse, bi-national perspectives, and with those held by the Council of Europe based on international styles and on elements of an artistic geography.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPEAN MUSEOGRAPHY Most of the 40,000 museums open to visitors in Europe today date from the last half-century. This was a period that witnessed both the creation of new collections and a renewed interest in promoting older ones. If surveys are to be believed, these establishments are unanimously seen as possessing legitimacy and moral and intellectual authority, both by the Europeans who have visited them and by those who never do so − the latter being roughly a third of the population. Now, with new territorial and political entities being constructed and patrimonial references becoming globalized, European museums remain crucial actors in the conservation of cultural heritage and of collective identity, and are benefitting from reinforced legitimacy. The image of the monumental museum bequeathed by history therefore remains a European stereotype, especially for visitors from other continents. In some cases, new ‘national’ museums attest to the rewriting of the traditional themes of a state when the latter is being re-established, as with the re-unified Germany, Hungary and the Baltic countries; in others, they reflect the emergence of new identities or of identities that a population can invest in once more, as with Scotland and Catalonia. These museums have drawn inspiration from the most innovative, immersive and spectacular global museographic forms, but also from the most traditional configurations of the last century. The House of History in Bonn uses exhibition settings belonging to fairly conventional analogue museological practices, and the German Historical Museum in Berlin is even more traditional in its presentation, which brings to mind an open textbook. In many respects the creation of the House of Terror in Budapest is a historical milestone; drawing on

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all the resources of the immersive museographical approach, it has made use of the remains, still in situ, of successive despotic organizations. In this way, its visitors are prepared for the museum’s message and history effectively becomes its tool. In another context, the El Born museum in Barcelona is a characteristic example both of the evocation of European history for nationalist purposes and of the mastery of state-of-the-art media tools. Installed on the site of a former Soviet military base, the National Estonian Museum at Tartu (2016) provides an international award-winning architectural setting for the memory of a country that returned to add its voice to the European chorus in 1991. Estonia’s only previous experience of independence had been from 1920 to 1939. The museum’s monumentality has proved equal to the challenges involved, although the museographic approach evident there, with the Finno-Ugrian costumes on display, is somewhat reminiscent of the standard type of museum devoted to folk arts and traditions. The end of the war in former Yugoslavia saw attempts at reconciliation being made through museums, inspired by examples from other continents. Meanwhile, the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade had effectively become a focus for ‘Yugostalgia’ devoted to the memory of Josip Tito, when it was not being used to induce partisan sympathies. The museum visit as an extreme and sometimes psychologically difficult experience has now become normalized through war and genocide museums and memorials. The architecture and museography of the three museums created by Daniel Libeskind − the Jewish Museum Berlin (2001), the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester (2002) and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen (2003) − are emblematic in this respect. Their visitors are plunged into a totally immersive experience, often at the expense of the objects exhibited. The various European versions of these museums give the continent the appearance of a land of memories, marked out with empty tombs and cenotaphs that serve a moral discourse, through an empathy created with a great deal of focus on communication. On the other hand, the quasi-monopoly on excellence in terms of collections and museography hitherto enjoyed by Europe has now disappeared − primarily in relation to modern art. A more or less balanced collaborative arrangement has been established between the major art museums of the Western world, whereby holdings are pooled and presented in temporary exhibitions. Most significantly, other references, and indeed values, have become mixed with European models through international collaborations established within ICOM − the International Council of Museums formally associated with UNESCO and founded in 1946 for the purpose of promoting cultural progress − or within professional or regional thematic organizations. These combinations sometimes result in formulaic images. In this way, New York’s Ellis Island site has provided a stereotypical museographic model for most of the European museums of migration that have recently appeared as a result of new social and cultural priorities. This has also largely been the case with the Holocaust museums influenced by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In the late twentieth century, European museums experienced a turning point in terms of commercial activity. This came about following considerable investment

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(in some cases) in the cultural domain, with funding arriving from various channels, either public or private depending on each individual country. This phenomenon had also been observed in most other countries in the world and stemmed from public policy reforms. It was sometimes manifested in the appointment of managers as museum directors and, more prosaically, in multiple commercial ventures involving merchandise or spaces. The late Giles Waterfield, former director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, created a biting, lively satire, The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner (2002), aimed at the new British museum culture that arose as a result of the reforms introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour government. There we see the effects of the free rein given to ambitions centring on pecuniary gain or symbolic status: the feverish urge to build, the rapacious desire to accumulate and the discarding of intellectual and ethical concerns.

RENEWED INFLUENCE Nevertheless, European culture maintained a certain originality during the period that witnessed this proliferation of museums, were it only through the longevity of the buildings used and of their museographic adaptations. Those of Carlo Scarpa and the Studio BBPR carried out in various historic Italian edifices in the mid-1950s long remained exemplary. Conversely, the Pompidou Centre was built on the tabula rasa of the Beaubourg site, in keeping with the cultural politics it was to embody. The project brought together a small team of international architects, providing museums with a new physiognomy both in France and elsewhere. As stated by the jury when the Pritzker Prize was awarded to its British architect Richard Rogers in 2007, the episode had ‘revolutionised museums, transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city’. With Pontus Hultén’s appointment as director, the pluridisciplinary character of its collections and exhibitions rivalled that of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, where it was a well-established feature, becoming the hallmark of the Pompidou Centre. The most recent influential establishments, such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Tate Modern, display the same set of characteristics, combining the architectural with the museographic and the sociocultural. The intention is to communicate the values of their organizations, the quality of their services and even the authenticity of their principles through ‘branding’. They fuel the process of metropolization now underway, at the expense of declining areas; and indeed, the situation and the memory of European museums depend on the urban networks forged in different regions and the effects of centrality. Although the continent’s major museums are reaping the benefits brought by the ever-increasing influx of cultural tourists, others are suffering, in varying degrees, from indifference or loss of interest. Nevertheless, the 1970s had witnessed the dismantling of cultural hierarchies and the social differentiation connected with them. According to a long-established anecdote, André Malraux, when minister of culture, described the Musée des Arts et traditions populaires as a ‘wheelbarrow museum’; it would have been unthinkable

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for the European governments of the 1990s to make such a deprecating comment. In France, the term musées de société was subsequently coined to denote collections that might seem to have nothing in common at first sight but are connected by a shared concern with interpreting them in terms of society, that ‘ensemble of ensembles’ in the words of Fernand Braudel. These establishments have developed analytical methods of presenting their objects, maintaining close links with political reflections, social theories and the human sciences, primarily anthropology. At the same, the emergence of public sociology highlighted the dominance of cultural elites in terms of visitor rates to European museums; this was established by Pierre Bourdieu shortly before the events of May 1968, in a survey he carried out for the French Ministry of Culture provocatively entitled L’amour de l’art. The concept of the eco museum was created in 1973 by Georges Henri Rivière, founder of the Musée des Arts et traditions populaires and an influential member of ICOM; he saw it as a ‘mirror’ in which ‘a population views itself ’ and which it simultaneously holds out to its visitors ‘in order to make itself better understood’. The model, initially wholly experimental, led to a new type of museum that spread throughout Europe, and later the world, via multiple instances of appropriation, but also of ‘betrayal’. It encountered the tradition of the open-air museum inaugurated at Skansen, near Stockholm, in 1891; in some cases, this model adopted a nostalgic stance, as with Beamish Museum in England, which was established in 1970. The sentiment inspired by ‘the world we have lost’, to quote the popular book by British historian Peter Laslett published in 1965, eventually justified the presentation of collections that were a far cry from the progressivist spirit that had motivated the foundation of the eco museum. Kenneth Hudson (1916–1999) was a British journalist who specialized in the subject of industrial heritage. In 1977, in the absence of a European policy designed to promote a certain type of museography, he founded the European Museum of the Year Award, the aim being to use shared expertise to identify establishments that were models of excellence. The early recipients of the award were educational, generally unassuming museums likely to develop innovative connections with their local communities, in contrast to the large national museums. Other initiatives were subsequently launched, such as the Best in Heritage survey established in Zagreb, with the backing of Europa Nostra and ICOM. Their dispersal, coupled with the diverse nature of the registers and models they reference, indicate the obvious difficulty involved in producing a precise definition of the character of the contemporary European museum.

THE LEGENDARY MOUSEION OF ALEXANDRIA In certain cases, however, we can recognize the originality of influential establishments that stand out as examples of the art of museography. The three exhibitions entitled La Différence, held from 1995 to 1997 by the Musée dauphinois in Grenoble, the Musée d’Ethnographie in Neuchâtel and the Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec, were based on identical stipulations. In the event, they transcended the concept of a stylistic exercise, the result being an exploration of preconceived museographical

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and ethnological notions in relation to oneself and the Other. This principle provides the basis for calls for the development of signature museums. Yet to identify the European museum with this type of conceptual approach or to see it as a musée d’auteur would be to overstate the case, for many establishments are, in the words of Kenneth Hudson, ‘museologically strong but intellectually weak’. Can such a challenge be met? The Europeana programme, a digital library network launched in 2008, provides access to material from nearly two thousand institutions. It has shaped a version of the European memory of museums that recalls the utopian ideal of the museum as a documentation centre, as conceived in the interwar period − notably by Belgian author Paul Otlet − and developed through the emergence of library science. Today, this is leading towards a potential convergence between museums, libraries and archives. In that form at least, the Mouseion of Alexandria now seems to have regained its relevance in Europe as a source of inspiration.

NOTES 1. Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, vol. 1, translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005 [1975]). 2. Siegfried Lenz, Heimatmuseum (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1978).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aronsson, Peter and Gabriella Elgenius (Eds.), National Museums and Nation-Building in Europe, 1750–2010: Mobilization and Legitimacy, Continuity and Change, London, Routledge, 2014. Ballé, Catherine and Dominique Poulot, Musées en Europe. Une mutation inachevée, Paris, La Documentation française, 2004. Hudson, Kenneth, Museums of Influence: Pioneers of the Last 200 Years, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987. Mazé, Camille, La Fabrique de l’identité européenne. Dans les coulisses des musées de l’Europe, Paris, Belin, 2014. McClellan, Andrew, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2008. Rampley, Matthew, Thierry Lenain and Hubert Locher (Eds.), Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, Leiden, Brill, 2012. Sherman, Daniel J. and Irit Rogoff (Eds.), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Wittlin, Alma S., The Museum: Its History and Its Tasks in Education, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. Wright, Gwendolyn (Ed.), The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1996.

CHAPTER 36

Three myths that made America PIERRE-OLIVIER FRANÇOIS

Jeans, Coca-Cola and pizza are the emblems of American popular culture. Now a worldwide presence, they embody standardized globalization. Yet Americans have forgotten that they originated in Europe and are imprinted with the culture of the Old Continent. When pizza made its first appearance in seventeenth-century Naples, it was a dish for poorer inhabitants – the previous day’s leftovers spread over a thin crust and a layer of tomatoes. It would never have been served in Rome or Venice and remained a purely local dish until the 1950s. A century earlier, however, Italian immigrants had brought it with them to the East Coast of the United States, as a central element of their family memories. Its geographical dissemination closely followed subsequent Italian migration patterns. With the full assimilation of Italian Americans, pizza became one of the archetypal aspects of American popular culture – and in this way, it went on to conquer the world. Lombardi’s, the very first American pizzeria, opened in Little Italy. Its owners still speak of the time when pizzas were sold outside Catholic schools every Friday, a day of fasting. Yet today Lombardi’s is primarily a place of pilgrimage. In the 1970s, industry giants Pizza Hut and Domino’s transformed the artisanal culinary tradition della mamma or della nonna into the heavy artillery of the ‘made in the USA’ foodprocessing sector. Surrounded by that aura of fame, and often quick-frozen, this ‘new pizza’ went on to invade the Old World, where it made its own mark on the memories of Europe’s inhabitants, all open to new culinary experiences. In this way, Norway became the biggest consumer of pizza, as per-person ratio, in the world.

JEANS: FROM GENOA OR NÎMES Jeans also date back to the seventeenth century. They originated either from a Genoese fabric (the word ‘jeans’ itself comes from Genoa) or from cloth made in the region around Nîmes (hence the term ‘blue denim’) – but who remembers this today? And who remembers – apart from a small museum at Buttenheim devoted to them –

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that the Strausses were a well-respected Jewish family who lived in Franconia, until Levi Strauss left for the United States in 1853? The Corsican pharmacist Angelo Mariani has likewise been forgotten, even in his native land. Yet in 1863 he invented the precursor of the ubiquitous cola and then went on to make his fortune in the United States. Moreover, he was a marketing pioneer in his day, having invited Jules Verne, Sarah Bernhardt and even Pope Pius X to sing the praises of his ‘French Wine Coca’, made of a mixture of alcohol and cocaine extracts. In turn, this Americanization of European products gave rise to new memories. When the United States entered the war, the Coca-Cola Company had sixty-four bottling plants established near the front lines, following the US troops’ advances in North Africa and subsequently in Europe. Having become a key product in 1943, and an integral part of each GI’s kit, Coca Cola was endowed with an aura of victory at the end of the war; it was the taste of freedom, of the New World. In the 1950s, however, the French Communist Party recoiled from the American cola and broadcast short propaganda films, in which honest bistro owners defend the interests of the nation’s red ‘plonk’ by driving out a Coca-Cola salesman. Billy Wilders’s film One, Two, Three revolves around Cold War relations in the context of Coca-Cola Company operations. In Moscow, furthermore, the ‘taste of the West’ was Pepsi. Nikita Khrushchev drank his first cola, offered by then Vice President Richard Nixon, at the first American National Exhibition held in Moscow in 1959. In this way, Nixon, who was also a lawyer for Pepsi-Cola, enabled the company to gain total dominance over the Eastern European market. Like jeans, Pepsi embodied the ‘soft power’ version of imperialism on the other side of the Iron Curtain; there, American sodas and jeans became essential identity-markers for anyone rebelling against the system. Obtaining either one of these was an adventure in itself, a trafficking operation − an affair of state. Jeans have now become a standard uniform for a large portion of the world’s inhabitants, and pizza has even conquered China. In Naples, meanwhile, the True Neopolitan Pizza Association (known in Italian as the AVPN − Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana) protects the original recipe for this family dish from heretical newcomers such as the ‘Hawaiian pizza’. The Brandi pizzeria displays a plaque proudly proclaiming that the Pizza Margherita was created there in 1889. According to the story, the pizzaiolo who made it used tomatoes, mozzarella and basil to create a red, white and green pizza in honour of the queen of Italy, Margherita of Savoy. Even the current owner of the restaurant doubts the veracity of this legend. But, as the Italians so rightly say, Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Sanchez, Sylvie, Pizza Connection, une séduction transculturelle, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2007. Sullivan, James, Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon, New York, Gotham Books, 2007. Mariani, Angelo, a blog dedicated to the Corsican inventor, https://angelomariani​ .wordpress​.com

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FILMOGRAPHY François, Pierre-Olivier, Pizza Nostra, documentary film, France 5, Artline Films, Stefilm & YLE, 2003. François, Pierre-Olivier, Pschiiiittt! la pétillante histoire des sodas, documentary film, France 5, Artline Films, Planète, RTBF, YLE, Stefilm, 2010.

CHAPTER 37

Swinging London BODO MROZEK

Rivalling Hollywood, London became the legendary heart of European pop culture and its history in the 1960s − a myth challenged by both the Punk and anti-racist movements. Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ was keen to revive the energy of those heady days, transforming it into a national brand image. The British vote in favour of Brexit in the summer of 2016 had a divisive effect in Europe; in the pop world, however, it created a rare example of consensus. No sooner had the victory of those in favour of leaving the EU been announced on the evening of 23 June, that the frontmen of two bands that had been feuding two decades earlier expressed their reactions in an unusual display of harmony. Noel Gallagher of Oasis spoke of it as a ‘black day’, while Blur’s Damon Albarn said he had a ‘heavy heart’ at the thought of leaving the EU.1 There were also concerns about what the British vote would mean for European pop culture in mainland Europe. Britain has considerable influence in the global music, cinema and entertainment industry, as well as receiving EU grants and being involved in collaborative projects. An entertainment magazine ran the headline: ‘5 ways in which Brexit will change British pop culture forever.’2 A German newspaper declared that the ‘narrow-mindedness and jingoism of the Brexit vote’ had ‘dealt a blow to the pop glamour associated with the Union Jack’.3 The Italian online magazine T-Mag even saw this as the potential end of ‘Swinging London’.4 That expression evoked a theme that has a fairly long history in the collective memory, having originated in the 1960s. ‘Swinging London’ was the name given to a city buzzing with the energy of pop culture. This notion of the ‘Swinging City’ was first promoted in 1966, as an ‘ideal type’ embodying a new form of urban life. In this way, pop became a focal point, the site of a debate not only over Europeanization and globalization but also over the ‘re-nationalizing’ and museification of urban culture.

‘. . . A VERVE WHICH HAS NOT BEEN SEEN BEFORE’ The expression ‘Swinging London’ dates from 1966. In April of that year, the American news magazine Time5 published a surprising issue. Instead of the usual grainy, black-and-white photograph of a serious, purposeful-looking politician or

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dramatic scenes of a crisis that had occurred somewhere in the world, the cover featured an exuberant, eclectic collage by the artist Geoffrey Dickinson. His naïve, pop-art style work brought together various images to create a colourful patchwork effect. It included a double-decker bus, a discotheque, a character dressed in a dinner jacket and flared trousers, Big Ben, a bingo hall, a Union Jack, paisley motifs, a Mini Cooper and a mini skirt, all under the heading: ‘London: The Swinging City’. In the article, the journalist Piri Halasz explained that this juxtaposition of contrasting images was the indication of a cultural transformation known as ‘Swinging London’ that had taken place. She identified two fundamental changes: a younger society and more porous boundaries between social classes, hitherto rigidly antagonistic to one another. In her view, these two developments had an impact on London’s topography. Galleries and discotheques, hairdressing salons and fashion boutiques were becoming the new versions of the traditional landmarks of the former British Empire. The heroes of this environment no longer came from the old upper class but ‘from the ranks of the British lower middle and working class’. Most of them were under thirty-five years old, reflecting the city’s demographic evolution; fifteen to thirty-four-year-olds were the city’s largest age group in the mid-1960s. Halasz drew on the work of Richard Hoggart, professor of English literature, to confirm this development: ‘A new group of people is emerging into society, creating a kind of classlessness and a verve which has not been seen before’, observed the future founder of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University.

