The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. Volume 1: Patterns and Trajectories over the Longue Durée 9781108427050, 9781108655385, 9781108447201, 9781108427067, 9781108781237

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the cambridge history of

NATIONHOOD AND NATIONALISM

This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. Volume I starts with a series of case studies of classical civilizations. It then explores a wide range of pivotal moments and turning points in the history of identity politics during the age of globalization, from 1500 through to the twentieth century. This overview is truly global, covering countries in East and South Asia as well as Europe and the Americas. C A T H I E C A R M I C H A E L is Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia. She has authored and edited several previous books including Language and Nationalism in Europe, coedited with the late Stephen Barbour (2000) and Genocide before the Holocaust (2009). M A T T H E W D ’ A U R I A is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715–1830 (2020). A V I E L R O S H W A L D is Professor of History at Georgetown University, Washington, DC. His publications include Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (2001) and The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (2006).

t h e ca m b r i d g e h i s t o r y of

NATIONHOOD AND NATIONALISM Edited by cathie carmichael, matthew d’auria, and aviel roshwald The origins and nature of nationhood and nationalism continue to be topics of heated scholarly debate. This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. The History also explores nationhood and nationalism’s relationships with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions, in addition to the phenomenon’s crucial political dimensions. Its wide range of regional case studies brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions. Volume I tracks turning points in the history of nationhood and nationalism from ancient times to the twentieth century. Volume I I theorizes the connections between nationhood/nationalism and ideology, religion, and culture. Together, they enable readers to understand the roots of and how nationhood and nationalism function in the present day. The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, Volume I EDITED BY CATHIE CARMICHAEL, MATTHEW D’AURIA, AND AVIEL ROSHWALD

The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, Volume I I EDITED BY CATHIE CARMICHAEL, MATTHEW D’AURIA, AND AVIEL ROSHWALD

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

NATIONHOOD AND NATIONALISM *

VOLUME

I

Patterns and Trajectories over the Longue Durée *

Edited by

CATHIE CARMICHAEL University of East Anglia MATTHEW D’AURIA University of East Anglia and AVIEL ROSHWALD Georgetown University, Washington DC

University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108427050 D O I: 10.1017/9781108655385 © Cambridge University Press 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI Group Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data N A M E S: Carmichael, Cathie, editor. | D’Auria, Matthew, editor. | Roshwald, Aviel, editor. T I T L E: The Cambridge history of nationhood and nationalism / edited by Cathie Carmichael, Matthew D’Auria, and Aviel Roshwald. D E S C R I P T I O N: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | C O N T E N T S: v. 1. Patterns and trajectories over the longue durée – v. 2. Nationalism’s fields of interaction. I D E N T I F I E R S: L C C N 2021050117 (print) | L C C N 2021050118 (ebook) | I S B N 9781108427050 (v. 1 ; hardback) | I S B N 9781108447201 (v. 1 ; paperback) | I S B N 9781108427067 (v. 2 ; hardback) | I S B N 9781108781237 (set ; hardback) | I S B N 9781108655385 (ebook) S U B J E C T S: L C S H: Nation-state – History. | Nationalism – History. C L A S S I F I C A T I O N: L C C J C311 .C 29 2022 (print) | L C C J C 311 (ebook) | D D C 321/.05–dc23/eng/ 20211122 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050117 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050118 – 2 Volume Set 978–1–108–78123–7 Hardback – Volume I 978–1–108–42705–0 Hardback I S B N – Volume II 978–1–108–42706–7 Hardback

ISBN

ISBN

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Contents

List of Figures page x List of Contributors xi

General Introduction 1

part

ONE

THE POLITICS OF ETHNICITY, NATIONHOOD, AND BELONGING IN THE SETTINGS OF CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS 1 . Nationality and Ethnicity in the Ancient Near East 11 STEVEN GROSBY

2 . Nationhood: Was There Such a Thing in Antiquity? ERICH S. GRUEN

31

3 . The Holy Roman Empire 54 LEN SCALES

4 . Ancient China

76

YURI PINES

5 . Politicized Ethnicity in Precolonial Southeast Asia MICHAEL W. CHARNEY

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6 . “India” before the Raj: Space and Identity in South Asian History ANANYA CHAKRAVARTI

Conclusion to Part I 133

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115

contents

part

TWO

PARADIGM SHIFTS AND TURNING POINTS IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION, 1500 TO THE PRESENT 7 . Colonial Expansion and the Making of Nations: The Spanish Case

145

TAMAR HERZOG

8 . The Reformation and National Identity GABRIELE HAUG-MORITZ

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9 . Europe’s Eighteenth Century and the Quest for the Nation’s Origins 186 MATTHEW D’AURIA 10 . Empire, War, and Racial Hierarchy in the Making of the Atlantic Revolutionary Nations 208 MALICK W. GHACHEM 11 . The Rise of the Charismatic Nation: Romantic and Risorgimento Nationalism, Europe, 1800–1914 231 JOEP LEERSSEN

12 . Revolution and Independence in Spanish America 256 JAIME E. RODRÍGUEZ O. 13 . A Tale of Two Cities: The American Civil War SUSAN-MARY GRANT 14 . The Cycle of Inevitability in Imperial and Republican Identities in China

281

301

PAMELA KYLE CROSSLEY

15 . Colonial Subjects and the Struggle for Self-Determination, 1880–1918 DANE KENNEDY

16 . The First World War 350 JAN VERMEIREN

17 . Anticolonialism and Nationalism in the French Empire 376 MICHAEL GOEBEL

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Contents

18 . Patriotism in the Second World War: Comparative Perspectives on Countries under Axis Occupation 399 AVIEL ROSHWALD

19 . Decolonization and the Cold War 421 LESLIE JAMES

20 . 1968: The Death of Nationalism? ANNA VON DER GOLTZ

Conclusion to Part I I Index 469

ix

463

442

Figures

The Holy Roman Empire in the time of Charles IV (From Len Scales, The Shaping of German Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).) page 57 C.1 Page 1 of the third Freising Fragment. © Digital facsimiles: Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Munich (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nd/2.5/si/deed.en). 134 11.1 Herman Wiscilenus, Apotheosis of Wilhelm I as Restorer of Imperial Germany (SPIN imagebank, Amsterdam (ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/52).) 238 13.1 Ruins in Charleston, South Carolina seen from the Circular Church (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.) 286 15.1 Rabindranath Tagore (Photo by Hutton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images). 337 17.1 Celebrating the outcome of the 1962 referendum on Algerian independence in Algiers. (Dominique BERRETTY/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.) 390 17.2 Street scene with Algerian flags, Algiers, July 1962 (Photo by Reporters Associés/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images). 392 3.1

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Contributors

A N A N Y A C H A K R A V A R T I is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. Her first book, The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India (2018), was awarded an honorable mention for the Association for Asian Studies’ 2020 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize. M I C H A E L W . C H A R N E Y is Professor at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, School of Politics and International Studies, at SOAS, University of London, as well as the Department of History. His publications include four monographs on the history of Myanmar. P A M E L A K Y L E C R O S S L E Y is Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Her most recent book is Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World (2019). M A T T H E W D ’ A U R I A is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715–1830 (2020). M A L I C K W . G H A C H E M is Associate Professor of History at MIT. His publications include The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (2012), which won two awards, including the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major Prize for the best work in English on French history. M I C H A E L G O E B E L is Einstein Professor of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin. His 2015 book Anti-Imperial Metropolis won the American Historical Association’s 2016 Jerry Bentley Prize in World History. S U S A N - M A R Y G R A N T is Professor of American History at Newcastle University. Her most recent books include the A Concise History of the United States of America (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Oliver Wendell Holmes: Civil War Soldier, Supreme Court Justice (2016). S T E V E N G R O S B Y is Professor Emeritus of Religion, Clemson University. His publications include Nations and Nationalism in World History (2022), Hebraism in Religion, History, and Politics: The Third Culture (2021), Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (2005) and Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (2002).

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list of contributors E R I C H S . G R U E N is Gladys Rehard Wood Professor of History and Classics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or editor of seventeen books, including Ethnicity in the Ancient World: Did it Matter? (2020) and Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (2011). G A B R I E L E H A U G - M O R I T Z is Professor of Early Modern History in the History Department of the Karl-Franzens-University Graz. She is editor-in-chief of the “Imperial Diet Records: Imperial Assemblies, 1556–1662.” T A M A R H E R Z O G is the Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs at Harvard. Her most recent books are A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia (2019) and Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (2015). L E S L I E J A M E S is Senior Lecturer in Global History at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of George Padmore and Decolonization from Below (2015) and co-editor of Decolonization and the Cold War (2015). D A N E K E N N E D Y is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs Emeritus at George Washington University in Washington, DC. He is the author of seven books, including The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire (2018) and Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (2016). J O E P L E E R S S E N is Professor of Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam; he also holds a research professorship at Maastricht University. He is the author of National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (2007) and the editor of the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (2018). Y U R I P I N E S is Michael W. Lipson Professor of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His monographs include, most recently, Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography (2020) and The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China (2017). J A I M E E. R O D R ´I G U E Z O. taught as Professor of Latin American History at the University of California, Irvine, from 1973 to 2008. His many books include “We Are Now the True Spaniards”: Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824 (2012). A V I E L R O S H W A L D is Professor of History at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His latest book, Occupied: European and Asian Responses to Axis Conquest, 1937–1945, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2023. L E N S C A L E S is Professor of History at Durham University, where his teaching focuses on medieval Europe. He is the author of The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245–1414 (2012). J A N V E R M E I R E N is Associate Professor in Modern German History at the University of East Anglia. Among his recent publications is The First World War and German National Identity: The Dual Alliance at War (2016). A N N A V O N D E R G O L T Z is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. Her publications include Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (2009) and The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany (2021).

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General Introduction the editors

Since the early 1980s, the study of nationalism has been revived as a distinct subject of enquiry in its own right.1 The seminal works of Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Anthony D. Smith, published in the 1980s and 1990s and now classics, have contributed to radically changing our reading of nationalism, offering paradigms for both its deeper understanding and radical deconstruction.2 Crucially, these scholars set the main terms of a debate that is still ongoing today. The major distinctions among the advocates of perennialism3 (fewer and fewer), the so-called modernists (still the predominant school), and Anthony Smith’s ethno-symbolists (ever growing in number), have remained largely intact to this day, more than thirty years later. Central to the discussion was the issue of the nation’s origins and whether or not premodern structures of community, tradition, and identity were or were not important in shaping the seemingly “modern” phenomenon of nationalism – whether or not, to use Gellner’s humorously dismissive expression that has become common currency in the field, it matters if 1

2

3

Earlier works include: Lord Acton’s 1862 essay, “Nationality,” in John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1919); Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture, “What is a Nation?” trans. Martin Thom, in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds.), Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Carlton Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York: R. R. Smith, 1931); the many works by Hans Kohn, such as The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1948); Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1953). See in particular Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The work of Adrian Hastings is often seen as belonging within this category; see, for example, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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“nations have navels.”4 Largely, the discussion hinged on the problem of whether nations were invented, or were, rather, more organic social and historical constructions. Although the genealogical dimension was clearly pivotal to it, the debate was at the time dominated by sociologists, political theorists, anthropologists, and philosophers. One of the few historians who did play an important role, Hobsbawm, famously defined the nation as an “invented tradition,” that is, as a series of practices of a ritual or symbolic character meant to inculcate specific views that implied a continuity with the past. Within the nationalist discourse, he argued, history was essentially a “legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion.”5 National histories were artifacts of historical fabrication by his reckoning. It was a view that was in some respects illuminating, but could also – and partly did – lead to a pervasive devaluation of the premodern past and its study in the understanding of nationalism. Over the years, historians have been influenced (implicitly or explicitly) by these paradigms even as social scientists have, in turn, drawn upon their work in the course of their ongoing theoretical controversies. But, although the theoretical debate among modernists and their critics continues, it has grown somewhat stale and repetitious. Moreover, some of the positions in that debate are themselves premised on historical assumptions that are increasingly contested among historians: e.g. the sharpness of division between premodernity and modernity, the triumph of secularism in modern history, a variety of other Eurocentric assumptions about the nature and trajectory of modernity, the exclusively Western origins of nationalism, etc. Hence, rather than simply rehashing and reengaging in the existing theoretical debate, what we have attempted in these volumes is to step outside its confines by doing what, as historians, we think we can do best: looking empirically and comparatively at the linked phenomena of “politicized ethnicity,”6 national 4

5

6

Ernest Gellner first used this image shortly before his untimely death, during a debate with his former student Anthony D. Smith at Warwick University in 1995. That debate is reproduced at www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/gellner/Warwick.html (accessed 13 September 2020). Their presentations were published in the following year as Anthony D. Smith, “Opening Statement: Nations and their Pasts,” Nations and Nationalism, 2/3 (November 1996), 358–365; Ernest Gellner, “Reply: Do Nations have Navels?” Nations and Nationalism, 2/3 (November 1996), 366–370. Eric Hobsbawm. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 12. Victor Lieberman introduced the term “politicized ethnicity” in his two-volume magnum opus, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003–2009). Azar Gat coined the term “political ethnicity”

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General Introduction

consciousness, and nationalism across a range of cases that are not limited to the modern era and not confined to the Western world. It is, after all, through the accumulation of new evidence that does not fit existing paradigms that paradigm shifts happen. As historians, we don’t set out to articulate a new social-scientific model, but we do refuse to be confined by existing ones. What our approach does assume is the formation and evolution of nationhood as a complex set of historical processes stemming from a superimposition of several successive layers of social representations, the later ones readapting in complex, unpredictable, and often conflicting ways the previous ones. Although nationalism is no more static than any other historical phenomenon, it draws on and adapts sentiments of kin-culture affinity that appear quasi-universal. If we are to understand the workings and distinguishing dynamics of modern nationalism – above all, its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and the roots of its emotional strength – we must study how nations are gradually constructed and continuously reconstructed in ways that both draw upon and reshape preexisting mentalities, sentiments, traditions, and practices. In many collections on the history of nationalism, the perspective adopted is clearly and firmly the modernist one. The seemingly indisputable starting point of the history of nationalism is the French Revolution, and the emphasis tends to be placed on discontinuities with earlier feelings of communality and solidarity. Our aim, by contrast, has been to consider continuities as much as discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with sweeping assertions about the primordial nature of kinship and ethnotypes without disdaining, a priori, longue durée analysis; this all in acknowledging the distinctive features of modern nationalism. By the same token, we aim to explore nationalism’s relationships with, manifestations in, and impacts upon a variety of cultural practices and social institutions – in addition to the phenomenon’s crucial political dimensions. The aim is to broaden and enrich the debate, not by offering a new, overarching theory of the nation and of nationalism, but by introducing new and more holistic perspectives to the phenomenon by approaching the history of nationalism through the prisms of other – intimately related – categories of conceptual and historical analysis. Indeed, one of the central concerns animating The Cambridge History of in Azar Gat with Alexander Yakobson, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For a concise version of Lieberman’s argument about how ethnic and political identities could overlap in precolonial Southeast Asia, see Victor B. Lieberman, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma,” Modern Asian Studies, 12/3 (1978), 455–482.

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Nationhood and Nationalism is the need to break the “internalistic” frame of reference that still largely informs many studies of nationalism. It is a matter that sociologists have long debated, following Ulrich Beck’s famous indictment of “methodological nationalism”7: the tendency to consider society as coincident with, and coextensive to, the nation. It is, importantly, an assumption that has led many scholars to search for the causes of the workings of nationalism from within the nation itself, thus ignoring the crucial importance of cultural transfers and overarching geopolitical forces. It is a fault that much historiography still suffers from today. Even when looking at the curricula of universities worldwide, the study of the past is still largely organized around single nations. Although an entirely transnational history of nationalism might be, at best, problematic – not least because of the historical weight of the principle of nationality, which has so strongly tied the nation to bounded forms of political sovereignty – there remains a pressing need to escape the perspectival trap associated with the internalist view of nationalism. There are at least two reasons for this. First, because, as Anne-Marie Thiesse cogently argued some time ago, nationalism emerges always in confrontation with other groups. If we are to accept that “there is nothing more international than the creation of national identities,” then we must recognize that internalism can lead to serious misconceptions and misunderstandings.8 The second reason is that methodological nationalism causes knowledge, a specific form of knowledge, to continuously reproduce itself – and its faults and merits – rather than to evolve and change in response to new research needs. Moreover, we seek paths beyond, not just the empirical internalism of the nation-by-nation case study, but the conceptual internalism of studying nationalism in isolation from the multiple other frameworks of identity, power, and behavior with which, historically, its development has been so intimately connected. Against the practices of historiographical and theoretical internalism, many of the chapters in these volumes adopt a comparative as well as a transnational approach that sheds new light on the history of nationalism(s). Thus, rather than having a series of case studies on individual nations, we have included chapters that look at the history of peoplehood across a crosssection of societies within any given era. In some sections, contributors 7

8

Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails,” Theory, Culture and Society, 24/7–8(2007), 286–290. Anne-Marie Thiesse, La création des identités nationales: Europe, XVIIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 11.

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explore the history of nationalism in the context, not of ethnic groups and nation-states, but of religions and of empires (be they territorially contiguous polities or overseas colonial enterprises). The final part includes chapters on the intertwined relationship between nationalism and a variety of sociocultural, political, and institutional practices, ranging from war and violence to tourism. A second aim of The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism is a global engagement with the history of nationhoods and nationalism. It is a truism that modern nationalism acquired many of its traits within the European setting and that it has then been adopted and readapted in other contexts which, in turn, have deeply influenced its shape(s). Yet, for all the truth in truisms, they can become analytical traps. Amidst all the talk, in recent years, of globalizing the study of history, much of the historical (as well as theoretical) study of nationalism has remained overwhelmingly Eurocentric; either it has focused explicitly and exclusively on the EuroAtlantic sphere, or it has assumed that national identities outside that sphere can only be explained and understood as byproducts of, and responses to, Western imperialism. The attention to the various and complex forms of cultural and ideological hybridization deriving from contact with or domination by European nationalities and empires has, on the one hand, led to the assumption that there are no significant indigenous antecedents to nationalism in the non-European parts of the world, a view only recently contested, and, on the other, produced the belief that the nation was the sole possible way of organizing political spaces and communities in the modern age. We face, then, the paradox that nationalism is widely viewed as a Western export, even as it has been celebrated as the primary means of resistance to the West in many cases. The effort to wrestle with this seeming contradiction in terms continues to play out in the historiography of nationalism, as reflected in the idea of multiple modernities, the Subaltern Studies school’s indictment of Indian nationalism as a form of internal colonialism, the recent efforts by some historians to find proto-nationalisms in the precolonial histories of South and East Asia, etc.9 By the same token, the relationship between the nation and the world is an ever contested issue within each of the Western great powers themselves (Little Englanders vs. Imperial 9

See, for instance, Atsuko Ichijo, Nationalism and Multiple Modernities: Europe and Beyond (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995); Lieberman, Strange Parallels.

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Unionists, American isolationists vs. liberal internationalists, etc.). The Janusfaced nature of the nation is, of course, a well-known issue to scholars of neoand postcolonialism – and an ironic conundrum for many of them. But the implicit theoretical concern that should interest us, here, is the need to grasp, through comparison, differences and similarities between European and extra-European nation-building experiences in order to comprehend not only how different histories have interacted and merged, but how they may have both paralleled one another in precolonial times and how they may diverge in our own ever more connected world. It is a crucial concern in this era of globalization, in which the autonomy and sovereignty of every single nation is constantly challenged, amidst the persistence of nationalism itself – a phenomenon that, notwithstanding periodic rumors of its imminent demise, is still far from defunct.

Plan of Organization The two volumes are divided into five major parts, as follows:

Volume I: Patterns and Trajectories over the Longue Durée Part I: The Politics of Ethnicity, Nationhood, and Belonging in the Settings of Classical Civilizations

The chapters under this heading investigate images of community and practices of inclusion and exclusion in the ancient world and up to the sixteenth century. Taking into account a variety of geographical regions throughout several centuries, the authors consider continuities and discontinuities in feelings of solidarity and interaction across different civilizations and societies. These chapters try to create a framework for analytical comparison and for the dissection of continuities and discontinuities across space and time, without becoming stuck in the binary trap of arguing over whether any given case does or does not merit the label of “nationalism.” The aim is to create the basis for more substantive and informed discussions about the evolution of cultural and political identities, and the relationship between universalistic and particularistic conceptions of community, over the longue durée of history. Part I I: Paradigm Shifts and Turning Points in the Era of Globalization, 1500 to the Present

This part examines the evolution of ethnocultural, ethnopolitical, and/or national identities from the sixteenth century onwards. Each chapter

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considers a global turning point or a specific era from a transnational perspective. Particular attention is given to cross-cultural practices in the definition of otherness and to patterns of convergence and divergence in the evolution of ethnic and national identities in an era when networks of cultural and economic exchange and patterns of domination, conquest, collaboration, and resistance were becoming steadily more global in scope.

Volume I I: Nationalism’s Fields of Interaction Part I: Imperial and Postcolonial Settings

Empires are commonly thought of as, in some sense, the opposite of nations and nation-states. In fact, as recent scholarship has highlighted, imperial elites both fostered and provoked the crystallization of national identities in a variety of forms, even as they struggled to contain various manifestations of popular nationalism. This part once again steps outside the bounded analytical framework of the nation-state, looking at the development of national identities, movements, and polities from the perspective of imperial, colonial, and postcolonial history. Part I I: Transnational and Religious Missions and Identities

Nationalism has shaped, and been shaped by, a variety of internationalist and universalistic forces and ideologies, the study of which has all too often been siloed away from that of nationalism. It is the interaction among these fields of national, transnational, civilizational, and cosmopolitan identity, loyalty, and conflict that concerns us in this part. Part I I I: Intersections: National(ist) Synergies and Tensions with Other Social, Economic, Political, and Cultural Categories, Identities, and Practices

How does nationalism permeate everyday life? How does nationalism interact with and shape diverse activities, behavior patterns, and cultural practices in the modern world? Conversely, to what extent do these practices in turn influence the ever-evolving forms and expressions of national identity? In this part, we examine some of the principal ways that national identity is experienced, with particular emphasis on its intersection with other social and political identities and practices. In so doing, we also hope to bring the historical and the contemporary together by looking at the effects of politics, the internet, social media, sport, and other cultural practices on historically evolving nationalisms.

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As this book was about to go to press, we were deeply saddened to learn of the passing in 2022 of one of the co-authors of this work, Professor Jaime E. Rodríguez O. We are grateful he was able to contribute to these volumes with a chapter which is a distillation of his years of outstanding scholarship in his field.

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part

I

*

THE POLITICS OF ETHNICITY, NATIONHOOD, AND BELONGING IN THE SETTINGS OF CLASSICAL CIVILIZATIONS

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Nationality and Ethnicity in the Ancient Near East steven grosby

Ascertaining whether or not nations existed in the ancient Near East is not merely for the sake of determining historically when these territorial relations of social kinship appear.1 If the evidence, however complicated, suggests the existence of nations in the ancient Near East, a more accurate understanding of not only antiquity but also “modern times” should emerge, as the classification of the self and others on the basis of birth and residence in a territory would not have originated with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, and certainly would not be novel to the socalled “Age of Nationalism” of the nineteenth century. The distinction between the putatively ethnic, tradition-infused local community (Gemeinschaft) of the distant past and the modern, commercial society (Gesellschaft) of today, or variations of that view of social development such as a historically original relation of status based on birth in contrast to the achievement of the individual through modern contractual relations, will be seen to be theoretically antiquated and historically simplistic. That distinction wrongly implies that in antiquity there were no territorially extensive states, large metropolises, extensive markets for goods and services, and long-distance trade.2 In fact, kinship, a relation of status between individuals that is based on the significance attributed to traceable descent, persists into the present, not only obviously through the family but also, and with increasing salience, through 1

2

For “social kinship,” “social relation,” and their relation to territory and nationality, see Steven Grosby, “Time, Kinship, and the Nation,” Genealogy, 2 (2018), 1–19; Steven Grosby, Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27–42; Steven Grosby, “Territoriality: The Transcendental, Primordial Feature of Modern Societies,” Nations and Nationalism, 1/2 (1995), 143–162. For critical evaluation of the contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, status and contract, see Steven Grosby, “Nationalism and Social Theory: The Distinction between Community and Society,” in Gerard Delanty and Stephen Turner (eds.), Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 2011), 280–289.

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what the anthropologist Robert Lowie long ago described as the “territorial tie.”3 Territorial relations between individuals, for example, nationality, are also anthropological categories. They are forms of kinship, as they entail self-classification, distinguishing one individual from another individual and one group from another group, based on the significance attributed to traceable descent, albeit not from a parent but within a territory. Finally, the interpretation of that evidence should involve subjecting the category of “ethnicity” to refined scrutiny, resulting in a more restricted use of it than one finds today in historical scholarship. Only the shameful neglect by many university history departments and the majority of scholars of nations and nationalism of the three-millennia-long history of the ancient Near East makes this examination pressingly necessary – a history that includes the emergence of urbanism, writing, the alphabetic script, clearly demarcated territories, law collections, states, standing armies, empires, long-distance trade, and religious monolatry, dualism, and monotheism. The problems posed by this investigation of nationality in the history of the ancient Near East can be formulated as a series of questions. Were there distinctions between “peoples” throughout that history? How should we understand these peoples? Were there bounded territories distinct from merely geographical areas? Did those territories convey a meaning to their inhabitants, specifically, where reference to a territory had a bearing on the classification of the self? While throughout this history there were tribes, city-states, and empires, were there also nations and national states? Finally, if there were nations, what was the relation between nation and empire?

Kinship and Peoples Our evidence throughout the history of the ancient Near East clearly indicates a continual differentiation of populations. In fact, references to terms distinguishing one people from another are so common that it is only a slight exaggeration to state that it is difficult to find examples among the tens of thousands of inscriptions discovered that do not contain terms of selfclassification distinguishing one people from another. As early as the early dynastic period (2900–2350 B C E), distinctions were drawn between the Sumerian city-states of Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Umma, Nippur, and Kish, the territories of all of which, while revolving around an urban center, contained 3

Robert Lowie, The State (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 51–73.

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within their borders other towns. A dramatic example of these distinctions is the description of the conflict between Lagash and Umma.4 Enlil, the king of the lands, father of the gods, upon his firm command drew the border between Ningirsu [god of Lagash] and Shara [god of Umma] . . . Eannatum, ruler of Lagash . . . made the border by extending the Inun-canal to Gu’edena [to the edge of the plain] . . . At that boundary-channel he inscribed new boundary-stones . . . If the man of Umma, in order to carry off the fields [takes the fields by force] crosses the boundary-channel of Ningirsu [Lagash] . . . be he a man from Umma [an Ummaean] or a foreigner, may [the god] Enlil destroy him!

There are several observations to be made from even this one excerpt of one inscription. Not only is there an obvious distinction drawn between Lagash and Umma, but also one individual is distinguished from another depending upon what city he was from, so “man from Umma,” or an “Ummaean,” in contrast to both a man from Lagash and a foreigner. This designation of “man (or son) of city-state x” – characteristic of the Mesopotamian city-states – indicates that territorial location was a reference in self-classification. Of course, within, for example, Umma, the population of which is estimated to have been approximately twenty thousand,5 the individual would have also understood himself or herself as a member of a family. We thus have a commingling of two forms of kinship: descent within a territory and descent within the family. This territorial kinship of those who are from, or of, the city-state is dependent upon the stability over time of an image of its territory. The classificatory salience afforded by the stability of that image will be achieved if there are relatively precise borders over time in contrast to imprecise frontiers, fluctuating both geographically and temporally often as a result of war. We see that in the description of the conflict between Lagash and Umma there were carefully demarcated borders, and specifically manmade borders: the boundary-canal/channel and boundary-stones. There is a great deal of evidence throughout the history of the ancient Near East of carefully demarcated borders, only a few examples of which are the boundary between Hatti and the land immediately to its west, Tarhuntassa,6 the provinces of the 4

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Jerrold Cooper, Presargonic Inscriptions (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1986), 54–57. Piotr Steinkeller, “An Estimate of the Population of the City of Umma in UR III Times,” in Yağ mur Heffron, Adam Stone, and Martin Worthington (eds.), At the Dawn of History: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honour of J. N. Postgate (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2017), 535–566. Gary Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 104–105.

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Assyrian Empire as described in the Annals of Tiglath-Pileser III,7 and the land of Israel as delineated in Numbers 34:2–12.8 The idea that in antiquity there were only geographically imprecise frontiers, dependent solely upon natural barriers such as mountain ranges, deserts, and rivers, is factually incorrect. Moreover, as one should expect, this territorial kinship of the city-state finds expression in law, specifically in the legal-anthropological category of the Akkadian term awı¯lum (Sumerian lú), the free adult individual. This territorial kinship, conveyed, once again, by the descriptive classificatory idiom “son(s) of city x” – a classification seemingly distinct from “son(s) of a tribe” (or “house of an eponymous ancestor”) – consists of the inhabitants of the city-state, who, as members of (or “sons of”) the city-state, claimed privileges and rights based upon their territorial descent and residence.9 Needless to say, not all who dwelled within the territory of the city-state had those privileges and rights, as the laws distinguished between, on the one hand, the awı¯lum, and, on the other, the indentured servant, slave, and foreigner, where the awı¯lum, as a free adult member of the state, possessed authority over himself and his property within the state.10 It may very well be that the historian is justified in translating awı¯lum as “citizen.” Putting aside consideration of the merit of this possibility and its historiographical implications, the awı¯lum is not merely a legal category. It is also implicitly an anthropological category as there is a territorial kinship with others who are recognized to be awı¯lum – a kinship conveying jurisdiction to the lawful exercise of the awı¯lum’s power over himself and his property. This territorial jurisdiction of the legal category of the free, adult male is explicit in the biblical ’ezra¯h ha’ares, “native of the land” – a term of legal anthropology ˙ ˙ distinct from both the alien who resides continually in the land (ge¯r) and the foreigner (nokrî), and which appears, either as ’ezra¯h ha’ares or abbreviated as ˙ ˙ 7

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9

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Hayim Tadmor, The Inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1994). For other examples, see Steven Grosby, “Borders and States,” in Daniel Snell (ed.), A Companion to the Ancient Near East (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019); Steven Grosby, “Frontiers, Ancient Near East,” in Roger S. Bagnell, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine, and Sabine R. Huebner (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012), 2770–2771. Amélie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East, c. 3000–330 B C (London: Routledge, 1995), 614; see also Marc Van de Mieroop, “The Government of an Ancient Mesopotamian City,” in Kazuko Watanabe (ed.), Priests and Officials in the Ancient Near East (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1999), 139–161. Eva Von Dassow, “Freedom in Ancient Near Eastern Societies,” in Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 205–228; see also Daniel Snell, Flight and Freedom in the Ancient Near East (Leiden: Brill, 2001); The Assyrian Dictionary, vol. I (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1956– 2011), A, part 2, amı¯lu, 48–57.

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’ezra¯h, “native,” nineteen times in the Hebrew Bible, for example, in ˙ Leviticus 24:22, “you will have one [civil] law for the alien who resides in your land (ge¯r) and for the native born (’ezra¯h = Israelite).”11 Thus, the often ˙ assumed historical contrast between an earlier personal law and a later territorial law is much too facile. The legal context for the distinction between awı¯lum and foreigner is one of lex terrae, as it also is between ’ezra¯h ˙ and ge¯r; for the ge¯r is distinguished from the nokrî by the ge¯r’s permanent residence within the territory of Israel. These observations provide the basis for a brief digression to address a view often raised by those historians who argue that larger societies occur only in modern times by insisting that in antiquity (and the Middle Ages) individuals did not and could not recognize themselves to be members of larger, territorial societies. Numerous collections of laws – Sumerian, Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian, neo-Babylonian – beginning with the laws of Ur-Namma (c. 2100 B C E), posited rights and privileges for the awı¯lum and judicial procedures.12 Characteristic of what one finds in these legal pronouncements is the following excerpt from one of Hammurabi’s (c. 1750 B C E ) laws:13 If a man [awı¯lum] who claims to have lost property [and] then discovers his lost property in another man’s possession . . . produces witnesses who can identify his lost property – the judges shall examine their cases . . . and the witnesses who can identify the lost property shall state the facts known to them . . . the owner of the lost property shall take the lost property, and the buyer [of the lost property] shall take from [legally untitled] seller’s estate the amount of silver that he weighed and delivered.

The very existence of these pronouncements, irrespective of whether or not judicial decisions were always made in accord with them, the description of relatively rational judicial procedures (witnesses and examination of testimony), the reference to “judges,” and the attendant contribution of these pronouncements to the ordering of a society ought to be enough to dismiss the “modernist” assumption by, for example, Ernest Gellner that in antiquity there were only the “low cultures” of isolated communities held together within a highly stratified, agrarian society by culturally distant elites.14 They indicate, in contrast, a civil, public sphere distinct from familial relations in 11 12

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Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus (New Haven: Yale, 2000), 1416–1420, 1704, 2127. Martha Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Atlanta: Scholars, 1997); Raymond Westbrook (ed.), A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Roth, Law Collections, 82–83, ¶ 9. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

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antiquity. Another example of this sphere was the standardization of weights and measures, already described in the prologue of the laws of Ur-Namma, which made possible and more equitable the commercial exchange of the market.15 While there certainly existed the Gemeinschaft of the local village in antiquity, there were also metropolises (for example, Babylon, Nineveh, Alexandria), territorial states (perhaps nations), and abundant evidence from as early as the late third millennium of extensive market relations of partnerships between merchants and investors, contracts, and long-distance trade, ranging from Iran and likely Afghanistan to central Anatolia to Cyprus (Alashiya) to Bahrain (Dilmun), Oman, and perhaps the Indus valley (Melukkha).16 If doubt remains about the salience of the self-classificatory “we” of this form of territorial kinship throughout the history of the ancient Near East, we also observe in the above excerpt from the Lagash–Umma conflict that the territorial dispute between these two city-states was also viewed as one between the god of Lagash and the god of Umma. Each city-state had its own god, worshipped by the population of the city. Thus, in addition to those legal pronouncements and the relations of the market, religion also provided a basis for the cultural unity of the city-state. In light of these straightforward observations, there is no compelling reason to assume that recognition of those selfclassificatory designations of territorial kinship was confined to the (royal) scribes. Thus, it is unduly restrictive to insist that this territorial “we” is dependent upon, for example, the political form of democracy or some modern “mechanism” of social solidarity such as electronic means of communication, as doing so ignores those factors of cultural unity mentioned above. Of course, the cultural unity of the city-state should never be mistakenly understood to imply a uniformity of the population; for, once again, not only would the awı¯lum be a son of, for example, Lagash, who, as such, worshipped Ningirsu, the god of Lagash, but he would also be a son of a family who, as a free adult male, was distinguished from the indentured servant, slave, and foreigner. Nevertheless, the self-classification of “son of a city-state,” the law of the city-state, and the religion of the city-state entitles the historian to recognize the existence of a territorially bounded society. The term “society” refers to more than merely a geographical framework for the market and a developed division of labor, evidence for which is as early as 3200 B C E in 15 16

Roth, Law Collections, 16. For one provocative selection of the extensive literature on ancient Near Eastern trade, see Klaas Veenhof, “‘Modern’ Features in Old Assyrian Trade,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 40/4 (1997), 336–366.

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Uruk from the so-called “Standard List of Professions.”17 It also and importantly designates a relatively – never absolute – stable pattern of consensus, that is, a cultural coherence which has as its object of reference the image of a trans-familial, territorial relation, in this case, that of the city-state. The cultural unity of this territorially delimited kinship appears to be the likely implication of the phrase “flesh of the city” in the inscription of Puzur-sin (c. 1700 B C E), describing the previous king as “a foreigner and not of the flesh of the city of Aššur.”18 The conceptual conflation of the idiom of familial descent – flesh (or blood) – and territorial descent – of the city of Aššur – is characteristic of territorial kinship. Recognition of distinctions among “peoples” was by no means unique to the city-states of southern Mesopotamia. The Gutians, for example, were a people described in Akkadian inscriptions as being from the (Zagros) mountains, hence, in contrast to the Akkadians, a barbarous people, “knowing no inhibitions . . . having canine intelligence and monkey features.”19 We especially and repeatedly find distinctions between what in the historiography of the ancient Near East have often been described as the “territorial states” of Hammurabi’s Babylonia (1792–1750 B C E), Kassite Babylonia (or, in the Kassite language, “Karduniash,” encompassing Sumer and Akkad, c. 1374– 1155 B C E), Hatti (1650–1207 B C E), Mittani of northern Syria (c. 1500–1150 B C E), and, from the fourteenth to the tenth century, Assyria, after which Assyria, beyond its historic homeland – the triangular area contained within the cities of Assur on the Tigris, Arba’il, and Nineveh, and whose distinctiveness was maintained by having its own governor – is more accurately understood as an empire.20 Many other examples of this kind of classificatory distinction are easily found, for example, Egypt, Israel, Moab, and later Iran as expressed in the conceptual conflation of E¯ra¯nega¯n, people of Iran, with E¯ra¯nšahr, the land of Iran – E¯ra¯n referring to both the people and the land.21 Evidently, this classificatory distinction of the territorial kinship of these larger societies is conveyed in Genesis 10:5 (see also 10:21, 31), “these are the descendants of Japheth in their lands, with their own language, by their families, in their 17

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Marc Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 34. Albert Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Third and Second Millennium B C (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 77–78. Jerrold Copper, The Curse of Agade (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 31. Mario Liverani, Assyria: The Imperial Mission (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2017). Steven Grosby, “Nationalism,” in William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Political Sociology (London: Sage, 2018), 593–596.

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nations” (gȏ yim, singular gȏ y). As with the Mesopotamian city-state, where a resident of that city-state is described as a “son of the city-state,” an Israelite (“son of Israel”) is one from – or native of – the land of Israel, an Assyrian is from Assyria, an Iranian is one from or of the land of Iran, and so forth. Here, the conceptual conflation of land and people is, as with the city-state, also observed, but now extended to a bounded territory geographically more extensive than the city-state. This conflation between a territory and “its” people, that is, where the image of a territory is the shared object among the individuals who constitute a “people,” is suggestive of nationality. Ubiquitous throughout our evidence are the terms “land of Babylonia,” “land of Hatti,” “land of Ashur (Assyria),” and so forth. In, for example, the correspondence of the “Amarna letters” between the ruler of Egypt and the rulers of other states in the ancient Near East during the mid-fourteenth century B C E, we find repeated use of the phrases “land of Ashur,” “land of Egypt,” “land of Mittani,” and “land of Hatti” (especially letters 16 and 17).22 They not only occur in correspondence between rulers, but are also, not surprisingly, quite common in the historical texts of a particular society, for example, Hatti or Assyria, as self-referential designations. These distinctions are clearly not merely geographical, for also common are the phrases “people of Hatti,” “people of Egypt,” “people of Babylon,” “people of Assyria,” and so forth. These latter phrases convey a conception of territorial kinship, as a people is described by a territorial designation and distinguished from other peoples who, in turn, are described by respectively different territorial designations. For example, in a letter from Hattušili, “king of Hatti-land,” to Kadašman-Enlil, “king of Karanduniyaš (Babylonia),” the Hittite king asks the Babylonian king, “Did the people of Babylon ever mistreat the people of Hatti?”23 Indicative of the conceptual conflation of territorial kinship of these larger societies are gentilic adjectives that could be used to describe both land and people. So, for example, there is, in addition to the phrases mar’e¯ ma¯t Aššur (“sons of the land of Assyria”) and niše ma¯t Aššur (“people of the land of Assyria”), the gentilic adjective Aššura¯yu, “Assyrian,”24 as in, for one among many examples, the “Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon.”25 Importantly, the 22 23

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William Moran, The Amarna Tablets (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Mark Chavalas, The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 277. Simo Parpola, “National and Ethnic Identity in the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Assyrian Identity in Post-Empire Times,” Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies, 18/2 (2004), 13, n. 37. Chavalas, Ancient Near East, 356.

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use of the gentilic adjective is not confined to Assyrian royal annals or treaties, as it also appears in the fourteenth-century B C E “Middle Assyrian Laws”: “If there is an Assyrian man (Aššura¯yu) or an Assyrian woman (Aššurayı¯tu) . . .”26 The use of this gentilic adjective to modify or imply the legal category awı¯lum, the free adult male, clarifies the latter category’s territorial jurisdiction. The problem remains to what extent the peoples of these various lands understood themselves in terms of this territorial kinship, as, for example, a Hittite, or an Assyrian, or an Israelite. One assumes the use of, for example, a gentilic adjective or the noun “native” in contrast to “foreigner” in the laws implies such a recognition by the inhabitants of those territorially bounded, yet relatively extensive societies, given the significance of law in establishing formally and publicly the reciprocal expectations of the daily activities of those inhabitants. Occasionally, the laws’ territorial distinctions are explicit, as, for example, in these Hittite laws, where one also finds use of a gentilic adjective designating territorial kinship. If anyone kills a Hittite merchant in a foreign land, he shall pay 4,000 shekels of silver . . . If it is in the lands of Luwiya or Pala, he shall pay the 4,000 shekels of silver and also replace his goods. If it is in the land of Hatti, he shall also bring the merchant for burial.27 If a Hittite man abducts a Hittite slave from the land of Luwiya, and leads him here to the land of Hatti and subsequently the abducted person’s owner recognizes him, the abductor shall pay him 12 shekels of silver.28

If the likelihood that the laws provide reason enough to assume this shared awareness of the territorial kinship of these larger societies is still called into question, we also have, as with the southern Mesopotamian city-states, religion as another factor. All of these “territorial states” had the god or gods of their respective lands, as expressed by our analytical categories of henotheism and monolatry. The storm-god Taru/Teshub and the sun-goddess Arinna were the gods of the land of Hatti; Aššur, the god of Assyria; Marduk, the god of Babylonia; Yahweh, the god of Israel; and so forth. In, for example, the Moabite stele of King Mesha (c. 830 B C E), Mesha describes how the god “Kemosh was angry with his land (of Moab).”29 Often temples of the god of the land were situated at the borders of the god’s territory, for example, King Jeroboam of the northern kingdom of Israel built temples at the northern border at Dan and at 26 29

Roth, Law Collections, 170, ¶ 44. Chavalas, Ancient Near East, 313.

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Ibid., 217, ¶ 5.

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the southern border at Bethel, as recounted in 1 Kings 12:28–29. Before the ascendancy of monotheism which, as such, is indifferent, at least doctrinally, to territorial kinship, to leave one’s native land and dwell in another was to worship the god of the land of one’s new residence (see, for example, 1 Samuel 26:17–20). It was evidently believed that the prosperity of the land was dependent upon the appropriate propitiation of the god of the land (see, for example, 2 Kings 17:24–27). The successful subjugation of a people and its land was often accompanied by taking captive the statue of the god of the land of the defeated people by the victor. The reestablishment of the sovereignty of the previously defeated people was represented by the return of the statue of that god to the land where it belonged30 (see, for example, the “Marduk Prophecy”31) and the renewal of the native cult, for example, as described in the “Cyrus Cylinder” (c. 538 B C E).32 We thus conclude that there are sufficient reasons to assume recognition of territorial kinship among the inhabitants of these larger territorial states which we may be entitled to characterize as nations.

Ethnicity and Nationality Over the past forty or so years, there has been a great deal written on ethnicity and nationality. The most important works have been by Anthony Smith and John Armstrong.33 Other noteworthy contributions have been made by John Hutchinson, Aviel Roshwald, Azar Gat, and Caspar Hirschi.34 I, too, have contributed to this investigation.35 Most of these scholars have recognized that nationality – a term used here to 30

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Morton Cogan, Imperialism and Religion: Assyria, Judah and Israel in the Eighth and Seventh Century B C E (Missoula: Scholars, 1974). Benjamin Foster, From Distant Days: Myths, Tales and Poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia (Bethesda: CDL, 1995), 215–217. Chavalas, Ancient Near East, 428–429. Anthony D. Smith, Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2009); Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). John Hutchinson, Nationalism and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); John Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict (London: Sage, 2004); Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Azar Gat, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Caspar Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Grosby, Nationalism, passim; Steven Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002).

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encompass the appearance of myriad, constitutively diverse nations throughout history – is a protean phenomenon. Many nations have a predominant, relatively uniform language, as apparently observed in the classification, noted above, of Genesis 10; but some, for example, the Canadians and Swiss today, do not.36 Some nations have a state religion, as in the history of the ancient Near East with the god of the land or, for example, today, the Greeks, Iranians, and Sinhalese; while others, for example, the Americans, do not. Given this variation, the question understandably arises as to whether or not “nation” is a heuristically useful category. The nation is a “we” – a social relation where its members recognize that there is a property that each of them has in common in contrast to those who do not. As noted above, the property recognized in another to be significant such that it becomes a part of a distinguishing self-classification may vary, for example, language or religion. However, if the category “nation” is to have heuristic application, it must be analytically distinctive, yet capable of incorporating the variation of its protean appearance throughout history. Distinctive of the category of nationality, distinguishing it from other categories of social relation such as family, friendship, business firm, religious sect, and so forth, is the ascendancy of the significance attributed to being related by virtue of birth or residence within a territory. Thus, the nation is a social relation of territorial kinship. But since we employ other categories of territorial relation, for example, city-state and empire, a further differentiation is required. The criterion distinguishing these different categories of territorial kinship – city-state, nation, and empire – is ostensibly elementary: their geographical extent. The city-state, while within its borders are often other towns, is organized around one city, and, thus, is territorially delimited. Even for the large Babylon, the territory of which is estimated to have been approximately 3.5 square miles with a population of several hundred thousand,37 it would have been possible for an individual to have experienced, that is, traveled throughout, its entire area. All the inhabitants of Babylon would have had occasion to have been familiar with its urban center, the Esagila district, within which was Marduk’s temple. The so-called territorial states of the ancient Near East contained within their well-designated borders more than one city. Their territories were beyond the experience of the average individual; and, yet, there evidently 36 37

Note, however, that Babylon/Babylonia was multilingual. Marc Van de Mieroop, The Ancient Mesopotamian City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95.

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existed, as described above, recognition of others within that bounded area as being territorially related: a nation. The administration – for example, taxation requiring a census, laws minimizing self-help and establishing property rights, and courts – of this relatively extensive, yet bounded territorial relation is the state, in this case, the national state. The belief that in antiquity there were not organized states is groundless, even though they were patrimonial and clearly not as dominated by the pervasive influence of the administrative center as is the modern state.38 Taxation, the census requiring scribes and schools to train them, and developed bureaucracies are well attested throughout the long history of the ancient Near East, for example, the “bala system” of the period of Ur III (2112–2004 B C E ) – the centralized collection and redistribution of various goods by provinces39 – or Solomon’s organization of Israel into twelve districts, each of which had its own governor, along with the king’s administrative staff of a recorder, commander of the army, a major domo, priests, scribes, and an official in charge of labor, as described in 1 Kings 4:1–19. Because the national territory is beyond the experience of the typical individual, its image must be constituted and sustained such that it is both shared by the members of the nation, as the referent of the social relation, and is one object among others in the formation of the understanding of the self. This constitution and sustenance of a territorial image is the result of several developments, some of which, for example, law and religion, were mentioned above. Memories of wars between different peoples would certainly be another factor. These peoples may not be nations; they may be coalitions of varying kinds which, as a consequence of war, may or may not develop into nations. If victorious, there may develop control over an emergent territory of a national state. For example, the coalition of Aramean citystates in opposition to the expansion of Shalmaneser III’s Assyrian Empire at the battle at Qarqar (853 B C E) might have developed into a nation of Aram, as suggested by the apparently emerging territorial classification of “all Aram” in the Sefire stele,40 but the subsequent westward advance of the Assyrian 38

39

40

For patrimonialism and brief comparisons between ancient and modern states, see Grosby, “Borders and States.” Piotr Steinkeller, “Administrative and Economic Organization of the UR III State: The Core and the Periphery,” in McGuire Gibson and Robert Biggs (eds.), The Organization of Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1987), 19–41. For “all Aram,” see Steven Grosby, “Borders, Territory and Nationality in the Ancient Near East,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 40/1 (1997), 1–29; Steven Grosby, “‘Aram Kulloh’ and the Worship of Hadad,” ARAM, 7 (1995), 337–352.

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Empire eliminated the further development of this possibility. In contrast, the apparent coalition of different “tribes” under the warrior-god Yahweh led to the emergence of the nation of “all Israel,” the physical existence of which, as a national state, lasted for only two generations – David and Solomon – but the image of which, as a nation, was cultivated and sustained through the traditions and historiography – the Hebrew Bible – of the worshippers of Yahweh. Clearly, the existence of a state contributes to the stability of the image of a territory through the administration of law, regulation of the market through stabilization of weights and measures, protection of the population within its jurisdiction, and religion, above all, when the deity worshipped is the god of the bounded land of the state. The traditions constitutive of that territorial image were often cultivated by the state, for example, laws, annals and histories, and religious festivals at a central sanctuary. However, others will have had different sources, for example, the accounts of Elijah and Elisha in I and II Kings and some of the traditions recounted in the biblical Book of Judges bear the hallmarks of having had local origins, but they were woven together into a national history. Irrespective of the origin of these traditions, necessary for the constitution of a nation is that those traditions have a territorial focus. Since a nation is a relation of territorial kinship, where recognition of the traceable descent within the land is a shared object of attachment, that relation necessarily has a temporal depth: traditions of past inhabitants of the land who become ancestors of – “fathers” of – the current inhabitants of the land. One complication of this elementary distinction between the “sons of a city-state” and the geographically more extensive territorial kinship of “sons of a nation” is the distinction itself, that is, that the area of a society can, over time, be fluid, both expanding and contracting, as with Babylon/ Babylonia and Aššur/Assyria. Another complication is when there exists a cultural unity among otherwise territorially distinct city-states, for example, among the southern Mesopotamian city-states which, while each had its own god, also recognized Nippur, the location of the ziggurat of the deity Enlil, the chief god of the Sumerian pantheon, as a shared religious center, until Enlil receded in significance in favor of the deity Marduk, whose temple was in Babylon, as described in the Enuma Elish.41 Indicative of this trans-city-state cultural unity were the repeated references to the territorial designation “Sumer and Akkad.” A rough parallel of this complication of a cultural 41

Foster, From Distant Days, 9–51.

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unity of otherwise distinct city-states is found in Greece with its Delphic oracle, the existence of which offered support to the category “Hellenes” encompassing the populations of the different city-states, as, for example, expressed by the recognition of the descent of territorial kinship in Aeschylus’ The Persians (lines 401–402), “Advance, O sons of the Hellenes, Free your fathers’ land.”42 It must always be kept in mind that with territorial kinship of various kinds, we are dealing with the attribution of significance in the formation of how one understands, hence classifies, oneself. The nature of that significance and its attribution, for both the individual and society, are not fixed; they vary temporally and geographically as a result of numerous factors, for example, victory or defeat in war, the emergence of new religions and their expansion, economic developments, changes in law, and so forth. Thus, the fluidity of these categories of territorial kinship results in analytical complications that are unavoidable, in the ancient as well as modern contexts. Before turning to the relation between the categories “nation” and “empire,” a few observations about “ethnicity” in general and in the ancient Near East in particular are necessary. The use of the category ethnicity is often to contrast it with, or at least in some way distinguish it from, nationality. Perhaps the inescapable fluidity and attendant ambiguity of the different forms of the traceable descent of kinship account for the increasing recourse to its use. Whatever might be the merit of ethnicity as an analytical category, which we will soon briefly examine, the question should still be posed as to how heuristically useful its use has been. Has its use obscured rather than clarified territorial kinship, and especially the historical appearance of nationality? Sometimes ethnicity appears to have been used as a kind of catch-all category for those societies which may exhibit features of nationality but which the historian refuses to characterize as nations simply because they are not modern. For our purposes, it is important to note that often obscured by the rarely conceptually refined use of ethnicity is that the ethnic group may be a social relation derivative of territorial kinship. When a group of individuals emigrates from one society to another, the territorial referent of the former society recedes in significance in favor of that of the new society of residence. However, when markers of the previous territorial kinship, such as language or religion, remain, such that those individuals distinguish themselves (or are distinguished by the members of 42

Aeschylus, “The Persians,” in Aeschylus II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956).

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the new society), there is an ethnic group. This social kinship of ethnicity is traced through familial descent through which those markers of the previous territorial kinship are sustained; but the immigrant family now coexists with and within the territorial kinship of its new nation. Intermingling of kinship structures has already been observed, where families coexist with the kinship of both the “sons of the city-state” and the “sons (or people) of the (national) land.” Now, however, there are three commingling kinships: (1) the family within the ethnic group contains references not only to the patrilineal or matrilineal descent of the family but also to (2) a connection to the previous homeland, while (3) dwelling within the new nation. The individual has attachments of varying salience to all three. While ethnicity as an analytical category designating this intermingling of kinship structures arose to account for the self-understanding and classification of immigrants from Europe to America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, phenomena seemingly similar are observed throughout the history of the ancient Near East, for example, the migration of the Amorites during the late third and second millennium B C E, and, later, the Arameans and Chaldeans into Babylonia, or those populations deported from their homelands by the neo-Assyrian and Babylonian empires. The connection of the ethnic group to its original, native homeland is usually severed over time, as the “we” of the ethnicity becomes part of the “we” of the new nation, unless there are reasons, for example, regionalism (where the ethnic group is concentrated within a particular area), religion (where the ethnic group has a religion different from that of the majority of the inhabitants of the nation), or its own laws (where the lex terrae of the nation allows for “personal law”), that would sustain the reference to the connection to the ethnic group’s original homeland. Notwithstanding these possibilities of the continuing attachment of the ethnic group, ethnicity by and large appears to be a transitory phenomenon, as the connection to the new homeland achieves precedence over or replaces the attachment to the previous one. An obvious example of this displacement is when immigrants use, and their children know only, the language of their new nation. There may, however, be two instances where ethnicity takes on the distinctiveness of a heuristically more useful category. The first is where there is very little, if any, territorial tie, specifically, as with nomadism, where the relation of kinship revolves around the gentilic descent of an extended family. It has sometimes been assumed in the historiography of the ancient Near East that this form of kinship, in contrast to the territorial kinship of both the city-state and the national (or territorial) state, is conveyed by the 25

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classification “house of PN,” widely attested among the Arameans, where PN stands for the personal name of an eponymous ancestor. However, the nomadism of the ancient Near East was, in fact, generally an enclosed nomadism,43 that is, where the nomadic “tribe” or “house of PN” had, as a constitutive referent, a location, often a town or a homeland. Well-known examples of a territorial tie in the formation of the Aramean “tribes” are the Bin Yamina (“sons of Yamina”) and Bin Sim’al (“sons of Sim’al”), respectively, “sons of the right” and “sons of the left,” that is, southerners and northerners as a consequence of the geographical distinction when facing the sun rising in the east. Similarly, the name of the Israelite “tribe” Benjamin indicates that it was the most southern area viz. the rest of the “house” of (northern) Israel. Moreover, Benjamin was not the only Israelite “tribe” that had a territorial referent; for so too did Ephraim, Judah, and likely Naphtali.44 Thus, the often made assumption of the extended familial descent of the ancient Near Eastern “tribe” or “house” is misleading, as these “tribes” or the “house of PN” or the self-classificatory gayum from ancient Mari are better understood as what we might characterize as “ethnogeographic” collectivities. The implicit territorial referent of classificatory categories like the “house of David” and, in general, “house of PN” should not be ignored.45 Rather than contrasting ethnicity and nationality, it is more accurate to recognize, given the territorial referent, however implicit, of the former, that there is no sharp distinction between them; for the nation is also an “ethnogeographic” collectivity, given its constitutive significance attributed to descent, albeit within the land, that is, territorial ancestors. The recognition of territorial ancestors accounts for the familial attribution – what is called “ethnic” – to the “territorial tie” of a nation, as is clear from the above quotation from Aeschylus’ The Persians. Modern expressions of this attribution are the use of the familial father and home to refer to the national territory as fatherland or homeland. There is a second instance where it may be heuristically useful to employ the category “ethnicity.” If we use the category “nationality” to indicate a consolidation and stability of the self-classification of territorial kinship, the problem arises as to how to understand a named population that apparently lacks that stability. This may have been the case with, for example, the 43

44 45

Michael Rowton, “Enclosed Nomadism,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 17 (1974), 1–30. Martin Noth, The History of Israel (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960), 53–68. For the likely restoration of “house of David” in the Tel Dan and Mesha inscriptions, see Chavalas, Ancient Near East, 305–307, 311–316.

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Amorites or the Arameans and Chaldeans (or migrations of peoples in the early Middle Ages). We face an analytical quandary here, seemingly dealt with by recourse to the category of ethnicity. However, we must not ignore the very existence among the Arameans and Chaldeans of the classificatory self-designation: “house” (or “sons”) “of PN” – a name that suggests a degree of stability. The problem is compounded by a lack of evidence. However, this lack of evidence may itself be significant; for it may indicate the absence of factors that would otherwise sustain an image of a relatively extensive, yet bounded territory, thereby lending support to the category “ethnicity” to capture the analytical consequences of this absence. Nevertheless, for this situation, the admittedly analytically imprecise “proto-nation” may do just as well as “ethnicity.” In any event, it seems that the category “ethnicity” is, in fact, ambiguous – an ambiguity underscored by the recognition that the “tribe,” or “house” (or “sons”) “of PN,” may refer to a collectivity where there is a constitutive territorial referent. “Ethnicity” as an analytical category should be used with more care and refinement than is often used today.

Nation and Empire Remaining to be analyzed is the category “empire” and its relation to nationality. While the nation, as a relatively extensive yet bounded relation of territorial kinship, is necessarily dependent upon the stability of an image of a territory as a referent of that relation, an empire, beyond its historic homeland or center, may lack that stability because the boundaries of its territory fluctuate under the incessant expectation of expansion and military fortune.46 Conceptually, the empire is bipolar, distinguishing between its civilized inhabitants, under its imperium, and those outside the empire who may be considered to be barbarians. In contrast, a world of nations is multipolar, with each nation understood to have its own territory.47 Wellknown examples of empires that ruled over various peoples and their territories in the history of the ancient Near East are the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian; and the most obvious example of the contrary conception of the multipolarity of nationality is found in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 10 and Deuteronomy 32:8, “when the Most High gave the nations (gȏ yim) their homes (inheritances), when he divided humankind (‘sons of 46

47

Joseph Schumpeter, “The Sociology of Imperialisms,” in Richard Swedberg (ed.), Joseph A. Schumpeter: The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 141–219; Liverani, Assyria, 1, 6, 266. Hirschi, Origins of Nations, passim.

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Adam’), he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the gods,” as the latter part of the verse appears in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint (where the Greek for “nations” is ἐθνῶν) but not in the Masoretic Text. Despite the apparent conceptual clarity of this distinction between nation and empire, here, too, we face analytical difficulties because the distinction between nations or national states and empires can sometimes be hard to maintain,48 as both Babylon and Aššur at times became respectively the empires of Babylonia and Assyria. The process of their expansion from national state to empire was also reversed under military pressures and presumably economic decline. Further complicating the distinction between empire and nation is that the former, especially if it excludes what becomes the “personal law” of those conquered in favor of a territorial law, could take on the character of territorial kinship. For example, the Assyrian Empire drew a distinction between those peoples whom it ruled directly and those whom it ruled indirectly. The former were subject to regular taxation and evidently Assyrian law administrated by the Assyrian military, while the latter paid “tribute” according to fluctuating Assyrian dominance. This distinction of fiscal policy between taxation and tribute corresponded to a sociological differentiation. Those ruled directly, hence taxed, were described as having been “counted as a part of Assyria,” with their formerly independent territories becoming “provinces” of the land of Assyria, as described in, for example, the Annals of Tiglath-Pileser III.49 They were legally and anthropologically transformed into Assyrians. In contrast, the tribute-paying peoples and their territories were understood to be vassal or client states, ruled indirectly, as the Assyrians allowed native rulers and continuation of the native religions. Thus, those peoples ruled indirectly were described not as “counted as part of Assyria” but as being under “the yoke of Assyria.”50 Here, we encounter the problem confronting empires, ancient and modern: how to administer those peoples and their territories under imperial domination. Few empires, ancient or modern, have resources sufficient to rule efficiently over time peoples and their lands distant from the imperial center. Even if resources might exist to do so, native traditions and loyalties persist. It is natural for an individual and a people to resent being ordered 48 49 50

Hutchinson, Nationalism and War, 120. Tadmor, Inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III, 42–43. J. N. Postgate, “The Land of Assur and the Yoke of Assur,” World Archaeology, 23/3 (1992), 247–263.

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what to do and to resist abandoning their self-understanding. While especially during the eighth century B C E, the Assyrian Empire, with its highly organized standing army and policy of mass deportations, transformed the peoples and lands it conquered into, respectively Assyrians, and Assyria, there existed an alternative means of vassal or client states to administer those conquered. For example, we find, in the treaty between the Hittite king Shuppiluliuma I (c. 1344–1322) and the Mittanian Shattiwaza, the following description of the expansion of the Hittite Empire: “From Mount Lebanon to yonder bank of the Euphrates I (Shuppiluliuma) brought them into my territory.” While formulations like “brought them (conquered peoples and territories) into (or ‘added to’) my territory” are common in the Hittite and Assyrian annals, there remains an ambiguity over the nature of the incorporation. That ambiguity is subsequently clarified in the treaty when the Hittite king continues, “I let him (Shattiwaza) sit on his father’s throne, so that the country of Mittani will not perish” (my emphasis).51 Thus, the Mittanis and their territory did not become Hittite, but continued, in this instance, as a vassal or client state. The description of the Hittite Shuppiluliuma’s “revival” of Mittani as a vassal state leads us to the Persian administration of its empire. Cyrus (c. 600–530 B C E), as recounted in the so-called “Cyrus Cylinder,”52 returned the (statues of the) foreign gods, previously held in captivity in Babylon, to sanctuaries in the gods’ native homelands. Similarly, Cyrus is described as returning previously deported individuals. These actions of “reviving” the conquered peoples and their lands account for the flattering description of Cyrus found in Isaiah 45:1, where he is referred to as Yahweh’s “anointed” (messiah).53 Surely, Cyrus’ decisions were motivated by political considerations: to minimize opposition to Persian imperial rule by permitting a monitored degree of administrative and religious autonomy.54 However, by doing so, this kind of imperial rule allowed the continuation of national traditions, however beleaguered, and, thereby, depending upon subsequent military fortune, laid, unintentionally and certainly paradoxically, the basis for the later reemergence of national states. Perhaps the clearest example of this reemergence was Judaea, understood by the Judaeans as being not

51 53 54

Chavalas, Ancient Near East, 243. 52 Ibid., 428–429. See also Ezra 1:2–4, 5:13–17, 7:12–26. For a reevaluation of Cyrus’ policies, see Amélie Kuhrt, “Cyrus the Great of Persia: Images and Realities,” in Marlies Heinz and Marian Feldman (eds.), Representations of Political Power (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 169–191.

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merely Judaea but also, through the continued cultivation and adaptation of their traditions, Israel. In conclusion, the focus given here to the territorial tie has admittedly led to an expansive application of the succinctly formulated definition of nationality, as a relatively extensive yet bounded social relation of territorial kinship, to the evidence from the history of the ancient Near East. Having done so, we have good reasons and a considerable amount of evidence to reconsider the existence of nations during this period. Recognizing their existence is not to gainsay numerous analytical difficulties, but difficulties remain today when examining modern nations. Those difficulties are likely consequences of the fluidity of, and tensions found within, all social relations. Finally, this focus has suggested a more refined use of the category “ethnicity” – a category which should be subjected to renewed scrutiny and clarification.

Further Reading Boardman, John, I. E. S. Edwards, E. Sollberger, and N. G. L. Hammond (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History, vols. I – I I I (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970– 1992). Gat, Azar, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Grosby, Steven, Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002). Machinist, Peter, “Assyrians on Assyria in the First Millennium B C,” in Kurt Raaflaub (ed.), Anfänge politischen Denkens in der Antike: Die nahöstlichen Kulturen und die Griechen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1993), 77–104. Parpola, Sami, “National and Ethnic Identity in the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Assyrian Identity in Post-Empire Times,” Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies, 18/2 (2004), 5–22. Sasson, Jack (ed.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Scribner, 1995). Smith, Anthony D., The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). Snell, Daniel (ed.), A Companion to the Ancient Near East, 2nd edition (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2019).

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2

Nationhood: Was There Such a Thing in Antiquity? erich s. gruen

Did the ancients have the concept of nationhood? To raise that question is to enter a minefield. The issue of what counts as a nation has generated a flood of articles and monographs, mostly by anthropologists and sociologists, with a smattering by historians. The very idea of a nation or nationhood has been preeminently associated with modern history. Its relevance for antiquity is not obvious and has prompted much debate. Those who see it as an exclusively modern phenomenon tend to associate it with the creation of new polities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century as nation-states. Others, however, and they have been growing in number, argue that the existence of a unifying consciousness of affinity, kinship, and shared history goes back to antiquity and amounts to nationhood or whatever one wishes to call it.1 “Nationhood” has regularly and unfortunately been bound up with the notion of “nationalism,” its origins, and its consequences. That term generally carries with it the connotation of a people whose sense of commonality takes the form of an assertive drive to project sovereignty or express authority in a wider world, manifested emblematically in the imperialism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. In our contemporary circumstances, paradoxically, “nationalism” seems to be shifting its meaning to a more 1

Among those who regard the notion as largely a modern construct, not readily applicable to antiquity, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). On the other side, see Steven Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality, Ancient and Modern (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002), 27–47; David Goodblatt, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–27; Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8–44; Azar Gat, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–26. A valuable discussion of the subject in general may be found in A. D. Smith, The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 127–153.

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inward than an outward orientation, a resistance to internationalism or globalism and a stress on a people’s more exclusivist character. In recent years the theoretical issues have become still more snarled in efforts to distinguish nationhood from ethnicity. Does ethnicity give meaning and substance to a nation? Or does the nation foster ethnic uniformity to establish its own distinctiveness? Or is it a reciprocal and dialectical process?2 Did ethnicity lie behind state formation or did the state foster ethnic distinctions to shore up its own position?3 Such problems have generated tortuous efforts to draw boundaries or dissolve them in order to make theoretical headway.4 As if that were not enough, we are faced with a growing body of literature that seeks to simplify very complex arguments by dividing them into two broad lines of approach. First, the view that “nation” refers to a natural and ineffable feature of humanity, an organic element present from the start as a central ingredient of identity. That notion often receives the label of “primordialism” or “perennialism,” or the ever-handy appellation of “essentialism” – almost always a negative term. The second approach, stressing fluidity and malleability, has also acquired multiple designations, whether “instrumentalism,” “constructivism,” “circumstantialism,” or “situationalism.”5 It is interesting and amusing to note that these brands are almost always affixed upon those who do not share the approach of the affixer. None of the practitioners of these supposed methodologies seems to have adopted any of the labels themselves, even though they ascribe them freely to others. That should tell us something about the value of applying artificial designations which are almost always exaggerated and simplistic. Efforts have been made, most notably by the eminent and eminently judicious sociologist Anthony D. Smith, to draw up a number of criteria to apply in deciding whether a nation is really a nation. He offers the following: a collective name, a common myth of descent, a shared history, a common culture, association with a specific territory, and a sense of solidarity.6 That is 2 3

4

5

6

See Gat, Nations, 3. A vast literature exists on these and comparable problems. For a useful collection of some key contributions, see John Hutchinson and A. D. Smith, Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For some valuable reflections on this matter, see Andreas Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), especially 1–10. For discussions of these labels, see, e.g., A. D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 6–18; Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, 3–10. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 22–31; cf. Smith, Antiquity of Nations, 15, 73–77, 133–136; Steven Grosby, Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7–42.

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a perfectly reasonable collection of yardsticks. But what Smith has produced essentially is a checklist. And even he has to acknowledge that some of the entities that we call “nations” possess more of these features than do others. I am not sure that checking off as many of these criteria as one can in each instance brings us any closer to knowing which entity is more of a nation than another. And we might ask how many items does it take to allow us to call the entity a nation? We are not here playing a numbers game. Then there is the question of whether nationalism is an inescapable concomitant of a nation. The social anthropologist Ernest Gellner neatly turned the tables and declared that “nationalism engendered nations, not the other way around.”7 The nation is thus like any other “imagined community” in the famous terminology of Benedict Anderson. Definitions are slippery, seductive but subjective, and usually not very helpful. Ernest Renan, the great French philosopher and historian of religion, may have had it right when he said back in 1882 that “nationalism is a state of mind,” and a nation is “a soul, a spiritual principle.”8 That cuts the knot very nicely. If that view had been adopted, it would have saved a vast amount of unnecessary verbiage. Perhaps the best, and certainly the most pungent, definition of a nation is that by Karl Deutsch: “A nation is a group of people united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors.”9 A very neat and unexceptional formulation. All this to say that I will avoid the concoction of arbitrary definitions or checklists. And I hope to escape the hazards of anachronism. Whether nations, in any meaningful sense, even existed before the early modern period obviously depends on whatever definitions or criteria one applies, and we thus fall all too easily into circularity. The question I am posing refers to where, if anywhere, one locates the ancient understanding or understandings of what we call “nationhood” – though they never did use such a term. How and with what meanings did ancient societies develop their own ideas of commonality? Did they indeed formulate a sense of collective identity that provided a locus for loyalty? Did they develop the notion of a uniform entity that defined their essence and projected their character? 7

8

9

Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 55. See also Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 10. See further the sober remarks of Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism, 8–44. Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nations and Narration (London: Routledge), 8–22. K. W. Deutsch, Nationalism and its Alternatives (New York: Knopf, 1969), 3.

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Of course, the space available here does not allow for anything like a comprehensive study of this subject. But it can at least give a sense of how multifaceted and problematic it is, defying neat categories and theoretical constructs. In order to gain at least some grasp of the complexity and ambiguity of the topic, I focus here upon three peoples about whom we have substantial testimony: the ancient Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews of the Greco-Roman period. Can one elicit their sense of nationhood – whether it is a construct or not?

Greeks The Greeks’ notion of commonality has received extensive discussion over the years, intensifying indeed in recent decades, as the subjects of identity and ethnicity attracted considerable attention in the broader scholarly world. Did Greeks have a concept of collective identity, and, if so, when did it emerge? Explicit testimony is exceedingly rare. That itself makes one wonder whether the question even impinged upon their consciousness. I start with a most celebrated passage in Herodotus, regularly and repeatedly cited. Ostensibly, it gives us our answer. It has served as the centerpiece of almost every treatment of the subject, seemingly the fullest and most revealing statement of the Greeks’ own understanding of “Greekness.” The great historian puts a telling speech in the mouths of Athenian spokesmen who illustrate their “Hellenicity” (τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν) by referring to common blood, language, shrines of the gods, sacrifices, and practices.10 That declaration accords closely with the tabulation of criteria compiled by scholars to correspond to national identity generally: common ancestry, language, religion, and customs.11 Herodotus’ assertion is invaluable, a concise and now nearly canonical formulation that appears to sum up nicely the essential ingredients of Greek nationality.

10

11

Herod. 8.144.2: τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐὸν ὅμαιμὸν τε καὶ ὁμόγλωσσον καὶ θεῶν ἱδρύματα τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι ἤθεά τε ὁμότροπα. See Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 165; Christopher Tuplin, “Greek Racism? Observations on the Character and Limits of Greek Ethnic Prejudice,” in G. R. Tsetskhladze (ed.), Ancient Greeks, West and East (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 48–49; Irad Malkin, “Introduction,” in Irad Malkin (ed.), Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Washington, DC: Harvard University Press, 2001), 5–6; D. Konstan, “To Hellenikon ethnos: Ethnicity and the Construction of Ancient Greek Identity,” in Malkin, Ancient Perceptions, 32–33. Cf. J. M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 44–48. Cf. the formulation by Smith, above, n. 6.