‘SWINGING EUROPE’? THE EXTENSION OF THE POP ZONE This change was certainly not limited to Britain. In the United States, the journalist Tom Wolfe had already forged the term ‘pop society’ in his reportages on new dances and fashions, and now Halasz in turn was referring to the ‘colorful and ebullient pop culture’. A few months after the publication of the Time article, its competitor, the American magazine Newsweek, used similar terms for its own cover. This features a drawing of an explosion in the signature comic-book style of the artist Roy Lichtenstein with the exclamation ‘POP!’ in the centre. Just below this, the caption proclaims: ‘It’s what’s happening in art, fashion, entertainment, business.’ By presenting these changes as specific to the English capital, Halasz’s renowned article triggered a few international reactions in its turn. Paris Match, for instance, acidly retorted that Paris, declared outmoded by Halasz, had no reason to envy London in the matter of pop culture.6 French news magazine L’Express, for its part, had witnessed the birth of ‘the Europe of stars’ in 1966: ‘That Europe of youthfulness and beauty takes its lead from Rome, Paris and London’, it stated.7 And when the West German magazine Der Spiegel first used the expression ‘pop culture’ in April 1966, it did not confine the phenomenon to London.8 The debate over the various evaluations of these trends concerns the topography of the cultural transformation, which reflects a remarkable shift. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, large cities were regarded as the centres of a cultural decline,

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with the anonymity and distractions of urban life providing a breeding-ground for crime. Although the memory of those debates survived during the construction of the ‘Swinging City’, it acquired a positive dimension. The expression ‘Swinging London’ became the emblem of a new creative industry that revamped ‘problem areas’ such as Soho by turning them into temples of consumerism – a process later condemned as ‘gentrification’. This discourse spread to Europe, but also extended well beyond the borders of the British Empire. Thousands of songs portray London as the place to be, an image notably endorsed through the music of dub pioneer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Brazilian author-composer Caetano Veloso. 1970s’ record covers in Pakistan and India, as well as Turkey, still displayed London-based themes; their iconography suggests that these provided surfaces onto which the idea of a ‘Western city’ could be projected. Yet images associating London with pop culture were not confined to the music world alone. In the United States, this massive phenomenon was described as the ‘British Invasion’. In 1965, the Fashion Fair organized by the African American magazine Ebony was based on the theme of London style, featuring English fabrics and miniskirts; one year later, the periodical Design asserted that even table settings could be ‘swinging’, just like the Supremes. Bollywood productions like Gumnaam combined the influence of the Beatles with traditional Indian elements.

CONFISCATED RECORDS However, the dissemination of this image of a Western metropolis had its boundaries, especially since short skirts and − in the case of men − long hair were seen as signs of a growing convergence of gender roles and of greater sexual freedom. These were frowned upon. Authoritarian states and theocracies imposed stringent restrictions in response to such developments. Eastern European governments reacted to the music of the Swinging Sixties with varying degrees of severity. While recordings of the Beatles were released in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and a Beat movie was even publicly financed in Hungary, records were confiscated in the GDR and the Soviet Union, and bands were forbidden to play there. East German propaganda also fought against overly positive presentations of London’s image. Amateur bands that had adopted English names were compelled to ‘Germanize’ them; the Leipzig band Butlers was dissolved and English was mocked on official youth radio stations. And even in some of the world’s Southern regions, not all cities had the right to be ‘swinging’ – far from it. This was regularly demonstrated through information issuing from particularly religious countries; rock ’n’ roll and the Twist were forbidden in Bangkok, and ‘Western’ pop music was banned on Taiwanese and Indonesian radio. In Cambodia/Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge brutally suppressed the Beat movement inspired by the British model. Swinging London had, in fact, already acquired an international, global image prior to 1966, thanks to its African-Caribbean immigrant population in particular. In his London trilogy, the writer Colin MacInnes describes the city’s Jamaican community and calypso music culture in the early 1960s, while a decade earlier,

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Trinidad-born musician Lord Kitchener had expressed his enthusiasm for the capital through his song ‘London Is the Place for Me’. In 1958, however, that initial euphoria was considerably reduced by the Notting Hill race riots, which saw attacks inflicted on African-Caribbean immigrants − an event whose seismic political impact even reached the African world. It was not until the 1970s that London regained its status as a multicultural model for other cities in the world, through the creation of the Notting Hill carnival in response to the shock.

‘LONDON CALLING AGAIN’: FROM PUNK TO BRITPOP Despite that exuberant, cosmopolitan image, the carnival was the regular scene of internal quarrels and tensions with London’s Metropolitan Police during the 1970s. Meanwhile, Notting Hill was falling prey to galloping gentrification and no longer provided space for the immigrants who had originally endowed the area with its multicultural image. Brixton likewise experienced riots in 1981 and 1985, following heavy-handed stop-and-search operations targeting young Black men and the shooting of Mrs Dorothy Groce – not long after Punk band the Clash had recorded a song describing the repressive atmosphere in South London. This change of image, which saw London transformed into a brutal Moloch and the scene of racial conflicts, continued to resonate in songs such as the global hit ‘Electric Avenue’ (1982) by Guyanese–British musician Eddy Grant. In 1977, together with New York, London became a centre of the Punk scene, whose impact extended to Japan. Malcolm McLaren had opened his shop on the King’s Road and various iconic Punk songs were associated with the city. For the subcultures of the 1980s, London was still the place to be. It embodied the archetypal Western city during the dramatic events around the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and was the title of a song by Warsaw rock band Kult released in 1989. During the same year, Israeli singer Hava Alberstein also paid tribute (but in a clearer fashion) to the English capital, which was praised by the pop world as a place of great cultural freedom – despite the fact that it was no paradise of peace and harmony. The Britpop movement of the 1990s was instrumental in reviving the original Sixties theme, a phenomenon that sometimes assumed the aspect of a campaign to commemorate the image of the city. The rivalry between the bands Oasis and Blur recalled that of the Beatles and the Stones, and in the song ‘Bar Italia’, Pulp immortalized an iconic 1960s Soho coffee bar. In the latter half of the 1990s, the notion of ‘Cool Britannia’ − originally conceived as the name of an ice cream − gave a political dimension to the refashioning of an existing label; ‘London Swings Again’ was a Vanity Fair headline in 1997. With the help of musicians from the Britpop scene and members of the ‘Young British Artists’ group, then Prime Minister Tony Blair sought to give New Labour a young image. However, the brief alliance between pop and politics crumbled the following year, when a member of the Punk band Chumbawamba threw a bucket of water at the deputy prime minister as a protest against neoliberal policies.

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NATIONAL RECLAMATION AND MUSEIFICATION: THE ‘SWINGING OLYMPICS’ The ‘Swinging London’ image experienced a new revival at the 2012 London Olympics. The opening ceremony, broadcast all over the world, presented an overview of the history of British pop music from its earliest beginnings, set out in the form of a colourful review. Also included were James Bond and Mr Bean, together with David Bowie and Harry Potter, the 1990s being represented by trip hop and Danny Boyle’s film Trainspotting. The spectacle also paid tribute to Jamaican star Millie Small (of ‘My Boy Lollipop’ fame) and the ska band Madness, who became prominent in the 1980s. In this way, (post)-colonial migration was included in the ceremony as a joyful story of integration, yet there were one or two gaps; the Notting Hill race riots and The Guns of Brixton were omitted, as were policies such as the eviction of young people and immigrant populations from the neighbourhoods where they had traditionally settled. Here, several highly diverse elements were brought together to create a national performance featuring examples of pop music chosen solely on the basis of their ‘Britishness’. This type of inclusive vision of history, disseminated throughout the world, has also had an impact on cultural memory, as the now-standardized ‘swinging’ element has become an integral part of a city’s history. Liverpool has its Beatles museum, as did Hamburg (temporarily), and even official institutions are following this trend. In Paris, the French yé-yé movement shares space with the military history collections exhibited in the Hôtel des Invalides, and exhibitions at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum give torn jeans from the Punk era equal status with Victorian costumes. In Berlin, the Stasi prison museum and memorial serves as a reminder of the persecution endured by the young members of the subcultures in the GDR capital, who only did their swinging ‘underground’.

SWINGING BERLIN Pop history landmarks are now taking their place alongside more traditional sites, being increasingly seen as a legitimate element of institutional memory. A blue plaque endorsed by then Mayor Ken Livingstone and bearing the words ‘Singer, Lyricist and Rastafarian Icon’ was installed at Bob Marley’s former London home in Ridgmount Gardens, while his house in Kingston, Jamaica, likewise refers to Marley’s London years. In the summer of 2016, the City of Berlin had a commemorative plaque made by the Prussian Royal Porcelain Factory installed on the Schöneberg building, where David Bowie, then in the grip of drug addiction, had spent just under two years in the late 1970s. The countless publications devoted to that episode enabled West Berlin to be part of the ‘Swinging City’ legend (which had by then become internationalized), despite being surrounded by the Wall. Today, Berlin is a budgettravel tourist destination (hence the term ‘the EasyJet Set’) and has become part of the international clubbing scene – as was the case with ‘Swinging London’, this has led to price rises.

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Consequently, certain discourses have developed around the Swinging City, which has now become a realm of memory. These are based on the industrialization of culture and the birth of a small community comprising producers, artists and ‘creatives’, and also on the internationalization of the pop movement. They have likewise triggered politico-moral debates over values. The late twentieth century witnessed attempts by various nations to re-appropriate pop music and its memory, the main example being Britain in the 1990s, with her ‘Cool Britannia’ slogan. This ‘romanticized’ the notion of ‘Swinging London’, which was transformed into the nostalgic memory of a ‘colourful’ city, whose culture industry exported pop hits as proof of Britain’s economic superiority. At the same time, criticism of racism, of the creation of ghettoes, of social exclusion and of anti-social housing policies was continuing to crystallize around the ‘London’ topos, a development that had begun in the 1980s. Nowadays, the only thing ‘swinging’ in districts once celebrated as centres of pop and subculture is the building and construction sector − the result of radically neoliberal urban and housing policies. In this domain, too, London has its imitators elsewhere in the world.

NOTES 1. Glastonbury Festival, 2016, ‘What Bands Are Saying about Brexit’, The Independent, 25 June 2016. 2. ‘5 Ways in Which Brexit Will Change British Pop Culture Forever’, DigitalSpy, 24 June 2016, www​.digitalspy​.com. 3. Robert Rotifer, ‘Was bedeutet der Brexit für die Zukunft der britischen Popmusik?’ Berliner Zeitung, 29 June 2016. 4. Umberto Schiavella, ‘Brexit: la fine della Swinging London?’ T-Mag. Il magazine di Tecné, www​.t​-mag​.it (undated). 5. Piri Halasz, ‘Great Britain. You Can Walk Across It on the Grass’, Time, 15 April 1966, pp. 32–42. 6. ‘La jeunesse anglaise ne s’intéresse plus au passé. Elle voit plus que l’avenir’; ‘Un revenant à Londres: Peter Townsend’, Paris Match, no. 891, 7 May 1966. 7. Patrick Theyen, ‘L’Europe des stars’, L’Express, no 765, 14–20 February 1966, pp. 48–53. 8. Richard R. Lingeman, ‘Mit Euch Tigern möchte ich ein Wörtchen reden. Sex-Symbole der Sechziger Jahre’, Der Spiegel, 25 April 1966, pp. 156–7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ball, John Clement, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2004. Braun, Anna, ‘Where Was Pop? Die Robert Fraser Gallery zwischen Popmusik und bildender Kunst in “Swinging London”’, in Bodo Mrozek, Alexa Geisthövel and Jürgen Danyel (Eds.), Popgeschichte, vol. 2: Zeithistorische Fallstudien, 1958-1988, Bielefeld, Transcript, 2014, pp. 65–88.

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Davis, John, ‘“Die Briten kommen!” British Beat and the Conquest of Europe in the 1960s’, in Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Kiran Klaus Patel (Eds.), Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Laing, Dave, ‘London’, in David Horn, Dave Laing and John Sheperd (Eds.), Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (EPMOW), vol. 7: Locations – Europe, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Matera, Mark, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2015.

DISCOGRAPHY Various artists, London Is the Place For Me, vols 1–6, Honest Jons (Indigo), 2013 [vinyl]. Various artists, England’s Dreaming, compiled by Jon Savage, Trikont, 2004 [CD]. Various artists, Common People – Brit Pop: The Story, Universal Music, 2009 [CD box set]

CHAPTER 38

The Volkswagen Beetle BERNHARD RIEGER

The Volkswagen Beetle was originally a product of Germany’s Third Reich, but it went on to have an unanticipated career contributing to the development of the consumer society and counterculture both in Europe and in other parts of the world. It has become a major focus of nostalgia. Commissioned by Adolf Hitler and designed by Ferdinand Porsche, the ‘StrengthThrough-Joy Car’ was presented by the National Socialists at the Berlin Auto Show in 1938, amid much fanfare. While this rotund automobile with an air-cooled rear engine and a torsion-bar suspension system was indeed to become the ‘people’s car’ – or Volkswagen – that fulfilled the dream of car ownership for millions, it did so under circumstances the führer never anticipated. In 1939, the regime shelved plans to mass motorize Germany (and suspended autobahn construction). The new gigantic factory the Nazis had erected for the production of Porsche’s brainchild became part of the war effort. During the war, thousands of forced workers from across Europe turned out a military version of the Strength-Through-Joy Car and other equipment for the Wehrmacht in the plant. It was the British, in whose occupation zone the works came to be located after National Socialism’s downfall, who first put Porsche’s design into serial production to remedy the severe vehicle shortage that hampered their administration. After the factory’s handover to German management in 1948, the car, renamed the Volkswagen, soon triumphed as the undisputed symbol of the recovery that the Germans have since revered as the ‘economic miracle’. As incomes rose in the 1950s and 1960s, West Germany turned into a car-owning society. The Volkswagen quickly gained a reputation for high reliability and low maintenance costs. Commanding a market share of up to 40 per cent, the VW embodied the advent of the Federal Republic’s appealing affluence as no other product could. Somewhat ironically, in the young FRG the vehicle’s Nazi pedigree indirectly supported its status as a new national icon. In contemporaries’ eyes, the VW’s ubiquity underscored West Germany’s superiority over the dictatorship that had promised the vehicle but left the country ruined. Driving Volkswagens en masse, West Germans experienced the freedom of the autobahn and gradually made their peace with democracy. Much to the surprise of VW, the United States emerged as the most successful export market in the 1950s and 1960s. As the post-war expansion of the suburbs

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witnessed the rise of the two-car family, many white suburbanites adopted the Volkswagen as an economical and dependable means of transport. In America, the Volkswagen morphed into the ‘bug’. Next to Detroit’s voluptuously baroque creations with their two-tone pastel paint jobs and tailfins, the diminutive, roundish import came across as decidedly cute and unconventional. From the late 1950s, irreverent and humorous advertising campaigns by Doyle Dane Bernbach ensured that the car retained the aura of a ‘duck that stood out in a tiger’s cage’, as an underground cartoonist remarked. Whether adorned with psychedelic swirls and daisies or starring in Disney’s hit movie as The Love Bug (1969), the Beetle sank deep roots into American popular culture as a marker of plucky individualism. While falling profits prompted the car’s departure from markets in Western Europe and the United States in the 1980s, it continued its journey across Latin America. All over Mexico, it is known as the vochito. Produced in Puebla from 1967, its robust features proved a match for the country’s tough road conditions. For several decades, the Beetle structured Mexican everyday life like no other vehicle – and not only because its comparatively low price brought it within the reach of ordinary citizens. Countless Mexicans who never owned a vochito are likely to have ridden in one of the green and white Beetle taxis that were a common sight everywhere until recently. Even VW’s workers revered the car – despite tense industrial relations at the Puebla plant that could explode into violent strikes. It was the one car they could buy on their wages. When the company pulled the plug on production in Mexico in 2003, a wave of nostalgia swept the country and the workforce. After the last vochito had rolled off the line to the mournful tunes of a Mariachi band, the workers christened the final production site ‘the hall of tears’. Almost eight decades after prototypes first hit the road in the Third Reich, the original Volkswagen continues to exert its charm. Hundreds of thousands of people come together all over Europe and the United States each year to display, admire and drive lovingly restored as well as spectacularly modified old Volkswagens. Old Beetles trigger collective memories of the economic and social optimism of the 1950s and 1960s as well as personal memories of youth and early adulthood, often linked to popular images of the ‘flower power’ and hippie movements. Numerous historical layers have thus come to envelop the first Volkswagen, gradually covering up its ugly Nazi birthmark and turning the Beetle not just into a European but a truly global icon. Nothing illustrates this better than the New Beetle that VW launched in 1998. Designed in Germany, made in Mexico and primarily targeting the US auto market, it became the first of a growing number of European retrocars including the Fiat Cinquecento and the Mini, all of them inspired by nostalgia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Mommsen, Hans, with Manfred Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich, Düsseldorf, Econ, 1996. Rieger, Bernhard, The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 39

Writing-between-worlds OTTMAR ETTE

European literature has been enriched by the unprecedented mobility of languages, cultures and experiences brought about through migrations and globalization. That fluidity has enabled it to become a means of directing our perception of the Other – and of all others. How does one think and write of a world in which Europe has always been the site of memory of a myth – the tale of the young and beautiful Europa on the shores of the Mediterranean, involving ecstasy and temptation, transplantation and rape, deportation and migration? For this is a Europe understood in terms of movement. Novelist and essayist Amin Maalouf was born in Beirut in 1949 and now lives in France, dividing his time between Paris and the Île d’Yeu; in the spring of 2009, he published his extended essay on a deteriorating era − Disordered World: Setting a New Course for the Twenty-first Century. There, he offers an uncompromising analysis of the dangers that brought humanity to the edge of the precipice in the early twenty-first century. As we now know, these problems are only intensifying and have led us to the end of the current phase of accelerated globalization. The universal scope of Maalouf ’s reflections is instantly apparent: ‘We have embarked on this century without a compass. From its very first months, disturbing events took place which created the impression that the world had gone seriously off course in several areas at once – it had gone off course intellectually, financially, environmentally, geopolitically and ethically.’1

COMPASS It would seem unnecessary nowadays to add migration or the deregulation of the political discourse to this profound state of disorder. We are searching for that metaphorical compass − the title of a novel by Mathias Énard, which received the 2015 Prix Goncourt − more anxiously than ever. However, if that carefully presented beginning leads readers to expect Maalouf to paint a pessimistic picture of the planet and global society, they are quickly proved wrong. The tone of the work by this Lebanese author, a representative of ‘writing-between-worlds’ in the Mediterranean region, is very far removed from pessimism, nostalgia or a paralysing

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mal du siècle. Indeed, as if implicitly responding to Samuel P. Huntington’s work The Clash of Civilizations (1996) the author devotes himself to indicating the points of reference necessary for a peaceful coexistence that could set the global ‘ship of fools’ on the right course once more. The essay by Maalouf, who chooses to write in French although it is not his native language, revolves around a distinctive understanding of the long-term process of globalization whose cultural aspects have long been underestimated. Moreover, they were pushed into the background after the financial crisis by politico-economic debates on the costs involved, which amounted to billions, by the ‘refugee crisis’ and the tensions it generated in Europe, and by Brexit. The lack of interest in the cultural, intercultural and transcultural implications of globalization – when they were not purely and simply excluded from discussions – has been and remains a major error. And, as these last few years have shown us, it has brought catastrophic consequences. Amin Maalouf ’s analysis leaves no room for doubt; it is the cultural dimension that will prove decisive for the future of humanity.

‘THE HEART OF A PEOPLE IS ITS LITERATURE’ We need responses that are not monological but fundamentally polylogical and centred on the aim of coexisting peacefully and respecting one another’s differences. For conviviality is unquestionably the main challenge presented by the twenty-first century at a global level − the challenge and the watchword of our era. Maalouf ’s essay is preceded by a judiciously chosen quotation from a poem by William Carlos Williams, regarding humanity’s knowledge in relation to its ability to endure: ‘Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. / Now that he can realize them, he must either change them, or perish’. This is a question of survival. Amin Maalouf considers it essential that we cease to regard ‘the Other’ in terms of the stereotypes presented to us by ideological and religious systems or by mass culture. And in doing so, we should abandon − as much as is possible – those unilateral constructions of the Other towards which ‘intercultural dialogue’ so often tends to gravitate. Let us go further still; it has become crucial to think beyond alterity. In a sense, the idea is to perceive the countless cultural differences and differentiations with other eyes – the eyes of many others (not of the Other) – starting from several directions at once and therefore providing ourselves with multiple perspectives. And in this respect, as the author of Leo Africanus emphasizes, nothing replaces literature: The heart of a people is its literature. That is where it reveals its passions, aspirations, dreams, frustrations, beliefs, its vision of the world around, its perceptions of itself and others – including us. Because when we speak of others we must never lose sight of the fact that, whoever and wherever we may be, we are also ‘others’ for the rest of the world.2

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Literature is the best possible antidote to the processes of simplification and schematization generated by mass culture and propaganda, for it reaches us from the most diverse languages, cultures and communities. If we overlook a standardizing and long-held traditional conception of ‘universal literature’, it is through the literatures of the world that we gain access to the most varied cultural and transcultural configurations. These enable us to think and act in polylogical life contexts or facilitate our ability to do so. World literatures are not only polylogical sites of memory but also seismographs for the future. Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt and Adelbert von Chamisso, who worked with several languages, were already aware of this. And it is in our era, specifically, that the literatures of the world have become the ideal cultural testing ground on which to examine experience − and, furthermore, lived experience − of cultural complexity. This has chiefly occurred through periods of accelerated globalization, which took place from the late fifteenth to the midsixteenth centuries, from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, from the last third of the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries and, finally, from the 1980s to the present day. The literatures of the world therefore have the potential to be schools for the mind, where complexity, a polylogical perspective and absence of bias can all be developed. This is a literature that has multiple languages at its disposal and is governed by the idea of routes rather than roots. Since the beginning of the first phase of globalization, it has been represented by great and glorious figures such as Leo Africanus, Garcilaso de la Vega, known as El Inca, and Anton Wilhelm Amo, who was brought to Germany as a slave in the eighteenth century and became an internationally renowned Black philosopher. These forms of expression and literary experiences have no interest in what is sedimented and stratified in history but in what is vectorial and directed; immobility is alien to them.

LITERATURES-WITHOUT-A-FIXED-ABODE The question of literature as a repository of knowledge has long been the focus of current debates. It is easy to connect this with a tendency that has become increasingly evident in the human and cultural sciences, this being the replacement of the hitherto predominant theme of memory with the issue of knowledge. In asking questions about the knowledge provided by literature we are, effectively, questioning its social, political and cultural relevance within the diverse knowledgebased and information-based societies of the twenty-first century. There can be no doubt that, over the last quarter of a century, our vision of literature, which is essentially orientated towards the past, has successfully contributed to masking the forward-looking dimension that is just as evident in the Epic of Gilgamesh as in the Shijing, two of the most ancient texts to have reached us today, from Mesopotamia and China respectively, and in the stories of the Arabian Nights. Yet these literatures of the world certainly do not confine themselves to fulfilling a purpose relating purely to memory (whose importance is uncontested) by turning their gaze towards a past that is to be made present. They also display their relevance in terms of prospective possibilities, being directed towards potential

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futures through a knowledge of life involving a focus not only on the past and the present but also on the forms and norms to come. What, then, does literature want, what can it do, what is it capable of achieving? And how can we renew our understanding of the vectorial perspective that governs it as a site of memory, using a poetics of movement as our point of departure? It is now time for literature and culture-related disciplines to activate a poetics of movement that incorporates literature in movement and as movement, according specific attention to a writing-between-worlds; although rooted in a long tradition, this will develop with considerable speed as our century advances. The starting point for this should be Europe, a place where migratory movements converge. Here, we could cite numerous recipients of the Nobel Prize as examples, as well as Salman Rushdie, Jorge Semprún, Norman Manea, Elias Khoury, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, José F. A. Oliver and Yoko Tawada. The literatures of the world are increasingly becoming literatures-without-a-fixed-abode. It is enough to observe current refugee influxes to understand that these developments will trigger profound changes – and these will involve the European literatures of the future − generating writing practices that will quite naturally be translingual. Looking beyond the continuing presence of national literatures, it is the continuous, polylogical development of the literatures of the world − and not of a universal literature, with its increasingly standardizing character – that will have a decisive effect on both our present and our future. As a phenomenon that arose in the past, the era of universal literature became historical long ago; as a Eurocentric invention, it is behind us. It could be asserted that the temporal foundations of our thinking and our way of shaping reality, so markedly historical and chronological in character, have weakened in the postmodern era, although they have not disappeared altogether. At the same time, concepts and ways of thinking, as well as patterns of perception, modes of experience and lived experiences linked to the spatial dimension have undeniably gained in importance. New spatial concepts relating to mobility, rather than territoriality, began to develop from the mid-1980s, at the latest. In this respect, the contribution of literatures-without-a-fixed-abode from Nobel Prize laureates, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Herta Müller, Gao Xingjian and V. S. Naipaul, has been essential. The debates of the 1980s and 1990s – which have continued to this day – have been dominated by geocultural and geopolitical issues, which, far from being confined to cyberspace have given rise to forms of spatialization and topographies associated with post-colonialism and culture clashes. The theory of confrontation presented by Samuel P. Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and Niall Ferguson’s work Civilization: The West and the Rest could still be assigned to a geocultural and geostrategic spatial turn. Literatures-without-a-fixed-abode show us how to escape the topographic maps of the threat of the Other.

BEYOND ALTERITY We must free ourselves, perhaps even take our leave of a way of thinking of alterity which – as Vincent Descombes has so rightly emphasized – has exerted a decisive influence on a whole set of twentieth-century philosophical traditions, as in France,

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in the domains of epistemology and methodology. The poetics of movement, which it is more important than ever to encourage these days, contains a cosmopolitanism orientated towards fundamentally complex connections; these have the potential, through the literatures of the world, to help develop polylogical forms of thought no longer hypnotized by the contrast between oneself and the foreigner, oneself and the Other. In a sense, this is a radicalized form of the effort that involves identifying in ourselves what is really our own and what is foreign to us (as included in the preoccupations of Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov). The history of places, which remains dominant, even ‘natural’, will give way to a history of movement, in which the topographies available will be transposed onto dynamic, mobile conceptions of space-time. Saint-John Perse, Samuel Beckett, Albert Cohen and Elias Canetti were very quick to conceive the multilingual, polylogical maps of the movement that will shape the Europe of the future. The literatures of the world play a key supportive role in this regard, presenting and representing ways of thinking and of forming vectorial images, powerfully expressed in an emotive, aesthetic form in literatures-without-a-fixed-abode. The sites of memory of the literatures of the world were drawn on maps of movement. As already shown by its founding myth, Europe would be inconceivable without the world outside it and its constant migrations. The Europe of the past, the present and the future − in movement and as movement – clearly illustrates both the need for multilingual and polylogical thought, and the dangers of continually falling back into a memory that turns away from the future. It is through those very movements that are currently occurring – and the notion of vectorization is orientated towards this – that those of the past become identifiable and perceptible. They are present as movements and may be understood in terms of both the fixed structure and the active structuration of spaces. They are also easily recognizable as having cleared the way for the migratory journeys of our era. It is in the writingbetween-worlds that these clearing processes are dissected.

KNOWLEDGE FOR LIVING Literatures-without-a-fixed-abode, in the sense of translingual and transcultural forms of writing generally arising from migrations, have become increasingly manifest since the last quarter of the twentieth century. They have activated all the elements and aspects of literary production in a much more radical and lasting manner than has previously been the case, thereby forming an excellent ‘school for the mind’. We are now witnessing the general vectorization of all spatial references. Writing-between-worlds creates new concepts serving a new conception of sites of memory. For, owing to a biased relationship with centuries, cultures and languages, these literatures of the world, these laboratories of polylogism, have accumulated a knowledge for living that may serve to bridge an increasingly ominous gulf. And it is no coincidence that the individual who has drawn attention to that gulf is a prescient representative of literatures-without-afixed-abode. In this way, Amin Maalouf ’s observations combine a call to action with the definition of a programme:

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What is at issue is the gulf that is opening up between our rapid material evolution, which brings us closer together every day, and our too slow moral evolution, which does not allow us to face the tragic consequences of our shrinking world. Of course, material progress cannot and should not be slowed. It is our moral evolution which must be considerably speeded up. It urgently needs to be raised to the level of our technological evolution, which demands a real revolution in attitudes.3 It is in this writing-between-worlds of the present time that we find the pathways to successful conviviality; there, it is through diversity of origin, as opposed to the many other signals operating today, that new futures are identified and outlined.

NOTES 1. Amin Maalouf, Disordered World: Setting a New Course for the Twenty-first Century, translated from the French by George Miller (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2011 [2009]), Preface to the Original Edition, p. 14. [Electronic edition] 2. Maalouf, Disordered World: Setting a New Course for the Twenty-first Century, p. 143. 3. Ibid., p. 62.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ette, Ottmar, Writing-Between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-afixed-Abode, translated from the German by V. M. Kutzinski, Berlin/Boston, Walter de Gruyter, 2016. Ette, Ottmar, ZusammenLebensWissen. List, Last und Lust literarischer Konvivenz im globalen Maßstab (ÜberLebenswissen III), Berlin, Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2010.

CHAPTER 40

The dust of empire THOMAS SERRIER

The West Indies, the Azores, the Canaries, Polynesia – vestiges of former empires, these localities have now become either a very lucrative means of preserving strategic positions or tax havens. Denmark, 2010: in the television series Borgen, broadcast widely across Europe, Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg is confronted with a scandal, in the form of a ‘Guantánamo’-style US detention centre set up in Greenland without her knowledge. This leads her to make the first official visit in decades to that forgotten land, an autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. This Danish detour illustrates the relative oblivion in which a number of Europe’s overseas territories are languishing; at the same time, it reminds us that the UK’s British Overseas Territories – the former Crown Colonies, not to be confused with the Dominions of the Commonwealth – and the French DOM-TOM (overseas departments and territories) are far from being the only examples. In fact, the territories connected with the European Union − among which we should distinguish the Ultra-Peripheral Regions (UPRs), these being EU territories situated outside the continent, and the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs), which do not form part of the EU − are included in the national territories of various European states. From Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao (the ABC islands) of the former Netherlands Antilles to the Portuguese Azores and the Spanish Canary Islands, and including Hong Kong, a British territory until 1997, these ‘confettis of the Empire’, as Napoleon once sarcastically called them, seem to emerge from a different era. Those Russian islands walled in by polar ice can likewise be added to their number, as non-EU examples. Before decolonization, the main European powers ruled over vast territories all around the globe. To take only the two most important examples at their apogee in 1939, the British Empire encompassed a quarter of the world’s population and extended over 29.8 million square kilometres, nearly 20 per cent of the earth’s surface. The French Empire, which was the second largest, covered 12.9 million square kilometres. For the most part, the end of the empires resulted in the dissolution of these imperial territories, although they did not completely vanish. The vestiges of the French Empire remain in the form of a dozen island territories covering a surface area of 119,394 square kilometres.

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OCEAN REVERIES The events experienced by these far-flung lands reveal the intertwining histories characteristic of Europe’s past. As its name (which it owes to its Portuguese discoverer) clearly does not suggest, the small Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha is actually a British territory. ‘Solitude Island’ (Russia) was discovered by Edvard Holm Johannessen of Norway and Réunion by a Portuguese explorer, Pedro Mascarenhas. The Falkland Islands, known to the Portuguese, Spanish and English since the sixteenth century, and later colonized by fishing communities from SaintMalo (hence their other name, the Malvinas), were the focus of an age-old HispanoEnglish conflict before the war between Britain and Argentina in 1982 marked an untimely return to the politics of aggression. And, as long-standing historical examples sometimes used in the present, what better way is there to refute the idea of a purely French identity than to compare the affiliation of certain West Indian islands to France (which dates back to the Compagnie des Indes in the seventeenth century) with the integration of Nice into the country in 1860? Today, these fragments scattered over the globe often awaken little more than affordable ocean reveries. Translated into twenty languages, Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands (a good many of them European territories) visibly draws on this notion of the faraway, with its use of historical type and graphics. Should the enduring nature of the old colonial link be revealed behind these tranquil appearances? Space stations, research bases, nuclear test sites, popular honeymoon destinations, offshore accounts – the overseas dependencies continue to host a number of ‘outsourced’ activities far from the metropolitan countries. In former times they received famous exiled prisoners, such as Napoleon in the case of Saint Helena, while Captain Dreyfus was sent to Devil’s Island. The civilizing discourse is still in evidence here; a statue installed in Cayenne, French Guiana, in 1896, represents Victor Schœlcher abolishing slavery, indicating a radiant future to a halfnaked African slave.

GEOPOLITICS Nowadays, calculations of the geostrategic advantages to be gained through budgetary investment continue to be made within a national framework. France possesses the second-largest sea-zone after the United States, a position she owes to Polynesia. In the Arctic, which contains 13 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil resources, the melting of the ice floes is inducing Russia to dispute new territories with Norway. Ultra-peripheral or overseas territories are often only brought back to European memories in the light of tensions or crises, involving the external Schengen border between Gibraltar and Spain, or the external EU border, particularly at Ceuta and Melilla; high-security border fences erected around those Spanish enclaves in Morocco are intended to prevent waves of migrants from entering the EU. But Europe also has a 730 kilometre-long border that runs between French Guiana and Brazil! Various cases of fraud serve as a reminder that the EU has to contend with the special status of ‘tax havens’, despite the fact that these are under the jurisdiction of

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member states. The Cayman Islands, for instance, has had a tax-free status since the days of George III. Édouard Chambost’s guide to tax havens, the Guide des paradis fiscaux (2005), indulges in obvious puns on the Virgin Islands, those ‘enclaves of pleasure’, where well-trained hostesses at financial institutions devote their attention to the business needs of wealthy Europeans, recalling those historical European accounts of sensual Tahitian women. Previous ages witnessed the construction of Spanish, Victorian and Third-Republic-style government institutions; today, the shiny new buildings of the financial centres stand before the coconut palms and the tranquil sea. Surely those stereotypical images of wheeling and dealing in a tropical setting inevitably bring to mind the ‘halcyon days’ of colonialism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coutansais, Cyril, Atlas des empires maritimes, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2013. Schalansky, Judith, Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, translated from the German by Christine Lo, New York, Penguin Books, 2010 [2009].

CHAPTER 41

The intransigent passport ILSEN ABOUT

Since the early twentieth century, the passport has embodied the link between an individual and a nation, with various visas preserving the memory of international journeys. Despite the Schengen Agreement of 1995, which eliminated the need for a passport when travelling within the European Union, the dream of a Europe without borders will only have been a reality for a privileged minority. [. . .] it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one. One embarked and alighted without questioning or being questioned, one did not have to fill out a single one of the many papers which are required today. [. . .] For all that I had been training my heart for almost half a century to beat as that of a citoyen du monde it was useless. On the day I lost my passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that losing one’s native land implies more than parting with a circumscribed area of soil.1 Here, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig is recalling the ‘good old days’ before the First World War; in The World of Yesterday he describes a period when no passports were required by ‘citizens of the world’, such as he was. That memory is misleading, however, as the golden age of a world without passports only existed for a certain social class and within very specific historical contexts. The passport made its appearance at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at a time of mass migration; replacing ‘interior passports’ and other documents stating an individual’s birthplace or place of residence, it became widespread as a symbol of national identity in the decades following the First World War.

NATION AND NATIONALITY Both a unique and a universal object, the passport is therefore the result of a long process of devising various ways of apprehending individual identity and of conceiving systems designed for the circulation of people. It also serves as a repository for personal memory and forms the traces of an existence marked by the control of a state and a nation. Its appearance in the twenty-first century, with its sombre cover and conventional format, is neutral and consensual. Yet its first page, bearing the name of the country concerned and its national emblem, invests it with

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a clear purpose; it defines affiliation to a nation, enabling each individual to be identified, but also to identify themselves with their country by connecting nation to nationality, through paper. Acquiring the passport to which one is legally entitled on reaching the age of majority marks the entry into active life, bringing the possibility of travelling abroad and ensuring that one will be recognized as the citizen of a particular country. Applicants must first demonstrate the authenticity of their civil identity and then provide proof of their physical existence. The image of the individual concerned, in photographic form, is included in the document as a matter of tradition. Confusions arising from cross-dressing, resemblance or errors of interpretation cannot be avoided altogether, despite the stringent regulations governing the taking of passport photographs. However, the official at the passport office is able to verify the visible reality of the applicant who submits their photograph, which they also sign. Formerly, weighing scales, height measuring instruments and eye-colour charts were used to provide information on the physical appearance of individuals in a medical context or for police files. Now, biometric passports require iris images and fingerprints − quick and painless procedures, certainly, but with a far-reaching impact that affects their significance. Details of an applicant’s identity are forwarded, via digital technology, to databases that store billions of records. These verifications could lead to the refusal of a request for a passport, its revocation or suspension; such acts represent some of the most serious sanctions that a state can inflict on its citizens. In this way, governments guarantee those who receive this precious document national status, ensuring the authenticity of their identity and, above all, their integrity, thereby authorizing them to circulate beyond their country’s borders. The implementation of the Schengen Agreement in 1995 marked a historic turning point by once more eliminating the need to carry a passport within the European Union. For those who only travel within the Schengen Area, visas and crumpled passport pages are becoming dim and distant memories. Yet in the case of many tourists, travellers and more or less voluntary exiles, these marks carry a variety of indications; their passports bear the signs of movements, constraints and of the waiting and fees involved in visa applications. They provide information on the stages of a journey or of sojourns that may have been pleasant or less so; for some, stamps, scrawled words and stapled pages attest to flight changes at international airports when travelling purely for pleasure; for others, they are the signs of ordeals undergone and countries left behind.