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Does it really do so? When one considers the context in which these words are delivered, doubts should arise. They come in a speech assigned by Herodotus to Athenian representatives in the midst of the great war of Greece against Persia. They reply to Spartan envoys deeply concerned that Athens might defect from the Hellenic cause and accept an offer of alliance from the Persians. The indignant Athenians respond forcefully, rebuking the Spartans for even imagining that Athens would ever abandon its loyalty to Hellas, and they reaffirm the bonds that tie them to all Greeks.12 If this passage is to serve as the cornerstone of Greek nationality, however, it needs some close scrutiny. First of all, the speech is Herodotus’ own composition. There is no reason to believe that anything like those words were actually delivered or that Herodotus had access to a faithful transcription of them. More importantly, how much weight does Herodotus himself place upon this statement as an index of national identity? The situation he depicts arises out of special circumstances. The Athenian representatives respond to a Spartan challenge that Athens should do nothing to damage the Hellenic cause and should reject any appeals from the Persians, especially as Athens provoked the war in the first place and Athenian territory has been its principal target. The spokesmen of Athens reassert their allegiance in no uncertain terms. But it is noteworthy that the first item which they display as illustrative of their steadfastness is not their commitment to a common Greekness but their fierce hostility to Persians for the burning and destruction of Athenian shrines and images of the gods. Retaliation for those abominable deeds stands first and foremost.13 Greek commonality takes second place. Indeed, the entire passage, prompted in the narrative by Spartan questioning of Athenian loyalty, presupposes that, whatever lip-service might be paid to shared values inherent in τὸ Ἑλλενικὸν, mutual suspicions and wrangling persisted. The discrepancy between the Athenian reference to elements of Greek commonality and the fact of distrust and disharmony among Greeks may indeed suggest that Herodotus here injects a subtle note of cynicism in this celebrated scenario.14 In short, the superstructure built upon this solitary passage rests on rickety foundations. The Herodotean presentation reeks of rhetoric, pitting Athenian fidelity against Spartan anxiety. It cannot easily serve as a centerpiece for reconstructing the ties that expressed Greek commonality. 12 13 14

The circumstances are presented in Herod. 8.140–144. Herod. 8.144.2: πρῶτα μὲν καὶ μέγιστα. See Philip Stadter, “Herodotus and the Cities of Mainland Greece,” in Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 249.

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To what degree indeed was there a Greek consciousness on this matter? One must stress what is well known, but not usually mentioned in this connection, that “Greece” as an abstract entity need not have had a primary claim on allegiance. Most of those whom we call Greeks would refer to themselves as Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, Ephesians, or Syracusans. Aristotle’s formulations of political theory rested first and foremost on the polis, the city-state, as the essential ingredient of civic organization and communal fidelity.15 And other intermediate sources of identity existed as well. One could characterize oneself linguistically as an Ionian, or a Dorian, or an Aeolian. Or indeed regionally as a Thessalian or a Boiotian or a Phocian. Multiple identities complicated matters. The term “Achaean,” for example, might refer to an inhabitant of the northwest region of the Peloponnese, but also to a member of a larger political entity, the association or federation of poleis that constituted the Achaean League, some of them not even in Achaea. Such an entity would normally be referred to as an ethnos, rather than a polis, a word whence we derive the term ethnicity, although it rarely had such a connotation in antiquity. Overlapping allegiances problematize any efforts to discern a clear basis for a broader Hellenic nationhood. To take it a step further, one might ask when Greeks would have been likely to develop a collective consciousness that superseded narrower allegiances and promoted a sense of Hellenic character. The age of colonization, on the face of it, might appear to supply an answer. Greeks were great colonizers. Expansion beyond the mainland began early, with migrations and settlements in Asia Minor after the Bronze Age and then major bursts of activity in the western Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries 16 B C E. A powerful sense of commonality joined mother-city and colony, a kinship connection, even when strains arose and estrangement divided them. The interlocking of cults, customs, ritual, calendar, institutions, and dialects linked colonies tightly to their metropoleis, maintaining their hold even in the face of friction, rivalry, and hostilities between cities with such bonds. The fact of extensive Greek colonization has itself been seen as a key element in eliciting the sense of a collective Hellenic identity. As Greeks moved abroad, especially in the eighth and seventh centuries, encountering and mingling with indigenous peoples, principally those in southern Italy and Sicily, it is tempting to see the creation of boundaries and a clearer articulation of national character and values in contradistinction to those of the 15 16

Aristotle, Politics, passim; see, especially, 1253a. See the still valuable general study of A. J. Graham, Colony and Mother City in Ancient Greece, 2nd edition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).

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indigenous peoples whom they encountered. The “otherness” of non-Greeks could be the stimulus for shaping the idea of a distinctive Greekness.17 That idea, though plausible on the face of it, is not fully satisfactory. Archaeological and linguistic testimony, as well as legends and traditions, show that contacts between Greeks and non-Greeks long predated the era of colonization, and material remains attest to widespread Mediterranean connections. Integration, accommodation, and acculturation were far more extensive than confrontation and alienation. Moreover, the mainland Greek cities that sent settlers abroad were themselves multiple, diverse, and often at odds with one another. These were not circumstances conducive to viewing indigenous people as the “other” and thus generating the notion of an identifiable Greek nationality.18 How then did the notion of commonality emerge? Scholarly consensus has it that the turning point came at the time of the Persian War in the early fifth century B C E. The pivotal contest that resonated throughout the remainder of Greek history was, on this theory, also the critical moment in determining the self-perception of a collective identity. Hellenic values, in other words, took shape through a constructed contrast with those of the enemy – not merely a political and military foe, but a “barbarian” whose “oriental despotism” and absence of rationality represented all that Greeks were not. That is the prevailing view.19 Yet the idea of this stark dichotomy can itself be questioned. Even in the immediate aftermath of the Persian War, Aeschylus could produce a tragic drama in which he portrays the Persians sympathetically, makes allusion to a shared genealogy that linked them to the Greeks in mythical times, and ascribes the roots of the conflict not to a fundamental divide between the peoples but to the overweening arrogance of a particular Persian king.20 Herodotus’ expansive history of the Persian War appeared a generation or so later. It too has regularly been seen as enshrining the concept of an unbridgeable chasm between Hellene and the “other,” with Greeks 17

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So, e.g., Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 8; R. L. Fowler, “Genealogical Thinking, Hesiod’s Catalogue, and the Creation of the Hellenes,” PCPhS, 44 (1998), 15. See the fine discussion of J. M. Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 90–124, with earlier bibliography. Among many formulations, see François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 323–324; Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 56–69; Paul Cartledge, The Greeks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13, 38–39; Hall, Ethnic Identity, 44–46; Josef Wiesehöfer, Iraniens, Grecs et Romains (Leuven: Peeters Press, 2005), 84–92. The play, of course, is Aeschylus’ Persae. For this interpretation, see E. S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 9–21.

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representing western values against eastern barbarism.21 But the great historian is much subtler than that. His nuanced portrait of comparisons and parallels between Greeks and Persians actually has the two societies reflect each on the other, with overlapping value systems and fluid cultural identities.22 Of course, the Persian War retained forever a powerful hold on the Greek imagination. But it need not have engendered a perception of distinctive nationhood. The very idea that the fashioning of Greek national identity depended upon contrast with the “other” may also be questioned. One need only point to the foundation legends that Greeks conceived for themselves. Far from stressing their own uniqueness and the special characteristics that set them apart from non-Greeks, they frequently called attention to their own foreign origins. Such tales remained popular, repeated and even embellished, well into the period of classical Greece and beyond. So, for example, tradition had it that the great city of Thebes was founded by the Phoenician hero Cadmus. And a noble fugitive from Egypt, Danaus, with his fifty daughters, attained the throne of Argos, the city that looms so large in Hellenic legend and tradition. Indeed, the figure of Pelops, either a Phrygian or a Lydian, but in any case an Asian, was conceived as an immigrant who gave his name to the whole of the Peloponnese. Even the Athenians, who often vaunted their autochthony, claiming to have no barbarian admixture in their bloodline, entertained a tradition that they descended from Pelasgians, a mysterious people who were reckoned as preceding Greek inhabitants of Attica. On this reconstruction, the later Athenians somehow derived from those prehistoric incumbents and non-Greek speakers.23 The upshot of this welter of tales demonstrates that the concept of Greek nationhood did not entail an exclusivist differentiation or a construct of alterity. Greek mythology embraced, indeed created, foundation myths that had legendary figures from abroad stand at the origins of Hellenic lands and peoples, thereby implying a mongrel mixture that enriched rather than compromised their identity – or identities. 21

22 23

See, e.g., Gerold Walser, Hellas und Iran (Darmstadt: Wissenschafltiche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 1–8; Hartog, Mirror of Herodotus, 40, 333–339; Edmond Levy, “Herodote philobarbaros ou la vision du barbare chez Hérodote,” in Raoul Lonis (ed.), L’étranger dans le monde grec (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1992), vol. I I, 242–244; Cartledge, The Greeks, 60–62, 143–145. See the analysis by Gruen, Rethinking the Other, 21–39, with bibliography. This is not the place to examine the various legends with any thoroughness. See the discussion in Gruen, Rethinking the Other, 224–243, with references to the sources and modern treatments.

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To be sure, the slogan of panhellenism had its advocates, most notably the fourth-century Athenian orator Isocrates, who sought to rally his countrymen in a unified effort for another contest with Persia. The orator put forth an eloquent plea for concord among Greeks and a joint crusade against the eastern foe. But here again, closer scrutiny indicates that Isocrates’ objective fell well short of a national blend that would supersede political divisions. In his call for action, he made clear that it was his own city that should take the lead and has the principal moral authority, just as it had in the great Persian War. This is an Athenocentric summons to action.24 Perhaps Isocrates’ most celebrated passage comes in his Panegyricus, where he appears to provide a definition of what it means to be a Greek. The orator declares that the very name of the Hellenes seems to apply no longer to a nation or a people but to a state of mind, and those who are called Hellenes are those who share our upbringing or culture (paideia) rather than our common nature (physis).25 These much quoted lines, however, should not be taken, as they often are, to signify that a cultural, rather than an ethnic, meaning defines the essence of Greekness. Isocrates, in fact, simply reiterates his conviction that Athens is the critical standard-bearer of Hellenicity. In the same passage he affirms that his city has left all other men so far behind in thought and in expression that Athens’ pupils have now become the teachers of others.26 Panhellenism takes a back seat to Athenocentrism.27 Did civic loyalties yield to a broader national consciousness in the Hellenistic period, the aftermath of Alexander the Great? The huge extension of territory and the emergence of the vast kingdoms of Alexander’s successors ought, in principle, to have superseded the particularism of the polis and inspired a wider vision of what constituted Greek nationality. Yet, although philosophers may have extended the horizons of Hellenic commonality, the polis retained its grip on the civic pride, devotion, and identity of its citizens. A vast number of inscriptions record honorific decrees, diplomatic 24

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See, e.g., Isoc. Panath. 41, 49–52, 59, 96, 99; Lynette Mitchell, Panhellenism and the Barbarians (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2007), 82–85. Isoc. Paneg. 50: τὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ὅνομα πεποίηκε μηκέτι τοῦ γένους ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας δοκεῖν εἶναι, καὶ μᾶλλον Ἕλληνας καλεῖσθαι τοὺς τῆς παιδεύσεως τῆς ἡμετέρας ἢ τοὺς τῆς κοινῆς φύσεως μετέχοντας. Isoc. Paneg. 50: τοσοῦτον δ’ ἀπολέλοιπεν ἡ πόλις ἡμῶν περὶ τὸ φρονεῖν καὶ λέγειν τοὺς ἅλλους ἀνθρώπους, ὥσθ’ οἱ ταύτης μαθηταὶ τῶν ἄλλων διδάσκαλοι γεγόνασι. See F. W. Walbank, Selected Papers: Studies in Greek and Roman History and Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 5–6, 9–11; Hall, Hellenicity, 208–210. It is noteworthy that E. E. Cohen, The Athenian Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), especially, 3–4, 79–82, applies the term “nation” not to Greece but to Athens – which saw itself as autochthonous and quite distinct from the rest of the Greeks.

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declarations and associations, adjudication of disputes, exchange of civic privileges, establishment of cults and festivals, benefactions and patronage, and active engagement in the political process, all centered upon the polis and its institutions.28 Citizens continued to regard themselves as Plataeans, Megarians, Milesians, or Pergamenes first and foremost. There was no such thing as Greek citizenship, nor had there ever been. The city held its place as a locus of allegiance and a source of pride. Greekness itself never engendered the same passion. And Greeks evidently did not internalize the idea of a nation as an essence that declared identity.

Jews Did the Jews of the Greco-Roman period consider themselves a nation? The ancient Israelites’ origin myths, as enshrined in the scriptures, traced a common descent from Abraham, their covenant with God (expressed in the laws of Moses) signified a sacred bond, and their “promised land” supplied a territorial dimension to their identity. On the face of it, that would appear to be a solid set of benchmarks to exhibit commitment to a nation. Indeed, the Israelites, as is well known, considered themselves as God’s “chosen people,” thus acquiring a special distinction that set them apart from all other nations.29 The conceptualization retained its force well into the Hellenistic period.30 All of this would seem to point to a strong sense of commonality.31 Yet here too matters were not so simple or one-dimensional. For example, how 28

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For selective examples of all this, see E. S. Gruen, “The Polis in the Hellenistic World,” in R. M. Rosen and Joseph Farrell (eds.), Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 339–354. See, e.g. Gen.12.1–3, Exod. 6.7, 33.16; Lev. 20.26; Num. 23.7–10; Deut. 7.6, 10.15, 14.2. See the famous passage in the Letter of Aristeas in which the High Priest declares the unique character of Mosaic law, asserting that Moses had equipped his people with impenetrable fences and iron walls, so that they would stand apart from all other peoples, devoting themselves to their sole god; LetArist. 131–139. The concern here is not with Jewish “nationalism,” i.e. a drive to establish autonomy and express authority in a wider world, but with how the Jews understood their own collective identity. On “Jewish nationalism” generally, what it means, and whether it is appropriate phraseology, see the thoughtful set of essays on ancient Israel by Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality, especially 13–68, 92–119. For Doron Mendels, The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism: Christian and Jewish Ethnicity in Ancient Palestine (New York: Doubleday, 1992), who examines the concept at length for the Greco-Roman period, Jewish nationalism is closely bound up with the idea of a nation-state; e.g. 16, 61, 83, 99, 137, 182. Goodblatt, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism, explores it on a broader plane. He stresses the overlap between nationalism and ethnic identity and argues that “nationalism” in its modern manifestations can be legitimately seen as analogous to the Jewish experience in antiquity; see, especially, 1–27, 204–210. The general reflections

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strong was the tradition of a pure lineage traceable back to Abraham and constituting the essence of the nation? To be sure, insistence upon endogamy appears in the Pentateuch, from the time of Abraham’s search within the community for a wife for his son Isaac and a shunning of non-Israelites, especially Canaanites, not to mention Moabites and Ammonites.32 Isaac issued the same injunction to his son Jacob. And even Esau, who strayed, took his last wives from inside the clan.33 The demand for purity of the race and resistance to any exogamy reached a peak in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, after the return from the Babylonian exile, when the need for an undeviating display of the lineage took special prominence.34 In fact, however, a commitment to endogamy was never undeviating. The biblical narrative itself makes that clear. Abraham took the Egyptian maidservant Hagar as his wife, and then married another non-Israelite after Sarah’s death. Among the sons of Jacob, Judah married a Canaanite and Joseph an Egyptian, without stirring negative comment – or any comment at all. Moses’ wife Zipporah was daughter of a Midianite, Gideon wedded a Shechemite and Samson a Philistine. David had at least two foreign wives, including Bathsheba, and Solomon, of course, had a houseful of alien women as his consorts. The genealogies in the first book of Chronicles trace biblical lineages from Adam on in numbing detail, including explicit references to non-Israelite wives, to Moabites, former Egyptian slaves, and concubines of unspecified origins.35 The idea of an unalloyed lineage was never enshrined in the tradition. Indeed, it was a “mixed multitude,” so the Book of Exodus informs us, who accompanied Moses out of Egypt.36 Did Jewish attitudes in the Greco-Roman period change on this score? Did Jews living in a world dominated by Greek culture and Roman power feel the need to insist upon a more narrowly conceived and distinctive collective identity in terms of a descent group deriving from the patriarchs? For this our best and fullest evidence comes from the voluminous writings of the philosopher Philo and the historian Josephus. Philo, writing in the mid-first century

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of Seth Schwartz, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 3–18, and “Were the Ancient Jews a Nation?” in F. E. Greenspahn (ed.), Early Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 71–96, provide valuable historiographical surveys, but are concerned primarily with the issue of whether Judaism is to be considered an ethnicity or a religion. Gen. 24.3–4, 24.37; Deut. 23.4–9. 33 Gen. 27.46, 28.1–9, 36.3. Ezra, 9.1–14, 10.2–4, 10.10–14; Neh. 10.29–31, 13.1–3, 13.23–30. 1 Chron. 2.3, 2.34–33, 2.46, 2.48, 3.1–2, 4.18, 4.22. 36 Exod. 12.37–38.

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erich s. gruen C E, when he expresses the nature of Jewish commonality, does so almost always in terms of customs, practice, and adherence to tradition. Genealogy is not the prime measure of nationality. Philo even describes kinship itself in terms of common customs and faithfulness to tradition.37 The extensive works of Josephus, composed in the second half of the first century C E, lead to much the same conclusions. The historian’s own nation (genos), he tells us, constitutes the chosen people of God.38 But what exactly made them so? Certainly not race or ethnicity alone. God bestowed his favor upon them, says Josephus, because of their zeal for virtue and choice of a life free from wickedness.39 Josephus regularly described Jews in terms of practices, cult, and ritual, reverence for the scriptures and indefatigable loyalty to the laws. A multiform sense of collective consciousness prevailed – well beyond just the lineage of Abraham. In a summary statement, the historian declares that the Jewish people have a code of laws ideally suited for their piety, their concord with one another, their humaneness in general, their righteousness, steadfastness in adversity, and scorn of death.40 No hint that their national character derives from common ancestry, or language, or territory. It is interesting to note that neither Philo nor Josephus engages in direct or extended discussion of what constitutes the essence of Judaism. The matter did not much impinge on their consciousness. A significant feature complicates any effort to define Jewish nationhood, namely the diaspora. In the Greco-Roman period Jews lived in the diaspora in far greater numbers than those in Palestine. So, where does one find the nation? Location evidently was not a determining factor. To be sure, the “homeland” retained its power as a meaningful emblem of Jewish identity. Numerous texts composed by diaspora writers in the Hellenistic period referred to Jerusalem as the “holy city,” texts like 2 Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Testament of Job, the Sibylline Oracles, and the writings of Philo.41 The symbolism was strong. Yet it was not in itself determinative of Jewish identity. Jews had formed stable communities in the diaspora and enjoyed civic privileges in numerous cities of the Mediterranean world. Like the Greeks in those poleis, Jews freely designated themselves as Alexandrians, Antiochenes, Ephesians, or comparable names of cities in which they had settled.42 The most telling statement of this

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Philo, Spec.Leg. 1.317, 4.159; Mos. 2.169–171; Virt. 79, 195–196. Jos. BJ, 6.310; Ant. 4.414, 5.93, 5.98, 8.120. 39 Jos. Ant. 4.114. 40 Jos. CAp. 2.146. See, e.g., 2 Macc. 1.7; Wisdom, 12.3; T Job, 33.5; 3 Sib. 267, 5 Sib. 281; Philo, Her. 293; Somn. 2.75; Spec. Leg. 4.215; Flacc. 46; Legat. 202. Jos. CAp. 2.38–39.

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mentality comes from Philo. He affirms that Jews considered the holy city of Jerusalem as their metropolis, but the states in which they were born and raised and which they acquired from their fathers, grandfathers, and distant forefathers they regarded as their native lands, their patrides.43 Their engagements with the communities in which they dwelled and had dwelled for generations constituted an identity as deep as or deeper than that of their ancestral origins. They could express their homage to the Temple in Jerusalem by occasional pilgrimage or the payment of a tithe (those who could afford it). But their homeland was elsewhere. That further problematizes the expectation of uniform Jewish nationhood. The circumstances of the Hellenistic world also impinged upon Jewish selfperception. Jews never attained any genuine or enduring political autonomy. After the so-called return from the Babylonian exile, they came under the suzerainty, first of the Persians, then of the Hellenistic kings, and finally of the Romans. Any nationalistic feelings would have to reckon with the fact of a subordinate position within the embrace of an imperial power. Even the Maccabean rebellion of the mid-second century B C E that broke the hegemony of the Greek kingdom of Syria, still celebrated today at Hanukkah as a triumph of the nation, had only limited effect. The successors of Judah Maccabee, the Hasmonean dynasty, ostensibly held sway in Judah.44 But their success was always a precarious one. The Hellenistic rulers of Syria, the Seleucid dynasty, still remained the major power in the area. Hasmonean leaders made their greatest gains by supporting one or another contender for the Seleucid throne. Each member of the Hasmonean dynasty held his post through authorization by a Seleucid monarch or pretender who needed his backing. Imperial authority and Hasmonean fortunes were, in fact, fundamentally interdependent. And the discrepancy in power was never in question. Jewish leaders received their positions, titles, and privileges at the hands of Seleucid princes.45 The idea of full autonomy for a Jewish nation was not on the cards.

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Philo, Flacc. 46: μητρόπολιν μὲν τὴν ἱερόπολιν ἡγούμενοι . . . ἂς δ’ ἔλαχον ἐκ πατέρων καὶ πάππων καὶ προπάππων καὶ τῶν ἔτι ἄνω προγόνων οἰκεῖν ἕκαστοι πατρίδας νομίζοντες, ἐν αἶς ἐγεννήθησαν καὶ ἐτράφησαν. Among countless discussions of the Hasmonean period, see the most recent treatments by J. C. Bernhardt, Die Jüdische Revolution: Untersuchungen zu Ursachen, Verlauf und Folgen der Hasmonäischen Erhebung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017) and Katell Berthelot, In Search of the Promised Land? The Hasmonean Dynasty between Biblical Models and Hellenistic Diplomacy (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2018). See E. S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998), 3–28.

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The absence of political independence, of course, would not prevent the Jews from having some sense of a distinctive nationhood. But just how would one define it? As we have seen, embrace of a direct bloodline traced back to the patriarchs was not a prominent feature of Jewish self-consciousness. Links to a particular territory would be problematic in view of the diaspora. And subordination to imperial power presented an obstacle to any form of political authority. Still another matter underscores the difficulty of defining Jewishness. Jews were open to and certainly did not discourage the embrace of Judaism by gentiles. Josephus maintained that there was not a city or a people, whether Greek or barbarian, to which Jewish observance of the Sabbath, fasts, lighting of lamps, and dietary regulation had not spread. Philo went further to affirm that the Sabbath and Yom Kippur were honored by Greeks and non-Greeks alike, by those who dwelled in Europe and Asia, indeed the whole world from one end to the other.46 Those statements are, of course, rhetorical outbursts, not to be taken literally. But it is not Jewish writers alone who attest this. Pagan sources too refer to the apostasy of their compatriots, their embrace of Judaism, and the growing number of Jews, a matter of ostensible alarm for some of them, like Seneca, Tacitus, and Juvenal.47 These notices too are exaggerated, to be sure. Jews were not proselytizers. No clear evidence can be adduced for Jewish missionary activity in the GrecoRoman world.48 Nevertheless, though there might not have been proselytizers, there were certainly proselytes. For this we have abundant epigraphic and literary testimony. Proselytes often identified themselves as such on inscriptions.49 And a variety of instances crop up in the literary sources. One need mention only the pointed story of the Assyrian Achior, as recounted in the Book of Judith. When the Jewess brought the head of Holofernes in triumph, Achior fell at her feet, declared his belief in the God 46 47 48

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Jos. CAp, 2.282; Philo, Mos. 2.20–21. Tac. Hist. 5.5.2; Juv. 14.96–102; Seneca, in Aug. CivDei, 6.11. See the convincing studies of S. A. McKnight, A Light among the Gentiles: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 11–77, and Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 60–90; as against L. H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 288–341. See, e.g., the list of donors for the synagogue at Aphrodisias which includes “proselytes” and “god-fearers”; Walter Ameling, Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis II: Kleinasien (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), Karien, no. 4.14, A, lines 13, 17, 22. Proselytes appear also on funerary inscriptions in the Jewish catacombs in Rome; David Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe, vol. I I: The City of Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), nos. 62, 218, 224, 392, 489, 577.

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of Israel, circumcised himself, and was added, as the text says, to the house of Israel up to this very day.50 A noteworthy narrative, recorded by Josephus, has Helena, queen of Adiabene in Mesopotamia, and her son Izates, become enamored of Judaism and decide upon conversion, and Izates, despite conflicting advice, even underwent circumcision.51 The historicity or lack thereof of these and other fanciful stories is immaterial. They take for granted the possibility that gentiles, even gentile rulers, could shake off their hallowed traditions and, in some sense, become Jews. What does this mean for a comprehension of Jewish national identity? We have little clue about what “conversion” to Judaism entailed, what steps needed to be taken or what hoops had to be jumped through – if any. Circumcision gains mention but was clearly not an inevitable requirement. One cannot imagine any significant number of proselytes voluntarily undergoing that ordeal. Beyond that, we have only vague references to the “ways of the Jews,” the “laws of the Jews,” or the “ancestral traditions of the Jews.”52 The very fact of conversion in some form, however, is a feature of the highest importance. The boasts of Philo and Josephus, the laments of Seneca and Tacitus, the inscriptions on stone from Rome, Asia Minor, and elsewhere that attest to proselytes, and the entertaining stories, whatever their validity, about acceptance of Judaism by benighted pagans and former enemies, prove that adoption of Judaism by non-Jews in some form or other was a known and not uncommon occurrence. And that itself tells the most important tale. If non-Jews could readily enter the nation of the Jews, that nation clearly did not define its essence in terms of descent from the patriarchs or an ethnic character carried in the genes, let alone identification with a native land or political dominion. A sense of Jewishness rested on a range of fluid, shifting traditions and practices that were open to outsiders, rather than confined to a cramped exclusivity.

Romans Openness to outsiders has still greater prominence in Roman history. Rome, of course, represents the very epitome of imperial power, rising eventually to dominance over the whole of the Mediterranean world and beyond. Did Romans articulate their collective identity, express their authority, or justify their imperial expansion as the achievement of a national entity with special 50 52

Judith, 14.6–10. 51 Jos. Ant. 20.17–96. See the language employed by Josephus in the Izates story; Ant. 20.17, 20.34–35, 20.38, 20.41, 20.47, 20.75.

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characteristics that rendered them distinct from and superior to neighbors and rivals? The Romans’ experience certainly gave them full confidence in their ascendancy, and they convinced themselves that the gods took care to guarantee their destiny and their dominion. The ingredients of their self-conception are manifold and tangled. The foundation myths themselves tell a revealing tale – or, rather, tales. As is well known, the Romans embraced and adapted a memorable fiction concocted by Greeks about the aftermath of the legendary Trojan War. The great hero Aeneas, saved from the flames of Troy, escaped with his immediate household, crossed the seas, and, after several detours and adventures, landed in Italy, where his progeny would establish a settlement in Rome. By propagating this tradition, the Romans felt perfectly comfortable and uncompromised in tracing the origins of their nation to a foreign figure from Greek legend. A variety of stories expanded the picture. The mingling of peoples, Trojans and Latins, that ensued after Aeneas’ arrival, proved to be emblematic of the blending and amalgamation that characterized much of Roman history. Tales multiplied in bewildering fashion, tracing Rome’s beginnings not just to Trojans but to a miscellany of Greek peoples, even to some mysterious folk like Aborigines and Pelasgians who helped to shape the nation from the outset. The canonical Trojan version, of course, stands in Vergil’s Aeneid, and was rendered in the classic prose treatment by Livy. But a different and quite complicated range of figures and people appear in the story as conveyed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek historian and near contemporary of Vergil and Livy. He observes that Romans welcomed large numbers of immigrants from cities and communities all over the Mediterranean whose cultures then merged with theirs.53 Indeed, tradition had it that the city, when established by Romulus, on advice from the oracle at Delphi, served as a haven and refuge for fugitives, debtors, slaves, homeless people, and the downtrodden generally.54 The populace and its growth thus depended upon an influx of persons from various places, backgrounds, and ethnic groups, a motley collection that stamped its story from the very inception. Cicero takes pride in Rome’s liberal policy of granting citizenship, from the time of Romulus on, to those who sought it, beginning with Sabines, Latins, Volscians, and Hernicans.55 In short, the predominant conceptualization 53

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Vergil, Aeneid, passim; Livy, 1.1–2; Dion. Hal. 1.9–13, 1.31, 1.89. For the tangled tradition generally and its gradual evolution, see E. S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 6–51; Andrew Erskine, Troy between Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2–43. Livy, 1.8.4–5; Plut. Rom. 9.3. 55 Cic. Pro Balbo, 31.

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conveyed by Roman writers has Rome as a blend of diverse peoples, a mongrel nation.56 The earliest kings of Rome, shrouded in legend and invention though they were, evoke significant reflections on Rome’s self-characterization. Two of the last three kings carry Etruscan names. This need not imply, as was once thought, an Etruscan conquest or domination in the regal period. But it does reflect acknowledgment of Rome’s position as part of a broader cultural milieu that enmeshed Latium, Etruria, and Campania. The emperor Claudius, centuries later, reminded his audience that Rome’s kings stemmed from foreign parts, that several of Rome’s most distinguished families derived from towns and peoples all over Italy, and that even non-Italians had been welcomed into the citizen body and to positions of leadership.57 Much of the surviving record of Rome’s extension of authority into various parts of Italy dwells on war, conquest, and appropriation. Yet the most enduring image from early Roman history, framed by its myth-makers, conveys a broader message: the “rape of the Sabine women.” According to the narrative, the episode culminated, after a brief generation, in intermarriage and a uniting of the peoples.58 The Roman king Romulus, according to the legend, had mollified the women by affirming that their marriages allowed them to participate in all the good fortunes of Rome and to share its civic privileges.59 The conclusion of the story reinforced the message. After years of warfare between Romans and Sabines, the women themselves brought the fierce contest to an end by inserting themselves between fathers and husbands and bringing about a pacific outcome. The historian Livy affirms that Romans and Sabines not only made peace but created a single civitas, a civic community, for the two peoples, with a share in rule, though ascendancy belonged to Rome.60 The portrayal of the settlement goes beyond a new political order. This was a union of communities. In addition to obtaining citizenship, the Sabines shared in religious rites.61 The narrative frame has as its central component the intermarriage of Romans and Sabines, the kinship relations that this produced, and the social, political, and religious connections that underpinned the union of the two peoples. The violence that stood at the tale’s inception was not suppressed or explained away. It constituted an essential feature, and emblematized the tensions and 56

57 58 60

See the fine discussion of Claudia Moatti, La raison de Rome: naissance de l’esprit critique à la fin de la République (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), 258–273. ILS, 212, col. 1, lines 10–19; Tac. Ann. 11.24; cf. Livy, 1.34.1–6. Livy, 1.9–13; Cic. De Rep. 2.13; Dion. Hal. 2.46.1–3; Plut. Rom. 19–21. 59 Livy,1.9.14. Livy, 1.13. 61 Cic. De Rep. 2.13; Dion. Hal. 2.26.3; Plut. Rom. 21.1.

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hostilities that marked the early (and not only the early) history of Roman expansion.62 But the story’s principal resonance lies in the creation of kinship ties that overcame belligerence and cemented bonds. The fact that this is the representation by later Romans (we do not have the Sabine version) has real significance for Roman self-perception. This notorious Sabine saga proved to be emblematic of the extension of Roman authority over the entire Italian peninsula. Brutality and bloodshed marked it throughout, but more stable and enduring relationships ensued. They included not just peace treaties and alliances that reinforced Roman advantage, but a whole network of associations that allowed for a share of civic privileges and accorded even Roman citizenship (though without the vote) to various Italian communities and peoples. Over the course of time colonies of Latins and Romans spread through parts of the peninsula, not strictly as means of occupation but as vehicles for the integration of diverse populations.63 The process was less a “conquest of Italy” than Rome’s attachment of Italy to itself. None of this stemmed from generosity or benevolence. The Romans profited from the complex of alliances and alignments and the exchange of privileges: they substantially increased the labour power on which Rome could call for further imperial expansion. The accumulation of bonds between Rome and Italian cities constituted a patchwork of relationships, some welcomed, others resisted by the diverse peoples of the peninsula. But the institutions themselves indicate an attitude that transcended any narrow parochialism. The question of how far Italians considered themselves Romans or indeed Romans considered themselves Italians admits of no easy answers. Attachments, as well as attitudes, doubtless varied from community to community. The Samnites in central Italy, for example, held tenaciously to their own martial traditions and fierce independence. And the regions of southern Italy originally colonized by Greeks maintained a strong Hellenic heritage. The idea of a shared lineage that encompassed Romans and Italians appears in some texts.64 Others, however, indicate that independent identities still prevailed. Italian peoples served in separate units in the allied 62

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This aspect is stressed by E. Dench, Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22–24, 253, 343–344. On these complex developments, see the discussions of A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), especially 38–133; E. T. Salmon, The Making of Roman Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (London: Routledge, 1995), especially 345–368. Vell. Pat. 2.15.2; Florus, 2.6.1–5; Appian, BC, 1.23.99.

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armies, not subsumed in an agglomerate.65 A notable passage in Cicero’s philosophic dialogue, De Legibus (On the Laws) gives voice to the tension. He explicitly raises the question of whether one born in a municipium (an Italian municipality) holds that as his true patria, or does the one patria that is shared in common, i.e. Rome, count as the fatherland – or can one have two fatherlands?66 Cicero himself, as a character in the dialogue, affirms that all those from the municipia do indeed have dual patriae. Cato, for instance, so Cicero asserts, though born in Tusculum, held Roman citizenship; hence the one was his patria by birth, the other his patria by law.67 The language is nontechnical. But Cicero insists that the two allegiances can coexist. For him, the civic community to which one belongs as a Roman citizen does not loosen in any way the ties that bind him to his native city or region. Tension adhered to the overlapping of Roman and Italian identities. Although Rome’s political hegemony gradually spread over Italy, the idea of nationhood remained problematic, manifesting itself in a pull between separatism and commonality. The tensions exploded into open warfare between Romans and many of their Italian allies in 90–88 B C E, the so-called Social War (the war between allies). The reasons for the Italian uprising are quite telling. The sources stress that the Italians fought not so much to get out from under Roman control, but to seek access to the full Roman citizenship that had been denied to or withheld from many Italian communities. The principal goal of the allies was partnership with the imperial power, thus to enjoy the full benefits of empire.68 In other words, the aim was not to shake off the Roman yoke but to join the Romans in yoking others. The Italian uprising itself actually, and perhaps paradoxically, stemmed from the sense of shared heritage itself – which, in Italian eyes, the Romans had betrayed. The Social War exemplified the very anomalies inherent in the perceptions of Roman or Italian nationhood. The contest came to a close only when Rome agreed to extend the franchise, with certain qualifications, to the whole of the peninsula.69 But the contest itself, ferocious and bloody as it had been, left its scars. Full 65 66

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Polyb. 2.24.5–14; Livy, 22.61.11–13; Florus, 2.6.6; Caes. BC, 1.15. Cic. De Leg. 2.5: id enim ego te accipio dicere Arpinum, germanam patriam esse vestram? Numquid duas habetis patrias? An est una illa patria communis? A. R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, De Legibus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 257–258. Cic. De Leg. 2.5: omnibus municipibus duas esse censeo patrias, unam naturae, alteram civitatis, ut ille Cato, cum esset Tusculi natus, in populi Romani civitatem, susceptus est; ita, cum ortu Tusculanus esset, civitate Romanus, habuit alteram loci patriam, alteram iuris. Cic. Phil. 12.27; Vell. Pat. 2.15.2; Justin, 38.4.13; Appian, BC, 1.34.152–155, 1.39.176. Vell. Pat. 1.20.2, 2.16.4; Appian, BC, 1.49.212–213, 1.53.231.

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integration of Italians into the Roman body politic took many decades thereafter. The achievement of a meaningful nationhood was still not on the horizon. Nor did Italian lineage constitute a prerequisite for collective identity. Perhaps the most striking of Roman practices, unparalleled elsewhere in antiquity, was that of awarding citizenship to manumitted slaves. Here again this did not stem from altruism. Romans dangled the reward of emancipation to slaves as an incentive for loyalty and submission – more a matter of practicality than philanthropy. But that does not alter the fundamental fact. The vast majority of Roman slaves came from abroad, war captives, victims of the slave trade, or the descendants of such persons. Citizenship gave them a stake in the community, a legitimate part in civic life, and, after a generation, the right even to hold office. As is clear, Romans felt no discomfort with infusing into their citizen body persons from a full range of ethnic backgrounds, languages, and traditions. The spread of Roman citizenship beyond Italy reinforced the principle of encompassing diverse peoples within the framework of the empire as participants rather than solely as subjects. Not that the Romans embarked on any mission to extend the benefits of Roman culture and civilization to the inferior peoples of their dominions. The idea of “Romanization,” once viewed by scholars as an imposition by the conquering power upon its submissive subalterns, is now properly understood as largely the initiative of the provincials, especially those of the upper echelons who sought to adapt Roman culture to advance their own positions in the new power structure. They may have internalized Roman values, but they were not force-fed by a “civilizing mission.” And, indeed, incorporation into the Roman Empire did not obliterate native cultures, but created a situation whereby they could coexist to mutual advantage.70 The eventual bestowal of Roman citizenship on all inhabitants of the empire in 212 C E came not as a bolt out of the blue but as the culmination of a lengthy and gradual process. It developed in fits and starts rather than on a smooth and teleological course. But it exhibits a mind-set that embraces pluralism as a hallmark of national identity. Of course, the Romans could be ruthless and devastating in war and ultimately 70

On the concept of “Romanization,” see Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 4–7, 238–249; Enrico Benelli, “The Romanization of Italy through the Epigraphic Record,” in S. G. Keay and Nicola Terrenato (eds.), Italy and the West: Comparative Issues in Romanization (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2001), 7–16; Andrew Wallace–Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), especially 9–28.

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unparalleled in the spread of their dominion. But the expansion of Roman authority went beyond an exhibition of power and the subjection of inferiors. Romans had a notably capacious self-perception. As Cicero put it, if we Romans were to compare ourselves with foreign peoples, we would discover that we are either equal or even inferior in all other matters, but far superior in one feature, namely in religio, i.e. devotion to the gods.71 That striking statement reveals a deeper layer of self-understanding. Like the Jews, Romans too saw themselves as a chosen people, not from any ethnic or national distinctiveness, but from a supreme self-confidence that they possessed the favor of the gods.

Conclusion The search for nationhood in antiquity is a highly problematic and probably irrelevant endeavor. Ancient attitudes to collective identity do not map readily on to familiar constructs of nationality. They were either more splintered or more capacious. And they followed no formula. The idea of Greece as a focus of loyalty and a source of inspiration plays only a small role in Hellenic history, a far less potent emblem than identification with individual city-states or with regional loyalties. That fact was compounded by the spread of Greek colonies in the western and eastern Mediterranean that often fragmented attachments to mother-cities but also engendered admixtures with indigenous peoples. Numerous tales (legendary or not) have Greek cities founded by immigrants from abroad who stamped their character upon the foundations, thus broadening and softening the contours of Hellenic distinctiveness. The continued vitality of the individual polis, even in the Hellenistic era of monarchies and empires, significantly compromised attachment to larger entities, let alone to any overarching Greekness. Jewish nationhood would be hard to pinpoint or define in the GrecoRoman period. Reconstructions of the Israelite past downplayed concepts of a pure lineage or a continuous descent group. Diaspora Jews swiftly outnumbered by a large margin those who dwelled in Palestine, and they were themselves scattered around the Mediterranean, thus impeding any unitary sense of common purpose, territory, or nationality. Encouragement for and welcoming of converts to Judaism swelled their numbers but also underscored the fact that they eschewed the narrow conceptualization associated with the “chosen people.” 71

Cic. De Nat. Deor. 2.8.

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Roman openness to the outsider was still more pronounced. The legends of Rome’s earliest history reflect a self-conception that saw the nation as an amalgam of diverse peoples from the very outset. The extension of Roman power through the Italian peninsula consisted as much of incorporation as of conquest, thereby applying a more inclusive cast to their brand of national identity. The liberal bestowal of Roman citizenship, in one form or other, first on various Italian communities, then on recipients abroad, and even on emancipated slaves from a wide range of nationalities, gave the citizen population a remarkably motley character and eclipsed any cramped sense of nationalist self-perception. Nationhood is a modern construct. Ancients not only did not have the term, they did not formulate the principle or deliberate its meaning. That does not, of course, preclude us from employing the concept. But its application to the ancients as a means of comprehending their sense of collective identity may have matters exactly the wrong way round. Too much effort has been spent on concocting criteria and then seeing if they fit. The ancients’ own experience and their own comprehension frustrate the imposition of any conventional categories of nationhood. The three cases discussed here reveal patchwork rather than pattern. In each case, however, it is somewhat reassuring to see that the actions and attitudes escaped the pinched and circumscribed ethnocentrism that too often attaches to nationhood today.

Further Reading Cornell, T. J., The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars, c.1000–263 B C (London: Routledge, 1995). Goodblatt, David, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Gruen, E. S., Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Hall, Edith, Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Hall, J. M., Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Hall, J. M., Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). Malkin, Irad, Ancient Perceptions of Greek Ethnicity (Washington, DC: Harvard University Press, 2001). Mendels, Doron, The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism: Christian and Jewish Ethnicity in Ancient Palestine (New York: Doubleday, 1992). Salmon, E. T., The Making of Roman Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

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Nationhood: Was There Such a Thing in Antiquity? Schwartz, Seth, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Mohammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Schwartz, Seth, “Were the Ancient Jews a Nation?”, in F. E. Greenspahn, Early Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 71–96. Sherwin-White, A. N. The Roman Citizenship, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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3

The Holy Roman Empire len scales Since the nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire has occupied a central but often negative place in accounts of German nationhood. “In the beginning was the Reich,” declared Heinrich August Winkler in his monumental German history, which took as its starting point the empire’s abolition in 1806.1 It was with the empire that, in Winkler’s view fatally, “that which distinguishes German history from the history of the great western-European nations has . . . its origin.” Winkler’s judgment reflects a viewpoint which has been tenacious and highly influential: that at the heart of the problem of German nation-making lay the peculiar and deficient character of Germany’s premodern “state,” the empire itself. Whereas other European nations had developed within the framework of governments exercising sovereign power over firmly bounded populations, the Reich, after a promising start, had fallen prey to universalist fantasies, fragmentation, institutional atrophy, and the interference of foreign powers. At the empire’s final, allegedly unlamented demise, the German people constituted a mere Kulturnation, a scattered population of shared language and custom, but lacking the unifying steel of firm, centralizing rule. That steel was destined to be supplied by Prussia. This chapter is concerned with the medieval period, comprising roughly the first two-thirds of the empire’s thousand-year history. The Middle Ages have been central to modern narratives of the tortuous and anomalous course of German nation-making, since it was in those early centuries that the prize of nationhood was supposedly first glimpsed and then fatally lost. On this view, rooted in nineteenth-century conceptions of the sovereign nation-state, nation-making in the German lands ran backwards, from early promise, under vigorous “German” kings, to imperial hubris, overreach, betrayal, and a long decline into sleepy provincialism and political impotence. In what follows, a different account of the relationship between the empire and collective identities is presented, setting aside ideal-typical 1

Heinrich A. Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 2000), vol. 1, 5.

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models of the nation-state and concentrating on the medieval evidence. To do this is important, because how we judge the relationship between the Reich and conceptions of peoplehood and common belonging in the Middle Ages will affect our understanding of postmedieval German nationhood, too. More broadly, the empire offers valuable insights into how a relatively weak, decentralized but prestigious polity could foster durable collective identities – in some ways, precisely on account of its apparent shortcomings. What, then, was the Holy Roman Empire, and how did it develop during the Middle Ages? The empire’s origins are usually traced to the coronation of the Frankish king Charlemagne (r. 768–814) by the pope in Rome on Christmas Day A D 800. This event marked the revival in western Europe of the imperial title, defunct since the abdication of the last Roman emperor in the west in A D 476. There is justification for this view, since commentators in the later Middle Ages came to appeal to Charlemagne’s authority as a founder-figure. The events of 800 were also important in establishing the idea that the pope might designate a single powerful, hegemonic ruler as a guardian for the Catholic Church and a militant propagator of the Christian faith. But too much stress upon Charlemagne is misleading, because his coronation did not immediately establish a stable new institution of western emperorship in the hands of rulers from the Germanic north. That only developed, together with a supporting body of traditions, symbols, rituals, and an official vocabulary, slowly and at first fitfully, over the course of subsequent decades and centuries. (The term “Holy Roman Empire” itself first appeared in the twelfth century and only became widespread in the thirteenth.) Charlemagne had ruled over a large agglomeration of territories, including much of what later became the kingdom of France, as well as core regions of the medieval Empire in Germany and northern Italy. His dynasty, the Carolingians, regarded monarchy as a family affair, sharing out the rule of their accumulated patrimony between different male members. An important moment came in A D 843 with the Treaty of Verdun, which divided Charlemagne’s territorial empire among his grandsons, establishing separate eastern and western kingdoms, as well as a middle realm encompassing northern Italy and what came to be known as Lotharingia. Much remained fluid until the early tenth century, when the Saxon duke Henry was raised to the throne east of the Rhine by Frankish and Saxon magnates, to rule (in subsequent reckoning) as Henry I (r. 919–936). Henry was succeeded on the throne by his second son, Otto, who as Otto I (r. 936–973) revived the 55

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Carolingian tradition of involvement in Italy and in 962 was crowned emperor in Rome by the pope. The rule of these Saxon (or Ottonian) monarchs marks a turning point since henceforth the western imperial monarchy was to have a continuous history down to 1806, even though not all its medieval rulers would be crowned as emperor. Henry I established the practice, continued by his successors, of passing on his territorial power-base undivided to a single heir. The patterns set by his son Otto, of military campaigns south of the Alps, close dealings with the papacy, and the expectation of imperial coronation in Rome, likewise proved binding in the centuries that followed. The Ottonians also continued the Carolingian tradition of war against their pagan eastern neighbors, under an ideological mantle of upholding and propagating the Christian faith, as well as to defend their frontiers and extend their territorial power. Over the course of successive reigns, emperors reinforced their rule over Italy, which came to be regarded as a distinct component kingdom of the empire, with its own crown. Down to the fourteenth century, Italy remained an important sphere of activity for the empire’s rulers, some of whom led repeated expeditions to the south and spent a significant portion of their reigns there. Only two, however, the Ottonian Otto III (r. 980–1002) and the Hohenstaufen Frederick II (r. 1212–1250), made serious attempts to rule from beyond the Alps: even in its central-medieval heyday, the empire was a fundamentally northern institution. Early in the eleventh century a Burgundian realm was added, comprising territories in Switzerland and southeastern France. It, too, had a crown, though few medieval monarchs troubled to undergo investiture. Within the Germanic-speaking core-lands in the north, the focus of power shifted over time with successive dynasties, reflecting the changing concentration of familial lands and resources. Under the Ottonians these lay principally in Saxony, although the old Carolingian heartlands on the Rhine remained important. The middle Rhine provided a center of gravity for the next dynasty, the Salians, whose members ruled down to 1125, and under whom Speyer attained prominence as a royal burial site and a center for dynastic self-representation. The Salians’ successors, the Hohenstaufen, who provided kings and emperors until 1254, had their power-base in the southwest, in Swabia and Alsace. One result of this changing dynastic focus was that for most of the Middle Ages there was no stable center of rule, let alone anything that might be termed a capital, in the empire’s northern lands. (See Figure 3.1.) 56

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Figure 3.1 The Holy Roman Empire in the time of Charles IV (d. 1378)

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Only in the final medieval centuries did this begin to change, as rulers from new families attained the throne and assembled the resources of dynastic power. These were no longer to be sought in the properties and incomes that came with the imperial title, which by the late Middle Ages were falling increasingly under the control of local and regional powers. Nor could the new dynasties count on enjoying lasting possession of the crown, which after the thirteenth century was in the gift of a constitutionally defined college of prince-electors. The Luxembourg dynasty, which first gained the empire with the election of Henry VII (r. 1308–1313), constructed over the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century a large, hereditary patrimony in east-central Europe. Charles IV (r. 1346–1378) developed Prague, the chief city of his dynastic kingdom of Bohemia, as a major metropolis, which for a short time functioned as a de facto capital for the empire. Following the extinction of the Luxembourgs in the fifteenth century, their place was taken by the Habsburgs, who had built a dynastic power-bloc in the far southeast of Germany. By the end of the Middle Ages Vienna had emerged as both a dynastic capital and an important site of imperial government. Monarchical rule in the empire was itinerant, and the locations for the ruler’s material and ideological support were always plural. This principle found expression already in the process of accession to the throne, in which election by the princes, customarily in Frankfurt, was followed by coronation and enthronement at the old Carolingian center of Aachen. Power was principally exercised through ritualized face-to-face encounters. Kings and emperors summoned periodic assemblies of the ecclesiastical and secular magnates of the empire. These met at a variety of accustomed sites, mainly in Germany, often on the high feast-days of the Church. In the late Middle Ages these meetings increasingly took place at urban centers and were also attended by representatives of the imperial towns. Institutions of impersonal government remained modest, at least when compared with the resources of central record-keeping, justice, and taxation that developed in neighboring western European kingdoms over the course of the Middle Ages. Although most of the empire’s medieval rulers hailed from its German territories and were raised to the throne by German princes, Italy long remained a major theater of their activity and relations with the papacy, on which they depended for imperial coronation, a long-running preoccupation and problem. The difficulties were partly ideological, since popes and emperors were ascribed a joint headship of Catholic Christendom, the terms of which, however, remained debatable, and partly material, with the emperor’s territorial claims in Italy threatening the papacy’s jealously 58

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guarded independence. The conflicts of emperors and popes, which were recurrent between the late eleventh and the mid-fourteenth century, proved particularly intractable and destructive because they often became entangled with political rivalries and princely ambitions north of the Alps. The damage that resulted was partly to the reputation of the imperial monarchy, which became at times a focus of bitter controversy and division. (Of the emperors who ruled during the centuries of conflict, few avoided excommunication.) But the long absences of monarchs in the south – Frederick Barbarossa (r. 1152–1190) spent more than a third of his reign campaigning in Italy – tended also to reinforce the natural regionalism and constitutional polycentricity of their northern lands. Only in the last two medieval centuries did these patterns change somewhat. For German historians writing in the nationalist tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the medieval Empire was a source of both allure and disappointment. Their approaches, long shaped by memories of the rise of Prussia and the founding of the German Empire of 1871, usually regarded a strong “state” as both reflecting and providing an indispensable basis for the growth of national identity. Much attention was devoted to fixing with precision “the origins of the German Reich” in the late ninth or early tenth century.2 The rival merits of 843, 911 (the first accession of a non-Carolingian east of the Rhine), 919, or other purportedly axial dates were weighed, as if these marked the founding moments of a modern-style nation-state. For Martin Lintzel, for example, “the will of the German Volk to independence achieved breakthrough” in the Treaty of Verdun dividing Charlemagne’s inheritance.3 A concern with origins and the power of kings long survived the discrediting of German-nationalist medievalism in 1945. After mid-century, however, the task became to explain why the German nation, which had seemingly enjoyed the same promising post-Carolingian start as the French, subsequently failed to grow healthily within monarchical state structures like its western neighbor.4 Implicitly or explicitly, Germany’s imperial Sonderweg, lamented by Heinrich August Winkler, was ascribed much of the blame. If one approach looked for a German nation-making moment antedating imperial titles, another, often reflecting modern imperialist longings, 2

3

4

See the essays in Helmut Kämpf (ed.), Die Entstehung des Deutschen Reiches: Deutschland um 900 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956). Cited in Gerd Tellenbach, “Wann ist das Deutsche Reich entstanden?”, in Kämpf, Entstehung, 175. See Carlrichard Brühl, Deutschland – Frankreich: Die Geburt zweier Völker (Cologne: Böhlau, 1990).

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highlighted the power of the empire itself, in its high medieval heyday, as constituting proof of a strong underlying sense of nation. Founding empires was surely what proud, self-confident nations did. Wilhelm von Giesebrecht thus presented his Deutsche Kaiserzeit – the “German imperial age” between the tenth and the twelfth century, the subject of his popular multivolume history – as the time “in which our people, strong in its unity, attained the fullest extent of its powers.”5 Medieval Germans were at their most German when at their most triumphantly imperial – a view which, while it never entirely silenced the empire’s kleindeutsch critics, received strong affirmation in both academic and political circles after the foundation of a new German Reich in 1933. A handful of historians continued into the second half of the twentieth century to discern in the empire of the Salians and Hohenstaufen a “German national state.”6 The late Middle Ages, when the empire no longer dominated the European political stage, were for a long time largely ignored by historians in search of a medieval German nation. What these approaches often had in common was a tendency to focus on external, objective criteria – the foundation of new polities, the assertion of imperial power – to the relative or complete neglect of subjective expressions of medieval consciousness and mentalities. The experience of modernity seemed to make clear both that healthy nations existed within well-made political structures and that their vitality, and thus self-consciousness, waxed and waned with the tides of political and military power. What more was there to seek? The result in the German case was a concentration in studies of medieval nationhood upon centuries in which the evidence for its existence is limited and problematic, at the expense of other, later centuries when such evidence becomes more explicit and abundant. For the much-studied, supposedly formative, late and post-Carolingian periods, the historian has little to work with beyond names – and a meager and unpromising tally even of those. Titles, when used politically, often placed their stress on political multiplicity rather than on unity. Ottonian kingship claimed to derive its legitimacy from acknowledgment by a plurality of established peoples (“the population of Franks and Saxons”); Otto I presented himself on occasion as a “king of the Franks and Lombards.”7 5

6

7

Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 5 vols. (Braunschweig: Schwetschke, 1855–1880), vol. 1, vii–viii. E.g. Karl Gottfried Hugelmann, Stämme, Nation und Nationalstaat im Deutschen Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1955). Eckhard Müller-Mertens, “Frankenreich oder Nicht-Frankenreich? Überlegungen zum Reich der Ottonen anhand des Herrschertitels und der politischen Struktur des Reiches,” in Carlrichard Brühl and Bernd Schneidmüller (eds.), Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Reichs-

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The idea of the imperial monarchy as the outcome of common action by a multiplicity of northern peoples proved long-lasting. As late as the thirteenth century, the widely copied vernacular law code known as the Sachsenspiegel could still proceed directly from discussing the election of the monarch to claiming that the Saxons, Bavarians, Franks, and Swabians, on whom his rule rested, had once inhabited their own kingdoms.8 When a unifying political identity was sought for the populations of the former Carolingian territories east of the Meuse and for their new rulers, until at least the eleventh century the habitual recourse was to the well-established, legitimizing theme of Frankishness. It is around the year 1000 and in the decades that follow that references to “the Germans” (Teutonici) start to appear in growing, if still modest, numbers. Their provenance and contexts are revealing, since they occur mainly in writings from south of the Alps or from the southern borderlands of the empire’s cisalpine core, and they often relate to the campaigns undertaken by the monarch, with northern military support, in Italy.9 The same sources and contexts also yield early references to a “German language” (lingua Teutonica), purportedly common (and by implication exclusive) to the different Germanic groups united in imperial service. A “German people” therefore seems first to have become visible to contemporaries in consequence of its rulers’ imperial turn during the tenth century and their ventures in the south. It appears to have been southerners, responding to the incursions from across the Alps, who did much to teach “the Germans” about their common existence as a community of imagination. But what above all transformed a collection of labels and epithets into something more substantial was the descent of the imperial monarchy’s relations with the papacy into bitter, protracted controversy during the second half of the eleventh century. Nothing did more to lend salience and lasting currency to a vocabulary of common Germanness than the campaign waged by the reforming Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–1085) to combat and constrain what a new generation of clerical zealots had come to regard as unwarranted interference in ecclesiastical affairs by the emperor. The papal challenge had partly been provoked by the development during the eleventh century of an increasingly ambitious

8

9

und Nationsbildung in Deutschland und Frankreich, Historische Zeitschrift Beiheft 24 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997), 48–50. Sachsenspiegel Landrecht, ed. Karl August Eckhardt, Monumenta Germaniae Historica [henceforth MGH] Fontes Iuris Germanici Antiqui, Nova Series 1.i (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1955), 238. Johannes Fried, Der Weg in die Geschichte: Die Ursprünge Deutschlands bis 1024 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1994), 20–21.

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doctrine of Christian emperorship, which insisted on the emperor’s duty and power to intervene at the highest levels within the Church for the general good. The papal party sought in response to force the monarchy back within clear boundaries, which the Church now claimed the power to define. The empire’s ruler, the pope and his allies insisted, was a mere German monarch, ruling over a German polity (regnum Teutonicorum), implicitly no different from other territorial kingdoms.10 The role of the “Investiture Contest,” as the conflict (which focused particularly on the monarch’s power to install, or “invest,” bishops) is known, as a stimulus to collective identities in the empire, is important in a number of seemingly paradoxical ways. The crucial formative interventions in imperial affairs were hostile ones, by an external actor, and they challenged some of the most explicitly universal aspects of the emperor’s titles and claims. The conflict resulted in no imperial triumph, but rather contention and protracted instability, which threatened the empire’s prestige. But its effect was also to lend urgency to debates about the nature of the imperial monarchy and to compel the taking of sides on matters where the salvation of souls seemed to be at stake. The consequences for political identities in the empire were initially complex. One result was, in response to papal attempts at limiting the monarchy’s scope, to encourage further emphasis by the imperialist party on the empire’s Roman and Christian-universal qualities. The practice of numbering medieval emperors in direct succession from Caesar and Augustus, which had developed in the eleventh century, became established as a widespread and lasting convention. The monarch’s title, as employed in his formal acts of government, now placed greater emphasis on the universal and sacral qualities of his rule. From the early twelfth century onward, he was styled “by the grace of God ever-august king of the Romans” from the time of his first coronation in Aachen.11 Over the course of subsequent decades, the empire itself came to be termed “holy” (sacrum), as well as Roman. The official vocabulary henceforth remained largely stable until the end of the Middle Ages. With the increasing adoption of the vernacular by the imperial chancery in the fourteenth century, the resonant Latin titles were translated directly into German. 10

11

Eckhard Müller-Mertens, Regnum Teutonicum: Aufkommen und Verbreitung der deutschen Reichs- und Königsauffassung im frühen Mittelalter (Vienna: Böhlau, 1970), 388–389. For what follows, see Gottfried Koch, Auf dem Wege zum Sacrum Imperium: Studien zur ideologischen Herrschaftsbegründung der deutschen Zentralgewalt im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau, 1972).

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Ruler and Reich were also Romanized and ascribed a general guardianship over the Church in Latin and vernacular literature in verse and prose from the empire’s northern lands. References to a “German” monarchy or sphere of rule, or to the monarch’s activities in “Germany” or (in the vernacular) “the German lands,” are occasionally to be found in diplomas and letters under the imperial seal, and more often in chronicles, political verses, and imperialist treatises. More is said about these references below. In most such cases, however, an encompassing, legitimizing Christian-Roman framework of rule is implied, or explicitly emphasized. But the closer reflection upon the empire discernible from the era of the “Investiture Contest” also stimulated consideration of how its character had changed since the time of its foundation. In particular, the fact that, titles notwithstanding, the empire’s rulers were patently not Roman in origin but northerners, raised to the throne by princes of Germanic, not Latinate, speech and culture called for explanation. The idea that imperial rule had passed, from the Romans or the Byzantine Greeks, to a new bearer-people – the Franks – had gained currency already in the ninth century. From the late eleventh, the view began to find expression that the Roman Empire was held by the German people.12 At around the same time, a legend took shape, recounting the origins of the Germans as a single, albeit composite, community. Significantly, this legend, which is first encountered in a vernacular verse Life of St. Anno of Cologne, portrays the ethnogenesis of the Germans (who, however, appear only adjectivally, as “German” men) as resulting from a union of the Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, and Swabians in common military service in the south. Caesar, so the story goes, after conquering the northern peoples, resolved to march on Rome and take sole power. His success in the venture rested upon the combined (and thereby “German”) military forces that he brought over the Alps.13 The tale was reproduced and elaborated in the widely read twelfthcentury Kaiserchronik and in a number of later vernacular histories, in which the element of common “German” achievement was given greater emphasis. It presents the origins of the German people as contemporary with and causally inseparable from the foundation of the Roman Empire. The unifying element is portrayed as military prowess in service of imperial goals.

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See generally Werner Goez, Translatio Imperii: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtsdenkens und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1958). Das Anno-Lied, ed. Martin Opitz (1639; repr. Heidelberg: Winter, 1946), 32.

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This did not, however, explain how the empire had come into the Germans’ hands. One explanation, advanced by influential Latin histories, maintained that the Franks were themselves Germans and that Charlemagne, as an imperial founder-figure, had bestowed a lasting title on his fellow countrymen. The more developed versions of this argument made appeal to the Trojan legend in order to claim for the Franks or Germans and the Romans a common origin in migrant warrior bands from Troy. It was therefore only proper that two such illustrious and interrelated peoples should between them provide the spiritual and secular heads of Christendom: Roman popes and Franco-German emperors. On another widely received view, which sidestepped the problem of Frankish ethnicity, the empire had been translated to the Germans with the renewal of the imperial title under the Ottonians in the tenth century. But translated by whom? If some accounts ascribed the foundational deed to Charlemagne, another highly influential view insisted that the initiative in the empire’s transfer had lain with the pope. The definitive statement on the matter was Innocent III’s decretal Venerabilem of 1202, issued at a time when the pope was claiming the power to judge between rival claimants to the imperial throne. Innocent’s bull explained how the Holy See, in translating the Roman Empire from the Greeks to the Germans (Germani) in the person of Charlemagne, had granted the princes “the right and power of electing the king, afterwards to be raised to emperor.”14 Venerabilem is important in several ways. Its incorporation into canon law ensured that it became widely known among the learned and was much cited to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. It asserted that the empire had been gained by the Germans through no mere act of force, but by the independent judgment of an external authority – the pope, as Christ’s earthly representative – based on their suitability as temporal protectors for the Church. It implicitly raised the prospect that what the pope had given he might take away, and it invited reflection on the collective qualities that had earned the Germans the empire, and on whether their descendants still exemplified those qualities. Importantly, it located the Germanness of the empire not in its rulers, but in the princes who chose them. By the thirteenth century, the old idea that the emperor ruled by the assent and acclamation of a plurality of northern peoples had developed into the belief that he was chosen by “the Germans,” understood as a composite 14

Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Emil Albert Friedberg, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1872–1881), vol. 11, cols. 79–82.

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community formed from those same ancient peoples. The Schwabenspiegel, a vernacular law code, put it succinctly: “the Germans elect the king: King Charles [i.e. Charlemagne] gained this for them.”15 During the thirteenth century, under the impetus of recurrent disputed successions, and stimulated particularly by the struggles accompanying the fall of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the idea of the “German” princes as the monarch’s electors was refined into a more precise body of constitutional titles and practices. By the century’s close, the composition of the college of seven prince-electors (three prelates and four secular magnates), whose powers and privileges would be codified in the Golden Bull of 1356, was already largely settled. The princes, headed by the electors, were made the subject of a Germanizing political vocabulary which, in its habitual application, contrasts with the customarily Christian-Roman styles of the monarchs they created (though the princes too were often simply styled “imperial”). To the higher nobility was ascribed collective responsibility for the Germans’ continuing hold on the imperial title. Since “German” identity was largely defined in relation to the empire, the princes became a principal repository and measure of Germanness itself. The treatise writer Alexander von Roes, whose works date from the 1280s, argued that the entire German people displayed the character of nobles: they were Christendom’s militia, with the aristocrat’s natural rapacity and love of quarrels. Their Italian and French neighbors, by contrast, had the less bellicose attributes respectively of plebeians and clerics.16 This was why, Alexander insisted, the Germans alone were born to possess the empire. That the Germans were outstanding warriors, and that they demonstrated their martial aptitudes in the service of the emperor, above all in campaigns south of the Alps, is a recurrent theme in writings from the empire’s German lands.17 It rested upon interdependent ethnic stereotypes, contrasting the masculine harshness of the Germans with the supposed softness and submissiveness of their southern neighbors and subjects. Violence in the empire’s name attains an almost ritual quality in later medieval chronicle accounts. Henry VII, for example, is described as displaying his “fury” at the siege of Brescia in 1311, overawing the rebellious citizens with “the invincible eagles of 15

16

17

Schwabenspiegel Kurzform, ed. Karl August Eckhardt, MGH Fontes Iuris Germanici Antiqui, Nova Series 4, 2nd edn (Hanover: Hahn, 1974), 182. Alexander von Roes, Noticia seculi, in Alexander von Roes: Schriften, ed. Herbert Grundmann and Hermann Heimpel, MGH Staatsschriften des späteren Mittelalters 1.i (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1958), 160. See generally Len E. Scales, “Germen Militiae: War and German Identity in the Later Middle Ages,” Past and Present, 180 (2003), 41–82.

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Germany.”18 Even the numerically depleted and largely pacific journeys undertaken by fifteenth-century kings to Rome for coronation were still staged at symbolically important moments as ostentatiously military spectacle. Later medieval writers constructed the Germans as a community of honor, based on their possession of the empire. But their title had constantly to be vindicated in the eyes of their neighbors, through warlike deeds in defence of Church and faith and in order to assert imperial rights against rebels. “Should the German tongue lose its right [to the empire], its honour will be undermined,” warned a vernacular poet in troubled times in the thirteenth century.19 The identity of the Germans as custodians of the Roman Empire came to rest upon the ascription to them, and specifically to their princes, of a body of imagined common qualities that at times appear non-Roman or even explicitly anti-Roman. The chronicler Otto of Freising imagined Barbarossa’s troops, in battle with the Roman citizenry in 1155, as saying, ‘Take now, O Rome, Teutonic iron instead of Arabian gold. This is the price which your prince offers you for your crown. Thus do the Franks purchase empire.”20 The empire’s bearers were proudly transmontani: men from beyond the Alps.21 It is revealing that, despite the Roman titles of their monarchs, the beneficiaries of the empire’s translation never – as did the Byzantines as custodians of the Eastern Empire – styled themselves “Romans.” A problem with the anti-Roman imperial identity of the Germans, however, was that it was not entirely of their own making. And as the empire became mired in controversy arising from its rulers’ Italian wars and recurrent conflicts with the papacy, and as the power and resources of those rulers dwindled in the later Middle Ages, this came increasingly to matter. The positive self-construction of the Germans as the fierce warrior-servants of empire and church was disconcertingly similar to the negative portrayals of 18

19

20

21

Die Königsaaler Geschichts-Quellen mit den Zusätzen und der Fortsetzung des Domherrn Franz von Prag, ed. Johann Loserth, Fontes rerum Austriacarum: Oesterreichische Geschichtsquellen 1.8 (Vienna: Karl Gerold’s Sohn, 1875), 342–343. Politische Lyrik des deutschen Mittelalters: Texte, ed. Ulrich Müller, 2 vols. (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1972), vol. I, 68. Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Friderici I. Imperatoris, ed. Georg Waitz, MGH Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum 46 (Hanover: Hahn, 1884), 113. My translation follows Otto of Freising and his continuator, Rahewin, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, ed. Charles Christopher Mierow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 151. See Peter Godman, “Transmontani: Frederick Barbarossa, Rainald of Dassel, and the Cultural Identity of the German Empire,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 132 (2010), 200–229.

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them by their neighbors in the south and west, as a cruel, turbulent, and disorderly people. Both views drew upon the same antique tropes for the barbarian: in the eyes both of their literate champions and of their Italian victims and critics, imperial armies exemplified the “Teutonic fury” (furor Teutonicus) which Lucan (39–65 AD) had made proverbial and which Henry VII was praised for displaying before Brescia.22 To critical observers – some of whom by the later Middle Ages were themselves German – the collective qualities habitually cited to justify the Germans’ hold on the Roman Empire might look more like a disqualification. After Frederick II’s imperial coronation in 1220, no more emperors were crowned in Rome for nearly a century. Frederick’s own bitter conflict with the papacy had seen him denounced by opponents as the biblical Antichrist and culminated in his formal deposition in 1245, at a church council presided over by the pope in person. Although “kings of the Romans” continued during the following century to be crowned at Aachen, none before Henry VII ventured over the Alps, and even in Germany the power of many was limited and contested. Given that the empire was by general agreement a transferable dignity, possession of which was justified above all by the idoneity of its possessors, voices were now heard urging its transfer afresh, to a more suitable people. A candidate seemed to some readily to hand, in the kings of France, who claimed descent from Charlemagne and his Franks, and whose reputation as devout and orthodox crusaders appeared to contrast favorably with the empire’s existing incumbents. The empire had become the subject of a lively treatise literature already during the “Investiture Contest,” reflecting its intimate but contested relationship with the Church and its head. Tracts defending the empire multiplied again in the years of internal strife and weakness, French political ascendancy, and recurrent tensions and conflicts with the Curia, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. The majority of these were the work of Germans, and the origins, character, entitlements, and defects of their people were often a prominent theme. The empire’s seeming enfeeblement and the imminent threat to what in German eyes appeared the proper order of peoples thus stimulated close reflection on the nature and implications of Germanness. Nothing of the kind was brought forth by the preceding high medieval Kaiserzeit of imperial (and to an older historical generation, German) ascendancy in Europe. Often, such works addressed the princes, 22

Ernst Dümmler, “Über den furor Teutonicus,” Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (phil.-hist. Klasse), 9 (1897), 112–126.

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lauding the deeds of their ancestors and reminding them of the collective honor that they would forfeit, together with the empire, if they continued to exemplify the vices rather than the virtues of their people. The importance of this treatise literature as reflecting or stimulating a sense of German peoplehood should not be overstated. Before the fifteenth century, all major known works are in Latin, and they often survive in very few manuscripts. Nevertheless, they clearly reflect debates that were current in clerical circles, and there are indications that some of the participants had connections to wider literate groups and networks. The heterogeneous, sometimes relatively modest, origins of their authors are an indication that the ideas with which they dealt were no preserve of rarefied court elites. Indeed, the late medieval imperial court played little part in the production of tracts in the empire’s defence. Characteristically for the political culture of the Reich, the households of prelates of the Church were an important venue for their composition and discussion. It was therefore natural that the empire should have been drawn into the debates about church reform which became increasingly urgent during the first half of the fifteenth century. This was a time of seemingly intractable schism in the papacy, which also saw the emergence of other powerful elements of religious division in Europe. The great church councils which met on imperial soil to address these matters, at Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1434–1449), acted as venues for the copying and circulation of older imperial reform treatises and the writing of new ones. Partly as a result of its own perceived failings and partly in the context of wider plans for the reform of the Church, the Reich now came to be debated – and debated by German speakers, from German perspectives – as never before. Speaking of the existence of a “German nation” even as late as the fifteenth century is possible only with much qualification. Quite a varied vocabulary of Latin names for land (Teutonia, Alemannia, Germania, sometimes with the addition of the more explicitly political regnum, or “realm”) and people was by then well established and in fairly common use among chroniclers and polemicists.23 Although each term had its own penumbra of meaning, they were in large degree interchangeable. They also occur quite often in the written acts of later medieval kings and emperors, although seldom in the more dignified clauses of their documents. Cognate terms are regularly encountered in vernacular writings, mostly formed from the originally 23

For what follows, see Len Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245–1414 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 10.

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linguistic signifier tiutsch, though it is revealing here that the most common territorial form was the plural “German lands” (tiutschiu lant, occasionally tiutschiu rîche). The geographical bounds of those lands were the subject of at least broad consensus, with the imperial frontier north of the Alps playing an important part in their definition. “German tongue” (tiutschiu zunge) was employed to denote the Germans as an ethnopolitical as well as a linguistic unity. Yet when the Germans are compared with their late medieval neighbors, it is the meagerness of any elements of common identity that seems initially to stand out. There was no hereditary ruling dynasty to provide a spine for narratives of collective history or destiny, such as we find in France and elsewhere. Only in relation to the empire were the Germans ascribed anything that can be termed a common history, embracing the several northern peoples to whom that name was applied. But while the honor arising from the empire’s translation was often emphasized, there was, for example, no imperial saint, enjoying a general, unifying cult among the empire’s German populations. (Veneration of Charlemagne, canonized in the twelfth century, remained largely confined to Aachen.) Germany experienced nothing to compare with the patriotic wars, with their calls to common sacrifice in the holy cause of king and kingdom, which dominated the late Middle Ages across much of western Europe. The empire’s late medieval rulers avoided such adventures, for which they lacked the means to raise forces or revenues on anything like the English or French scale. While awareness of the monarchy was widespread among the populations of the empire’s northern lands, there is no reason to think that many beyond a small literate minority gave it more than passing thought. It is true that the emperor’s links to Christian eschatology could make him the subject of popular attention, and even wild fantasies, in times of crisis. But from day to day, the institution which he headed touched relatively few lives. If the concept of “Germanness” was also widely (although for most people no doubt only vaguely) familiar, other common identities – local, regional, or those deriving from subjection to a lord or prince – were more intrusive and compelling. Only in the imperial and free towns, directly subject to the empire, was awareness of that institution more pervasive, not least as a source of legitimacy and protection. At the close of the Middle Ages there were around seventy of these, concentrated in southern Germany and including some of the empire’s largest urban communities and principal communications hubs. In these towns, by the fifteenth century the Reich and its rulers had attained a heightened symbolic visibility through depiction 69

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in public art and sculpture. The imperial eagle armorial was widely to be seen adorning town gates and council chambers, while the figures of kings and emperors past and present were represented – sometimes in order to commemorate or invoke particular acts of monarchical favor – on the façades of public buildings and on urban structures such as fountains. The seven (“German”) prince-electors were a recurrent subject for portrayal. It is, by the same token, not without significance that by the late Middle Ages, at least among an educated few, German identity had become a matter for debate, bound up with ideas of possession of the empire, with controversy, and with judgments about neighboring peoples. Something of this contentiousness was able to infiltrate broader social strata through the empire’s intimate ties, in doctrine and in political reality, with the Church and its heads. The recurrent contests of emperors and popes left their scars. The Church’s capacity to address society at large with its messages and to touch people with its actions was unmatched in medieval Europe. The excommunications, preaching campaigns, and suspensions of religious services that accompanied papal–imperial quarrels had been widely felt and were not quickly forgotten. And emperors as well as popes had their vocal popular mouthpieces among the clergy. As late medieval reform debates intersected with currents of popular anticlericalism, it was natural that some turned, however unrealistically, to the figure of the emperor as savior. No region of late medieval Europe was as abundant in prophecies, including many in the vernacular, as was Germany, and often these invoked the emperor. On occasion, this imperial eschatology found expression in hopes that a mighty “German” monarch would arise, to purge the corrupt (“Roman”) Church and establish a new ecclesiastical order in the north.24 The tension, discernible from the empire’s earliest days, between imperial Romanitas and its northern, in some ways anti-Roman, bearers was never more widely evident than at the close of the Middle Ages. During the fifteenth century, major structural changes took place in the empire which by the century’s close had reinforced its German character and significantly expanded the German “political nation” in size and social breadth. These developments must be understood in the context of the empire’s territorial contraction and the changing geographical scope of its rulers’ activities in the late Middle Ages. Although kings of the Romans were still crowned emperor in Rome, their expeditions south of the Alps were now 24

Frances Courtney Kneupper, The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 50–51.