PASSPORTLESS AND STATELESS All passport holders carry with them the inalienable property of the nation to which they belong and are liable to prosecution in cases of deliberate damage or falsification. The unsettling and fascinating figure of the spy juggling multiple fake passports is an indirect indication of the almost sacred character acquired by that everyday object. The acts of brandishing one’s passport with pride or publicly destroying it are manifestations of the state of the relationship between individuals

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and their country. In the first instance, they are claiming their affiliation to their state, defending its position and expressing their attachment to the values it embodies. In the latter case, they are questioning the very terms of that affiliation and deciding to separate themselves symbolically from their own nation. However, this politically blasphemous gesture remains a weapon generally used by those in a position to acquire a new passport. Wars, state collapse and chaotic situations have resulted in roads full of passportless individuals who have been deprived of their nationality or can no longer claim to be part of a nation. The Nansen Passport, introduced in 1922, was intended to protect stateless refugees dispossessed of their identity as citizens. When the League of Nations definitively established the international passport in May 1926, it was to prevent a repetition of that original refugee crisis following the First World War. After the Second World War, various United Nations Conventions defined the status of refugees (1951) and stateless persons (1954). Yet these authorities and systems cannot prevent the recurrence of anomalies that place huge numbers of migrants and refugees in positions of total uncertainty, their long journeys sometimes resulting in the acquisition of a new passport − the sign of a return to normal life.

NOTE 1. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (New York: The Viking Press, 1943 [1942]), p. 280 and p. 282.

BIBLIOGRAPHY About, Ilsen and Vincent Denis, Histoire de l’identification des personnes, Paris, La Découverte, 2010. Claes, Thomas, Passkontrolle! Eine kritische Geschichte des sich Ausweisens und Erkanntwerdens, Berlin, Vergangenheitsverlag, 2010. Groebner, Valentin, Der Schein der Person. Steckbrief, Ausweis und Kontrolle im Europa des Mittelalters, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2004. Reale, Egidio, Le Régime des passeports et la Société des Nations, Paris, Rousseau et Cie, 1930. Robertson, Craig, The Passport in America: The History of a Document, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010. Salter, Mark B., Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations, Boulder, Lynne Rienner, 2003. Torpey, John, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

CHAPTER 42

Comings and goings CATHERINE WIHTOL DE WENDEN

After long being a continent of emigration, Europe has now become one of the world’s main migrant destinations. Imaginary borders have shifted over the decades. Today, the Other is no longer the European immigrant who has broken through the Iron Curtain or fled war or dictatorship; instead, alterity is represented by the Middle East or Africa and is often Muslim. The term ‘melting pot’ first appeared in the United States as the title of a 1908 play by a Jewish American author, who had used it to illustrate the thoroughness of the assimilation process in America. The same concept has been adopted in France (the creuset français), the title of a book by Gérard Noiriel, published in 1988. The melting pot image is with us still and is even seen as a utopia; a new individual and a new way of life would arise from the general mixture. This idea is conveyed by the motto one sees on the American dollar − E pluribus unum − an expression borrowed from a poem by Virgil (‘Moretum’ in The Aeneid), describing how elements are combined to produce a herb cheese. It suggests that new arrivals will likewise merge with the existing population in the melting pot. Is the European melting pot the adaptation of a reality imported here from elsewhere? Is it based on the American ‘model’ of assimilation upheld until the 1960s and subsequently defined by some as a ‘salad bowl’ whose ingredients remain intact, suggesting multiculturalism? Unlike the new worlds, which have regarded immigration as a means of swelling the population, Europe, a continent of immigration despite itself, struggles to consider immigration as a constituent element of its population growth. It is currently experiencing a paradoxical situation, for although it is now one of the world’s main migrant destinations, the principal continent of immigration in terms of influx and the second in terms of stock (established populations), most Europeans do not see themselves as inhabitants of a continent of immigration. The latter is still not part of – or forms only a very small part of – the European story or indeed of the national story in most European countries. Worse still, many reject it as illegitimate, dangerous and destructive to national and European values and identity. Hence the crucial issue contained within collective memories relating to the migratory experience, in a Europe that creates and recreates new imaginary and imagined frontiers, despite being permeated by the desire to live as a community. What is demonstrated by both the intermittent

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use of political symbols and memory cultures in the broad sense is the way in which a whole series of future projections, fears and hopes develop and re-emerge in the present; these are linked to the centuries-old experience of immigration and to the foreign contributions made to a shared history.

A LAND OF DEPARTURES Europe has long been a land of departures on account of its large population, its inhabitants’ curiosity and desire to explore new worlds and their greed for the riches to be found there, resulting in colonization. In Migration in European History, Klaus Bade explains that steamships also played a part, enabling the mass transportation of European emigrants to countries keen to increase their workforce and to swell their populations. Other, intra-European emigrations were of a religious or confessional nature; French Protestants took refuge in Germany, Geneva, the Netherlands and Britain in the seventeenth century; the Jews were expelled from Western Europe (Spain and the Germanic lands) and moved to the ‘refuge’ offered by Poland and the Balkans, then under Ottoman rule; they were driven out of Russia, Poland and Romania by the pogroms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not forgetting their flight and exile due to political persecution and the subsequent Nazi policy of extermination. Internal conflicts (the French Revolution and those of several European countries, autocracies and dictatorships, with their ‘1848ers’) and international upheavals (the nineteenth-century partitions of Poland, the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Cold War) have added their share to these migrations. The two world wars, for their part, led to enormous ethnic ‘disentangling’ processes; examples include the Vertriebene, populations expelled from the German territories that had become Polish after 1945, and the still-cited precedent of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey after 1923. Certain conflicts, such as the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the Spanish Civil War, resulted in major migration flows. Both saw the emergence of lasting communities of memory and collective claims to identities, involving both countries of departure and host countries. Poverty also plays a part in these emigrations, one example being the thirty-one million Italians who left their country between 1860 and 1960. The continent was affected by further departures made by Europeans within Europe following the collapse of the Iron Curtain. These include the ‘repatriation’ of the two million Germans who had settled in Russia and Romania, that of 350,000 Greeks from Black Sea settlements (now in the Republic of Georgia), the departure of 500,000 Bulgarians of Turkish origin to Turkey and the migration flows from the former Yugoslavia.

EXILED FIGURES Each of these historic migrations is associated in collective memories with exiled figures; these are icons of a certain European form of cosmopolitanism, from the German Romantic poet Adelbert von Chamisso (originally a French aristocrat whose

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family had emigrated to Germany after 1789) to Franco-Greek film director CostaGavras and including two exemplary Polish figures, the poet Adam Mickiewicz, who wrote his Pan Tadeusz in Paris in 1834, and the English novelist Joseph Conrad, né Józef Korzeniowski. Remembering that infinite group of foreigners who have shaped different national cultures and contributed, through their very mobility, to the emergence of a European culture, is always a highly symbolic choice, given the recurrent temptations to adopt an inward-looking approach. To cite just one example, the success story of the French Huguenots in Prussia, against the background of gilded memories of Prussian tolerance, played an obvious role in the democratization of West German political culture after 1945 and has retained all its evocative power in Berlin today. Since the 1960s, however, Europe has primarily been a continent of immigration, even if public opinion there seemingly refuses to accept this. In late 2015, the Eurobarometer Survey showed that immigration was the main concern of 45 per cent of Europeans.

A HOST LAND AND A REFUGE France was the first to open her doors to immigrants in the latter half of the nineteenth century, due to the concomitance of the Industrial Revolution and a shortage of manpower. Initially, the arrival of the Belgian, Italian and Swiss border dwellers was viewed with disfavour, as described by Émile Zola in Germinal. The violent anti-Italian riots known as the ‘Marseillan Vespers’ and the massacre of the Italians at Aigues-Mortes in 1893 have also remained in the collective memory, a memory that contests the dominant narrative to this day. The Italians, who were the largest immigrant group in 1930, were joined after the First World War by the Poles, then by the Algerians. After 1945, the French immigrant landscape was shaped by a succession of different nationalities: Spanish (some came during the Retirada, the Republican exodus to France in 1939); Portuguese, who mainly arrived as undocumented immigrants after crossing the Pyrenees – a story told by Christian de Chalonge in his documentary O Salto (1967); Yugoslavians, then Moroccans, Tunisians, Turks and sub-Saharan Africans. Germany, which has had the largest number of immigrants of any European country since the 1990s, appealed for ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter) in the mid1950s, signing agreements with Turkey, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia and Greece. During the German economic revival immigration was praised as a healthy sign, and no concern was given to the question of integration, as it was seen as temporary phase. It was with the end of the recruitment of foreign immigrant workers in 1973 that the issue of integration was raised, as was also the case in France. Today, Germany has seven million foreign inhabitants, in addition to the so-called ethnic migrations: the Vertriebene from the former Eastern regions after 1945 (12 million), the Aussiedler after 1989 (2 million) and the Übersiedler from East Germany, who crossed the Iron Curtain, which collapsed in 1989. During this period, Germany also received three-quarters of the refugees who arrived in Europe; in 1992, for

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example, the country took in 438,000 asylum seekers out of a total of 500,000 registered in the European Union. Luxembourg – 40 per cent of whose population is of foreign nationality − Belgium and the Netherlands have also turned to immigrant labour for their mines and industries and function partly thanks to the contribution made by immigration. The same is true of Switzerland, 30 per cent of whose population is foreign, and of Austria (10 per cent). The UK initially benefitted from Commonwealth immigrant workers, until the recruitment restrictions imposed by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 and the restrictions to circulation applied after the country joined the European Communities in 1972. The opening of the UK’s borders to the Eastern European labour force in 2004 brought a large influx of Polish immigrants, who represent the highest percentage of foreign nationals in the UK and the second largest in Ireland. For its part, Northern Europe has played an important role as a land of asylum for refugees from the Middle East since 1975. Southern Europe had previously been a land of labour migration and political exile, examples being the fuoriusciti fleeing fascist Italy, Spanish Republicans and Portuguese and Greeks fleeing the Salazar and Colonels’ regimes, respectively. It became a land of immigration in the mid-1980s. Seen as a whole, these migration waves and their sequencing in time provide an overview of the landscape of migration in all its diversity.

IMMIGRANTS’ JOURNEYS IN THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY Since the mid-1980s there has been an abundance of ‘post-migration’ songs, films, novels, autobiographies, essays and theatre plays. These have conceptualized the recent experience of immigration and have achieved lasting acclaim extending beyond their own countries. Examples include Shantytown Kid (1986), Azouz Begag’s story of his difficult childhood as an immigrant in Lyon, which has become a popular text in schools, and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), which was adapted into a BBC television series with music by David Bowie and has been widely translated. A prominent intellectual, the German–Iranian writer Navid Kermani bases all his political reflections on his personal and family journey, while the films of Fatih Akin focus on the successes and heartbreaks of second-generation Turkish immigrants in Germany. In the realm of popular culture, sport also offers an ideal context in which to present examples of integration in the form of talented players from immigrant backgrounds and to compare eras. Any misdemeanours committed by current footballers are particularly frowned on as forming a blatant contrast with the ‘Black-Blanc-Beur’ generation of star player Zinedine Zidane. This, in turn, had been the focus of constant comparisons with the Michel Platini and Jean Tigana generation, which had itself been measured against the great Raymond Kopa (Kopaszewski), the French striker of the 1950s born to Polish immigrants. The same example exists in Germany (involving a slightly different time frame), where the arrival of the first Turkish and African players in about 2006 brought back memories

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of the Polish footballers who were already playing in the championships of the interwar period. This is not an exclusively West European phenomenon. A player of Nigerian origin became part of the Polish national team for the first time in 2000, and Sweden has long depended on its star player Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Yet these highly publicized examples remain disconnected, as it were, from the dominant image, which is still essentially that of employment-based immigration, rarely seen in terms of population swelling. Demographic decline and the enduring presence of Muslim populations remain ‘unexamined’ phenomena. Europe has experienced a new challenge with the refugee crisis that arose in 2014, in the form of the contestation of immigration policies and of the Schengen and Dublin Conventions relating to asylum of 1985 and 1990, respectively. The security syndrome has not prevented a mass influx of asylum seekers (625,000 in 2014, 1.2 million in 2015) in the wake of the crises in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. The temptation to close national borders − as Central and Eastern European states have done − has now surfaced, for the gains made by the extreme right represent an additional threat to solidarity between European nations. Germany (which has received three-quarters of the refugees who have arrived in Europe since the end of the Second World War) distinguished itself in 2015, when its chancellor, Angela Merkel, announced that the country was ready to take 800,000 asylum seekers. The other West European nations warily agreed in principle to ‘share the burden’ (160,000 asylum seekers were to be spread over 28 European countries). At the same time, 25,000 people died in the Mediterranean between 2000 and 2015, transforming the Mare Nostrum into a maritime graveyard amid almost general indifference. Indeed, the policy of closing borders seems set to continue, with public support for the measure reflected in opinion polls and the rise of extreme right-wing parties, despite sporadic wake-up calls in the form of shameful images from the twentieth century. It has led to the creation of multiple immigration detention centres, waiting zones, walls (as at Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves in Morocco), ‘hotspots’ in Italy and Greece, and the erection of barbed wire border fences, such as those now separating the Central European states from the Balkan route. The 2015 Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (the UNHCR) gave Greece as the first port of call for asylum seekers, with Italy second. The failure to achieve solidarity within Europe finds legitimacy in the eyes of the public through the fight against terrorism, refugees having become conflated with the perpetrators of attacks in major cities.

SECOND GENERATIONS The 1980s were a pivotal decade. First, the EU countries at that time, which had suspended employment-based immigration, were gradually becoming aware of the necessity of introducing policies of hospitality. These were often accompanied by repatriation policies, as with Germany in 1972, the Netherlands in 1975 and France in 1977. Intercultural policies were likewise implemented and were often

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orientated towards returns to a country of origin. The term ‘integration’, whose launching in France was prompted by the word used in colonial Algeria in the 1950s, subsequently replaced that of ‘assimilation’, which had been in use since the 1880s. Other European countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, launched the term ‘multiculturalism’; this had first emerged in North America and had been used in the United States but principally in Canada, where it had initially defined the coexistence of francophone and anglophone communities before being applied to newcomers from elsewhere. The phenomenon of second generations originating from immigrant parents began to emerge in the inner cities of Europe’s oldest migrant destination, France. The decade between 1975 and 1985 saw the implementation of policies establishing new rights in certain European countries, generally promoting the transition from immigrant to citizen. Foreigners (both European and non-European) acquired voting rights in local elections in Sweden (1975), Denmark (1981) and the Netherlands (1985); this policy is now in force in fifteen European countries, including Switzerland (where it was established in the canton of Neuchâtel in 1848). In France, foreign voting rights are an ever-recurring issue. Presidential candidate François Mitterrand included it among his 101 proposals in 1981; it was re-adopted in 2012 by François Hollande but came to nothing. EU citizenship was defined by the Treaty of Maastricht of 1992, which accorded EU citizens voting rights in local elections (Article 8), on the basis of reciprocity between European states. However, as regards local voting rights for non-EU foreign nationals, the weight of different traditions has remained a determining factor − jus soli in the case of the UK and jus sanguinis in that of Italy.

DISCRIMINATION It is the European Union, rather than the individual European states, that has done most to promote the rights to citizenship of immigrants and of populations originating from immigration, in the light of the dawning realization that they were here to stay and that their children would become EU nationals. Following the precedent set by the UK, a pioneer in this regard (the Commission for Racial Equality was established in 1976), an EU directive aimed at combatting racial discrimination was issued in 1999. This policy therefore became an obligatory part of the legislation of EU member states in the 2000s. Policies designed to promote diversity, of a different nature, were a response to the Affirmative Action system established in the United States. Since the mid-1990s, young Europeans born to immigrant families from the Maghreb and Africa, or from Pakistan in the case of the UK, have rebelled against the discrimination to which they have been subjected: racial profiling, arbitrary arrests and detention in custody. Doubts are cast on their citizenship and affiliation to European countries on the basis of their skin colour and their innercity backgrounds; added to this, they now live under the suspicion of belonging to radicalized Islamic fringe groups. Deadly terrorist attacks have taken place in France (1995, 2012, 2015 and 2016), in Spain (2004), in the UK (2005 and 2017)

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and in Belgium (2016). These were carried out by European Muslims who believed that their place was no longer in Europe and that their mission was to support, through acts of violence, the armed Muslim extremists active in the Middle East and Africa. For their part, the fundamentalists considered the European way of life to be impious and corrupt. These young radicalized protagonists found this extremist interpretation of Islam gave a meaning to their existence. Inner-city riots are of a different nature and do not take place in the name of Islam; instead, they are a repudiation of the proclaimed values of equality and fraternity in the prevailing political, social and institutional context. The first city riots in France took place in the late 1970s. Others followed in 1995 and 2005, revealing a profound sense of exclusion. Similar riots occurred in London in 2011, creating a vivid and lasting impression in their turn.

INCORPORATING ISLAM At the same time, Islam has become part of the European landscape – when it was not already present – in all its diversity. Immigrants have arrived from the Maghreb, from Turkey, sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan, refugees from the Middle East. This is an essentially peaceful Islam, which seeks to mark its presence only by the construction of mosques and Muslim squares in cemeteries, by women wearing the hijab, Halal butchers and Muslim bookshops. It sometimes comes up against secularized societies that may see these in elements a desire to transgress the Western values of individualism, human rights and gender equality. Although European countries all seek to promote coexistence using a variety of means and philosophies, and although integration processes, unlike migration flows, are managed by individual member states rather than the European Union, there is an evident convergence of methods applied. France and the UK favour a fairly inclusive nationality code, and several other European countries, founded on the basis of jus sanguinis, introduced a mix of jus soli and jus sanguinis provisions for the acquisition of citizenship at the dawn of the 1990s. Lack of understanding has sometimes persisted; in 2004, for instance, France, unlike many other European countries, imposed a headscarf ban on female public sector employees. The lack of mosques led several municipalities to offer plots of land for the construction of Muslim places of worship, so that prayers would not have to be held in cellars and garages, but some countries preferred to delegate the responsibility of managing matters relating to Islam to the communities involved.

NEW BORDERS, IMAGINARY AND IMAGINED Many European countries have constructed their national identity on the basis of the nation states defined in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a process that followed the collapse of the major empires (the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman). While often multicultural in character, these also pursued discriminatory policies against a number of minorities, such as Jews, Armenians,

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Alevis and Protestants. These national identities built on languages, cultures and in some cases, religion, did not include immigration, for some of these territories were also countries of departure. Once they had become host nations they often effaced immigrant origins from their national history, just as the descendants of immigrants themselves have sometimes pulled the ladder up behind them through xenophobic voting against newcomers, that ancestry having no value, in their eyes, in their settlement country. In this way, France, where one French person in four has a foreign ancestor, has built a powerful founding myth of autochthony, which has often served as a national narrative. Some rail against the ‘great replacement’ of the ‘true nationals’ by immigrants, an extreme right-wing myth in which mosques are replacing churches and Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans have taken all the prestigious posts once occupied by white Christian Europeans. This is the subtext in the essays by Germany’s Thilo Sarrazin and Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission. The truth is that replacement has been a two-way process; Byzantium was renamed Constantinople, then became Istanbul, and the cathedral of Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque – yet in Andalusia, the mosques in Seville and Córdoba became Roman Catholic cathedrals. The role of the memories of previous migrations is central to the definition of European identity, which was constructed at the point where the wave of Muslim conquests surged back. Europe was bolstered by the defeat of the Turks and the Arabs at Malta, Grenada, Vienna and Lepanto. Thereafter, the figure of the Other was only celebrated in the continent in order to showcase colonial activities (as with the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931), or in the context of the contribution to the war effort made by the colonial troops, an episode recalled with pride and bitterness in Rachid Bouchareb’s film Days of Glory (2006). Confronted with new migration influxes coming mainly from the world’s Southern regions (involving refugees, workers, families and students), Europeans’ perception of their continent is governed by a narrative that either ignores migrations altogether, or accords them very little place, by highlighting a ‘traditionally European’ identity. In the decade between 1990 and 2000, multiculturalism was extolled in the UK, then in Germany (multikulti) and the Netherlands, yet it has a bad name nowadays, being suspected of promoting communitarianism. Some prefer the notion of national cohesion or of the preservation of national ethnic identities, as with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, as a response to the latest migrations. The frontier between ourselves and the Other has shifted, as West Europeans are no longer seen as foreigners in their European countries of residence, unless they originate from non-European immigration – poor, visible and Muslim in character. Other frontiers have been reinforced, however; walls, camps, retention and incarceration zones have been established to protect Europe from these newcomers, to separate exclusion zones from city centres and to differentiate Islam from Christian cultures – a paradox in secularized countries where religious affiliation has decreased. Another paradox is that those who have effectively implemented ethnic, cultural and social diversity have been the Europeans themselves, particularly at a grassroots level, through mixed marriages, instances of dual nationality and cultural

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blending; these have been celebrated, one or two generations later, in popular and sentimental romances such as the German–Turkish tragi-comedy Almanya: Welcome to Germany by Yasemin Șamdereli, Pot Luck (based on the Erasmus Programme), by Cédric Klapisch, The Women on the 6th Floor by Philippe Le Guay (a story of Spanish maids in Paris) and The Gilded Cage by Ruben Alves.

IMMIGRATION PERCEIVED AS A RISK For all that, it is still difficult to tell Europeans that they live in the largest immigration area in the world, even if the foreign presence remains moderate. Many Europeans today regard immigration chiefly as a risk, a challenge and a threat to their way of life (particularly to the welfare state) and to their identity. They are impervious to the way in which immigration has transformed identities and collective memories, often preferring an inward-looking approach. Mosques are only reluctantly tolerated in the urban landscape. Immigration museums struggle to establish their presence in Europe, while they are increasingly prolific across the Atlantic. As a case in point, the French National Immigration History Museum in Paris, which opened in 2007, was not inaugurated until 2014; meanwhile, similar museums in New York (Ellis Island), Buenos Aires and São Paulo, where visitors can connect with their roots, experienced no such difficulty in achieving official, national recognition. In his novel Two Women, Alberto Moravia describes the attitude of the officers in the Allied liberation army at Campania (central Italy) towards a distraught woman whose daughter has been gang-raped in a church by soldiers from the Maghreb, probably belonging to the French colonial army. The officers simply regarded the mother as mad. All that mattered was the fight against the Other − in the form of fascism and Nazism − and those Muslim soldiers were liberators, on their side in the war. The frontier had therefore shifted, with German Nazis and Italian fascists on one side, and the allied liberation forces, including non-European Muslims, on the other. Today, that frontier stands entrenched in a constructed confrontation with non-European immigration and Islam. Yet military cemeteries, European working-class history, activist movements, sport and the popular arts in particular, are all overflowing with collective histories that include immigration. And it is all too often forgotten that certain elite figures, such as great architects like Gustave Eiffel (né Bonickhausen), certain novelists, painters, fashion designers, film directors and actors, composers and musicians, sports stars and scientists like Marie Curie, all had immigrant backgrounds. Many of Europe’s symbols were invented by foreigners, and many great men (and women) such as Leonardo da Vinci, Immanuel Kant, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven were European first and foremost before becoming national figures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bade, Klaus, Migration in European History, translated from the German by Allison Brown, Oxford, Blackwell, 2003 [2001].

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Body-Gendrot, Sophie and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, Policing the Inner City in France, Britain and the US, New York, Palgrave, 2014. Noiriel, Gérard, Le Creuset français. Histoire de l’immigration, Paris, Le Seuil, 2006. Rex, John and Guharpal Singh, The Governance of Multiculturalism, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004. Schmoll, Camille, Hélène Thiollet and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, Migrations en Méditerranée, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2015. Wieviorka, Michel, La Diversité, Paris, La Découverte, 2008.

CHAPTER 43

Silenced memories Mosques and minarets in Europe SCHIRIN AMIR-MOAZAMI

They attest to Islam’s centuries-old presence in Europe, yet, since the Spanish Reconquista, mosques have been the focus of a permanent debate over whether they constitute a European memory. When he took up his post as the minister of the interior in 2011, Hans-Peter Friedrich apodictically claimed that Islam did not belong to Germany. Four years later he confirmed his statement, elaborating further to claim that historically Islam is ‘not a constitutive element of the identity of our country [. . .]. Everyone becomes aware of this when walking around in Germany. You can see churches, you can see paintings, you can hear music that derives from centuries-old Christian roots, you can see pictures, you can see art and architecture that is moulded by Christianity’.1 Friedrich’s reasoning boils down to this: Muslims might belong to Germany, but Islam emphatically does not. Such ‘Muslims-minus-Islam’ or ‘Europe-minus-Islam’ statements are symptomatic of a wider discursive framework both in Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe – remember the 2009 referendum in Switzerland against minarets or the request made in 2010 by Bishop Demetrio Fernández of Cordoba, who wanted the cathedral-mosque to be known only as a cathedral, and to forbid Muslims from worshipping there. These are part and parcel of shared aversions against the visible and physical presence of Islam in Europe, fears that are definitely nurtured by global terrorism conducted in the name of Islam. Is it, however, possible to think of Europe without Islam as its formative ally or enemy? Is it possible to conceive of any European nation state, or of Europe as a whole, as autonomous geographical units, independent from entanglements with other parts of the globe, in this case the so-called Islamic world? What do we have to erase from Europe’s past to sustain the narrative of its smooth path from tamed Christianity (Reformation) through humanism (Enlightenment) to contemporary liberal democracy? And what is the purpose of such silencing? Instead of repeating a problematic framework that enables problematic questions and answers – Does Islam belong to Europe: yes or no? – we therefore need to disclose the memory politics involved in evoking Europe’s past plus or minus Islam. What kind of collective

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sensibilities, aspirations to this memory, are recalled and interpellated here? Whose past is evoked and whose is silenced? Symptomatically, such memory politics require concrete references. It is not a coincidence that Friedrich referred to paintings, music, art and architecture – in churches – revealing Germany’s ‘Christian’ roots. Yet, if we continue his line of argument, it is hard to deny that mosques and minarets across Europe do reveal the physical and durable presence of Islam in Europe too. This presence is carved in stone, even if we might put aside for a moment the more recent past – the postwar and post-colonial immigration of Muslims into Europe, which fundamentally and irreversibly changed Western European landscapes into multicultural societies. Even if we thus move to a more remote past, which Friedrich and others seem to recall when evoking impermeable ‘Christian’ identities, we are left with visible traces referring back to Islam’s presence. These traces lead back to eighth-century Andalusia or to the Balkans since the fourteenth century. Both regions are still full of mosques and minarets signalling Islam’s centuries-long presence in geographical Europe. Any of these sites would tell us distinct and complex histories of Europe’s entanglement with Islam. Europe’s colonial and imperial past fostered, rather than deleted, these entanglements. We do not even have to think about most obvious sites like the Grande Mosque de Paris to see Islam’s presence within Europe as an outcome of colonial entanglements (Davidson 2012). Consider Germany again with its shorter and less distinctive colonial history: let us remember that the first purpose-built mosque was constructed in Wünsdorf (near Berlin) in 1915 in the midst of the First World War as part of a camp for Muslim prisoners of the German Reich. Note as well that, with the cooperation of the declining Ottoman Empire, these prisoners were incorporated into the army to fight the jihād (here: armed battle) on the side of the German troops. Note too, finally, that this wooden mosque, significantly called ‘half moon camp’, was built to reveal Germany’s ‘friendly’ relationship with Islam and to give the inmates the impression that they were guests, not prisoners (Höpp, Reinwald 2000). Even if the camp, as well as the mosque, was destroyed shortly after the First World War, other ones followed. What is the status of these Islamic sites vis-à-vis Germany’s or Europe’s ‘Christian’ identity, one may ask? Can we detach these pasts from Europe’s memory and hence Islam’s presence? These pasts can only be neglected rhetorically by restoring, purifying or resignifying an allegedly impermeable, pure and stable history. Shifting the temporal framework to the more recent past again, one also wonders whether the large number of less pliant, less representative courtyard or factory mosques in European cities, constructed in the period of post-war and post-colonial migration, do not count as part of Europe’s more recent history. Despite often lacking the typical features of purpose-built mosques, these can be called places of memory too, even if scattered, as they reveal post-war and post-colonial labour systems and their long-term effects. All these mosques and minarets across Europe reveal Islam’s presence within Europe’s past and more recent present (see also Tolan in volume 1 of this work). In

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this way, they potentially constitute sites of a European Muslim memory, even if this memory is neither pure, nor freed from conflicts nor even collective.

NOTE 1. Hans-Peter Friedrich‚ ‘Islam ist kein prägendes Element in Deutschland’, Deutschlandfunk, 13.1.2015.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Davidson, Naomi, Muslims Only Embodying Islam in Twentieth Century France, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2012. Höpp, Gerhard and Brigitte Reinwald, Fremdeinsätze, Afrikaner und Asiaten in Europäischen Kriegen, 1914–1945, Berlin, Das Arabische Buch, 2002.

CHAPTER 44

Old Europe ANDREAS ECKERT AND SHALINI RANDERIA

This name, derogatory in tone, was first given to Europe by the New World, primarily America. Today, it crystallizes debates over the place of Europeans − long convinced of their civilizing mission − in the modern world. When right-wing Republican Donald Rumsfeld, then US secretary of defence, declared in January 2003 that France and Germany were ‘a problem’ and that he regarded them as part of ‘old Europe’, he caused an outcry. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, among others, was fierce in his condemnation of the statement. He retorted that by describing the new Europe, which was combatting the cynical pursuit of Realpolitik, as ‘old’, Rumsfeld – a proponent of the ‘pre-emptive strike’ – was presenting the situation in a curiously inverted manner: ‘In the criticism that he has levelled at his European friends, he finds the ideals that he has abandoned, the American ideals of the eighteenth century.’ The playwright Luc Bondy declared in turn: ‘By treating “Old Europe”, the Europe that aspires to peace, with contempt, Mr Rumsfeld is honouring us. If Old Europe, which has experienced war, now has enough reason and good sense to reject it, then I am for that Old Europe, which is the New Europe.’1

AMERICA AS A MIRROR In making an acerbic comparison between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Europe, Rumsfeld was using a solidly entrenched stereotype. For Europe had been obliged for centuries to assert herself and to seek comparisons with America. ‘America, your lot is better / Than our old continent’s’, wrote Goethe in 1827, while Hegel, during the same period, noted with markedly less enthusiasm that Europe’s attitude towards America resembled that of Hamburg towards the district of Altona or Frankfurt towards the neighbouring town of Offenbach. Hegel’s view revealed a certain ambivalence, for in his eyes America was not only a peripheral part of Europe with no autonomy to speak of but also a place of development and liberty, unencumbered by the impediments resulting from tradition.2 Years later, at the end of a three-month tour of the United States, Max Weber showed himself to be just as equivocal on the subject; America had

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certainly developed productive forces, but he doubted whether they could serve as a model for an exhausted Europe. When describing America, Europeans were also portraying themselves, and that portrayal could be critical. The notion of ‘old Europe’ originates from the rhetorical arsenal of the French Revolution, the Ancien Régime being used to designate the time before 1789. During a study trip to North America in the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville had sensed that American democracy would be governed by the masses, and that this would mark the dawn of a new era in human history. Despite a certain form of continuity, this new era would be radically different from the Ancien Régime – to echo the title of one of his major works, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856). In his Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx presented the Ancien Régime as a form of social organization that he called ‘feudalism’, and he used the expression ‘old Europe’ in a provocative manner: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe − the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.’3

EUROPE AS A CIVILIZING FORCE The ‘new Europe’, in fact, assumed the features of a civilizing power, a representative of modernity that would bring enlightenment to the continents of the South through colonial domination. This is what emerges, for instance, from the legitimizing discourse of those calling for the colonial conquest of Africa in the last third of the nineteenth century. The image of Africa as a continent where slavery prevailed, a land oppressed by its own tyrants and kept away from the path to civilization, Christianity and commerce had been central to the propaganda used by missionaries and anti-slavery movements since the 1860s; it was one of the principal elements of the knowledge of Africa to which the European readership had access. Works that were especially popular and effective include those by Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who set out to convert Africans to Christianity and release them from the yoke of slavery. This, he wrote, destroyed all desire to perform agricultural work or to take up salaried employment. The forces pushing for colonial expansion now had a powerful new argument at their disposal and were able to present the partition of Africa as a humanitarian crusade against slavery and the slave trade. The firm hand of the colonial state seemed necessary and was even said to be the only possible means of protecting the Africans from their own violence, ‘opening’ the continent, in the economic sense, to the presumed benefits of ‘legal’ trade in the process. In this way, the abolitionist discourse was one of the principal legitimizing strategies applied during the establishment of European colonialism in Africa. Or, in more precise terms, one could say that the political fight against slavery undertaken in the 1780s led to the colonization of Africa a century later. One characteristic of the abolitionist movement, which was particularly evident in England, was the engagement − initially on an unconcerted basis – of religiously affiliated

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prophets and moralists. As they regarded slavery as a sin and a crime against Divine Providence, their fight assumed the appearance of a crusade aimed at purifying individual and national morals. In showing compassion towards subjugated victims, one was cleansing one’s conscience. Politics and ideology therefore acquired particular importance in the action conducted against slavery and the slave trade. Jürgen Osterhammel encapsulates the most widely held opinion in Europe today: ‘Slavery was not abolished because it stood in the way of economic advancement, but because it was no longer politically or morally defensible.’4 In 1807, a British parliamentary bill making it illegal to trade slaves with any colonies, English or otherwise, was passed by a considerable majority in both the Lords and the Commons. In less than forty years from that date, Britain’s Parliament also passed a law prohibiting slave ownership. Other great powers, such as France, and, later, the United States, followed this example.

THE OPPORTUNISTIC FIGHT AGAINST SLAVERY In Britain, the success of the anti-slavery movement was congruent with a reformulation of the national interest following the loss of the North American colonies. The fight against slavery became an indication of national virtue, a means by which the English could impress others with their self-proclaimed innate love of freedom and boost their spirits in trying times. In the medium term, it was primarily the dominant class that gained from the abolitionist movement, being compensated for the loss of slaves, although it was far from being a conservative enterprise and was supported by broad sections of the population. However, the fight against slavery legitimized Britain’s global supremacy, as her crusade served as both additional proof and a guarantee of her exceptional position in relation to other nations: ‘British gun-boats sailed under God’s protection because they carried out God’s work.’5 Furthermore, in terms of domestic policy, the abolitionist doctrine contributed to safeguarding the new configuration of an industrialized society by extolling related social and moral values, such as the liberal economy and the principle of individual responsibility. The imperialist interventions in the areas of overseas trade and production, as manifested in the late nineteenth century, coincided with the efforts of European governments to support – and therefore also to contain – the working class. During the slave-trading era, ‘Old Europe’ had exploited, even encouraged, the violence carried out in Africa. ‘New Europe’, conversely, was now advocating a manageable and organized programme of economic expansion. Reflections of this type were not exclusive to the European metropoles, but also occurred at ‘local’ level, in Africa itself, where violence was harmful to European commercial interests and triggered complex debates over where and how governments should intervene to protect their possessions and guarantee economic progress. In Europe, where public attitudes to colonialism tended to be sceptical, as it was seen as a hunting-ground for adventurers, a discourse referring to the need for this much-discussed subject of progress proved useful. That moral vision was far from being exclusively embodied by the fight against the slave trade launched in Britain in 1807. The imperialist powers

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constructed themselves as a civilizing force and Africans as slavers, disorderly and incapable of self-control. The Europeans were ready to cooperate in the creation of structures enabling African resources and labour power to be utilized in an orderly and rational manner.6

COLONIZATION: A MISSION Colonial power was held to account from the outset. And although a great many representatives and actors involved in the colonial project saw themselves as ‘naturally’ invested with power, both the colonized populations and the detractors in the ‘metropoles’ made sure that colonialism was constantly compelled to justify itself – or at least to justify the violence it was exhibiting. In this respect, the argument of the civilizing mission no doubt prevailed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was based on the assertion that colonized peoples were too primitive to govern themselves but were capable of improving. The colonial project was intended to turn the populations of the civilized territories into disciplined agricultural workers or labourers, in addition to making them compliant subjects of a bureaucratic state. This prompted a whole debate on the question of precisely what degree of ‘civilization’ should be achieved and the consequences of taking things to excess in this regard. The colonial officials wanted the peoples they administered to become ‘perfect indigenous inhabitants’ rather than ‘replicas of Europeans’. That being said, the idea of a civilizing mission also enabled the colonized populations to retain some scope for action, providing them with an important point of reference for expressing their complaints and protests and for asserting their interests.