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shorter in duration and, after the early fourteenth century, more modest in scale. Much more of their time on the throne was spent in the north. Although northern Italy remained constitutionally subject to the empire, its rule passed into the hands of local regimes, exercising delegated powers in return for payment. Much of the kingdom of Burgundy was lost to France in the late fourteenth century, and part of what remained merged with the northern (“German”) territories of the Reich. By the late fifteenth century, regions peripheral to this northern core, notably the Swiss cantons and the Netherlands, were also becoming detached, politically and to some extent culturally. After 1420 Hussite Bohemia was for two decades in full-scale revolt and the object of crusades. Especially important were the changes taking place in the heartlands of “imperial” Germany, in the south and west. There, a series of interconnected developments were under way in society, culture, and political life, which Peter Moraw together termed Verdichtung (loosely, “densification”): processes fostering the multiplication of bonds, networks, and exchanges of diverse kinds.25 The towns especially, as trade and communications hubs and as venues for a thriving literate culture and the sites of growing numbers of university foundations, became vibrant centers for the exchange of knowledge and ideas. By the century’s close, this discursive urban culture had been further stimulated by the spread of printing with moveable type. Political life, too, was marked by the more intensive interaction of different groups, as well as by the growing prominence of educated specialists as advisors to princes and in the government of towns. Stimuli to change came from the multiplication of external dangers, the protracted absence of the monarch from the empire’s German heartlands, and, related to this, the establishment of the Habsburgs on the imperial throne. Potent threats to imperial territory (as well as to the Catholic faith) were posed by the armies of Hussite Bohemia and by the Ottoman Turks. New menaces arose after midcentury from the expansionist ambitions of the duke of Burgundy (a prince of the French royal blood, whose rich territories lay adjacent to the imperial frontier and are not to be confused with imperial Burgundy) in the west and the king of Hungary in the east. The incapacity of the empire’s military and fiscal organization to meet such challenges stimulated plans for institutional innovation and encouraged 25

Peter Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung: Das Reich im späten Mittelalter 1250 bis 1490 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1985).

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assemblies to meet, seeking solutions.26 At a time when the monarch’s attention was often diverted to dynastic affairs, these might be convened by the princes, even in his absence. The towns, too, were increasingly represented. By the time of the great reforming assembly that met at Worms in 1495, it is possible to discern the existence of a Reichstag, where the estates of the empire’s German (but not its non-German) lands assembled to negotiate with the emperor. New judicial and fiscal institutions, more determined efforts to enforce the public peace, and in the early sixteenth century the division of the empire’s northern territories into administrative spheres, together amounted – false starts and setbacks notwithstanding – to a substantial Verdichtung of the Reich itself. These changes provide the context for the more varied and developed articulations of German identity which found expression at the close of the Middle Ages and which would form a basis for further development between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. This more articulate sense of nation was inseparable from the empire as an idea and from its development as a political community. Although it drew upon new sources and developed new themes and foci, it would have been unthinkable without the stock of established concepts, motifs, preoccupations, and arguments, upon which writers and propagandists drew directly and to which a wider political public now responded.27 The heightened sense of the existence of a German political community, and of its lineaments, was expressed in various ways. The empire itself appears to contract conceptually, to become equated increasingly with its northern core. The growing practice of using the vernacular “Reich” to designate both Empire and German kingdom reflected and encouraged this trend. The conflation of the Reich with its German members found visual affirmation in the popular heraldic confection known as the Quaternionen eagle.28 This device, which portrayed the imperial eagle with armorials representing the empire’s German estates arranged on its wings, attained wide dissemination, boosted by the development of printing. By the sixteenth century, it is to be found adorning utilitarian objects such as drinking vessels. The vocabulary of German identity was enriched with the reception of new terms and concepts – natio (or nation) and patria (or vatterland) – which were quickly 26

27

28

See generally Heinz Angermeier, Die Reichsreform 1410–1555: Die Staatsproblematik in Deutschland zwischen Mittelalter und Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1984). Frank L. Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Ernst Schubert, “Die Quaternionen,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 20 (1993), 1–63.

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taken up in imperial proclamations, broadsheets, and other widely circulating texts, as well as in oral debates in the Reichstag and elsewhere.29 It is symbolic of the new focus that the imperial herald, previously styled “Romreich,” was from 1520 known as “Deutschland.”30 And, in a development that had been some time in the making, “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” became after 1512 firmly established as an official imperial title.31 Also new were the efforts now made by the monarch and his supporters to drum up German patriotism in support of imperial and dynastic projects. Maximilian I (r. 1493–1519) was a vocal champion of Habsburg interests who harnessed the cultural resources of the day, including the printing press, to his ends. Monarchical pronouncements now spoke a more strident language of German as well as imperial allegiance. Humanist writers with ties to the court wrote the earliest full-blown German histories and geographies. These too reflected a northward turn, in their quest, nourished by the rediscovered writings of Tacitus, for an autochthonous German past, unencumbered by Trojan or Roman ties and populated by ancient German (and anti-Roman) heroes like Arminius. But the humanists also quarried the chronicles and polemical tracts of their medieval forebears, with their heroic accounts of the deeds of Charlemagne and the Hohenstaufen emperors, their invocations of the honor that the Germans gained from the empire, and their denunciations of the jealous French and treacherous Romans who would rob them of their prize. An expanded public for national sentiment is now discernible. The calls, at the time of the imperial election of 1519, for a German and no foreigner to be raised to the throne, were nothing new. More novel were the convictions to which some gave voice, that failure to choose a German would surely provoke popular uprisings.32 The empire was different. As a framework for or catalyst to any form of nation-making it appears uniquely unpromising. Its character as a medieval polity appears to contrast sharply with its neighbors, particularly the western kingdoms. To the seemingly abundant empirical reasons for setting the empire aside can be added the peculiar tradition within which state- and nation-making in Germany were for a long time studied, and which had its origins in the years following the empire’s abolition. Nation-making states 29

30

31

32

Caspar Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 124–174. Ernst Schubert, Einführung in die Grundprobleme der deutschen Geschichte im Spätmittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), 33. Ulrich Nonn, “Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation: Zum Nationen-Begriff im 15. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 9 (1982), 129–142. Hirschi, Wettkampf, 400–401.

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were measured in terms of their similarity to Prussia – a test constructed in order that the old Reich might fall short. The empire fails on every count. It was heavily decentralized, extensive rather than intensive in its government, and, at least until the reforms around 1500, institutionally weak. Its rulers professed a universal Christian mission, which found expression in their official titles and the symbolism of their rule. Although the empire was highly prestigious to its partisans, its rulers were repeatedly drawn into bitter conflicts with the Church and with their own subjects, through which the empire was further weakened. Its “Roman emperors” made singularly unconvincing Romans, as medieval observers were not shy to point out. Yet when conventional expectations about power and medieval peoples are set aside, many of the empire’s weaknesses appear instead ultimately as stimuli to a conception of nationhood. The itinerant, face-to-face character of imperial rule gave significant numbers of the emperor’s subjects an opportunity to witness the ritual staging of emperorship with their own eyes. The decentralized character of the Reich, combined with its longevity, left behind a palimpsest of sites of imperial memory extending across much of the German lands, although densest in the south and west. That the empire’s rulers were better able to grant privileges than impose burdens did little to harm their standing in the eyes of their subjects. The dissonances between the empire’s official Romanism and facts on the ground, which appeared to invite different conclusions, stimulated reflection. The widespread understanding of the imperial title as elective rather than hereditary encouraged the view of it as borne collectively – by a whole people, rather than a single family – and invited examination of the character and qualifications of its bearers. The special role ascribed to the emperor in the Church made the recurrent clashes with the papacy appear especially significant, and in need of explanation. The Church’s unrivalled communications resources helped to keep its imperial competitor in the public eye. By the early sixteenth century, the Reich was widely understood as a German polity. This perception had not arisen out of the blue. The north–south polarities, with their underpinning bodies of stereotype and accumulated grievance, which Luther was to exploit, had medieval antecedents in a tradition of reflection on the wrongs done to the Roman Empire and its German custodians. The national histories and polemics of the humanists exploited and built upon a medieval tradition. Particularly the later Middle Ages, the time of apparent weakness and crisis in the empire, furnished an extensive and influential literature of imperial German nationhood. If the nation-making potential of the medieval Reich was indeed in some ways limited, in others it was to prove uniquely rich and potent. 74

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Further Reading Borchardt, Frank L., German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Brühl, Carlrichard, Deutschland – Frankreich: Die Geburt zweier Völker (Cologne: Böhlau, 1990). Ehlers, Joachim (ed.), Ansätze und Diskontinuität deutscher Nationsbildung im Mittelalter (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1989). Ehlers, Joachim, Die Entstehung des deutschen Reiches (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994). Hirschi, Caspar, The Origins of Nationalism: An Alternative History from Ancient Rome to Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Kneupper, Frances Courtney, The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Scales, Len, “Late Medieval Germany: An Under-Stated Nation?” in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds.), Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 166–191. Scales, Len, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245–1414 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Whaley, Joachim, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, vol. I: From Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia 1493–1648 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Wilson, Peter, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History (London: Allen Lane, 2016).

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Ancient China yuri pines

Introduction Through much of the twentieth and well into the twenty-first century, scholars in China and in the West debated the nature of Chinese nationhood. In the West, the once dominant view was promulgated by Joseph R. Levenson and like-minded scholars, who depicted Chinese identity in terms of “culturalism,” that is belonging to a universalizing and inclusive civilization, defined by a common Confucian culture. A concept of national identity conceived in ethnic or racial terms was considered a modern phenomenon, closely related to China’s entrance into the world of nation-states.1 In the last decades of the twentieth century, though, this view was criticized by scholars who demonstrated the existence of traits of exclusive ethnocentric Chinese identity back in the past. Some went as far as to postulate racism as pertinent to Chinese civilization from its earliest stages.2 Among Chinese scholars, the trend was different: the exclusive “nationalist” interpretation of Chinese identity gained popularity in the twentieth century but was later largely rejected in favor of the “culturalist” view.3 Proponents of both inclusive and exclusive views of Chinese identity find abundant evidence to support their interpretations. Recall that we have at 1

2

3

See Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate, vol. I: The Problem of Intellectual Continuity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 95–108. For a succinct and critical summary of the “culturalism to nationalism” paradigm, see J. Townsend, “Chinese Nationalism,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 27 (1992), especially 98–103. For the most radical (and obviously manipulative) postulate of China’s primeval racism, see Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), especially 1–30. See a brief summary in Shao-yun Yang, “‘Their Lands are Peripheral and their qi is Blocked up’: The Uses of Environmental Determinism in Han (206 B C E –220 C E ) and Tang (618–907 C E) Chinese Interpretations of the ‘Barbarians,’” in Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Molly Jones-Lewis (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds (London: Routledge, 2015), 390–391.

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our disposal an enormous corpus of historical, philosophical, and literary texts from imperial (221 B C E –1911 C E ) and to a lesser extent pre-imperial China. One can easily find in this corpus either pronouncements that denigrate the “barbarians” as beastlike savages, or statements that emphasize the relativity of “Sino-barbarian” dichotomy and even reject this dichotomy altogether. Similarly, in China’s lengthy history we can find bitter ethnicbased clashes that could reach genocidal proportions, but also the amalgamation of different ethnicities and, most notably, manifold political occurrences in which the participants’ ethnicity did not play any discernible role. Trying to reduce this rich evidence to a single conceptualization of “Chineseness” (either exclusive or inclusive) is untenable. A more promising line of analysis would be a contextual one. In China, as elsewhere, one can find a great variety of collective identities: ethnic, cultural, social, regional, linguistic (recall that many of the so-called dialects of Chinese language are mutually unintelligible), religious (albeit less prominent in China than in other parts of Eurasia), and so forth. Under different circumstances, different collective identities could become more prominent, for instance being utilized as a mobilizing device during wars, rebellions, or domestic conflicts. What is quite remarkable, though, is that once utilized for the sake of mobilization or legitimation, the identity-oriented discourse would then be discarded, leaving only a negligible long-term impact. We may cautiously surmise, paraphrasing Karl Marx, that in China it was not collective (national or otherwise) identity that determined politics; it was politics that determined one’s collective identity. Whether or not this observation is peculiar to China or can be applied to other Eurasian empires remains to be seen. Given the limited scope of the present chapter, in what follows I shall demonstrate my points by focusing on just one – albeit lengthy and exceptionally important – period in Chinese history. My discussion will highlight the complexity of identity construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction during the formative age of Chinese imperial civilization – namely the centuries preceding and following the establishment of the Chinese Empire in 221 B C E. My discussion will revolve around two issues. First, I shall explore the interplay between the overarching “Chinese” identity (back then identified as Xia 夏 or Huaxia 華夏) and what can be called the proto-national regional identities formed during the lengthy age of political fragmentation that preceded China’s imperial unification. Second, I shall explore fluctuations of Sino-alien (or, as it is frequently dubbed “Sino-barbarian”) dichotomy before and after the imperial unification. In both cases I shall show that 77

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there was no neat progression toward ever more cohesive “Chineseness.” Rather identities were repeatedly negotiated and renegotiated, shaped by multiple political circumstances, and were not uniformly endorsed by members of different social strata. Finally, I shall briefly address the relevance of my findings to the understanding of the interplay between ethnic identities and political life in later periods of Chinese history.

Aristocratic Elites of the Bronze Age Archaeological discoveries of recent decades have revolutionized our understanding of China’s past. A previously widespread uncritical acceptance of Chinese political mythology, which postulated the existence of a single legitimate locus of power on China’s soil since the very inception of civilization there, gave way to a polycentric perspective. It is widely accepted nowadays that multiple Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures interacted for millennia in the basins of the Yellow River, the Yangzi, and beyond, none of them obviously superior to the others.4 The situation started changing with the advent of the Bronze Age (c. 1500–400 B C E). By then, in the middle to low reaches of the Yellow River a singular focus of political gravity emerged, the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 B C E). The Shang clearly enjoyed military, political, and most importantly cultural superiority over other political entities in northern China. In particular, their bronze production was most advanced, and they in all likelihood were the only literate culture in East Asia. Since possession of ritual bronze vessels and literacy became hallmarks of elite cultural identity for centuries to come, the Shang period may be considered the first stage of formation of a distinct Chinese identity.5 The overthrow of the Shang by the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–255 B C E) became an important turning point in China’s history. Having overcome the Shang and having quelled the rebellion of the Shang loyalists, the victorious Zhou leaders utilized their success to rapidly expand the territory under their direct and indirect control, establishing a military and civilian presence beyond their original Wei River valley locus to the vast areas along the Yellow River basin and further to the south, to the area of the Huai and Han rivers. Lacking the ability to control this vast territory directly, the Zhou leaders opted to establish in strategic locations new settlements ruled by royal kin and allies. 4

5

Gideon Shelach-Lavi, The Archeology of Early China: From Prehistory to the Han Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See details in Li Min, Social Memory and State Formation in Early China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 175–311.

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Somewhat surprisingly, both the relocation of the subjugated Shang population to the new settlements, and the imposition of the Zhou elite over the indigenous inhabitants of the eastern parts of the realm, appear to have been accomplished relatively smoothly. Probably, the successful extermination of the Shang bolstered the new dynasty’s prestige and prevented the formation of an effective opposition.6 The Zhou’s reliance on a web of subordinate and allied regional lords, who ruled an area incomparably larger than the dynasty’s royal domain, had farreaching impact on the formation of elite Chinese identity. Many indigenous polities were eventually incorporated into the Zhou realm through gaining recognition from the Zhou kings and establishing affinal (or fictitious consanguineous) ties with the Zhou house. The regional lords maintained a high degree of autonomy in their domains, but they recognized the superiority of the Zhou kings, who arrogated to themselves the prestigious title of “Sons of Heaven,” placing themselves as the mediators between the supreme deity, Heaven, and humans. This symbolic power proved to be the dynasty’s most valuable asset. Long after its erstwhile military prowess waned, the Zhou house continued to maintain its symbolic prestige and its position as the unrivaled cultural center of the oikouméne¯. It shaped the cultural norms of the aristocratic elites throughout vast areas of northern and central China. In particular, the ritual system formed c. 900–850 B C E (i.e. in the last century of the Zhou’s effective rule) provided the social, political, and cultural framework for the aristocrats’ lives well into the end of the Bronze Age.7 In 771 B C E, the Zhou dynasty was dealt a grave blow by the coalition of disgruntled regional lords and alien invaders, the Quanrong (“Canine belligerents”). Although the dynasty survived for another five centuries in the crippled eastern part of its domain, the kings were dramatically weakened. Their nominal underlings, the regional lords, turned their domains into independent polities in their own right. These polities were henceforth engaged in vibrant diplomatic and military activities: they concluded alliances, waged wars, and annexed weaker neighbors. The Sons of Heaven became hapless spectators of internecine struggles, in which they could occasionally intervene but the outcome of which they could not determine. Yet regional lords were not the beneficiaries of this situation either. By the 6

7

See more in Li Feng, Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and Fall of the Western Zhou, 1045–771 B C (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For the Zhou ritual reform and its impact, see Lothar von Falkenhausen, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 B C): The Archaeological Evidence (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, 2006).

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seventh century B C E, many of them started losing power to their own ministers, who amassed economic, political, and military power on a par with their nominal rulers. The hereditary ministerial lineages became the major political force. An increasing number of regional lords were assassinated, expelled, or otherwise sidelined by the powerful aristocrats. Soon enough, the Zhou world was engulfed in a web of debilitating struggles among the rival polities, between rulers and their ministers, and among major ministerial lineages in each polity. The political system established by the early Zhou leaders was disintegrating. The political crisis of the aristocratic Spring and Autumn period (Chunqiu, 770–453 B C E) was extraordinarily severe, but forces of political disintegration did not tear apart the cultural unity of the oikouméne¯. To the contrary, aristocrats from the rival polities maintained a remarkable degree of social cohesiveness and cultural uniformity, political cleavages notwithstanding. This ongoing cultural unity at the elite level is reflected in the aristocrats’ common adherence to the Zhou ritual culture. Elaborate rites, developed in the first centuries of Zhou rule, permeated all imaginable spheres of the nobles’ activities – from weddings and mourning to court ceremonies and even warfare. The ritual culture became a source of transregional aristocratic identity. Its perpetuation despite the ongoing political fragmentation is most easily discernible from the material evidence: tombs of the nobles from the entire Zhou realm conform to the common rules regarding their size, the sets of mortuary goods, and even the shape of the bronze vessels. Whereas sharpeyed archeologists can discern certain local idiosyncrasies, which, at least in the case of the southern state of Chu, may reflect the evolution of nascent local identity, overall the vessels do conform to the common Zhou ritual norms. Even the inscriptions on the bronze vessels reflect the common set of values (and common language) of the elites throughout the Zhou world.8 From textual sources – most notably the Zuo Tradition (or Zuo Commentary, Zuo zhuan), our major source for the history of the Spring and Autumn period – we may understand the background for the ongoing cultural unity of Zhou aristocrats. Bitter interstate and inter-lineage conflicts notwithstanding, the nobles from the Zhou realm perpetuated close ties and a strong sense of belonging to the common superior stratum. The aristocrats from different polities routinely intermarried, but never married the commoners of their own state. They shared a common textual culture and spoke a mutually intelligible language (which was in all likelihood significantly removed from 8

See more in ibid.

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the colloquial language of the commoners). They performed common ceremonies during the frequent interstate meetings. A noble who had to flee from his state could expect to be given in a new host state a rank commensurate with his original position. Even the violence of frequent wars was mitigated owing to the widespread adherence to the codes of chivalry on the battlefield. Actually, ritual norms were supposed to regulate warfare as well, and although it is clear that these norms were often discarded, they were not entirely meaningless either. As in medieval Europe, military conflicts during the Spring and Autumn period were first and foremost competitions among the peers.9 To a certain extent they served to strengthen rather than undermine the aristocrats’ common identity.

We and the Other: Ritual Culture as Dividing Line That the Zhou world remained culturally united amid political fragmentation does not require further discussion; but how did it interact with the nonSinitic tribes and polities? Alien ethnic and cultural groups existed not only on the periphery of the Zhou oikouméne¯ but also in its heartland, in the hilly areas in between Zhou polities. Sometimes, relations with the aliens soured. The Zuo Tradition and other texts record dozens of incursions of Di and Rong tribesmen into the Zhou realm, and even extermination of important polities such as Wei 衛 in 660 B C E. These clashes and the resultant animosity were conducive to strengthening the separate “Chinese” (Xia) identity. Thus, in 661 B C E, when a leading statesman, Guan Zhong (d. 645 B C E), asked his lord to save a beleaguered state of Xing from the Di invasion, he argued: The Rong and the Di are jackals and wolves and cannot be satiated. All the Xia are close kin and cannot be abandoned.10

This and similar statements are often used to demonstrate the existence of exclusive Chinese identity back in the Bronze Age. All the Xia are close kin; the aliens, in distinction, are beastlike; they are impaired humans. The enmity toward the aliens and the feeling of Xia (Chinese) solidarity are clearly pronounced. Yet before we jump to conclusions, it should be advisable to consider Guan Zhong’s and similar statements in their immediate context. In 9

10

See Mark E. Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 15–52. Translation modified from Zuo Tradition/Zuozhuan Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals,” trans. Stephen W. Durrant, Li Wai-yee, and David Schaberg (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 229 (Min 1.2).

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the above citation, it was a call for war: an attempt to build a broad coalition against the Di (which indeed materialized). Elsewhere, pejorative comments against beastlike and immoral aliens are often made to dissuade one of the Xia leaders from allying with them against other Xia polities. For instance, when the Zhou king himself allied in 636 B C E with the Di against the fraternal polity of Zheng, his advisor promptly reminded that Di embody “four iniquities”: they are “deaf and blind” (meaning unable to appreciate the ritual culture of the Zhou), and are also “wayward and perfidious.”11 These arguments were not effective though: the king continued his alliance with the Di, and even elevated a Di concubine to the position of a queen. Argumentation based on ethnicity could work at times, but it was far from being compelling. Nor should we exaggerate the importance of the periodic invocations of the aliens’ bestiality. The notion of bestiality was not necessarily related to one’s inborn qualities but rather to one’s disregard of ritual norms. A fourth-century B C E ritual compendium asked rhetorically: “So, although a man who lacks ritual can speak, his heart is also one of a bird and a beast, is it not?”12 Not a few thinkers asserted, accordingly, that the commoners – and not just aliens – do not differ much from birds and beasts.13 Actually, the bestiality of the Rong and Di was perceived as the direct result of their disregard for ritual norms: “they enter hastily [into a Zhou court banquet] and despise order, they are greedy and unwilling to yield, their blood and breath is unmanageable, just like that of birds and beasts.”14 What happened when aliens adapted themselves to the Zhou ritual? In that case they could cross the line and become fully absorbed in the Xia community. The road could be bumpy, though. The Zuo Tradition tells of an interstate meeting of 559 B C E. The leaders of the state of Jin, the major northern power, suspected that their erstwhile ally, a Rong leader Juzhi 駒 支, was plotting against them, and forbade him to participate in the meeting. In response, Juzhi delivered a long speech in which he surveyed the Rong services to Jin in the past, absolved the Rong from Jin’s accusations, and finished with the following passage: The food, drink and clothing used by us, various Rong, are not the same as those of Chinese (Hua); gifts [presented at diplomatic meetings] do not pass 11 12

13

14

Zuo Tradition, 383 (X i 24.2b). Liji jijie 禮記集解 [Records of the Rites with Collected Glosses], compiled by Sun Xidan 孫 希旦 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995), 11 (“Qu li shang” 曲禮上). E.g. Mengzi yizhu 孟子譯注 [Mencius, Translated and Annotated], annotated by Yang Bojun 楊伯峻 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1992), 191 (8.19). Guoyu jijie 國語集解 [Discourses of the States with Collected Glosses], annotated by Xu Yuangao 徐元誥 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 58 (2.7, “Zhou yu 周語 2”).

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back and forth; our languages are mutually incomprehensible. How could we do any evil?15 Yet, if you do not want us to participate in the meeting, we shall not be distressed. – He recited the “Blue Fly” [ode] and left.16

Not a few scholars take Juzhi’s speech at its face value as an important survey of ethnic differences between Chinese and the aliens. Yet consider the irony of the Zuo Tradition account. Not only did Juzhi deliver a speech (presumably in entirely comprehensible Chinese) that was constructed in the best tradition of Zhou rhetoric, but he also enhanced its effect by reciting the ode from the Canon of Poems, which implicitly criticized the Jin leader for trusting slanderers. This recitation was a hallmark of Juzhi’s high diplomatic skill and of his profound adoption of the Zhou culture. The “uncouth barbarian” proved to be a highly civilized “Chinese,” and his declarations about his people’s savagery should not be taken too literally. Juzhi’s case may reflect not only adaptation of the aliens to Zhou culture but also the complexity of this process: conceivably, his emphasis on the Rong otherness implied criticism of the widespread denigration of aliens qua aliens. That ethnic prejudices existed in China as elsewhere is certain, but overall, their impact on political life remained minuscule. Not incidentally, the very topic of Sino-alien dichotomy occupies a marginal place in the Zuo Tradition and in related historical texts. The aliens’ otherness is more often than not ignored altogether. Nothing can demonstrate this better than the case of Hu Yan (aka Zifan), one of the most celebrated statesmen of the late seventh century B C E. Only a very careful reader who could juxtapose genealogical information from several different places in the Zuo Tradition would discover that Hu Yan was actually a Rong person. Throughout the text (and in countless later texts) he is treated unequivocally as a cultivated member of the Xia community, and his alien origins are never mentioned. Actually, his portrait as a Xia noble seems to be historically reliable: an inscription on a set of bronze bells cast on Hu Yan’s behalf in 632 B C E portrays him as a conservative Zhou aristocrat, not as an outsider.17 This is an excellent example of the permeability of cultural boundaries between Chinese and non-Chinese.

15

16 17

Juzhi implies that since the languages of the Rong and the Xia are mutually incomprehensible, he could not plot with other Jin allies against Jin. Zuo Tradition, 1009–1011 (Xiang 14.1). For this inscription, see Constance A. Cook and Paul R. Goldin (eds.), A Source Book of Ancient Chinese Bronze Inscriptions (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 2016), 263–265.

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This permeability is observable not only on an individual level but on the level of different ethnic and cultural groups, which became absorbed into Zhou culture. This absorption started early in the Western Zhou period. For instance, recently excavated burial complexes of the non-Sinitic Peng polity, located surprisingly close to the Zhou eastern capital, show how Peng’s rulers navigated their course between affinity to northern non-Sinitic cultures and to their Zhou neighbors with whom they intermarried and whose written and ritual culture they adopted.18 This adaptation to Zhou norms was not necessarily a sign of weakness. For instance, two powerful southeastern powers of Wu and Yue absorbed aspects of Zhou culture (and even forged appropriate genealogies), primarily as a means of bolstering their prestige en route to subjugating parts of the Zhou realm. Another interesting example is the state of Zhongshan, established by a branch of the Di people in the sixth century and reestablished in the fourth century B C E. Its elites became so versatile in the niceties of Zhou ritual culture, without abandoning, however, strong cultural ties with the semi-nomadic people to the north, that scholars still debate whether this polity was ruled after its reestablishment by a Sinified Di elite or by a Xia elite that adapted itself to non-Sinitic customs.19 Adopting the dichotomous view of Xia “Chinese” versus “barbarians” in these and many similar cases is self-defeating. The relative marginality of identity questions in Zhou politics is observable also in the texts from the Warring States period (453–221 B C E), which is frequently dubbed the age of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Although not a few thinkers pay due attention to the existence of alien ethnicities, the topic of “us” versus “them” remains marginal in all but a very few texts. Actually, even the names of alien groups, such as Rong and Di, disappear from most historical accounts of this age. It seems that many of these people became incorporated into expansive Sinitic states of this era. However, parallel to this diminishing of tensions with outsiders, Zhou culture faced a different challenge: formation of strong regional identities that threatened to tear the Zhou world apart culturally, and not just politically.

18

19

See Maria Khayutina, “The Tombs of Peng Rulers and Relationships between Zhou and non-Zhou lineages in Northern China (up to the early 9th c. B C),” in Edward L. Shaughnessy (ed.), Imprints of Kinship: Studies of Recently Discovered Bronze Inscriptions from Ancient China (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2017), 71–132. See Wu Xiaolong, Material Culture, Power, and Identity in Ancient China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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Regional and Universal Identities in the Warring States World The Warring States period – as its name suggests – was an age of perennial interstate warfare and ever escalating bloodshed. Yet it was also an age of economic and military revolution, of profound political and social restructuring, of unprecedented social mobility, and of fascinating new departures in the intellectual realm. Among other changes, it brought about administrative centralization, restoration of the rulers’ effective control over their ministers, and eventual replacement of the hereditary aristocracy with a new broad elite of shi, “men-of-service,” who owed their position to individual skills rather than pedigree. These profound political and social changes developed in tandem with economic reforms, prompted by the “iron revolution,” which allowed the creation of the proactive agro-managerial state, and with parallel advances in military technologies, which brought about the replacement of aristocratic chariot-based armies with mass infantry armies staffed by peasant conscripts. A new model of assertive bureaucratic state was born. This state replaced the loose aristocratic polities of the Spring and Autumn era, laying the foundation for the future tightly integrated imperial polity.20 In the context of our discussion, what matters most is the territorial integration of the newly formed Warring States. This integration was a natural byproduct of the state’s need to control all its land resources and all its inhabitants. All the arable lands had to be measured, recorded, allocated to peasants, and taxed. All the inhabitants had to be registered for the sake of taxation, conscription, and general surveillance. Not only arable lands mattered: a state had to control its “mountains, forests, marshes, swamps, valleys and dales” from which benefits could be extorted.21 Every piece of land had to be identified as either “ours” or “theirs.” Territorial integration of individual states eventually contributed toward the future integration of the entire realm, but in the short term, it also aggravated centrifugal forces by increasing separation among rival polities. The separation was promulgated through administrative regulations, which monitored movements of population and merchandise into neighboring 20

21

For the overall survey of Warring States period reforms, see Mark E. Lewis, “Warring States: Political History,” in Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 587–650. For the iron revolution, see Donald B. Wagner, Iron and Steel in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1993). Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China, trans. and ed. Yuri Pines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 159 (6.2).

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polities, through legal distinctions between the native and foreign population, and, most visibly, through long protective walls which distinguished between the “inner” and “outer” realms. These walls were defensive in their nature, but they had far-reaching symbolic significance, changing not only the physical but also the mental landscape. The land outside the boundaries became a dangerous terra incognita, departure into which was considered a most inauspicious event, which required a special exorcist ritual, similar to the ritual performed upon leaving one’s native settlement.22 The combined result of these developments was somewhat equivocal: whereas individual states became better integrated, the Zhou world became even more fragmented. To the erstwhile political and military contest among rival polities one may add a new sense of cultural alienation. The increasing divergence in the material and, to a lesser extent, written culture of major states is well documented by archeological, paleographic, and textual evidence. The decline of the aristocratic elite of the Spring and Autumn period meant partial abandonment of Zhou ritual culture, which had once served as a common cultural denominator of the upper classes throughout the Zhou world. The new elite, some members of which had risen from the lower social strata, was more diversified culturally than its predecessors. This diversification is particularly evident in the changing image of powerful “peripheral” states, Qin in the northwest and Chu in the south. Both had once been considered members of the Zhou oikouméne¯, but by the fourth to third century B C E were treated as cultural strangers. The case of Qin is the most revealing. For centuries, this state, which occupied the abandoned lands of the Western Zhou royal domain, was a culturally conservative part of the Zhou world. In the mid-fourth century B C E, however, it underwent a series of radical reforms associated with the major statesman Shang Yang (d. 338 B C E). Shang Yang replaced the pedigree-based aristocratic order with a new system of ranks of merit, which were granted primarily for military valor (such as cutting off enemies’ heads on the battlefield). This resulted in a complete overhaul of Qin’s social system. The demise of hereditary aristocracy and the rise of a new elite, in which commoners played a prominent role, was accompanied by the abandonment of traditional ritual norms. As a result, Qin’s cultural image profoundly changed. This, in addition to escalating conflicts between Qin and other states, brought about the proliferation of 22

For the early walls and their manifold impact, see Yuri Pines, “The Earliest ‘Great Wall’? Long Wall of Qi revisited,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 138/4 (2018), 743–761.

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strong anti-Qin sentiments throughout the Zhou world. All of a sudden, Qin was reimagined as an ultimate cultural other.23 Texts composed prior to Shang Yang’s reforms contain no hint of Qin’s cultural otherness. By contrast, those composed in the late Warring States period abound in anti-Qin pronouncements. Qin is equated with the Yi (“barbarians”) or with the Rong and Di (“savages”). “[It is] a state with tiger’s and wolf’s heart: greedy, profit-seeking and untrustworthy, which knows nothing of ritual, propriety and virtuous behavior.” Another speaker plainly identifies Qin as “the mortal enemy of All under Heaven.”24 Whereas these statements can easily be dismissed as mere anti-Qin propaganda (which they surely were), there are additional indications of Qin’s estrangement from the rest of the Zhou world. Thus, Qin’s legal codes from the late Warring States period distinguish between Qin’s natives and not only the Rong but also the Xia (i.e. the dwellers of other Zhou states but not natives of Qin). A few pronouncements of Qin statesmen suggest self-images as cultural outsiders of the Zhou world. Although the evidence is not unequivocal, it suffices to indicate strong cultural alienation between Qin and its neighbors.25 Some of the reasons for Qin’s alienation from the rest of the Zhou world are probably byproducts of the bitter conflicts of that age. Think of bloody wars, which included frequent mass beheadings of POWs, expulsion of noncombatant populations, and even their outright extermination. Think of universal conscription, which turned every Qin peasant into a soldier in Qin’s army that often had to stay for months and years in the newly occupied territories surrounded by hostile local populations. Yet it is also possible that the new Qin identity was consciously bolstered by the country’s rulers, eager to strengthen the domestic cohesiveness of the Qin population and enhance therewith the martial spirit of Qin’s conscripts. In China as elsewhere war and identity-building were closely related.26 A similar process of cultural estrangement from the Zhou world is observable from another example, the state of Chu. Chu became politically 23

24

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See Gideon Shelach and Yuri Pines, “Secondary State Formation and the Development of Local Identity: Change and Continuity in the State of Qin (770–221 B C),” in Miriam T. Stark (ed.), Archaeology of Asia (Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 2006), 202–230. See Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan yizhu 春秋公羊傳譯注 [Gongyang Tradition on the Spring and Autumn Annals, Translated and Annotated], annotated by Liu Shangci 劉尚慈 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011), Zhao 5; Zhanguo ce zhushi 戰國策注釋 [Stratagems of the Warring States, Annotated], annotated by He Jianzhang 何建章 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 907 (24.8, “Wei ce” 魏策 3) and 508 (14.17, “Chu ce” 楚策 1). See more in Yuri Pines, “The Question of Interpretation: Qin History in Light of New Epigraphic Sources,” Early China, 29 (2004), 1–44, especially pp. 23–35. See Shelach and Pines, “Secondary State Formation.”

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alienated from the Zhou royal house early in its history. Since its rulers were among the first to arrogate to themselves the royal title (wang 王), which should have been exclusively used by the Zhou kings, they were treated as potential usurpers. Nonetheless, political alienation aside, Chu elites continued to adhere to Zhou ritual norms throughout most of the Spring and Autumn period, and back then Chu was never dubbed a “barbarian” polity. In the Warring States period this situation changed. Texts from this age routinely identify Chu with southern “barbarians.” This new image perhaps reflected Chu’s conscious adoption of a new cultural outlook, which is observable in the distinctive “flamboyant” style of Chu mortuary goods. Once again, we witness a process of carving out a separate cultural identity by at least some segments of the Chu elites.27 The process depicted above of internal consolidation of large territorial states, amid political and cultural separation from their neighbors, unmistakably recalls similar developments in early modern Europe, where, as is well known, these resulted in the formation of nation-states. In China, however, the developmental trajectory was markedly different. The potential transformation of the competing Warring States into full-fledged separate entities never materialized. Instead, these polities were submerged by the unified empire in 221 B C E, becoming thereafter a focus of ethnographic curiosity rather than of political separatism.28 Why did this happen? To answer this question, we should focus on the new elite of men-of-service (shi), which replaced (and absorbed) the aristocratic elites of the Bronze Age. The men-of-service were not only the occupants of all positions of importance in the rapidly expanding civilian and military bureaucracies; they also succeeded in establishing themselves as society’s moral and intellectual leaders. All known intellectually active individuals from the Warring States period came from this stratum. The intellectual leaders of the shi, the so-called Masters (zi), were the men who shaped Chinese political culture for millennia to come. And it was they who promulgated the idea of the unity of All-under-Heaven as a singular solution to the situation of perennial war of all against all. In this unified world, regional states and regional identities had no place.29 27

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For the Chu cultural trajectory, see the articles collected in Constance A. Cook and John S. Major (eds.), Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Early China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999). See Mark E. Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 189–244, and Yuri Pines’s review of this book in Early China, 30 (2005), 181–187. See Yuri Pines, “‘The One that Pervades the All’ in Ancient Chinese Political Thought: The Origins of ‘The Great Unity’ Paradigm,” T’oung Pao, 86/4–5. (2000), 280–324.

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The “universal” outlook of the Warring States period men-of-service reflected their peculiar career patterns. In marked contrast to the Bronze Age nobles, who normally occupied hereditary positions in a single polity and emigrated only under duress, the men-of-service frequently moved from one state to another. In an age when most states tried to prevent emigration, these elite members were free to cross boundaries in search of better careers. Any known thinker of that age served more than one court, and this very flexibility of movement through the interstate “market of talent” broadened their horizons, causing their concerns to transcend the confines of individual polities. Eventually, this breadth of horizons became associated with high elite status, whereas localism – local customs and identities – was viewed as characteristic of culturally impaired commoners.30 Lacking the intellectuals’ endorsement, local identities of the Warring States never developed into a politically meaningful factor, as happened elsewhere, for example, in modern Europe. This observation explains the complexity of the cultural trajectories of, for example, Qin and Chu. For instance, whereas Qin may have benefited from stronger cohesiveness of its conscripts, it would also have had to maintain bridges with the rest of the Zhou world, so as to facilitate incorporation of the newly conquered territories and to attract immigrants, whose presence was strongly desired by Qin leaders.31 Of these immigrants, particularly important were guest statesmen who could climb to the very top of Qin’s administration (and even its military). These guest ministers and their retinue served as a cultural bridge that prevented Qin’s further estrangement from its peer polities. Whereas some members of the ruling lineage were unhappy with the employment of guest ministers in key positions and appealed to nativism to quell it, and whereas members of lower strata may have had a stronger sense of Qin native identity, insofar as the intellectually dominant stratum of the men-of-service is concerned, their goal was to stem the forces of cultural disintegration rather than to fan cultural divisions.32 A similar observation can be made with regard to Chu. While Chu’s leading aristocrats did maintain a distinctive cultural identity, and this identity may have had strong appeal among lower strata as well, this was not the case with intellectually active men-of-service. Their attitude can be gleaned 30 31

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Lewis, Construction of Space, 192–212. For Qin’s need for immigrants, see Yuri Pines, “Waging a Demographic War: Chapter 15 (‘Attracting the People’) of the Book of Lord Shang Revisited,” Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung, 43 (forthcoming). Shelach and Pines, “Secondary State Formation.”

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from Chu’s locally produced historical texts. Surprisingly, these texts never employ history to strengthen Chu’s local identity. They neither eulogize the country’s military achievements, nor lament its failures so as to bolster the readers’ identification with their homeland. Their outlook is decisively cosmopolitan and identity-neutral.33 Once again, we may discern a common pattern: local identities existed and were endorsed by the uppermost segment of the nobility (members of the ruling lineage who continued to have a stake in their natal state) and were probably shared by many commoners. Yet without the endorsement of intellectually active men-ofservice, these identities did not develop into a politically potent weapon like in modern Europe. Under the soon-to-be-established unified imperial regime, local identities ceased to be a politically divisive factor.

China and the World: The Impact of Imperial Unification In 221 B C E, the expectations of generations of preimperial thinkers were realized, albeit not necessarily in the way they hoped. King Zheng of Qin (r. 246–210 B C E), having subjugated all the rival states, put an end to centuries of war and bloodshed. Proud of his unprecedented achievement, the king changed his title to the First Emperor and proclaimed the new beginning. He promised his subjects that “warfare will not arise again” and that the era of “Great Peace” (tai ping 太平) had arrived.34 This was a hasty promise though. Within just a few years of unifying the realm, the First Emperor had to take up arms again. Among manifold explanations for Qin’s swift abandonment of its promises of eternal peace, one is pertinent to this chapter. Having declared “mission accomplished” in 221 B C E, the First Emperor could not entirely ignore one important problem: there were still areas beyond his direct control. Whether or not these areas should be incorporated in the unified realm was a thorny question. Preimperial discussants of the would-be imperial unification (and of its legendary and semi-legendary antecedents) had rarely addressed the 33

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See Yuri Pines, “Chu Identity as Seen from its Manuscripts: A Reevaluation,” Journal of Chinese History, 2/1 (2018): 1–26. For the First Emperor, his image, and his propaganda, see Martin Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2000); Yuri Pines, “The Messianic Emperor: A New Look at Qin’s Place in China’s History,” in Yuri Pines, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Gideon Shelach, and Robin Yates (eds.), Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 258–279.

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question of the empire’s territorial limits. Some of the texts focused on the “nine provinces” (jiu zhou), which were more or less coterminous with what may be dubbed “China proper,” leaving the alien periphery beyond their interest. Other texts put forward the so-called Five (or Nine) Zones scheme, in which the outlying areas inhabited by the alien tribes should be at least symbolically (but not practically) incorporated into the unified realm.35 Yet most other texts promoted a much broader and inclusive vision of unity. They insisted that the future unifier, the True Monarch, should put in order not just “Central States” (China), but also the alien periphery, eventually extending his blessed impact even to beasts and birds. The unity should be truly universal.36 Notably absent from preimperial discussions of unity were ideas of unity against the barbarian other. Quite to the contrary, whenever the aliens figure in debates over unification, it is implied that they should be its beneficiaries, the would-be subjects of the morally impeccable True Monarch. This optimism was not ungrounded. It reflected the relatively smooth expansion of Sinitic states into the alien periphery during the Warring States period, which proved that alien polities and tribes could ultimately be assimilated into the culture of the Central States. The First Emperor was clearly committed to truly universal unification. In one of his stele inscriptions he boasted that “wherever human traces reach, there is none who does not declare himself [my] subject.” The same stele (erected in 219 B C E) outlines the confines of the new realm. On three of the cardinal directions the territory under the emperor’s control reaches natural limits (the flying sands in the west, the sea in the east, and the areas beyond the Tropic of Cancer, where the people’s doors “faced north” toward the sun, in the south).37 In the north, however, the definition is notoriously vague, reflecting perhaps the emperor’s lack of clarity as to where to stop the expansion there. Soon enough, the First Emperor duly dispatched his troops northward, toward the steppe. The campaign was successful, but it had unanticipated consequences for China’s political history and to a certain extent for its sense of identity. 35

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See Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “Ritual Practices for Constructing Terrestrial Space (Warring States–Early Han),” in John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (eds.), Early Chinese Religion, Part 1: Shang through Han (1250 B C–220 A D), 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), vol. I, 629–636. Yuri Pines, “Limits of All-under-Heaven: Ideology and Praxis of ‘Great Unity’ in Early Chinese Empire,” in Yuri Pines, Michal Biran, and Jörg Rüpke (eds.), Universality and its Limits: Spatial Dimensions of Eurasian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 79–110, especially pp. 89–93. Kern, Stele Inscriptions, 32–33.

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Qin’s aggression prompted the steppe tribes, who until then had been only minimally engaged in the political affairs of the Chinese world, to reorganize. The newly emerged Xiongnu confederacy immediately turned into the formidable rival of China. Soon after the Han dynasty (206/202 B C E –220 C E ) replaced the short-lived Qin, Xiongnu intervened in the ensuing civil war, and inflicted a major blow on the Han founder, Gaozu (r. 206–195 B C E). Startled, the beleaguered Han leaders had to opt for peace. They promised a princess to marry the leader of the Xiongnu, the chanyu, and added lavish subsidies for the erstwhile foes, so as to maintain “harmony of the kin.” Alas, the appeasement policy failed to prevent recurrent Xiongnu incursions. Worse, it infuriated many Han statesmen who considered it humiliating to Han imperial prestige. When the assertive Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 B C E) came to power, he opted for war.38 Emperor Wu’s armies scored several impressive victories, dramatically expanding the territories under the Han control, but soon enough it became clear that decisive victory remained elusive. The Xiongnu’s major advantage was their inhospitable terrain, which could not be meaningfully absorbed by Chinese agriculturalists. This was tacitly understood already by the First Emperor, who ordered the erection of the Great Wall to protect the newly conquered Xiongnu territories, putting therewith a self-imposed limit on China’s further expansion. The Han leaders also learned the lesson. Campaigns against highly mobile Xiongnu proved to be costly and ultimately ineffective. Even major victories brought about only limited benefits. Whereas semi-arid areas to the south of the steppe belt could be effectively incorporated into the empire, the deserts and steppes to the north of the Great Wall forever remained the abode of the Xiongnu. After decades of war that devastated the Han economy, a breakthrough was achieved. The internal strife among the Xiongnu caused the chanyu to adopt a peaceful stance. He recognized Han superiority and entered into socalled tribute relations. In exchange for Xiongnu’s tribute, the Han emperors bestowed on them lavish gifts, which benefited the nomads enormously. Once again, relations reverted to those of tense peace; yet once again, stability failed to materialize. When the balance of power tilted in the Xiongnu favor (e.g. in the early first century C E), they tried to renegotiate their inferior status. And when, in the late first century, the Xiongnu confederacy was finally destroyed, this did not bring respite either. Rather, new 38

See details in Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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nomadic players filled the vacuum on the steppe, continuing to press the Han.39 After generations of ebbs and flows in relations, the Han leaders realized that there was no magic weapon that would bring about the Xiongnu’s permanent submission. Neither peaceful nor military methods allowed maintenance of lasting stability along the frontiers. Attempts to lure the Xiongnu into the orbit of Chinese civilization through lavish gifts were of limited effect as well. For the first time in its history, China encountered a rival which could be neither conquered nor transformed into a part of the Chinese cultural oikouméne¯.40 This awareness resulted in profound reevaluation of the Sino-alien divide. An increasing number of statesmen and thinkers came to the conclusion that the inborn nature of the nomads, determined by their peculiar environment, made them inassimilable and fundamentally ungovernable.41 This understanding crystallized in the writing of a great historian, Ban Gu (32–92 C E). Having surveyed the centuries-long futile attempts of the Han rulers to get rid of the Xiongnu menace, Ban Gu concludes: They [the savages] are separated [from us] by mountains and gorges, and barred by the desert: thereby Heaven and Earth sever the internal from the external. Therefore, the sage kings treated them as beasts and birds, did not make treaties with them and were not engaged in offensive expeditions: if you make a treaty with them, they spend the gifts and then deceive you; if you attack them, then the army is exhausted and you induce banditry. Their lands cannot be tilled for living; their people cannot be treated as subjects; therefore they must be regarded as external and not internal, as strangers and not as relatives.42

Ban Gu is unequivocal: neither military conquest nor imposition of tribute obligations on the aliens is feasible or even desirable. The dream of universalism embedded in the concept of “All-under-Heaven” is dismissed here. 39

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Rafe de Crespigny, Northern Frontier: The Policies and Strategy of the Later Han Empire (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1984). See more in Di Cosmo, Ancient China; cf. Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989). See Paul R. Goldin, “Steppe Nomads as a Philosophical Problem in Classical China,” in Paula L. W. Sabloff (ed.), Mapping Mongolia: Situating Mongolia in the World from Geologic Time to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2011), 220–246. Ban Gu’s discussion from the History of the Former Han Dynasty (Hanshu 漢書) is cited here from Yuri Pines, “Beasts or Humans: Pre-Imperial Origins of Sino-Barbarian Dichotomy,” in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (eds.), Mongols, Turks and Others (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 79–80.

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Geographic conditions and historical lessons alike drive Ban Gu to the conclusion that the separation between Chinese and the aliens is the only reasonable choice.

Afterword Ban Gu’s statement could easily be interpreted as reflecting a fundamental shift from inclusive views of Chineseness that dominated pre-imperial discourse to a new, exclusive view in which the Great Wall served as the dividing line between “us” and “them.” In practice, however, things were much more complex: the inclusive and exclusive views of Chinese identity continued to coexist throughout the imperial millennia. The exclusivist arguments were often promulgated by opponents of military expansion,43 or, in the late imperial period, by those literati who refused to acquiesce to potential or actual alien rule over China proper.44 During periods of prolonged weakness vis-à-vis foreign powers, e.g. the Song dynasty (960–1279), exclusive views could gain prominence to the degree that they resemble modern national identity.45 Inclusive views, in distinction, were often endorsed by supporters of robust territorial expansion (e.g. under the Tang dynasty, 618–907), as well as by those eager to serve the conquest dynasties.46 Each of these opposite views could be adopted and articulated in response to specific political circumstances by different groups. None formed the basis of a permanent consensus, although the inclusive view generally enjoyed higher intellectual prestige. As for the centrifugal tendencies of regionalism, these were quelled in the unified empire but never disappeared entirely. Particularly under periodic disintegrations of the realm (e.g. in the third to sixth century C E), regional identities could become stronger and more meaningful politically.47 Even in the unified empire they were often present as the backdrop of inter-elite competition for political and economic benefits. On a lower social level, local (or linguistic) identities could become a source of powerful political 43 44

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Yang, “Their Lands are Peripheral.” See, e.g., Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, “Proto-Nationalism in Twelfth-Century China? The Case of Ch’en Liang,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 39/2 (1979), 403–428. See Nicolas Tackett, The Origins of the Chinese Nation: Song China and the Forging of an East Asian World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). See, e.g., John D. Langlois, “Chinese Culturalism and the Yüan Analogy: Seventeenth Century Perspectives,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 40/2 (1981), 355–398. See Andrew Chittick, The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History: Ethnic Identity and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

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mobilization, as was, for instance, the case of the Hakka in the nineteenth century.48 Yet, time and again, the principle of “great unity” prevailed. Regionalism remained a powerful force, but it never evolved into political secessionism. The desideratum of the political unity of China remained unquestionable. Moreover, the ongoing cultural and ideological unity on the elite level remained a powerful antidote against the disintegration of what we call today the “Chinese nation.”

Further Reading Chittick, Andrew, The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History: Ethnic Identity and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Di Cosmo, Nicola, Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Di Cosmo, Nicola, “Ethnography of the Nomads and ‘Barbarian’ History in Han China,” in Lin Foxhall, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, and Nino Luraghi (eds.), Intentional History: Spinning Time in Ancient Greece (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2010), 299–325. Goldin, Paul R., “Steppe Nomads as a Philosophical Problem in Classical China,” in Paula L. W. Sabloff (ed.), Mapping Mongolia: Situating Mongolia in the World from Geologic Time to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2011), 220–246. Li, Wai-yee, “Anecdotal Barbarians in Early China,” in Paul van Els and Sarah Queen (eds.), Between Philosophy and History: Rhetorical Uses of Anecdotes in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), 113–144. Pines, Yuri, “Beasts or Humans: Pre-Imperial Origins of Sino-Barbarian Dichotomy,” in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (eds.), Mongols, Turks and Others (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 59–102. Pines, Yuri, “Chu Identity as Seen from its Manuscripts: A Reevaluation,” Journal of Chinese History, 2/1 (2018), 1–26. Poo, Mu-chou, Enemies of Civilization: Attitudes toward Foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). Shelach, Gideon, and Yuri Pines, “Secondary State Formation and the Development of Local Identity: Change and Continuity in the State of Qin (770–221 BC),” in Miriam T. Stark (ed.), Archaeology of Asia (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 202–230. Tackett, Nicolas, The Origins of the Chinese Nation: Song China and the Forging of an East Asian World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Yang, Shao-yun, The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). 48

See Sow-Theng Leong, Migration and Ethnicity in Chinese History: Hakkas, Pengmin, and their Neighbors, ed. Tim Wright (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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Politicized Ethnicity in Precolonial Southeast Asia michael w. charney

Introduction The historiography on politicized ethnicities in Southeast Asia has for a long time gone hand in hand with the story of nationalism. Colonial rule was believed to have introduced the kinds of registers that stemmed from the Enlightenment into non-Western societies. Colonial ethnographers divided up populations by languages and culture, sometimes deciding that one or another embodied the genuine national identity. Benedict Anderson, working with indigenous literature and new research on the Southeast Asian geobody, introduced the notion that nationalism was a socially constructed political community. Like religious communities, it was an imagined community, in that any one member felt they were part of a larger, horizontal group whose full membership transcended their personal acquaintance. It was introduced in the eighteenth century in Europe, then exported and politicized in the revolutions in Latin America in the first half of the nineteenth century and then reexported as an abstract idea through the rise of print capitalism, the use of vernacular language, and the novel to other colonies, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia. The national idea reached the Philippines first in Southeast Asia and then filtered through from the European metropoles to other Southeast Asian colonies, helped along by colonial schools, literature, and languages.1 Anderson’s model helped to explain why modern nationalism succeeded reformist anticolonialism in the region after the First World War. The conventional narrative for the emergence of nationalism in Southeast Asia is unattractive for a number of reasons. Anderson’s model did not explain a range of ideas Southeast Asians already had about different peoples 1

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

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prior to the introduction of colonial rule anywhere in the region, centuries earlier than Anderson’s model would suggest. Nationalism, in this view, also reveals a Western bias for it considers nationalism a Western event that has global repercussions. Southeast Asia, like Africa, would not have nationalism without European ideas, empire, or Western technology (the printing press and colonial schools). But beyond the unattractiveness of the Anderson model, it is demonstrably incorrect on the basis of empirical evidence. We know that parts, and perhaps even all, of Southeast Asia had group identities or identifications that appear to have been cognates to what in the West came to be called ethnic groups. We also have evidence that these group notions were politically instrumentalized by elites and that they provided the motives for autonomous actions of ruling elites as well. Some of these understandings would be reimagined in the colonial period within a Western vocabulary. This evidence requires us to step outside the Western-dominated narrative of nationalism studies and to see how precolonial Southeast Asia speaks to or challenges the dominant modernist, perennialist, and ethnosymbolic schools. The present chapter focuses on the emergence of precolonial politicized ethnicities in Southeast Asia to better understand their later relationship with colonial and postcolonial ethnicities. It will look first at the early phases of knowledge production, the impact of the “Age of Commerce,” then the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century crises, and finally at ethnicity’s evolution during the intellectual and religious reformations of the region’s last indigenous empires. The conclusion will then consider how the examination of indigenous notions of ethnicity challenges some of the models of ethnicity that have been developed to explain the phenomenon in the West. Ultimately, it is argued, the emergence of ethnicity or its indigenous equivalent is historically contingent and the result of conflict and interaction between populations over time rather than being either socio-biologically determined or a phenomenon of the modern period.

Early Phases of Knowledge Production Natural decay and wars have meant that most of our sources on precolonial Southeast Asia are archeological remains, stone inscriptions, and foreigners’ travel accounts until the fifteenth century, save for occasional reproductions of earlier, often religious material. It is very unlikely that there will be substantial discoveries of new, written materials that will shed more light than is available already from the existing body of source material. As a result, our reconstruction of intellectual developments in the region depends more 97

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upon anthropological retrospection than it might in the West and earlier models focus more upon worldview and spiritual beliefs than on other matters. Human beings have lived in the region for several millennia. There were certainly population migrations, and Malays who entered the Indonesian archipelago would also colonize Madagascar some two thousand years ago. But we have little information to suggest anything more than that political vision was probably very localized prior to Southeast Asia’s incorporation into the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. The small size of pre-eighth-century Southeast Asian settlements also probably did not lend itself to the need for religious beliefs that transcended what could be offered by local spirit cults. Oliver Wolters developed a model, based on anthropological literature and his own understandings of classical and early modern Southeast Asian culture, for how rulers (and thus followers) emerged in the prehistorical period in the region and why the adoption of Indian political and religious theory followed. In his view, Southeast Asians viewed the landscape with animist eyes and believed all things were animated by charisma or soulstuff, some things with a little, some things with a lot, and many things with a store of soulstuff somewhere in-between. Warriors who demonstrated significant prowess in battle were believed to have more soulstuff than other people, and the latter would follow whoever could demonstrate their superior store through combat or success in war. This was an undesirable state of affairs, however, for the person at the top, because this superiority was ephemeral. A defeat, the appearance of a stronger warrior, a sickness, or the like would demonstrate a weaker store or that it had passed on to someone else and the ruler would be toppled.2 A more secure path to rulership that came with the ability to pass on the crown to a chosen successor came with participation in what Sheldon Pollock has called the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” the world that encompassed South and Southeast Asia in which different centers in both were looped into the intellectual world of Sanskrit literature.3 The exact mechanisms concerning how this intersection actually occurred, what was at one time called Indianization, is debated. Wolters suggested that the ruler found the idea that he was the intermediary between a Brahmanical god (Indra, Siva, or Brahma) and the group he led appealing. Some Angkorian kings such as Indravarman even included the name of their chief god in their regnal titles. 2

3

Oliver Wolters, History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, new edition (Ithaca: Cornell SEAP Publications, 1999). Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

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This gave the ruler a secure footing as king, came with priests and rituals that inspired awe but not deep, popular understanding, and provided reasons for people to be loyal to the king. The personal community of the tribe or band now became the political community of the king and his subjects, which was integrated with a religious system of belief that provided incentives for elites at least to support the system that kept the king in place. Bad times could lead to a threat to a throne, but the daily trials of rulership in the pre-Sanskrit Cosmopolis period now became only an occasional such threat. Such political stability lent itself to larger and faster state formation and this era, remembered today as the classical period, saw the rise of several gargantuan kingdoms including the mainland states of Angkor (today, Cambodia) and Pagan (today, Burma), and the maritime empire of Sri Vijaya in the archipelago, as well as a range of more geographically modest kingdoms like Champa (today, the southern coast of Vietnam), Dai Viet (what is today northern Vietnam), and Majapahit (covering much of Java), which carved up most of the region, mainland and island world alike. Characteristic features of the classical states included the adoption of Indian scripts, inscription engraving, and the borrowing from Indian epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, all things prominent at the court and among the upper echelons of society. These groups saw their king as a world conqueror and the royal domain as being the central core of a series of concentric circles of gradually declining power. The king’s mandala encompassed the whole of the earthly plane, neighboring rulers being viewed as tributaries rather than as coequals. As the king’s role was to maintain universal harmony, when he engaged in war with other kings it was often justified in theory as an effort to restore stability to the world by bringing order to an unruly part of his dominion. In practice, such rulers encountered other growing states with different cultures which led them to “other” other peoples in a way that was permanently recorded in inscriptions. Examples of this can be found in temple bas reliefs such as those at Angkor on the Bayon, in which Khmer warriors, invading Cham warriors, and perhaps Tai mercenaries are all represented in ways that suggest perceived cultural differences in how they dressed, how they wore their hair, and the weapons that they used. Below the court and the literate, elite classes, we know far less about world or local views. Universal salvation religions, where introduced, probably did not permeate society very deeply outside the court, and the temples and religious functionaries it patronized, during the classical period. Religion was thus probably a very weak bond of identification. Many of the Brahmanical gods provided a link between the ruler and the heavens but were very weak 99

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in providing a portable religion that could be carried to a new land. Most people were probably animists more than members of any royal religious cult. Local spirits were relevant mainly to the local environment and did not provide protection outside the local geographical context. This would change later with the increasing social permeation of universal salvation religions, after the decline of the classical states and the beginning of the “age of commerce” (roughly mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth century), in so far as these religions provided portable gods.4 Until then, the most deeply entrenched traditions in rural Southeast Asian societies were those organized around patron–client ties. These vertical relationships were the natural outcome of collections of small village communities around a person of prowess. Horizontal identities, so far as we can tell, remained vertically oriented. There is little evidence that society and identities differed from the patron–client mechanisms of the past, although kings had become more secure and much more durable state formations had become possible. Indeed, the continuity of the latter suggests that beneath the court, little changed in this regard. For much of the classical period, individuals were part of hereditary status and occupation groups. Most free people belonged to communities of cultivators or craftspeople, sometimes living in villages specializing in particular kinds of crafts. War captives would be resettled in new village communities where they specialized as cultivators, craftspeople, or in some kind of activity in warfare. Criminals and captives donated as slaves to the religion would similarly have lived in a self-contained cellular group. Village groups moved around in war as a result served one king as well as another. Political identities, then, defined by subjecthood to the king, were weak and ephemeral, while the identification with one’s trade, craft, or martial skill was much more meaningful and durable, and translated easily into other political contexts. There was, however, an infusion of new ideas of origin and political identities that could provide the building blocks for politicized ethnicities in later centuries. One of these was the idea that kingly lines could be traced back to India or the Middle East and ultimately to the first kings of the world. Another was the idea of varnas, or castes, that while not significant in remolding Southeast Asian societies per se, did lend itself to the idea that leaders of groups did not necessarily emerge from the groups they ruled. In other words, it was possible to be subject to a ruler as part of a population 4

Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, Volume Two: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

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group that was distinct from others under the same ruler. The theory of cakravartanship to which Southeast Asian kings would aspire during this period in fact made the idea of ruling over a number of distinct peoples more attractive because it lent itself to the notion that the king was a universal ruler. In another part of Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese state was attempting to introduce notions of ethnic peoples on the basis of linguistic and civilizational differences. In order to strengthen itself against the inroads of China, the state had adopted for itself the same middle-kingdom view of the world around it. This included placing the Vietnamese and Vietnam at the center of a tributary system in which the tributary peoples surrounding them, who would be described as Tai, Lao, or Khmer today, were marked as civilizationally inferior to the Vietnamese lowlanders and identified by a system of names drawn from Vietnamese registers, not indigenous ones. These identities were imposed upon these minorities, and it was through such filters that they engaged in political relations with the Vietnamese court.5

Trade, Movement, and New Religions The single most important feature of the post-1450 period was that it saw movement everywhere as maritime trade, overland trade, and growing foreign demand for sea trade commodities increased rapidly.6 These economic changes had a negative impact on the large, interior-based agricultural kingdoms of Pagan and Angkor, and added to a number of internal factors that were causing these polities to decline. The emergence of new trade centers closer to the coasts in the Irrawaddy and Mekong river deltas helped to reverse many of the centrifugal political patterns of preceding centuries. Political particularism reinforced, once again, local spirit cults, universal religions weakened, and rulers were reduced in stature as they held hegemony over small enclaves that compared poorly with their classical counterparts. Coastal villages sold their fish or supplied seamen for the carrying trade, residents of villages specializing in handicrafts traveled to markets to sell their wares, and cultivators hauled their produce to markets, often across state boundaries. Those who could not trade sold themselves as bondsmen or as 5

6

Charles Keyes, “Presidential Address: ‘The Peoples of Asia’ – Science and Politics in the Classification of the Peoples of Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies, 61/4 (2002), 1172; John K. Whitmore, “The Two Great Campaigns of the Hong-duc Era (1470–97) in Dai Viet,” South East Asia Research, 12.1 (2004), 119–136. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce.

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mercenaries, feeding new military labor markets demanded by incipient statelets. The older Brahmanic gods had favored royal cults with cryptic rituals and specialist priests, but a new wave of universal salvation religions brought protection for everyone. Religions new to the region such as Islam, Theravada Buddhism, and later, Christianity offered commoners and elites alike protection regardless of where they traveled in the world, unlike local spirit cults which were only relevant in the immediate landscape. The requirements for Buddhist religious pilgrimages or the Hajj to the Middle East helped reinforce a sense, through religion, of being a member of a larger community that transcended the local state, one defined by shared community with one god. Islam would play an especially important role in this period in defining a new identity as Melayu or Malays in the archipelago. Leonard Andaya has shown that the colonial period was marked by the obscuring of this development, because it was politically convenient for Europeans to do so in the early nineteenth century. Melayu was originally a name for a place in the interior of southeast Sumatra as early as the seventh century and, as we know from an inscription, the Javanese referred to the people who had come to live in this area as the “people of Melayu.” By the fourteenth century, the name began to spread, especially with the establishment of the Malay sultanate at Melaka in the fifteenth century. The idea of “Melayu” now provided a cultural, linguistic, and political ideal for all archipelagic polities that attempted to copy Melaka’s commercial success. As Melaka came to be equated with Malay, this spread a particular kind of “Malay” culture, language, and identity throughout the archipelago. Part of this identity, because of the conversion of the Melakan founder Paramesvara to Islam, was to also be Muslim. What was key to this development, Andaya argues, was that the Malay identity was deterritorialized, so that all that being Malay required was “adherence to common mythic ancestors and standards of language, literature, behaviour, laws, and religion.”7 So deterritorialized, the identity could move quickly and be accepted easily. Complicating religious and ethnic identifications, however, were new political ones on the mainland. Given the range of movement, it was not difficult to see what kinds of political identities would emerge. Politics had to remain separate from language, religion, and culture. One “belonged” politically where one was employed rather than with those who shared similar 7

Leonard Andaya, “Aceh’s Contributions to Standards of Malayness,” Archipel, 61 (2001), 33.

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languages, religions, or material culture. Moreover, mainland courts also realized the benefits of a diverse range of followers, and, prior to the economic downturn which accompanied the seventeenth-century crisis, they patronized subjects of all religions, often without prejudice to their own beliefs. The kingdom of Rakhine is one of the great examples of a heterodox court of the period.8 Another aspect of the period involving increased mobility was movement due to political expansion and warfare. Military campaigning between states for control of maritime resources, domestic commercial resources, human resources, agricultural lands, and the like ranged far and wide and some contests were so chronic that some courts fought each other for decades on end, some for half a century or more. Such conflict was bound to give an emotive element to political identities. While Burmese speakers came to work for both the Avan and the Peguan courts or Vietnamese speakers (and Tai speakers) for both the Trinh and the Nguyen, loyalty to one court and hatred of the other often grew into something more meaningful than simply political loyalty. In some cases, such contests probably strengthened regional identities, but in others they may have contributed to a developing notion that one’s political group was one’s main community, not simply through vertical association with the court, but by way of horizontal association with other members of one side in the warfare.

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Changes The reduced activity in international commerce and climate change had important negative impacts on pluralistic notions of group membership. While regional, cultural, and political subjecthood would take a considerable time to lose currency, they were increasingly countered by a strengthening of religious and cultural community. As Anthony Reid has argued, the seventeenth century saw a massive decline in maritime trade, as, for a number of reasons, consumer demand in western Europe and East Asia declined, weather patterns became more diverse, population circulation slowed, and, as a desperate VOC (Dutch East India Company) attempted to weed out competition from local suppliers in the shrinking spice trade, they forced populations concentrated in port cities in what would later be 8

Michael W. Charney, “Crisis and Reformation in a Maritime Kingdom of Southeast Asia: Forces of Instability and Political Disintegration in Western Burma (Arakan), 1603– 1701,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 41/2 (1998), 185–219.

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called the Indonesian archipelago into the interior of the islands where they could grow food to feed themselves.9 In the interior of Java, populations retreating from the coasts encountered more orthodox forms of Islam. On the mainland, declining maritime revenues, although compensated for by overland trade with China, hurt the charismatic aura of the king in a merit-based economy in which prosperity demonstrated good rulership and bad times were taken as evidence of bad rulership. Rulers now ended the era of religious toleration. As the problems they were facing must have been due to universal disharmony, solutions were sought in patronizing the religious clergy or teachers with the correct interpretation of the religion. The religiously tolerant rulers of the past were replaced by born-again orthodox kings who tolerated no heterodoxy. In the pursuit of the salvation of the religion and the community, rulers built either Theravada Buddhist temples or Muslim mosques (and less commonly Christian churches) but not both. Kings who would in the past have used Buddhist and Muslim titles, as in Rakhine and Cambodia, or even flirted with Christianity as well as Buddhism, as in Chittagong, now chose one only. And the worldview of courts included a reimagining of the world around membership in one religious community. The court now had only one religion and the community of the kingdom began to have one religion. In the nineteenth century, in many courts, even Brahmanical priests would be abandoned or pushed further back into the shadows.10 This period also saw the writing of some of the first “country” histories in Buddhist societies on the mainland. These histories, some more accurately called royal histories or chronicles of kings, such as U Kala’s Mahayazawingyi (c. 1730), focused on the royal line of ruling kings and their predecessors and their relationship to Buddhism, but also incorporated oral traditions and even new politically advantageous inventions, which in passing explained how different ethnic groups emerged within the kingdom and its vicinity. Subnarratives included accounts of new kings securing legitimacy and then physically touring the kingdom, and sometimes planting war captive communities along the way at each stop where the king made camp. These war captive communities emerge as the groups that populated the kingdom at the time of writing, groups that would later be identified in the colonial period as ethnic minorities. These precolonial histories demonstrated to the reader (or 9 10

Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce. Michael W. Charney, Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752–1885 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 2006).

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listener) that the kingdom of their own time was not just made of the king and subjects, or free people and royal service groups. Transcending these vertical and horizontal political and social divisions were also different population groups descended from earlier groups mentioned in the chronicles as having been put there by an ancestor king. As for the population groups themselves, many, such as the groups which eventually became known as the Karen, Kachin, Chin, Chams, Dayak, Karenni, Hmong, Bugis, and many others, were oral communities which have left few written records more than a few hundred years old about themselves. This means that aside from politically dominant groups, such as the Burmans, Vietnamese, central Thai, Khmer, Javanese, and Malays, usually equated with the main population of the kingdom, we have little with which to work on understanding how they viewed themselves and their own communities. The fact that we have so much information by these latter “lowland populations” about these oral, highland, and outer island societies means that they have been understood by modern scholarship, until relatively recently, through alien and often hostile eyes. Discussion of precolonial proto-ethnicity can thus be just as misinformed and mal-intentioned as colonial era ethnography, or even more so, and generalizations made need to be understood as being based until relatively recent times on subjective and one-sided evidence. The evidence that we do have for the period before, say, the eighteenth century, indicates several key features of lowland Southeast Asian protoethnicity. First, different groups were believed to speak different languages, to the degree that each group may very well have been determined by its peculiar language or dialects. Literati, lay and monastic, in and outside eighteenth-century Southeast Asian courts, worked with numerous languages and scripts and the different kinds of stories, knowledge, and culture found in the corresponding texts. They may have believed that languages emerged out of differentness or that living within a particular language immersed one in a particular culture that made them different (so, for example, participation in the Mon language and all that went with it made one, at least eventually, a Mon). Second, by the eighteenth century at least, some in Southeast Asia saw community being defined by cultural practice as a key element of group identity. The Burmese case provides the earliest and best-documented examples, although this was likely true throughout the region at this time. Burmese chronicles in the 1730s, at a time when tensions were building between the Burman-dominated court and the Mondominated south, related that in the sixteenth century, the Burman king of 105

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the First Toungoo court made his ministers unhappy by adopting Mon words, the Mon dress, and the like, as if this were a betrayal of his own community.11 Third, othering was also a consequence of the expansion of the Thai-, Burman-, and Vietnamese-dominated states, from the sixteenth century in the case of the first two and even earlier for Vietnam. All polities seem to have given names to enemies they encountered in certain places and at certain times, and often these had little to do with the groups themselves, if in fact they actually did form a group of any kind. As lowland polities expanded, its ways of labeling people gained greater currency and were adopted by others, including Europeans, as ways of rendering the local population geography (and would be reified later by the same route in the colonial period). A good example is that of the Muslim population of Rakhine, who saw themselves as Rohingya by the eighteenth century at least,12 but would be called by other names by the Burmans. Even today, the myriad highland groups across Southeast Asia are known in indigenous languages by different names in different languages. Fourth, the old political ways of identifying people became decreasingly valid from the late eighteenth century, in part due to issues of trust. Religious and cultural reformations in which the courts and religious orders became more conservative led to the perception of differences in culture and religion as marking the boundaries of trust. European mercenaries and war captives from enemy communities were regarded with less trust than they had been in the past. This was partly due to a number of rebellions in which such “strangers” turned against their respective employers. But it was also because religion and the culture that went with it began to be used, and thus seen, as tools of foreign influence and hence as threats. This was particularly true of efforts to convert local populations to Christianity. Fifth, regional identities were not extinguished but were broken up, along the lines of language, class, and religion. As lowland states expanded and regional autonomy became unsustainable, people made alliances as opportunities afforded themselves. Those who met certain expectations were transformed into Central Thai. They married Central Thai, sent their children into the military or to schools in Bangkok. They patronized the right monks and benefited from appointments to important offices by Bangkok.