EUROPE ON TRIAL On the whole, the rhetoric of the civilizing mission was characterized by a tension between narrow-mindedness and universalism, the awareness of having a mission to accomplish and megalomania, a teleological view of history and the negation of development, an assertion of cultural superiority and incompetence, a rhetoric of assimilation and a fear of being submerged by the Other. We have several examples of criticism expressed by members of colonized populations opposed to that civilizing mission. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, on being asked by a young American journalist what he thought of Western civilization, was reported to have answered, ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ Aimé Césaire, the great poet of the négritude movement, showed far more severity in his attitude to Europe. In his Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1955, he voices the suspicion that ‘at bottom’, what the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century [. . .] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man [. . .] it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India and the ‘niggers’ of Africa.7

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Césaire’s furious denunciation of the minimization, even denial, of colonialism’s violent crimes challenged the widespread idea that the Europeanization of the world had ultimately been dictated by progress and that it had enabled the colonized populations to escape a worse fate. At the time when Césaire’s text was published, not a great deal remained of the colonial project. Europe’s former colonies in Asia had achieved independence, with a few exceptions. In Africa, the decolonization process was gathering pace, and in a few years it was to bring an end to colonial supremacy in vast swathes of the continent. Frantz Fanon, the radical anti-colonial thinker, forcefully declared that the ‘Third World’ should permanently turn its back on Europe. And, as a conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, he writes that this Third World finds itself: ‘[facing] Europe like a colossal mass whose aim should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers’. He continues: So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature. If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us. But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. [. . .] For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.8

BOOMERANG The criticisms of Europe expressed by non-Western intellectuals and politicians have generated growing interest during these last few years. In particular, they emphasize the fact that Europe is only one of many continents and certainly does not serve as a role model or a point of reference for the rest of the world. This arises in a context characterized on the one hand by the acceleration of economic globalization and the intensification of migration, and on the other hand, by an increased tendency to move towards forms of cultural essentialism, whether or not these are national in character. In Europe, Islamic fundamentalism appears as the most significant (and dangerous) manifestation of anti-Westernism. Radical Islamism is an ultra-modern ideology hostile to internationalism and secularism within the Muslim world. Europe’s unease in the face of these growing conflicts and tensions linked to the rise of radical ethno-nationalism stems from the fact that this is not only a problem involving so-called developing countries, but it is unfolding at the heart of Europe. The historian Antony G. Hopkins has observed that the unexpected emergence of violent ethnic pressure engulfed not only peoples who were very different and

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remote from us but also societies sufficiently close to our own to suggest that the barbarians were among us, or even that we ourselves were the barbarians.9 Partha Chatterjee goes further: [. . .] nationalism is now viewed as a dark, elemental, unpredictable force of primordial nature threatening the orderly calm of civilized life. What had once been successfully relegated to the outer peripheries of the earth is now seen picking its way back toward Europe, through the long-forgotten provinces of the Habsburg, the tsarist, and the Ottoman empires. Like drugs, terrorism and illegal immigration, it is one more product of the Third World that the West dislikes but is powerless to prohibit.10 From this perspective, we might say that Western modernization has seen its chickens come home to roost.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT: BROKEN PROMISES At the same time, the West is being taxed with hypocrisy, the European Enlightenment project is seen as being full of contradictions and subject to double standards. The Western way of life, which already takes a great variety of forms as it is, does not appear to lend itself to universalization and nor do the ideas on which it is based. The development of this discourse has cast light on Europe’s shortcomings as a role model and shows that European thought no longer directs global debates on social and political configurations. Moreover, the last two decades have emphatically demonstrated the relative nature of the ‘Western scenario’, which has ceased to be a fundamental and universal reference. Outside Europe, ideas orientated towards other points of reference that draw on a multitude of sources are gaining in importance, thereby altering the global discourse. In this respect, the growing economic power of a large number of non-Western states (particularly China) seems to be doing a great deal to increase the attractiveness of these ideas, which, outwardly at least, show a disinclination to follow the Western path. In this way, current debates on the possibility of installing a specifically Chinese form of capitalism have been taken up in Africa, while Brazilian and Indian intellectuals discuss methods of promoting social justice in their own way. Certain suggestions from non-European countries have found echoes throughout the world, such as the reflections of Amartya Sen on state aid and the fight against poverty (The Idea of Justice, 2009). Moreover, in several regions of the world, Europe is no longer a welcome interlocutor and her advice is not especially appreciated. This has occurred both because there are capacities for innovation outside Europe and because Europe has broken multiple promises. A number of non-European intellectuals have expressed their disappointment with the presumed indifference of Europeans and their withdrawal from the sufferings of others, those ‘sad mutations in the heart of secular modernity’.11 They criticize the lack of interest aroused by the massacre of two thousand people carried out by the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria at the same time as the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the scant attention paid by Europe when both killers and victims are Black.12

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SHARED HISTORIES For a considerable period, cultural studies focused on how the transmission of ideas had introduced changes into societies that showed themselves to be receptive in this area. The ideas in this influence model − or rather propagation model − essentially appeared to be travelling down a one-way street, and questions relating to these primarily concerned the links between already existing ‘traditional’ ideas and imported, ‘modern’ ones (in other words, ideas originating from Europe). This approach overlooked the fact that ideas are not transplanted exactly as they are, as if totally unaffected by their journey. In fact, the transmission process results in alterations, which occur both in the societies that receive them and in the ideas themselves. Consequently, any deviations cannot be discredited as misunderstandings, or mistaken interpretations, for this would mean disregarding the complex processes of adaptation, transformation and appropriation involved. It is only by shedding light on methods of acquisition that we are able do justice to the hybrid nature of ideas in the modern world and transcend the notion of the idea freed from all affiliation (in the sense of a universal idea of Western origin), turning instead to an approach based on contextualizing and historicizing ideas and their itineraries. Only then can we begin to apprehend their multiple repercussions on Europe. The circulation of ideas between Europe and her former colonies has not been a one-way process; it has left traces in ‘Western’ centres, even if the exchanges have remained fundamentally asymmetrical in character. Of course, there is no denying the attraction exerted by European ideas and concepts. After 1945, the idea of ‘development’, for instance, was equally appealing to politicians from ‘developing’ societies and individuals from ‘developed’ countries. It enabled everyone to have a stake in the intellectual world and ethical community created after the Second World War, in a vast scenario of development projects. That community shared the conviction that poverty could not be alleviated simply through economic and social self-regulation. The governments of both rich and poor countries would have to intervene in a concerted manner and in partnership with the growing number of international aid and development organizations. The concept of human rights represents a Western ‘idea’ of prime importance that was widely echoed and generated controversy, particularly after 1945 in the context of a new world order. The comparisons made between that idea and the practices actually being pursued caused Europe to be accused of hypocrisy, particularly towards the end of the colonial era; the colonial powers were preaching the doctrine of human rights but were not putting it into practice in their own colonies. At the same time, the idea constituted an important argument for a number of politicians from the colonized world. Frantz Fanon, whom many consider to be a post-colonial theorist avant la lettre, once wrote that Europe was the creation of the ‘Third World’. In this way, he was formulating, with great perspicacity, one of the fundamental theories of post-colonialism. ‘New Imperial History’ has used this, particularly in its discovery of the ‘counterflows’13 to colonialism, which challenges the notion of a unilateral transmission of ideas from the metropoles to the colonies. Nevertheless, despite

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all the new spatial categories such as ‘global’, ‘trans-imperial’ and ‘trans-colonial’ devised in order to overcome the dichotomy between ‘metropole’ and ‘colony’, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, Europe has remained in a central position within the new narrative. Despite the fact that the nation state had been partially destroyed as a theoretical framework of reference, the empires were still given a national character – ‘British’, ‘Dutch’, ‘French’ and so forth. The old nation-centred discourse or, rather, the old nation-centred rationale has still endured in a number of studies and essays on Europe. Étienne Balibar has explored the questions raised by the European project; has it always meant, as stated and reiterated, that the European dimension will transcend that of the nation and national conflicts? Are we not now witnessing nationalism, often associated with racism, gaining a new momentum even in the heart of Europe? Has the nation state been content to assume a European character?14

BEYOND NATIONAL SPACES That concern, expressed over a decade ago, has never been so topical. At the same time, the concept of ‘crossed history’, or of ‘interdependence’, has brought to light the need for a complete revision of our representations of national spaces. For colonialism, from this perspective, did not actually cause Europe’s colonizing nations to connect with each other or with their colonies. The connecting agents tended to be cities – Paris, London and Hamburg, but also Vienna and Zurich. This was because they maintained multiple links with the colonies and because their activities were governed by the translocal networks and circles within which their trading companies, scientists and emigrants operated. As seen with the example of Switzerland, even those European nations with no actual colonies of their own had stakes in the colonial project and profited from it. Furthermore, colonial discourses and imaginaries, together with knowledge and merchandise brought from the colonies, circulated in Switzerland within the academic and business communities, were introduced into political life and pervaded everyday culture. The image that European countries constructed of themselves is inextricably linked to ‘imperial fantasies of the “self ” and the “Other”’, this being the case both with countries that had colonies and those that did not. It is perhaps through the study of this ‘informal imperialism’ of non-imperial European nation states that we will gain greater insights into the current functioning of ‘soft power’ in the absence of direct territorial control. Observing Europe through the prism of colonialism also allows us to apprehend processes of ‘internal colonialism’ – economically exploitative and repressive structures in Ireland, for example, or the treatment of minority communities such as the Roma in Eastern and Western Europe. Fatima El-Tayeb refers to the ‘particular European form of “invisible” racialization’, symptomatically expressed through ‘colonial amnesia’ or ‘colonial innocence’.15 It would be interesting to look at these forms of voluntary forgetting in relation to the concept of realms of memory. As Pierre Nora understood so well, the history of Europe was written under the weight of collective memories, but collective forgetting also plays an important role. Collective memories and collective forgetting form part of a ‘shared history’

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connecting (Western) European nation states, the old Europe in its entirety and the non-European world. This is a history that unites as much as it divides. And it is a history that Europe must now confront again in a robust fashion – at a time of increasingly brutal forms of nationalism, Brexit and individuals such as Donald Trump are once more making her aware of her age.

NOTES 1. All these quotations are taken from the Frankfurter Allgemeine of 24 January 2003. 2. Goethe, Zahme Xenien: Der Vereinigten Staaten, in Werke, Weimar, H. Böhlau, 1889-1919, WA I, 29, p. 156. Hegel, Werke, vol.12, Vorlesungenüber die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 109 sq. 3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975 [1848]), p. 41; Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated from the German by Samuel Moore (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1888), p. 11. 4. Jürgen Osterhammel, Sklaverei und die Zivilisation des Westens (Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2000), p. 54. 5. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 360. 6. Frederick Cooper, ‘Conditions Analogous to Slavery: Imperialism and Free Labor Ideology in Africa’, in Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 116. 7. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated from the French by Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1955]), p. 36. 8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated from the French by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 239. Quoted in Godfrey Mwakikagile, Conquest of the Mind: Imperial Subjugation of Africa (Dar es Salaam: African Renaissance Press, 2019), p. 116. 9. Antony G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’, Past & Present, 164 (1999): 198–243. 10. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 4. 11. Pankaj Mishra, ‘After the Paris attacks: It’s Time for a New Enlightenment’, The Guardian, 20 January 2015. 12. Tariq Ali, ‘It Didn’t Need to Be Done’, London Review of Books, 37, 3, 5 February 2015. 13. Michael H. Fischer, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600-1857 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006). 14. Étienne Balibar, Nous, citoyens d’Europe? (Paris: La Découverte, 2001). 15. Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barth, Boris and Jürgen Osterhammel (Eds.), Zivilisierungsmissionen. Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, Constance, UVK, 2005. Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, translated from the French by Joan Pinkham, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1955]. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, translated from the French by Constance Farrington, New York, Grove Press, 1963 [1961]. Randeria, Shalini, ‘Geteilte Geschichte und Verwobene Moderne’, in Jörn Rüsen, Hanna Leitgeb and Norbert Jegelka (Eds.), Zukunftsentwürfe. Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung, Frankfurt am Main, Campus, 1999, pp. 87–96. Randeria, Shalini and Andreas Eckert (Eds.), Vom Imperialismus zum Empire, Nichtwestliche Perspektiven auf die Globalisierung, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2009. Ross, Andrew C., David Livingstone: Mission and Empire, London and New York, Hambledon, 2004. Sen, Amartya, The Idea of Justice, London, Allen Lane, 2009. Wirz, Albert, Sklaverei und kapitalistisches Weltsystem, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1984.

Overview Europe in the eyes of the world SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM

In a celebrated poem entitled ‘Elegía’, Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the destino el de Borges / haber navegado por los diversos mares del mundo / o por el único y solitario mar de nombres diversos. If the custom of naming the ‘único y solitario mar’ by diverse names can seem slightly arbitrary and even absurd, can one not say the same of the land and its continents? How different was the entity called ‘Europe’ after all from the rest of the Eurasian landmass? Was the fact that the line of demarcation between Europe and Asia has shifted constantly, until it finally stabilized sometime in the eighteenth century as part of a rather obscure Russo-Swedish agreement, not in itself the sign of a deep malaise regarding the real physical and demographic boundaries of Europe? Furthermore, did Europeans always know for sure who they themselves were and who their Others were? These questions are worth posing precisely because many Europeans (and especially Western Europeans) deliberately do not choose to pose them today. For them, the identity of Europe is and has been stable and secure, usually because they think of ‘Europe’ less as a geographical entity than as a civilizational and transcendental one. Thus, even across the divide between those who today support or oppose the European Union as a political project, there is an easy and lazy set of shared assumptions, some stated and others subterranean, about what constitutes Europe and its limits. In this brief essay, my intention therefore is to dismantle ‘Europe’ somewhat by focusing less on Europe as an idea (as is done even by those who wish to ‘provincialize Europe’) and more as a concrete geographical entity, inhabited by real groups of people. My chronological point of departure must inevitably be the fifteenth century, the moment when the Iberian kingdoms (and to a lesser extent the Italian city-states) began to extend their networks of trade and conquest into the Atlantic world. Their initial contacts and conflicts were with a rather familiar set of peoples, those of the Maghreb, who had long been their neighbours and even at times their overlords in the Iberian and Sicilian contexts. What distinguished them from the Iberians was above all religion, and this binary opposition between Christian and Moor was thus crucial from the start. The opposition was based on the claim that while what the Moors believed was partly false (notably in the prophetic figure of Muhammad and his revelation), they also shared a common heritage of other prophets, sacred places and narratives with the Christians. Moving down the African coast, however, the Iberians and Italians encountered other, much less familiar, peoples, and this

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problem was further aggravated in the sixteenth century when they began the conquest of America, on the one hand, and entered the trade of the Indian Ocean, on the other. The still less familiar peoples in these new places were characterized by them, on the one hand, using the vague and capacious term ‘gentiles’; but they were also increasingly treated, on the other hand, with colour and race-based epithets such as negro (or preto). In turn, the Iberians and Italians were quickly characterized by their Muslim neighbours by employing a term that was at the time already some centuries old: Afranj or ‘Frank’. This term had emerged in the context of the Crusades and was intended especially to distinguish men subject to the Western Christian powers from the Byzantines, whom the Muslims saw as more stable and reasonable in their comportment. The Crusades had left behind an abiding memory of the Franks’ extreme violence in respect of not only their Muslim opponents but also their coreligionists, the Eastern Christians. It is thus striking that the term that followed the Iberians eastward into the Indian Ocean after 1500 was always ‘Frank’, whether in Persian, Tamil, Malay or even Chinese (where it appears as folanji). It was durably associated with qualities such as chicanery, deviousness and dissimulation, the central attributes of these people in recurrent testimonies and characterizations across the breadth of the Indian Ocean. It is notably in these very regions that indigenous polities were most successful in resisting the imperial projects of the Iberians, and later the Dutch and English, at least until 1750. It is naturally necessary to distinguish this set of relations somewhat from what happened in the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. In material terms, the deadly triad of ‘guns, germs and steel’ (to use Jared Diamond’s phrase) worked far more to the Iberians’ advantage in some places than others. The pervasive myth that the invading Iberians (and, later, other Western Europeans) were perceived as gods by indigenous peoples was of course a self-serving construction, even if it may have contained a small kernel of truth in some situations. But it was hardly a myth that was destined to survive the trial of extended contact. A generation or two into the conquest, American writers such as the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616) had a far subtler understanding of who their conquerors were and why they had succeeded. This included a diagnosis of the weaknesses of the pre-Columbian political systems, which had often been consolidated relatively recently, and thus rapidly showed cracks under pressure from the conquistadores, who, it was well understood, were mere humans and rather flawed ones at that. By the late sixteenth century, the Iberians were being joined in their projects of overseas expansion and colonization by other Western European states, notably the Netherlands and England, but also to an extent France. These newcomer powers sought to play a complex set of cards; if, on the one hand, they wished to claim that they were far better people morally than the Iberians (whom they often characterized through the leyenda negra of their gratuitous cruelty to non-European peoples), they also insisted on important forms of continuity between the two sets of enterprises. It is in this context that the centrality of ‘Europe’ as a concept became truly operational, in the sense of setting out a genealogy of states that were engaged

342

EUROPE AND THE WORLD IN HISTORY

in versions of the same project – despite the internal fractures that existed among them. In America, Africa and maritime Asia, Western Europeans were less interested in stressing their divergences than their commonalities. In the Early Modern Period, therefore, ‘Europe’ was very much a category under construction, with the spaces of overseas expansion providing a crucial laboratory where definitions were tested and contested. As for their counterparts from the non-European world, they equally tended to consider the Western Europeans as a single, if internally differentiated, category but did not necessarily include Eastern Europe (broadly the world of Orthodox Christianity) under the same heading. Ottoman intellectuals, who probably had the most extensive diplomatic and commercial contacts with Italy, France and other states, often had a highly subtle understanding of their internal dynamics. But they still continued to see them as ‘Franks’ and treated them with justifiable mistrust. The Mughal elite in India had by the eighteenth century also developed an elaborate and differentiated understanding of European geopolitics. But they too referred to Europe as the bilad-i afranj, the ‘territory of the Franks’, who were portrayed as a notoriously proud, violent and devious people, even if endowed with ingenuity. The drive to spread Christianity in the overseas territories was undoubtedly an important vector in the identification of ‘Europeans’ as a collective entity. As is well known, the Tokugawa state in Japan most vigorously resisted this drive, eventually expelling the Iberians around 1640 and allowing the Dutch to stay on only in highly restrictive trading conditions. This attitude of closure was not applied to all foreigners, and it is an open question whether the Japanese actually used a category like ‘European’ rather than ‘Christian’ (kirishtan) in their decisions and the extent to which the awareness of confessional differences played a role. The second massive wave of colonial expansion, inaugurated around 1750, undoubtedly had a good deal of impact on how ‘Europe’ and its boundaries came to be conceived. While religion remained central to the definition, the experiences of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought to the fore far more racialized conceptions of continental difference, based on many varieties of pseudo-science as applied to theories of race, themselves circulating widely in the world. But these were quarrels that were often fought out in different spaces than those of the preceding centuries. The ‘Black’, ‘brown’ and ‘yellow’ races were naturally excluded from the start, in respect of any idea of Europe. But, closer at hand, the Russian intelligentsia agonized in the nineteenth century over whether they were ‘really’ Europeans or mere Asiatics. The decline of the Ottoman Empire similarly led to the question of whether the Turks should orient themselves eastwards to Asia or westwards to Europe, a debate that remains with us even today. The creole nationalisms that stirred first in the nascent United States in the 1770s, and then in Spanish America after 1810, raised the question of whether there could be a ‘Europe beyond Europe’, on account of projects of settler colonialism by populations of Western European origin. After all, they too could by then claim the Enlightenment as their heritage! In sum, it is important to retain the idea that ‘Europe’ is and has always been an ongoing and contested invention, but in terms of the limits and boundaries of

OVERVIEW

343

a concrete space rather than simply of an abstract and ‘hyper-real’ entity. We also cannot ignore that who is included and excluded may matter deeply to some but be a matter of profound indifference to others. Equally, to claim that Europe is simply a civilization or an idea is a way of escaping from the concrete reality of this contest. There can be no ‘European values’ that exist in the absence of Europeans as human beings or of Europe as a defined space. And those values will probably be at least as different 100 years from now, as those of today are from the racialized ideologies of the nineteenth century.

INDEX

Abélard, Pierre  215 abolitionist discourse and movement  62– 3, 138–9, 331–2 academia/akademeia 214 accommodation policy  34–5 ACHAC (research group)  133 Adrià, Ferran  248–9 Africa/Africans European “possessions” in  16 as Europe’s ‘civilizing mission’  331–2 marginalization 138 political activism in Europe  192–3 presence in Europe  191 presence in Paris  194–5 African American Spirituals  64 African Caribbean immigrants and pop culture  298–9 Ağca, Mehmet Ali  30 agrarian capitalism  158, 162 air transportation Concorde 50 Graf Zeppelin 50 AK-47 (Kalashnikov) assault rifle  184–5 Akin, Fatih  320 Alcáçovas, Treaty of (1479)  38 alchemy 257 Alexander VI, Pope  16 Alexander Lenoir’s Museum of French Monuments 276 Allenby, Edmund  22 Al-Qaeda 30 Altes Museum (Berlin)  276 American Dream  88, 89 disenchantment with  98, 99 and happiness  94–5 modern context  96–7 and religious freedom  92–3 American War of Independence (1776—89) 93–4

Americas 88–9. See also United States of America abolition of slavery  62 Columbus commemorations  46 discovery anniversaries  41, 43–4 discovery narratives  46–7 (see also Columbus, Christopher) name origin  52, 80, 89 place ‘baptisms’  80–1 place names inspired by Christianity 83 places named after European capitals 82 territorial conquest  90–1 Andrade, Mário Pinto de  193–4 Angelopoulos, Theo Ulysses’ Gaze  183 Angels of Mons (WWI legend)  29 anti-colonialism  134, 138–9, 333–4 birth 130–1 Germany 132–3 memories 140–1 anti-Nazi films  236 Antiquity as inspiration for place names  80–1, 83 Apocalypse Now (film: Coppola)  136, 144 Aquinas, Thomas  215 Arabs/Arab world. See also Muslims/ Muslim world archaeology and acceptable memory 126–7 circulation of goods and ideas  260 navigation instruments  57–8 Araújo, Vasco  141 archaeology and acceptable memory  126–7

346

appropriation of Graeco-Roman period 127–8 origins and development  124–5 outside Europe  125 arquebus (weapon)  206 Art Deco movement  267 Arts and Crafts movement  267 asbestos 261 Asia circulation of goods and ideas  260 trade  258–60, 264 West’s knowledge  260–2 Atlantic slave trade and slavery. See slave trade and slavery Augustine of Hippo, Saint  21, 261 on time  100–1 Australia convict past  146–8 Austria  119, 120, 180, 207, 220, 230 appropriation of Columbus and da Gama 42–3 museums 276–7 autochthony 324 automobiles 303–4 Baader, Andreas  189 Bade, Klaus Migration in European History 318 Balbao, Vasco  10 Baldus, Édouard Mission Héliographique 288–9 banks and banking development 164 Italian origins  160, 161 Middle Ages  158–9 Baquaqua, Mahommah Gardo  63 barricades as symbol of revolution  179–80 Basalla, George “The Spread of Western Science”  120 Beauvilliers, Antoine  245, 248 Begag, Azouz Shantytown Kid 320 Belgium colonial atrocities  143–4 places named after Patrice Lumumba 199 Benin  63, 85

INDEX

slave trade commemorations  66, 71 Berlin 1989 fall of Berlin Wall  175, 179, 281–2 international clubbing scene  300 Berlin West Africa Conference (1885)  16 Bin Laden, Osama  30 biometric passports  315 Black identity  193, 195 Bocuse, Paul  248 Bolshevism  173, 175. See also Russian Revolution (1917) Bonapartist ‘Imperial’ University  220 Bongars, Jacques  25 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de  54 Bowie, David  300 Brazil burial site of slaves  69–70 Capoeira 64 Brexit 296 Bride of Frankenstein (film: Whale)  231, 235 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme  245–6 Physiologie du gout 245 Britain abolitionist movement  331–2 American colonies  90–1 and capitalism  164 collegiate system  214 colonization and decolonization  132 commemorations of slave trade  66–7, 71–2 commercial trade networks  15–16 and Crusades  28–9 cuisine 242 East European immigrants  320 maritime power  57 museums 277 navigation acts  54 navigation knowledge and skills  58–9 penal colonies  146–8 British Museum (London)  275, 285 Elgin Marbles  282 British Overseas Territories  311 Britpop movement  299 Burke, Edmund  170, 172 Bush, George W.  30, 66 bushido tradition  208–9 Butterfield, Herbert

INDEX

Origins of Modern Science 116 cabinets of curiosities  274, 277. See also museums Cabral, Amílcar  175, 191, 192, 196 places named after  198–9 political activism and career  193–4, 198 in popular memories  199–200 calendars  102, 103 and holidays  106–8 starting point  104 traditional functions  104–5 Camilleri, Andrea  250 Camões, Luís de  39 Capart, Jean  280 Cape Coast heritage sites associated with slave trade 65–6 capitalism birth of term  166 ‘creative destruction’  165–6 criticism 166–8 and Enlightenment  164–5 notion 157–8 and violence  162–3 Capitoline Museum (Rome)  274 Capra, Frank  233 Carême, Antonin  246–7 Carta Marina (Waldseemüller, 1516) Map  10, 13 cartography 1300s 7–9 1500s 9–11 Mongol traces  13 representation of China  11–13 Casablanca (film: Curtiz)  228–9, 237 Casement, Roger  134 Catherine of Siena  22 Cayman Islands  313 Centre for African Studies (Lisbon)  194 Césaire, Aimé  138, 140, 193, 333–4 Chaplin, Charlie  231, 233, 238 The Immigrant (film)  97 Charleston (South Carolina, US) and slavery  68, 69 Chateaubriand, François-René de view of Crusades  27 chefs 246–7

347

China and accommodation policy  34–5 cartographic representation  11–13 conception of time  101 Maoism 187–8 maritime power  53 Polo and Ricci vis-à-vis  33–4 Shikumen and Hutong 290 Silk Route  255, 258–61 standardization of time  109 Chinae regnum map  11 Chinese calendars  104, 105 Chipperfield, David  282 Christian calendars and festive days  104 Christianity 1–2 conversion drive  342 and Europe  327–8 and food practices  241 as inspiration for place names  80, 83 and Islam  340–1 (see also Crusades) and Jerusalem  19–23 and money  158–9 and university  219 Christian universities (medieval)  212–13 cinematographers 231–3 civil rights movements  64 Clair, René 237 Clark, William S.  208 Clemenceau, Georges  134 clocks 24 hr clocks  103 as gifts  105 and navigation  58–9 clothing jeans 293–4 and socio-economic stratification 265–6 Coca-Cola Company  294 coffee  3, 62, 267 collective memories 1492, symbolic year  39–40, 46 and collective forgetting  337–8 of colonialism  135 of immigrants’ journeys  320–1 preservation in urban spaces  290–1 role of Columbus and da Gama  43–4 of slavery in US  68–9 of slave trade and slavery  63, 64, 65

348

collectors’ museums  278 colonialism and appropriation of Columbus and da Gama 42–4 Civilization, Commerce and Christianity of  134 ‘civilizing mission’  92, 134–5, 138, 331–3 ‘colonial amnesia’  337–8 composite memory  152–3 and Crusades  28–9 enduring taboos  141 and naming of places  81–2, 84 and Native Americans  91–2 notion 131 and racism  129–30 Romantic representation  136–7 colonial museums  133, 137, 278 colonial subjects/societies  137 as actors  139–40 Columbian Exchange  60 Columbus, Christopher discovery of America  38, 88–9 discovery of America narrative  46–7 and Enlightenment  40–1 as icon of European expansion  37–8 as investigator of natural sciences  40 places named after  52, 84 places named by  83 Polo’s influences on  34 as ‘Porter of Christ’  39 in public spaces  41–4, 46 commercial enterprises  162–3 profits and risks  163–4 compass  9, 10, 12, 57–9 Conant, James Bryant  117–18 Confucianism 34–5 Congo. See also Lumumba, Patrice colonial past  143–4 museum 278 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness  137, 143–4 Conservative Revolution  174 convict system 19th century  147 Cook, James  42, 43, 49–51, 54, 59, 81, 84 cooking/cookery acculturation 240–1

INDEX

as identity-marker  243 political element  242–3 religious element  241 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)  108 Cortés, Juan Donoso  172 counter-revolutions 173 cross/crucifix and Crusades  19 as divisive symbol  18–19 Crusades 16th & 17th century conception  25 criticism 23 crucesignati  19, 21 and Enlightenment  26–7 era 21–3 etymology 19–20 ‘Frank’/Afranj  341 Holy War  20–1 and Jihad  24 legacy 30–1 and Muslim world  30 restored popularity  27–9 and World Wars  29 culinary arts  250–1 and luxury  266 culinary nationalism  243 cultural exchanges  2–3 cultural links  3 in paintings  270–2 Cultural Revolution (China)  187–8 cultural time  102–3 cultural transformation  297–8 Curtiz, Michael  234 Da Gama, Vasco  263 discovery of sea route to India  38–9 and Enlightenment  40–1 as icon of European expansion  37–8 in public spaces  41–4 daguerreotype 228 Dakar (Senegal) colonial composite memory  152–3 colonial past  149–50 public space  151–2 urban landscape  152 Dalio, Marcel  235 dandyism 267 D’Anghiera, Peter Martyr  40 De Castanheda, Fernão Lopes  39

INDEX

Declaration of Independence (US)  94, 95 ‘Decolonial Desire’ (exhibition: London: 2016) 141 decolonization  2, 80, 131–4, 140 Degeyter, Pierre  180 Dickinson, Geoffrey  297 Diderot, Denis  244, 275 view on Crusades  26 Dietrich, Marlene  234, 236, 237 discoveries and conquests  2. See also explorers/discoverers; maritime expeditions demarcation of territories  15–16, 55 discovery of America narratives  46–7 Iberian Kingdoms  340–1 and memories  51–3 Spain and Portugal  43–4 discrimination of immigrants  322–3 domestic life in paintings  270 Domino’s Pizza  293 Doyle, Arthur Conan on colonial crimes  143 dreamtime 102 Dunant, Henri  73 Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC)  162–3, 270, 272 Eastern Europe  342 colonial memories  133–4 and pop culture  298 eco museums  286 economics Columbus and da Gama vis-à-vis  40– 1 of gold  255–7 Edison, Thomas A.  96 educational museums  277 Eisenhower, Dwight D.  30 Eisenstein, Sergei  178 revolutionary memories in films of 181 view of Crusades  30 El Born Centre de Cultura I Memòria (Barcelona) 284 Énard, Mathias  124, 126, 305–6 Ende, Michael

349

Momo 100 English South Sea Company  163 Enlightenment and capitalism  164–5 Columbus and da Gama vis-à-vis  40– 1 and Confucianism  35 contradictions and double standards 335 and cooking  243 and Crusades  26–7 and development of museums  275–6 and gastronomy  244 Japanese (see Meiji) university reforms  219–21 Ensslin, Gudrun  189 environmental imperialism  60 Equiano, Olaudah (Gustavus Vassa) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself 63 Erasmus 215 on Crusades  23 Erasmus Programme  223 Eriksson, Leif  47, 52 Escoffier, Auguste  247 ethnic migrations  319 Europe African “possessions”  16 cartographic representation  8–9 centrality 341–2 Christian roots  327–8 identity 340–3 impact of discovery of Americas  40 impact of discovery of sea route to India 40 introduction to China  33–5 Europeana programme  287 European Museum of the Year Award 286 European unification Columbus and da Gama’s role  43–4 exiles 318–19 exoticism 136–7 explorers/discoverers. See also discoveries and conquests; specific explorers, e.g. Magellan, Ferdinand places named after  51–2

350

places named by  81–2 rivalry 54 extreme right-wing groups  138 Fanon, Frantz  132, 139, 174, 175, 334, 336 fascism  129, 166, 174, 325 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner  238 Faulkner, William The Sound and The Fury 232 Fejos, Paul  231 The Fellowship of First Fleeters  147 Ferro, Marc  138 Ferro Meridian  59 Fête des Arts parade (Paris: 1798)  273–4 film noir  236, 237 films 228–9. See also Hollywood German-speaking directors  230–1 on Holocaust  229, 230 New Wave  232 and revolutions  181 and sense of history  229–30 Volkswagen Beetle in  304 financial capitalism  158–9 criticism 167 development  161–2, 164 Flinders, Matthew  81, 82 food critics  247–8 France African colonies  149 Black students  194 and colonial memory  140 and Crusades  25, 27–8 foreign voting rights  322 immigrants 319 maritime expeditions  54 Marseillaise 180 monuments 288–9 museums  273–6, 280, 281 places named after President Senghor 198 role of private collectors  278 support for American independence cause 94 Taubira Law  67 universities 215 Francis of Assisi, Saint  23, 256 Franco, Francisco  29 Frankenstein (film: Whale)  231

INDEX

Franks  341, 342 Frederick I (Barbarossa), Holy Roman Emperor  22, 28, 30 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor  23 freedom Gandhi’s and Tagore’s views  202–3 and New World  92–3 French cuisine  242–3. See also gastronomy French DOM-TOM (overseas departments and territories)  311 French National Immigration History Museum (Paris)  325 French Revolution (1789—99)  171–3, 179 iconoclasm 176–7 French West Africa (FWA)  149, 192, 195, 197 Freund, Karl  231–2 Friedrich, Hans-Peter  327, 328 Fulton, Robert  59 Galois and Galoises 267 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) freedom for  202–3 Hind Swaraj 203 on Western civilization  333 gastronomy  242–3, 251 invention 243–4 a legitimate culture  249–50 post-modern 248–9 treatises 245–6 Gault, Henri  247–8 Geneva (Switzerland) ‘city of peace’  73–4 Genoa (Italy) origin of jeans  293–4 genocide museums and memorials  284 gentiles 341 geopolitics 312–13 German Historical Museum (Berlin)  283 Germany Columbus and da Gama’s monuments  37, 42, 43–4 and Crusades  28, 29 cuisine 245–6 decolonization 132–3 emigration to US  95–6, 98

INDEX

film industry  230–3 immigrants and refugees  319–21 Islam in  327, 328 museums  276, 279 role model for Japan  209 standardization of time  108 Getty Museum (Los Angeles)  282 Ghana  85, 196 heritage sites associated with slave trade 65–6 Gibbon, Edward view on Crusades  26–7 Glinka, Mikhail  225–6 globalization cultural aspects  306 and European navigation knowledge and instruments  60–1 globe 13–14 Godard, Jean-Luc  189, 232, 238 gold in culinary domain  266 fascination with  255–7 monetary system  265 symbol of security  257–8 gold fever/rush  89–90 Grand Tour  222–3 Grass, Günter The Flounder 250 The Great Exhibition of 1851 (London)  207, 277 Great Library of Alexandria  275 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)  108 Greenwich Meridian  58–9 Gregorian calendar  104, 106–8 Griaule, Marcel  280 Grimod de La Reynière, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent  244, 246, 248 Almanach des gourmands 245 Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, Spain) 285 Guibert de Nogent  21, 25 Guy, Alice  233 Halasz, Piri  297 Haley, Alex Roots 64 Hall, Alfred Rupert Scientific Revolution 117 Harrison, John  58–9

351

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  136, 201, 215 on French Revolution  172 views on America  330 Hendrik, Frederik  84 Henry the Navigator  51 Hereford Map  8, 9, 10 heritage sites. See also monuments; UNESCO World Heritage List associated with slave trade  65–6 German sites in US  97 ‘internationalization’ of memories 289–90 and memories of everyday existence 290–1 Hessen, Boris  114–15 historical museums  276 historic monuments  288–9 history ‘crossed history’  337 rebuttal of Eurocentric history  201 of science (see science, history of) Hitchcock, Alfred  235 Hitler, Adolf  303 Operation Barbarossa  29 Hobson, John A.  166 Hochschild, Adam King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa  144 Hollywood. See also films European-born film-makers in  230– 1, 233 European Film Fund  236–7 European film-makers who grew up in 237 Expressionism in  231–2 Holocaust films  229, 230 Hopkins, Antony G.  334–5 horror films  231, 232 House of History (Bonn)  283 House of Terror (Budapest)  283–4 Hudson, Kenneth  286 Hultén, Pontus  285 Humanism and Crusades  22–3 and settlers of New World  92–3 Humboldt, Alexander von  40 in collective consciousness  52–3

352

Humboldt, Wilhelm von  221 Hume, David  164, 215 views on Crusades  26 Hussein, Saddam  127 Iberian Kingdoms trade networks and conquests  340–1 iconoclasm and revolutionaries  176–9 The Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers (of Heaven, Earth, and Humankind) 12 immigration 317–18 causes 318 and discrimination  322–3 employment-based 320–1 of film-makers to US  236–7 to France  319 to Germany  319–20 and incorporation of Islam  323 and integration  322 and national identity  323–5 to New World  92–5 as risk  325 to US in 19th century  95–8 immigration museums  99, 325 imperialism and colonialism  143–4 Incense Route  259, 264 independence and toponymic decolonization  85 USA 94 India conception of Europe  342 conception of time  101 da Gama’s discovery of sea route to  38–9, 43 source of precious stones  262 standardization of time  109 Indian Ocean  262–3 characterisation of Franks  341 West’s knowledge  263–4 individual films  238 industrial capitalism  165–6 integration of immigrants  322 internal colonialism  141, 337 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 284 International Museums Office  280

INDEX

International Slavery Museum (Liverpool)  67, 72 Isis (periodical)  112–14, 118 Islam and Christianity  340–1 (see also Crusades) ‘Europe-minus-Islam’ 327–9 and immigration  325 incorporation 323 Islamic calendars  103, 104 Islamic fundamentalism  334 and new Crusaders  30 Italy banking origins  160, 161 Columbus commemorations  41–2 fascist revolution  174 food movements  248 knowledge of Asian products  261–2 propaganda of state ideology  279 Southern question  132 trade networks and conquests  340–1 Iwakura Mission (1871–3)  208 Japan calendars 107 and Christianity  342 conception of time  105 military victories  209, 210 modernization 210 opening of  207–9 a role model  209–10 symbolism of banknotes  206 westernization 208 Jaurès, Jean  246 Jeanron, Philippe-Auguste  277 jeans 293–4 Jerusalem in cartography  8 and Crusades  19–23, 25, 26 Jesuit missionaries cartographic contributions  11 and China  33, 35, 105 Jewish calendars  104, 107 Jewish museums  278 Jihad and Crusades  24 Joan of Arc  22 Juan de Segovia  23 Julian calendar  104, 107

INDEX

Jünger, Ernst  174 Justus, Wolfgang  219 Kajoor Kingdom  150, 151 Kalashnikov (AK-47) assault rifle  184, 185 Al-Kamil, Sultan of Egypt  23 Keneally, Thomas  147 Kipling, Rudyard universality in Jungle Book 204–5 Knackfuss, Hermann Peoples of Europe, Protect Your Most Sacred Possessions 209 Kohner, Paul  236 Kollwitz, Käthe 182–3 Kościuszko, Tadeusz  94 Koster, Henry  236–7 Koyré, Alexandre  115–17, 119 Krasin, Leonid  178 Kureishi, Hanif  320 Kurti, Nicholas  248 Laemmle, Carl  231, 233 land seizure from Native Americans  47, 91 Lang, Fritz  235, 238 latitude and longitude calculation 58–9 Lebu Republic  150–2 Leeuwenhoek, Anthony van  271, 272 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  35, 105 Leiris, Michel  280 Leni, Paul  231 Lenin, Vladimir  176, 178, 180, 182, 183, 187 Lenz, Siegfried Heimatmuseum 281 Leopold II, King of Belgium  143, 144, 278 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  250 Libeskind, Daniel  284 Liebknecht, Karl  182–3 linear time  102 Lisbon (Portugal) African students  193–4 literature colonial propaganda in  136, 144–5 Congo’s colonial past in  143–4 food theme  249–50