11

12

Victor B. Lieberman, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth Century Burma,” Modern Asian Studies, 12/3 (1978), 455–482. Francis Buchanan, “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire,” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, 1/1 (2003), 43.

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A number of wars from the mid-eighteenth century until the early nineteenth century, between Siam and Vietnam and between Burma and Siam, also seem to have played a relatively significant role in cementing in place particular groupings on the basis of political allegiances. The eighteenthcentury crises, as these conflicts together were known, saw all the dominant states of mainland Southeast Asia collapse and then rise again under new dynasties, some, like Vietnam, several times in short succession. These conflicts saw heightened awareness of membership in political groupings that also began to align along with other attributes, such as shared culture, language, and religion. The southern rebellion in Lower Burma that broke out in 1740 soon became more or less a Mon rebellion, while the new Burman ruler of Ava from 1752, Alaunghpaya, was said by his late eighteenth-century biographer, the Twin-thwin Taik-wun, to have appealed to Burmans in the south to join him as a fellow Burman. Perhaps also, the increased participation of Europeans as mercenaries, allies, and suppliers during this period may have helped to introduce Western notions of race and nation current at the time as well. Also significant were a number of “national” challenges that came with Qing Chinese invasions of northeastern Burma and northern Vietnam in the last few decades of the eighteenth century. These invasions, coming shortly on the heels of the preceding conflicts, helped solidify the identity of the victors in the previous wars as “our” side.

Intellectual and Religious Formation in the Late Indigenous Empires By about 1830, long-term administrative, economic, social, and cultural trends culminated in the evolution of durable state formations in combination with proto-national communities, preceding, at least on the mainland, the introduction of European rule.13 Courts benefited from holding on to and regulating their human and material resources, and so now, when populations moved about, they did so in circuits under the watchful eye of the state. As a result, their circulation was often limited to regions within the kingdom and thus increasingly fed national identities rather than transnational ones. Populations were becoming coterminous with the boundaries of the state for the first time during a period when the royal domain was being transformed 13

Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. I : Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830; vol. I I : Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands, Studies in Comparative World History Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003–2009).

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into a national geobody by its own design or that of colonial authorities and cartographers.14 The culmination of the evolution of what Lieberman has called the charter states of the region15 also invited a robust intellectual response in mainland Southeast Asia to make sense of the world around them and the people in it.16 Literati who used to pursue knowledge at the request of the king now, often on their own initiative, looked for the basis of proto-national communities of their own time in the past, in the old literature. Cyclical views and religious beliefs meant that national identities, at least for Buddhist Southeast Asians, could not be new but were already there waiting to be revealed. Most importantly, it meant sifting through the multiple and often contradictory notions of population identities and identifications that had come together in the new national polities. Since the beginning of literacy, and especially with the wide-ranging reach of the first Toungoo dynasty, courts had been gathering libraries from those courts they conquered and building everlarger archives of different materials of captured texts. A court might have in its library Rakhine histories and other texts, Burman histories and other texts, Thai histories and other texts, as well as materials taken from Cambodia or the Malay peninsula. Such texts were studied, sometimes traditions were mixed together, and all sorts of combinations of histories, traditions, and lists resulted. When kings sought answers for the questions of their day, ministers returned with multiple, conflicting accounts that created more confusion than confidence. Moreover, it raised possible questions about how the court understood the extent of the current Buddha’s dispensation. Some courts began to turn to monastic sects that claimed they had the right answer, and other courts took on the work of sorting out all knowledge themselves. Whether commanded by the court or on their own initiative, literati in the Buddhist kingdoms were developing indigenous systems of ethnological organization as a register to understand the huge and varied dataset of political, regional, ethnic, and other names they had inherited from earlier generations. At the same time, more autonomous change was underway as the result of commerce and material exchange in an increasingly wideranging empire in the cases of both Burma and Siam. Increasingly, to be “national” meant the adoption of particular cultural practices, religious 14

15 16

Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Thai Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1997); Keyes, “Presidential Address,” 1174. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. I. Charney’s Powerful Learning focuses on these developments in Burma.

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membership, political affiliation, and language, defined by court practice. Such developments probably reached their peak by the early nineteenth century, leaving in place “traditional” fixtures of culture, religion, and history that colonial scholars would later identify as genuinely national. Such transformations were incomplete, however, and were limited to what James Scott has called “state space,” lowland terrain that was cultivatable and easily governed. Lowlanders who wished to resist state revenue demands and law enforcement fled to more difficult terrain, in the outer islands of the archipelago, the mangrove swamps of the delta, or the highland areas that were less easy to govern, which Scott calls non-state space. Here, Scott argues, people were absorbed into preexisting communities, the latter formed perhaps by earlier generations of lowland refugees.17 While there remains debate about this interpretation, Scott’s argument highlights the fact that a number of features of highland life, such as orality and, with it, flexible traditions, presented a contrast with those of late precolonial lowland life on the mainland.18 As a result, there was a disconnect between the hardening identities in lowland Burma and Siam and those of the highlands, where identities remained flexible and fragmented until late in the nineteenth century. Some highlanders claimed multiple ethnicities, strategically using one or another in different contexts. Whether one was a Shan, a Lao, a Burmese, a Thai, or something else depended on the context they happened to be in at the time, whether they were at home in their own village, crossing the border into Thailand, going to trade in Mandalay, or going on a religious pilgrimage. At a time when lowland states were beginning to view membership along hardened, proto-ethnic lines, being able to present oneself as “part of the community” could allay suspicion or gain some other kind of advantage, even save one’s life. Similarly, differences in religion helped to keep ethnic groups separate in the archipelago. Some scholars have highlighted the particular kinds of oral traditions that “sea peoples,” the maritime equivalent of mainland highlanders, have about their origins, many of which include references to their ancestors being cursed and, with no religion, being banished to live on boats in the service of others. Such stories reflected the very real division that separated nominally Muslim Orang Laut from their devout Muslim Malay neighbors on the mainland.19 17

18 19

James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 40–45. Ibid., 221. Tom Gunnar Hoogervorst, “Ethnicity and Aquatic Lifestyles: Exploring Southeast Asia’s Past and Present Seascapes,” Water History, 4/3 (2012), 253–254.

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The arrival of colonial rule brought European ethnographers, who drew upon the registers formed in large lowland courts or developed their own locked-in-place permanent abstractions of Southeast Asian ethnicity. As a result, ethnic groups came to be known by the Europeans by lowland names for them, rather than by how they called themselves. In some cases, such as the Chin, these groups would become known (and governed) as different ethnic groups (in this case as the Zo, Chin, or Lushai) depending on which side of colonial administrative borders they resided, and only relatively recently have these groups attempted to reconnect under a single ethnic banner. More importantly, the histories of highland ethnic groups were those found in lowland histories, or in particular highland or archipelagic histories convenient to colonial designs,20 rather than reflecting the stories they told about their own pasts. The limited historical engagement of these highland peoples with essentially lowland cultural, linguistic, and religious developments made them prime objects for conversion by Baptist missionaries. These missionaries undertook a role not dissimilar to that of lowland scribes in defining ethnicity for these minorities, forging ethnic historical narratives from diverse oral traditions, and bringing diverse dialects together into a single or – in the case of the Karen, overlapping the frontiers between Burma and Siam – two main dialects. The late nineteenth century saw a wave of European conquests across the region. Some, such as in the island world, built upon European conquests of earlier decades and centuries. On the mainland, European military victories were something new, as military technology now made it possible for European countries to overcome the huge numbers of soldiers that indigenous courts could field. Successive wars in Burma and Vietnam included calls to loyalty made on the basis of some of the systems of identity developed since the late eighteenth century. And with each new war, these appeals seemed more and more national. Some indigenous scholars have referred to those insurgents who fought the final British and French conquests as nationalists or patriots.21 It may very well be the case that, by this time in the century, indigenous ideas had developed this far. More tellingly, indigenous resistance was not uniform, and some minorities were not fighting to save the court, but instead for their own populations. Such groups easily transferred loyalty to the Europeans when the latter offered their leaders significant autonomy. 20 21

Andaya, “Aceh’s Contributions to Standards of Malayness,” 30. Ni Ni Myint, Burma’s Struggle against British Imperialism, 1885–1895 (Rangoon: Universities Press, 1983).

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Precolonial Southeast Asian politicized ethnicities or proto-national identities would remain durable throughout the colonial period in large part because of their intersection with thinking of the Enlightenment that permeated the non-Western world over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These intellectual and ideological waves hit the Philippines first because of special connections between the Spanish Philippines and Latin America, which saw revolution and the rise of nationalism first. Then other European colonies followed. There was a strong intellectual link between the colonial educated class and the metropole through shared language (French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch) and through the medium of colonial education. These links encouraged the introduction of the modern novel from Europe into the region, and, with it, the idea of imagined communities. The introduction of the printing press and Western political discourse gave birth to the national idea, a political community, as the final step in politicized ethnicities. Burmese, Vietnamese, and Indonesians were no longer just political subjects of the state they were living in; they were each a national community built around language, religion, culture, and traditions, that could be politicized to take action in favor of the wellbeing of all members of that community. Their interests were increasingly viewed as inconsistent with the interests of the colonial state. By the 1920s, in most colonies, save for Malaya and a few other places where development was slower, political parties calling for national liberation had been organized. Unfortunately, the intersection of precolonial ethnic paradigms and colonial ethnicity cemented in place ideas of the nation which were unitary and not pluralistic. Ethnic minorities within countries that were becoming independent from the mid-1940s would be treated in an almost colonial way by majority populations which determined national languages, national religions, national history, and a national culture. Throughout the region, problems between lowland, majority populations and highland or outer island ethnic minorities have worsened, resuming longer-term tensions that were delayed in part because of European divideand-rule approaches to their colonies. In colonial Burma, for example, the majority Burmans were largely excluded from the military, a ban that became complete in 1928, while ethnic minorities such as the Karen were identified as martial races. As a result, independence brought hostility toward these ethnic minorities, helping to contribute to the civil war in the country. The Dutch similarly tried to exploit ethnic tensions in the Indonesian Revolution after the Second World War. In the Philippines and Vietnam, lowland states began settling majority ethnic and religious groups (Catholics 111

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in the Philippines) in minority areas as part of attempts to alleviate overcrowding but also to encourage state integration. Moreover, under Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam recommenced Vietnam’s attempts to Vietnamize the Mekong delta’s two-million-strong Khmer ethnic minority by abolishing the use of the Khmer language and closing Khmer schools in the country.22 In Malaysia and Singapore, different kinds of tensions emerged between the indigenous Malays, the Bumiputera (sons of the soil), and Chinese immigrant populations largely but not entirely dating from the colonial period.

Conclusion Southeast Asia met the arrival of colonial ethnic paradigms with those of their own which had been developing for many centuries. Their historical development cannot be entirely explained by prevailing models built on the European or Western experience. The socio-biological model, for example, a subschool of the perennialist approach, explains the initial formation of groups under rulers on the basis of charismatic power. In Southeast Asia the evidence of history does not support the idea of people being genetically predisposed to forming ethnic groups. In fact, it was never a given in the region that people would primarily identify as part of a horizontal group instead of part of a vertical network, an orientation still very influential throughout the region. By contrast, the ethnosymbolic subschool of the perennialist approach provides more room for comparison, as it holds that ethnic groups predate the modern era but depend upon writing, religion, and extra-local mobility as the means of forging the bonds of imagined ethnic communities. Such an explanation does reflect some of the articulations and politicizations of protoethnicity among the core ethnic groups that continue to dominate Southeast Asia politically, and the long-term and staggered evolution of these groups within Southeast Asia over the course of many centuries. But this model does not account for the marginalization of those groups formed by inclusion and exclusion in the highland areas of the mainland or among the seafaring peoples of the archipelago, respectively. Moreover, it reinforces the biases of lowland, majoritarian states by denying a range of modern, minority, ethnic groups historical agency in their own formation. The efforts to form “the Austrien” ethnic group by joining together the Chams, Hmong, and 22

Gerald Cannon Hickey, Window on a War: An Anthropologist in the Vietnam Conflict (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2002), 69.

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Khmer, possibly on the basis of connections to the Austronesian language group, in mid-1960s Cambodia and the Vietnamese highlands,23 provide a rare insight into how those left out of lowland ethnic formation responded to the changed political circumstances of their surroundings. The antiquity of the beginnings of what emerged as ethnic groups within the region also questions the relevance of modernist models of ethnicity. Southeast Asians had been grouped and grouped themselves in what, at the very least, must be accepted as proto-ethnic groups or an indigenous equivalent of ethnic groups long before the colonial period and long before the Enlightenment. Colonial influence would give these identifications and identities a particular order that suited Western registers and they would identify particular terms and descriptions, but deep within the European paradigm were indigenous ways of dividing the peoples of the region in ways that were close enough to European formations to be adapted by the latter. Where does this overview of precolonial ethnicity in Southeast Asia leave us? It is unclear whether all ethnic groups formed in the region in the same ways. Certainly, in broad strokes, ethnic formation was due to some of the same transitions during the same periods, but there also appear to be significant variations. Some of these may have arisen from substantively distinct contexts and conditions, while others may be artifacts of the particular kinds of source materials we have to rely upon for different parts of the region. Certainly, trade and a particular kind of relationship with Melaka, at a time when consumer demand in Europe and China made Melaka so attractive, was crucial in spreading a Malay identity that was also Muslim and not Brahmanical. Moreover, had the same events occurred several centuries earlier, when Sumatra was the world center of Tantric Buddhism, we might have wound up with a Malay identity today that was Buddhist and not Muslim. In this view, ethnic identity was a motor of political expansion. On the mainland, by contrast, ethnic formations were more of an outcome of political expansion and conflict. Despite their diverse origins, they would be picked up and re-utilized by colonial regimes for their own purposes. It remains unclear whether, if the influence of the state since the colonial period could be set aside, the kinds of understandings of ethnicity that remain embedded in the region’s cultures would still look the same, or more closely resemble the different kinds of formations the Europeans encountered when they arrived in the region.

23

Ibid., 164.

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Further Reading Andaya, Leonard, Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008). Charney, Michael W., Powerful Learning: Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last Dynasty, 1752–1885 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 2006). Hoogervorst, Tom Gunnar, “Ethnicity and Aquatic Lifestyles: Exploring Southeast Asia’s Past and Present Seascapes,” Water History, 4/3 (2012), 245–265. Keyes, Charles, “Presidential Address: ‘The Peoples of Asia’ – Science and Politics in the Classification of the Peoples of Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies, 61/4 (2002), 1163–1203. Lieberman, Victor B., Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. I : Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, Studies in Comparative World History Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Lieberman, Victor B., Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. I I : Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands, Studies in Comparative World History Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Wolters, Oliver, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, new edition (Ithaca: Cornell SEAP Publications, 1999).

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6

“India” before the Raj: Space and Identity in South Asian History ananya chakravarti The birth of the nation in South Asia is inextricably linked to the sundering of our past and our communities along religious lines, a fracturing rehearsed endlessly in the bloodbaths of repeated partitions, riots, and pogroms, in the banality of daily lynchings. For South Asians today, “India” before the Raj is indeed a foreign country. Let me recount a tale from this faraway land, which cannot be located on modern maps, to show how wondrously strange it is. On 1 April 1597, Gonçalo Toscano was arrested in Portuguese India.1 The Inquisition classified Toscano by “caste” as being “Muslim [mouro], originating from Balaghat [a range of foothills in present-day Maharashtra], freedman [forro], single,” and about twenty-three years of age. Some nine years before, after being baptized and owing to disagreements he had with “his friend,” a certain Matheus Carvalho, he had left the city of Bassein (Baçaim) to return to his hometown of Kalyan (Galiana, near Thane).2 There, his mother convinced him of his error in converting to Christianity. Gonçalo admitted to learning two Muslim prayers, identifiable from the mangled Portuguese transcription as a portion of the su¯rah al-fa¯tihah, the opening chapter of the ˙ Qur’a¯n, and the su¯rah al-ikhla¯s, declaring the absolute unity of God. Gonçalo ˙ himself confessed to being unable to explain the prayers “in our language.” He also returned to Muslim practices of praying at the mosque, performing ablutions, and observing the fast of Ramadan. This was recorded with an obsessive attention to the minutiae of ritual practice, reflecting perhaps a narrow inquisitorial concern with confessional boundaries rather than Gonçalo’s own devoutness. In the third session of his interrogation, on 8 May, Gonçalo revealed that, while living in his mother’s house, he had accompanied his relatives on 1

2

Processo de Gonçalo Toscano, 1597, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT), Tribunal do Santo Ofício, Inquisição de Lisboa, Processo 4931. Given Toscano’s status as a freedman, Carvalho may well have been his former owner, with whom he continued to have a client–patron relationship, a common occurrence in Portuguese India.

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pilgrimage to the gumbad (gamote, lit. domed house) of the Chishtı¯ saint Syed Muhammad Yousuf al Hussaini, popularly known as Bande Nawa¯z Gı¯su¯dara¯z, “he with the long tresses” (d. 1422). The saint had come to settle in Gulbarga at the invitation of the Ba¯hmani sultan, Ta¯j ud-Dı¯n Firuz Sha¯h, who sought to make the Deccan an Islamic cultural center independent of Delhi. Gı¯su¯dara¯z was the first Sufi to use the Dakkhanı¯ vernacular, composing a life of the Prophet in the language, Mi’ra¯j al-‘ashiqı¯n, for the instruction of the masses.3 As such, the saint continued to hold great popular appeal in the Deccan in this period. At the shrine, the inquisitorial scribe recorded, Gonçalo had fallen to his knees and laid offerings that he had carried on the saint’s tomb. In the days he remained there, he went every day to the tomb with his mother, but insisted he only prayed to ask for riches. In the same interrogation session, he also admitted to learning the šaha¯dah, the Islamic creed whose meaning he was able to convey roughly to the inquisitors as “there is only God and Mohammad and there is none other greater.” In the fourth interrogation, of 12 May, Gonçalo also admitted to having married a Muslim girl at some point. For two years, Gonçalo declared, he persisted in these errors before repenting and returning to his friend, who took him to an inquisitor in Bassein. After he completed the penitences ordered by the rector of the Jesuit College of São Paulo, Gonçalo stayed with his friend for three years as “a true Catholic.” Then, a Hindu sailor denounced him to the captain of the fortress of Bassein, João Gomes de Azevedo, as a highwayman. The sailor carried him off to the Moors, knowing that the captain had ordered Toscano to be captured. He was left to wander for some five or six days in hiding through the orchards of the city and then, “through the Devil’s temptation,” he passed to the camp (arraial) of the Moors, intending to become Muslim. There, he advertised himself as a Portuguese, and was dressed in the same Christian costume (trajo da christão) he had worn for the past six days and despaired of finding anyone to feed him. Eventually, he was brought before the captain of the Moors, to whom he revealed his parentage and how he had come to flee Bassein in order to become Muslim. The captain ordered him to dress as a Muslim, with a cap and robe, and over the next fifteen days, he accompanied the Moors three times to “fight the Christians,” before he was sent as a prisoner with “ten or twelve others of the cavalry” to Ahmadnagar.

3

Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 351.

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There, Toscano was presented to the Niza¯msha¯hi sultan in the same Portuguese clothes in which he was discovered, and recounted the tale that had roused the suspicion of the Moorish captain, that he was, in fact, a spy for the Christians. He was then confined to a fortress for three months, during which he lived publicly and observantly as a Muslim. One night, finding the fortress open, Gonçalo escaped dressed as a yogi (Jogue). He wandered alone through many lands for some three or four months until, arriving in the city of Diu, he came to find himself with the Capuchins, to whom he gave an account of his life. The following day, he was commanded to appear before the Portuguese captain, who apprehended him for fighting against the Christians on behalf of the Moors. He then languished in prison for more than a year, until the inquisitor passed through the city. When Gonçalo was presented to him, he was handed over to the local archpriest (vigário da vara, lit. vicar of the rod), who demanded a bond in exchange for freeing him from the stocks. One day, while accompanied by the bailiff, on the pretext of stopping to drink a little water, Gonçalo ran down the street and again escaped to the land of the Moors. On his third interrogation he revealed the reason for this impetuous bid for freedom: while imprisoned in Diu with a Hindu “sorcerer,” the latter gave Gonçalo a small amount of some roots and herbs to place in a silver ring, telling him that it would aid him in escaping within fifteen days. Though Gonçalo wore the ring for two months, to his increasing rage, he remained imprisoned. When he came to realize he had been deceived, he planned a more worldly means of escape. In the land of the Moors, he returned to Muslim vestments and customs. Yet his former faith continued to prick his conscience. Meeting some Portuguese renegades in the employ of the Moors, he learned from them that he would only find a legal remedy for his situation by appealing in Rome. (The inquisitors pressed him on the identity of these Portuguese “turned Moors” during the sixth session of his interrogation of 14 May.) Accordingly, dressed as a yogi again, he determined to go to Surat and take a boat to Mecca. (Though his intention was to convey to the inquisitors his intention of going to Rome, the ambiguity of his planned route, along the path of the Hajj, is notable.) At this juncture, the armada arrived from Diu, and Gonçalo was discovered by some soldiers. He told them about his plans to go to Rome. He was told that the archbishop primate was in Daman and had the power to absolve him. Toscano then requested the captain of the armada to hand him over only to the archbishop. On this understanding, he accompanied the armada to Diu, where he was handed over to the Capuchins. From there, he went to Bassein where he presented himself to the archbishop and 117

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briefly told him how he came to be a Moor. Lacking time, Toscano claimed he could not tell the whole story and was thus imprisoned yet again. He therefore threw himself upon the mercy of the Inquisition, seeking pardon as an “ignorant weak boy and miserable, blind sinner, deceived by the Devil.” As his repeated interrogations suggest, the inquisitors found his bizarre story deeply suspicious, with each session revealing yet more instances of crossing boundaries, both confessional and political. (The intense pressure he must have undergone between these sessions to confess further transgressions remains undocumented in the archive.) Yet the one striking motif in all his sessions was Gonçalo’s repeated declarations of faith in the Virgin Mary, a theme he stuck to even when reversing his claim that he had remained Catholic in his heart at all times. A fascinating coda to the inquisitorial trial revealed the reason for his faith: on 10 June, his spiritual guardian informed the inquisitors that Gonçalo had confessed to him that, during his second time among the Moors, he was invited to accompany a group to burn down the church of the Madre de Deus in Palle. The Franciscan Paulo da Trindade, in his monumental account of the spiritual conquest of the orient composed in Goa around 1630/1636, described it as the most important of the churches in the town (cassabé) of Bassein: “there is a Lady of extreme beauty, the best finished and most perfect that is known in India, who is crossed with a sword, in whom the inhabitants of the city have a lot of devotion, and many go on Saturdays to hear the mass of the Lady, taking olive oil and candles as offerings.”4 It was here that God allowed Gonçalo to witness a miracle: the Virgin with her infant son in her arms and a red rose in her hand appeared to him before his very eyes beneath a tree. Behind her, an entire squadron also appeared. Gonçalo appears not to have been alone in seeing this apparition, for all the Moors, seeing this, were frightened and turned around. This miracle had confirmed in him, it seems, a lifelong devotion to the Virgin. Yet, here again, confessional ambiguities abound: not only is the red rose redolent with Islamic symbolism, the Virgin is equally venerated in Islamic culture as in Catholicism. Indeed, the Virgin provided an important cultural bridge between European missionaries in early modern India and its Islamic elites: Christian and Muslim theological differences in the tradition of the Virgin constituted an important area of religious disputations staged at the Mughal court, allowing both rapprochement and the marking of confessional

4

Frei Paulo da Trindade, Conquista espeiritual do oriente, vol. I I (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1964), 121.

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difference, while visual representations of Mary became an important focus of local engagement with European traditions of art.5 Gonçalo Toscano – devotee of the Virgin Mary and of Bande Nawa¯z Gı¯su¯dara¯z, sometime Muslim warrior, occasional good Catholic, cunningly disguised yogi, who once sought the pope’s benediction via a voyage to Mecca – is unlikely to be any modern South Asian’s idea of an ancestor. What might his picaresque life reveal to us about the history of South Asia before British colonialism? With all the usual caveats regarding the reliability of archival documents produced in hegemonic institutions as sources for subaltern lives, Toscano’s trial leads to two important observations regarding the ways in which nationalist paradigms obscure pasts. First, the reification of political boundaries entailed by the modern nation-state blinds us to the porosity and fragility of such boundaries for polities that preceded its advent. Toscano, slipping back and forth between the Deccan sultanates and the Portuguese Província do Norte, serves as a salutary corrective to our geographical imaginations that are too often shaped by modern fictions of power. Second, it underscores the importance of considering the difference between elite projects of enforcing boundaries – both spatial, as in fortified borders and other forms of licensed pathways such as the Portuguese system of cartazes in the Indian Ocean, and social, in the sense of consciously articulated and policed structures of identities – and the ways in which subaltern subjects negotiated these projects.6 It is this latter point that remains the unfulfilled promise of present historiography on South Asia before the British Raj. I deliberately eschew the characterization of this historiography as premodern or precolonial, in part because these terms themselves are central to debates within a field that struggles with the entangled teleologies of modernity and colonialism. It is a struggle that reflects the central contradiction of nationalism in postcolonial places like South Asia, in which the quest for indigenous genealogies for the modern nation is confounded by the 5

6

Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Frank Disputations: Catholics and Muslims in the Court of Jahangir (1608–1611),” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 46/4 (2009), 457–511. For an outstanding example of Indian representations of the Virgin, see Farrukh Beg’s beautiful depiction of the Madonna, depicted with a revealed breast, and the infant Jesus, holding a book, dating from his post-Mughal career at the ‘A¯dil Sha¯hi court in Bijapur. Inspired by a European print, undoubtedly easily available from neighboring Portuguese Goa, the image is nonetheless characteristically Deccan, including the use of marbled paper. Farrukh Beg, A Christian Subject: Madonna and Child, c. 1605–1610, opaque watercolor and gold on marbled paper, 16 x 11.1 cm, Washington, DC, Freer-Sackler Gallery of Art. On this issue, see Ananya Chakravarti, “Mapping ‘Gabriel’: Space, Identity and Slavery in Late Sixteenth-Century Western India,” Past and Present, 43/1 (May 2019), 5–34.

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inescapable coincidence of European colonialism and the advent of modernity. (The relative paucity of research on European settlements in South Asia beyond British high colonialism has only skewed our understanding of European imperialism and colonialism. The Anglophilia of the field since the 1990s, as the study of South Asian history has declined in both continental Europe and South Asia itself, has exacerbated this tendency.)7 In the current context of resurgent nationalist politics in South Asia, the complexities of South Asian history are being deliberately – and violently – excised to fit narrow nationalist paradigms. The 2015 assassination by Hindu nationalists of the octogenarian scholar Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi – whose most important work was on the twelfth-century S´aiva thinker Basava’s critique of the caste and gender hierarchies and ritualism of the dominant S´rotrı¯ya brahmins of medieval Karnataka – is emblematic of the violence claiming scholars who resist communitarian and nationalist narratives across South Asia. Less dramatic but equally pernicious has been the systematic distortion of historical narratives for nationalist ends in South Asian textbooks since independence, culminating recently in the Hindu nationalist campaign to remove references to the Mughals in Indian textbooks at the state and national level.8 Yet, the intensity and violence of political conflict over history ironically underlines what all historians know: the past, as Arjun Appadurai once said before his turn to postmodernism, is a scarce resource and cannot be infinitely molded to contemporary purposes.9 Thus, South Asian pasts before the Raj are not reducible to neat nationalist teleologies. Indeed, the historical 7

8

9

Scholarship on the Portuguese, French, and Dutch in South Asia that moves beyond the frame of imperial history to take seriously the local context of these settlements is beginning to address this lacuna. For the case of the Portuguese, the pioneering work of D. D. Kosambi, Michael Pearson, and George Scammell that emphasized indigenous agency in the making of Portuguese India bore fruit, particularly, in the work of Goan historians like the late Teotonio da Souza, Celsa Pinto, and others. For a recent example of this approach, see Rochelle Pinto, “The Foral in the History of the Communidades,” Journal of World History, 29 (2018), 185–212. Another strand of scholarship has taken the pioneering work of scholars such as Ashin Das Gupta, Phillipe Haudrère, Sinnapah Arasaratnam, and Om Prakash on the economic and trade history of the European companies to mine the same archives for cultural history. See, for example, Markus Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Danna Agmon, A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). On this issue, see Khursheed Kamal Aziz’s classic work, The Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1993); Niladri Bhattacharya, “Teaching History in Schools: The Politics of Textbooks in India,” History Workshop Journal, 67/1 (2009), 99–110. Arjun Appadurai, “The Past as a Scarce Resource,” Man, new series 16/2 (1981), 201–219.

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transmutation of texts and narratives demonstrates precisely the convoluted genealogies of contemporary communal constructions of the medieval past, built through accretions of narrative layers, each directed to a coeval political purpose that has now been forgotten.10 By the same token, communities have constructed usable pasts for themselves in the context of the modern nation-state out of the fragments of half-forgotten history.11 Little wonder then that past-making itself has been a central preoccupation of South Asian historiography.12 The context of resurgent nationalism in South Asia has shaped the questions and tenor of historical research, particularly with regard to a renewed focus on religion. In an illuminating historiographical essay, Daud Ali pointed out that the original temporal divisions of South Asian historiography bore an explicitly religious inflection: colonial constructions of a “golden age” (usually identified with either the Mauryan or Gupta Empire) required a corollary period of medieval decline, before the renaissance of the colonial modern. “For most,” Ali wrote, “the Turkic conquests and establishment of the Delhi Sultanate between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries . . . provided a convenient occasion for this decline.”13 This association continued despite the adoption of a secular terminology of “ancient,” “medieval,” and “modern” in postindependence university departments, where research continued 10

11

12

13

James Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Shahid Amin, Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2015); Cynthia Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Manan Ahmed Asif, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Sunil Kumar, “The Tyranny of Metanarratives: Re-reading the History of Sultanate Delhi,” in Kumkum Roy and Naina Dayal (eds.), A Festschrift for Romila Thapar: Questioning Paradigm, Constructing Histories (New Delhi: Aleph, 2019), 220–233. See, for example, Yasmin Saikia, Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity and the Making of Kashmir (London: Hurst, 2004). See, for example, Sheldon Pollock, “Mimamsa and the Problem of History in Traditional India,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 109 (1989), 603–610; Daud Ali (ed.), Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 (New York: Other Press, 2003); Sumit Guha, “Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400–1900,” American Historical Review, 109.4 (2004), 1084–1103; Kumkum Chatterjee, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Chitralekha Zutshi, Kashmir’s Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014). Daud Ali, “The Historiography of the Medieval in South Asia,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd series, 22/1 (2012), 7.

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to be organized along religious lines of Hindu/Buddhist, as opposed to Muslim pasts.14 Not until the rise of social history in the late 1950s did this religious focus give way, as Marxist scholars elaborated a theory of “Indian feudalism.” When scholarship on the vibrant trade and urban density of medieval India discredited feudalism as a historical model, anthropological and sociological theories animated new research. The preoccupation with the apparent lack of centralized bureaucratic structures in medieval South Asia eventually gave way, by the end of the 1980s, to a more positive interpretive model, in which localization and regional state formation in the post-Gupta period were seen as the proliferation rather than devolution of state structures in a continuous process from below. At the same time, the Aligarh Muslim University-led school of research into the Mughal period advanced a model of military-fiscalism which upended the image of Muslim decline with a robust view of the Mughal state. In different ways, these dynamics disrupted the (colonial) classification of South Asian pasts along religious lines. With the rise of identitarian politics and the opening of the Indian autarchy in the 1980s to the forces of global neoliberalism, the focus on economic and social history retreated. Instead, cultural and global historical frameworks, including the introduction of the explicitly teleological notion of the early modern in South Asia, came into vogue.15 In the process, two major changes are discernible in the historiography. First, religion returned as a central 14

15

On the colonial bifurcation of an Indian past, which laid the foundation of the communal interpretation of Indian history, see Brajdulal Chattopadhyay’s lucid discussion in Representing the Other?: Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (8th–14th Century) (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998), 16. This is precisely the dangerous and disturbing methodological and political trap Ananya Vajpayee’s work falls into, particularly when we consider that the only figure outside the pale of “Indic tradition” in her construction is the Dalit leader, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Needless to say, no Muslim thinker even figures in her pantheon of modern representatives of “Indic tradition.” See Ananya Vajpayee, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). The pioneering work of Sanjay Subrahmanyam is of paramount importance here in refusing a solely colonial genealogy for South Asian modernity, especially his collaborative research, which models the advantages of joint scholarship in a field too often fragmented along linguistic and regional historiographical specialties. See especially Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Christopher Bayly, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 25/4 (1988), 401–424; Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “L’état Moghol et sa fiscalité, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles,” Annales, 49/1 (1994), 189–217; Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in

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category of historical analysis. Second, new and more extensive spatial frameworks defined the horizons of research, to which I return below. It is no accident that a major theme of recent scholarship has been the investigation of identity formation, particularly between Hindus and Muslims. In response to the alarming rise of militant Hindu nationalism in the 1980s, which legitimizes its exclusionary claims precisely through a changeless and eternal view of a unified Hindu tradition, one strand of scholarship denied that the category “Hindu” had any meaningful precolonial referent. In this view, Hinduism as a unified religion is an artifact of the British colonial experience. Even as Protestant missionaries examined indigenous cosmological worlds and found them deficient in the minimal features of a Christian notion of religion, orientalists advanced a view of an ancient and unchanging Vedic tradition.16 Whether through the self-serving machinations of brahminical native informants or as an act of defiant appropriation in the face of colonial domination, colonial subjects came to internalize a view of a unified and unchanging faith, the sana¯tana dharma, even as they elaborated a new religion.17 This strand of scholarship, unsurprisingly in vogue among historians of the colonial period, refuses the essential unity implied by the term “Hinduism” as either the invention of tradition among modern believers, or as the misguided effect of a scholarly bias (itself a historical legacy of Eurocentric conceptions of religion) toward finding coherence or unity where none exists.18 Historians of the pre-Raj period are more skeptical of the notion that such categories as “Hindu,” let alone caste, were solely colonial inventions.19

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Nayaka Period Tamil Nadu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); Rao et al., Textures of Time. G. A. Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793–1900 (New Delhi: Sage, 2006); Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Paul Hacker, “Aspects of Neo-Hinduism as Contrasted with Surviving Traditional Hinduism,” in Wilhelm Halbfass (ed.), Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 229–256. On brahminical native informants and the ways in which colonialism reinforced brahminical hegemony, see Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995, repr. 2008), 113–159; Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). See the seminal volume published in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron (eds.), Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (New Delhi: Sage, 1995), particularly the chapters by Partha Chatterjee and Vasudha Dalmia. The most pernicious outgrowth of the postcolonial strand of scholarship has been the denial of caste as a feature of pre-Raj South Asian life. See, for example, Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton

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Recent exploration of the early modern European constructions of Hinduism, beyond the relatively late British tradition, has shown that many outsiders did in fact observe a certain unity in the religious phenomena of South Asia.20 From the emic viewpoint, Andrew Nicholson has argued that, between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, indigenous philosophers and doxographers began to treat the diverse philosophical teachings derived from the Upanisads, epics, pura¯nas, and the six philosophical schools (sad dars´ana) as ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ a single whole.21 Nonetheless, it is undeniable that the presence of Islamic rule played an important role in the consolidation of a Hindu identity. In a classic essay, Cynthia Talbot argued that in the fluid frontier context of the medieval Deccan, where “[n]either the parvenu Andhra warriors of the fourteenth century, nor the Turkic intruders of the Delhi Sultanate, relative newcomers to Islam, had much stature as authority figures,” discursive constructions drawing on ancient symbols of their respective religions – whether brahminical images of the struggle against demons and the godless, or Islamic ones of jiha¯d – served to shore up their own shaky claims to legitimacy. As Talbot demonstrates, at a time when regional and linguistic identities were increasingly important in political self-fashioning, religion was far from the primary motivation of elite competition and conflict. Such discourse instead reflected strategies aimed at consolidating community allegiance in a military frontier.22 Talbot’s striking thesis soon found corroboration: Brajdulal Chattopadhyay’s analysis of Sanskrit epigraphic and textual sources, notably, revealed not homogeneous religious communities but ethnic groups of diverse origins functioning as traders, looters, rulers, and administrators,

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University Press, 2001). Longue durée studies are particularly valuable in showing the obvious untruth of this position; see, for example, Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Discourses of Caste over the Longue Durée: Gopı¯na¯tha and Social Classification in India, ca. 1400–1900,” South Asian History and Culture, 6/1 (2015), 102–125. The far longer and non-British European tradition of documenting and classifying native religion in the subcontinent remains relatively overlooked in the scholarship. For welcome exceptions, see Will Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism: “Hinduism” and the Study of Indian Religions, 1600–1776 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003); Carolien Stolte, Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers: Vaisnava Mythology from Manuscript to Book Market in the Context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600–1672 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012); Ines G. Županov and Angela Barreto Xavier, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Andrew Nicholson, Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Cynthia Talbot, “Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self: Hindu–Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37/4 (1995), 692–722.

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invoking past terminologies for others or coining new ethnic terms depending on sociopolitical context.23 Denying the Hindu nationalist construction of medieval Muslim rule as a historical injustice against the non-Islamic majority that must be righted by the modern nation-state, medievalists instead presented nuanced studies of competitive religious identity-making. Notably, they have shown that the cultural borrowing and even bivalence that resulted from encounter did not preclude the rhetorical assertion of religious difference as a political strategy of ruling elites in frontier zones.24 This emphasis on the political nature of royal decision-making in matters of religion has also characterized studies of the north Indian heartland.25 Beyond ruling elites, as various excellent studies have demonstrated, brahmins, who had undoubtedly lost land, endowments, and patronage during the initial conquest, quickly accommodated themselves to Muslim rule. In the dynamic social context of emerging state bureaucracies, they vigorously contested competition to their social status from other, particularly scribal, castes.26 Their symbiotic relationship with royal power, in which 23

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See Chattopadhyay, Representing the Other? As a point of comparison, see also Sunil Kumar, “Politics, the Muslim Community and Hindu–Muslim Relations Reconsidered: North India in the Early Thirteenth Century,” in Rajat Datta (ed.), Rethinking a Millennium: Perspectives on Indian History from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century. Essays for Harbans Mukhia (New Delhi: Aakar, 2008), 140–167. See, for example, Philip B. Wagoner, “‘Sultan among Hindu Kings’: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,” Journal of Asian Studies, 55/4 (1996), 851–880; Philip B. Wagoner, “Harihara, Bukka and the Sultan: The Delhi Sultanate in the Political Imagination of Vijayanagara,” in David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence (eds.), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 312–320; Richard Eaton, “Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States,” Journal of Islamic Studies, 11/3 (2000), 283–319. See especially Satish Chandra, Mughal Religious Policies: The Rajputs and the Deccan (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1993); Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Muzaffar Alam’s subsequent work on Mughal–Sufi relations, reflecting in some ways Simon Digby’s approach in his classic essay on the relationship of the sheikh and the sultan in the Delhi Sultanate, has continued in this vein: see especially Muzaffar Alam, “The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation,” Modern Asian Studies, 43/1 (2009), 135–174. Most recently, Audrey Truschke has taken a similar approach in her studies of the Mughals and their relationship to religion: Cultures of Encounter: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) and Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). Rosalind O’Hanlon, “The Social Worth of Scribes: Brahmans, Kayasthas and the Social Order in Early Modern India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 47/4 (2010), 563–595; Rajiv Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Than Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). For an excellent history of their most successful rivals in this enterprise, see Chitralekha Gupta, The Kayasthas: A Study in the Formation and Early History of a Caste (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1996).

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they served as reliable agents in exchange for the kingly adjudication necessary to maintain corporate identity, thus continued in both Hindu and Muslim domains, particularly in the south.27 Later, as regional powers sought to articulate their growing independence from the Mughal Empire, the brahminization of court culture again reinscribed the power of the caste.28 At the popular level, excellent studies that eschew the binary paradigm of either reifying identity or emphasizing syncretism show the complexity and multivalence of past religious cultures. The lines of research engendered by Simon Digby and Richard Eaton’s pioneering work on Sufism from the 1970s have been especially fecund in this regard, as has been the study of bhakti, to which I return below. These studies challenged problematic divisions between an elite “classical” or literary culture and popular cults in conceptualizing religious history in South Asia, showing how subaltern religiosity was absorbed, appropriated, and accommodated in elite cultural production – and could thus be read back into the archive.29 Ironically, much of the historiography on religious history in South Asia demonstrates precisely how the contemporary emphasis on religion as the 27

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Rosalind O’Hanlon and Christopher Minkowski, “What Makes People Who They Are? Pandit Networks and the Problem of Livelihoods in Early Modern Western India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 45/3 (2008), 381–416; Sumit Guha, “Serving the Barbarian to Preserve the Dharma: The Ideology and Training of a Clerical Elite in Peninsular India, c. 1300–1800,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, 47/4 (2010), 497–525. Kesavan Veluthat’s important corpus has demonstrated the importance of the temple as an institution in early medieval south India, particularly in comparison to the north, itself a major factor in cementing brahminical dominance. See the essays collated in The Early Medieval in South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). This fact has long been recognized for the Peshwa dynasty of the Maratha polity but has recently been demonstrated more generally across South Asia. See, for example, Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Monika Horstmann, Visions of Kingship in the Twilight of Mughal Rule (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Academie van Wetenschappen, 2006). See, for example, Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Tony Stewart, “Alternative Structures of Authority: Satya Pir on the Frontiers of Bengal,” in David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence (eds.), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 21–54; Kunal Chakrabarti, Religious Process: The Puranas and the Making of a Regional Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Nile Green, Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (London: Routledge, 2006); Velcheru Narayana Rao, “Pura¯na as Brahminic Ideology,” ˙ in Wendy Doniger (ed.), Pura¯na Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and ˙ Jaina Texts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 85–100; Velcheru Narayana Rao, “Pura¯na,” in Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby (eds.), The Hindu World ˙ 2004), 97–115; Christian Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: (New York: Routledge, A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

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defining wedge of South Asian identity politics is historically misleading. Dovetailing with Talbot’s insight regarding the importance of linguistic and regional identity in particular, Sheldon Pollock noted that, by the turn of the first millennium, a new vernacular political order was emerging in South Asia that displaced an earlier Sanskrit “cosmopolis”: To participate in Sanskrit literary culture was to participate in a vast world; to produce a regional alternative to it was to effect a profound break – one the agents themselves understood to be a break – in cultural communication and self-understanding. It was in conscious opposition to this larger sphere that these intellectuals defined their regional worlds. They chose to write in a language that did not travel – and that they knew did not travel as easily and as far as the well-traveled language of the older cosmopolitan order.30

In Pollock’s description, this was a secular political process, centered on court elites. As Christian Novetzke’s brilliant study of the emergence of Mara¯thı¯ as a linguistic public shows, however, these languages were also ˙ vehicles of a new form of sacrality.31 This was centered not on brahminical intellectual culture and ritual, but on bhakti, which laid open the possibility for any devotee to establish a connection to the divine through intense personal devotion regardless of social status, particularly caste.32 As such, Mara¯thı¯ became the site for the expression of the quotidian concerns of the ˙ common person. Indeed, the brahminical adoption of this new vernacular reflected the political force of a critique of social inequity and exclusion, which inaugurated a nascent public sphere in the region – even as brahmin participants in this sphere subtly reinscribed caste and gender hierarchies in this new language.33 Novetzke cautions us against looking to the archive of religion in South Asia as an easy recourse to countering contemporary intolerance and social exclusion: the emancipatory or even revolutionary potential inherent in the spiritual promise of Mara¯thı¯ bhakti went hand in hand with a subtle discour˙ agement of concrete social change. Contrast this, for example, with Elaine 30

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Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 21. It is notable that in Pollock’s seminal edited volume on South Asian literary cultures, Mara¯thı¯ was conspicuous by its absence. See Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in ˙ Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). History: Karen Pechilis characterizes this tension, reinscribed in bhakti itself, as the poles of (brahminical) intellection and (devotional) emotion. Karen Pechilis, The Embodiment of Bhakti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Christian Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

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Fisher’s view of early modern Hinduism, which she argues produced an emic form of pluralism, irreducible to Western secularism or cosmopolitanism, allowing the toleration of genuine difference without reduction to a homogenizing universalism.34 These historiographical tensions reflect contemporary divisions in India on the place of Hinduism in a modern republic, beyond the homogenizing majoritarianism of Hindutva. This ranges from outright rejection, particularly in the tradition of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s famous articulation of the impossibility for the Dalit political subject to remain in the Hindu fold, to a more sanguine view, which sees in the pluralism of the enormous range of beliefs and practices lumped under “Hinduism” an indigenous alternative to colonial legacies of secularism. This brief survey, while by no means exhaustive, should convey the richness of the past three decades of scholarship on South Asian religious culture before the Raj. I turn now to the second major trend in the historiography – one not of theme, but of scope. Even as South Asia opened up to the world economy after the (neo)liberalization of India in 1991, scholars viewed South Asian history in new spatial frames that exceed the geographical contours of the subcontinent. This broadening of focus partly resulted from the changing center of gravity of the field itself: this was the era in which Indian universities suffered their first concerted assault on funding, leading to the continued decline in departments of social sciences and humanities. Similar trends were apparent in other South Asian countries. Simultaneously, traditional centers of Indology and South Asian history declined in Europe. By contrast, the American academy, driven by the increasing presence of the first generation of legally born South Asian-American students in university classrooms, began to increase its investment in South Asian history.35 In this institutional context, the impetus for the scalar change in South Asian historiography has come from two sources. The first, and older, strand is an outgrowth of the turn toward trade, and away from agrarian studies, in economic history. Building on the pioneering work of scholars like Ashin Das Gupta, K. N. Chaudhuri, Sinnapah Arasaratnam, and Michael Pearson, economic historians who viewed South Asia in the broader context of the Indian Ocean – prime among them, Sanjay Subrahmanyam – reoriented the field to look beyond the polities of the South Asian interior. Port cities, mercantile diasporas and trading companies, and oceanic empires provided 34

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Elaine Fisher, Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). See Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s perspicacious, and personal, description of this changing context for the field in “One for the money, two for the show,” L’Homme, 187–188 (2008): 93–104.

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new ways of framing South Asian history that stretched the field beyond the confines of the geographical contours of the subcontinent.36 As economic history fell out of favor throughout the 1990s, this new spatial framework persisted through the cultural turn. One of its most important effects was to undo the colonial binary of Europe and the rest implicit in much of global history, particularly its comparative variant, and in South Asian history itself. (Again, this was mediated in no small part by Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s own turn toward cultural history and the resulting articulation of his notion of connected history.37) A second historiographical thrust expanded the spatial scale of South Asian history through a more abstract approach to imagining past political community. Here, Sheldon Pollock’s landmark survey of Sanskrit culture, mentioned above, provided a provocative new thesis for temporally and spatially reframing early South Asian history. The Sanskrit cosmopolis – undergirded by language and not religion, ethnicity, or empire – remained a remarkably stable political and cultural order across Asia for much of the first millennium of the common era, before the emergence of new, explicitly local ways of articulating power in vernacular languages. Though Pollock does not make this leap, it may also help us understand the remarkable stability of caste as a total social fact in South Asian life from the Gupta Empire onwards: it is 36

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Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s entire publication record from the 1990s is of relevance here, but especially The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1700 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). For an outstanding sample of this scholarship, see, for example, Stephen Frederic Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Carla Sinopoli, The Political Economy of Craft Production: Crafting Empire in South India, c. 1350–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See especially his landmark essay, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies, 31/3 (1997), 735–762), which has engendered a whole new avenue of research, including a new publication series, “Connected Histories in the Early Modern World” (ARC Humanities/Amsterdam University Press). For the South Asian case in particular, see, for example, Jorge Flores’s astonishing article, “Distant Wonders: The Strange and the Marvelous between Mughal India and Habsburg Iberia in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49/3 (2007), 553–581; A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). For examples of related, if different, approaches to connecting local and global history centered on South Asia, see Nile Green’s remarkable Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ananya Chakravarti, The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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difficult to ignore the social effects of the spread of Sanskrit on its original community of users, the brahmins, or not to suspect that it continued to provide them the socio-literary capital that helped consolidate brahminical varna ideology across South Asia. Not only did Pollock’s thesis animate historical studies of South Asia’s literary cultures, it also provided a paradigm of the “cosmopolis” for other self-reflexively translocal languages of power, particularly Persian, for reframing South Asian history.38 The turn toward cosmopolitan or global frameworks was also, however, a turn toward the history of elites. This is not peculiar to South Asian historiography: as Jeremy Adelman recently noted, the “cosmopolitan selfyearnings,” not to mention the class positions, of historians themselves are reflected in the unexamined elitism of much of global history.39 Amidst rising discontent with neoliberal globalization and a global turn toward populist nationalism, the critique is uncomfortably apt for the South Asian scholarly community. Many of the scholars mentioned here who adopted this global framework, including myself, are diasporic intellectuals, whose professional success in the context of a rapidly adjunctifying academe in the Global North and a disappearing professoriate in the humanities in the Global South is stark testament to globalization’s inequalities. Fortunately, critiques of these expansive and elite spatial frameworks are beginning to emerge in South Asian history.40 The rich tradition of finegrained social history favorably positions historians of South Asia to reorient themselves. One hopes, for example, that the relative paucity of non-elite women’s history beyond the Raj will be addressed in the coming years.41 38

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See, for example, the special issue edited by Unman Hamid and Pasha Khan on “Circulation and Language: Iranians in Early Modern South Asia,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37/3 (2017), 491–587; Richard Eaton, “The Persian Cosmopolis (900–1900) and the Sanskrit Cosmopolis (400–1400),” in Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf (eds.), The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 63–83. Ronit Ricci has used a similar framework based on Arabic to connect South and Southeast Asia in Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Jeremy Adelman, “What is Global History Now?” Aeon (2 March 2017), https://aeon.co/e ssays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment (accessed 15 October 2018). For a recent critique of Subrahmanyam’s notion of connected history, see Indrani Chatterjee, “Connected Histories and the Dream of Decolonial History,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 41/1 (2018), 69–86. Notable exceptions include Irina Glushkova and Rajendra Vora (eds.), Home, Family and Kinship in Maharashtra (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Dilbagh Singh, “Regulating the Domestic: Notes on the Pre-colonial State and the Family,” Studies in History, 19/1 (2003), 69–86; Indrani Chatterjee (ed.), Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004); Nandita Prasad Sahai, “The ‘Other’ Culture: Craft Societies and Widow Marriage in Early Modern India,” Journal of

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Emerging English-language scholarship on the pre-Raj history of the lower castes is another vital corrective in the field.42 Yet we must not assume that non-elite peoples are confined to “local’ spaces that are inexorably absorbed into elite systems of power, constructed as translocal in dimension.43 Gonçalo Toscano’s repeated transgressions of the spatial and confessional boundaries that both indigenous and European elites sought to enforce are a potent reminder of the ways in which subaltern subjects evade fixed identities and positions to negotiate landscapes of power. To seek subaltern lives in the interstices of the local should impel us to continue to seek new spatial frames for South Asian history and to resist reading back into such gestures a reflection of elite cosmopolitanism. As climate change, conflict, and hunger drive the most vulnerable among us to cross the same national borders that elites routinely and legally traverse, recovering the histories of both spatial and social mobility of subaltern subjects is vital. It is also how historians of the pre-Raj world may continue resisting the caging of South Asian pasts into the lockbox of national, and by implication religious, borders. For historians of South Asian nationalisms and nations, remembering preRaj “India” in all its complexity is vital to fighting the erasure of histories inconvenient to nationalist myth-makers. This is not in the service of academic pedantry: these erasures are increasingly precursors to the violent excision of the living communities who are the bearers of these pasts from the body politic of South Asian nations today.

Further Reading Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Asher, Catherine, and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Women’s History, 19/2 (2007), 36–58; Nandita Prasad Sahai, “Some were Larger than their Communities: A Potter’s Family, Community and Justice in Early Modern Rajasthan,” Studies in History, 25/1 (2009), 39–68. See, for example, Milind Wakankar, Subalternity and Religion: The Prehistory of Dalit Empowerment in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2010). Emerging histories of slavery in South Asia comprise a promising area for such historiographical innovation. See, for example, Richard Eaton and Indrani Chatterjee (eds.), Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Shadab Bano’s important corpus, beginning with “India’s Overland Slave Trade in the Medieval Period,” Proceedings of Indian History Congress, 58 (1997), 315–326; Chakravarti, “Mapping ‘Gabriel’.”

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ananya chakravarti O’Hanlon, Rosalind, and David Washbrook (eds.), Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2011). Pollock, Sheldon (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Ramaswamy, Vijaya (ed.), Women and Work in Precolonial India: A Reader (New Delhi: Sage, 2016). Rawat, Ramnarayan S., and K. Satyanarayana, Dalit Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Roy, Tirthankar, An Economic History of Early Modern India (New York: Routledge, 2013). Shulman, David (ed.), Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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Conclusion to Part I the editors Anthropologist Georg Elwert has argued that neither ethnic groups nor nations constituted a “natural order,” but instead competed with other types of social organization for the place of central organizing structure in the historic past. He even argued that there had been social structures where there were no “‘we-groups’ based on ethnicity.”1 However, most commentators do give emphasis and weight to the role of ethnos in the formation of communities, especially the modern nation. No historian of nationalism knows exactly when to begin the history of any given nation, but all know that identity is a complex issue. Perhaps we also know that definitive and final answers are unlikely to be ever established, even if we know when and where an event took place. Nationalism as an ideology depends on loyalty and certainty, nationhood as an international system depends on legality and legitimacy, but historians have to live with an intelligent ambiguity. In 1807, a set of three manuscript fragments were found in Bavaria, written in Carolingian minuscule in a single Latin codex. (See Figure c.1.) The exquisite manuscripts (c. 972–1032) are now thought to have been copied from an eighthcentury original and are the oldest known Slavic texts in the Latin alphabet. They are permanently housed in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, although they have been lent out to exhibitors. Interest in these rare documents has been fuelled by both academic curiosity and national pride. The manuscripts were first exhibited in Ljubljana in 2004, the year that Slovenia acceded to the European Union, under the banner of The Birth Certificate of Slovenian Culture.2 Celebrated and carefully studied in Slovenia, several valuable critical editions and facsimiles of the original have been 1

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Georg Elwert, “Nationalismus und Ethnizität: Über die Bildung von Wir-Gruppen,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 3 (1989), 440–464. The Birth Certificate of Slovene Culture: Exhibition of Medieval Slovene Manuscripts in Honour of the Accession of the Republic of Slovenia to the European Union: Freising Manuscripts, Celovec (Ratecˇe) Manuscript, Sticˇna Manuscript, Cˇedad (Cˇernjeja) Manuscript, ed. Mihael Glavan (Ljubljana: Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, 2004).

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Figure c.1 Page 1 of the third Freising Fragment, a manuscript which reveals many common Slavic words (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/si/deed.en) © Digital facsimiles: Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Munich.

published.3 The texts are now read at school by children in Slovenia and valued especially as regards their rarity and antiquity. For former Prime Minister Janez Janša, well known for his populist Twitter feed as well as his support for Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump, the manuscripts represent an important and preordained stage in Slovenia’s road to statehood.4 It is not known where the Freising Fragments were actually written or by whom, but it is likely to have been either in Carinthia (now in Austria) or Carniola (now in Slovenia) and by a monk. Carolingian writers referred only to the Slavic language (lingua Sclavanisca),5 but 3

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France Bernik, Jože Faganel, et al., Brižinski spomeniki: Znanstvenokriticˇna izdaja (Ljubljana: Slovenska Akademija Znanosti in Umetnosti, 1993). “Slovenija na novi poti,” Novica, 28 June 2004, www.sds.si/novica/slovenija-na-novi-poti-9795 (accessed 28 November 2020). Peter Štih, Vasko Simoniti, and Peter Vodopivec, Slovenska zgodovina: družba – politika – kultura (Ljubljana: Inštitut za novejšo zgodovino, 2008), 29.

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the so-called “Freising Fragments” have been variously hailed as one of the first known texts in Slovene, but also Czech and Slovak. Jadranka Gvozdanović has described the language as representing the “transitional phase between the late Common Slavic and Slovene.”6 Henrik Birnbaum suggested that the texts could be in an “Old Common Slavic (of the early, pre-Slovak or Moravian-Pannonian type) overlaid with secondary Slovenisms.”7 Linguist Frederik Kortlandt even asked: Are the Freising Fragments a Slovenian document? The characteristic development common to all Slovenian dialects is the progressive accent shift in words of the type okộ . . . [but] the Freising Fragments reflect a linguistic stage which is anterior to the progressive accent shift. From this point of view, the language of the Freising Fragments must be regarded as the preSlovenian dialect of Slavic.8

The fact that all the Western Slavic languages are now conventionally written in the Latin script does not mean that they are somehow lineally descended from the Freising Fragments. The adoption of this script owes more to nineteenth-century Czech linguists than to tenth-century clerics.9 The variations between the Slavic language regions are unlikely to have been as pronounced in c. 1000 as they were when the Freising Fragments were rediscovered in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it becomes extremely difficult to describe what the Fragments represent within actually existing national lexicons. Eric Hobsbawm argued that “however long the real or ascribed historical continuity between groups, earlier collectives cannot be confused with the modern.”10 Could the manuscripts be reasonably seen as shared cultural capital between all speakers of Slavic languages? As Erich Gruen has argued in Chapter 2, ethnic and national identity was complex, layered, multifaceted in the Greco-Roman world and yet still distinct enough for separate communities to have evolved. Similarly, at some point Common 6

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Jadranka Gvozdanovic,́ “Changes in Tense and Modality in Late Medieval Slovene,” in Lars Heltoft, Iván Igartua, Brian D. Joseph, Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh, and Lene Schøsler (eds.), Perspectives on Language Structure and Language Change: Studies in Honor of Henning Anderson (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019), 398. Henrik Birnbaum, Common Slavic: Progress and Problems in its Reconstruction (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 1975), 11. Frederik Kortlandt, “Jers and Nasal Vowels in the Freising Fragments,” Slavisticˇna Revija, 23 (1975), 405. W. K. Matthews, “The Latinisation of Cyrillic Characters,” Slavonic and East European Review, 30/75 (1952), 531. Eric Hobsbawm, “Comment on Steven Grosby: The Primordial, Kinship and Nationality,” in Atsuko Ichijo and Gordana Uzelac (eds.), When is the Nation? Towards an Understanding of Theories of Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2005), 80.

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Slavic evolved into separate and only partly mutually comprehensible languages, and its speakers parted ways. The Slovenian state was first formed in 1991 from the Yugoslavian republic created in 1946. A driving force behind the creation of the system of republics in Yugoslavia was the Marxist scholar Edvard Kardelj, who was Josip Broz Tito’s closest comrade and main expert on the “National Question.”11 After Tito seized power, historic communities of German and Italian speakers left the new communist state in their tens of thousands under extreme duress and Slovenia has been one of the most ethnically homogeneous states in Europe since 1946. The Slovenian language had developed since its codification in the mid-sixteenth century, when parts of the New Testament were translated by the Lutheran Primož Trubar. During the nineteenth century, the politics of language dominated much of the Habsburg Empire, and Slovene national selfconfidence was fueled by growing literacy, as well as journalism, poetry, and novels. Unlike many of its neighboring nations, no distinct Slovenian polity had existed since the early Middle Ages. Indeed, for much of the last millennium, Slovene speakers lived in the Holy Roman Empire, the complex and Germandominated legacy of which is discussed in Chapter 3 by Len Scales. Slovenes could look back to the proto-state of Karantanija, which was one of the building blocks of the Carolingian March of Carinthia from 889 onwards,12 but written evidence was sparse and Carinthia had only a small Slovene minority by 1991. The French scholar Jean Bodin wrote about the ducal stone at Karnburg/Krnski Grad (now close to the Austrian town of Maria Saal) in the 1576 treatise Les Six Livres de la République. The local Slovene peasants had an investiture ritual for the duke of Carinthia, which involved him making a commitment to duties and responsibility while sitting on the stump of a Roman-era pillar.13 This idea of the transfer of power from the people to the ruler was taken up by Thomas Jefferson, who underlined the passages about the ducal stone in his own copy of Bodin’s book. This alone was not enough to build a hope of national liberation upon, although there has been some popular nostalgia about an intriguing tradition of peasant politics.14 11

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Some of his main ideas were established in Edvard Kardelj, Razvoj slovenskega narodnega vprašanja (Ljubljana: Naša založba, 1939). Štih et al., Slovenska zgodovina, 25–32. Joseph Felicijan, The Genesis of the Contractual Theory and the Installation of the Dukes of Carinthia (Klagenfurt: Družba sv. Mohorja v Celovcu, 1967), 63. Peter Štih, “On the Modern (Mis)understanding of Old History in the Case of the Enthronement of the Carinthian Dukes,” in Štih, The Middle Ages between the Eastern Alps and the Northern Adriatic: Select Papers on Slovene Historiography and Medieval History (Leiden: Brill 2010), 53–70.

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Establishing a national heritage is more than writing a simple history, as Yuri Pines argues in Chapter 4. Indeed, structures of power, once established, make it harder to overcome a tendency to read history backwards to see the nation and its people(s) as an embryonic form of community even before the state itself existed. Institutional traditions make it even more difficult to research the past in all its complexity. Significant works of national importance are easily accessible, while “obscure,” “difficult,” and “challenging” sources are often ignored, hidden, or marginalized. Some researchers have accepted strategic essentialization in a pragmatic fashion, while others embrace it as providential, seeing their primary role as one of reinforcing national structures of power and knowledge. Consciousness about nationality usually develops in relation to other peoples, as Ananya Chakravarti and Michael Charney argue in their chapters. It also usually develops in the context of empires or multiethnic polities or within the competition for resources. The Herderian ideal of an equality of nations has almost never been reached, nor has the vision of the Slovenian national anthem, Zdravljica (A Toast) – first written as a poem by France Prešeren in 1844 – which looks forward to a kind of fraternal unity between countries amidst “cheers to the world.”15 Slovene speakers lived beside many other languages and idioms, including modern Hungarian, Croatian, Fruilian, Italian, and German, and as well as historic, but now expired, Venetic and Noric languages. Over the centuries after the establishment of the March of Carinthia, the areas where the Slovene language was spoken diminished. The rapid decline of language can be charted during the nineteenth century through Habsburg census data, especially in the area around the Carinthian town of Klagenfurt.16 Although nationalists could look back to the Freising Fragments as a foundational text, they still faced the almost insuperable problem that the language had died out in the area where the texts were (probably) first produced. The dislocation between state boundaries, historical territories, and language minorities has been a challenge for many nationalists. Perhaps the bestknown example of this is the example of Kosovo, reconquered from the Ottomans by Serbia in 1912. Despite colonization of the region by Serbian speakers after the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), they were never able to regain 15

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Christopher Kelen and Aleksandar Pavkovic,́ “‘Zdravljica’ – Toast to a Cosmopolitan Nation Anthem Quality in the Slovenian Context,” Nationalities Papers, 42/5 (2014), 828–847. On the decline of Slovene culture in Austria, see, in particular, Andreas Moritsch (ed.), Kärntner Slovenen/Koroški Slovenci 1900–2000 (Klagenfurt: Hermagoras Verlag, 2000).

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a majority in the area, which many of their ancestors had vacated in the 1690s when Archbishop Arsenije III Crnojević led an exodus of the Orthodox to the relative safety of the Habsburg Monarchy. The “myth” of Kosovo has played an exceptionally important part in recent Serbian and Balkan history.17 Slovenian nationalism has focused primarily on language rather than territory, thus avoiding some of the irredentist calamities that have beset central and eastern Europe. In other words, the Slovenes have created a homeland that might be classified as what Steven Grosby has called an “anxietyreducing structure.”18 A focus on manuscripts like the Freising Fragments as a lieu de mémoire rather than on an actual geographical place (such as Kosovo polje) has meant that conflict has been avoided and humanism enhanced.19 Nevertheless, there has been some skepticism about the real importance of the Freising Fragments as a national foundational text. The satirical magazine Mladina, which often derides the nationalism of Janša and his associates, even invented a joke conspiracy theory about a “fourth part” of the manuscript that has been kept secret from the public.20 Nations create edifices of learning, metiers of culture, and control over the past. Rituals, memorials, and public holidays fortify what Ernest Renan called “the common possession of a rich legacy of memories.”21 Often memorialization is dignified, for example in the case of Remembrance Sunday in London or Bastille Day in Paris. Given the violence that these events commemorate, such as the destruction of the Bastille fortress in 1789 or the battle of the Somme, the calm is ironic. More often control over the past becomes entwined with collective violence. The ritualized burning of effigies, usually of the Catholic traitor Guy Fawkes, but occasionally another symbolic enemy, was commonplace in England until (at least) the 1960s.22 In England, on 5 November, children would push a homemade straw man 17

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Ivan Cˇ olovic,́ Smrt na Kosovu polju (Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek, 2016); Đorđe Stefanović, “Seeing the Albanians through Serbian Eyes: The Inventors of the Tradition of Intolerance and their Critics, 1804–1939,” European History Quarterly, 35/3 (2005), 465–492. Steven Grosby, Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 51. A place of memory can be found in many forms of national ritual or practice; see Pierre Nora and Charles Robert Ageron (eds.), Les lieux de mémoire, tome I: La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). Jure Trampuš, “Janez Janša: ‘Greta je malik’. Zarota ekosocializma,” Mladina, 16 November 2019, www.mladina.si/194209/janez-jansa-greta-je-malik/ (accessed 28 November 2020). Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Stuart J. Woolf (ed.), Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 58. David Cressy, “The Fifth of November Remembered,” in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 68.

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around in a wheelbarrow and chant the rhyme: “Penny for the Guy, hit him in the eye, stick him up a lamp-post and there let him die.” Being English thus involved highly ritualized rites, which included the whole community. Fires were lit across Europe in the pre-1914 period at different times of the year, often involving immolating a suspended papier-mâché Judas Iscariot. Amongst the Czechs, the burning of a model of Judas took place on bílá sobota, the Saturday before Easter Day.23 Similar rehearsals for punishing betrayal through mock hangings took place in the Tyrol and around the Mediterranean within Catholic and Orthodox communities.24 In this way, the nation appropriated religious traditions, such as the lighting of festive fires (which might have predated Christianity). An individual’s own memories thus become tied up with national rites and the symbolic repudiation of foreigners or traitors. Traveling on foot through the Rhineland in the 1930s, writer Patrick Leigh Fermor recalled the way in which his own view of Germany and Germans had been shaped as a child: I must go back fourteen years to the first complete event that I remember . . . in the late afternoon of 18th June 1919 . . . (A) throng of villagers had assembled around an enormous bonfire ready for kindling and on top of it, ready for burning, were dummies of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince . . . The Kaiser wore a real German spiked helmet and a cloth mask with huge whiskers . . . Everyone clapped and cheered.25

Once a state has been successfully created, it fortifies itself with walls, turrets, and military bases. Indeed, when its adherents depict the nation, it is usually as a strong fortress rather than a hastily constructed trench26 or winding river. When Romantic nationalists imagined the forest (Deutscher Wald) in the nineteenth century, it was as a “primeval home” and a place of impenetrable refuge from which the Germanic tribes could rebuff invaders.27 William Blake’s 1804 poem “Jerusalem,” referred to as the unofficial and 23

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“Velkonocˇni,” Slovan – Cˇasopis veˇnovaný politickým a vů bec verˇejným záležitostem slovanským, zvlášteˇ ˇceským, 30 March 1872, 191. James Fraser, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 715–716. Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (London: Penguin, 2004), 35–36. On the difficulty of using the image of the trench, see Andrew Wackerfuss, “This Game of Sudden Death: Simulating Air Combat of the First World War,” in Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott (eds.), Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 233–246. Thomas M. Lekan, “The Nature of Home: Landscape Preservation and Local Identities,” in David Blackbourn and James N. Retallack (eds.), Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 171.

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preferred English national anthem28 (as if the real national community was in waiting in the hills like King Arthur), promises to build that very city in “England’s green and pleasant land.” If a nation has been formed only recently, then ancient antecedents, heroes, perhaps some villains as early bearers (or opponents) of the national idea, are fervently sought.29 The protections and securities that belonging to a strong state offers often produce raw patriotism, loyalty, and passions that can stun more measured and dispassionate observers (who may have never come close to collectively experiencing what Andreas Wimmer has called “nationalist euphoria”30). For example, spectators at high-level sporting events have even been known to wrap themselves – quite literally – in the national flag.31 In order to understand “nationhood” before “nationalism,” the researcher therefore has to cross the barriers of collective patriotic emotion, institutionalized modes of learning, and the (invented) traditions and essentialism of “lay cognoscenti.”32 We do not underestimate the difficulty of this task. These chapters are not primarily focused on whether the concept of “nation,” or “nationhood,” or “nationalism” can be legitimately ascribed to ancient societies. Rather we have promoted a radically pluralist approach, which promotes a close reading of sources and a reconceptualization of the key problems away from the pressures of reproducing triumphalist narratives or imposing a restrictive periodization. Without denying the importance of historical identities and actual chronologies, all the chapters in Part I have taken a critical stand on important questions, and have sought to reinsert skepticism into historical enquiry. These chapters have investigated images of community and practices of inclusion and exclusion in the ancient world and up to the sixteenth century. Taking into account a variety of geographical regions throughout several centuries, the authors consider continuities and discontinuities in feelings of solidarity and interaction across different civilizations and societies. These chapters have created a framework for analytical 28

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Jason Whittaker, “Mental Fight, Corporeal War, and Righteous Dub: The Struggle for ‘Jerusalem,’ 1979–2009,” in Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker (eds.), Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 263–273. Clifford Geertz used the phrase “apotheosizing . . . heroes and diabolizing . . . enemies” in his essay “The Uses of Diversity,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 25/1 (1986), 120. Andreas Wimmer, Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 156. Richard Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 23. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London; Verso, 1998), 107.

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comparison and for the dissection of continuities and discontinuities across space and time, without getting stuck in the binary trap of arguing over whether any given case does or does not merit the label of “nationalism.” We have thus aimed to create the basis for more substantive and informed discussions about the evolution of cultural and political identities, and the relationship between universalistic and particularistic conceptions of community, over the longue durée of history.

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part

II

*

PARADIGM SHIFTS AND TURNING POINTS IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION, 1500 TO THE PRESENT

7

Colonial Expansion and the Making of Nations: The Spanish Case tamar herzog

It is habitual among scholars to suggest that European nations were formed during, and to some degree because of, the colonial expansion.1 Many argue that this expansion, which placed colonizers in opposition to the natives they sought to control, to other Europeans with whom they competed, and to the large African population that they enslaved, led to the emergence of new identities. In the Spanish case, it enabled the move from multiple local distinctions to a unitary national designation, allowing individuals originating from the different Iberian kingdoms (Castile, Navarre, Aragón, and so forth) to assume a single identity as Spaniards. While some scholars pointed to the formation of nations (or proto-nations), others concluded that the colonial experience led Europeans to think of themselves as participants in a community, members of which belonged to a particular race. Imagining themselves to be distinct from both natives and Africans, these Europeans refashioned themselves as “white.”2 In what follows I ask whether other interpretations are also possible. I am mainly interested in applying European debates to the colonial setting, inquiring into what knowing more about Europe would do to our image 1

2

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 35, 42; Nicholas Canny, “The Origins of Empire: An Introduction,” in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24–25; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 132–133; Maria José RodríguezSalgado, “Christians, Civilised and Spanish: Multiple Identities in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 8 (1998), 239–240, 244: Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 331–333; Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 19–20. George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 17–47; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Ann Laura Soler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31/1 (1989), 134–161.