353

forward-looking dimension  307–8 and movement  308–9 polylogical sites of memory  306–7 and revolutions  181–2 writing-between-worlds 308–10 Liverpool (England) and slave trade/slavery  67, 71–2 Livingstone, David  134 Loach, Ken Land and Freedom (film)  183 local place names  85 Lombardi’s (pizzeria)  293 Lombroso, Cesare  173 London (England) popular culture  299–300 racial conflicts  299 South Bank district  290–1 ‘Swinging London’  296–300 London Olympics (2012)  300 Louis IX of France, Saint  22, 30 Louis Philippe I, King of France  28 Lourié, Eugène 235 Louvre Museum (Paris)  273 development 275–6 evacuation during wartimes  278 Lubitsch, Ernst  234 Lumumba, Patrice  191, 196–7 popular memories  199–200 lunar calendars  103, 107 Luther, Martin  214, 215 view of calendar  102 view of Ottoman expansion  25 Luxemburg, Rosa  182 luxury and luxury goods  255, 265–7 Maalouf, Amin  305, 306, 309–10 Machen, Arthur  29 McLaren, Malcolm  299 Mad Love (film: Freund)  232, 235 madrasas 213 Magellan, Ferdinand  43, 49–50 places named after  52 places named by  81, 83 Maghreb  322, 323, 340–1 Maistre, Joseph-Marie  172 Mandela, Nelson  140 Mao, Zedong  3, 182, 187–8 Maoism in the West  187–9

354

mappa mundi (1507)  10, 12 Mariani, Angelo  294 maritime expeditions  53–4. See also discoveries and conquests; navigation 15th century  264–5 ‘around the world submerged’ voyage 50 circumnavigation of the world  49–50 rivalry 54 Marley, Bob  300 Maté, Rudolf  237 May, Karl Winnetou: The Red Gentleman 98 Mayan calendars  104 Mayer, Carl  233 Mayflower (ship)  47 ‘homecoming myth’  89 Meiji 206. See also Japan bunmei-kaika 207–9 a historical success  210–11 Meiji Ishin 210 Mennonites 92–3 mercantile capitalism  159–61 consequences 163–4 and production  161, 162 Mercator projection  10–11 Mérimée, Prosper  289 Methuen, Treaty of  242 Mexico  79, 82, 98, 175 vochito/Volkswagen Beetle popularity 304 Michaud, Joseph-François 28 Michelet, Jules  276 Middendorp, Jacop De celebrioribus universi terrarium orbis academiis 218 Millau, Christian  247–8 Moberg, Vilhelm The Emigrants 98–9 molecular gastronomy  248–50 money and Christian morality  158–9 Mongols  33, 34 cartographic traces  13 monopoly companies  163 Montalbán, Manuel Vásquez 250 monuments. See also heritage sites Columbus’ and da Gama’s  37, 42–4

INDEX

commercial activities  291 Lenin’s mausoleum  178 notion 288–9 and vandalism  177 Moravia, Alberto Two Women 325 Morris, William  267 Morrison, Toni ‘Bench by the Road’ initiative  68–9 motion pictures. See films Mouseion (periodical)  280 multiculturalism  317, 322, 324 American colonies  90–1 Muriel, or The Time of  Return (film: Resnais) 229 Murnau, F. W.  233, 235 Murray, David  274 Musée Carnavalet (Paris)  176 Musée de l’Homme (Paris)  280 musées de société 286 museography  275, 283–4 Museum of Europe (Brussels)  283 museums acts of pillage  279–80 commemorations 281 commercial activities  284–5 devoted to immigration  99, 325 as documentation centres  286–7 evacuations during armed conflicts  278, 280 history 273–4 as instrument of propaganda  279 and memory  280–1 Old Sydney Town  147 proliferation  276–7, 285 renewed influences  285–6 repatriation claims  282–3 as representations of power  274–5 restorations and reopenings  281–2 revolution as  177–9 role of collectors  277–8 music Amílcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba in 199 Internationale (left-wing anthem)  180–1 Marseillaise 180 ‘Moreton Bay’ ballad  147 Muslims/Muslim world. See also Arabs/ Arab world

INDEX

conflicts and conquests  24–5 and Crusades  30 view of cross  18–19 Mussolini, Benito  29, 174 Musuraca, Nicholas  233 Myhrvold, Nathan and Chris Young Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking 249 Nansen passport  316 National Estonian Museum (Tartu) 284 national identity and immigration  323–5 and passport  314–15 Portugal’s 39 National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, D.C.) 141 national museums  276, 283–4 Native Americans and 1537 Papal Bull  23 and British trading relations  91 generic name Indians 81 land seizure  47 population decline  91–2 natural time  102–3 naval artillery  55–6 navigation. See also maritime expeditions circumnavigation of the world  49–50 instruments 57–9 Mediterranean origins  54–5 Polynesians 53 and steam power  59–60 Needham, Joseph  114, 119 Négritude  193–5, 198, 333 Neickel, Caspar Friedrich Museographia 275 neo-noirs 237–8 Netherlands commemorations of slave trade  67–8 commercial trade networks  15–16 maritime trade  54 ‘tulip mania’  163 Neto, Agostinho  193–4 Newsweek (periodical)  297 Newtonian time  101–2, 109 New Urbanism  291 New Wave (film movement)  232

355

New World. See Americas; United States of America New York (US)  35, 63, 82, 84, 97, 299, 325 burial ground of slaves  69 Chrysler Building  267 Ellis Island site  284 New York Metropolitan Opera  226 Night and Fog (film: Resnais)  229 Nixon, Richard  114 and Pepsi-Cola  294 Nodier, Charles  289 non-cooperation 203–4 Notting Hill Carnival (London)  299 nouvelle cuisine movement  247–8 octant 58 October Revolution. See Russian Revolution (1917) Old Europe  330, 331, 332 Onfray, Michel  250 opera 225 multilingual approach  226 nationalistic phase  225–6 Ophus, Marcel  237 oriental science  113 Otlet, Paul  287 Ottoman Empire archaeology 126 and Crusades  25 decline 342 and Jihad  24 Ouidah (Benin) and slave trade  71 Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) 311 overseas dependencies British and French  311 tax havens  312–13 overseas expansion  56 European identity  43 history 37–8 Iberians and Italians  340–1 icons 37 other Western European states  341–2 second massive wave  342 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de  40, 83 paintings

356

of home and domestic life  270 and revolutions  181 of world  271, 272 Palais de la Découverte (Paris)  280 Papal Bulls Ex illa die (1715)  35 Veritas ipsa (1537)  23 Papin, Denis  59 Paris (France)  52, 58, 96 African presence  194–5 restaurateurs 244–5 Val d’Europe  290, 291 yé-yé movement  300 Paris Commune  175, 177, 179, 180 in literature  182 public commemorations  182 Paris Meridian  59 passport/s 314 and nationality  314–15 passportless 315–16 Paul III, Pope  23 Pegolotti, Francesco di Balduccio Prattica della mercatura 261–2 penal colonies  146–8 Penn, William  92 Pennsylvania (US)  92–3 People’s Spring (1848)  170, 172 Pepsi-Cola Company  294 Perrin, Jean  280 Person, Yves  134 Peter the Hermit  26 Petrini, Carlo  248 Philip II, King of Spain  25 Picasso, Pablo  269 Pietists 92–3 Pilgrims 47 Pipino, Francesco  34 Piri, Ahmed Muhiddin  9 Piri Map  9–10 pisciculture 242 Pius II, Pope  22 pizza geographical dissemination  293 Pizza Hut  293 place names after Amílcar Cabral  198–9 after Christian saints  83 after European cities  82

INDEX

after explorers and discoverers  51–3, 84 after figures of power  84 after Léopold Senghor  198 after Patrice Lumumba  199 countries renamed  85–6 given by explorers and discoverers 81–2 inspirations 80–2 linguistic legacy  79–80 re-establishment of former names  85 toponymic decolonization  85–6 Planudes, Maximus  8–10 Polanski, Roman  237 Polo, Marco  13 on Asian trade merchandise  260–2 in Chinese memory  33–4 in popular memory  35 Polynesians maritime expeditions  53 Pompidou Centre (Paris)  285 pop society  297 popular culture American symbols of  293–4 Amílcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba in 199–200 and Brexit  296 British 296–7 colonialism in  137 European 297–8 Porsche, Ferdinand  303 port cities  1–2, 60–1 Portmeirion (Wales)  291 portolan charts  9–11 Portugal commemorations of slave trade  68 conquest and division of territories  15, 16, 38 da Gama’s commemorations  41 and discovery of sea route to India  38–40, 43 navigation knowledge and skills  55 Potosi (Peru)  12 Pottier, Eugène 180 prandiality 241 precious stones and pearls  262 Preminger, Otto  237 Price Revolution  256 private memories

INDEX

of slavery  63–4 propaganda colonial 135–6 museum as instrument of  279 pseudocylindrical maps  11–12 Ptolemaic map  8–10 public holidays  107–8 public spaces in Dakar  151–2 the House of Slaves on Gorée Island 65 of slavery in Brazil  72 of slavery in France  67 of slavery in Portugal  68 of slavery in US  68–9 punk rock  299 racism 138 and colonialism  129–30 Reade, Winwood  111 Red Crescent  74 Red Cross  73, 74 and neutrality principle  74–5 Redemptioner System  93 refuges and asylum seekers  319–21. See also immigration Renoir, Jean  235 representational paintings  269–72 Republic of Letters  221, 276 research and research institutes  220–1. See also university/ies Resnais, Alain  229, 232 restaurants. See also gastronomy birth 244–5 publicized rankings  249 revolution/s and arts & literature  181–2 defeat and desolation  182–3 end 175–6 and iconoclasm  176–9 metamorphoses 173–4 and museum  177–9 and music  180–1 notion 171 semantic metamorphosis  170 as social and political rupture  171–3 symbols 179–80 throughout the world  174–5 and universities  215

357

Ricci, Matteo accommodation policy  34 cartographic contributions  11–12 in Chinese memory  33–4 Richard of Haldingham and Laffod  8, 9, 13–14 Richard I (the Lionheart), King of England 30 romanticization 27 Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) Cemitério dos Pretos Novos (‘The Cemetery of the New Blacks’)  69– 70 Rivière, Georges Henri  286 Rogers, Richard  285 Romanticism and Crusades  27–8 and monuments  289 Rouff, Marcel  247 La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet 246 Rouget de Lisle, Claude Joseph  180 Roy, M. N.  202 Roy, Rammohan  201 Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium)  278 Royal Observatory at Greenwich  58 Rumohr, Karl Friedrich von Essence of Cookery 245–6 Rumsfeld, Donald  330 Rurik (ship)  50 Russia American sodas and jeans  294 maritime expeditions  50 Russian Revolution (1917)  173–4, 176 and iconoclasm  177–9 memories in music  180–1 and museums  279 and redefinition of science  114–16 Ryotaro, Shiba  211 sacrifice 241 sailing ships  60. See also navigation masts and portholes  56–7 Saint-Saëns, Camille  225 Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria  19, 22, 25, 29, 30 Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) and slave trade  72

358

Sarton, George  113–14 Introduction to the History of Science  114 Sartre, Jean-Paul  138, 174, 189, 194 satyagraha 203 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodaran  202 Savorgnan de Brazza, Pierre  137 Schalansky, Judith Atlas of Remote Islands 312 Schall von Bell, Adam  34–5 Schengen Agreement (1955)  315 Schindler’s List (film: Spielberg)  229 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich  276 Schlosser, Julius von Kunst-und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance  274 Schmitt, Carl  172 scholasticism 215 Schüfftan, Eugen  236 Schumpeter, Joseph  165 science Eurocentric history  114–17 European superiority  111–12, 117–19 history of  112–14 history of, academic programmes  118 Science and Technology in the European Periphery (STEP)  120 Scientific Revolution  115–16 and redefinition of Europe  116–19 and rest of the world  119–21 Selden Map  12–13 self-governance 202–3 Senderens, Alain  250 Senghor, Léopold Sédar  191–2, 194, 195 French life  197–8 places named after  198 political activism  192–3 political career in Senegal  195–7 Sengoku period (Japan)  206–7 sextant 58 shipbuilding 15th & 16th century  56–7 and steam power  59–60 Silk Route  258–60 silks 261 Sinbad the Sailor  263–4 Sindika Dokolo Foundation  141

INDEX

Siodmak, Curt  236 Siodmak, Robert  236 Sirk, Douglas  236, 238 slave trade and slavery  62 abolition  62–3, 138–9, 331–2 and capitalism  162 and colonialism  129–30 commemorations  64–8, 70–2 emergence of emancipation  64 heritage sites  65–6 narratives 63 ‘negro’ 138 opportunistic fight against  332–3 private and collective memories  63–4 public memories  65 slow food  248 Smith, Adam on Columbus’ and da Gama’s discoveries 40–1 on ‘commercial society’  165 socialism  165, 166 social stratification and dress, lifestyle and food practices 265–7 Sokurov, Alexander  273 Son of Saul (film: Nemes)  230 sovereign dictatorship  172 Soviet Union. See Russia Spain colonization and decolonization  132 Columbus commemorations  41 and Columbus’s arrival in Americas 38 commemorations of slave trade  68 conquest and division of territories  15, 16, 38 cruzada  20, 25 gold fever  90 inspiration for place names  83 post-modern gastronomy  248–9 Spice Route and spices  259, 262, 264, 266 sports and immigration  320–1 statelessness 315–16 steamships 59–60 role in European emigration  318 Sternberg, Josef von  234 Stolpiansky, Petr  178

INDEX

Strauss, Isaac  278 Strauss, Levi  294 Stroheim, Erich von  234 student mobility  222–3 Al-Sulami Book of Jihad 24 Sunrise (film: Murnau)  233 swaraj (self-governance)  202–3 Swift, Gustavus  96 swinging sixties Eastern Europe  298 London 296–300 swinging city  301 Switzerland 337 and slave trade  68 symbols and symbolism in Japanese banknotes  206 of revolutions  179–80 Syria appropriation of the past  127 T/O map  8 Tagore, Rabindranath views on freedom  202–3 Taine, Hippolyte  173 Tasman, Abel  84 Tasso, Torquato  25 Tate Modern (London)  285 technology advancement in US  96–7 and maritime expeditions  53–4 shipbuilding 56–7 Tenshin, Okakura  209 This, Hervé 248 time 100–1 conception 101 European control  105–6 saving 106 standardization 108–9 time discipline  106 Tintin (Hergé) as colonial propaganda  144–5 toponyms. See place names Tordesillas, Treaty of (1494)  16, 55 Torres Naharro, Bartolomé Comedia Trophea 40 tourism and Atlantic slave trade heritage sites 65–6

359

and heritage sites  290 Tourneur, Jacques  233–4, 237 trade Netherlands 54 in paintings  270–2 rivalry 15–16 Silk Route network  258–60 transmission of ideas  336 tribal art  137 True Neapolitan Pizza Association (AVPN) 294 Trumbo, Dalton  237 Ufa (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft)  231, 232 Ulmer, Edgar G.  236 UNESCO and Needham  119 Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict  280 ‘The Slave Route: Resistance, Liberty, Heritage’ project  66 UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List 290 ‘Gastronomic Meal of the French’ 251 UNESCO World Heritage List  290 Pelourinho (‘The Pillory’) (Salvador) 72 Tomioka Silk Mill (Japan)  211 United States of America. See also Americas Americanization of European products 293–4 ‘Americans’ 93–4 collective memories of slavery  68–9 discovery narratives  46–8 as export market for Volkswagen 303–4 Far West/Wild West  95–6 heritage sites  97, 289 immigration in 19th century  95–8 local place names  85 as penal colony  146 place names inspired by Antiquity  83 place names inspired by figures of power 84 public holidays  107 as realm of nostalgia  98–9

360

standardization of time  108 technological advancement  96–7 university model  223–4 view of Europe  330–1 Universal Pictures (film company)  231 university/ies Americanization 223–4 autonomy 213–14 centre of engagement  215–16 and Christian Europe  219 etymology 217 gender inequality  221–2 Grand Tour  222–3 history 218–19 Humboldtian model  220–1 origin 212–13 as preserver of European memory 216–17 reforms 219–21 state intervention  217–18 University of Al-Qarawiyyin (Fez, Morocco) 213 University of Bologna  213, 216–17, 219, 220 University of Paris  213, 220 University of Wittenberg  214 Urban II, Pope  19–21, 26 USS Triton (ship)  50 usury/money-lending Middle Ages  159 Utopia (ideal society)  14, 88, 109, 181, 317 formation 94 vandalism and revolutions  176–7 vegetarianism 249 Veidt, Conrad  237 Vendôme Column (Paris)  177 Vermeer, Johannes  269–72 The Geographer  271, 272 Woman with a Pearl Necklace 270, 272 Verne, Jules  207, 294 Le Tour du monde en 80 jours 49 Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea 50 Vesey, Denmark  69

INDEX

Vespucci, Amerigo  52, 80, 89 Victoria and Albert Museum (London) 277 violence and capitalism  162–3 and overseas expansion  55–6 Virginia (US)  90 Volkswagen Beetle (automobile)  303–4 Voltaire on China  35 and Crusades  26, 28 La Fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète 27 Wagner, Richard  225 Waldseemüller Map  10, 12, 13, 14, 89 Waldseemüller, Martin  52 warships 56–7 Vasa 56 Waterfield, Giles The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner 285 Weber, Max  165, 330–1 week(s) astral 105 seven-day 103 Weiss, Peter The Aesthetics of Resistance 273 West Africa collective memory of slavery  65 West Asia archaeology 125–7 Westfall, Richard S.  118 The West/Western World  118–19 Maoism in  188–90 US as part of  118, 120 Wilder, Billy  236 One, Two, Three (film)  294 Wilhelm II, Kaiser Middle East visit  28, 29 Williams-Ellis, Sir Clough  291 wine and wine-making  241 Madeira and Port Wine  242 Wittlin, Alma  281 Wolfe, Tom  297 Wolff, Christian  35 Wood, Frances  34 world heritage  289–90

INDEX

world history European traces  2–3 world memories  291 World’s Fairs  277 World Wars and Crusades  29 Wytflief, Cornelis van Histoire universelle des Indes occidentales 11

361

Xanadu (Shangdu)  13 Yukichi, Fukuzawa  207–8, 210 Yuon, Konstantin The New Planet 181 Zheng, He  15, 53, 61 Zinnemann, Fred  236