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of its overseas engagement. I therefore observe debates on how to identify Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. My aim is to demonstrate that colonialism indeed affected processes of identification but that, to understand fully how this transpired, we need to pay close attention also to Europe. During the early modern period, a Spanish community indeed gradually emerged, but it was not the result of colonialism. Instead, it pitted Spaniards against one another. Those involved in carving it out were not that interested in inventing nations, or in affirming cultural or biological similarities. Instead, they sought to distinguish individuals who merited rights from those who did not. On their horizon was a civic community to which individuals belonged allegedly by virtue of their loyalty and their agreement also to comply with associated duties. I trace how this transpired in Spain, and I ask what happened overseas once Spaniards attempted to apply these understandings to individuals of both indigenous and African descent.

Regimes of Rights, Regimes of Duties: Distinguishing Spaniards from Other Europeans In the early seventeenth century, a group of Flemish merchants residing in Seville wrote to the Spanish monarch insisting on their condition as “properly native Spaniards” (propiamente naturales españoles).3 During the same period, yet thousands of miles away in the Amazon basin, a Jesuit missionary from Bohemia similarly testified that the Indians whom he sought to convert “have never seen a Spaniard” other than him (no han visto más gobernador ni español que a mí).4 In Peru, Lourenço de Mendonça insisted that the Portuguese were Spaniards because “Portugal was part of Spain and the Portuguese, as natives and as true Spaniards . . . should not in Peru and other parts of Spanish America be considered or included in the condition of foreigners.”5 These vindications, which individuals in both the Old and the New World voiced, 3

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“Súplica hecha a Su Majestad por los flamencos establecidos en Sevilla . . ., ” Archivo General de Indias, Escribanía de Cámara, 1 0 57 A, fols. 428r–431r, at fols. 428v–429r. Hernán-Rodríguez Castelo (ed.), Diario del padre Fritz [1697–1703] (Quito: Studio 21, 1997), 110. Lourenço de Mendonça, “Suplicación a su Majestad Católica . . . en defensa de los portugueses,” Madrid, 1630, fols. 1, 8v–11r, 12v, 16v–18v, e 57v. I would like to thank Pedro Cardim for calling my attention to and facilitating a copy of this document. Also see Pedro Cardim, “‘Todos los que no son de Castilla son yguales.’ El estatuto de Portugal en la monarquía española en el tiempo de Olivares,” Pedrables, 28 (2008), 521–552; Pedro Cardim, “De la nación a la lealtad al rey. Lourenço de Mendonça y el estatuto de los portugueses en la Monarquía Española de la década de 1630,” in David González Cruz (ed.), Extranjeros y enemigos en Iberoamérica: la visión del otro. Del imperio español a la Guerra de Independencia (Madrid: Sílex, 2010), 57–88.

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reflected not so much who they were, but what they sought to achieve. While the Flemish merchants and Mendonça wanted to trade in the New World, an activity that by virtue of a commercial monopoly was reserved to “natives of Spain,” the Jesuit wished to confirm that his presence on the territory, which Spain claimed as its own, was legitimate. The way Spanishness came to be associated with a privileged regime and how this development influenced its definition has a long history. The idea that “natives” should enjoy a preferential treatment when compared with non-natives was introduced to the Iberian peninsula following the penetration of medieval Roman law. First invoked in the Siete Partidas, a Castilian compilation of that law ordered in the thirteenth century by King Alfonso X, this vision became particularly important in the fifteenth century, when the parliaments (Cortes) of the various Iberian kingdoms began requesting the king to institute a monopoly on office holding favoring natives.6 Tied to the emergence of a composite monarchy, in which a single king ruled over various territories, each with its own constitutional and legal arrangements, the local elites who voiced these concerns mostly wished to ensure that foreign vassals would not obtain lucrative resources in their kingdom. Because of these pressures, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most Iberian kingdoms moved to reserve most public offices, ecclesiastical benefices, seigniorial jurisdictions, fellowships, and guild membership to their natives. Offices in Castile were reserved to natives of Castile, offices in Aragon to natives of Aragon, and so forth. Meant to exclude other vassals who were not natives of the kingdom, petitions requesting the institution of monopolies and royal response to them rarely engaged with the question of who natives were because their authors assumed that the legal system would supply the answer. By the sixteenth century, following medieval legal discussions, most peninsular jurists agreed that nativeness was a condition that could be recognized in individuals who were tied to the community and were invested in its wellbeing. These ties could be established and verified in various ways. The best-known rule determined that individuals born in the kingdom to local parents naturally loved the community and were loyal to it.7 As a result, in their case, the assumption was that they were natives. This conviction, however, only 6

7

Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 64–118. José María Álvarez, Instituciones de derecho real de Castilla y de Indias (Mexico City: UNAM, 1982 [1818]), 82; Gerónimo de Ustariz, The Theory and Practice of Commerce and Maritime Affairs, trans. J. Kippax (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1752 [1742]), 39.

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embodied a legal presumption. Although most jurists expected that in most cases it would prove true, they also admitted that, on occasions, those born in the kingdom to local parents did not love the community or feel loyal to it. In such cases, despite their local birth to local parents, these individuals would be foreign rather than native.8 For the same reason, individuals born to foreign parents and/or in foreign lands were presumed foreigners. However, if there were indications that such was not the case – because they had forged ties with the community through domicile establishment, marrying local women, paying taxes, serving in the local militia, and so forth – then despite their foreign birth and/or foreign descent, these individuals would be considered natives.9 Because of these convictions, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, jurists, administrators, and litigants all over Spain insisted that what made people native or foreign was their loyalty to the community and their willingness to comply with duties, which was the best manifestation of allegiance. Although speaking one of the Iberian languages well could be an indication that one was integrated, and its absence a sign of foreignness – the same being true of other cultural traits such as ways of behaving or dressing – these inferences could be contested and overturned.10 Such would be the case when other proofs existed which demonstrated that despite these indications, the individual in question had established (or severed) permanent ties with the community. The result was that, during the early modern period, natives were not necessarily individuals who shared a language, a culture, a common descent, or a place of birth. Instead, the question of whether one was native hinged on a myriad of factors such as residence, tax payment, office holding, marriage, militia service, and the like that, evaluated one against the other, were said to indicate (or not) loyalty to the community. These characteristics were acquired individually, but they could be reinforced (or weakened) by a family history of service and integration, or a lack thereof, or by group

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“If a native of the kingdom, or anyone reputed as native, leaves the kingdom and resides in a foreign kingdom, where he establishes domicile, if he later pretends to be a native, he is no longer considered thus.” G. López de Tovar, Índice de las leyes y glosa del mismo, in Los códigos españoles concordados y anotados, vol. V (Madrid: La Publicidad, 1848 [1757]), 536. Also see J. de Hevia Bolaños, Curia Philipica (Madrid: Pedro Marín, 1771 [1603]), 266. Baltasar Álamos de Barrientos, Discurso político al rey Felipe III al comienzo de su reino (Madrid: Anthropos, 1990 [1598]), 14–16; Uztariz, The Theory, 37–40; Pedro Fernández Navarrete, Conservación de monarquías y discursos políticos, ed. M. D. Gordon (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1982 [1792]), 126. Tamar Herzog, “Lengua y pertenencia en la América Española, siglos XVI–XVIII,” Ínsula, 762 (2010), 7–10.

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membership, as contemporaries suggested that some groups were more prone and more likely to integrate fully than others.11 These perceptions, which operated in both Castilian and Aragonese territories, initially defined the natives of each Iberian kingdom because only natives of Castile were eligible to benefits in the kingdom of Castile and only natives of Aragon in the kingdom of Aragon. However, by the late sixteenth century and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, gradually all benefits were extended to “natives of the kingdoms of Spain,” often rendered in shorthand as “Spaniards.” This process of unification – the move from several types of nativeness to a single, all-encompassing, Spanish one – was slow in the making. In the decades following its introduction, debates raged as to which Iberian kingdoms would be included among “the kingdoms of Spain” whose natives would be eligible to rights as Spaniards. Were the Aragonese Spanish? Were the Navarrese? Were the Portuguese?12 Regardless of these questions, where the answer was often much less coherent than the theory would advise, by the mid-eighteenth century little was left of the separate regime of privileges distinguishing among the natives of the different Iberian kingdoms. By that stage, the operating assumption was that most (if not all) benefits were shared by all natives of the kingdoms of Spain, now identified as “Spaniards.” Rather than distinguishing members of one Spanish kingdom from the next, natives were now distinguished from foreigners, that is, nonSpaniards. The degree to which these developments were propelled by competition for resources was clear to contemporaries. Many suggested that debates regarding who natives were, were always linked to specific privileges. Rather than asked in the abstract or vindicated as an identity, the identification of Spaniards and their distinction from non-natives was always tied to the question of who deserved which treatment. On occasions, debates could be lengthy, even violent. They confronted individuals wishing to enjoy the privileges reserved to natives with others who wanted to bar them from achieving their goal. 11

12

Herzog, Defining Nations, 140. Also see Tamar Herzog, “Vecindad y oficio en Castilla: la libertad económica y la exclusión política en el siglo XVIII,” in J. I. Ignacio Fortea, J. E. Gelabert, and T. A. Mantecón (eds.), Furor et rabies: violencia, conflicto y marginación en la época moderna (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 2002), 239–252. Herzog, Defining Nations, 94–110, 133–139; Tamar Herzog, “Una monarquía, dos territorios: la frontera entre españoles y portugueses, España y Portugal durante (y después) de la Unión,” in Carlos Martínez Shaw and José Antonio Martínez Torres (eds.), España y Portugal en el mundo (1580–1668) (Madrid: Polifemo, 2014), 139–155; Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 52–65.

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Because in each case at stake were particular privileges or duties, the agents propelling these debates and the interests at stake could vary dramatically, and so could the result. The comparison between developments in peninsular Spain and in Spanish America is illuminating. In Spain, most debates distinguishing Spaniards from foreigners were focused on eligibility for public office and ecclesiastical benefices or membership in certain guilds. They pitted job candidates against local elites and municipal councils, in which these elites were heavily represented. In Spanish America, by contrast, most debates distinguishing Spaniards from non-natives involved merchants. At stake was the operation of a commercial monopoly that restricted trade in the New World to “natives of the kingdoms of Spain” and allowed merchants to exclude their competitors by classifying them as foreigners. These merchants often pressured the king and the local authorities to apply a restrictive meaning to Spanishness and, as individuals and through their respective guilds, they presented themselves to the courts in order to ensure a result to their liking.13 Debates regarding nativeness rarely mentioned religion. Discussants took it for granted that, from the sixteenth century, only Christians (and later Catholics) could legitimately live in Spain and only they, as a result, could be integrated in the community and thus be identified as natives. Yet, while the integration of non-Christians was impossible, even unthinkable, the degree of limpieza de sangre was deemed irrelevant.14 When locals rejected candidates based on their lack of limpieza, jurists and the authorities responded by negating its relevance.15 According to them, the lack of purity could greatly stigmatize certain social sectors and bar them from certain activities, but it did not affect their condition as natives. In other words, at stake in examining limpieza were not rights and obligations as Spaniards. Creole demands first for equality with and then for preference to European Spaniards should be read in conjuncture with these developments. Rather than expressing a national (or pre-national) identity as Benedict Anderson had led us to believe, these claims were based on Iberian debates that tied 13

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Tamar Herzog, “Merchants and Citizens: On the Making and Un-making of Merchants in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America,” Journal of European Economic History, 52 (2014), 137–163. Some of these debates were described in cédula of 2 October 1608, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, MSS. 20047–12, fols. 1–9 and Recopilación de Indias, book 9, title 27, laws 31, 32, 34. Also see R. S. Sidney Smith, “Estudio histórico del consulado de Lima 1593–1887,” in El índice del archivo del tribunal del consulado de Lima con un estudio histórico de ésta institución (Lima: Ministerio de Hacienda, 1948), 139–144, 155. Maria Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Herzog, Defining Nations, 121–128.

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nativeness to office holding and determined that only those willing to perform duties should be granted rights.16 These debates suggested that Creoles were worthy of office or even of preferential treatment because, while they were natives, in the Americas peninsular Spaniards were foreigners.17 According to these vindications, although by virtue of civil law there was a single Spanish community on both sides of the ocean and all its members were equally Spanish, natural law nevertheless mandated that European and American Spaniards were distinct. Such was the case because, contrary to American Spaniards, European Spaniards did not love the local community nor were they loyal to it. They treated overseas territories as a foreign land, where they were temporarily exiled. As a result, while natives in Europe, peninsular Spaniards were but “newcomers” (advenedizos), “transients” (transeuntes), or “outsiders” (estraños) in Spanish America.18

The Various Meanings of Spanishness in an Early Modern Age Debates regarding nativeness and foreignness were thus initially centered on the wish to distinguish between the natives of the various Iberian kingdoms. Eventually, they led to the formation of a community made of Spaniards, who were differentiated from other Europeans. Asking who was worthy of which treatment, the answer was that natives of Spain (Spaniards) were not distinguished according to linguistic or cultural ties, not even origin or descent, but instead they were recognized by their degree of integration in the community. Members of this community could enjoy a shared regime of rights, but they were also expected to comply with duties, and it was their 16

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Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Herzog, Defining Nations, 145–152. Creoles fashioned themselves as natives also in comparison to the autochthonous population: Peter B. Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), for example at 11–14. Álamo de Barrientos, Discurso político, 13–15; P. de Bolívar y de la Redonda, “Memorial . . . en favor de los españoles que en ellas nacen, estudian y sirven” (Madrid 1667), The Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington, fols. 3v, 25r, 32r– v, 45v, 53r, 56r; J. A. de Ahumada, “Representación político-legal . . . en favor de los empleos políticos, de guerra y eclesiásticos” (1725), in Documentos selectos del Centro de Estudios de Historia de México (Mexico City: Condumex, 1992), 87–105; “Representación que hizo la ciudad de México . . . sobre que los criollos deben ser preferidos a los europeos . . ., ” 2 March 1711, in J. E. Hernández Dávalos, Colección de documentos para la historia de la guerra de independencia de México de 1808 a 1821 (Mexico City: José María Sandoval, 1877), 430; the letter of Caracas, 28 November 1796, in J. F. Blanco (ed.), Documentos para la historia de la vida pública del libertador (Caracas: “La Opinión Nacional,” 1875), 269–270, 272.

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agreement to do so that best defined who they were. These criteria were applied to European foreigners and, from the late seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, they served, according to some, to institute a distinction between peninsular and American Spaniards. But how did they operate vis-àvis the indigenous and African populations?

The Indigenous Population Historians of Latin America have long noted that Spaniards catalogued those who inhabited the American continent before their arrival as “natives.” Assuming that this designation reflected the obvious fact that – contrary to the invading Spaniards – these inhabitants were indigenous to the territory, historians made no reference to the fact that, according to contemporary criteria, Spaniards were also classified as “natives.” Neither did they consider peninsular debates that portrayed nativeness not as a factual situation but instead as a juridical status that implied membership in the community and eligibility to rights. But what would happen if we included these debates and asked how they illuminate what had transpired in the New World vis-à-vis the indigenous population? Our story would be as follows.19 The standard narrative tells us that, in order to facilitate their control, Spaniards instituted in the Americas a bipolar system that distinguished between a “Spanish republic” (which included Spaniards and the laws and authorities that applied to them) and an “Indian republic” (with its own members, authorities, and laws).20 Although this design theoretically allowed the indigenous people to retain their communal belonging and recognized the validity of their precolonial authorities and laws, in practice the aim was not to preserve precolonial structures but instead transform or even eliminate them. To obtain this result, Spaniards proceeded to reorganize the “Indigenous republic.” They engaged in processes of forced removal, which relocated indigenous people to new settlements, built according to Spanish criteria.21 They also gradually transferred power and faculties from traditional leaders (identified as caciques) to newly instituted municipal councils (cabildos), and 19

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Tamar Herzog, “The Appropriation of Native Status: Forming and Reforming Insiders and Outsiders in the Spanish Colonial World,” Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History, 22 (2014), 140–149. Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492–1700 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 177–180. Tamar Herzog, “Indigenous Reducciones and Spanish Resettlement: Placing Colonial and European History in Dialogue,” Ler História, 72 (2018), 9–30.

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they modified the meaning and extension of indigenous customary law.22 Contemporaneously, native communities were reimagined. No longer defined as including individuals permanently tied to traditional leaders or sharing an origin, as had been the case before, they were now comprehended as civic polities. To achieve integration in them, members had to perform duties, which was the best way to manifest their ties to the community.23 One can therefore argue that what Spaniards did was to de-ethnicize Indians by transforming them from members in multiple traditional ethnic groups into participants in a common patria, the kingdom. Paradoxically, to achieve this aim, Spaniards refashioned (rather than recognized) the indigenous people as “natives.”24 Thereafter, membership in the community, that is, nativenness would become (also for the indigenous) a civic affair, with status depending on integration rather than origin or descent. Making the indigenous people “natives” also paradoxically assimilated them to Spaniards – who were also “natives” (first of Spain and then of the Americas) – even before indigenous conversion and Hispanization ever took place. Furthermore, if the normal assumption was that either one was an “Indian” or one was a Spaniard, the two terms indicating two opposing rather than complementary statuses, such was not always the case. “Indians” could be distinguished from Spaniards in some cases and for some ends, while being considered Spanish in others. Early modern authors pointed to this complexity when they suggested, for example, that Indians were members of the Spanish commonwealth because they paid taxes (tributo) or when they affirmed that Indians recognized the king as their master (señor) “as all other Spaniards” did.25 Missionaries working in the New World equally explained that the natives they converted became Christians and vassals but that, on occasions, their behavior also merited their classification as Spaniards.26 In the eighteenth century, Spanish commanders could 22

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Tamar Herzog, “Colonial Law and ‘Native Customs’: Indigenous Land Rights in Colonial Spanish America,” The Americas, 63/3 (2013), 303–321. Herzog, Defining Nations, 61–62. Carmen Beatriz Loza, “‘Tyrannie’ des Incas et ‘naturalisation’ des Indiens: la politique de Francisco Toledo, vice-roi du Pérou (1571–1628),” Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2 (2002), 377, 389–394, 405. Carlos Baciero, “Juan de Solórzano Pereira y la defensa del indio en América,” Hispania Sacra, 58 (2006), 263–327, 300; Solórzano Pereira, Política Indiana, book 3, chapter 1, no. 14. “These Indians of this nation should be treated not as other Indians but as Spaniards.” Pedro Baigorri to the king, Buenos Aires, 15 March 1656, in Jaime Cortesão (ed.), Jesuítas e bandeirantes no Itatim (1596–1760) (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1952), 274–275; letter of the viceroy of Peru to the bishop of Misque, Lima, 25 October 1765, Archivo General de la Nación/Buenos Aires, I X.4.3.5; Alonso Vaca, “Razón de lo que parece . . .

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thus maintain that indigenous people allied with Spain were either vassals of the crown or outright Spaniards and that they could therefore not become – voluntarily or forcefully – Portuguese.27 Eventually, some would even point out that Indians could choose (not that choosing was free) between vindicating their condition as Indians or taking on the trappings of Spanishness.28 It is therefore not surprising that, even if, on occasions, exercising choice was an option more theoretical than real, in their condition as natives, Indians could hold public office and ecclesiastical benefices.29 Not only were these offices, habitually reserved to Spaniards, open to Indians but, according to some, Indians were particularly worthy of them because, contrary to Spaniards of Iberian origin, they were true natives of the land.30 Legally granted the ability to hold office, however, the capacity of Indians to do so was habitually questioned. To counter these challenges, the king periodically reaffirmed these rights, his jurists pointing out, for example in 1697, that there was no need for royal intervention as no laws existed that would bar Indians who were natives from enjoying these benefits.31 Thus, while most scholars agree that, during the colonial period, Indians were vassals of the Spanish king, what remains unstudied was whether their nativeness also made them Spaniards. This ambiguity allowed some native Americans, whose colonial role was different from that of most others, to vindicate their Spanishness. Implying that being an Indian designated a particular social role and social standing within the colonial world, not

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sobre la población que los portugueses intentan hacer” (1677), Biblioteca de la Real Academia de Historia, Madrid, Jesuitas v. C L X X X V I I, num. 23 antiguo, 29 moderno. Joaquín Alos to Nicolás Arrendondo, Asunción, 19 September 1791, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Estado, legajo 4387, num. 5; “Autos formados a consecuencia de una real cédula . . . ” Archivo Nacional, Quito, Fondo Especial 30, v. 83, num. 3226, fols. 80r– 275v, at fols. 87r–v. Villella, Indigenous Elites, 160, 164, 169–171, 228–229. Solórzano Pereira, Política Indiana, book 2, chapter 29, nums. 25–34; Villella, Indigenous Elites, 233–260, 295–300. Juan Zapata y Sandoval in 1609 and Juan Meléndez in 1681, both cited in Antonio Feros, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 121–122, 145. Cédulas of 19 December 1696, 26 March 1697, 27 November 1703, 21 February 1725, 11 September 1766, in Richard Konetzke (ed.), Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de hispanoamérica, 1493–1810 (Madrid: CSIC, 1953), v.3, t.1, 64–69, 93–94, 186, 333–334; A. Muro Orejón, Cedulario americano del siglo XVIII, vol. I (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1956–1977), 602–605; Antonio Muro Orejón, “La igualdad entre indios y españoles: la real cédula de 1697,” in Estudios sobre política indigenista española en América, vol. I (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1975), 365–386, 268–269, 367–375; Juan B. Olaechea Cabayen, “Política social y política racial de España en orden a los indios,” Revista Internacional de Sociología, 27 (1969), 101–122; Juan B. Olaechea Cabayen, “La ciudadanía del indio en los dominios hispanos,” Cuadernos de investigación histórica, 5 (1981), 113–133.

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origin or descent, indigenous nobles who, like the Spaniards living in Spanish America, did not pay tribute (which other Indians did), could thereafter consider themselves Spanish rather than Indian.32 A similar conclusion was reached by the elites of Tlaxcala who, by virtue of their alliance with Spaniards and their colonization of the Mexican north, could present themselves as conquistadors (rather than conquered), colonizers (rather than colonized), Spanish (rather than Indian).33 These individuals vindicated their condition as outright Spaniards, they argued that they should be distinguished from other Indians, or they suggested that they were both Indian and Spanish. These claims were sometimes supported, sometimes opposed, on occasions violently, by Spaniards of Iberian descent. Yet, they were persistently voiced during the colonial period and were frequently backed by local agents, clergymen, and the state.

Individuals of African Descent While the status of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas remained somewhat vague, Africans who were brought to the New World as slaves were neither natives nor foreigners. What happened to them after they obtained freedom (if they did) was not always clear. Most discussants who debated the adoption of the first Spanish constitution in the early nineteenth century portrayed freed Africans as foreigners.34 According to these discussants, in their condition as natives of a distinct continent, to become Spanish individuals of African descent would have had to naturalize. Yet, naturalization never took place because, by definition, Africans did not willfully decide to join the Spanish community. Their immigration to Spanish territories and their residence there were involuntary, which is why, contrary to other newcomers, they could not be construed as manifesting a desire to create ties with the community. Early nineteenth-century discussants who 32

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Ruth Hill, “Teaching the Pre-History of Race along the Hispanic Transatlantic,” Dieciocho, 30 (2007), 105–118; Ruth Hill, “Towards an Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Critical Race Theory,” Literature Compass, 3/2 (2006), 56–57. Patricia A. Ybarra, Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 9, 19, 56, 138; Laura E. Matthew, Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 111, 113–115, 127, 131, 186, 198–199, 281–283. Besides registering claims to vecino and Spanish status, Matthew also mentions “Indian conquistadors” dressed and performing as “Spaniards.” The term “foreigner” (extranjero and casta extranjera) was used, for example, by Morales Duárez on 7 February 1811, Fernández de Leyva on 3 September 1811, and Gurídi y Alcocer on 4 September 1811; Diario de las discusiones y Actas de las Cortes de Cádiz (hereafter DDACC) (Cádiz: Imprenta Real, 1811), v.3, 282, v.8, 134, v.8, 150–151.

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construed individuals of African descent as permanent foreigners, found support for these conclusions by considering office holding, typically associated with nativeness. They explained that the king always wanted to maintain separate this foreign caste which proceeds from different parts of Africa . . . without allowing its members even the smallest access to offices and civic decorations, prohibiting bishops to dispense them of the impediment to be ordained. They were incapacitated, in short, to obtain legal naturalization or the title of citizen. With this, our kings exercised the faculty all nations have to put on the foreigners who entered their territories the restrictions and difficulties that they considered essential for better order and security.35

The argument equating individuals of African descent with permanent foreignness was first invoked by participants in the constitutional debate during the discussion on the right of representation in the National Assembly. On that occasion (January 1811), delegates who opposed the concession of this right to Afro-Spaniards reasoned their case by reference to the practice of other European countries. However, all the examples they supplied dealt with the treatment of foreigners not locals.36 Africans were designated as foreigners again in August 1811, during the debate on the status of freed slaves who, according to article 5 of the proposed constitution, would become Spaniards upon their emancipation. Reviewing this article, one of the delegates protested that it was senseless to ask foreigners to comply with several conditions before allowing them to naturalize, yet admit Africans to Spanishness immediately upon obtaining their freedom.37 By the time the debates on citizenship took place (September 1811), the classification of individuals of African descent as permanent foreigners was so obvious to most speakers that many objected to the need to set specific rules for African citizenship, arguing that their status could be inferred from the general articles dealing with foreigners.38 The claim that individuals of African descent – even those residing in the community for generations – were quintessentially foreign had colonial precedents. It was particularly clear in the eighteenth century, when some individuals of African descent living in Spanish America requested that the 35

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Morales Duárez on 7 February 1811, DDACC, v.3, 281–282. Similar was the opinion of Cisneros on 6 September 1811, DDACC, v.8, 200–204. Espiga on 9 January 1811, DDACC, v.2, 327–328. Borrull on 31 August 1811, DDACC, v.8, 101–102. Gurídi y Alcocer on 4 September 1811 and Ostolaza on 10 September 1811, DDACC, v.8, 150, 239–240.

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legal impediments distinguishing them from all other Spaniards be removed. Their petitions, identified in the literature as gracias al sacar, mostly included requests to enjoy the privileges of natives.39 At stake were tangible rewards such as office holding, ecclesiastical benefices, studying at the university, or admission to professional guilds, all of which were, in both Spain and Spanish America, reserved to Spaniards.40 Petitioners offered money in exchange for obtaining this grace (as they would for most other royal grace), but to ensure success, they mostly mentioned accumulated merits such as rendering services to the crown and community, long residence, orthodox Christianity, legitimate birth, and, in general, a “respectable” or “honorable” lifestyle. Often, those requesting these rights had already transcended some or most of the limitations placed on individuals of African descent. In their case, the decrees were a final recognition of a metamorphosis that had already happened or was underway. For others, gracias al sacar were a means to combat local opposition to a social or economic ascent, an opposition which they feared might take place or they were already facing.41 Yet, regardless of why they were sought after and what was involved in obtaining them, historians have generally assumed that gracias al sacar targeted racial discrimination.42 The gracias, they suggested, opposed blacks to whites and they allowed individuals of African descent to purchase “whiteness.” Nonetheless, a closer reading of what petitioners said, and how those opposing them or deciding their case responded, reveals additional possibilities. Displaying the degree to which individuals of African descent were discriminated against, as well as demonstrating the profound prejudice that many social members held against them, it is nevertheless clear that these debates equated whiteness with Spanishness and blackness with permanent foreignness.43 39

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Other types of gracias al sacar included, for example, allowing minors to act as adults (in order to enable them to hold certain offices or manage their affairs), legitimizing children (mainly in order to inherit), allowing women the rights of men, and so forth: José María Ots Capdequí, “Sobre las ‘confirmaciones reales’ y las ‘gracias al sacar’ en la historia del derecho indiano,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana, 2 (1968), 44–47. James F. King, “The Case of José Ponciano de Ayarza: A Document on Gracias al Sacar,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 31/4 (1951), 640–647. Petitions dated 14 February 1788 and 26 November 1796, in Santos Rodulfo Cortes, El régimen de “las gracias al sacar” en Venezuela durante el periodo hispánico, vol. I I (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1978), 71, 117. A summary of the historiography on these issues is included in Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 3–34. On how petitioners behaved before opposition was voiced, see 124, 154–155, 162–163. Frederick P. Bowser, “Colonial Spanish America,” in David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (eds.), Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1972), 38–39.

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Petitioners were aware of these ties. They requested to end discrimination against them by asking to be reclassified as Spaniards, or to be eligible for all those things that Spaniards could enjoy.44 They declared that the transformation they desired would affect their naturaleza, that is, their membership in the Spanish community.45 Petitioners also argued that they were excluded from these rights by birth, but that their behavior nonetheless justified their inclusion, indeed, their naturalization.46 They acknowledged that all colonies established laws that favored the colonial power but insisted that, by the same token, all equally devised means allowing the gradual integration of colonized and colonizer.47 These assertions allowed petitioners to conclude that, though they might not be “Europeans by origin,” their behavior merited that they be treated as such. Petitioners also asserted that their ancestors might have been foreigners, but that they should no longer be considered thus because they were not newcomers, having resided in Spanish America for several generations.48 Those who opposed these concessions used the same language. They argued that descendants of Africans could not be trusted because they did not have the proper ties to either king or patria. According to these allegations, individuals of African descent only sought to benefit from privileges without obeying duties.49 Far from looking to Spain as the center of their interests, they “kept their eyes on the dark people of Africa, which is where they come from, to patronize them and raise them against the Spaniards, the authors, so they say, of all their grievances.”50 Would it be sensible to pretend that the “new whites” were more loyal to Spain than the “old whites?” Would those of African descent ever desire the wellbeing of Spain as did those who originated in that country? If such was not the case, why should they “qualify, among other things, to offices in the republic that are reserved to whites?”51 44 45

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Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness, 185, 186, 187, 190. Ibid., 50. While naturaleza designated membership in the community, the contemporary term indicating inherited traits was extracción or calidad: the city of Caracas on November 21, 1796, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 45–46. Diego Mexias, for example, stated that “although birth excluded him from the class of whites, he does not believe that deserving by conduct to enter into this class, he would be unworthy of it.” His petition dated Madrid, 22 June 1797, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 50. Representation of the gremio de pardos libres de Caracas on 9 June 1797, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 120, 122. Josef Antonio Cornejo, Madrid, 26 August 1793, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 40–41. The city of Caracas on 21 November 1796, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 45. The city of Caracas on 28 November 1796, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 91–107. I use the translation in John Lynch (ed.), Latin American Revolutions, 1808–1826: Old and New World Origins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 181–187. The city of Caracas on 14 April 1798, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 87.

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Both those requesting status change and those opposing it thus linked whiteness to Spanishness, African origin to foreignness. The debates that ensued focused on access to membership benefits, from which not only individuals of African descent but also foreign Europeans (who were theoretically “white”) were equally excluded. It was precisely for this reason that royal councilors, writing in 1806, suggested that gracias al sacar neither changed the characteristics of petitioners nor pretended to modify the basic assumptions upon which rights and duties were distributed. Instead, they only removed a legal impediment, allowing a naturalization of sorts.52 In other words, in that setting, whiteness was an “achievable status.”53 Those of African descent who were admitted to the militia, the Church, and the local and royal bureaucracy, and were thus treated as natives, could thereafter think of themselves as both Spaniards and “whites of the land” (blancos de la tierra).54 Gracias al sacar, in short, conferred on successful petitioners a new status, allowing them to benefit from the rights of Spaniards. Said differently, those who petitioned or objected to their grant certainly wished either to avoid or to act upon prejudices, but they couched the discussion in civic terms.55 In some odd way, as happened with foreign merchants, the closer individuals of African descent were to obtaining the resources reserved to Spaniards, the more likely they were to compete successfully, and the greater their numbers were, the stronger was the wish to bar them from achieving their goal.56 As a result, opposition to individuals of African descent obtaining the status of Spaniards was particularly strong in centers where they were numerous and their social mobility greater, such as colonial Venezuela. By contrast, where their presence was limited or their chances of obtaining privileges smaller, efforts to halt their integration were less frequent and/or less adamant. Scant response was also typical of peninsular localities, where, despite the wide presence of African slaves in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth 52 53

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Consulta dated July 1806, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 252. Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 5. Frank Moya Pons, “Dominican National Identity: A Historical Perspective,” Punto 7 Review, 3/10 (1996), 14–26, at 14–16. Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, “Black Honor, Intellectual Marronage, and the Law in Venezuela, 1760–1809,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York University (2015), 133, 158, 164, 185. Cynthia E. Milton, The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 219–223; Jean-Frédéric Schaub, Pour une histoire politique de la race (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015), 8–20.

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centuries, by the eighteenth century the memory of African origin was extremely dim.57 Thus, while the clear association between status, ancestry, and color greatly stigmatized individuals of African descent, their marginalization did not depend only on references to slavery or racial prejudice. For most practical purposes, these individuals were mostly discriminated against in Spain and Spanish America through their classification as non-Spaniards.58 Classification as permanent foreigners, rather than as locals or as foreigners who could integrate after certain conditions were met, certainly signaled the members of this group as different and brought about severe discrimination against them. Nonetheless, it also opened the possibility – even if difficult or remote – of integration, as the gracias testify. This understanding was espoused by Juan German Roscio, a law professor the bar association (colegio de abogados) of Caracas refused to admit in 1798.59 Rejected because his mother was a mestiza and because two of his siblings married individuals of African descent, Roscio responded to this exclusion by arguing that those who descended from unions between Spaniards and Indians (as his mother did) were true Spaniards (españoles). Such was the case because, after the incorporation of the Americas to the Spanish crown, stating that one was of the “Indian nation” was the same as saying that he was a Spaniard. Indians and their mixed offspring were thus eligible to all national (sic) offices, distinctions, and honors as all other Spaniards were. Indeed, if Indians and mestizos were not outright declared white (blanco), it was because their whiteness was evident and consensual and was implied in their classification as Spaniards. In other words, while blacks and mulatos were distinguished from whites because, by virtue of their birth in Africa, they were foreigners, Indians were not. The bishop of Caracas agreed with this analysis, suggesting in 1803 that mestizos should be classified as whites and be admissable to all offices and concessions as Spaniards.60 So did the Council of the 57

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Tamar Herzog, “How Did Early-Modern Slaves in Spain Disappear? The Antecedents,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics and the Arts, 3/1 (2012), available at https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/how-did-early-modern-slaves-spaindisappear-antecedents (accessed 20 September 2021); T. Herzog, “Beyond Race: Exclusion in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America,” in M. S. Herring Torres, María Elena Martínez, and D. Nirenberg (eds.), Race and Blood in the Iberian World (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012), 151–167. Ariela J. Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves, Free Blacks, and Race in the Legal Regimes of Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia: A Comparison,” North Carolina Law Review, 91/5 (2013), 1709–1711. Juan Germán de Roscio, 11 September 1798, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 129, 132, 135–137, 139, 150, at 136. Francisco, bishop of Caracas, on 1 December 1803, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 206–207. In 1645, Juan Palafox y Mendoza, bishop of Puebla, equally distinguished between

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Indies, explaining in 1806 that the differences between Africans, on the one hand, and Indians and mestizos, on the other, were based on origins and nativeness, which was why the latter were considered and esteemed Spaniards, but the former were not.61

Nations and the Emerging Colonial Order In early modern Spain, nativeness designated membership in a political community and identified Spaniards, as well as distinguished them from foreigners. While in the Old World, it mainly operated to differentiate between Spaniards of different Iberian kingdoms and between them and other Europeans, in the Americas it also served to incorporate or reject individuals belonging to other groups. It allowed for a degree of indigenous integration by way of de-ethnicization, but it also served to exclude persons of African descent by their classification as permanent aliens. Although discussants used terms we would identify today with nations, ethnic groups, even race, their debates were directed at obtaining (or barring others from obtaining) certain entitlements, reserved to members. The operating assumption during that period was that everyone was different and unequal, and that some were more worthy than others. Debates on inclusion and exclusion were often extremely harsh and unjust, and they revealed the operation of severe prejudice, yet what they sought to construct was a transatlantic republic that was defined by civic rather than national considerations. It is therefore not surprising that, coming to define who Spaniards were in the first Spanish liberal constitution (the Constitution of Cádiz, 1812), most delegates conceded that Spaniards equally existed on both sides of the ocean and that, among them, were individuals of European, indigenous, and African descent. Discrimination, however, continued. While Spaniards of European and indigenous descent were declared not only nationals but also citizens, that is, they had active political rights (unless special circumstances made them unworthy of this condition), Spaniards of African descent (this was the term the constitution used), who were nationals nonetheless, had to prove their “worthiness” in order also to be recognized as citizens.

61

Africans (who were foreigners) and natives (who were vassals): Villella, Indigenous Elites, 232. “What distinguishes them is not the difference in color but their origin and nativeness”: consulta dated July 1806, in Cortes, El régimen, vol. I I, 254–255.

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Thereafter, a new Spain might have come into being, but the logics of gracias al sacar remained untouched.

Author’s note: Some of the terminology in this chapter reflects its composition back in 2017.

Further Reading Tamar Herzog, “Beyond Race: Exclusion in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America,” in M. S. Herring Torres, María Elena Martínez, and D. Nirenberg (eds.), Race and Blood in the Iberian World (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012). Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Tamar Herzog, “How Did Early-Modern Slaves in Spain Disappear? The Antecedents,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics and the Arts, 3/1 (2012), https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/how-did-early-modern-slavesspain-disappear-antecedents. Tamar Herzog, “Merchants and Citizens: On the Making and Un-making of Merchants in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America,” Journal of European Economic History, 52 (2014), 137–163. Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Ruth Hill, “Teaching the Pre-History of Race along the Hispanic Transatlantic,” Dieciocho, 30 (2007), 105–118. Carmen Beatriz Loza, “‘Tyrannie’ des Incas et ‘naturalisation’ des Indiens: la politique de Francisco Toledo, vice-roi du Pérou (1571–1628),” trans. Cécile d’Albys, Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2 (2002), 375–405. María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Laura E. Matthew, Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Bounded Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). Peter B. Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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“Cacophony” was the term appropriately chosen by David Bell more than twenty years ago to sum up recent research on early modern nationalism (in France).1 His diagnosis still stands. The sources of this dissonance can clearly be traced to the “political language” (as Pocock and Skinner call it) of nationhood itself. Its longue durée encourages the assumption that the nation was “always already” there; moreover, it is many sided, and its key concepts – nation, Volk, (father)land, kingdom, the French, the Germans, etc. – are each distinct rather than interchangeable.2 Because this political language displays a high degree of congruency across the individual language areas of early modern Latin Christendom, this congruence of signifiers in the vernacular is frequently taken at face value to equal a congruence of the things signified. The cacophony becomes truly deafening when, as in the following discussion, one compares developments in the Empire of the German Nation and France to examine the connection between religious dissent and communicative practices intended to forge social cohesion. Presenting the results of this analysis to an audience that is mainly familiar with the key concepts in English complicates matters considerably, for scholarship on nationalism is above all notable for one characteristic: “methodological nationalism.” For example, there is a tower-of-Babel-like confusion concerning the terms “nation” and “nationalism” applied as interpretive concepts, for scholars’ understandings of these diverge substantially. English-language research tends to discuss “nationalism” in connection with (nineteenth-century) social 1

2

David Bell, “Recent Works on Early Modern French National Identity,” Journal of Early Modern History, 68 (1996), 84–113, at 89. An excellent overview is Reinhard Stauber, “Nation, Nationalismus,” EDN, 8 (2008), 1056–1082. They are, however, used as synonyms in Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1993); Myriam Yardeni, La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion, 1559–1598 (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1971); Myriam Yardeni, Enquêtes sur l’identité de la “nation France”: de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005).

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movements; this does not correspond precisely with the French concept of nationalisme as “a principle or ideology which supposes a correspondence between political and national unity.”3 In the German context, the English term “nationalism” and the French nationalisme are invoked to refer to social or political nationalism, with emphasis on the idea that the social form does not necessarily have to be transmuted into a political one. At the same time, both forms are analytically separated from the kind of cultural nationalism called “national identity” in English and sentiment or conscience nationale in French, neither of which is precisely identical to the German kultureller Nationalismus.4 In one respect, though, there is consensus: scholars should not “mistake the discourse of collective mobilization for a description of the kind of belonging it intends to create.”5 It is particularly important to keep this in mind for the sixteenth century, when the concept of national belonging did not extend beyond the realm of discourse.

Establishing Historical Parameters The current state of research makes it absolutely necessary to outline the premises for one’s approach to the topic. There is no getting around the need to historicize, if only cursorily, the language of the national for the (Holy Roman) Empire of the German Nation and the kingdom of France, not least to demonstrate that the distinction of a French civic and a German ethnic nationalism is insufficient. This is a necessary step in creating a basis for a systematic comparative analysis of “the national”6 as it appears in Reformation-era sources. In addition to pinpointing the concept of “the national,” it is also necessary to define the Reformation as a historical period. Recent historiography, particularly in the English-speaking world, has tended 3

4

5

6

Véronique Bénéi, “Nationalisme,” Anthropen.org (Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines, 2016). See, in addition to Bénéi, “Nationalisme,” also John Breuilly, “Changes in the Political Uses of the Nation: Continuity or Discontinuity,” in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds.), Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 67–101; Dieter Langewiesche, “‘Nation,’ ‘Nationalismus,’ ‘Nationalstaat’ in der europäischen Geschichte seit dem Mittelalter – Versuch einer Bilanz,” in Dieter Langewiesche (ed.), Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa (Munich: Beck, 2000), 14–34. J.-F. Schaub, “Le sentiment nation est-il une catégorie pertinente pour comprendre les adhésions et les conflits sous l’Ancien Régime,” in Alain Tallon (ed.), Le sentiment national dans l’Europe méridionale aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, France, Espagne, Italie (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2007), 155–167, at 159. Quotation marks are placed around concepts when they are used as analytic categories. In order to get away from the confusion about nationalism as an approach, I consistently refer to “the national.”

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in this respect to what Tom Scott aptly calls “diseased hypertrophy.”7 For instance, Peter G. Wallace’s “long European Reformation” spans from 1350 to 1750, making it, as others have pointed out, a global phenomenon.8 Such a broad conception of the “Reformation” cannot fulfill the basic function of any periodization, which is to provide a heuristic tool for better understanding the era or phenomenon under consideration. This requires a narrower, more analytically precise definition: the “Reformation,” as a turning point in modern history, is the era which saw the establishment of – or at least attempts to establish – churches free from papal influence in a number of European countries in the hitherto Catholic portions of the continent.9 This long, complicated process began in the fifteenth century, peaked in the sixteenth, and ended in the late seventeenth century. At that point, the confessional landscape of Latin Christendom had largely taken on the form it would retain (cum grano salis) until the mid-twentieth century. This chapter, therefore, deals with the sixteenth century. During the early modern era, communicative practices aimed at developing a sense of collective identity took shape under constraints which distinguished them from such practices before and after this period. Beginning around 1500, the introduction of new media and the increased importance of vernacular languages, the exact timing of which varied in the individual European lands, fundamentally transformed the social importance and reach of public discourse, although there is an ongoing debate over the extent to which sixteenth-century print media may be regarded as mass media. In calls for solidarity that extended beyond particular localities or estates, linguistic discourse served as the dominant mode of communication during the Reformation period, while visual or performative forms of communication played only a marginal role. At the same time, starting around 1500, the social function of the national “language” evolved in Latin Christendom in a way that foreshadowed the future. The name of a language now came to be used as a shorthand for specific collectives – e.g. the “German nation,” the “French people.” In the same vein, the conventional bipolar constructions of alterity (“us” vs. the “barbarians/ 7

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Tom Scott, “The Reformation between Deconstruction and Reconstruction: Reflections on Recent Writings on the German Reformation,” German History, 26 (2008), 406–422, at 407. P. G. Wallace, The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity, 1350–1750, 3rd edition (London: Red Globe Press, 2019); Richard Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), A Companion to the Reformation World (New York: Blackwell, 2008). Berndt Hamm, “Abschied vom Epochendenken in der Reformationsforschung: Ein Plädoyer,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 39 (2012), 373–411.

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heathen”) were extended to include a multipolar construct characterized by competition among the “nations.” Only in the Sattelzeit (the period associated with the shift toward modernity in western and central Europe around 1750–1850) did these concepts, anchored as they originally had been in a realm of (sacral) historical experience, fully shift in function to become Erwartungsbegriffe (“anticipatory concepts”), for which “there is not yet any corresponding experience in reality.”10 That is to say, rather than serving as legitimizing tools for an existing order, they were now actively repurposed to help define and lend inspiration to programs for transformative change. It is out of this temporal dimension of the imaginary that, in the context of the fundamental sociopolitical transformation in the period around 1800, the power of the “national” as a force for social mobilization emerged. It’s when modern nationalists succeeded in aligning their programs for change with the “imagined order” of the early modern period, “finding” there what they were looking for – the evidence that their own nation had “already always” existed. A case in point is Prussian historiography and its nationalistic interpretation of the Reformation era.11 At the same time, the historical moment from which this perspective emerges highlights a distinctive characteristic of early modern conceptions of collective identities: “Whether defending or attacking, within Europe itself or directed abroad, the (national) Churches and Christian tradition provided the framework for political entities into the nineteenth century.”12 That means that not only are any attempts to appeal to a collective consciousness (in the context of Latin Christendom) anchored in the Judeo-Christian conceptual framework, but also that “the national” cannot be understood apart from the geographically and chronologically specific manifestation of the Church. Our recognition of the resemblances between emergent senses of “national” community in the early modern period and in (nascent) modernity must be tempered, however, by understanding the differences in historical 10

11

12

Reinhart Koselleck, Fritz Gschnitzer, K. F. Werner, and Bernd Schönemann, “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politischsozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta 2004), 141–431, at 149. Gabriele Haug-Moritz, “The Holy Roman Empire, the Schmalkald League, and the Idea of Confessional Nation-Building,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 152/4 (2008), 427–439. Koselleck et al., “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” 146, 171–186. This aspect was long overlooked by scholars in postrevolutionary, laicist France: Alain Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe siècle: essai sur la vision gallicane du monde (Paris: PUF, 2002), 1–24.

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contexts. Those groups that shaped the discourse “found” a collective identity as a result of shifts in political power; it was not their ideas that catalyzed the initial political transformation. This “finding” is not an arbitrary process but highly determined by specific historical conditions. On the one hand, as “one controls the choice of what to use for one’s own construct of nation, one chooses from existing things. One invents by finding,” no matter whether the “finds” from the past are intended for the present or for an imaginary future. On the other hand, this finding is not accidental but “a struggle for power, which struggle intends to decide the future by asserting imagined constructs of the past.”13 For this reason too, the “rhythms of cultural and political nation building” proceed in a manner that is “sudden and discontinuous, unpredictable and easily reversible.”14 Everything we know today suggests that periods of military conflicts that necessitated a comprehensive reallocation of resources coincided with urgent appeals to collective identities.15 This chapter focuses on contexts in which the “struggle for power,” which was closely intertwined in the Reformation era with the establishment of “new” churches, was carried out by force of arms in the two polities being compared. To avoid “the trap of simply stringing together isolated citations from large, complex works without much reference to genre, literary convention, political language, vocabulary shifts, the circumstances of composition, or the author’s social or institutional status,”16 I have chosen a complementary approach that begins by analyzing a systematically selected corpus of the most widely circulated printed texts (i.e. those of ten or more editions) from the years of the Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547) and the First French War of Religion (1562–1563) to determine the concepts of community propagated therein.17 The final paragraphs then briefly address the results of this analysis within the broader context. 13

14

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16 17

D. Langewiesche, “Was heißt ‘Erfindung der Nation’? Nationalgeschichte als Artefakt– oder Geschichtsdeutung als Machtkampf,” Historische Zeitschrift, 277 (2002), 593–617, at 602, 616. Bell, “Recent Works on Early Modern French National Identity,” 91; Koselleck et al., “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” 243, 282. Peter Hoppenbrouwers, “The Dynamics of National Identity in the Later Middle Ages,” in Robert Stein and Judith Pollmann (eds.), Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 19–41; Caspar Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen. Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005), 60–63. Bell, “Recent Works on Early Modern French National Identity,” 92. Text citations refer to the database “Religious Dissent, Peacelessness and Media Change in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and in the French Kingdom in MidSixteenth Century: The Print Medias” (https://gams.uni-graz.at/context:kmw), especially the introduction.

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Transnational Perspectives The “language” of nationhood is genuinely transnational; its paroles are rooted in (pagan) antiquity and the medieval scholarly traditions of Latin Christendom. In addition to the Christian doctrine of election – which in France was associated with the monarchy from the time of Clovis (482–511) onward – there are four central Latin concepts: gens and populus, which describe the collective group, and natio and patria, which describe the geographical origins of the individual. All these terms were translated into the vernacular languages, but the specific nuances of the resulting vernacular terms varied widely. Such semantic differences, themselves the result of diverse paths of historical development, were crucial factors in subsequently determining the various ways and forms in which “the national” was “found” by Reformation-era contemporaries. In Latin, and later in the humanist historical tradition,18 the concept of gens is inseparable from rex (König, le roi) and regnum (Königreich, le royaume), and at the same time marks a legal point of reference (lex gentis). The roots of a reflection on national identity may thus be found in a political and legal context, rather than in a cultural and linguistic one, as nineteenth-century historiography would have it. Gens integrates both rex and populus and enables one to define the regnum as the space of the lex gentis. Linear borders, however, that clearly separate the domestic from the foreign, have no place in this construction of a “national” space. From the very beginning, there was a certain tension inherent in the category populus that was resolved very differently in the empire and France from the late Middle Ages on. On the one hand, populus refers to that portion of the gens whose relationship to the king is elevated in some regard, i.e. the nobility in its spiritual and worldly functions (the Adelsnation), which simultaneously forms a counterpart to the king. On the other hand, the populus also includes all those who, independent of their social status, are subject to the laws of the gens. It is this capacity for uniting diametrically opposed realities in a single concept, with the expansion of the Français as the “people of the north (gens du nord)” into the south, the challenges of the Hundred Years War, and the accompanying intensified reflection on the part of scholars about the foundations of coexistence in Francia, that transformed the regnum into a sacred body politic (corps mystique). The rituals of kingship (coronation, 18

Albert Schirrmeister and Stefan Schlelein, “Semantik im Vergleich. Politische Sprache in humanistischen Nationalgeschichten und Landesbeschreibungen,” in Johannes Helmrath, Albert Schirrmeister, and Stefan Schlelein (eds.), Historiographie des Humanismus: Literarische Verfahren, Soziale Praxis, geschichtliche Räume (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 9–47, at 37–38.

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burial) that began to develop in France starting in the fourteenth century portray – and thus create and reinforce – this reality over and over again. The kingdom of France, the sacralized corps mystique as the body of the mortal and immortal king, materialized in the crown (la couronne), is the Francorum patria. The affective significance that is attached to the concept of patria from the very beginning makes the “love of God and king” the central principle of “being French.”19 This is the same principle which makes it possible for the French kings to recast the term populus in a monarchical sense in its vernacular form (le peuple) and to thus address – for the first time in a coronation oath in 1547 – a peuple, which consists of all loyal subjects of the king. Such subjects had already been designated as patriots in the middle of the fifteenth century. The nobility, the traditional populus, retained “only” its honorary rank. The analogy between father and king (roi-père) employed by French kings since the start of the sixteenth century,20 along with their use of the patria concept, both fulfill an identical function in the kings’ language. By forging an affective bond between the monarch and each individual, they add a new dimension to the collective identity, which had evolved in the late Middle Ages from a medieval expression of political and legal solidarity to recognize a sacral corps mystique. In contrast, the term natio, which did not become common in vernacular French until after the French Revolution, remains in the ecclesiastic sphere, to which it has belonged since its (similar) transformation from an individual characteristic (i.e. birthplace) into a collective idea in the late Middle Ages. From its inception, however, whether in the clerical “nation” of ecclesiastic councils or the “nation” of the university, the term distinguishes itself from other concepts in that the substance of its meaning is constituted by sharply distinguishing between a shared sameness and that which is distinctly foreign. The Church in France and its clerics were – as definitively proclaimed by the Concordat of Bologna (1516) once and for all – “the king’s Church” and thus “the Church of the realm,” a Church in which “strangers” (from Italy) had no part to play.21The fact that in mid-fifteenth-century France a language for conceptually and theoretically expressing a sense of collective identity had already developed, whereas in the Holy Roman Empire this process was just 19

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Alphonse Dupront, “Du sentiment national,” in Michel François (ed.), La France et les Français (Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1972), 1423–1474; Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe siècle, 286. Martin Gosman, Les sujets du père: les rois de France face aux représentants du peuple dans les assemblées de notables et les États généraux, 1302–1615 (Paris: Peeters, 2007). Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe siècle, 79–100, 281–286; Dupront, “Du sentiment national,” 1445–1446.

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beginning to pick up momentum, underscores the fact, mentioned above, that increased power intensifies the search for such a sense of belonging, rather than the other way around. In the late medieval empire, the king was not the kingdom, as in France, but rather the Rex Romanorum to whom this “Holy” (since the Staufer period) “Empire” had been entrusted and was conceptually distinct from his kingdom, the Regnum Alemanniae. The regnum appears as a term for a reduced territorial domain, namely Alemannia, one of the numerous gentes and regna that made up the empire of the Roman king. This is the development that made the Roman kings from the houses of Luxembourg and Austria, and above all Emperor Maximilian I, into propagandists for a new language of collective identity. However, this language was not formulated for the people of the gentes – it is notable that, in German, the Latin populus becomes the derogatory Pöbel or mob – but was meant for those whom the legal language of the thirteenth century already addressed as Teutsche, that is to say, the “princes of the Holy Roman Empire, who were rulers over their lands, entitled to elect the king, and obliged to travel to Rome.”22 In the language of the king, this noble populus functions as the Teutsche Nation. In this way, the king adopts a term that a portion of this populus, the “clerical nation,” had used to designate themselves in their grievances against the Roman curia (Gravamina nationis Germanicae). For within the empire, the Church – and this is the second significant difference in comparison with France – was entrusted equally to the king and the Teutsche Nation (i.e. the clerical estates), even though the Roman king as defensor ecclesiae had a unique responsibility not only for the Church within his realm, but also for all of Christendom. The Church of the Empire of the German Nation, as a result of its plural structure, thus enjoyed less autonomy – or, in early modern terms, less “freedom” – from the papacy,23 than the French Church, the église gallicane. Maximilian I’s readiness, in the face of the “Ottoman threat,” to delegate the Holy Empire to this Teutsche Nation, to address it (for the first time in 1471) as the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation,” and simultaneously to communicate the idea of his reign as one which he exercised “on behalf of” the (Holy) Empire, marks the definitive break. It made the king into a “trustee” of the empire and, most decisively, it created additional duties for the nobility in respect to “its” Holy Empire, along with the material and 22 23

Koselleck et al., “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” 150. Norbert Haag, Dynastie, Region, Konfession: Die Hochstifte des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation zwischen Dynastisierung und Konfessionalierung (Münster: Aschendorff, 2018), 27–69.

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immaterial ones born of the traditional feudal ties binding the nobility to the king. In short, the empire became a sacralized transpersonal federation, which both the king and the Teutsche Nation served in equal measure, if in different manners.24 Thus, in the emperor’s language, the “German nation” was that part of the empire which, after the 1470s, increasingly coalesced into a duty and tax association from which the Italian parts of the empire, along with the regions of Burgundy and the Swiss Confederation, were slipping away in a long process that lasted until the mid-seventeenth century. Maximilian, a skilled propagandist, drew extensively on humanists’ expertise25 to exploit scholars’ increasing reception of Tacitus and their “discovery” of Germania to convey the idea – both verbally and, quite exceptionally, visually – that he was the rex Germaniae in his regnum nationis germanicae.26 However, “Germania” cannot be equated with the “deutsche Nation,” as did the ethnic ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporaneous visual imagery conveys this clearly: “Germania” refers specifically to the “Holy Empire,” the sacral unity of the “King and the Empire of the German Nation,” while the Teutsche Nation itself is represented in the heraldry by the seven electors. This ethnographic expansion of the late medieval imaginary of king and empire, shaped by politics and law, made the mental maps more complex. Furthermore, the humanist constructions of identity did not only serve to expand and augment the space of political discourse, as in France. This also occurs because humanist historiography more sharply defines the distinguishing feature of Germanness, the common language, which was associated from the beginning with the term teutsch but not with the Teutsche Nation. Both factors, the more pronounced legitimizing function as well as the ethnic and cultural connotations of the humanist discourse, may be the reason why the “battle of nations” fought out among humanists was from the beginning more prone to xenophobia in the empire 24

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Ernst Schubert, König und Reich: Studien zur spätmittelalterlichen deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, 1979), 254–276, especially 267–272. Dieter Mertens, “Die Instrumentalisierung der ‘Germania’ des Tacitus durch die deutschen Humanisten,” in Heiko Steuer, Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, and Dietrich Hakelberg (eds.), Zur Geschichte der Gleichung “germanisch – deutsch”: Sprache und Namen, Geschichte und Institutionen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 37–101; Johannes Helmrath, Ursula Kocher, and Andrea Sieber (eds.), Maximilians Welt: Kaiser Maximilian I. im Spannungsfeld zwischen Innovation und Tradition (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2018). Albrecht Altdorfer und Werkstatt, Das Reich Germaniae. Aus dem Triumphzug Maximilians I., um 1512/15; Wien, Albertina Museum, Inv. Nr. 25211, fol. 55 (www .rdklabor.de/wiki/Germania#/media/File:RDK_Germania_8_Albrecht_Altdorfer_u nd_Werkstatt,_Das_Reich_Germaniae.jpg (accessed 14 October 2019).

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than in France.27 But our current knowledge of the subject indicates that the construction of a common Germanic past and culture as a point of reference for collective identity is an enterprise primarily limited to scholarly culture until the mid-sixteenth century.28 Even for the royal propagandist himself, concepts of belonging together rooted in the ethnic-empirical humanist discourse retained a distinct “deficit.” They could not transform the sacredness bestowed upon him as the Holy Empire’s trustee (Wahlheiligkeit) into a matter of national consciousness along French lines, in which the sacredness of the political body served to unite the king with his realm, whereby these two entities became indistinguishable from each other. It is hardly an accident, therefore, that Maximilian’s grandson, Charles V, the first king and emperor for whom this mental dissociation of king and empire (of the German Nation) materialized in the form of an electoral capitulation, presented himself in the competitive election of 1519 as a Teutscher, whose birthplace (Ghent) – i.e. his natio(n) – was in Teutschland. In general, though, he was less concerned with a shared ethnicity of king and Teutsche Nation as constructed by the humanists than he was with expressing his affective ties to the Teutsche Nation. For instance, in his opening statements to the imperial diets,29 he labeled it the “beloved fatherland.” He thereby took up a figure of thought that, in humanist discourse, had previously referred to the “lands and their citizens” (vulgo: the Landesherrschaften) of which the Teutsche Nation consisted, rather than to the Teutsche Nation as such. In the Reformation-era empire, however, it was not only the language of belonging and cohesion shaped by scholars focused on political and legal matters at court – a language which, under humanism’s influence in the sixteenth century, was taking on increasingly ethnic dimensions – that shaped public discourse. It was left to the German Reformation’s most effective propagandist, Martin Luther, to “nationalize” the concept of the Volk or people, by creating a Volk teutscher Nation (people of the German nation) and, at the same time, “confessionalizing”30 this people by postulating as its 27

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Hirschi, Wettkampf, 251–379; A. Jouanna, “Le thème de la liberté française dans les controverses politiques au temps des guerres de Religion,” in Tallon (ed.), Sentiment national, 19–32. Mertens, “Instrumentalisierung,” passim; Hirschi, Wettkampf, 502–510. Deutsche Reichstagsakten, Jüngere Reihe: Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Karl V., 20 vols. (to date) (Munich: Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1893–2018). Weimarer Ausgabe, D. Martin Luthers Werke, vol. L X X I I I: Deutsches Sachregister (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger Weimar, 2009), 387–395 (“Volk”), at 392.

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unifying element its steadfastness in the face of the outrages of the Roman Antichrist. And thus the path Luther chose after 1520 “into the unrestricted public sphere of the printed word, also led from the German background as an unspoken condition to a clearly voiced appeal to national energies and to German pride.”31 But above all, it led to a theologically and biblically expanded imaginative space. The Volk was still the “nobility of the German nation,” but no longer simply the “German nobility” (Teutsche Adel). Luther also addressed the “great masses” (der grosse Haufen), the subjects who comprised die Teutschen and who were to be won over by the “true word of God” for the salvation of their souls. This kind of community was anchored in the realm of biblical experience, in the history of the chosen and suffering people of Israel. However, the Volk teutscher Nation acted as a “Volk of true believers” within a fundamentally different conceptual and chronological framework than their French counterparts. While the French people consisted of the unified totality of all the French, united in their love for the fatherland of the French crown, namely a social body anchored in the past and present of the (sacred) worldly order, the Lutheran Volk der teutschen Nation was, by contrast, consigned to the narrative of a mission of redemption which, though it had begun in the present, would find its resolution only in the future end times, which had begun with Luther’s appearance.32 In the context of this eschatological theological discourse, the Volk of the teutsche Nation took a similar posture – if with different specific expectations – to modern nationalists: the present looked toward a future in which the promises of the present (e.g. in the early modern context, the imminent return of Christ) would be fulfilled.

Communication, Nationhood, and the Reformation The propagation of key concepts is always a power struggle; it is thus impossible to describe them without at least giving some indication of the media landscape in which this war of words is waged. A central factor in determining who can circulate which key concepts in print media is the infrastructure for the communication process. A comparison shows that the key structural difference between France and the empire was not – as has 31

32

Lutz Heinrich, “Die deutsche Nation zu Beginn der Neuzeit. Fragen nach dem Gelingen und Scheitern deutscher Einheit im 16. Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift, 234 (1982), 529–559, at 546. Thomas Kaufmann, Das Ende der Reformation: Magdeburgs “Herrgotts Kanzlei” (1548–1551/ 2) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 429–484.

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often been suggested – a greater convergence between Reformation tactics and the printed word, but rather the fundamental difference in the configuration of the two polities, as manifest in the semantics of “the national.” Put simply, in sixteenth-century France, printing was (and remained) centered in Paris. It was and remained dominated by the old faith, and, in the early phase of the religious conflicts, print media remained the media of royal power.33 In the empire, the decentralized yet closely intertwined structure of the printing industry, predominantly in Protestant imperial cities and principalities, reflected – and was caused by – the empire’s political structure. As a result, more key texts printed in multiple editions appeared in the empire than in France, both in absolute numbers and relative to printing production in general, which, with nearly five hundred editions related to this conflict, is nearly the same in both cases (thirteen texts in 147 editions in the Empire; eight texts in 94 editions in France).34 In France, the persistence of long-established infrastructural conditions is notable. The most heavily reprinted editions, ones in which the French center of printing, Paris, only marginally dominates, draw our attention to the gradually changing media landscape on the eve of the outbreak of the civil wars. Print production in general, however, highlights the fact that this change was one of degrees, and that Paris was able to maintain its position as the prevailing center of printing.35 These differing conditions generated far-reaching, fundamentally divergent consequences. In France, where the monarchy succeeded in exerting royal power as “power of data constitution” (Popitz), the king is, during the military conflict, a constant presence in print media in the form of countless edicts and decrees. In the empire, on the other hand, the Schmalkaldic League tightly controlled the domain of print media in 1546 and the emperor was almost entirely absent. In both lands, it was pamphlets, written in the vernacular and printed on a few, fairly small pages, that dominated the

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Some of the most recent scholarship from a transnational perspective: Alexandra Schäfer-Griebel, Die Medialität der Französischen Religionskriege: Frankreich und das Heilige Römische Reich 1589 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2018), 122–123, 369–375; Gabriele Haug-Moritz, “Entscheidung zu physischer Gewaltanwendung: Der Beginn der französischen Religionskriege (1562) als Beispiel,” in Arndt Brendecke (ed.), Praktiken der Frühen Neuzeit. Akteure, Handlungen, Artefakte (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015), 658–666. For this and the following primary texts, see https://gams.uni-graz.at/context:kmw. Sources will be cited in text using the short title references from the database. For printing as a characteristic of the “Parisian Athens,” see Dupront, “Du sentiment national,” 1453–1458.

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market, although the text forms were admittedly more varied in the empire than in France. The structural differences in the printing markets notwithstanding, the development of print media communication followed a similar chronology. Communication increased noticeably both in the initial phase of the conflicts (July–August 1546; April–May 1562), as the opposing sides mobilized, and also at the point at which it became clear which side had won the military victory, namely, in both lands, the monarch’s forces (May 1547; February 1563). In France as well as in the empire, the most printing took place in those areas where the military forces of the king and his noble opponents met, and, in the case of France, was also where the decisive battles were waged. In the empire, on the other hand, 1546–1547 saw “only” sieges and military skirmishes. The French printing centers were thus primarily in the gouvernements controlled by the protagonists and their supporters (i.e. Île de France, Picardy, Normandy, Orléans, Champagne), whereas in the empire they were in the south (“the Danube Campaign,” especially the imperial cities of Augsburg and Nuremberg) and in the region of Saxony (“the Saxon War”), particularly in Wittenberg, Erfurt, and Magdeburg. Thus, from a spatial point of view, they were national only in a restricted sense. The where and when of communication through the new media was largely parallel in the two realms, but there are also striking similarities and differences in who was speaking in the communicative space print media created, and these are an essential element in understanding the “language” of belonging. In both lands, opponents among the nobility armed themselves with words and weapons simultaneously. In both cases – in the spring of 1547 and March 1563, respectively – the royal victors of the military conflicts featured heavily in widely circulated texts, though obviously in very different forms. The regent Catherine de’ Medici and her son Charles IX appeared in the text of the Edict of Pacification, while the Emperor Charles V was present in countless songs, one of which his contemporaries even attributed to him (Lied, Ehre Kaiser).36 If the unifying element lies in the communicative activity of the noble protagonists in these conflicts (the nobility is admittedly responsible for many more widely circulated texts in France than in the empire), it is worth noting that, despite the dominant practice of anonymity in the French 36

Gabriele Haug-Moritz, “Zu Lob und Ehre Römischer Kaiserlicher Majestät: Karl V. in der pro-kaiserlichen Liedpublizistik des Schmalkaldischen Krieges (1546–47),” in Friedrich Edelmayer, Martina Fuchs, Georg Heilingsetzer, and Peter Rauscher (eds.), Plus ultra: Die Welt der Neuzeit. Festschrift für Alfred Kohler zum 65. Geburtstag (Münster: Aschendorff, 2008), 103–122.

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and German language areas, the texts most often reprinted are those whose authors signed by name – namely, in France, those by the prominent humanist Pierre de Ronsard,37 and, in the empire, texts written by Lutheran theologians, mostly from Wittenberg. It was this divergence – the French humanist, on the one hand, the Lutheran theologians, on the other – that was the determining factor for the manner in which a language of national identity emerged during the wars. In their “narrative” of what “is,” the two groups that dominated the print-media discourse – i.e. the nobility and the scholars – referred frequently to each other’s accounts. Yet each side adhered to its own logic of argumentation when deciding what constituted their shared identity as opposed to that which was foreign and hostile.

The “National” in the Communication of Conflict In both cases of conflict, it was the noble protagonists, Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, as well as Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony and Landgrave Philipp of Hesse, who dictated the “narrative” of what is, and who made use of genuine legal models of argumentation (and legal expertise). In the empire in 1546–1547, and in France since the early 1570s, the forms of argumentation were developed systematically and theoretically, and recent research has witnessed an intense discussion of this “development of the modern right of resistance.”38 In both kingdoms, the presentation of the case for one’s own right to resistance (Gegenwehr/défense) and for the wrongdoing of one’s opponent determined the strategy of argumentation. In both polities, the legal framing of one’s own claim to legitimacy determined the mediality of the communication process, taking into account the contemporaneous conception of the law, which made no distinction between the form and content of the maintenance of rights. Indeed, resistance (Gegenwehr/ défense) was only permitted when the wrongdoing in question was notorious, and wrongdoing could only become notorious when “everyone” affected was aware of it. This is why the “new media” were the chosen means to satisfy this requirement.

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On Ronsard as “political publicist,” see Daniel Ménager, Ronsard: le roi, le poète et les hommes (Genf: Librairie Droz, 1979); Virginia Scott and Sara Sturm-Maddox, Performance, Poetry and Politics: Catherine de Médicis and Pierre de Ronsard at Fontainebleau (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007), especially 35–61. It will suffice to mention just a few names of those leading experts who have published extensively on the subject, often from a transnational, comparative perspective: Arlette Jouanna, Robert von Friedeburg, Luise Schorn-Schütte, and Mario Scattola.

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Aside from these issues of content, which refer to “the national” in a political and legal (that is to say in a civic) manner, the vernacular nature of the communication process and its transnational dimension points to another aspect concerning the audience addressed: whereas in the empire the addressed “everyone” (männiglich; Abdruck, Verwahrungsschrift) was not defined more specifically, Condé explicitly included not only “all of the faithful and loyal subjects, servants . . . of this kingdom” – in short, the French people – but also “all of Christianity” (Déclaration, Séconde Déclaration). The translations of Condé’s writings from French into English and German show that the “nation” – the kingdom of France and the French people – was neither intended as, nor in practice was, the sole addressee.39 The fact that there are known handwritten translations into English of publications of the Saxon and Hessian chancelleries,40 but no print translations except for Czech, indicates that the focus was more on the “national” and less on the European in 1546–1547. It also shows, however, that “national” did not carry ethnic or cultural linguistic connotations but was conceived in the traditional political-legal sense. Thus Condé, when he took up arms in revolt in April 1562, presented himself as waging war on behalf of Christianity and to defend the immortal body of the French king, and repeatedly invoked the terms “crown” (la couronne) and “kingdom” (le royaume) as leitmotifs. These were used against those who had, not only captured the king’s mortal body, but also usurped his immortal body and his royal courts, the conseil privé and parlements, thus “ruining” the sacred body politic (corps mystique). Among those mentioned by name as usurpers, the Guise family was characterized (starting in 1560) as foreign, though it was not their foreignness in Condé’s argument which motivated their antipathy toward the French king and kingdom. Rather, it was their personal viciousness, selfishness, cupidity, and, above all, disobedience toward royal authority in general and the Edict of Saint-Germain (17 January 1562) in particular, that allowed “those of the new religion” to “exercise their religion during daylight beyond the city walls.” The argumentation developed in the empire stands in diametrical opposition to the French noble opposition’s claims until 1572 that they were fighting 39

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Gabriele Haug-Moritz, “Hugenottische Pamphletistik und gelehrtes Wissen – die Déclaration Louis de Bourbons, Prince de Condés (1562): Ein Beitrag zur politischen Ideengeschichte der Anfangsphase der französischen Religionskriege,” Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte, 39 (2012), 115–134. For another example, see Sebastian Lucas to Paget, Antwerp, 18 August 1546, www .british-history.ac.uk/letters-papers-hen8/vol21/no1/pp732-748.

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to defend the sacred unity of the king, the kingdom, and the French people.41 Starting from the premise that all authorities united by the Augsburg Confession (along with all authorities of the Teutsche Nation) had an equal duty toward the Roman king and the Holy Roman Empire, the office of the king is defined as one based on contractual positive law (the electoral capitulation). It is the breach of this contractual foundation, mainly Charles V’s refusal to grant the matter legal consideration and, in addition, his presumptuousness in deciding matters of true faith by means of factual evidence, that led to the demotion of Emperor Charles V to the title of Charles of Ghent. He is the (medieval) tyrannus quoad executionem (i.e. a factual usurper, and not the apocalyptic tyrant Luther would have him be), one who relieves himself of his own office, and against whom it is not only a right but a duty to take up arms, “for the maintenance of its [i.e. the Holy Empire’s] customary liberty and freedom” (Abdruck, Verwahrungsschrift). This was all the truer when dealing with a ruler who claimed in his imperial ban (20 July 1546) to be acting with good intentions, “out of inborn love and affection . . . for the Holy Empire of the German Nation as our beloved fatherland,” but whose deeds belied his words. He was beginning to arm his forces while the imperial diet was still in session, and endeavoring to “put the German nation in the power of the Spanish, Burgundians, and Austrians,” and thus also to ally himself with the pope in suppressing the “true faith” here as he was doing in his Dutch hereditary lands. The adherents to the Augsburg Confession, as they defined themselves confessionally, declared themselves ready to defend their position by legal means before the German Nation. It is particularly in this appeal to the law that the language of the conflict’s protagonists (once again) highlights the teutsche Nation’s political and legal character, represented by the German nobility, and, in this particular case, its arbitrational form of peacekeeping. However, even in their understanding, the teutsche Nation is not synonymous with the Holy Empire, the humanists’ Germania, but rather – to use an anachronistic expression – a transnational polity that rests upon the mutuality of Roman king and German Nation. This is evidenced in the implicit premise underlying the distinction between the German Nation and Spain, the Netherlands, or Austria. This distinction refers to the polity as defined by the different legitimations of royal rule – hereditary lands in one case, elective monarchy in the other. The diametrically different conceptualizations of the monarchical in relation to the “national” also surface 41

Arlette Jouanna, “Liberté,” in Jouanna, Le devoir de révolte: la noblesse française et la gestation de l’état moderne (1559–1661) (Paris: Fayard, 1989).

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in the manner in which Charles IX and Charles V communicate their military victories. In his Edict of Pacification, the French king drew directly on Condé’s model and demonstrates in his role as lawmaker and judge what he claimed: the illness (maladie), which had afflicted “his kingdom” and “his people and his subjects” – that is, France as sacred body – had been cured.42 In contrast, Charles V’s discursive strategy employed the construct of the miles christianus (soldier of Christ), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, reverted to a topos he had employed previously to present himself as the caring “father of the fatherland,” whom many of his children-subjects, especially the wrongdoers, repaid not with gratitude and obedience, but with the very opposite. Yet God stood by his warrior and punished those whose behavior validated the emperor’s diagnosis of his time: his enemies had “upended” the earthly and heavenly order.43

Nationhood in the Discourse of a French Humanist and Lutheran Theologians The fact that, in contrast to his French counterpart, the emperor, even in the moment of his triumph, only partially represented in print the power that he wielded as lawgiver and judge after 1546–1547, popularizing the imperial victory instead with vernacular songs, is not least a product of the differences in standing of the scholarly publications surrounding the conflicts. Representative of the communication process in general is the fact that, in France, there is only one “bestselling author,” Pierre de Ronsard, whereas in the empire, aside from one anonymous, though theologically well-grounded, “man, wise and experienced in war,” there are six other authors. These were Johannes Bugenhagen (Philipp Melanchthon; Wittenberg/Saxony), Johannes Schradin (imperial city of Reutlingen), Martin Luther-Philipp Melanchthon (Wittenberg), Joachim Mörlin (autonomous city of Göttingen/dukes of Luneburg), Cyriacus Schnauß (pharmacist, Coburg/Saxony), and Hans Baumann (from the emperor’s field camp in Wittenberg).44 All these authors 42

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Dietmar Peil, Untersuchungen zur Staats- und Herrschaftsmetaphorik in literarischen Zeugnissen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Fink, 1983), 302–488. For what is still the most relevant text on the “verkehrte Welt” or “world turned upsidedown,” see Bob Scribner, “Reformation, Karneval und die ‘verkehrte Welt,’” in Richard van Dülmen and Norbert Schindler (eds.), Volkskultur: Zur Wiederentdeckung des vergessenen Alltags (16.–20 Jahrhundert) (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984), 117–152, especially 148–152. Short biographical and bibliographic information on all those named here, except Hans Baumann, may be found in the Deutsche Biographie, www.deutsche-biographie.de.

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disseminate an interpretation of the developing military events. The exception is Baumann’s Zeitung (News Book), typical of its genre in reporting on the event of the Elector of Saxony’s capture (24 April 1547). The common thread that runs through all these interpretations is that the pope – “God’s enemy and the devil’s servant” (Meldung, Anschläge) – is the enemy, and no aspect of the conflict is more thoroughly documented in print than the pope’s support for the emperor and the emperor’s warring party (Abdruck/Kopie; Ablaß/Bulle/Friede). The first two texts that take a position on the now unmistakably impending military conflict – Bugenhagen and Melanchthon’s (Schrift, Pastoren; before 4 July 1546) and Schradin’s (Meldung, Anschläge; 7 July 1546) – offer narrative perspectives in which the time-honored hostility toward Rome is embedded, a hostility increasingly laden after the late 1530s with eschatological significance. The texts reinforce each other, but differ in where they place the accent, in particular concerning the “national.” Put simply, the Wittenberg theologians address their colleagues, who should teach, comfort, and warn “the pious Churches’ and God’s people” that they may be threatened by a warlike people from “a foreign nation” who thirst for “German blood” (teutsches Blut), emphasizing that the threat is even greater because they are the “persecutors of Christ.” The latter is crucial, since it concerns more than only the “external regiment.” It is the imagined community of the Godfearing and elect, at whose side God will stand in their battle against Christ’s enemies, as evidenced by the story of the people of Israel, whom God rescued from great peril in the midst of the Red Sea when the tremendously powerful, “stubborn” pharaoh threatened them. And that which once happened in the Red Sea is happening today in “Teutschland,” in order to make the Teutsche Nation an example for other nations. But again, as numerous texts about the “persecutors of Christ” make clear, it is not “national” belonging upon which their collective identity rests, but rather their readiness for penitence and sacrifice in opposition to “the Antichrist and his followers.” If Schradin is in agreement with his Wittenberg colleagues that they must do battle against the “enemies of God,” namely the “pope and his followers,” his rhymed dream-narrative also adopts the topoi of the humanistic discourse of nation. Joined across the ages by their “love of the noble German fatherland,” Ariovist, Arminius, Barbarossa, and Georg von Frundsberg all relate in detail the deviousness, duplicity, and hypocrisy of Rome and the Welsch (people from the linguistically Romance areas of Europe). For the reader or listener familiar with the publications of the protagonists in the Schmalkaldic conflict, it was just more proof that the emperor’s deeds contradicted his 180

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words. His love of fatherland was only lipservice, since he employed the Welsch among his troops, but also thereby revealed what he truly was – a hypocritical, deceitful Welscher himself. Yet even in Schradin’s case, the Teutscher needs to be won over as a Christian, and not the other way around, when it concerns opposition to “God’s enemies.” “(E)ach Christian / when called to take up the shield / and needed on the battlefield / may with good conscience his sword wield,” since it is his duty, after all, “until the end of days / to give enemies of the faith chase.” The same antipapal eschatological antagonism that one finds in both Bugenhagen/Melanchthon and Schradin appears in countless variations, but, in the context of the larger communicative process, Schradin’s reliance on the humanist discourse on the national is the exception to the rule. He is the only writer whose texts not only employ the components, especially the xenophobic ones, of the humanist discourse on the nation, but also follow the same discourse structure. But it is also true of those few texts (less than 10 percent) which prominently feature the Teutsche and their land and nation in their titles, like Schradin does, that the “national” does not stand alone as a secular and ethnic-empirical concept, but rather is integrated into the history of salvation. Also, when the spiritual community of the God-fearing displays the sort of nearness to the oscillating construct of the “teutsche Nation” that Luther so precisely formulated, those so addressed are nevertheless not called to participate in a “battle of the nations” in military form. Rather, they are to prove themselves as milites Christiani, as God’s warriors, who will battle against the devil, now that the end times have begun. In contrast, Ronsard’s interpretive strategy fits perfectly into the contours of Condé’s or the king’s argument, according to which one must protect the sacred kingly body of the realm against its enemies. It is only in one, albeit decisive, matter, that interpretive possibilities differ, namely as to the definition of who that enemy is. Condé and the king designate specific agents, whereas Ronsard provides a diagnosis of his time by naming the followers of the monster “Opinion,” whose furor (fureur) rages in “our France” and murders the authority which maintains the common good: “Authority is dead / Everyone lives as he sees fit” (“Morte est l’autorité, chacut vit à sa guise”). This “barbarous monster” (monstre barbare; Discours misères) is a priori located far outside any “national” conceptual boundaries.45 Thus 45

For the foundational analysis of the crisis of authoritative speech, see Mark Greengrass, “Language and Conflict in the French Wars of Religion,” in Jane Ohlmeyer and M. Ó Siochrú (eds.), Ireland 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 197–218.

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“the strangers” are mentioned, especially after the English occupy Le Havre in the autumn of 1562 and Swiss mercenaries are involved in the conflict. However, in France there is a total absence of xenophobic topoi borrowed from the humanist discourse over the national. A small semantic shift in Ronsard’s diagnosis of his time indicates something more significant: the “world turned upside-down” (monde renversé) of spring 1562 (Discours misères) becomes “France turned upside-down” in spring 1563 (Réponse injures calomnies). Ten years prior to the publication of his Franciade, the national epic commissioned by Charles IX, and before la France gained force as a unifying mental construct,46 Ronsard breathed life into the meaning of la France in his “Continuation du discours.” “The idol of France” – “the mother” of all native Frenchmen like himself – presents herself to him as a poor, unhappy, mortally ill apparition, dressed in ragged royal robes, who bewails her sad fate. Her right arm, the arm of justice, is broken, her (royal) robe destroyed, for the cities are plundered and French citizens are outraged. Her hair is in disarray, because the churches have been plundered and desecrated, but her heart has not yet failed. For this heart finds comfort and encouragement with the queen(mother), and the king – already grown – courageously supports and defends her and gives her hope, “for good follows evil as one wave follows upon the next.” Ronsard is the first, as far as I can determine, who places the apparition of la France as the queenly mother of the French people at the side of the king, the father of the people. This simultaneously highlights and fills the “empty space” created by the French children-subjects, making clear that the child’s position exists in relation to two – and this is key – distinctly different points of reference. Both the father and the mother have the same claims to the love and obedience of their children-subjects, and, as parents, they share responsibility for their children. They exist on the same level, even if the father has different (and, from the early modern perspective, more important) responsibilities than the mother, above all that of protecting his wife and dependents. If the father, however, does not live up to his responsibilities and cannot safeguard the kingdom from the fury of the monster “Opinion,” then this differentiation between the kingdom of France (le royaume de France) and France (la France) implies that the sacred political body (corps mystique) is destroyed, but la France continues to exist on its own. For even if the wife, absent the protection of her spouse, is challenged in her status, she is not dead. Furthermore, if the husband-father cannot protect her, then her sons-(male) 46

Dupront, “Du sentiment national,” 1458–1461.

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subjects have a duty to do so. Nothing indicates more clearly the fundamental difference in the language of belonging in the two polities examined here than a comparison of the roles played by the personification of the “national” in the publications regarding the conflict. Even if less than 2 percent of all printed texts focus on such a personification of Germania or Teutschland, and these two texts are also not among the most frequently reprinted,47 they still provide a lens which reveals essential differences that shape reflection and writing about national identity. Germania in one case and Teutschland in the other speak as physically present mothers rather than apparitions. Moreover, when they address the emperor, they do not grant him the status he claims as their father (that is, father of the beloved Teutsche Nation), nor do they constitute the wifely equivalent of Ronsard’s la France. Instead, they treat the emperor as their son, the son who owes them obedience and gratitude, a son most beholden to them, having received the greatest benefactions.

Summary and Further Considerations Where, then, can the “national” be located in the Reformation era? The systematic comparison of the printed materials accompanying the conflict makes it abundantly clear that it can only partially be found in the integration of the whole kingdom or empire through mass media, and not at all in an appeal to a public conceived of as an ethnic community. Instead, one finds a vernacular reconfiguration of what was, until the late Middle Ages, a transnational language of collective belonging, which, current research shows, “nationalized” not only certain words, but rather the entire framework for speaking about nationhood. Furthermore, the dynamics of change have been proven more complex than the dominant binary perspective suggests, in which the German case is subsumed under ethnic identity and the French under civic national identity. In both polities, the monarchical-ecclesiastic sphere (despite considerable differences) proves to be the area that provides a conceptual point of orientation for the emergence of a collective national identity. The fact that a language of nationhood appears earlier in France than in the empire validates that finding, because it mirrors exactly the different time spans when monarchical power intensified. In the France of the first half of the sixteenth century, the monarchical, in its personal and transpersonal dimensions, appears as an indivisible whole, inseparably bound to the Church. The 47

Schradin, Expostulation, six editions; Anonymous, Gespräch Deutschland, four editions.

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monarchy is the sacred political body of the kingdom of France. In the Empire of the German Nation, the king is the appointed custodian of the “Holy Empire,” but he is not the empire, even in his own understanding of his role. Within the empire, moreover, the Church is entrusted not only to him but also to the Teutsche Nation. This reality is not only asserted in discourse, but also performatively validated. It is this reality that allows for the dethronement of Charles V and that makes the character of the “national” thus addressed and appealed to in the empire correspondingly more opaque, as well. It oscillates between conceptions of community grounded in the political and legal configuration of the “Holy Empire” as it emerged around 1500: a conception rooted in Lutheran understanding of the history of salvation, and the other – clearly the more marginal – in the humanist tradition emphasizing a common ethnicity and history. Though these competing worldviews predate the military conflicts of 1546–1547 by several years, in France they appear in the years after 1572 during, and because of, the wars. It was via a bloody process that the sense of belonging to the sacred and therefore inseparable whole of the king, his kingdom, his Church, and the French people as his subjects became less monarchical. While those who speak continue to be those who belong to the immortal body of the king, predominantly the jurists of the parlements, it is also true that, after 1572, an increasing number of theologians (mainly those of the old faith) demanded “the right to speak” in the communicative realm of print media in order to defend “their” French Church, too, especially in opposition to the king.48 In the debates over the right to resistance, it becomes possible to differentiate between the king’s mortal body versus the immortal one, and new forms of collective identity emerge, which still bear monarchical connotations but are no longer equivalent to the king. The “birth” of one such successful mental paradigm, as subsequent developments in the early modern era would show, occurs in 1563: la France as the royal mother of all French people. Though this increased Reformation-era reflexivity with regard to collective identities had far-reaching consequences for early modern conceptions of society and politics in both polities, there is little evidence that it affected the self-definition of the “masses.” The outcome of the conflicts and, in the empire, the theologians’ complaints in the pamphlets that the audience did not share their “truth,” confirm this, as does recent research on the French Wars of Religion. It is revealing that “God’s warriors,” who had been addressed more and more prominently by the theologians since 1572, were 48

Schäfer-Griebel, Die Medialität der Französischen Religionskriege, 107–122.

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nowhere to be found on the ground.49 The end of the religious wars themselves confirms this as well. Henry IV succeeded because he placed the sacred unity of the king, the kingdom, the French people, and the French Catholic Church at the center of his self-representation.50 It was left to what Onno Klopp called the “Geschichtsbaumeister” (“architects of history”) of the nineteenth century to “find” in the Reformation period the promise that would be fulfilled in their time – the nation as a secular value that integrates the masses.

Further Reading Babel, Ranier, and J.-M. Moeglin, Identité regionale et conscience nationale en France et en Allemagne du moyen âge à l’époque moderne (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1997). Dupront, Alphonse, “Du sentiment national,” in Michel François (ed.), La France et les Français (Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1972), 1423–1474. Giesen, Bernhard, Nationale und kulturelle Identität. Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). Hirschi, Caspar, Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005). Koselleck, Reinhart, Fritz Gschnitzer, K. F. Werner, and Bernd Schönemann, “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politischsozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta 2004), 141–431. Stauber, Reinhard, “Nation, Nationalismus,” EDN, 8 (2008), 1056–1082. Stein, Robert, and Judith Pollmann (eds.), Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Tallon, Alain, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe siècle: essai sur la vision gallicane du monde (Paris: PUF, 2002). 49

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See, for example, the pamphlets of Wolfgang Musculus; Mark Greengrass, “The Psychology of Religious Violence,” French History, 5 (1991), 467–474; B. B. Diefendorf, “Review Essay,” Church History, 77/3 (2008), 688–697; the articles in Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer (eds.), “Religion and Violence in Early Modern France: The Work of Natalie Zemon Davis,” Past and Present, 214 (2012) and Issue Supp. 7/1 discuss the current state of research in detail. Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe siècle, especially 281–286.

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Europe’s Eighteenth Century and the Quest for the Nation’s Origins matthew d’auria

Introduction Some years ago, the intellectual historian Bronisław Baczko noted that a crucial feature of eighteenth-century thought was its all-pervasive desire for a “return to origins,” a fixation emerging through a quasi-obsessive quest for the beginning of all sorts of social, political, and religious institutions as well as moral principles.1 Indeed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1754), Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Johann Gottfried Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), and the Essai sur l’origine des connaissance humaines (1778), by the abbé de Condillac, are just a few works that testify, by their titles alone, to the eighteenth-century preoccupation with “origins.” But many more could be added. From the late seventeenth century onwards, innumerable scholars across Europe produced a plethora of tracts, pamphlets, articles, and books to investigate and dissect the origins of languages, knowledge, feelings, prejudice, and, importantly for us, nations. Obviously, the meaning(s) of “origin” varied throughout the long eighteenth century and differed from one language to another. But many would have agreed at the time that the word somehow referred at once to the beginning as well as the cause of an event. So, according to Immanuel Kant, the origin was “the descent of an effect from its cause” and, therefore, indicated a temporal beginning as well as a logical principle.2 Consistently, in the case of a nation, the quest for its origin then referred to the search for its (alleged) chronological birth as well as to its (supposed) nature. A nation’s 1

2

Bronisław Baczko, Rousseau: Solitude et communauté (Paris: Mouton, 1974), 60–61. Also see, on this, Christophe Martin (ed.), Fictions de l’origine (1650–1800) (Paris: Desjonquères, 2012). Immanuel Kant, “Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft” (1793), in Werke, vol. I V (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968), 39.

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origin was the place where the causes of, and reasons for, its laws, customs, institutions, and character had to be sought. By investigating its birth, scholars could seek the causes of its entire history and hope to predict (or even shape) its future. This chapter aims to shed light on how intellectual changes pertaining to the study of the past interacted with a new understanding of nations and their origins. It does so by focusing on three case studies. All relate to specific debates and intellectual disputes involving scholars from different national backgrounds. There are several reasons for choosing to focus on intellectual disputes. First of all, these were often the contexts where old assumptions were challenged and new ideas were formed, and, therefore, represent a privileged vantage point for dissecting power/knowledge claims. Second, the long eighteenth century was the age par excellence of intellectual disputes, as some of its protagonists acknowledged. As the Neapolitan political economist Antonio Genovesi commented in 1762, the European Republic of Letters resembled “more an arena of gladiators than a city of learned” scholars.3 It is rather telling, in this regard, that the “crises of the European mind” started with what is perhaps the most important scholarly debate of early modern European history, that between the advocates of the Anciens and the champions of the Modernes. Third, scholarly debates often took place within a community that transcended national boundaries and within a “great society of minds, extending everywhere and everywhere independent” – to use Voltaire’s famous, if misleading, expression.4 So, for example, the fact that the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes was sparked by a disagreement over the universality of French and Italian cultural achievements and then extended to several other countries is revealing of its transnational nature. Looking at debates such as these when focusing on perceptions of nationhood and ideas of nation might help us to evade the pitfalls of methodological nationalism and offer new perspectives on the history of national identity formation processes.

On Franks, Gauls, and Germans In 1710, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz presented at the Prussian Academy of Sciences an essay on the ancient history of the peoples of Europe and on the 3

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Antonio Genovesi, “Lettere accademiche su la questione, se sieno più felici gl’ignoranti che li scienziati”, in Autobiografia, lettere e altri scritti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), 525. François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, “Le siècle de Louis XIV” (1751), in Œuvres historiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 1027.

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importance of languages in understanding their origins.5 His main contention was that spoken languages were the oldest records of a nation’s past, more so than usages, customs, the arts, religion, and the written word: “[W]hen the origins of ancient nations transcend time, language performs the role of ancient monuments,” he argued.6 Assuming that most words, especially proper names, such as those of rivers and forests, preserved earlier layers of a language, Leibniz went on to contend that over the centuries their everchanging pronunciations and meanings had led to distinct dialects and new languages. Reconstructing the original forms and grasping the original meaning of those words could then shed light on the earliest history of nations, on the place of their origin, and the paths of their respective migrations. By comparing ancient with modern languages and examining the migrations of peoples in ancient times, Leibniz was able to produce a classification of most of the languages – and hence, from his perspective, of the nations – of Africa, Asia, and Europe. His reasoning was based on the assumption, shared by many of his contemporaries, that all men stemmed from “a single race” which, over the centuries and through its dispersion across the globe, had “been altered by different climates.”7 Proof could be found in what he called the “harmony of languages,” that is, the similarity of the languages of distant peoples. Leibniz also argued that from a primordial tongue that was now irreversibly lost stemmed two branches, the Japhetic and the Aramaic, and that the former was the source of all European and northeast Asian, the latter that of all southeast Asian and northeast African idioms. The Japhetic branch, which he divided into Scythians and Celts, had populated Europe and Asia issuing from a vast region north of the mountain passes between the Caspian and Black seas. In truth, the arguments in Leibniz’s essay were far from new. The assumption that the peoples of Europe were originally from Scythia dated back to antiquity.8 In the seventeenth century, paving the way for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, the Leiden philologists Claude de Saumaise and Marcus Boxhorn even resorted to a comparative study of modern languages 5

6 7

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G. W. Leibniz, “Brevis designatio meditationum de Originibus Gentium, ductis potissimum ex indicio linguarum” (1710), in Opera Omnia, vol. I V, part 2 (Geneva: Fratres de Tournes, 1768), 186–198. Ibid., 186. G. W. Leibniz to Johan Gabriel Sparwenfeld (c. 1697), in Leibniz, Otium hanoveranum, sive Miscellanea, ex ore et schedis illustris viri, piae memoriae (Leipzig: Christiani Martini, 1718), 38. James William Johnson, “The Scythian: His Rise and Fall,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (April 1959), 250–257.

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to argue that the similarities between German, Latin, and Greek proved that they all stemmed from the same source, the “Scythian” matrix.9 Other scholars followed suit. The famous Breton Celticist, Paul Yves Pezron, published in 1699 an outline of his forthcoming book on the origins of nations in which he claimed that all the peoples of Europe issued from Scythia and northern Asia, that the Gauls descended directly from Gomer, the eldest son of Japhet, and that after settling around the Black Sea they then colonized the entire Old Continent. In this narrative, the Gauls were assigned a special role, as the people siring all other European nations. Having read Pezron’s outline, Leibniz himself found such views particularly interesting, not least because, in his own words, he was fascinated by “all matters that concern the Scythians.” However, he repudiated the conclusion reached by the Breton scholar, and in his private correspondence accused him of falling prey to national pride and making a partisan use of etymology.10 The book Pezron was working on, the Antiquités de la nation et de la langue des Celtes, autrement appelez Gaulois, was finally published in 1703. Soon translated into English, it enjoyed wide success and was republished many times throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.11 The celebrated Welsh antiquary and linguist, Edward Lhwyd, was particularly impressed by it.12 Importantly, it was against Pezron’s book that Leibniz set out his own work on the origins of the Gauls. He did so in a short pamphlet that first appeared in 1715 in Latin and was then translated into French and circulated in manuscript form before being published in 1720.13 In the opening pages of his “L’origine des François,” after dismissing the myth of the Trojan founding of France with the help of etymology and philology and by carefully discussing primary sources, Leibniz criticized as groundless the so-called Gallo-Frankish theories of the famous sixteenth-century jurist Jean Bodin, and the seventeenth-century scholars Pierre Audigier and the abbé Lacarry – and, though not explicitly mentioned, of Pezron himself. According to these authors, in 9

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11

12

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On such ideas, see the classic by Daniel Droixhe, La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600–1800): Rationalisme et révolutions positivistes (Geneva: Droz, 1978), 118–159. G. W. Leibniz to Marie de Brinon, 15 June 1693, in Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1970–), ix.112. G. W. Leibniz to Job Ludolf, 3 April 1699, in Leibniz, Collectanea etymologica (Hanover: Foerster, 1717), 57. Paul Yves Pezron, abbé de la Charmoye, “Copie d’une lettre de Mr. L’abbé de la Charmoye à Mr. L’abbé Nicaise,” Nouvelles de la Républiques de Lettres, June 1699, especially 631–638. Edward Lhwyd to John Lloyd, 29 September 1703, in R. T. Gunther (ed.), Early Science in Oxford: Life and Letters of Edward Lhwyd (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1945), 489. See Louis de Jaucourt [Louis de Neufville], Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Leibnitz (Amsterdam: François Changuion, 1734), 112–113.

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fact, the Franks had originally been Gauls who had crossed the Rhine and, at the fall of the Roman Empire, had returned to France and freed their brothers from the Roman yoke. Indeed, according to Leibniz, this autochthonous view of the origins of modern France could offer its advocates several advantages. First of all, it made the case for a “racial unity” of the French nation, asserting, as it did, that the descendants of the Franks and the GalloRomans, the modern noblemen and the modern commoners respectively, shared the same origin. Second, it argued for a greater antiquity of the French over the German nation, the latter thereby being held to descend from the former. However, according to Leibniz, such views were informed by a mistaken patriotism. All its advocates simply believed “for the glory of their country” that it would be more honorable “to have the modern inhabitants of Gaul descend from the Gauls themselves.”14 For his part, leaning on the works of classical authors and geographers, Leibniz sought to demonstrate that the French were originally a Teutonic people related to the Saxons, the Angles, and the Cambrians. Coming from a region between the River Elbe and the Baltic Sea, the Franks had moved to the lands between the Rhine and the Weser and had finally settled in Gaul, giving birth to modern France. More generally, Leibniz contended that the antiquity of a language, and hence of the nation that spoke it, could be ascertained by considering its differences with the universal, original tongue (Ursprache). In fact, already in 1704, Leibniz had argued that while all languages had a common origin and while this was now irretrievable, some of its elements could be inferred nonetheless. Indeed, he contended, most words were originally imitations of natural sounds, indicating “a relationship between things and sounds and movements of the vocal organs.” On such an assumption, he went on to offer his readers a series of German onomatopoeias, maintaining, for example, that the letter “r” had been used by the ancient Germans, “by a natural instinct,” to “signify a violent movement and a noise like that of this letter.” Such conjectures, questionable in several respects, led him nonetheless to the conclusion that, although Hebrew and Arabic were close to the primitive, common language of all nations, modern German had retained yet more traces of the “Adamic” tongue.15 According to Leibniz, the Germans had remained closer to nature, to the purity of origin – 14

15

G. W. Leibniz, “Essai sur l’origine des François,” in Pierre Desmaiseaux (ed.), Recueil de diverses pièces sur la philosophie, la religion naturelle, l’histoire, les mathématiques, etc. (Amsterdam: H. Du Sauzet, 1720), ii.294. G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (written in 1709 but first published in 1765) (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 218–220.

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a distant and mysterious beginning located somewhere in the east – even more so than the Jewish people, whose language had long been considered the closest to the one spoken by Adam. Of course, Leibniz’s contention could be seen as having an overtly nationalist overtone – a contention that would later be used time and again by other scholars, in the eighteenth as well as in the nineteenth century, to cry up their own nation.16 That, in doing so, the great German polymath was following the example of the authors he was reprimanding is somewhat ironic. Returning to the “Essai sur l’origine des François,” its reception was mixed, as might be expected. While some scholars, such as the historian Jacques Le Long, embraced the overall argument, others, including the young antiquary and orientalist Nicolas Fréret, were fiercely critical. Even the German professor Nicolas Jérôme Gundling was very skeptical.17 But the most detailed and acerbic response came from the Jesuit scholar Joseph Tournemine, whose censure, tellingly, may have been encouraged by the duc d’Orleans with a view to reviving the thesis of the purely Gallic origins of France.18 Following Bodin’s and Lacarry’s “simple and yet convincing” arguments, Tournemine made the case that in the sixth century B C E, Gallic tribes had left their homelands to cross the Rhine into present-day Germany. Later on, they adopted the name Franks/ French to celebrate their love of freedom. To prove his contention, Tournemine used etymology, showing that the Germans and the French were simply two subgroups of the same Teutonic race and that they originally spoke very similar languages. On such evidence, he concluded that: “[T]he French are the Germans; the Germans are the Gauls who crossed the Rhine under Sigovese. Consequently, the origin of the French is entirely Gallic.”19 Tournemine’s arguments soon led Leibniz to reply in what would be one of his very last writings. Once again, he did so with the aid of philology and etymology, insisting that “the Gauls are 16

17

18

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See Umberto Eco, La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (Bari: Laterza, 1993), 110–113. Jacques Le Long to G. W. Leibniz, 29 Febraury 1712, quoted in Louis Davillé, Leibniz historien, essai sur l’activité et la méthode historique de Leibniz (Paris: F. Alcan, 1909), 296, n. 6; Nicolas Fréret, “De l’origine des Français,” in Fréret, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Dandré, 1796), v.196–8; Nicolas Jérôme Gundling, “Gedanken über deß Herrn Baron von Leibnitz Schrifft de Origine Francorum,” Gundlingiana (1715), 234–273. G. W. Leibniz to Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre, 2 October 1716, in Leibniz and Saint-Pierre, Correspondance (Paris: Centre de Philosophie du Droit, 1995), Paris II, 72. René-Joseph de Tournemine, “Réflexions sur la dissertation de M. Leibnits, touchant l’origine des François,” Journal de Trévoux, ou Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des Sciences et des Arts (January 1716), 16–20.

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descended from the Germans and the Germans from the Scythians.”20 But the dispute lingered on. In 1722, the Benedictine historian Dom Vaissette intervened with his Dissertation sur l’origine des Français, siding with Leibniz and repudiating the idea of the racial unity of modern France.21 From his standpoint, there was scant proof that the French were descendants of the ancient Gauls who had settled across the Rhine. Tournemine’s was “nothing more than a convincing reasoning that is not founded on any solid argument.”22 However, while the Dissertation did not add much to what was already known about the nation’s origins, it definitively discredited the idea of the wholly Gallic origins of France, and the thesis, for a while, failed to find much purchase.23 Cleary, in this debate about the origins of France, language, philology, and semantics were instrumental. And Dom Vaissette’s essay too, like the works by Leibniz and Tournemine, contained many comments and arguments about the ancient names of rivers and mountains. To an extent, it might even be ventured that, here, there was a shift from the more traditional way of recounting the nation’s past, focusing on kings, court, and high nobility, to one placing at its center the language as well as customs and social practices of the people. Indeed, several scholars throughout the century deplored those narratives centering on the royal household that pretended to embody the nation’s history but which, they argued, were in fact little else than a biography of royal power. The underlying implications of such reasoning are obvious. Yet more overtly political preoccupations were even clearer in Dom Vaissette’s essay and in the works of the many antiquaries, historians, and pamphleteers who kept alive the quarrel, giving it a new hue, up until the Revolution and beyond.24 In fact, Dom Vaissette was a champion of the Germanist thesis, espousing the idea that the modern-day French nobility were descendants of the Franks who had subdued the Gauls at the fall of the Roman Empire and who, therefore, deserved preeminence over the commoners, whom he saw as the progeny of the Gauls. Within such a framework, it fell to the Franks/noblemen and the Gauls/commoners to 20

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G. W. Leibniz, “Réponse aux objections du Père de Tournemine contre la dissertation sur l’origine des François” (1716), in Leibniz, Recueil de diverses pièces sur la philosophie, la religion naturelle, l’histoire, les mathématiques, etc. (Amsterdam: H. Du Sauzet, 1740), ii.274. Joseph Vaissette, “Dissertation sur l’origine des Français,” in Carl Leber (ed.), Collection des meilleurs dissertations relatifs à l’histoire de France (Paris: J.-G. Dentu, 1838), i.133–177. Ibid., 177. Italics in the original. On the persistence of such views, see Henri Duranton, “‘Nos ancêtres les Gaulois’: genèse et avatars d’un cliché historique,” Cahiers d’Histoire, 16 (1969), 343–347. On this, I am taking the liberty of referring to my own The Shaping of French Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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defend and to feed the nation respectively. The writings of the Comte de Boulainvilliers, the most famous advocate of such views, would be published a few years later, exacerbating the tone of the debate and allowing for all its political implications to emerge. But, for us, the point to take is that these discussions, both scholarly and political, were shaped around an ethnic assumption that was at once intranational and transnational. These discussions referred more or less overtly to the character of the ancient Franks and Gauls and the modern nobility and commoners, who were often seen to embody bravery and industriousness respectively – two groups each of whose members allegedly shared the same experiences, values, and ideals as couched and defined against those of the other. Countering the nobility’s claim to embody the nation as its worthiest part, having preserved its freedom and protected it from foreign enemies over the centuries, the commoners would insist on their right to represent the nation by dint of being the makers of its greatness and power, through their hard work, and against the overweening abuses of an idle nobility now of little or no worth to the nation. But this intranational aspect of the debate over the nation’s past and its origin dovetailed with a transnational – or even antinational – feature. In fact, for those who denied the autochthonous origins of France, the question of the nobility’s role transcended national boundaries, for, after all, its ancestors came from across the Rhine. On such a point the exponents of the Germanist thesis would agree, of course, but so would many revolutionaries, who were bolstered in their convictions by the phenomenon of the émigration, after 1789. It was a seemingly uncontroversial idea but, in truth, the underlying issues would emerge later on, at times of political and social crisis. So, for example, following the defeat at Sedan in 1870, the great historian Ernest Renan deplored the excessive purchase of the southern (that is, Gallo-Roman) and Catholic elements upon the French mind, blaming these for the corruption that had brought France to its knees. He then called for the reawakening of the nation’s Germanic and Protestant foundations as a means of attaining the nation’s moral and intellectual reform. And, in effect, emerging here was a racial(ist) argument built around notions of Latinity and Germanness that questioned, in a way, national boundaries as they were construed and understood at that time.25 But this, of course, was some years before Renan’s own Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (1882). 25

Ernest Renan, “La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France” (1871), in Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? et autres écrits politiques (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1996), 97.

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Italians, Italiotes, and Greeks On 9 March 1757, Johann Joachim Winckelmann wrote to a friend to inform him he was about to embark on a journey to Naples. His purpose, he said, aside from admiring the city’s monuments and ruins, was “to meet and to learn from the Canon Mazzocchi,” who was, in his own words, “the greatest expert of Greek antiquities in the entire world.”26 Made by one of the most distinguished Hellenists and antiquaries of all time, the comment carries some weight. Although Alessio Simmacco Mazzocchi is an all but forgotten figure in present-day intellectual history, in the second half of the eighteenth century he was not only revered by his Neapolitan countrymen but also admired well beyond the kingdom of Naples. The great Modenese scholar Ludovico Antonio Muratori praised Mazzocchi for his “blessed ingenuity and rare knowledge,” while the perpetual secretary of the Académie des Inscription et Belles Lettres, Charles Le Beau, even hailed the canon as the “marvel of literary Europe,” a man who with his “genius had enlightened” the entire Old Continent.27 Indeed, Mazzocchi’s works, mostly written in Latin, were well received and circulated widely in the Republic of Letters. A member of the French Académie des Inscriptions, he was also the leading figure of the Accademia Ercolanese, an institution that had been established in 1755 by King Charles, following the excavations in and around Herculaneum and Pompeii.28 Importantly, the first ruler of the independent kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, Charles was particularly eager to bring prestige to the nation’s origins. These, it was often assumed, were buried in pre-Roman times, where vestiges of an allegedly proud, frugal, ancient people were to be sought. The royal authorities usually emphasized the antiRoman aspects of this (new) national narrative since it implied an assertion of autonomy from foreign rule – the message being addressed to the former Spanish rulers. On the other hand, the nobility and the rising middle classes throughout the realm often underscored the supposed love of freedom of their ancestors, the ancient inhabitants of southern Italy – and, in this case, the message was meant for the Bourbon monarchs. Partly for these reasons, 26

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J. J. Winckelmann to Johann Michael Francke, in Winckelmann, Briefe: Erster Band (1747–1761) (Berlin: In der Schlesingerschen Buch- und Musikhandlung, 1824), 203. L. A. Muratori to A. S. Mazzocchi, 23 January 1728, in Muratori, Epistolario (Modena: Società Tipografica Modenese, 1901–1922), vii.2743. Charles Lebeau to A. S. Mazzocchi, 15 September 1759, in Mazzocchi, Opuscula quibus orationes, dedicationes, epistolae, inscriptiones, carmina, ac diatribae continentur (Naples: Raymundos, 1771–1775), i.136. See Raffaele Ajello, “Ercolano tra antiquari e filosofi,” in Ajello et al., Le antichità di Ercolano (Naples: Banco di Napoli, 1988), 41–60.

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archeology became an instrument of political struggle throughout the kingdom, affecting the way the nation’s origins were understood and, in turn, increasing interest in the study of the past. Almost inevitably, given his various roles and his standing, Mazzocchi himself was caught up in more than one of these intellectual (and political) struggles. Such was the case with his commentaries to the Heraclean Tablets. Accidentally unearthed in Lucania in 1732, the tablets displayed a list of regulations that the city had freely accepted, along with Roman citizenship and the status of municipium. A few years after the discovery, Duke Carlo Guevara purchased and donated the tablets to the Royal Museum of Herculaneum, asking that Mazzocchi be called upon to interpret them. Tellingly, Guevara’s intention was to show the importance of the provinces in the nation’s history and, moreover, emphasize the love of freedom of the ancient and pre-Roman Italic peoples. It is somewhat ironical that Guevara should have pursued his aims through an institution created by the king to augment his own prestige and thereby bolster his authority over the provinces of the kingdom. At another juncture, Mazzocchi became involved in the dispute over the origin of the vases found in and around the city of Naples. In 1723, in his De Etruria regali, the Scottish scholar Thomas Dempster had made the claim, then endorsed by many Tuscan antiquaries, that several of the vases found in the environs of Naples were originally Etruscan and this, in turn, confirmed that the ancestors of present-day Tuscans had once ruled over the bay of Naples.29 As might be expected, such arguments were not well received by their Neapolitan counterparts, who used in their counterarguments evidence garnered from vases bearing Greek inscriptions, the authenticity of which, however, was questionable. Accusations of intellectual partisanship and even dishonesty were exchanged between the Neapolitans and the Tuscans. Mazzocchi himself took part in the dispute with an essay on the collection of vases owned by the scholar and antiquary Maria Felice Mastrilli.30 According to the canon, such vases were neither Greek nor Etruscan. On the contrary, they were “Graecanic.” The inscriptions on them, although seemingly Etruscan, were, in fact, an admixture of Greek and the languages spoken by the peoples inhabiting the southern coasts of the peninsula.31 It was an interesting stance, 29

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See, for an overview, Maria Emilia Masci, “The Birth of Ancient Vase Collecting in Naples in the Early Eighteenth Century: Antiquarian Studies, Excavations and Collections,” Journal of the History of Collections, 19 (2007), 215–224. Claire L. Lyons, “The Museo Mastrilli and the Culture of Collecting in Naples, 1700– 1755,” Journal of the History of Collections, 4 (1993), 1–26. A. S. Mazzocchi, Commentariorum in Regli Herculanensis musei aeneas tabulas Heracleensis (Naples: Gravier, 1754–1755), i.137–138.

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one that ran counter to the views commonly held at that time, and which a few years later would be partly adopted by Winckelmann.32 But Mazzocchi’s reasoning also implied that there was a civilization, well before the Greek colonization of southern Italy and the heyday of Magna Graecia, deserving scholarly attention in its own right, which had not passively accepted and adopted the language and culture of the settlers. Mazzocchi’s definition of Magna Graecia was crucial to the way he interpreted the origins of the Neapolitan nation. His views were directed against the arguments laid out a few years earlier by the French geographer Antoine-Augustin Bruzen de La Martinière, who had contended that Magna Graecia originally referred to the whole of southern Italy.33 Relying on works by Pliny, he argued that the notion simply denoted a land that was effectively larger than the whole of Greece. Believing such a conclusion to be “most false,” Mazzocchi remarked on the contrary on how several ancient authors always told apart the Italian-Greeks from the “Lucanians, Samnites, Campanians, Apulians, and all the other peoples of this kingdom [i.e. the Kingdom of Naples].”34 It was, in fact, an intriguing remark since it implied a shift from La Martinière’s geographical definition of Magna Graecia to a historical and ethnic understanding. Mazzocchi went on to make explicit the latter point, informing his readers that the expression “Magna,” that is, “great,” betokened an acknowledgment by the Greek settlers of the cultural, political, and moral greatness of the peoples of southern Italy established there prior to their own arrival.35 Indeed, he wrote, were it not for its cultural splendor, “the Greeks, those arrogant men, would never have called a small part of Italy ‘great,’” a word that risked “obscuring the glory of Greece” itself.36 Mazzocchi proceeded to investigate the origins of the peoples inhabiting the southern part of Italy before the arrival of the Greeks and did so, as was still common at that time, by referring to the first migrations described in the Bible. To do so, he relied heavily on the famous Geographia sacra (1646), by the French Protestant scholar Samuel Bochart.37 Interpreting passages in Genesis 10 and deploying complex studies of a linguistic and philological nature, Bochart claimed to have identified each one of Noah’s descendants, 32

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J. J. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1763) (Vienna: Phaidon, 1934), 119–127. Mazzocchi, Commentariorum, i.18–20; Antoine-Augustin Bruzen de La Martinière, Le grand dictionnaire géographique et critique (The Hague: P. Gosse, R.-C. Alberts, P. de Hondt, 1726–1739), iv/1.318–319. Mazzocchi, Commentariorum, i.23. 35 Ibid., i.46–48. 36 Ibid., i.19. On Bochart, see Zur Shalev, Sacred Words and Worlds: Geography, Religion, and Scholarship, 1550–1700 (Leiden: Brill 2012), 141–203.

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the nations they had formed, and their migrations. Within the framework of his argument, he attributed a key role to the Phoenicians and their traversing of the Mediterranean, and offered his readers evidence of the Hebrew origins of most European languages and cultures. For his part, Mazzocchi went a step further by trying to bridge the gap between antiquarianism, numismatics, and archeology, using ancient sources as well as evidence from the recent excavations in the Kingdom of Naples. He was adamant he could identify the origins of its cities not only “through texts” but also “through coins.”38 The fact that many inscriptions on coins, vases, and monuments were wholly unrelated to Latin, Greek, and Etruscan was key and, crucially, led Mazzocchi to investigate the possibility of the “oriental” origins of the peoples of southern Italy.39 So, for example, in one case he discussed the origins of Paestum which, he argued, had been founded by a colony from the Phoenician city of Dora. It had first been called Posetan or Posta, Mazzocchi maintained, the name of a Phoenician maritime deity to whom it was dedicated. It was later invaded by the Sybarites, in the sixth century B C E , and, under its new Greek rulers, was renamed Posidonia.40 Mazzocchi used similar premises and a similar mode of reasoning to show the oriental origins of other southern cities of Italy, including Locri, Croton, and Heraclea. Crucially for us, according to the Neapolitan canon, the ancestors of the modern-day subjects of the kingdom of Naples, well before the Greek settlements and well before the Roman conquest, had originated from the east, as the archeological remains scattered throughout southern Italy indicated. Mazzocchi’s works on the origins of the Neapolitan nation have been compared, with good reason, to the studies of the Tuscan authors who were seeking at that time to establish the Etruscan origins of most of Italy, including the south. Yet the canon’s concerns were less “Italian,” for, in fact, most of his works were addressed to his Neapolitan countrymen and pertained mainly, if not only, to southern Italy.41 However, from a different perspective, his concerns were much broader, and he was part of a vast current of thought that questioned or even rejected altogether the Roman 38 39

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Mazzocchi, Commentariorum, i.45. Giovanna Ceserani, “The Antiquary Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi: Oriental Origins and the Rediscovery of Magna Graecia in Eighteenth-Century Naples,” Journal of the History of Collections, 19 (2007), 252. Mazzocchi, Commentariorum, i.498–515. See A. S. Mazzocchi, In mutilum campani amphitheatri titulum aliasque nonnullas campanas inscriptiones commentarius (Naples: Felice Mosca, 1727), 7. Even Sicily was not taken into consideration by Mazzocchi since, as he saw it, the island had never been part of Magna Graecia.

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legacy within national histories. Indeed, as Arnaldo Momigliano wrote long ago, the eighteenth century, in Italy, truly was “the century without Rome.”42 It offered, in intellectual terms, the marginalization of a legacy common to all the different states of the peninsula – and, in fact, to most of Europe. Yet some scholars both within and beyond the Kingdom of Naples even questioned the role of Greece, including Mazzocchi, as we have seen, but also Giambattista Vico, before him, and Scipione Maffei and Mario Guarnacci.43 A similar reasoning likewise informed Vincenzo Cuoco’s Platone in Italia (1806), a highly influential novel in which the author imagined that the Greek settlers had been civilized by the ancient people inhabiting Italy and who – contrary to Mazzocchi – he saw as a branch of the Celts. The so-called “Italic model,” asserting the moral primacy of the Italian peoples, would become crucial to nineteenth-century nationalist thought and would be championed in a new guise in Vincenzo Gioberti’s famous Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843), one of the intellectual backbones of the Italian Risorgimento.44 Indeed, the arguments of all these authors, notwithstanding their differences, were predicated upon the greatness of the ancient people inhabiting the peninsula before the settlement of the Greek colonists, a notion that went against the philhellenism that would soon sweep across most of Europe. But another equally interesting aspect is that, despite the growing concern to ascertain and assert some form of national primacy, in these discourses there was always a deeply felt need to emphasize the nation’s filiation to a distant and often romanticized culture – whether Egyptian, Phoenician, or Celtic – through arguments that clearly transcended national borders.

On Scandinavians, Celts, and Goths On 19 February 1765, a few months after publishing his famous Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole confided in a letter to a friend that a book had turned him into “a perfect hermit” for more than a fortnight and had buried him “in Runic poetry and Danish wars.” The book was a “history of Denmark, written by one Mallet, a Frenchman, a sensible man, but 42

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Arnaldo Momigliano, “La nuova storia romana di G. B. Vico,” in Momigliano, Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1980), i.193. Annalisa Andreoni, Omero italico: Favole antiche e identità nazionale tra Vico e Cuoco (Rome: Jouvence, 2003), 116–117. On the “Italic model,” see Giuseppe Giarrizzo, “La storiografia meridionale del Settecento,” in Giarrizzo, Vico, la politica e la storia (Naples: Guida, 1981), 175–239.

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I cannot say he has the art of making a very tiresome subject agreeable.” A few years later, also commenting on Paul Henri Mallet’s History of Denmark, Edward Gibbon expressed similar ideas, judging him “a man of sense and candour” who “has carefully examined his subject, but treats it with more perspicuity than elegance.”45 A Genevan-born historian and, since 1752, professor at the Academy of the Arts in Copenhagen, Mallet had been prompted by King Frederik V and his ministers to write a history of his host country in French, the lingua franca of the Republic of Letters.46 The aim was to counter the allegations made in an influential work by the Irish-born politician and essayist Robert Molesworth, who had accused the Danes of having fallen prey to a hideous despotism.47 Mallet’s work was preceded by a separate introduction, published in 1755, in which he made clear his intention to shed new light not only on the history of Denmark but on that of the whole of Europe. To properly grasp the latter, his readers were encouraged to study, not the laws, customs, and institutions of the Greeks and the Romans, but those of the Middle Ages since it was there that, according to Mallet, the seeds of modern freedom would be found. The manifest debt to Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (1748) was acknowledged in the first few pages with a long quotation stating that “the great merit of the peoples of Scandinavia,” a merit that set them “above all the nations upon earth,” was “having been the source of the liberties of Europe.”48 In fact, the notion that freedom and even civilization itself had originated in Scandinavia was not entirely new. In the late seventeenth century, the scientist and writer Olaus Rudbeck went as far as to claim that Sweden was the birthplace of Western culture as such, and that the Greeks and the Romans originally came from Scandinavia. In what might seem a bizarre move nowadays, he made such a claim by identifying Scandinavia with the mythical island of Atlantis described by Plato.49 But Mallet never went as far.

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Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 19 February 1765, in Letters (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1906), iv.326–327; Edward Gibbon, “An Examination of Mallet’s Introduction to the History of Denmark” (1764), in Miscellaneous Works (London: J. Murray, 1814), iii.231–2. See Charles Weiss, “Mallet,” in Joseph Michaud and Louis-Gabriel Michaud (eds.), Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne (Paris: Michaud Frères, 1811–1828), xxvi.389. Robert Molesworth, An Account of Denmark, as it was in the Year 1692 (London: n.p., 1694). See T. J. Beck, Northern Antiquities in French Learning and Literature, 1755–1855: A Study in Preromantic Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934–1935), i.15–16. Paul Henri Mallet, Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc (Copenhagen: n.p., 1755), 8 (introduction). See Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, “L’esprit des lois,” in Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1949–1951), ii.528 (book xvii, ch. 5). Kristoffer Neville, “Gothicism and Early Modern Historical Ethnography,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 70/2 (2009), 13–34.

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In the opening pages of his work, Mallet offered his readers a thoughtprovoking explanation of the origins of the nations of Europe: “If we were to go back to the most ancient times, we would see, emerging from the swamps of Scythia, a nation incessantly expanding and dividing and occupying all the uncultivated lands along its path.” Soon, this people, “like a healthy and vigorous tree, extended its branches throughout the whole of Europe,” from the Black Sea to Spain, Sicily, and Greece. Inspired by its love of freedom and its prowess, the courage of its people was “fed by a life of savagery and vagrancy.” However, Mallet went on, the branches of the ancient Scythians who had settled in southern Europe had gradually been weakened by the mild weather, while settlers from Egypt and Phoenicia had mingled with them on the coasts of Greece and then to Sicily and southern Italy, spurring them on to new ideas and customs. In time, they became accustomed to ploughing the fields and living in towns, while their trade and their arts flourished. Their character was thus slowly corrupted. Finally, when the Romans rose to prominence, not having been corrupted by the peoples from the southern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, it was easy for them to subdue the rest of Europe. However, as they grew more powerful and wealthier, the Romans themselves abandoned “their ancient mores,” and the peoples under their yoke lost all traces of their ancient bravery and their love for freedom. These qualities remained unchanged in those northern nations that the Romans had failed to conquer. When the empire finally crumbled, the new conquerors from the north rekindled throughout Europe a love for freedom that, Mallet believed, was proof of the common origin of its peoples.50 Despite its many limitations and factual inaccuracies, Mallet’s was an interesting and even alluring interpretation. On the one hand, in fact, it offered an explanation for the cultural similarities of the peoples of modern Europe who, he assumed, all stemmed from the Scythians; on the other hand, it explained their differences either through climate – a common explanation in the long eighteenth century – or through what might seem, today, as a sort of racial mingling – a less common explanation at that time. Equally important, Mallet’s interpretation paraded the notion that the peoples of northern Europe had maintained unchanged their original ways of life, not having succumbed to the Roman yoke. They had, that is, kept themselves closer to the origin, and therefore purer. Consequently, when the empire fell, the nations of the north inundated the whole of Europe and thus rejoined their brethren. Here, of course, the assumed ethnic unity of the 50

Mallet, Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc, 3–6.

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Scythians, of those who had settled across Europe in pre-Roman times and those who had remained at its margins, was key. Within Mallet’s scheme, the notion that the east was the cradle of all civilization(s) and that the north was the birthplace of European civilization clearly anticipated the concerns of later, Romantic authors. Mallet’s Introduction and his other works on the history and poetry of the Scandinavians enjoyed wide success throughout Europe. They were well known and often used and quoted by authors such as Herder, Hamann, Klopstock, Lessing, Diderot, Voltaire, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and Gibbon, to mention but a few.51 Madame de Staël’s famous contrast between the southern and the northern peoples of Europe, set out in her De la littérature (1800), owed much to her friend Mallet.52 But it was in Britain that the works of the Genevan scholar stirred the liveliest debate. There were two main reasons for this. First, there, the debate became entwined with discussions surrounding James Macpherson’s somewhat fanciful “rediscovery” of the Ossian poems in the 1760s.53 Second, in Britain there was a strong antiabsolutist tradition, dating at least to the seventeenth century and particularly receptive to the notion of northern freedom.54 According to one scholar, Mallet’s introduction and his ensuing works may have been “the most important event for Norse-inspired writing in Britain.”55 This might well be true. And yet it is striking that the translation into English of the Introduction à l’histoire de Dannemarc, by Thomas Percy, himself a wellknown expert of northern antiquities, was also its most important refutation. As Colin Kidd has aptly put it, Percy’s edition of Mallet’s work simply “subverted the very text he was editing.”56 The aims of the English antiquarian were made clear in a lengthy preface. As he informed his readers, his work would rectify Mallet’s misguided opinion, which “has been a great source of 51

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Paul Van Tieghem, Le Préromantisme: Etudes d’histoire littéraire européenne (Paris: F. Rieder, 1924–1947), vol. i, 122–130. Jean-Yves Guiomar, “‘Les peuples du nord’, matrice d’un système politique et culturel?,” Revue du Nord, 360/361 (2005), 572. Howard Gaskill, The Reception of Ossian in Europe (London: Continuum, 2002). R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Peter Mortensen, “‘The Descent of Odin’: Wordsworth, Scott and Southey among the Norsemen,” Romanticism, 6 (2000), 213. Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 207. On the reasons that prompted Percy to translate a text that he so deeply disapproved of, see the remarks by Gauti Kristmannsson, Literary Diplomacy: The Role of Translation in the Construction of National Literatures in Britain and Germany, 1750–1830 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 156–157.

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mistake and confusion to many learned writers of the ancient history of Europe, that is, of supposing the ancient Gauls and Germans, the Britons and Saxons, to have been all originally one and the same people; thus confounding the antiquities of the Gothic and Celtic nations.” Such a misconception, Percy went on, had been reinforced with remarkable erudition by the German scholars Philipp Clüver and Johann Georg Keysler, as well as by the French historian Simon Pelloutier, before Mallet himself endorsed it. Against such views, Percy would show that Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, and France were “not inhabited by the descendants of a single race,” but rather by two “very different” peoples, the Celtic, “who were the ancestors of Gauls, Britons, and Irish,” and the “Gothic or Teutonic, from whom the Belgians, Saxons, and Scandinavians derived their origin, and that, therefore, these were ab origine two distinct peoples very unlike in their manners, customs, religion, and laws.”57 To advance such arguments, Percy rejected the use of etymology, which focused on the study of one or a few words, “so uncertain and so precarious,” and offered in its stead “solid, positive proofs.”58 To contend that the Celtic and Gothic were radically different peoples, he considered in some detail the differences in their “person, manners, laws, religion, and language.” Percy then went on to assess and underscore the elements that made it possible to tell apart Goths and Celts. So, for one, he considered the different weight of the written word in the two cultures, making the claim that while the Celts were deprived even “of an alphabet of their own,” dominated as they were by a caste of druids who forbade that their dogmas be written down, the Goths held letters in “higher reverence” than any other barbarous people.59 In another instance, Percy noted instead the extent to which the Goths cherished freedom and carried with them that sentiment wherever they settled, arguing that the opposite was true of the Celtic nations, in which druids and knights shared all power and where “the inferior people were little better than in a state of slavery” – obviously, another of Percy’s motives was to illustrate the merits “of our excellent Gothic constitution.”60 But it was on 57

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Thomas Percy, “Translator’s Preface,” in Paul-Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities: Or, a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes, and other Northern Nations; Including those of our own Saxon Ancestors, i (London: Carnan, 1770), ii– iv. As for the works Percy refers to: Philipp Clüver, Germaniæ Antiquæ Libri Tres (1616), Johann Georg Keysler, Antiquitates selectæ Septentrionales et Celtæ (1720), Simon Pelloutier, Histoire des Celtes (1750). Percy, “Translator’s Preface,” vi. 59 Ibid., xvii. Ibid., xii–xiii. Percy’s remark was in a letter addressed to the publisher, then copied down in Thomas Percy to Evan Evans, 23 April 1764, in Percy and Evans, Correspondence (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1957), 84.

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a genealogical comparison between languages, their grammar, and the structure of their sentences that Percy relied the most to draw a mapping of the nations of Europe based on the origins of the tongues they spoke.61 Arguably, the differences so strongly emphasized by Percy would have been of little apparent relevance for Mallet, since the latter was vindicating the common, distant Scythian origins of the peoples of Europe. In fact, according to Kidd, Percy was questioning the “ethnological foundations upon which the polyethnicist version of English ancient constitutionalism rested,” which was based on the alleged similarity between Anglo-Saxon and ancient British values and ways of life.62 Indeed, the editor of the 1847 edition of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, I. A. Blackwell, would insist on the idea that races differed in, and hence could be defined by, their values, manners, and institutions as well as their physical features. One had to consider “physiological and psychological qualities” to grasp a nation’s history and to seek the diverging paths “of cognate races.”63 Ideas like these were surely closer to modern racialism than Percy’s. Although the latter had discussed the differences between Gauls and Germans “in their persons,” he had relatively little to say on the topic and even admitted that the two “resemble each other in complexion.”64 For Percy as for most eighteenth-century authors, racial differences were a cultural and ethnic rather than a biological fact. And the idea that external features mirrored a person’s inner moral qualities, the lynchpin of modern racialism, was seemingly alien to him.

Conclusion There should be no need to point out that the three case studies featured above are not meant to offer an exhaustive description, or even less so an explanation, of how nation and nationhood were understood in the eighteenth century in western Europe. To offer such, we would have to have taken into consideration, among other things, travel literature, religion, the rise of liberal and republican ideals, the impact of wars such as the Seven Years War, the changes in colonial policies and practices, shifting perceptions as to the meaning of “race,” and, not least, a new understanding of the 61 62 63

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Percy, “Translator’s Preface,” xxiv–xxxiii. Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism, 208. I. A. Blackwell, “Remarks on Bishop Percy’s Preface,” in Paul-Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities: Or, a Historical Account of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws, Maritime Expeditions and Discoveries, Language and Literature, of the Ancient Scandinavians (London: Bohn, 1847), 44–45. Percy, “Translator’s Preface,” xii.

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economic world. And yet, similarities and differences between the cases above might shed light on some crucial aspects of the way a nation’s past came to be understood and, hence, might be useful in grasping much broader issues. First of all, clearly emerging from the three cases is an increasingly strong interest in the study of national customs, institutions, laws, beliefs, and manners, a concern that gradually took precedence over more traditional approaches that had concentrated on kings, ministers, and courts. It was now assumed that to properly grasp a nation’s history it was no longer enough to concentrate on the deeds of its rulers but, on the contrary, it was necessary to take into due consideration the character, beliefs, and habits of their subjects. Here was a deep shift from a political to a sort of sociological or even anthropological understanding of how a nation’s history unfolded. Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois was instrumental in such a turn, crystallizing inclinations felt by many scholars and hastening changes already underway. Indeed, all the authors mentioned above – as well as many others – called, to a greater or lesser extent, for a deeper focus on the customs of nations. Works such as Pietro Giannone’s Dell’istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (1723) or Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756) indicated the path to follow. Such a turn was indissolubly tied to the fact that scholars were gradually being drawn toward the ages preceding the birth of modern monarchies and to pre-Roman antiquity, a concern that inevitably led to their questioning the notion that the birth of a nation coincided with the birth of its polity. The père Gabriel Daniel could still claim in 1713, in his extremely popular Histoire de France, that France was born with Clovis, for his rule had turned an unruly multitude into a community of subjects, his baptism having sanctioned the special role of the French people. But views such as these became less relevant as scholars became preoccupied with ancient languages, customs, and migrations. From this angle, it might be ventured that the new approach implicitly denied the identification of the ruler and state, on the one hand, and the nation, on the other. Partly for such a reason, although the shift was not necessarily or always anti-monarchical, it often led to or entwined with liberal or republican arguments. But investigating the ancient origins of nations could also cause a recasting of the role of the Christian religion in a nation’s history because, ultimately, it placed emphasis on its pre-Christian past. Obviously, all this is not to deny the crucial role played by Throne and Altar in eighteenth-century ideas about the nation and nationhood, or to overemphasize the importance of those multifarious processes commonly 204

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referred to as “secularization” – after all, as we have seen, biblical genealogies still played a role. More simply, it might be said that increasing importance was given to elements such as languages, ways of life, traditions, and those shared worldviews that formed a multitude into a nation. And for such a reason, the latter increasingly came to be understood as either a natural fact or a historical reality. A second, equally important element is represented by the role played by the Middle Ages in the discussions considered above. As is well known, in the nineteenth century it was commonly assumed that nations owed their origins to the barbarian invasions at the downfall of the Roman Empire. It was a view that, of course, was heavily indebted to the Romantic movement sweeping across Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the concomitant disparaging of all continental imperialistic ambition associated with the image of Rome. However, partly at least, such views could already be found in the works of eighteenth-century scholars. To be sure, some tended to scorn the Middle Ages as a time of violence and superstition and deplored the destruction of a great civilization – Voltaire and Gibbon, to mention but two, were among them. Yet others, such as Montesquieu and Mallet, saw that epoch as the breeding ground of modern political freedom. But what is perhaps even more remarkable is that some scholars, and surely the ones we have considered, were concerned with the relationship between the nation’s pre-Roman and its post-Roman history. In some cases, as for the so-called Gallo-Gallic thesis of the origins of France, championed by Tournemine and claiming that Franks and Gauls were originally the same people, the aim was to establish an ethnic (if not a racial) unity of the modern French and thus downplay the social and political division within the kingdom. In other instances, ideas of ethnic unity were meant to show that the barbarian tribes from the north, at the fall of the Roman Empire, had regenerated and revived – rather than simply carried with them – the love for freedom, a love that Roman rule had toned down but had failed to suppress. In part, as we have seen, these arguments were contained in Mallet’s works. And it is surely a matter of interest that the feral vigor evoked by the image of the barbarian was seen, in eighteenth-century discussions about nationhood and national character, as a source of freedom while, from the Romantic turn onwards, it would more often be associated with military prowess – as Renan’s views, briefly mentioned above, would suggest. The third and perhaps most interesting aspect of the debates discussed in the preceding pages is the antinomy between the assertion of national primacy, on the one hand, and the recognition, equally solid, of a common 205

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origin of the nations of Europe – or, at least, of most of them. Clearly emerging in the cases above is what Vico called the “arrogance of nations,” the presumption that one’s own country was the most ancient and that, therefore, it deserved some kind of preeminence over other nations.65 This was not, of course, a peculiarity of the eighteenth century, but during our time frame it did acquire a new hue, not least because of the momentous advances in the study of history, philology, archeology, and also thanks to the nascent “sciences of man.” However, underlying the arguments of our authors – and many more could have been considered – were some noticeably transnational elements. In fact, they all believed in a common origin of Europe’s nations, a distant and often obscure origin located somewhere in the orient. This is an argument that some modern scholars have associated with the (rather problematic) notion of pre-Romanticism. Others have written, instead, of an “Oriental Renaissance” taking place in the second half of the eighteenth century.66 Be that as it may, it is important to emphasize that, here, differences between the European nations in customs, ways of life, mores, and character were seen as depending on the different paths taken from that common origin. They could hence be explained in cultural, social, and political terms or through geographical causes. They were understood as a consequence of the greater or lesser distance from the same point of departure and were, in a sense, a matter of degree – for, indeed, the nations of Europe were seen as different branches of the same tree. The latter element ought to be grasped in connection with discussions around monogenism – the idea that all humans shared a common origin – and its contrary, polygenism. As early as the late seventeenth century the French scholar Isaac de la Peyrère championed polygenism and, in the following century, authors such as Voltaire hinted at it. But it was not until the early nineteenth century that the theory gained ascendancy.67 It was then, partly entwining with such a change, that the idea of nations as radically different entities came to be more widely accepted, and the need to pose insuperable barriers between them so deeply felt. But, to most denizens of the Republic of Letters, that would have been an unfathomable (and, perhaps, rather disheartening) future. 65

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Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova (1730 ed.) (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013), 92. Tieghem, Le Préromantisme, passim; Raymond Schwab, La renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950). C. Loring Brace, “Race” is a Four-letter Word: The Genesis of a Concept (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 37–43.

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Further Reading Banti, Alberto Mario, L’onore della nazione: Identità sessuali e violenza nel nazionalismo europeo dal XVIII secolo alla Grande Guerra (Turin: Einaudi, 2005). Bell, David, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Blitz, Hans-Martin, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland: Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000). Cottret, Bernard (ed.), Du patriotisme aux nationalismes (1700–1848): France, Grande-Bretagne, Amérique du Nord (Paris: Éditions Créaphis, 2002). D’Auria, Matthew, The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715– 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Ihalainen, Pasi, Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685–1772 (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Jensen, Lotte (ed.), The Roots of Nationalism: National Identity Formation in Early Modern Europe, 1600–1815 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). Kidd, Colin, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Leerssen, Joep, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). Smith, Anthony D., The Nation Made Real: Art and National Identity in Western Europe, 1600– 1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Empire, War, and Racial Hierarchy in the Making of the Atlantic Revolutionary Nations malick w. ghachem

In 1954, the great African-American painter Jacob Lawrence conceived of a remarkable series of paintings that would, in his words, “depict the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy.” Initially, he had in mind a grand narrative beginning with the “causes and events leading into the American Revolutionary War” and ending in the early years of the twentieth century. As finally executed, Lawrence’s Struggle series of panels (1954–1956) extended chronologically from the 1770 Boston Massacre to the aftermath of the battle of New Orleans in 1815. Lawrence thereby placed the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 at the center of the path to American nationhood. Less well known but no less dramatic than his 1940– 1941 series on the Great Black Migration, Struggle is the work of “an artist – a black man – in 1955 [who] decides that he has the ability, the power, and frankly the right to image what it means to be American.”1 In Lawrence’s hands, the canonical events and ideas of the American Revolution are reimagined as nation-making episodes thoroughly inflected by the harsh pressures of empire, war, and race. Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, the Sons of Liberty, Benedict Arnold, and James Madison all make their appearances, but so do Crispus Attucks (the seaman of indigenous and African descent who was the first victim of the Boston Massacre) and the I thank my colleagues Craig Wilder and Jeff Ravel for having co-taught “How to Stage a Revolution” with me at MIT in fall 2013. Their understandings of the American and French revolutions have deeply shaped my own. Thanks also to Daniel Gordon, Robin Bernstein, Katherine Turk, Corinne Fields, and Dana Sajdi for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1 Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Austen Barron Bailly (eds.), Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, in association with the University of Washington Press, 2019), 65; Steve Locke, “I, Too, Sing America,” in ibid., 21. The Struggle series was displayed for the first time in full in a special exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2020.

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enslaved man (named “Felix”) who petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for his freedom in 1773. Other panels depict the 1803 Lewis and Clark expedition from the perspective of the Lemhi Shoshone translator Sacajawea and her brother, the Shoshone chief Cameahwait. And Lawrence gives us a War of 1812 told from the vantage point of Tehcumseh, the chief of the Shawnee Confederation, who fought (and lost) the decisive Battle of the Thames in Canada, notwithstanding an alliance with British troops. Struggle gives us the creation of the American nation as we have rarely seen it. Rewriting rather than displacing the familiar episodes and icons of the founding era, Lawrence makes it possible to see the words of the Georgia slave Captain James in 1810 – “for freedom we want and will have, for we have served this cruel land long enuff [sic]” – as no less central to the experience of nationhood than the famous opening lines of the Declaration of Independence.2 In so rendering the North American experience, Struggle also reveals a more general story about the Atlantic revolutionary era that can tell us a great deal about the genesis of nationalism during this period. The American Revolution, the War of Haitian Independence (which Lawrence depicted in his betterknown Life of Toussaint Louverture series in 1936–1938), and the War of 1812 were all conflicts in which slavery figured centrally as part of a process of national consolidation following the long wars of the revolutionary era. These three events serve as capstones for the story that I tell in this chapter, about empire, civil war, and racial hierarchy as the critical ingredients shaping the culture of nationalism as it emerged at the end of the Atlantic revolutionary period. Racial hierarchy – a doctrine common to both the dispossession of American Indians and the subjugation of peoples of African descent – was the great shadow that fell over the long transition from imperial crisis to nation making in the North Atlantic world. How long to define the transition is, in a sense, the central question, for the scholarship of recent decades has been emphatic that ideas of nationhood neither originated with, nor were necessarily central to, the Atlantic revolutions. Historians of Latin America such as Jeremy Adelman have argued that the wars of Spanish independence were not governed by a predetermined teleology culminating in the establishment of the nation. Far from it: empire rather than nation remained the determinative category well into the nineteenth century.3 My argument in this chapter builds on these important insights, but – focusing on the trifecta of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions – I want to 2 3

Turner and Bailly, Jacob Lawrence, 118 (for the Captain James quote). Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review, 113/2 (2008), 319–340.

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outline a somewhat different genealogy for the rise (and fall) of revolutionaryera nationalism that builds on three historical forces. The first is empire: the imperative to sustain commercial imperial dominance in the eighteenth century, which drove the earliest ruptures not only between but within empires and generated the culture of creole (colonial settler) self-determination on which much of the revolutionary era drew.4 The second is civil war, which grew out of the need to defend commercial boundaries and prerogatives, and both reinforced and destabilized those boundaries at critical moments, most notably during the Seven Years War (1754–1763). The third and last phenomenon is racial hierarchy, which (particularly in the form of plantation slavery) increasingly displaced silver as the bedrock of mercantilist supremacy in the eighteenthcentury Atlantic world and set the terms by which war and violence were used as strategies in the process of consolidating national borders and identity in the early nineteenth century.5 In British North America, the race-based character of creole identity formation stemmed from not only the social antagonisms of slavery but also conflict with Native Americans. To be sure, some very large gaps separated the American, French, and Haitian revolutions from each other – a point that the quickest glance at the Haitian Revolution, the era’s sole frontal challenge to plantation slavery, makes altogether clear. While race was important to all three revolutions, it is the interaction among empire, civil war, and racial hierarchy that brings these three divergent events within the same analytical framework, very much including the French Revolution. The pursuit of empire and mercantilist supremacy shaped nearly every aspect of the French absolutist state, never more so than in the politically turbulent aftermath of the Seven Years War that was the prelude to all three eighteenth-century revolutions. Seeing the Atlantic revolutions in this light has two key implications. First, it permits us to reverse the normal chains of cause and effect that have tended to characterize the study of nationalism and racism. In the work of scholars like Rogers Brubaker and others who contrast ethnic versus more inclusive forms of nationalism, nationalist ideology is the original and independent variable that generates the social conditions of exclusion or inclusion.6 Rather than 4

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Throughout this chapter, I use the term “creole” to denote the political culture of settler communities in the Americas. For earlier studies noting the role of racism in the rise of nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised and expanded edition (New York: Verso, 1991), 59; Kenneth R. Minogue, Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 1967), 9. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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reading the nation as the point of departure for a process that gives rise to modern racism, we can see the nation as the product of the revolutionary-era struggles to preserve (or to contest) various forms of racial hierarchy. Under the pressures of racial hostility, revolutionary politics made the nation-state – or, in the American case, the state-nation7 – come to seem the most attractive alternative to empire. Second, the experience of imperial and civil war paved the path to nationhood nearly everywhere in the revolutionary Atlantic. The race-based nature of civil war in the American and Haitian contexts should not lead us to discount its fundamental role in the traumas of the French revolutionary decade. Even in France, the birthplace of the unitary, territorial nation-state, imperial and domestic military conflict cast a long shadow over the struggle to create a rights-based, liberal civic order.8 And everywhere that the influence of French revolutionary warfare extended (which was most of the North Atlantic world, not to mention large stretches of the rest of the globe), the nation-state faced a constant challenge at the hands of the imperial tradition. Haiti’s ability to assert a robust version of state sovereignty in the aftermath of its war of independence was systematically compromised by foreign hostility and the legacies of slavery. And the persistence of empire within a national, postrevolutionary framework – what Josep Fradera has called the “imperial nation”9 – enabled France, Britain, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands to survive as colonial powers, whether in the Atlantic basin, the Indian Ocean, or both. In this sense, Martinique, Cuba, and Brazil are no less representative of the early nineteenth-century Atlantic world than Haiti or the new American republic. Even where mercantilist empire survived, however, it did so largely because of the desire to preserve and extend racebased hierarchy.

Mercantilism and Imperial Crisis Imperial crisis was the predicate for the formation of the corporate identities that preceded nationhood throughout the North Atlantic. In the familiar narrative of Atlantic history, inter-imperial competition for territory and money spawned wars that occasioned fiscal reform, and these fiscal pressures, 7 8

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Jill Lepore, “A New Americanism,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2019), 13. See Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). Josep M. Fradera, The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

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in turn, induced imperial crisis. Towns, companies, cities, and plantations played critical roles in these crises, which had the effect of generating greater awareness of the particular unit’s place in a larger framework. In few cases did that larger framework extend beyond the single colony to encompass some larger abstraction defined at the level of the “British (or French, Dutch, Spanish, etc.) Empire.” Colonists typically claimed a strong attachment to metropolitan institutions and legal traditions that they conceived of in empirewide terms,10 but these claims of continuity with the European past were not proto-national assertions of citizenship so much as efforts to secure locally established rights and privileges within the circumscribed space of a particular colony or sub-colonial entity. Although an important corrective to an earlier generation of scholarship on the revolutionary era, interpretations that emphasize the persistence of empire as the dominant alternative to the nation obscure the range of political affiliations that existed within empires and that made empires meaningful experiences for their subjects. Mercantilism shaped both metropolitan and creole communities, forcing them to confront sub-imperial entities – most notably, monopoly trading companies – to which they could attribute their difficulties and discover others around which they could rally. It was the little monopolies, rather than the overarching boundaries that we associate with the nation-state, that often mattered in practice. As Richard Pares has written, “the triumph, indeed the creation, of national monopolies was accompanied at first by small monopolies within monopolies – local monopolies or company monopolies.”11 The development of creole colonial identity in the Americas was often a function of these embedded or layered monopolies: a company’s exclusive privilege contained within the larger monopoly of the mother country. A good example is the storm in Saint-Domingue over the slave-trading monopoly granted by the French monarchy to John Law’s Indies Company in 1720. Hostility to the company’s monopoly brought planters, anxious about the price and availability of West African captives, to the brink of treason. This resistance transformed Saint-Domingue from a set of loosely connected settler communities into a cohesive, plantation-driven polity willing and able to assert the supremacy of planter interests over all others. Both here and in the later American Tea Crisis, however, creole solidarity was very far from a proto-national demonstration of colonial determination 10 11

Ibid., 4–5. Richard Pares, Merchants and Planters, Supplement 4 of the Economic History Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 27.

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to resist the tyrannical commercial and tax policies of the metropolitan government.12 Instead, the American Tea Crisis centered on the actions of another locally organized polity, the Boston city-state,13 seeking to protect the commercial interests of an economy organized in significant measure around the practice of contraband (in particular, smuggled Dutch tea). But monopoly did not simply exclude individual American tea merchants from the market enjoyed by others; it portended a threat to the political liberties of this community as a whole, understood in the language of slavery and freedom. A broadside directed to the “inhabitants of Pennsylvania” warned against the “inroads of oppression and slavery, being now meditated by the East-India Company, under the direction of a corrupt and designing ministry.”14 The American Revolution was the product of many such local acts of collective resistance to mercantilism, conceived in relation to the problem of political slavery. These acts of resistance mostly lacked the coherence of a two-way struggle between unified national or proto-national entities, as we know from a long line of studies of the internal battle between revolutionaries and Tories on the American side.15 But the imperial conflict between metropole and patriots also proceeded alongside one other conflict that both predated and outlasted the revolutionary struggle: a racially inflected war between settlers, Native Americans, and slaves over the question of who belonged to the emerging political community.

Civil War and Whiteness Civil war, no less than mercantilism, was the progenitor of nationhood in America, France, and Haiti alike.16 Recent work on the American Revolution suggests that the founders’ achievement pivoted on an ideology of white nationhood that stemmed from violent conflict with American 12

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See Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 4 (cautioning against reading American nationalism backwards into the revolutionary era). See Mark Peterson, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630– 1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). “Inhabitants of Pennsylvania . . . October 13, 1773” (Philadelphia: s.n., 1773), Readex Early American Imprints, first series, no. 12940 (copy in the Library Company of Philadelphia). See, e.g., Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011). The key study of civil war as a transnational concept in the history of ideas is David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Knopf, 2017).

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Indians and the subordination of slave and free black communities across British North America. More than any other event, the Seven Years War awakened this ideology of white nationhood in the thirteen colonies. In The Rights of the British Colonists Asserted and Proved (1764), published one year after the Peace of Paris brought that war to an end, the Massachusetts lawyer James Otis famously denounced the first of Britain’s postwar revenue-raising measures, the 1764 Sugar Act. He did so according to the peculiar logic that the American colonists were not, “as the common people of England foolishly imagine . . . a compound mongrel mixture of English, Indian and Negro.” Instead, he insisted, they were “freeborn British white subjects, whose loyalty has never been suspected.”17 The point of this insistence was to show that the Americans, as “true Britons,” were entitled as a matter of principle to representation in Parliament – a claim that has long been understood (correctly) as central to the entire imperial conflict.18 But as Otis makes clear, the coherence of this claim, and of the larger sense of colonial union that it fostered, was based on conflict with and differentiation from America’s non-white population, American Indians in particular.19 Outbreaks of intercommunal violence between Indians and settlers profoundly shaped local and even regional notions of English identity in the colonies.20 But the style of Britishness that Otis evoked – a racialized identity common to all thirteen mainland colonies – depended for its formation on the French and Indian War (as the Seven Years War is more usefully called in this context). That near-decade of fighting also occasioned waves of antinative violence and massive displacements of Indians that together produced a fundamental transfer of sovereignty to the British North Americans by the 1770s. 17

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James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764), in Gordon S. Wood (ed.), The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate, vol. I: 1764–1772 (New York: Library of America, 2015), 65 (emphasis in the original). Also quoted in Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1776–1804 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 4. See, e.g., Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic, 1763–1789, revised edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). As Gordon Wood points out, Otis’s portrayal of the whiteness of the colonists did not prevent him from voicing a strident antislavery position. In a later section entitled “Of the Natural Rights of Colonists,” Otis wrote that “[t]he Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black.” He went on to denounce the slave trade as “the most shocking violation of the law of nature.” Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies, 69–70. See Jill Lepore, In the Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999); Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Vintage, 2003).

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The hostility of “British white subjects” to the Indian presence in their midst shaped the course of the conflict and made possible the tentative union that was its legacy. In the Albany Plan of Union of 1754 – the colonies’ earliest attempt to coordinate their governments by way of negotiating an umbrella treaty with the Iroquois – Benjamin Franklin “assigned an equality of subjecthood to all Britons, regardless of which side of the Atlantic they inhabited, but also excluded from this national empire the non-British racial and cultural groups of North America.”21 The conviction that Indians and other nonBritish racial groups were excluded from the colonial American community gave tacit permission to go on the military offensive against them with the outbreak of war. The Phips Proclamation of 1755 graphically illustrates the consequences of that dynamic. For Spencer Phips, the lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts when the French and Indian War commenced, the Penobscot Indians of New England were no less than “enemies, rebels and traitors to his Majesty King George II,” thereby justifying the colonists in seizing “all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing, and destroying all and every” member of the tribe.22 This sense that the Indians were a threat to royal authority and colonial security alike entailed an extraordinarily creative reading of the colonists’ longstanding movement to grab native land, a movement that occasioned the many conflicts between colonists and Indians of the decades before the Seven Years War. In the Proclamation of 1763, the British government aimed to put an end to this vicious cycle of colonial expansion and retaliatory violence that threatened London’s hold on its North American empire. The Proclamation accordingly barred American colonists from settling (further) into Indian country west of the Appalachian Mountains given the “great frauds and abuses . . . committed in the purchasing lands of the Indians, to the great prejudice of our interests, and to the great dissatisfaction of the said Indians.”23 Pursuant to the law of unintended consequences, this effort to constrain the British colonists from further encroachments on Indian land set off probably the greatest episode of land grabbing in early American history, extending from 1763 well into the revolutionary period. The violence 21

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Timothy Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 13. For a reproduction of the Phips Proclamation, see http://lawandrevolution.com/tag/ seven-years-war/. See the penultimate paragraph of the 1763 Proclamation, at https://avalon.law.yale.edu /18th_century/proc1763.asp.

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unleashed by the war licensed further postwar violence, as in the massacre of the Conestoga Indians in western Pennsylvania in December 1763 (also known as the Paxton riots). The perpetrators of this act argued that they had simply acted in self-defense: “[T]ho’ born to Liberty, and all the glorious Rights and Privilege of B R I T I S H S U B J E C T S, they were denied Protection at a time when the cries of murder and distress might have made the very stones relent.”24 As this rhetoric makes clear, the colonists still thought of themselves as subjects of Britain at the end of the Seven Years War. In the revolutionary conflict of the 1770s that turned them into Americans, racialized slavery and hostility toward indigenous peoples exerted a powerful centrifugal force. The Declaration of Independence captured this new landscape, for it construed the Indian and slavery questions first and foremost as urgent (and overlapping) military problems. “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” This description of the Native American response to their displacement from eastern North America and decimation at the hands of European settlers might well have been used to capture the colonists’ own tactics in the revolutionary war. Major General John Sullivan’s destruction of the Iroquois country of the Six Nations in 1779 is only the most prominent case in point. The revolutionary conflict opened the door to American subjugation of those Indian nations that still stood in the way of the expansion stalled by the Proclamation of 1763. George Washington’s instructions to Sullivan left little doubt that the elimination of the Iroquois was the purpose (as it would be very nearly the effect): “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of the [six nations’] settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.” Robert Parkinson’s analysis of newspaper coverage of this genocidal campaign demonstrates that it played an important role in the “common cause” narrative by which patriots fashioned a radicalized understanding of American identity. And that narrative, in turn, influenced the patriot policy of revenge against the “merciless Indian savages.”25 24

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Thomas Barton and John Ewing, The Conduct of the Paxton-men, Impartially Presented (Philadelphia, 1764), 5 (capitalization in the original). Robert Parkinson, The Common Cause: Making Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019), 434 (quoting Washington’s instructions), 442–446.

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Even the “domestic insurrections” referenced in the Declaration of Independence depended, in a way, on the long-term subjugation of the indigenous peoples of North America. What made the problem of slavery seem increasingly prominent in the late colonial period was that the AfricanAmerican population had begun to overtake the Indian population in many colonies. Having previously led aggressive military campaigns against Native Americans, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor in Virginia, approved the use of Ohio valley Indians as proxies in the fight against the Virginia patriots. By 1775, with the intensification of conflict along the eastern seaboard, he was ready to offer British liberty in exchange for African-American service in the armies of George III. Dunmore’s November proclamation unleashed a flood of patriot denunciations that took little to no stock of the reality that African Americans were simultaneously bearing arms for the patriot revolution. One anonymous writer in the Virginia Gazette queried whether there should be “any amongst the negroes weak enough to believe that Lord Dunmore intends to do them a kindness, and wicked enough to provoke the fury of the Americans against their defenseless fathers and mothers, their wives, their women and children.” As Parkinson observes, shortly after this “another Virginian would cordon off these ‘domestic insurrectionists’ from the ‘we’ who held truths to be self-evident.”26 These conflicts had debilitating consequences for the future of African Americans and shaped the powers that the new American state could claim. Patriot rhetoric about violent and treasonous blacks severely impaired the antislavery cause and arguably took abolition off the agenda of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, indefinitely postponing America’s reckoning with slavery. The new federal government would also lack the power to regulate or abolish slavery within any of the existing states, let alone throughout the new American republic.

War, Patriotism, and the Nation in France The road to French and Haitian revolutionary nationalism was also paved with the stones of military conflict, racism, and xenophobia. As David Bell has shown, the military reversals of the Seven Years War period prompted an outpouring of patriotic literature demonizing the English as “barbarians” 26

Ibid., 149, 154–155, 157 (quoting the Virginia Gazette (Pinkney), 23 November 1775); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, new edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996), ch. 5.

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even less civilized than American Indians. “The war literature of the 1750s and 1760s, for the first time in French history, presented an international conflict neither as a duel between royal houses nor as a clash of religions, but as a battle between irreconcilable nations.” The death of the French officer Jumonville at the start of the war, for example, generated some florid poetry and illustrations contrasting the French as (Christian) Crusaders and the English as (heathen) Saracens. The point was to demonize “an entire enemy nation.” While both Britain and Prussia gained at the expense of France in the Seven Years War, French wartime propaganda predominantly targeted the British rather than the Prussians.27 It was thus the imperial nation – not the nation per se – that was at stake in these ideological conflicts of the 1760s and beyond. The imperial nation was possessed of an army and navy, colonies and ships, spies and propagandists, to be sure. But it also depended on an internal constitutional structure, overseen by parlements and other legal authorities, and framed by the absolutist logic of a society of corporate orders. And it depended, crucially, on a convincing exercise of the power to extract money from the populace in the form of taxation. Britain subsidized its rise as an imperial nation through its success at this last challenge, reflected in the Financial Revolution that flowed from the constitutional settlement of 1688.28 A century later, France’s own constitutional settlement was still up for grabs. In the 1770s, the parlements of the realm began to invoke the authority of the nation and the patrie to oppose the arbitrariness of royal despotism, thereby opening up another pathway toward French revolutionary nationalism. The dam of parlementaire resistance to the absolute monarchy, which was at least as old as the age of Louis XIV, was opened in 1771, with the socalled “Maupeou Coup.” More than any one person, it was Louis XV’s lord chancellor, Maupeou, who unwittingly helped to introduce the term “nation” into French political discourse when he moved to eliminate venality of parlementary offices, limit the right of parlementary remonstrance, reorganize the parlements’ jurisdiction, and replace existing magistrates with loyalists of the king. As Keith Baker observes, this challenge to the parlements “underlined the need for a restatement of the principles of the political order, a reconstitution of the body politic, and a reconsideration of the traditional theory of representation.” Increasingly after 1771, those needs would be 27

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David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 80–81, 91. See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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answered in relation to Enlightenment concepts of the nation and the social contract rather than the principles of the absolute monarchy. In 1775, the parlementaire publicist Guillaume-Joseph Saige captured the drift of French political thought in his statement that “there is nothing essential in the political body but the social contract and the exercise of the general will; apart from that, everything is absolutely contingent and depends, for its form as for its existence, on the supreme will of the nation.”29 The “desacralization” of the French monarchy and its equation with despotism in the closing decades of the Old Regime were critical to the triumph of the nation in France. The French Revolution would, in effect, weaponize the nation, making it an instrument of both domestic political struggle and international conflict. For that to happen, at least one additional development was necessary: the discovery of a new domestic enemy of the nation to replace fading memories of the British menace from the Seven Years War period. That enemy would prove to be the aristocracy (and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Church), whose history was itself undergoing an important rewriting in the second half of the eighteenth century. The French nobility found itself fighting on two simultaneous fronts in this period: against the monarchy (in the form of the parlementaire movement against royal despotism) and the Third Estate. The complicated interaction of these two battles turned the society of orders of Old Regime France on its head and then pulled it apart, with the aristocracy now capable of definition as something distinct from – indeed, incompatible with – the new concept of the nation that had emerged via the patriotism of the post-Seven Years War period and the parlementaire movement.30 The French Revolution turned on, was made possible by, this prioritization of the nation over the group, and even over the individual. As Keith Baker observes, “[o]nly when the rights of the nation had been secured did the revolutionaries claim the rights of man.” Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, a priest elected delegate to the Estates General, became the spokesperson for the Third Estate in its wrangling with the delegates of the First and Second orders. Sieyès’ pamphlet What is the Third Estate? captured at once the now 29

30

Pierre Nora, “Nation,” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), The Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 743; Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 111–112; Bell, The Cult of the Nation, 68–70 (Saige quote at 70); Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989), xv. Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 143–144.

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self-evident authority of the nation and the vulnerable position of the nobility vis-à-vis that authority. The useful, productive efforts that sustain society, wrote Sieyès, are made by the Third Estate. At the same time, the Third Estate “is laden . . . with all the burdens which the privileged classes refuse to carry.” The rights and privileges of the nobility “make of it an isolated people in the midst of the great nation. This is truly imperium in imperio.” It followed that the solution was to define the nation exclusively in relation to the order that constituted “everything.” “The Third Estate embraces . . . all that which belongs to the nation; and all that which is not the Third Estate cannot be regarded as being of the nation.”31 The inability of French elites to agree on a fiscal plan that could stave off an imminent royal bankruptcy had triggered the convening of the Estates General. As the negotiations within the Estates General broke down over the Third Estate’s demand to be represented by head rather than by order, the tax question emerged as the crucial mechanism by which Sieyès’ vision of the nation as the sole font of sovereignty was operationalized. To be precise, the French nation was born at the moment the delegates of the Third Estate voted, 17 June 1789, on a motion (by Sieyès) to cast off their Old Regime label and deem themselves instead the National Assembly. That occasion coincided with the deputies’ first major collective decision: to place the debts of the French state “under the protection of the honor and loyalty of the nation.” In doing so, the (former) Third Estate had seized control of the power to tax: primus inter pares of the main powers associated with sovereignty.32 The formalization of this new order came three days later, with the more famous Tennis Court Oath of 20 June, whereby the members of the new National Assembly swore never to disband until they had succeeded in framing a new constitution for the kingdom. In taking this oath, the deputies defined the new locus of national authority in terms that were mobile yet also personal to them: “wherever the [National Assembly’s] members are gathered, there is the National Assembly.”33 Whether the subsequent course of the French Revolution – in particular, the Terror and the rise of Napoleon – can be interpreted as an expression of the “latent illiberalism” embedded in this concept of the sovereign nation 31

32

33

Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 127; Emmanuel Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate?” in Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, vol. V I : French Philosophers of the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899), 32–35. Nora, “Nation,” 744; Martine Allaire, Le serment du jeu de paume: l’événement, le tableau de David (Paris: Hatier, 2014), 12, 15. Quoted in Allaire, Le serment du jeu de paume, 85.

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remains a matter of debate among historians.34 Understanding the French Revolution within the larger context of the Atlantic revolutionary era may require stepping back from these intense historiographical discussions. Instead, we can consider how the Revolution both contributed to and was itself radicalized by the basic elements of the imperial nation developed in this chapter: mercantilism, war, and race. The quest to resurrect French international commerce and place it on a footing equal to Britain’s remained a powerful temptation in the final years of the Old Regime and the beginning of the revolutionary period. In 1785, Louis XVI’s penultimate Controller General, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, resurrected Colbert’s seventeenth-century vision of a monopolistic French (East) Indies Company. Calonne’s “new” Indies Company came to be identified in the eyes of its many opponents with everything that was wrong about the Old Regime: privilege, corruption, fiscal abuse, the ministerial nexus between wealth and power. The new company’s short, violent, and scandalridden career announced the final eclipse of corporate mercantilism in the North Atlantic: the era that extends from the 1790s, which saw the death of the French and Dutch East Indies companies, to the repeal of the East India Company’s India monopoly in 1813 and its China monopoly in 1833. The debates of the late 1780s and early 1790s over the “new” French Indies Company carried forward the antagonisms associated with the old company but mapped them on to the emerging divisions of revolutionary politics. This realignment of Old Regime mercantilist politics on the revolutionary stage had a distinctly French context dating back to the scandals of the Mississippi Bubble era (1718–1720). But it was in many ways a continuation of the older contests over the Indies monopolies in Saint-Domingue and America, and shows the extent to which the company served as fodder for the invention of the nation in both revolutionary America and France. Historians of the French Revolution are understandably reluctant to consider the American and French revolutions in the same analytical context. As one scholar has written recently, “[a]mong revolutions that social scientists are wont to compare, the eighteenth-century American experience was clearly rather different, much closer to a war of independence than to a social revolution. A comparison between it and the French Revolution has only 34

For a sampling of the debate, compare Keith M. Baker “Sovereignty,” in Furet and Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 858 (“The Terror thus revealed the tyranny inherent in any notion of political voluntarism”); and Isser Woloch, “On the Latent Illiberalism of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, 95/5 (December 1990), 1452–1470.

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limited value.”35 Leaving aside the question of how to distinguish a “social” revolution from other kinds of revolutions, such statements reflect a persistent view that the nation is the relevant unit of historical analysis. A more integrated history of the revolutionary era suggests that the transnational monopoly company was a surprisingly powerful force in more than one experience of national or communal self-determination. We need not equate the American Tea Crisis with the scandals attending Calonne’s new East India monopoly in order to see just how important the latter was in the origins and early years of the French Revolution. The stockjobbing scandals of 1785–1787 in which the French Indies and other joint-stock companies became enmeshed brought Calonne’s government to the brink, and their intersection with the fiscal crisis of 1787 completed the collapse. Moreover, whereas the failure of the East India Company’s monopoly in America following the Tea Crisis essentially removed the issue of the transnational trading monopoly as a “live” question in American revolutionary politics (it would reemerge in the early republic), that issue remained squarely under the spotlight of the French revolutionaries for several years after the Oath of the Tennis Court. The dismantling of the French Indies Company’s new monopoly was driven by an insistence on taxing (not exempting or indemnifying) a profligate corporation set on diverting resources away from the national treasury. Between 1790 and 1793, the French revolutionary assemblies suspended the FIC monopoly, imposed a registration tax on extant shares, and – when it became known that the company had organized an effort to evade those taxes – abolished all jointstock corporations (on 24 August 1793). In late 1793, facing liquidation, the FIC’s directors persuaded a handful of legislators to secretly alter the dissolution terms then being considered by the National Convention. After the plot was exposed, a cascade of denunciations followed that was very quickly absorbed into the preexisting conflict between the radical Jacobin and moderate Girondin factions of the National Convention. The ensuing trial of those associated with the Indies Company by the Revolutionary Tribunal – a case that merged imperceptibly into the prosecution and subsequent execution of Georges Danton and other leading Girondins – turned on perceptions of corporate greed and stockjobbing as mortal threats to “the public fortune” of the nation.36 35

36

Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 355, n. 27. See Elizabeth Cross, “L’anatomie d’un scandale: l’affaire de la Compagnie des Indes revisitée (1793–1794),” in Michel Biard, Philippe Bourdin, Hervé Leuwers, and Alain Tourret (eds.), Vertu et politique: les pratiques des législateurs (1789–2014) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 251–264; Albert Mathiez, Un proces̀ de corruption sous la terreur: l’affaire de la Compagnie des Indes (Paris: F. Alcan, 1920), 31, 33 (quoting the

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This ferocious campaign against bankers and corporate profiteers turned on the deeply felt conviction that the Indies Company was part of a broad international conspiracy to undermine France. The xenophobia of the postSeven Years War period, never entirely absent from the scene in the 1770s and 1780s, made a dramatic return to French political culture following the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, when virtually all the rest of Europe joined Austria and Prussia in declaring war on France. By March, France was at war with Britain, the Dutch Republic, Spain, and Portugal (in addition to Austria and Prussia). These conflicts unquestionably deepened the sense of internal and external enemies lurking at every corner that fueled the radicalization of the Terror.37 In this climate, the proliferation of “plots” against the French nation did not simply serve as justification for the elimination of a rapidly expanding list of political suspects. It occasioned a new kind of warfare in the name of national “liberation” both at home and abroad.38 The brutal military repression of the Catholic, loyalist peasants of the Vendée region of western France in late 1793–1794 was the domestic counterpart to a series of increasingly ambitious campaigns beyond the boundaries of France. The invasion of the Austrian Netherlands and the crossing of the River Rhine in the summer of 1794 marked a fundamental turn toward the imperial nation that Napoleon would inherit and expand to unforeseen levels in the later 1790s and early 1800s.39

From the Plantation to the Nation in Haiti The third and final major element in the shaping of revolutionary nationalism during the 1790s was race, and here we must confront the profound impact of the Haitian Revolution on the North Atlantic world, including on Napoleon’s France and the new American republic. Unlike the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution did not commence with an act of national founding.

37

38 39

July 1793 speeches of Delaunay d’Angers and Fabre d’Eglantine); Henri Houben, Finance et politique sous la terreur: la liquidation de la Compagnie des Indes (1793–1794) (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1932); Malick Ghachem, “At the Origins of Public Credit: A Story of StockJobbing and Financial Crisis in Pre-Revolutionary France,” in Martin Rogoff (ed.), The Financial Crisis of 2008: French and American Responses, Proceedings of the 2010 FrancoAmerican Legal Seminar (Portland: University of Maine Law School, 2011): 151–199. See Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 66. Ibid., 91. See generally David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

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Indeed, for most of its long course – 1791 to 1804 – the revolution in Haiti had very little if anything to do with the concept of national independence. The Haitian Revolution began, like the American Revolution, as an ideological contest over imperial governance and the representation of (white) colonists in the metropole. Unlike the American Revolution, it then transformed into a struggle over racial equality and, in yet a third stage, a battle over plantation slavery that interacted in complicated ways with the civil war over the rights of free people of color. It was not until its final stage – 1802 to 1803 – that the Haitian Revolution manifestly became a war of anticolonial liberation and national independence. These differences do not suggest that the nation founded in 1804 with the Haitian Declaration of Independence was any less “real” than the nationstates (or state-nations) created out of the American and French revolutions. There was no single path to nationhood in the revolutionary North Atlantic, no one model of national sovereignty that became normative for all others. As the first half of the nineteenth century makes clear, even the American and French models of nationhood were dramatically unstable, prone to paroxysms of internecine violence that revealed a fundamental lack of consensus on the part of political elites in both societies about the nature and future direction of their polities. Reading these experiences in light of the Haitian Revolution, we can see that there were alternatives to, and variations on, the liberal nation-state model based on the “rights of man” at work in all North Atlantic societies (some of them captured by Josep Fradera’s concept of the “imperial nation”). For example, in 1801, under Toussaint Louverture’s leadership, Saint-Domingue (before any of its neighboring polities in the Atlantic world) abolished slavery and enshrined equal protection in its constitution even as it continued to acknowledge French imperial sovereignty. The nation-state model that triumphed in 1804 as a result of the intense pressures of the war of independence was the contingent product rather than the logical culmination of these prior experiences, not all of which had the nation-state as their telos. The national community created in 1804 was self-determined even if it was not always able to exercise the formal attributes of sovereignty associated with statehood, owing in large part to the hostility of the dominant slave societies of the Atlantic basin. It misses the point to describe this predicament in terms of either authoritarianism or a uniquely radical form of late eighteenth-century Atlantic republicanism. The Haitian Revolution undoubtedly displayed aspects of both, but it was, at its core, a literal application of the definition of a revolution found in a French revolutionary catechism of 1793– 224

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1794: “a violent passage from a state of slavery to a state of liberty.” It was the only such literal application of the catechistic definition of a revolution to be found in the Atlantic revolutionary era.40 To be sure, even in Saint-Domingue, the rhetoric of metaphorical or political slavery had enjoyed a long life, going back at least to the creole demonstrations of the early 1720s discussed above. During and after the Seven Years War, moreover, both white and free colored colonists protested onerous militia duties and the imposition of military government as forms of colonial ministerial “despotism” – echoing the contemporaneous parliamentary struggles against royal authority in France. These protests culminated in the armed revolt of free colored and white planters in the southern and western provinces of Saint-Domingue in 1769. Quickly suppressed, the 1769 revolt was the final manifestation of a racially united creole patriotism in the colony. Thereafter, colonial administrators, with the zealous support of white planters, pursued an increasingly rigid separation between white and free colored political elites. Opportunities for free people of color to serve in leadership roles in the militias evaporated, and a wide range of other discriminatory measures were adopted that had the effect of systemically closing off the public sphere to non-whites.41 The deliberate fracturing of planter elites along racial lines left the colony with two competing forms of creole patriotism in the 1780s, white and free colored – a state of affairs that facilitated the arrival of revolution in SaintDomingue. With the convocation of the Estates General in France in 1788, the planters of Saint-Domingue insisted on representation in the constitutional deliberations of the metropole, and despite some opposition they ended up being all too little careful for what they had wished. Free colored planters, too, insisted on representation in the metropole as a way of bypassing the local white supremacist regime in the colony, even though they, too, were acting in conditions of radical uncertainty about the implications of the revolution in France for their own status as slaveholders.42 The decision to include Saint-Domingue in the proceedings of the new National Assembly made it possible for leading free colored representatives to insist on a raceneutral application of the equality provision of the 1789 Declaration of the 40

41

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Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–2, at 1. John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French St. Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 108, 131, 138–139, 141–170; Ghachem, The Old Regime and Haitian Revolution, 114. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 229.

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Rights of Man and the Citizen. This demand for the abolition of racial discrimination in the election of representatives to local assemblies then being organized in Saint-Domingue met with the expected resistance by the colonial administration, which ordered the brutal suppression of a revolt engineered by Vincent Ogé, a leading free colored advocate. The violent contest between whites and free people of color over the principle of racial equality destabilized the colony just enough for slave communities in the north to mount a direct challenge to the institution of plantation slavery beginning in November 1791. The voodoo ceremony that initiated this slave uprising, known as the Bois Caïman gathering, is often identified as the starting point of the Haitian Revolution proper and a founding moment in the history of the Haitian nation.43 It is just as fairly described as the beginning of a long and convoluted process of self-determination that had no clear relation to the concept of national sovereignty until a much later stage of the revolution. Two moments in that later history of the Haitian Revolution stand out in this regard: Toussaint Louverture’s attempt to articulate a model of revolutionary citizenship in the late 1790s, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ proclamation of Haitian independence at the start of 1804. Although he was involved in the earliest negotiations between the slave insurgents and civil commissioners sent from France to restore “order” in Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture gravitated cautiously toward the cause of the abolition of slavery. In June 1793, he had joined insurgents loyal to Jean-François Papillon and Georges Biassou in rallying to the flag of the Spanish king, an event that, along with the British invasion of the colony’s western and southern provinces that same year, turned the Haitian Revolution into a contest for supremacy between Europe’s three leading colonial powers. Louverture was comparatively slow to abandon the Spanish flag, even after the abolition of slavery by way of local proclamation in SaintDomingue in the summer and fall of 1793 and then its ratification by the French National Convention in February 1794. It was not until May 1794 that Louverture declared his allegiance to the French Republic, and his ascendancy to a position of supreme leadership of the colonial revolution in coming years entailed a careful adherence to the principle (if not the actual practice) of French national sovereignty over Saint-Domingue. Louverture’s program for colonial self-determination within the framework of the French Empire entailed two competing programs. On the one 43

David Geggus surveys the debates over the nature and significance of the Bois Caïman ceremony in his Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), ch. 6.

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hand, he had to persuade his constituency that there would be no return to the rule of racial slavery. At the same time, he had to place what remained of the colonial plantation economy on a viable footing and maintain profitable trading relationships with the new American republic and other commercial partners. Threading the needle between these two objectives was no easy task, and by 1798 it had occasioned open revolt against the requirement that former slaves work the plantations on which they once had been coerced to labor. The economic tone of Louverture’s agenda was struck in an October 1800 labor ordinance that declared agricultural cultivation the “prop of governments” and the “mechanism of all states.” The former slaves were expected to assume the role of warrior-cultivators, accepting limits on their “individual” liberty for the sake of the “general” liberty of an emancipated Saint-Domingue.44 As for the menace of a return to the race-based plantation regime of the past, Louverture’s Constitution of 1801 offered the New World’s first guarantees of equal protection and the abolition of slavery. “There can be no slaves on this territory; servitude is forever abolished here. All men who are born here live and die free and French.” That same constitution, however, declared that “being essentially agricultural,” Saint-Domingue “could not suffer the least interruption in the work” of its plantations. Accordingly, Louverture’s text included a provision authorizing the renewal of the slave trade to Saint-Domingue, designating the West African captives to be imported as “new cultivators” rather than slaves.45 This model of the warrior-cultivator as the new ideal type of colonial citizen in a nominally “free and French” territory met with resistance on two fronts at once: on the part of the cultivators (who rebelled again in the fall of 1801), and on the part of Napoleon, who interpreted Louverture’s constitution as the functional equivalent of a declaration of independence. Napoleon’s invasion of Saint-Domingue in 1802 led to an all-out race war for control of Saint-Domingue that provided the immediate context for the stridently militant nationalism of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ Declaration of Independence on 1 January 1804. In this culminating reflection on the terrible violence of colonial slavery and the Haitian Revolution, we find at last an unvarnished distillation of the principles that would guide the new Haitian nation. Dessalines summoned 44 45

Quoted in Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, 304. Constitution of Saint-Domingue, July 1801, in Claude Moise, Le project national de Toussaint Louverture et la Constitution de 1801 (Montreal: CIDIHCA, 2001), 99, 104, 106–107.

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the ominous specter of lingering Frenchness in order to justify the final and decisive act of anticolonial rupture: The French name still haunts our country. Everything here is a reminder of the cruelty of that barbarous people: our laws, our customs, our towns, all still bear a French imprint. More than this, there still exist French people on our island, and you believe that you are free and independent of that republic.46

This vision drew boundaries between peoples, nations, and events all at once. It declared the French people to be radically different from the Haitian people (in the process conflating renunciation of France with renunciation of the legacies of the law of slavery). It declared the French nation to be the sworn, eternal, and supreme enemy of the Haitian nation (while also declaring Haiti’s intent not to intervene in the slave regimes of other Atlantic nations). And, finally, it declared that the Haitian Revolution was a distinctive movement in the era of the late eighteenth-century (North) Atlantic revolutions. Against the false universalism of the American and French revolutions, the Haitian Declaration of Independence announced that only the unremitting particularity of Haiti’s oppression at the hands of France could explain the meaning of the Haitian Revolution. In the process, Dessalines not only imbued Haitian revolutionary nationalism with a distinctive identity, he also shed comparative light on the nature of the nationalism produced by the American and French revolutions.47

To the War of 1812 In April 1804, Dessalines followed up on his threat, implicit in the Declaration of Independence, to eliminate from the territory of Haiti any and all remaining French colonists. Their massacre in the name of Haitian national “vengeance” occasioned an 28 April proclamation in which Dessalines vowed: “Never will any colonist or European set foot on this land as a master or proprietor. This resolution will henceforth be the foundation of our constitution.” With one small modification (the replacement of “whites of whatever nation” for “European”), that clause would appear in Dessalines’ 1805 Constitution and in all but one of the subsequent Haitian constitutions down 46

47

The Haitian Declaration of Independence, 1 January 1804, in David Geggus (ed.), The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 179. I draw here on my “Law and Atlantic Revolutionary Exceptionalism,” in Julia Gaffield (ed.), The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 110–111.

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to 1918.48 This language comes as close as we can to a concise distillation of the new Haitian nationalism, inherently linked as it was to revulsion against the experience of colonial slavery. Notwithstanding this oath, the names of Haitian laws, customs, and towns still bore a French imprint after independence – as they do even in our own day. As if in a never-ending dialogue with this lingering colonial past, the towering monument to Haitian national defense and sovereignty that Christophe called the Citadel, built in the mountains near Milot after the assassination of Dessalines, also survives. So, too, does an American monument to an early nineteenth-century military conflict that we can use as a final illustration of the powerful role of race and slavery in shaping the contours of Atlantic revolutionary nationalism. Fort Adams in Newport is the Citadel of the early American republic, constructed in response to the devastating British invasion of Washington, DC and other American losses in the War of 1812. That war has served as the traditional point of departure for mapping the rise of American nationalism in the antebellum period. By then, Americans had already long since begun to set racial limits to the universalism of their revolution, particularly in response to the realization that black people, too, could become revolutionaries, as they had in Haiti.49 Those limits also had domestic roots, of course. The state-centered nationalism that emerged from the War of 1812, especially in Virginia, drew on old anxieties about the supposed treachery and innate violence of black slaves that went back to the revolutionary era and before. Just as Lord Dunmore had done in 1775 during the Revolutionary War, the British offered freedom after the War of 1812 to any slaves who escaped to fight for the Union Jack. Many slaves did just this, and were joined by free blacks nominally in possession of their freedom but subject to both customary and legal disabilities under state law. As Alan Taylor writes, the War of 1812 “gave Virginians a great scare, revealing the military potential of black troops deployed against them. Long a specter, the internal enemy had become real in the red coats of British troops rather than as the anticipated murderous massacre at midnight.” These fears took shape in light of Virginians’ experience of the Haitian Revolution, which led them to interpret the British mobilization of black American troops as a reprise of the “Saint Domingue Scene.” The nationalism that took shape in response to the War of 1812 reflected these local, regional, and transnational 48

49

In Geggus (ed.), The Haitian Revolution, 182, and n. 10. Several versions of the 28 April proclamation are reproduced online at Julia Gaffield’s “Haiti and the Atlantic World” website, https://haitidoi.com/2015/10/30/dessalines-reader-28-april-1804/. Taylor, American Revolutions, 9.

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anxieties. Those anxieties speak to a nationalism that was more state- than nation-centered, and that pointed toward Virginia’s future as the heart of a southern nation rather than its membership in the United States.50 That southern nation was, as Walter Johnson and others have shown, an imperial nation in its own right, with aspirations not only to dominate the North American union but also to extend its power into the Caribbean and Latin America.51 Such aspirations bore the traces of the mercantilist, military, and racial projects of their eighteenth-century predecessors. The revolutionary period had not liberated the North Atlantic world from the pull of these old dreams. In Newport and Washington, DC, Virginia and New Orleans, Paris and London – as well as from the shores and mountaintops of a largely isolated Haiti – they remained visible as powerful temptations symbolizing what it meant, even then, to be a nation.

Further Reading Adelman, Jeremy, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review, 113/2 (1 April 2008), 319–340. Baker, Keith M., Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Bell, David, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Bradburn, Douglas, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1776–1804 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014). Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Furet, François and Mona Ozouf (eds.), The Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Gaffield, Julia (ed.), The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). Geggus, David, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Parkinson, Robert, The Common Cause: Making Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019). Taylor, Alan, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). 50

51

Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 396, 398. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

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11

The Rise of the Charismatic Nation: Romantic and Risorgimento Nationalism, Europe, 1800–1914 joep leerssen Introduction A specific type of nationalism developed in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. It differed from New World nationalisms (in the tradition of George Washington, Toussaint Louverture and Simón Bolívar) in a number of respects. It was spearheaded to a large extent by writers, artists, and intellectuals (in the fields of cultural production and knowledge production) rather than by political and popular activists; as such it affected existing states and newly emergent nations alike; and its main impact was through the reconceptualization of the state, its self-image, and its institutions, rather than through popular mobilization. Its main tenet – that the state should reflect, and indeed be defined by, the ethnocultural nationality of its inhabitants – was applied in the Peace Treaties of 1919 as an overriding principle in international law (the peoples’ right to self-determination) and still informs our current assumption that the default state is the “nation-state.” Thus universalized, it would appear as though the type of nationalism which emerged out of Romantic Europe is also the ideology’s default, or standard type, and can be mapped on to earlier centuries and wider areas. While indeed Romantic/Risorgimento nationalism has inspired national movements outside Europe, and also invokes collective cultural memories of pre-1800 periods, we would be well advised not to lose sight of its European, nineteenth-century emergence and formation. Romantic nationalism has a long memory but a short, post-1800 history, and emerges from the tectonic faultlines between Europe’s post-Napoleonic empires.1

1

The approach throughout is informed by Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller (eds.), Nationalizing Empires (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982).

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The following pages will aim to give a typology of the tenets and characteristics of the national movements of nineteenth-century imperial Europe (the polygon Baku – Crete – Gibraltar – Iceland – Nova Zembla).2 The approach will move through a narrative sketch of European nationbuilding instances in the century 1804–1914. On the basis of that survey, a summarizing typology will be outlined in this chapter’s conclusion.

The Fall of Two Empires, 1803–1813 During the 1790s, the Holy Roman Empire had lost numerous territories (imperial fiefdoms and lordships) west of the Rhine to the victorious French. The rulers of those territories looked to their liege, the emperor, for compensation; to meet that demand, the empire drew on its reserve of imperial fiefs and ecclesiastical states east of the Rhine. By 1803, a huge reshuffle had been set in motion, requiring cascading constitutional changes that fatally destabilized the old empire. In 1806, Emperor Francis II abolished the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, reverting to the less august style of Emperor Francis I of Austria. In a mere decade and a half, between the guillotining of Louis XVI and the abdication of Francis II, the power of dynastic and institutional traditions had been well and truly demolished. A century later, Max Weber felt it necessary to define, alongside dynastic and institutional forms of authority (the mainstays of the ancien régime), a third one: that of charismatic leadership. Between 1792 and 1806, dynastic and institutional leadership were bulldozed aside by the almost superhuman force with which Napoleon had pursued his rise to power. Goethe and Hegel considered Napoleon a “Titan”; later in the century Carlyle would draw on that sense of transcendent awe in his influential On Heroes and Hero-Worship; and the idea of hero-worship, in turn, influenced Weber when he tried to make sense of the new, national leadership-figures that emerged from the First World War. In calling them “charismatic,” he borrowed a theological term to indicate an authority that was not just coercive but based on awe and devotion: a joyful reverence and a cheerful desire to serve, inspired by force of personality.

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This area, which includes Russia’s southern Caucasus as well as the Europe-facing parts of the Ottoman Empire, stands out as a distinct (albeit, of course, not wholly isolated) catchment area of communicative interconnections; see Joep Leerssen (ed.), Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018; online at http://ernie.uva.nl).

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Weber thus applied to individual political personalities a religious-style liturgical reverence, based on a mantic force of personality, which in the nineteenth century had been focused on the state as an (abstract, impersonal) object of “secular religion”’ or “civic religion.” In fact, state and religion had never been that far apart in the first place. As Rousseau had pointed out in the Contrat Social, “Jamais état ne fut fondé que la religion ne lui servît de base” (“No state was ever founded without religion serving as its base”); and conversely, Durkheim saw religion largely as a metaphysical exteriorization of the state celebrating its own institutional self-perpetuation. Something to that effect had already been intuited by Edmund Burke when he spoke of the “awe and reverence” in which the state’s constitutional permanence should be held by its subjects (see below).3 But whatever individuals Weber had in mind when he typified charismatic leaders as authority figures in the state, behind these we may surmise that it was the nation itself (as opposed to the state and its institutions and representatives) which in the preceding century had become a charismatic presence, an object of devotion, in European politics. In this chapter, I aim to trace this gradual accumulation of charisma by the “nation” (however that term was understood, be it in primarily civic or primarily ethnic terms, be it embodied in a sovereign state or in a disempowered minority population) in the century of imperial downfalls (1806–1918). Napoleon continued to throw his imperial weight around after 1806, humbling Prussia at Jena, creating and abolishing kingdoms, and even annexing Rome and the Papal States. But having demolished the ancien régime order of things,4 his own imperial system lasted all of seven years. And those seven years witnessed the birth of a specific European type of nationalism, one which replaced a lost sense of custom and tradition with that almost mystical force-field that Weber would later call “charisma.” The crushing of traditional institutions and customs in the Napoleonic decade created a general sense of turbulence. Many countries in Europe smarted at their defeat in war, the humiliating reduction of their territories and autonomy, the disorienting disruption of their traditions. In turn, these widespread identity crises provoked a similar response everywhere: a national-cultural reassertion compensating for the political-institutional 3

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See my “Sacral States: The Politics of Worship, Religious and Secular,” in Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason (eds.), Great Immortality: Studies on European Cultural Sainthood (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 15–27. Generally, Annie Jourdan (ed.), L’empire de Napoléon (Paris: Flammarion, 2000); Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History, 3rd edition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

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upheavals. Very often, this gesture came from writers and intellectuals. While the state’s standing, the country’s very territory and sovereignty, may have been violated and disrupted, the nation could take heart by remembering its former greatness and lingering symbolical glamor.5 In 1807, Ireland’s national poet, Thomas Moore, responded to the recent abolition of Ireland’s constitutional autonomy and its coerced merger into the United Kingdom by penning the “Irish Melodies” that revolved around the exhortation to “Let Erin remember the days of old.” In 1811, the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér wrote his epic Svea to deal with the traumatic cession of Finland to Russia, and in 1812, the Dutch poet Frederik Helmers wrote De Hollandsche Natie to reflect on the glories of his country, now annexed into the French Empire. Different countries, similar crises, identical responses. The roll-call of “national-historicist poems written in the Romantic period to come to terms with a crisis of identity and continuity” could be expanded by multiple examples, from Józef Wybicki’s Mazurek Dą broskiego (“Dabrowski’s Mazurka,” beginning “No, not yet is Poland lost,” 1797) and Denmark’s Adam Oehlenschläger’s Guldhornerne (“The Golden Horns,” 1802) to Auguste Brizeux, Le chant des Bretons (1835) and Nikoloz Baratažvili’s Bedi Kartlisa (“The Doom of Georgia,” 1839). An epidemic proliferation gathered momentum as each text, while responding to specific tensions, had repercussions of its own and inspired others. Wybicki’s Polish anthem inspired the Croatian Ljudevit Gaj to pen his 1833 lyric Još Hrvatska ni propala (“Croatia Has Not Yet Fallen”). By 1848, all oppressed peoples recognized their own plight in Verdi’s Va pensiero chorus (from the opera Nabucco, 1842), ostensibly about the Jewish people in their Babylonian captivity, but with universal symbolic applicability. This poetic nationalism, or Romantic nationalism – the culturally expressed affirmation of national continuity and identity, and the invocation of the nation’s deep roots in the face of present and future disruptions – was not “started” by a single inventor. It emerged from the systemic collapse of the ancien régime in Europe and proliferated in an intricately complex literary system (Romanticism) from a multiplicity of factors, at a precipitating rate, and with a rapidly increasing cohesion between its individual manifestations in different places. The development was neither linear nor random; and it was identifiably specific as to its typology and the “tipping point” moment of its emergence. 5

Unless otherwise specified, references to historical events and developments follow the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe and its documentation.

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Four factors coincide that allowed Romantic nationalism to go viral all over Europe: 1 Repertoire: the discourse of the nation’s liberty as a moral imperative was pan-European, rooted in Old Testament and classical antiquity, and that textual inheritance, its themes and rhetoric, had been assiduously applied to modern Europe in the preceding century of Enlightenment patriotism.6 2 Systemic: these were parallel responses to similar situations in different countries, notably the disruptive Napoleonic challenge to traditional continuity.7 3 Infrastructural: all affected countries experienced a fresh availability of historical sources and literary publication media, a heightened human mobility as a result of warfare, and the translocal outreach of newly reformed academic schooling. This process went in tandem with the growth of the public intellectual and with the academic professionalization of historians and philologists.8 4 Communicative diffusion: poets and writers took inspiration from each other in a continent-wide network of cross-national transfers.9

Nation against Revolution, 1805–1815 Two or three names stand out as early and influential vindicators of the nation’s continuity against disruptive modernity: Edmund Burke, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Between them, they redefined the concept of the nation from sociopolitical into culture-historical terms. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke had famously argued that the nation was more than just a social contract. The members of 6

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See Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); for the pre-1700 run-up: Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1945, with repeated reprints). Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). This ideologization of nostalgia recalls Mannheim’s analysis of the ideologization of traditionalism: the challenges of modernity and the disruption of traditions turned people who had unreflectedly and unconsciously been traditionalists into conscious, ideologically deliberate conservatives and anti-revolutionaries; Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (translation of the 1925 habilitation thesis) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Joep Leerssen, “Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past,” Modern Language Quarterly, 65/2 (2014), 221–243. A.-M. Thiesse, La création des identités nationales (Paris: Seuil, 1999).

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the nation were also bonded in a transgenerational contract between ancestors and descendants, sharing an enduring legacy of institutions, and a sense of awe and reverential piety toward those ancestral institutions. Around 1805, that point was picked up by the German legal scholar Savigny. He resisted the imposition of a modern, uniform Napoleonic law code by arguing that it was alien to the German national identity. Legal systems, like languages, were proper to the individual nation, an organic outgrowth of its institutional and moral development over the centuries, and the inalienable expression of its own unique and distinctive Volksgeist (Savigny’s neologism). Fichte, in his Addresses to the German Nation of 1808, elevated this principle of cultural authenticity and organic continuity into a moral-political imperative. He argued that, since the love between parents and children was a spontaneous human instinct, not an acquired social accomplishment, it was therefore a moral, not just a civic, duty to respect the nation’s uninterrupted continuity between generations. From this, Fichte also deduced the moral superiority of the German nation as a stalwart protector of cultural continuity and traditions. Thus the argument against revolutionary change widened from institutions of state to the nation’s culture. As the Holy Roman Empire was expiring, its constituent German Nation with its cultural persistence and moral virtues was invoked, not only by Savigny and Fichte, but by intellectuals and writers in their wake: the Grimm Brothers, E. M. Arndt, J. J. Goerres, Friedrich Jahn, Schleiermacher, and many others. These were not just rarefied men of letters but public intellectuals. Through their essays, periodicals, and poems they applied mounting anti-French pressure to the public climate of the German lands, and helped nudge Prussia into joining the anti-Napoleonic alliance in 1813 and into arming its civilian militias. After Napoleon’s defeat, Arndt used the Volksgeist principle to justify territorial claims for an aspirationally reconstituted Germany. He proclaimed in a classic 1814 anthem that “the German’s fatherland is wherever the German tongue is heard, singing the praises of God on high.” That became the dominant outlook of the German Romantics. “German” as a national slogan referred to more than a language and a set of vernacular, homespun traditions. In the parlance of Arndt and his successors the appellation deutsch celebrated the moral superiority of the Volksgeist, with its forthrightness, honesty, quiet tenacity, and decency – always contrasted, implicitly, with duplicitous, pushy, showy, or pretentious foreigners. Most foregroundedly, those foreigners were the French, but, if need be, other nationalities or ethnicities could also serve as the negative counterpart: Poles or Jews. Echt

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deutsch, or recht deutsch, or gut deutsch was a dogwhistle affirmation that this was a stalwart nation rooted in strong traditions and a firm character.10 And so “moral self-righteousness” and “a territory defined by language and Volksgeist” became further additions to the repertoire of anti-revolutionary nationalism. Nationalism necessarily combines a claimed territory with selfserving chauvinism – although we should realize that this is not a German monopoly or Sonderweg: the word chauvinism itself was coined after the French fictional character of Nicolas Chauvin, and has its parallel in the very British notion of jingoism. Within Britain, earlier patriotic and antiFrench sentiment had hardened into outright chauvinistic nationalism during the Napoleonic invasion scare of 1803 and following Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar (1805). British nationalism expressed itself in a welter of celebrations of true Englishness, jolly tars, hearts of oak, roast beef, inviolate insularity, unbroken traditions, and other John Bullish tropes and icons.11 Outside the realm of war propaganda, the political impact of these sentiments was less direct. Arndt, to his lifelong chagrin, failed to see a German fatherland realize his claims to Alsace-Lorraine and the Low Countries. But behind short-term political failure we often see, more lingering, a long-term cultural allure and ideological influence. Within Germany, memories of a primordial German past had been reawakened after 1806 in various cultural fields: in Von der Hagen’s first modern edition of the Nibelungenlied (1807); in the Grimm Brothers’ editions of German fairy tales and legends (1811–1816); in Goerres’s call to restore and complete Cologne Cathedral (1814); in Rückert’s poetical celebration of the Barbarossa myth (1817); in the flood of sentimental medievalism that suffused German literature and painting from 1810 onwards. The restoration of the various castle ruins on the Rhine, and later on the Kaiserpfalz in Goslar: all this harked back to the old empire, and by tacit implication looked forward to its future restoration.12 (See Figure 11.1.) That political renewal was attempted in 1848, when the Frankfurt Parliament (with a heavy contingent of literati from the Romantic generation) resolved to offer the imperial dignity to the king of Prussia – unsuccessfully so. 10

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On the importance of stereotypes of national character in national thought, see Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (eds.), Imagology (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Many of these tropes had entered into cultural circulation in the previous half-century, dominated as it had been by the French wars. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nations, 1707–1837, revised edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London: Routledge, 1989). Camilla Kaul, Friedrich Barbarossa im Kyffhäuser (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007); Joep Leerssen, “Once Upon a Time in Germany,” in Graham Loud and Martial Staub (eds.), The Making of Medieval History (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2017).

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Figure 11.1 Herman Wiscilenus, Apotheosis of Wilhelm I as Restorer of Imperial Germany. Fresco, in the main hall of the Kaiserpfalz, Goslar, c. 1897. Reproduced by permission from the SPIN imagebank, Amsterdam (ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/52). This mural is the centerpiece of a cycle of history paintings covering the walls of the main hall of the Imperial Manor (Kaiserpfalz) at Goslar following its restoration. It shows in central position Emperor Wilhelm I and behind him the Crown Prince, Friedrich, flanked on the left by Chancellor Bismarck and Commander-in-Chief Moltke, and on the right by the allegorical figures of the cities of Strasbourg and Metz, symbolizing the recently (“re”-)annexed province of Alsace-Lorraine. At the foot are the allegorical figures of the River Rhine and the Spirit of the German Fairy Tale, signifying the power of Germany’s romantic cultural traditions; a “raven of discord” is seen flying away. To the left are the assembled monarchs of the German lands, with (counterhistorically) Ludwig of Bavaria proffering the imperial crown; to the right are the Hohenzollern royal family (with a young Wilhelm II) and Prussian dignitaries. The aerial figures above are imperial predecessors and Hohenzollern ancestors grouped around the figure of Queen Louise (1776–1810), object of a sentimental-political cult at the time. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108655385.013

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A Reich was restored, to universal jubilation, in 1871, when a renewed German Empire was proclaimed on the ruins of the vanquished French one, in the presence of its architect, Bismarck, and with Alsace-Lorraine included. Wilhelm I was hailed as Barbablanca, in analogy to the medieval Barbarossa. While cultural nationalism had been powerless to force the pace of these developments, its omnipresent and unchallenged appeal to the collective imagination did dictate the direction in which those developments would move. Somewhere between Grimm and Bismarck, the Reichsidee had been adapted from medieval fairy tales and Barbarossa memories to blood, iron, and Realpolitik.

Restorations and Dynastic Historicism, 1815–1848 After Napoleon’s two-stage downfall, marked by the battles of Leipzig and Waterloo, Europe reverted, ostensibly, to a status quo ante. A complete return was impossible, of course; like Humpty Dumpty, the ancien régime, having had a great fall, could not be put together again. Monarchs (like Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, Willem I of the Netherlands, and Louis XVIII of France) tried to pick up the pieces, many of them accepting, half-heartedly, to govern by constitution rather than by divine right. The people had clamored for an end to Napoleonic rule, not because they hankered after hard dynastic and aristocratic power, but because they were loath to see traditions and a sense of historical rootedness abolished by a foreign conqueror. And so, the restored regimes accepted a more communitarian notion of the state – although many monarchs would in the next decades ignore or abrogate the constitutions they had accepted in 1814–1815. The cultural and historical ties between kings and people were emphasized. A more traditionalist and historicist, “romantic” notion of kingship was adopted. Decaying monuments, which a generation earlier would have been torn down or left to fall into ruin, were now preserved and restored as visible markers of the monarchy’s continuity: the royal burial chapel at Saint-Denis, the headquarters of the Teutonic order at the Marienburg (now Malbork), the feudal keep of the Muiderslot near Amsterdam, and, most famously, Cologne Cathedral, now under Prussian rule and under Prussian protection, in an attempt to win Rhinelanders’ hearts and minds. Pius VII, restored to his city of Rome, undertook maintenance works in the Colosseum and the Arch of Titus, and founded what are now the Vatican Museums, sending Canova on a mission to Paris to retrieve looted artworks.13 Similar 13

On the papacy and the Vatican as a vantage point on nineteenth-century nationalism in various parts of Europe, see Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).

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retrieval missions for artworks and medieval manuscripts were undertaken by many other restored monarchs; culture was now a matter of national interest. Louis XVIII replaced the vanished equestrian statue of Henri IV on the PontNeuf with a brand new one, recast from decommissioned republican and Napoleonic monuments. Willem of the Netherlands and Ludwig of Bavaria readopted feudal titles that had lapsed a long time ago but carried historical resonance. The benchmark of such a politics of symbolism was George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1821, stage-managed by none other than Walter Scott, during which the Hanoverian monarch donned the tartan and kilt that had until fairly recently been outlawed, like the bagpipes, as signs of Scottish rebelliousness. That ban, imposed in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, had been lifted owing to the effort of Highland Societies founded in the 1770s. Scott, who saw in George’s visit a chance to merge past Scottish–English enmities into a higher British concord, urged Highland gentry and Edinburgh elite to present themselves to the king in their cultural finery. This reframing of native traditions in an urban-aristocratic setting had a twofold impact. In the nineteenth century, it spawned the cult of All Things Highland, as a colorful variation in the British-imperial iconography; Queen Victoria set the tone with her newly acquired and newly refurbished castle at Balmoral and her patronage of Highland games. A century later, the same episode furnished historians with an ideal-typical example of an “invented tradition.” In Hobsbawm and Ranger’s epochal collection The Invention of Tradition (1983), Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay on the kilt-and-tartan case was the flagship contribution. The analytical model – that national historicism thrives on notions of authenticity and tradition, and will invoke or cultivate these even though there may not be much authentic material to work from – was and remains one of the most important historiographical insights to enrich nationalism studies. But Trevor-Roper (notoriously antipathetic to all things Scottish) scornfully overstated his debunking case – as if before Scott there had been nothing culturally authentic or traditional in Scottish society, and no cultural transfer whatsoever from Highland society into the Scottish urban elite or middle classes.14 In the process, the “Invention of Tradition” 14

Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in E. J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, new edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–42. A more balanced and thorough account is given in John Prebble, The King’s Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, August 1822: “One and Twenty Daft Days” (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1988). Trevor-Roper’s ongoing engagement with Scotland is documented in his posthumous The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

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model was rendered unhelpfully black-and-white, with no middle ground between the truly authentic and the spuriously faked contrivance. In the decades since 1983 scholars have begun to explore the grey area between those extremes: how romantic historicism will not necessarily invent a national past out of whole cloth, but, in retrieving such fragments and traces as can be found, reassemble and prettify it and accommodate it to contemporary values and agendas.15 Victoria’s generation of monarchs were, all of them, like Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, “Romantics on the throne”: they had been educated or influenced as youngsters by anti-Napoleonic, Romantic intellectuals (like Scott). When their turn came to mount the throne, they carried nationalhistoricist romanticism into the very apex of governance. The prototypical “Romantic on the throne” was Ludwig I of Bavaria, who reigned from 1825 on. Prince-Consort Albert in the UK, Willem II of the Netherlands, and Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia were all in position as of 1840; Empress Elisabeth of Austria (“Sissi”) spread her cult of Heine and dashing Byronic Magyars as of 1854. And various Wittelsbach, Hohenzollern, and SaxeCoburg princes were placed on newly created thrones in the Balkans: Otto of Greece, 1832; Carol of Romania, 1866; Ferdinand of Bulgaria, 1887. They all applied Walter Scott’s lesson of donning traditional dress, channelling, and purportedly embodying the nation’s cultural traditions, in a Ruritanian but highly effective policy to capture “soft power.” The royal palaces themselves, from Balmoral to Peles¸ Castle (Sinaia) by way of Neuschwanstein, were often “Disneyfied” to recall medieval romances or Grimm-style fairy tales; this was the century of rampant neogothicism, not of Good Taste. Royalty bought into romantic glamor, but what of the people at large? Those people who had, before 1789, been subjects, but now called themselves nations?

Nation against Restoration, 1820–1830 What seemed lost in the post-1815 restorations was the democratic ideal of the nation as a self-governing community of empowered citizens. “Democracy” was a dirty word, conjuring up images of guillotines and sans-culottes, but the notion of popular empowerment remained a powerful dream for the activists of the 1805–1815 decade. 15

Generally, see Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); also Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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Indeed, by 1820, the honeymoon between Europe’s restored monarchs and their liberated nations was over. Those who had resisted Napoleon’s rise to dictatorial power and had called for a return to national community were now beginning to resist the Restoration regime and recalled with some wistfulness the civic empowerment they had tasted before 1815. In Germany, antirestorationism turned to an idealized memory of the collective national awakening of 1806–1813; elsewhere in Europe there was a sense that Napoleon had not been all bad, and that the baby of civic empowerment needed to be rescued from the Metternich bathwater. An early sign was the fateful Wartburg Festival (October 1817).16 It marked two national glory days at once: the tercentenary of Luther’s reformation (publication of the Ninety-Five Theses) and the anniversary of the battle of Leipzig, which had been celebrated nationwide since 1814 at Arndt’s instigation. After the battle of Leipzig, demobilized students had incorporated themselves into fraternities, keeping the spirit of 1813 alive in songs and rituals, and setting up a transregional network connecting German university towns across state frontiers. The celebrations involved a bonfire (by now traditional for these 1813 anniversaries) and speeches denouncing the ongoing influence of French-derived frippery and authoritarianism in German affairs. Books and other symbols were solemnly burned in the bonfire; that fatal gesture was intended to recall Luther’s burning of the Papal Bull of excommunication, but would, in turn, be recycled by Goebbels a good century later for altogether more sinister purposes. The authorities were alarmed by this vehemence and (as it was termed) “demagoguery.” When one of the protagonists committed a politically motivated assassination shortly afterwards (the victim being the celebrated playwright August von Kotzebue, apologist for the reactionary and autocratic tsar), harshly repressive countermeasures ensued. Arndt was suspended from the professorial chair he had been given in Bonn. The honeymoon was over, and German nationalism parted ways with restoration monarchism. Similar tensions were noticeable in all parts of Europe. In Ireland, Daniel O’Connell unleashed a campaign for the emancipation of the country’s disenfranchised Catholics. In the process he looked to the example of the Latin American independence leader Simón Bolívar, and after achieving “Catholic Emancipation” in 1828, he shifted his aims toward “Repeal of the 16

Generally, see Dieter Düding, Peter Friedemann, and Paul Münch (eds.), Öffentliche Festkultur: Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1998).

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[British–Irish] Union.” In Odessa, Greek merchants founded a prototypical secret society for the liberation of their fatherland from Ottoman rule, the Filiki Eteria or “friendly association.” The troubled period of Greek insurrections after 1821 elicited huge support across Europe, known as philhellenism, culminating in the almost-mythical death of Byron in besieged Missolonghi (1824). In Britain, progressives supported the Spanish resistance against neoabsolutism during and after the Trienio Liberal (1820–1823) and showed support for the most influential anti-restoration movement of all: the Italian Carbonari and their successor, Giuseppe Mazzini’s “Young Italy” (Giovine Italia) movement.17 The Carbonari had organized popular revolts in various states on the Italian peninsula throughout the 1820s; after their defeat by Habsburg armies, they regrouped under Mazzini as Giovine Italia. Mazzini’s program was, it should be noted, not primarily nationalistic; the self-realization of the nation as a historical/cultural community and its rejection of foreign hegemony was at best an undertone in his republican agenda, which was dominated by a rejection of hereditary rulers and their repressive, divisive government. It was only in the later phases of the Risorgimento that a culturalist-national element came to the fore: to unify the Apennine peninsula into a single nation-state. Tellingly, however, that national-unification ideal had little appeal for the intended grassroots of the movement, the peasantry. There was a similar asymmetry in Ireland between the primarily social grievances of the peasantry and the cultural historicism of nationalist activists. While Greek, Spanish, and Italian insurgents attracted international support among Europe’s Romantics, their mobilizing power at home was no match for the state’s power. The only successful uprisings of the period were those of the Serbs, which in 1817 ended in the de facto recognition of a principality of Serbia. The Greeks fared poorly in their 1821 uprising until, under the pressure of philhellenism and geopolitical rivalry, the European powers came to their aid and fostered the establishment of a kingdom under a Bavarian king (1832). By then, a wave of anti-absolutist, liberal revolts had swept the continent, inspired by the revolution against Charles X’s absolutist policies in France (July 1830). Anti-absolutism took on a nationalist tinge with the Belgian revolt of September 1830, when the activists of Liège and Brussels foreswore the rule of the Dutch king Willem I – not only in the name of constitutional freedom, but also in the name of national liberation from 17

Richard Stites, The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Konstantina Zanou, Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean: Stammering the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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a neighboring hegemon. This wave crested two months later (November 1830) in the Polish Uprising. When it transpired that the tsar intended to deploy troops from Russian-governed Poland to aid the autocratic monarchs Charles X and Willem I, Polish officers refused service. Their uprising was from the beginning also marked by deep bitterness over Poland’s continuing dismemberment and foreign domination over the erstwhile kingdom. The motto of the Polish Uprising (“For your liberty and ours”) was a direct appeal to solidarity among the emerging national movements of Europe. These movements were carried, ironically, by a certain nostalgia for the Napoleonic period, which in France, Poland, Italy, and the Illyrian Provinces (roughly present-day Croatia and Slovenia) was recalled in a favorable contrast with post-1815 restoration regimes. Once again, national idealism, even when it failed to topple state power, left a lingering influence outlasting its defeat. The national movements in Italy and Poland were suppressed, but they left a strong sense of unfinished business among the defeated nationalists, who now had the success stories of Serbia, Greece, and independent Belgium to inspire them. Mazzini, driven into exile from Italy after failed insurrections in 1833, became a charismatic wandering apostle for the cause of national liberty; in Geneva he won Giuseppe Garibaldi (who as a merchant’s son led a traveling life) over to his cause. On their nomadic wanderings, the two would become international celebrities, almost in the style of the Dalai Lama or Che Guevara. Mazzini’s message caught on internationally: on the model of “Young Italy,” similar associations were established vindicating the cause of national liberty for Poles, Germans, and many other nationalities. In the century’s second quarter the national movements of Europe slowly became the strongest counterideology against Metternich-style restorationism, sensitizing and mobilizing hearts and minds for what in 1848 would become a surge of revolutions across Europe.

Official and Subversive Nationalisms, 1830–1848 Only a few European states endorsed an overtly nationalistic agenda in the 1830s. The two newcomers, Belgium and Greece, proclaimed their newly won sovereignty with an intense cultural policy of historicist selflegitimation, underwriting their recent independence by stressing their deep and authentic cultural roots. But Europe’s most typically nationalistic state was perhaps Louis-Philippe’s France. The July Monarchy aimed to reconcile the country’s sharp political divisions in the name of a shared 244

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French nationality. Part of Versailles was transformed into a national museum dedicated “à toutes les gloires de la France”; the contested space behind the Tuileries (where Louis XVI had been guillotined) was redesigned as the “Place de la Concorde” on the sightline between the Louvre and the Napoleonic Arc de Triomphe; and Louis-Philippe repatriated the emperor’s corpse from St. Helena to its final resting place in the Invalides. Under his reign, the cult of Joan of Arc took off, Victor Hugo published his Notre Dame de Paris, Michelet began his Histoire de France, the Musée de Cluny opened, and Mérimée inventorized the country’s historical monuments for their future restoration by Viollet-le-Duc. In addition, Paris became a haven for Polish revolutionaries who had fled from the suppression of the uprising in 1831; wandering Romantics like Chopin and Mickiewicz joined them there. None of that could prevent Louis-Philippe’s downfall in the revolution of 1848. Similarly, Ludwig of Bavaria came to grief, despite his massive public assertion of national historicism, with monumental museums and buildings dedicated to great German geniuses and military leaders, and his sincere dedication to his country’s arts and sciences. He was driven from the throne in truly romantic fashion: during the unrest of 1848 he scandalized and alienated his powerbase by an affair with an adventuress, Lola Montez. In the build-up to the 1848 moment, cultural nationalism had also been used “from below”: as a coded expression for political radicalism. Its repertoire differed very little from the official art of the restored monarchies: both the monarchical and the subversive celebration of the nation drew on common themes and styles. Hearts aglow with ardent love of the fatherland, heroic-sublime sacrifices for its liberty; communities celebrating their convivial concord; moving examples from the colorful past inspiring present generations: all that could be used either to glorify the status quo or to challenge it. The figure of the Tyrolean peasant insurgent Andreas Hofer, executed in Mantua in 1810, was used as the occasion required: by the left, as a tragic peasant hero callously abandoned by his country’s elite; by the right, as an exemplar of grassroots peasant traditionalism; and later on in the century to personify Austria’s claims on Southern Tyrol. The opera La muette de Portici, which during its premiere in Paris 1828 had proclaimed the doomed folly of revolutionary violence, had in its 1830 reprise in Brussels triggered the national Belgian revolt with its aria Amour sacrée de la patrie. Romantic art preached nationality as a virtue to reactionaries and revolutionaries alike. Europe, as yet, had little freedom of the press or freedom of assembly. What seemed on the surface an anodyne exercise in cultural antiquarianism or leisure time amusement could in fact be a veiled assertion of the people’s 245

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liberties and aspirations. Verdi’s Nabucco of 1841 did for domestic Italian audiences what Mazzini and Garibaldi were doing in their exiled activism. Norwegians and Icelanders glorified the stalwart days of their medieval independence, literati in Barcelona revived the memories of the medieval troubadours and their poetic contests (“Floral Games”), oral epic was being retrieved and published from Serbia to Finland. Everywhere in Europe, novelists in the wake of Walter Scott narrated the glories and the crisis moments of their national history.18 Tellingly, unlike the conservative Scott, his imitators usually ended their novels, not on a note of reconciliation or of moving beyond the hatred of the past, but with a resounding clarion call to heed the ancestral call and to continue the nation’s struggle against its oppressors. Similarly, public cultural events (musical performances, funerals of cherished writers, public commemorations of great authors and artists) could be pregnant with coded political messages.19 The various Schiller commemorations in Germany as of 1829 recalled him as the champion of Gedankenfreiheit (freedom of conscience) and as author of Wilhelm Tell, glorifying the hero’s resistance against Habsburg rule and the unification of the cantons into a single, empowered nation. Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1834) was abjectly loyal to the dynasty but already glorified a self-sacrificing peasant-figure; Scribe would go on to pen librettos (for Auger’s La muette de Portici and for Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers) where the common people would take a bolder hand in their nations’ destinies. And the arias and choruses from such operas were applauded not only in the concert halls but also domestically and convivially, in chamber music arrangements or choral adaptations. In the climate of sociability, so characteristic of this century, choral associations were founded from Catalonia to Wales and from Greece to the Baltic. Their membership was locally situated, usually based in the lower and middling bourgeoisie of the towns and cities, but the repertoire was intensely national, published on sheet music with a wide distribution, its spirit often celebrating the nation as an object of loyalty and veneration.20 As leisure time travel became more easily affordable, choirs (usually male choirs, 18

19

20

Murray Pittock (ed.), The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (London: Continuum, 2007). Düding et al. (eds.), Öffentliche Festkultur, passim; Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (eds.), Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen (eds.), Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Joep Leerssen, “Romanticism, Music, Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism, 20 (2014), 606–627; Joep Leerssen, “The Nation and the City: Urban Festivals and Cultural Mobilization,” Nations and Nationalism, 21 (2015), 2–20.

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later also mixed) exchanged visits, held regional festivals, and concatenated into federative structures. By the early 1840s, “national” choral festivals were held in Germany; the format spread to Spain, the Scandinavian countries, and the Baltic later in the century. A composer like Mendelssohn owed part of his popularity to his involvement in choral festivals. Other public manifestations of national concord and cultural interest included the Welsh eisteddfod, which later in the century would inspire similar events across the Celtic world, and the Slovak hiking excursions into the Tatra Mountains. In the Nordic countries, students from Denmark and Norway/Sweden met in pan-Scandinavian gatherings. Athletics and sports were another nationally inflected platform which later would carry mass-participation events. The result of all this was a curious ambivalence in the cultural celebration of the nation. On the one hand, it was studiously apolitical, avoiding the suspicion of sedition by extolling the nation as a purely moral framework, as unpolitical as a fitness workout, sweetheart wooings, or the joys of nature, hunting, and convivial cheer. Below the surface, however, there was always the oblique hint that the nation desired unity across political divides, and was prepared to face foes and oppressors. The national fervor of the 1840s reconciled the nostalgic, chauvinist, and radical aspects of nationalism. The nation was invoked as a comfort zone of tradition, concord, and familiarity; at the same time, it was mobilized against elite prerogative and authoritarian power, and against foreigners. The poet Hoffmann von Fallersleben, in his Deutschlandlied (“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles”), looks forward both to a chauvinistically expanded unified territory and to a democratically empowered unified nation. The nation was placed in two differently angled alignments. One vindicated its place and territory in space and history, as a transgenerational cultural community; the other vindicated its empowerment in the state, as a social stratum. That ambivalence foreshadowed the duality of what are nowadays termed the coexisting “ethnic” and “civic” aspects of nationalism.21 In the

21

The heuristic distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism uses those terms as ideal types: they serve only as the end points of a transitional spectrum between them, on which all actual manifestations of nationalism can be situated. As such, the distinction, a tool for present-day theorists and historians, in fact perpetuates the older discourse of national thinkers and activists themselves. The long debate between German and French intellectuals and writers over which country had the best claims to Alsace-Lorraine saw German apologists, from Arndt to Treitschke, habitually invoke the ethnic argument: deep cultural rootedness. After the 1871 German annexation, French intellectuals, led initially by Numa Fustel de Coulanges, countered such claims by the argument of civic involvement and popular choice. Ernest Renan, who had formed part of this French

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mid- to late nineteenth century, those two aspects were merged in the ideology of “national liberalism.” The program linking territorial unification to political emancipation was particularly powerful for those populations divided across different states: the Germans, the Italians, but also the Scandinavians and various Slavic nations, which in these years became aware of their common cultural roots and heritage. All this came to a head in the revolutionary year 1848, which saw the city of Rome briefly conquered by Garibaldi and a republic proclaimed there; a national parliamentary assembly deliberating on a pan-German constitution in Frankfurt; and a Slavic Congress in Prague formulating common grievances and aspirations. Revolution was general all over Europe, typically combining a democratic and a national independence program – importantly so in Hungary and in the Danubian Provinces (present-day Romania). The idea of liberation worked both horizontally and vertically, proclaiming the freedom of the press, the end of servitude and aristocratic privilege, as well as the restoration of the country-at-large to its ancient historical dignity and proper boundaries. Once again, these revolutions failed to realize their ideals but managed to carry their memory forward. Even in France, where Louis-Philippe was ousted, the 1848 republic was soon hijacked by Napoleon III, who, having gained power electorally in late 1848, restored the imperial system in 1852. The dignitaries from the Frankfurt parliament who offered an imperial crown to the king of Prussia were sent packing – that dignity was not in the gift of mere commoners – and the Habsburgs beat down their various revolutionaries and separatists, embarking on a period of censorship and repression. The legacy of 1848 was foregroundedly a bifurcation between nationalism and socialism. The latter, following Marx, shifted from idealism to materialism, from the nation’s cultural superstructure to its economic base. And soon

counterclaim, juxtaposed the two modes of reasoning in his classic Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? of 1882. It archly refrained from mentioning the contested region by name, but repeatedly identified (and contradicted) the ethnic, misleading nationality claims as “German,” opposing them to his own, saner, more reasonable civic-voluntaristic definition of the nation – which implicitly was claimed as “French.” Renan thus transferred the civic– ethnic distinction from the field of political antagonism to that of political theorizing. But the implicit value judgments (ethnic is theirs and bad, civic is ours and good) were taken over in Hans Kohn’s model of nationalism opposing good, Western, civic nationalism to its bad, ethnic, Eastern counterpart. See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New York, Macmillan, 1944). Cf. generally my “The NederEnding Stream: Cultural Mobilization over the Rhine,” in Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (eds.), The Rhine: National Tensions, Romantic Visions (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 224–261, with primary documentation 262–347.

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the Crimean War would turn the question of nation formation in Europe into a matter of geopolitics, directed from above by statesmen and raison d’état.

1848–1871: We’re All National Now In the wake of the Crimean War (1853–1856), geopolitical jealousies between the European powers aided the autonomy of Serbia, Montenegro, and the Danubian Provinces (Wallachia and Moldavia, achieving all but complete sovereignty under the name of Romania). The Tanzimat reforms had created a breathing space for Christian subjects in the Ottoman millet system in the southern Balkans and the capital Istanbul. National minorities in the western provinces of Russia (Finland, the Baltic areas, Ukraine, and of course Poland) were cautiously pursuing a politically sanitized cultural agenda. Similarly, conservative nationalists in Bohemia, Galicia, and Croatia managed to nudge the reactionary Habsburg government toward some degree of cultural subsidiarity.22 Things were a little edgier in the northwest: the Germanspeakers of Schleswig-Holstein were getting increasingly fervent panGerman moral support against Danish centralization, the Flemish movement intensified its social demands in Belgium, while in Ireland, politics was feeling the backwash of its American diaspora in the form of Fenianism (radical republican separatism, if necessary by violent means). Polish patriots engaged in another doomed uprising in 1861. The unification of Italy was achieved in 1861; it was the first sign that Habsburg Austria, the successor state to the defunct Holy Roman Empire, was now itself beginning to crumble. In a good-cop/bad-cop approach, the military actions of Garibaldi were backed up by the diplomacy of Cavour and the prestige of the king of Sardinia, Vittorio Emmanuele. With the connivance of Napoleon III, Italian regions united in the teeth of Austrian resistance. An independent state was proclaimed, with its capital initially in Turin, then in Florence, and finally, after the Papal States had been conquered, in Rome. That new state was a kingdom; necessarily so, given the anathema that republicanism represented post-1848. Mazzini, his ideals betrayed, kept an embittered distance. The Austrian sphere of influence also eroded north of the Alps. Prussia waged victorious wars, first jointly with Austria against Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein (1864), and then against its German opponents. The 22

Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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years 1866–1867 saw the defeat of Austria and Bavaria, and the annexation of Hanover and Saxony. In response, Austria marshaled its internal resources by conciliating its ethnic minorities, which since 1848 had been kept on a tight leash. A constitutional recalibration (Ausgleich) was undertaken in 1867, with its prime beneficiaries being the Hungarians. In a Romantic pageant full of traditional Hungarian dress uniforms and Walter-Scott-style ceremonies, Franz Joseph and Sissi were crowned king and queen of a revamped kingdom of Hungary. A dual Austro-Hungarian, imperial-royal realm was created, predicated on the ideal of a multiethnic empire (Vielvölkerstaat), with all inhabitants, diverse as they were culturally, united in their loyalty toward the emperor-king. In practice, the Dual Monarchy was less of a happy family than it would have liked to think. Czechs were disgruntled because their kingdom of Bohemia received less autonomy and status than Hungary; Hungary itself, ethnically diverse though it was, celebrated its Magyar identity while intolerantly repressing the aspirations of its Slovaks, Transylvanian Romanians, and Vojvodinian Serbs; and Galicia saw growing tensions between its Ukrainian/Ruthenian and Polish populations. The bestplaced minorities were the Slovenes and Croats, but even in that area, trouble was brewing. Italian irredentist claims targeted the (formerly Venetian) Dalmatian coastline from Trieste to Dubrovnik. In short, the nationalities of the area, once given a little leeway, were using that leeway to firm up their nationalist claims, frequently against each other. The unification of Italy was followed in 1871 by that of Germany. An imperial Reich was proclaimed; its fervent, all-pervasive triumphalism drew in equal measure on the cultural self-celebration of the Romantics and on Prussian geopolitical power politics. In this third quarter of the century, state-dominant and regional-minority national identities asserted their aspirations concurrently. The national language, literature, and history were taught in schools, but minorities requested recognition for their language or culture in the public sphere and usually obtained a modicum of it – enough to enhance their visibility, not enough to satisfy their need for recognition. Cheap print and increasing literacy made reading material available – if necessary through book clubs and reading rooms23 – to all cultural communities in Europe, from Basque and Gallego to Gaelic, and from Icelandic to Finnish, from Albanian to Lithuanian. Performative culture (sports, amateur theatre, choral singing) 23

Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen (eds.), Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

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involved all portions of society. The stage dresses of choirs and theater troupes were fashioned by their female members on the model of traditional peasant dresses, which had obtained iconographic currency in the open-air school of rustic genre painting. Like painting, the novel, too, turned from past to peasant, that other privileged sphere of the romantic imagination: from the themes of primitive epic or heroic chivalry to the rustic realism of the contemporary countryside. Even operas, traditionally in the high historicalheroic mode, developed a taste for countryside tragedy (Carmen, Cavalleria rusticana, Jenů fa). By the 1870s, all classical music in Europe had, in the wake of Glinka, Liszt, Wagner, and Smetana, become nationalized. Architecture was beginning to inflect its neogothic historicism with locally vernacular styles, channeling half-timbered farmhouses, Alpine chalets, and Ottoman-style projecting balconies and oriel windows. All the central squares of the cities and towns were studded with commemorative statues of Great Fatherlanders, often planned and financed in grassroots campaigns but unveiled by government officials or heads of state. Nationality was proclaimed in all places, in all genres, in all cultural fields, in education and in public events, top-down and bottom-up, in the metropolitan centers and (hybridized with regional particularisms) in the outlying provinces. The later nineteenth century was as deeply soaked in cultural nationalism as the Middle Ages had been in religion.

The Nation Calls her Sons to Arms, 1870–1914 Between 1870 and 1914, nationalism sharpened intranational and international divisions in Europe. In the multiethnic states, minorities became increasingly impatient about their rights. All the European nation-states that gained their independence between 1900 and 1920, mainly in the framework of the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919, were rooted in increasingly assertive movements that had gathered steam from the 1860s on. From the peaceful (Norway, Iceland) to the militantly separatist (Ireland, Macedonia), all these movements were prone to a stadial progress of antagonistic intensification.24 The cautious Austro-Slavic conservative nationalists of post-1848 vintage (Old Czechs, Old Slovenes) were outflanked by more radical Young Czechs and Young Slovenes. Reformists in the ailing Ottoman Empire moved from Young Ottomanism to Young Turkism. Many regionalist movements were turning away from the old modes of romantic historicism and rustic realism, and 24

As per the well-known “phase model” progression mapped by Miroslav Hroch.

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developed a deliberately avant-garde form of cultural expression (often in the art nouveau register, from Riga to Prague to Barcelona), which proclaimed their ambition to become autonomous members of a European international modernity. The growing fashion for international fairs and expositions offered a display platform for such regionalist-to-nationalist selfproclamations. Meanwhile, the existing states engaged in increasingly fierce territorial rivalries, where geopolitical considerations (access to sea ports and natural resources) were overshadowed by cultural self-vindications ultimately derived from the Arndt school. The Prussian historian Treitschke echoed Arndt verbatim when he vindicated the German annexation of AlsaceLorraine in 1870–1871. Italy developed a political agenda to incorporate all “unredeemed” Italian lands (Italia irrendenta) still under foreign domination, from the Adriatic coastlands to Corsica and Malta. The Romanov tsars officially linked their autocracy to a missionary Orthodox zeal and an overriding, exclusivist sense of Russianness (increasingly alienating their nonRussian minorities in the process). Mirroring Russia’s expansionism around the Black Sea, Greece also expanded territorially at the cost of the Ottoman Empire; the Megali Idea or “Great Scheme” envisaged ultimately to restore the erstwhile grandeur of the Hellenic or Byzantine world, and incorporate all areas of ethnic Greek settlement in the Balkans and along the Anatolian coast. Serbia aimed to absorb all Serbian (i.e. South Slavic) peoples until it reached across the Balkans from Dubrovnik and Podgorica on the Adriatic to Varna on the Black Sea. Austria thwarted these policies by annexing BosniaHercegovina, thus paving the way for the 1914 shooting in Sarajevo. And as the Sarajevo incident (Serbian-abetted as it was) made clear, all European states – the policy was so obvious and all-pervasive that its importance went almost unnoticed – covertly or “culturally” supported disaffected minorities in their neighboring countries so as to weaken their rivals. Meanwhile, the patriotic literature of the 1880s and 1890s had become intensely bloody-minded, from Namik Kemal’s Silistra to Patrick Pearse’s poems and the English “invasion novels.” When the Great War broke out, it made more intense propagandistic use than ever before of intellectuals vindicating the state’s war aims with cultural and moral arguments. Poets, playwrights, and professors were enrolled in propaganda campaigns to demonstrate that this was more than a belligerent settlement of intractable policy differences: this was a crusade, a culture clash, where the nation’s very identity was to be defended against the hate-filled savagery of the foe. Such intellectual propaganda reached bombastic displays 252

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of self-serving justification. Camille Jullian claimed that the Rhine had always been a Gaulish, French river. German intellectuals, artists, and scientists signed manifestos indignantly rejecting the accusation of German atrocities by asserting the moral superiority of German Kultur – initially numbering ninety-three leading lights, followed by a shock-and-awe roll-call of no fewer than three thousand academics. Nor was all this propaganda a cynical contrivance by duplicitous hacks: most of it was sincerely felt. The outbreak of hostilities had been greeted by crowds singing their national anthems in the streets of Europe’s capitals, and although these demonstrations may have been propagandistically puffed up by the media, they were not invented out of whole cloth. Young men between 1880 and 1914 could think of no nobler task than to march forth to war on behalf of their nation; young women could think of no greater disgrace for young men than a reluctance to do so. That heroic pathos was the end result of a process that had germinated among the anti-Napoleonic Romantics between 1806 and 1813. A sense of duty or fealty toward king or emperor may doubtless have been at work – those points of authority that Weber called institutional or dynastic. But alongside those affects there was a burning love for the nation as such, its culture and traditions. The nation itself had become charismatic, something inspiring an almost religious sense of affection, and men were now, quite literally, joyfully filled with a sentimental sense of devotion as they marched off to kill and die for their nation.

Conclusion Romantic nationalism is marked by a tight interplay between cultural production and knowledge production, on the one hand (the work of artists and intellectuals), and political idealism, on the other, deriving the autonomy and sovereignty of the state from the authenticity of the nation’s “identity” (perceived character and cultural traditions). It typically sees the nation in a double perspective, culturally diachronic and socially synchronic. As a transgenerational tradition across the centuries, the nation is ethnically bonded; as a body politic engaged in political and societal interactions in the state, the nation is civically bonded. Nationalism will always situate the nation on an ethnic–civic spectrum. In its more democratic manifestations, the state’s identity and sovereignty are derived from the civic mandate of the nation; in its more conservative manifestations, the state derives its authority from its underlying ethnic identity and historical permanence. While the adherents of nationalism are predominantly the urban middle and lower-middle classes, the 253

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ideal-typical “authentic” portions of the nation are usually those most unlike that stratum: the nation’s ancient warriors and its contemporary peasantry; past and peasant sharing the virtue of being least involved in modernity and identity-drift. Both the civic and the ethnic ends of the spectrum will seek to territorialize the nation’s cultural identity. Languages become language areas, ethnic communities are translated into their settlement patterns. Cartography thrives. Ethnic and linguistic maps are drawn up in ever finer detail and are used for territorial claims and irredentist policies. Since most of Europe’s border zones (and Europe is a continent with a high density of border zones) are inhabited by mixed populations, the territorial demands of neighboring states, once they become nationstates, will usually overlap and lead to border disputes – from Nagorno-Karabakh to Ulster and from Karelia to Southern Tyrol and Alsace-Lorraine. As a political force, Romantic nationalism from 1805 on failed and failed again, but it failed better every time. As an outlook, it had indoctrinated all of Europe by 1900. Even at the high-point of 1848 and in the Polish uprisings of 1831 and 1861, the mobilizing power of nationalism was limited to relatively small insurgency units aided by street barricades in the cities. After 1848, it became increasingly clear that real mobilizing power was wielded by social reformists and revolutionaries (socialists, social democrats) rather than nationalists, and that it was the state itself which could most successfully harness national sentiment to its armies and propaganda machinery. The influence of nationalism lay, then, less in its power to overthrow the state than in the ability to convince the state of its ideals. Nationalism had more influence than power; it shaped the outlook, the self-image, and the institutions of existing and emerging states by persuasion rather than coercion, by cultural allure rather than clout, by bestowing charisma rather than authority. Not really a political doctrine in its own right, but rather a set of ideals and a mind-set inflecting existing doctrines, from conservatism to social democracy, Romantic nationalism’s most important afterlife post-1918 was in the diffuse, ambient guise of “banal nationalism.” And we may also ponder the tendency of every new nation-state between 1920 and 1935 (except Norway, Czechoslovakia, and Ireland) to abolish its parliamentary democracy and instead subject itself to nationalist authoritarianism.

Further Reading Berger, Stefan (ed.), Writing the Nation: National Historiographies and the Making of Nation States in 19th and 20th Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

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Romantic and Risorgimento Nationalism Breuilly, John, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982). Falina, Maria, Monika Baár, Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, and Michal Kopecˇek (eds.), History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016). Hroch, Miroslav, European Nations: Explaining their Formation (London: Verso, 2015). Hroch, Miroslav, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Leerssen, Joep (ed.), Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Leerssen, Joep, National Thought in Europe, 3rd edition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Michel, Bernard, Nations et nationalismes en Europe centrale, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Aubier, 1995). Senelick, Laurence (ed.), National Theatre in Northern and Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Thiesse, Anne-Marie, La création des identités nationales: Europe, XVIIIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1999). Trencsényi, Balázs, et al. (eds.), Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006–2014).

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12

Revolution and Independence in Spanish America j a i m e e . r o d r ´ı g u e z o .

The editors note with deep sorrow the passing of Jaime E. Rodríguez O. in 2022, and regret that he did not live to see his fine contribution in print. A note about America and Americans: Cristobal Colón (Christopher Columbus) had been en route to India when he tripped over the islands of the Caribbean: therefore, the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere came to be called indios (Indians) and their lands las indias (the Indies). In the eighteenth century, however, the continent was renamed América and its inhabitants americanos. Since America is the name applied to the Western Hemisphere, all peoples from Canada to Argentina may be correctly called Americans. This is a paradox that vexed Spanish Americans even before independence.1

The eighteenth and early nineteenth century encompassed rapid political, social, and economic changes in the Atlantic world. The French Revolution and French expansionism under Napoleon Bonaparte accelerated the restructuring of the Hispanic world. Unfortunately, Spain had to navigate the challenging international period without the great enlightened monarch Carlos III (1759–1788), who had presided over a major intellectual transformation in the Spanish world. Ironically, for much of the period Spain and France cooperated to thwart British naval power in the Atlantic and its territorial ambitions in the Americas. The alliance devastated the Spanish economy and led to the defeat of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar.2 These disasters provoked public discontent, allowing anti-French factions in Spain to force the abdication of Carlos IV in March 1808. When Fernando VII became king, French troops were already on Spanish soil since his father had 1

2

Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “We Are Now the True Spaniards”: Sovereignty, Revolution, Independence, and the Emergence of the Federal Republic of Mexico, 1808–1824 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), xvii. Allan J. Kuethe and Kenneth J. Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 231–345.

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given Napoleon permission to cross Spain and occupy Portugal. Napoleon seized the opportunity to turn on his allies; he lured the royal family to France and forced them to abdicate. Then he granted the Spanish monarchy to his brother Joseph. Napoleon’s decision had a number of unintended consequences for both countries. Despite the fact that large segments of the royal bureaucracy, nobility, clergy, and military accepted José Bonaparte as king, the people of Madrid and other provincial cities and villages rejected the French. Their actions triggered a series of political and military events that transformed the Spanish world, ignited a protracted guerrilla war that the French could degrade but not defeat, and exposed the strengths and vulnerabilities in the new world order.3

Representative Government In the Iberian peninsula, juntas, originally formed to govern their provinces and to oppose the French, established a Supreme Central Governing Junta, which convened on 25 September 1808 to govern the nation and to coordinate the struggle against the invaders. That body soon realized that it needed American support to conduct the war against the French. On 22 January 1809, it decreed that each of the ten kingdoms of America and Asia – the four viceroyalties of New Spain, New Granada, Peru, and the Río de la Plata and the six captaincies of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guatemala, Venezuela, Chile, and the Philippines – should elect a deputy to represent them in the national government. The act was profoundly revolutionary. By recognizing the equality of Americans and Spaniards, it created a relationship between a metropolis and its overseas territories that no other European monarchy granted its possessions. Regional economic variations in Spanish America contributed to social diversity. The core areas included significant urban groups – a diverse elite of government officials, clergy, professionals, merchants, large and middle-sized landowners, miners, and other entrepreneurs – as well as a varied artisanal and working sector. Those regions possessed a complex peasantry, predominantly Indian; it was also composed of criollos, mestizos, blacks, and castas (people of mixed African ancestry), which included small landowners, renters, resident workers, day laborers, and corporate villagers. While “Indians” constituted the majority of the population in core areas, many were not 3

Gabriel H. Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1965).

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“juridical” Indians, those living in corporate villages subject to tribute. In the urban centers, the population was increasingly defined along class rather than racial lines.4 As Americans held elections to the Junta Central, the French renewed their drive to conquer the peninsula. Napoleon’s armies reoccupied Madrid and, during 1809 and 1810, defeated Spanish forces throughout the country. News of these calamities alarmed Americans who believed that the Spanish monarchy would not survive as an independent entity and Spanish authorities would surrender America to the French. The uncertain political situation provided autonomists in two South American audiencias (courts of appeal and the territorial units where they held jurisdiction) that were not granted individual representation in the Junta Central, Charcas in May and July, and Quito in August 1809, with the opportunity and the justification to seek independence from their viceroyal capitals, Buenos Aires and Santa Fe de Bogotá. Although royal authorities rapidly crushed both movements, over the next decade comparable demands eroded the legitimacy of the system and its capacity to reconcile competing interests.5 In an attempt to create a more effective government, the Junta Central authorized elections for a national Cortes (parliament). It subsequently appointed a five-member Regency Council that included an American representative and dissolved itself at the end of January 1810. Two weeks later the Regency Council directed the ayuntamientos of capitales de partido (city councils of district capitals) of America to elect three individuals of well-known probity, talent, and learning, and select one by lot. The 1810 elections, unlike those for deputies to the Junta Central, required candidates to be natives of the province, thus excluding European Spaniards residing in America, and deputies represented an ayuntamiento rather than a kingdom. The changes dramatically expanded the number of American representatives.6 Elections for the new government occurred while warfare engulfed the peninsula and parts of America. Because many of the occupied provinces of Spain could not hold elections, and because distance delayed the arrival of many American deputies, the Regency Council decreed that residents from those areas residing in the port city of Cádiz should elect fifty-five suplentes 4

5

6

Manuel Chust (ed.), 1808: La eclosión juntera en el mundo hispano (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007), 11–394. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., Political Culture in Spanish America, 1500–1830 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 63–79. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “‘Equality! The Sacred Right of Equality!’ Representation under the Constitution of 1812,” Revista de Indias, 58/242 (2008), 107–109.

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(substitutes), among them thirty from America and the Philippines. New World suplentes were a varied group. They included military men, lawyers, academics, clerics, and government functionaries. Two were Grandes de España and one, Dionisio Inca Yupangui, was a Peruvian Indian who had served as a lieutenant colonel of dragoons in the peninsula. The suplentes played a major role in defending American interests. Moreover, when the proprietary deputies arrived, most suplentes remained in the Cortes to represent New World realms that failed to send proprietary delegates.7 The elections to form a representative government for the Spanish world took place in the midst of a crisis of confidence. Home-rule movements reemerged in Charcas and Quito and erupted in other kingdoms in 1810: Caracas in April, Buenos Aires and Charcas in May, Santa Fe de Bogotá in July, and three in September – the Bajío in New Spain on the 16th, Santiago de Chile on the 18th, and Quito on the 20th. All these regions sought to establish caretaker governments to rule in the name of Fernando VII. However, the 1810 movements, unlike those of 1809, inadvertently unleashed irreconcilable social and political conflicts that exploded into civil wars throughout the continent. Americans held elections for proprietary deputies to the Cortes during late 1810 and the first half of 1811. Although insurgencies had erupted in various parts of the continent, most kingdoms, with the exception of Chile and parts of Venezuela, New Granada, and the Río de la Plata, participated in the elections, which had a profound impact throughout the New World. The capitals of most of the provinces eligible to elect deputies consulted widely with towns and villages of their regions. During the consultation process, there was widespread public discussion about the importance of supporting the new government. Clergymen kept their parishioners informed, emphasizing their duty to oppose the godless French who threatened the holy faith, the king, and the patria. Elections in provincial capitals took place in public, accompanied by ceremonies that usually included a mass, speeches, and entertainment. These events created a spirit of optimism and gave Americans a sense that they could surmount the grave political crisis. The general and extraordinary Cortes of the Spanish monarchy faced an uncertain future. At the end of January 1810, French troops planned to subjugate Seville and occupy or seize Cádiz where the Cortes planned to 7

Ivana Frasquet, “La construcción de la representación: Los diputados suplentes americanos en las Cortes de Cádiz,” in Carmen Corona, Ivana Frasquet, and Carmen María Fernández (eds.), Legitimidad, soberanías, representación: Independencias y naciones en Iberaamérica (Castello de Plana: Universidad Jaume I, DL, 2009), 97–146.

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convene. Residents of the port worked zealously to strengthen its defenses, but lacked the resources to withstand the French. Fortunately, an army under the command of the Duque de Alburquerque arrived from Estremadura on 4 February, the day before Marshall Claude Victor’s French troops reached the outskirts of the city. The reinforced garrison supported by the cannons of the Spanish and British fleets stationed on each side of the isthmus stopped the French. However, the French army, numbering twenty thousand, was not defeated and formed an arc around Cádiz. The situation was so uncertain that the Cortes, inaugurated on 24 September 1810, met on the Isla de León in the Bay of Cádiz. Even there the deputies were not free from French heavy artillery, which continuously rained fire on both areas.8 Unlike earlier Cortes, the congress was a modern national assembly. It met as one body and its members represented the entire Spanish world. When the Cortes convened, 104 deputies were present, including 30 representing the overseas territories: 27 Americans and 2 Filipinos were substitute delegates chosen in Cádiz. Only one of the 38 proprietary deputies elected in America, Ramón Power from Puerto Rico, attended the opening session. Other proprietary deputies soon joined the assembly. Approximately 220 deputies, including 67 Americans, eventually participated in the General and Extraordinary Cortes in Cádiz. The delegates to the Cortes were one-third clergymen, about one-sixth nobles, and the remainder members of the third estate who, because of their professions, comprised a “middle class.” Priests, like their secular counterparts, played an active role in politics and the economy, and had diverse ideologies. Neither liberals nor radicals considered the participation of ecclesiastics inappropriate. After 1808, most clerical politicians did not represent the interests of the Church as an institution. Indeed some of the most virulent anticlerical politicians were churchmen. They were educated individuals whose contact with all social classes gave them a deep understanding of local communities and the broader society. The twenty-one deputies from New Spain formed the largest American delegation. They included fourteen ecclesiastics, three government officials, two military men, and two merchants. Although most were moderate liberals, some were radical liberals, and a few were conservatives. Six served at various times as president of the Cortes, six served as vice-presidents, and one as secretary. Three clergymen, José Miguel Ramos Arizpe (Monterrey), Antonio Joaquín Pérez (Puebla), and Salvador Sanmartín (Guadalajara), served on the commission to prepare the Project of the Constitution. 8

Rodríguez, “We Are Now the True Spaniards,” 149–152.

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Ramos Arizpe, José Guridi y Alcocer, and others who came from northern New Spain proposed a new institution, a regional administrative body called the provincial deputation that was approved by the Cortes and became the basis of the constitutional system. With the creation of the provincial deputations, the Cortes abolished the viceroyalties, transformed the audiencias from judicial and quasi-administrative bodies into high courts of appeal, and divided the Spanish world into provinces that dealt directly with the national government in Spain. Ramos Arizpe and Guridi y Alcocer also played an important part in the establishment of the second home-rule institution created by the Cortes, constitutional ayuntamientos, which substituted popularly elected officials for the hereditary elites who had heretofore controlled city government. The constitution granted towns with at least a thousand inhabitants the right to elect city governments, thus dramatically expanding political participation in the Spanish world and transferring political power from the center to the local level.9 The Constitution of 1812 was not merely a Spanish document; it was a charter for the Hispanic world. Indeed, the Constitution of Cádiz would not have taken the form it did without participation of the representatives from America. It was the most radical charter of the nineteenth century, abolishing seigniorial institutions, Indian tribute, forced labor other than slavery – such as the mita in South America and personal service in Spain – and affirming the state’s control of the Church. It created a unitary state with equal laws for all parts of the Spanish monarchy. When it enfranchised all men, except those of African ancestry, without requiring either literacy or property qualification, the Constitution of 1812 surpassed all existing representative governments in providing the right to vote to the vast majority of the male population. An analysis of the 1813 election census in Mexico City, for example, concludes that 93 percent of the male population of the capital possessed this right.10 The question of political rights surfaced in article 18, which defined citizenship thus: “Citizens are those Spaniards who trace their origins on both sides [of the family] from the Spanish dominions on both hemispheres and reside in any part of those same dominions.” Article 22 noted: “Those Spaniards who on either side [of the family] originate or are reputed to originate in Africa have the door of virtue and merit open to them to become 9

10

Charles R. Berry, “The Election of the Mexican Deputies to the Spanish Cortes, 1810– 1822,” in Nettie Lee Benson (ed.), Mexico and the Spanish Cortes, 1810–1822: Eight Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), 10–42. Rodríguez O., “Equality! The Sacred Right to Equality,” 97–122.

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citizens.” In short, colored castas who wished to become citizens had to meet higher standards than others. On 25 May 1812, Guridi y Alcocer proposed abolishing slavery. Since the representatives of slaveholding regions – the Caribbean, Venezuela, coastal New Granada, and Peru – were adamantly opposed to ending both slavery and the slave trade, Guridi y Alcocer and others recommended the gradual elimination of slavery. At the request of Quito José Mexía Llequerica, a commission was appointed to consider the matter. But despite eloquent and often emotional arguments in favor of abolition, the opposition triumphed. In the end, the Cortes believed that political expediency required the retention of slavery. As Esteban Palacios, Simón Bolívar’s uncle and the suplentes from Caracas, declared: “As a lover of humanity, I approve the abolition of slavery: but as a lover of political order, I disapprove it.”11 In that respect, we can take as both inspirational and aspirational the words of the bishop of Mallorca, Bernardo Nadal y Crespí, the president of the Cortes on 19 March 1812, who, when the constitution was promulgated, declared: “Eternal praise, eternal gratitude to the Sovereign National Congress! . . . Our slavery has ended! My compatriots, inhabitants of the four quarters of the world, we have now recovered our dignity and our rights! We are Spaniards! We are free!”12

Constitutional Government in the New World As finally approved, the Cortes established nineteen provincial deputations for the overseas territories: New Spain, Nueva Galicia, Yucatán, San Luis Potosí, Provincias Internas de Oriente, Provincias Internas de Occidente, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba with the two Floridas, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Nueva Granada, Venezuela, Quito, Peru, Cuzco, Charcas (present-day Bolivia), Chile, Río de la Plata (which subsequently divided into Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina). (The Philippines also gained a deputation.) Autonomists who controlled Chile and Río de la Plata did not recognize the Constitution of Cádiz or hold elections. Because the electoral system was complex, campaign organization and voter education became critical. The convocatoria required voters to be twenty-five years old. Although women who were heads of families had possessed the right to vote in traditional elections, under the Constitution of 11

12

Manuel Chust Calero, “De esclavos, encomenderos y mitayos: El anticolonialismo en las Cortos de Cádiz,” MS/EM, 11/2 (Summer 1995), 179–202. Federico Suárez, Los Cortes de Cádiz (Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, SA, 2000), 129.

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1812 they were excluded. In contrast, illiterates could vote until 1830. Secular priests could participate fully in electoral politics; however, members of the regular orders were disenfranchised because they were obligated to obey their superiors. In a number of regions, such as northern Yucatán, Pasto in Colombia, Cuenca and Loja in the kingdom of Quito, and Charcas, Indians who controlled their own land exercised their right to vote. They not only won control of their local towns, but also formed interethnic coalitions to participate in the governments of the larger provincial capitals. While the constitution excluded men of African ancestry from the suffrage, the question of race was often blurred in the New World, where socioeconomic status permitted persons of African ancestry to be incorporated into other ethnic groups. They voted and, in many cases including parts of New Spain, Guatemala, Guayaquil, and Peru, held public office at the local, provincial, and national level.13 The overwhelming majority of Americans supported the new political system since it was the natural outgrowth of a shared Hispanic political philosophy. New Spain, the largest, most populous, and economically developed region, provides a general example of the transition to the new system. As soon as the constitution arrived in New Spain, Yucatán, Nueva Galicia, San Luis Potosí, Provincial Internas de Oriente, and Provincial Intiernas de Occidente each established a provincial deputation. The royal authorities promulgated the charter throughout the new polity and created a committee to supervise the elections. The enabling legislation charged priests with determining the number of citizens and qualified voters in their parishes. The Junta used this information to establish the size of delegations and to apportion the representatives among the six provinces. The sparsely populated frontier regions in the northwestern part of the country pleaded a lack of resources and did not participate. There were two different electoral processes. The first, to select members of the constitutional ayuntamientos, consisted of a two-stage procedure in which parish residents selected electors who met to elect city authorities. The second entailed a multistage process: parish voters chose representatives who subsequently selected parish electors; these electors met in the six provincial capitals to elect the deputies to the Cortes and the following day to select the seven-member provincial deputation. The results of the election in Mexico City were unequivocal: among 13

Jaime E. Rodríguez O., La revolución política durante la época de la independencia: El Reino de Quito, 1808–1822 (Quito: Corporación Editorial Nacional, 2006), 82–84; Jairo Gutiérrez Ramos, Los indios de Pasto contra la República (1809–1824) (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2007), 113–153.

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them twelve priests, five lawyers, several functionaries, and two former governors of Indian communities in the city were elected. Novohispanos elected forty-one deputies to the 1813–1814 ordinary Cortes that met in Madrid. The scope of political participation was extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands of citizens, possibly more than a million or about a sixth of New Spain’s population, including castas, and blacks, who were legally prohibited from voting, participated in elections and in government, both at the local and provincial levels.14 Similar elections took place in the former Captaincy of Guatemala, which had been divided into two provincial deputations, Guatemala and Nicaragua. The preparatory committee determined that with a population of 840,000 inhabitants, Central America had the right to elect twelve deputies. Only one elected deputy served in the Ordinary Cortes of 1813–1814. However, seven Central Americans who had been deputies in the Cortes continued to represent the region. Although the documentation is incomplete, residents appear to have established more than a hundred constitutional local governments, the majority in towns and villages controlled by Indians and castas.15 Residents in the three Caribbean provincial deputations also elected their deputies for the Cortes in Madrid. Cuba with the two Floridas sent four representatives, and Puerto Rico and Santa Domingo one each. Unlike most of Spanish America, women, particularly free Afro-Cubans, played a central role in the election of municipal officials. Their political power was based on their control of key sectors of the island’s economy. While favoring home rule and abolition, as members of the propertied classes, they supported evolutionary rather than revolutionary change.16 An armed struggle to maintain autonomy that had emerged in South America thwarted the electoral process. Support for the Spanish monarchy remained firm even in Venezuela. On 19 April 1810, the elite of Caracas established a Junta Suprema Conservadora de los Derechos de Fernando VII. The moderate Caracas Junta sought to unify the kingdom by convening a congress that met on 2 March 1811. However, under increasing pressure from radicals composed of urban professionals and a few wealthy aristocrats, including Simón Bolívar, who 14 15

16

Berry, “The Election of Mexican Deputies to Spanish Cortes, 1810–1822,” 10–42. Jordana Dym, From Sovereign Villages to Nation States: City, State, and Federation in Central America, 1750–1839 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2006), 110–126. Mathew C. Mirow, “The Constitution of Cádiz in Florida,” Florida Journal of International Law, 24 (2012): 271–329; Juaquín E. Ruiz Alemán, “Los municipios cubanos en el bienio constitucional,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 29 (1972), 379–387; Antonio Gómez Vizuete, “Los primeros ayuntamientos liberales en Puerto Rico (1812–1823),” Anuarios de Estudios Americanos, 47 (1990), 581–615.

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favored greater autonomy and in some cases independence, the assembly drafted and adopted a declaration of independence. The Venezuelan charter completed in December 1811 was more conservative than the Cádiz 1812 Constitution. It retained the property qualifications for voters, disenfranchising most Indians and blacks. Despite the chaotic situation, six provinces – Maracaibo, Valencia, Coro, Barcelona, Cumaná, and Margarita – which escaped most of the conflict, elected constitutional ayuntamientos when the royalists were in power. Caracas was unable to complete the election of deputies to the 1813– 1814 Cortes and Provincial Deputation. The three-member Venezuelan delegation in Madrid only included one elected deputy from Maracerosonaibo and two substitute deputies.17 Regionalism and conflicting attitudes toward the legitimacy of the government in Spain also threatened the integrity of the kingdom of New Granada. The peaceful establishment of juntas to govern in the name of Ferdinand VII in 1810 quickly degenerated into regional coalitions vying for control. The provinces splintered into three coalitions during 1810–1815, a period known as the Patria Boba (foolish fatherland). Cartagena de las Indias formed a governing junta on 8 May 1810 upon learning that the Junta Suprema Central in Spain had dissolved and established a Regency Council. Other provinces followed suit. In an effort to regain the initiative, on 20 July, Santa Fe de Bogotá, capital of New Granada, formed a Junta Suprema de Nuevo Reina de Granada. Cartagena proposed instead establishing a federal government that granted each province equality and sovereignty. Santa Fe countered by convening a congress in the capital. In March 1811, that assembly created the Estado Cundinamarca, which recognized Don Fernando VII as lawful king. The new government consisted of a strong legislature and a weak executive. The new “centralist” state consisted of Santa Fe de Bogotá and other provinces of the sierra.18 Led by Cartagena, five provinces formed the Provincias Unidas de la Nueva Granada, a confederation of autonomous provinces with an extremely weak government in which congress received most of the authority. Royalists, who maintained control of a number of provinces including Santa Marta and Panama, rejected the centrist and confederalist coalitions. After years of warfare, Santa Fe de Bogotá fell to armies of the Provincias Unidas on 12 December 1814. By that time, however, Fernando VII had abolished the Constitution of Cádiz and dispatched an army under the command of Marshall Pablo Morillo to restore 17

18

See Carl Almer, “The Spanish Constitution in the Eastern Provinces of Venezuela,” unpublished essay, Irvine, 2006. Armando Martínez Garnica, “La eclosión juntera en el Nuevo Reino de Granada,” Secuencia: Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, commemorative issue (2008), 125–143.

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order in northern South America. After a prolonged struggle, the Provincias Unidas collapsed in May 1816. The chaotic situation in much of Gran Colombia provided Quito an opportunity to assert its right to autonomy. A Junta Suprema de Quito was formed in October 1810 and the capital attempted to assert its primacy in 1810–1811. Other provinces resisted, prompting Quito to form armies to subdue the recalcitrant regions. The situation led to armed conflict between the capital and various royalist and autonomist factions. Despite the chaos, residents throughout the region formed constitutional city governments and provincial deputations. The congress of eighteen members that met in Quito in December 1811 coalesed into rival factions led by two prominent families. They drafted charters, held elections, and discussed the unfolding political events in Spain and America. When members of the Montúfar family gained control of congress, the Sanchez de Orellana family and their allies left Quito and formed a government in the southern city of Cuenca. Royalist forces under the command of General Toribio Montes and their Indian allies defeated the second junta of Quito in January 1812. After reestablishing royal authority in Quito, Montes helped the province of Quito to assert this authority throughout the audiencia and cooperated with amnestied leaders of the movement to initiate the process of holding popular elections of cities and the Cortes.19 The 1812 Constitution divided the former viceroyalty of Peru into two provincial deputations, Peru and Cuzco. During the following decade, both remained bastions of royalist power. Communities throughout Peru formed constitutional city councils and participated in electing the provincial deputation. Five Peruvian substitute deputies participated in the Cortes of Cádiz. By the end of 1812 they were joined by seven elected deputies who represented the fifteen provincial deputations of the former kingdom, including two delegates from Cuzco and one each from Lima, Guayaquil, and Trujillo. The preparatory junta had determined in February 1813 that the population of 1,180,669 entitled Peru to send twenty-two representatives to the Cortes. The 1813 election of twenty-seven representatives for the ordinary congress of 1813–1814 took place in Lima, the capital. Peru’s delegation, which represented the former intendancies, included eleven substitute deputies and seven elected representatives.20 The situation functioned until October 1814 when King Fernando VII restored the old regime. 19 20

Rodríguez O., La revolución política durante la época de la independencia, 46–88. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “De la fidelidad a la revolución: El proceso de la independencia de la Antigua Provincia de Guayaquil, 1809–1920,” Proceso: Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia, 21 (2004), 35–88.

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The constitution had a far-reaching impact in Cuzco. There, the provincial deputation functioned from September 1813 to November 1814. Although the provincial government held an election for seven deputies to the Cortes in April 1813, none of the deputies arrived in Madrid to participate in the first session of the legislature. At local level, residents throughout the province held elections for constitutional ayuntamientos and refused to disband them when the constitutional system was abolished in 1814. Events in Cuzco and Puno demonstrate that the populace understood the new system and used it to assert their autonomy within the province and the kingdom of Peru. Instead of returning to the old regime, local leaders established an autonomous junta.21 Chileans responded to French aggression by pledging loyalty to Ferdinand VII. In September 1810, Santiago’s leading citizens attended an open meeting and approved the formation of a moderate Junta Provisional Gubernativa. The junta governed until the municipalities elected a congress that convened in July 1811. Within a few months, a power struggle among conservatives, liberals, and radicals raised the specter of civil war. Two rivals who subsequently played important roles in the formation of the Republic of Chile, José Miguel Carrera and Bernardo O’Higgins, were unable to mount a coordinated military campaign to defeat the royalists. Peruvian Viceroy José Fernando de Abascal dispatched General Mariano Osorio with a contingent of troops to restore order.22 The majority of the leaders of Buenos Aires, after a heated debate on 25 May 1810, voted to establish the Provisional Governing Junta of the Río de la Plata, the port, to rule in the name of Fernando VII. They, like liberals in the Iberian peninsula, shared the goal of creating a modern society but differed on who would rule. A number of provincial leaders doubted that the Junta represented their interests and called for autonomy and a federalist system. Strong separatist movements emerged in Montevideo and its interior, which competed with Buenos Aires for control of domestic and external trade. The interests of the isolated, interior provinces such as Córdoba, Salta, Tucumán, and Mendoza, and the strong separatist movements in Montevideo, Paraguay, and Charcas, thwarted the ambitions of groups who wanted to establish a strong 21

22

Victor Peralta Ruiz, “Los inicios del sistema representativo en Perú: Ayuntamiento Constitucionales y Diputaciones Provinciales (1812–1815),” in Marta Irurozqui Victoriano (ed.), La mirada esquiva: Reflexiones históricas sobre la interacción del estado y la ciudadanía en los Andes (Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú. Siglo XIX) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Historia América, 2005), 69–92. Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, “Kinship Politics in the Chilean Independence Movement,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 56/1 (February 1976), 58–80.

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central government. Despite repeated military campaigns, the Buenos Aires government never reestablished control of Paraguay or Charcas. It was also unable to reconcile ideological struggles between moderate and radical factions within the administration or eradicate federalist movements in the interior.23

Insurrection and Revolution In 1808, the Spanish monarchy was in the process of restructuring the composite polity. The construction of a more intrusive and powerful central government threatened broad segments of the population, making them receptive to leaders willing to use force to preserve their autonomy within the Spanish nation. One such movement erupted in New Spain on 16 September 1810. Father Miguel Hidalgo and Ignacio Allende led a rebellion in which tens of thousands took up arms to defend the foundations of Hispanic society – the Catholic Church and the monarchy. Although the upper and middle class initially defended the insurrection, when the leaders were unable to control their followers, support even within the lower classes, Indians, and campesinos (peasants) with communal lands disappeared. More important, Hidalgo feared that Spaniards in New Spain would grant control over it to the French. However, he maintained that “we are now the true Spaniards” and would defend their land. The revolt lasted only a few months. As news of indiscriminate looting, destruction of property, and carnage swept through rural and urban areas, the royal army and most of the militia, which were 95 percent American, were able to defeat the insurgents. The royalists subsequently captured, tried, defrocked, and executed Hidalgo in March 1811. Father José María Morelos, who had been waging a guerrilla campaign in the south since 1810, emerged as the most important insurgent chieftain. In contrast to Father Hidalgo’s movement, the Morelos insurgency flourished for several years because he disciplined his forces, virtually eliminating the specter of race and class warfare. His forces employed guerrilla tactics and maintained ties with clandestine urban autonomists. Morelos’s greatest success came when he captured the city of Oaxaca in the south. In June 1812, Morelos convened elections in the regions controlled by insurgents and secretly in Mexico City for a congress held in Chilpancingo, a small, easily defended, friendly town. The congress was composed of eight important men from various parts of the kingdom who issued a declaration of independence. Morelos, who believed 23

Marcela Ternavasio, Gobernar la revolución: Poderes en disputa en el Río de la Plata, 1810– 1816 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2007), 23–178.

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that he had the authority to exercise supreme power, soon clashed with the legislature. When Morelos lost a number of battles in December 1812 and January 1813, the royalists regained control of much territory. The congress reasserted its authority, and other insurgent commanders began to act independently. The short period of civilian control ended when the royalists threatened Chilpancingo, forcing congress to flee. The return of King Ferdinand VII and abolition of the Constitution of 1812 briefly rekindled the hopes of insurgent congressmen. In a bid to win support for their cause, they completed a liberal constitution that included many aspects of the Constitution of 1812. Royalist forces captured Morelos, who was tried, defrocked, and executed on 22 December 1815.24 Other insurgent leaders, such as Vicente Guerrero, continued the guerrilla war and after independence held public office at local, state, and national level. The Constitution of Cádiz divided the Caribbean into three provinces: Cuba with the two Floridas, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. Residents of towns and villages in the first two provincial deputations held elections for constitutional ayuntamientos. It also appears that there were elections for the Cortes and the provincial deputation. The region remained loyal to the government in Spain and served as a base for the restoration of royal authority in northern South America.25 The governments of South America, like New Spain, reacted with great patriotism when they received the news that the French had invaded the Iberian peninsula and imprisoned the king. However, the Venezuelan charter completed in December 1811 was more conservative than the 1812 Constitution. It restored property qualifications for voters, disenfranchising most Indians and blacks. The republican elites had no intention of losing control to the colored masses who overwhelmingly supported the royalists. Many towns rejected the capital’s unilateral actions and formed their own governing juntas. A more serious threat emerged in other cities such as Valencia, whose leaders recognized the authorities in Cádiz. Under pressure from radicals, the authorities in Caracas appointed the inveterate revolutionary General Francisco de Miranda commander of the military to subdue the city.26 24

25

26

Virginia Guedea, “Los procesos electorales insurgentes,” Estudios de Historia Novahispana, 2 (1991), 214–248; Ana Macías, “The Genesis of Constitutional Goverment of Mexico, 1808–1820,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Columbia, 1965. Mirrow, “The Constitution of Cádiz in Florida”; Rui Alemán, “Los municipios Cubanos”; Gómez Vizuete, “Los primeros ayuntamientos.” P. Michael McKinley, Pre-Revolutionary Caracas: Economy and Society, 1777–1811 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 159–160; Almer, “The Spanish Constitution in the Eastern Provinces of Venezuela,” 13–23.

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A new external threat compounded the regime’s problems. In March 1812, Captain Domingo Monteverde arrived in Coro from Puerto Rico with a detachment of troops and undertook a successful campaign to recover western Venezuela for the royalists. In most cases, towns changed hands without a battle. Miranda immediately proclaimed martial law and ordered the arrest of all Spaniards. As a result, numerous pardos and blacks rebelled in favor of the crown. Former slaves advanced on Caracas after Miranda transferred the government to Valencia. Simón Bolívar, who was entrusted with the defense of Puerto Cabello, lost the city to the royalists. Facing certain defeat, Miranda capitulated on 25 July 1812, whereby republican forces surrendered to the royalists. On the night of 30 July, Bolívar and two other republican officers arrested Miranda and turned him over to the royalists. Miranda later died in a Spanish prison. Bolívar accepted a passport from Monteverde and left Venezuela, ostensibly to join the British army that was fighting the French in the Iberian peninsula.27 When Bolívar learned that his wealth had been taken, he joined the republicans in Nueva Granada on 21 December 1812. The peaceful establishment of juntas to govern in the name of Fernando VII in 1810 quickly degenerated into regional coalitions vying for control of the former viceroyalty. In the highlands, a group was formed to establish a central government in Bogotá and the State of Cundinamarca which included five provinces. In the south near the sea were stablished the provinces that formed the Cartagena de Indias, which supported the king who was in prison in France. The government in Bogotá wanted to impose its control in the former kingdom. Authoritarians used populist rhetoric and opportunities to redress grievances to attract followers. The Venezuelan émigrés who had arrived in Cartagena were skilled in exploiting such volatile situations. Within four months Bolívar recruited and equipped a small mobile army that could fight in the coastal wetlands and the rugged highlands of Nueva Granada and Venezuela. Despite his belief in a strong central government, he accepted a commission as brigadier general in the federalist army. After months of struggle, Cartagena was forced to join the federation.28 Simón Bolívar left Grand Colombia and returned to Venezuela in June 1813, leading a small republican army determined to defeat the royalists. He was disdainful of civilian representative governments, preferring the expediency of centralized authoritarian rule. On 15 June, he issued the decree 27

28

A distinguished German historian, Gerhard Masur, published a negative detailed study of Simón Bolívar (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 103–107. Ibid., 116–121.

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of war to the death against Spaniards who did not actively work for independence. Later Bolívar boasted how “I marched . . . through cities and towns of Toyoquito . . . Maracay, Turnero, San Mateo, and la Victoria, where all the Europeans and Canary Islanders, almost without exception, have been executed.”29 When he reached the capital in August, Bolívar established a military dictatorship. The second republic would be different from the first. The victors terrorized Spaniards, imprisoning and executing men and whipping and raping women. The violence culminated in February 1814 with the execution of a thousand Spanish prisoners.30 However, an unlikely royalist leader, José Tomás Boves, emerged to challenge the republicans. He lived in the llanos, an immense floodplain that extended from Venezuela to Colombia. Leading a small nominally royalist army anchored by a superb cavalry, Boves enjoyed a series of victories over the republicans, retaking Caracas in July 1814. Like Bolívar, Boves used indiscriminate executions to enforce his dictates. By September 1814, Bolívar was back in Gran Colombia. At the height of his power, on 5 December 1814, Boves was killed at the battle of Urica.31 His death brought relief to the royal authorities he nominally recognized. In 1817, the Gazeta de Caracas calculated that more than 80,000 of Venezuela’s 420,000 people, onefifth of the population, had perished in the civil war, most of them during the years 1813–1814 when Bolívar and Boves sought to impose their will through terror.32 It is striking that popular elections occurred in royal areas in the midst of a violent insurgency. Royalist forces under the command of General Toribio Montes crushed the second junta of Quito at the end of 1812. As required by the Hispanic constitution, however, General Montes initiated the process of holding popular elections. Thus, possessing a politically eligible population of 400,000, Quito had the right to six deputies to the Cortes on the basis “of one per seventy thousand” inhabitants. But since “fifty thousand inhabitants remained, [the kingdom] had the right to one more deputy . . . [according to article 32 of the constitution]. As a consequence, this province had the right to six proprietary deputies and two suplentes . . . [as well as] eighteen partido electors.” After months of effort, the electoral census of the Provincial 29 30

31

32

McKinley, Pre-Revolutionary Caracas, 171–174. George Flinter, A History of the Revolution in Caracas; Comprising an Impartial Narrative of the Atrocities Committed by the Contending Parties (London: T. and J. Allman, 1819), 111–151. Masur, Simón Bolívar, 148–151; Rebecca A. Earle, Spain and the Independence of Colombia, 1810–1825 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 59–61. Gazeta de Caracas, 6 (21 May 1817).

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Deputation of Quito – which included the highland provinces from Pasto and Popayán in the north to Loja in the south, Marañon, Mainas, and Jaén de Bracamoros in the eastern jungles, and the northern coastal provinces of Barbacoas and Esmeraldas – was completed in June 1813.33 More than eightynine constitutional ayuntamientos had formed during the months from September 1813 to January 1814. Indians were very active in taking towns, villages, and other land. Free Afro-Americans, fugitive slaves, mulattoes, and mestizos won control of many towns. Various factions provided voters who could not read, lists with the names of candidates. The election of deputies to the Cortes and the provincial deputies in the former kingdom of Quito proved to be lengthy and complicated. Finally, eighteen representatives met in Quito from 24 through 26 August 1814, to elect the six deputies to the Cortes, the two suplentes and seven deputies to elect the six deputies to the provincial deputation. As occurred in other areas of the New World, quiteños (people from Quito) selected Americans rather than peninsulares (persons from Spain) to represent them. Significantly, what they had been unable to win by force, the quiteños accomplished through the ballot.34 The situation of Charcas is not clear. Professional historians are only now beginning to study the political and constitutional processes there. Invaded by armies from Buenos Aires and royalist forces from Peru, the region endured continuous warfare. No evidence has emerged to indicate that residents formed the Provincial Deputation of Charcas. Although some researchers allege that elections for deputies to the Cortes were organized in 1812, given insufficient time and political stability, elections seem improbable. Moreover, the name of only one deputy who was in Cádiz as a suplente receives mention. Local populations did, however, hold elections for constitutional ayuntamientos.35 Scholars of the region are engaged in research that will expand our understanding of events in this area, among other Andean regions. Attempts by the government in Buenos Aires to use military force to maintain control of the provinces frequently failed and hardened separatist sentiments in many regions. The policies of the government in Buenos Aires prompted some provincial leaders to discuss forming coalitions without the 33 34 35

Rodríguez O., “De la fidelidad a la revolución,” 46–55. Rodríguez O., La revolución política durante la época de la independencia, 79–88. Marta Irurozqui, “Huellas, testigos y testimonios constitucionales: De Charcas a Bolivia 1810–1830,” in Antonio Annino and Marcela Ternavasio (eds), Laboratorio constitucional iberoamericano: 1807/1808–1830 (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2012), 157–178.

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port city.36 Porteño leaders responded to the growing crisis by strengthening the executive and disbanding the assembly before it drafted a constitution. In January 1814, they appointed Gervasio Antonio Posadas supreme director and named José de San Martín commander of the Army of the North.37 The diverse regions that formed the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata might have united with Buenos Aires had it been willing to accept the creation of a confederation of equal provinces. It was not. Instead, the porteños sought to impose their rule by force. Isolated, the interests of the interior provinces such as Córdoba, Salta, Tucumán, Mendoza, Montevideo, Paraguay, and Charcas resisted the authority of Buenos Aires. As a result, three provinces, Charcas, Paraguay, and Uruguay, refused to accept the domination of Buenos Aires and ultimately decided to become the independent nations of Charcas, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Despite the continuing stalemate between Buenos Aires and the other provinces, the region’s isolated geographic position made it relatively safe from royalist forces.38 Chile, isolated on the southwest coast of South America, responded to the disasters in Spain by forming an autonomous junta. The struggle for control of the government reflected regional, familial, and political differences. During the next four years, although individuals and groups were willing to use force or threats of force to achieve their goals, Chile avoided the endless cycle of civil wars that ravaged other parts of Spanish America.39 As a British naval officer noted in 1812: “The people of Chile . . . might with no great difficulty, be prevailed to accept the new Constitution of Spain.”40 Unable to prevent the royalists from advancing, the Chilean government accepted British mediation and signed the armistice on 3 May 1814. Two events contributed to abrogation of the treaty. José Miguel Carrera overthrew the new government, and O’Higgins led an army to the north to restore the legitimate government. However, Carrera and O’Higgins proved unable to unite sufficiently to prevent disaster. As a result, Carrera, 36

37

38

39 40

Gabriel Di Meglio, Viva EL BAJO PUEBLO! La Plebe urbana de Buenos Aires y la política: Entre la Revolución de Mayo y el rosismo (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libres, 2007), 27–122. John Lynch, San Martín: Argentine Soldier, American Hero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 1–71. John Street, Artigas and the Emancipation of Uruguay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 114–117; John Hoyt Williams, The Rise and Fall of the Paraguay Republic, 1810– 1840 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979). Lowenthal Felstiner, “Kinship Politics in the Chilean Independence Movement,” 58–80. The Patria Vieja (Time of the Old Fatherland) was the 1810–1814 period of transition to Chilean independence. Simon Collier, Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence, 1808–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 116.

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O’Higgins, and other leaders abandoned Chile, fleeing to Mendoza across the Andes. The Patria Vieja had ended.41 Had all the provinces of America eligible to elect deputies exercised that right, 149 delegates would have represented the New World, just a few less than the number for Spain. Unfortunately, circumstances in America prevented many elections from taking place. Only just over sixty deputies from the New World participated in the ordinary Cortes of 1 October 1813 to 10 May 1814. However, only around a third of these were elected under the new constitutional system; the others were suplentes. American deputies in the 1813–1814 Cortes represented the following provinces: Cuba had three representatives; the Floridas one; Puerto Rico one; Santo Domingo one; New Spain nineteen; Guatemala seven; Venezuela three; New Granada two; Panama one; Quito one; Guayaquil one; Peru eighteen; Charcas one; Montevideo one; Río de la Plata three; and Chile one.42 The first constitution ended in 1814 when King Fernando VII returned. Ironically, the man who symbolized legitimate royal authority and unity of the Spanish nation lacked the vision to modernize his nation and ensure its ability to compete in the New World. Virtually every act that had occurred since 1808 – the struggle against the French, the political revolution enacted by the Cortes, and the autonomy movements in America – had been taken in his name. Initially, it appeared that he might accept moderate reforms, but ultimately the king opted to abolish the Cortes and the Constitution of Cádiz. His autocratic government relied on force to restore royal order in the New World. There followed a fiveyear period in which, unfettered by the constitution, the royal authorities in the New World crushed most insurgent movements. Only the isolated Río de la Plata remained beyond the reach of a weakened Spanish monarchy.43

Independence The crown’s repression prompted the minority of America’s politically active population that favored independence to act decisively. Republicans renewed the struggle in Venezuela in 1817, and by 1819 the tide had turned against the monarchy when a combined force of people from New Granada and 41 42

43

Jay Kinsbruner, Bernardo O’Higgins (New York: Tayne, 1968), 64–84. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 103. Ivana Frasquet Miguel, Las caras del águila: Del liberalismo gaditano a la república federal mexicano (Castelló de la Plata: Publicaciones de la Universidad Jaume I. DL, 2008), 29–42.

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Venezuela defeated the royalists at Boyacá, forcing the viceroy of New Granada and other officials to flee from Bogotá. In the south, José de San Martín won a decisive victory in Chile in 1818. As a result, he supported O’Higgins, who was chosen to lead the new republican government. The new president promoted economic and social reform and used his authority to build an army capable of defending the republic and cooperating with San Martín’s campaign to end royalist power in Peru and Charcas. The Argentine general spent two years rebuilding his army. Chileans supplied the funds to equip and train the force that invaded Peru in 1820. The southern forces led by General San Martín took control of Lima in August with a liberating army composed of Chileans and ríoplatences. Although he controlled the coast, San Martín could not overcome the royalists who had retreated to the highlands. On 29 January 1821, the Peruvian royalists recognized the authority of the Constitution of Cádiz. However, divisions within the royalist ranks prevented them from defeating the republicans.44 The renewed conflict in South America enhanced the power of military men such as Bolívar and San Martín, who gained immense power and prestige as leaders of the bloody struggles to win independence. Although civilian and clerical institutions – ayuntamientos, courts, parishes, cathedral chapters – continued to function, new governments with military power predominated. Colombia, as it was called, provides the clearest example. The Congress of Angostura, located in the south of Venezuela, which Bolívar convened in February 1819, legitimized his power and in December created in a constitution the Republic of Colombia, incorporating Venezuela, New Granada, and Quito. Although Venezuela and New Granada had some representation, Quito had none. Most representatives were military men who served as suplentes.45 Autonomists in America and Spanish liberals in the peninsula grew increasingly dissatisfied with the autocratic government of Fernando VII. In March 1820, liberals in Spain forced the king to restore the Constitution of Cádiz. The restoration of constitutional government elicited disparate responses from the American regions. New Spain and the kingdom of Guatemala enthusiastically reestablished the constitutional system. In the months that followed, they conducted elections for countless constitutional ayuntamientos, provincial deputations, and the Cortes. The arrival of the proprietary deputies in 1821 reinforced the American delegation. From 44 45

Lynch, San Martín, 91–110. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America, 107–168.

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February to June 1821, more than forty proprietary deputies arrived from New Spain, six from Guatemala, one from Cuba, one from Panama, and three from Venezuela. They and the thirty suplentes, who remained in the new session, constituted a powerful coalition that continued to press the American Question and to criticize the government for failing to resolve the issues that led to the conflict in the New World.46 Political instability in the peninsula during the previous dozen years, however, convinced many novohispanos that it was prudent to establish autonomous governments within the Spanish monarchy. They pursued two courses of action. New Spain’s deputies to the Cortes of 1821 proposed a project for New World autonomy, which would create three American kingdoms allied with the peninsula and governed by Spanish princes under the Constitution of 1812. On 25 June they proposed dividing the New World into three kingdoms: New Spain and Guatemala; New Granada, Venezuela and Quito; and Peru, Chile, Charcas, and Buenos Aires. Each kingdom would possess its own Cortes and govern under the Constitution of 1812. A Spanish prince or a person appointed by the king would preside over each area. At the same time, fearing that Spanish conservatives would reject their proposal, they organized a movement throughout New Spain to establish an autonomous monarchy under the Constitution of 1812. When the Spanish majority in the Cortes, faced with political, social, and economic crises in the peninsula, rejected their proposal to create autonomous American kingdoms, the leaders of New Spain chose to secede. The distinguished politician José Miguel Ramos Arizpe, who had participated in the development of the Cortes of 1812 and also participated in that of 1820–1823, recommended that Mexico be independent. Mexico achieved independence not because royalist forces were defeated militarily but because novohispanos no longer supported the monarchy politically. They persuaded royalist military officers such as Agustín Iturbide who were weary of fighting the insurgency to change sides. The newly independent Mexicans carefully followed the precedents of the Spanish constitutional system. Although they initially established an empire, they soon formed a federal republic in 1824. They modeled their new constitution on the Hispanic charter because it had been part of their recent experience. Like Mexico, the new Central American republic established a federation based on Hispanic constitutional practices.47 46 47

Frasquet Miguel, Las caras del águila, 29–88. Rodríguez O., “We are Now the True Spaniards,” 233–344; Dym, From Sovereign Villages to National States, 127–204.

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The restoration of constitutional government in 1820 allowed those favoring independence to liberate South America. The restored absolutism of 1814–1820 convinced many residents of the port city of Guayaquil, including the liberal deputy to the Cádiz Cortes, José Joaquín de Olmedo, to declare independence on 9 October 1820. Within a few days a group of upper- and middle-class notables had formed a republic, elected Olmedo president, and formed a División Protectora de Quito (Division to Protect Quito) to liberate the rest of the realm. Their first attempt stalled, leaving republicans in control of the coast while the royalists controlled the highlands. The congress that met in Guayaquil in November consisted of fifty-seven deputies representing the coast. It declared independence and established a republic. The deputies intended the former kingdom of Quito to be one entity with other provinces. However, Quito was under royal control. Other cities in the highlands such as Cuenca, Ambato, Riobamba and Latacunga declared independence, but they were not able to oust the royalists. As a result, Olmedo sought aid from San Martín and Bolívar to defeat the royalists. A combined army of three thousand men, primarily local troops, supported by Colombians and men from San Martín’s army, under the command of General Antonio José de Sucre defeated the royal forces in Quito on 24 May 1822, at the battle of Pichincha. Bolívar, who arrived from the north in June with more Colombian troops, imposed martial law in the former kingdom of Quito to impress men as well as to requisition money, men, and supplies for the struggle against the royalists in Peru, the last bastion of royal power in America. Olmedo asked San Martín to assist Bolívar, but he could not help them. Bolívar had no intention of allowing Guayaquil to decide its own destiny. Nearly two thousand Colombian troops occupied Guayaquil as Bolívar required. The president of Colombia entered Guayaquil on 11 July to the firing of cannon and the ringing of bells. Two days later, Bolívar announced that he would “save the people of Guayaquil from the dreadful anarchy . . ..” The government of Guayaquil had no choice but to acquiesce. Olmedo wrote to Bolívar that “all the philosophy of a Stoic or impudence of a Cynic would be necessary to see how the candor of these people has been abused.” Bayonets rather than votes prevailed.48 Unable to obtain the support he needed in Peru and abroad, San Martín ceded the honor of the final victory to Bolívar. Although the Colombians – mostly quiteños – arrived in force in 1823, they made little progress. Divisions among Peruvians, shortage of supplies, and strong royal armies kept them 48

Rodríguez O., La revolución política, 179–186.

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pinned down along the coast. However, the royalist armies were also divided. In Charcas, the absolutist general Pedro Antonio Olañeta opposed General Joaquín de la Serma and the liberales. After King Fernando VII again abolished the Hispanic Constitution, General Olañeta took up arms against the Spanish liberals on 25 December 1823. This internecine warfare contributed to the royalists’ defeat. For nearly a year, while Bolívar and his men recovered, royalist constitutional and absolutist armies waged war in the highlands. Ultimately, General Sucre defeated the royalist constitutional army in the decisive battle of Ayacucho on 9 December 1824. Olañeta’s absolutist forces, however, remained in Charcas. Political intrigue finally ended the struggle. The assassination of Olañeta in April 1825 marked the end of royal power in Charcas. Subsequently, General Sucre formed the new republic called Bolivia. By 1826 Bolívar dominated northern South America as president of Colombia, dictator of Peru, and ruler of Bolivia.49 The assembly of Bolivia adopted Bolívar’s constitution on 11 July 1826. It established a lifetime president with vast power. As he insisted: “A lifetime president, with the right to elect his successor, is the most sublime inspiration of republican ideas . . . This measure avoids elections which are the greatest scourge of republics and produce only anarchy, which . . . is the immediate and most terrible danger of popular governments.”50 At Bolívar’s recommendation, the assembly elected Sucre president for life. The new executive president devoted himself to restoring order and prosperity to the nation. His government was a model of enlightened reform. However, unlike Bolívar, Sucre did not desire a lifetime appointment. He resigned at the end of 1828, after a revolt erupted in the country, and returned to his family in Quito. Thereafter, Bolivia charted its own independent path. Bolívar returned to Colombia determined to resolve the nation’s conflicts by imposing his Bolivarian charter. Unwilling to accept the Bolivarian charter, congress summoned a gran convención, which met in April 1828 to resolve the nation’s constitutional crisis. After two months of bitter debates between liberales and bolivarians, the partisans of the president withdrew, leaving the convention without a quorum. On 27 August, Bolívar established a dictatorship and dismissed the convention until a new constituent congress met in 1830, stipulated by the Constitution of Cúcuta. In 1830, a constituent congress, 49

50

Charles Arnade, The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1957), 165–204. Simón Bolívar’s address and constitution are reproduced in Manuel Antonio Pombo and José Guerra (eds.), Constituciones de Colombia, vol. I I I (Bogatá: Impr. De Echeverria Hermanos, 1892), 115–154.

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known as the Congreso Admirable, failed to resolve the issues that divided the nation. On 6 May an assembly in Venezuela declared independence and seceded from the union. A week later Quito, now called Ecuador, followed suit. Bolívar’s most trusted lieutenant, Sucre, who had served as president of the Congreso Admirable, was murdered on 4 June 1830, as he returned home to Quito. Bolívar died of his lingering tuberculosis while still on Colombian soil on 17 December 1830. Three nations emerged: Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.51 The two halves of America followed different paths to emancipation. While the elites of América Septentrional (Spanish North and Central America) gained independence through a political compromise in which civil and military officials changed sides and supported the decision to separate from the Spanish monarchy, the republicans of América Meridional (South America) fought prolonged and bloody wars to defeat the royal authorities. By the end of that struggle, some military leaders disdained the capacity of Spanish Americans to govern. They adopted autocratic rule rather than building institutions to resolve competing political and economic interests through parliamentary deliberation and compromise. It is often said that Simón Bolívar was the “liberator” of five nations. It is more correct to say that he was the “conqueror” of those nations. The majority of the population in those nations, including his birthplace, Venezuela, preferred the Hispanic constitutional political system to the alternatives offered by republicans. By 1826, the overseas possessions of the Spanish monarchy, one of the world’s most imposing political structures at the end of the eighteenth century, consisted only of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and a few other Pacific islands. The two Floridas, which Cuba supported, were sold by the king to the USA, even though Mexico tried to protect them in 1820. Having achieved independence, the countries of the American continent would henceforth chart their own futures. Spain and America’s nineteenth-century experience provides stark proofs of the cost of independence. Like its American offspring, the former metropolis suffered political chaos, economic decline, economical imperialism, and foreign intervention. Both the peninsula and the nations of the New World endured civil wars and military pronunciamientos. In their efforts to resolve their political and economic crisis, Spain and America experimented with monarchism and republicanism, centralism and federalism, and representative 51

Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America, 220–236.

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government and dictatorship. Unfortunately, there was no simple solution for nations whose economies had been destroyed by war and whose political systems had been shattered by revolution. Political order and economic growth would not begin to be restored in both regions until the 1870s.

Further Reading Anna, Timothy E., The Fall of the Royal Government in Peru (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). Arnade, Charles, The Emergence of the Republic of Bolivia (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1957). Arrom, Silvia Marina, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985). Carroll, Patrick J., Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). Dym, Jordana, From Sovereign Villages to Nation States: City, State, and Central America, 1759– 1839 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2006). Earle, Rebecca A., Spain and the Independence of Colombia, 1810–1825 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000). Rodríguez, Linda Alexander, The Search for Public Policy: Regional Politics and Government Finances in Ecuador, 1830–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Weber, David J., Bárbaros: Spaniards and their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

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13

A Tale of Two Cities: The American Civil War susan-mary grant

The short version of the history of nationalism and America’s mid-nineteenthcentury civil war (1861–1865) may best be explained as a tale of two cities. Not, as one might suppose, the capitals of the Union and the Confederacy, Washington and Richmond, but two cities each of which was situated some four hundred miles from their warring sides’ respective capitals: Boston and Charleston. Arguably, it was in these cities that the essence of the national sentiments that motivated each side was most concentrated: in the case of the Union, to seek to maintain the federal compact and, in the case of the Confederacy, to destroy it. But this is also a story of alternative nationalist approaches. The Union and the Confederacy, respectively, inhabit what Christopher Wellman juxtaposes as the two camps of political theorizing on the subject of states, nations, and secession: the “statist” and the “nationalist.” The former denies the right of secession on the grounds that the attempt to secede threatens the integrity of, and seeks to remove territory from, a legitimate state. The latter denies any implicit right to such territory on the grounds that not only are territories, borders, and frontiers “human constructions that can be redrawn but that they owe their current configuration to a series of violent conquests and morally dubious treaties.”1 This is not necessarily to subscribe to the “two nations” theory of America’s civil conflict as “the first great conflict in the nineteenth century between modern nations that commanded the loyalties and lives of their peoples.” The war was not, after all, recognized as a civil war at all at the time. Then it was, from the Union perspective, the War of the Rebellion, from which angle the Confederacy comprised a composite of traitors to a national creed sanctified by the sacrifices of the revolutionary generation 1

Christopher Heath Wellman, “The Morality of Secession,” in Don H. Doyle (ed.), Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America’s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010) 19–20.

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who had fought and died so that a new nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” in Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at Gettysburg in 1863, might be born.2 Such national sentiment as existed in the still relatively new nation, focused as this largely was on the revolution that had separated it from British colonial authority, did not in any obvious sense diminish in the antebellum era, but it did divide along the Mason–Dixon Line.3 What it divided into, according to some, were two “sectionally unifying grievance narratives” that set North against South, freedom against slavery, and nation against state, which came to a head with the election, in 1860, of Lincoln.4 Such grievances as there were, however, were not equally divided. Even within each section they pulled in several different directions. As a result, in the northern states the threat that some disaffected white southerners posed to the stability and perpetuation of the United States was not universally understood. In part the misunderstanding was temporal. After decades of hearing southern slaveholders’ threats to dismantle the nation, many northerners were simply disinclined, in 1860, to take such threats seriously. As historian David Potter observed, “[d]isunion had for so long kept the bad company of sheer rhetoric that it was looked upon as a mere stage property of the spellbinder.” In part the misunderstanding was spatial. Contemporaneous historian Henry Adams addressed this in his retrospective account of The Great Secession Winter when he recalled that “the extreme North” viewed secessionist rhetoric as nothing more than “sheer panic, which would be as short-lived as it was violent.” The middle and border states, by contrast, “knew their neighbors better,” and understood that, in 1860, “the danger was real.” They realized that too many in the South had become “intoxicated with the prospect of the new Confederacy which was to be founded on enslaved labor and to draw its wealth from its harvests of 2

3

4

Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 4, 5–6; Gaines M. Foster, “What’s Not in a Name: The Naming of the American Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 8/3 (September 2018), 416–454; Abraham Lincoln, “Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863,” in Roy P. Basler (ed.), The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. V I I (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 23. On the significance of the American Revolution in the immediate pre-Civil War period, see Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon, Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 68–71; Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and their Experiences (1988; repr. New York: Touchstone Books, 1989), 1; James M. McPherson, What They Fought for, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 9, 28. Cook et al., Secession Winter, 7.

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cotton.” Stuck in the middle, in Washington, the seat of government, there was only “a strange and bewildering chaos, the fragments of broken parties and a tottering government.”5 Union military victory five years later inevitably determines the interrogative angle from which we view the relationship between American nationalism and the Civil War, the nationalist narratives that we construct, be these for the Confederacy alone, for the Union, or for the reconstructed nation. Consequently, scholars have tended toward two distinct approaches to America’s Civil War. For some, the focus is on the “culture of defeat” as a significant factor in the creation, after the Civil War, of a southern nationalism conceived in the Confederacy and raised in the cultural construct that was the “Lost Cause,” which matured into a racialized romanticism rooted in the social and political efforts to reestablish white supremacist rule after 1865. This was, and remains, a nostalgic nationalism that located the Confederacy in the past. Best summed up by poet and author Robert Penn Warren, it was a nationalism that effectively faked its own death in order to survive: “only at the moment of death,” Warren argued, “was the Confederacy born.” Through death, he intoned, with more rhyme, perhaps, than reason, “the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.”6 Immortality is also the main theme of those who adopt a Union perspective, but a more ambitious immortality. The Union War, Don Doyle has proposed, was the “cause of all nations.” Supporting Doyle’s argument, scholarship also tends in two main directions in respect of the Union cause and ultimate victory. Either it locates this firmly at the core of biblical prophecy, as a “culmination” of the nation’s “dialectic of covenant and chosenness”; in Liah Greenfeld’s words, as the point at which “the soul of the American body . . . became its owner.” Or, in its more secular iterations, the Civil War is understood as defining the crossroads in the nineteenth century’s global battle between progressivism and conservatism. It was, 5

6

David M. Potter, Lincoln and his Party in the Secession Crisis (1942; repr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 14; Henry Adams, The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61 (New York: Sagamore Press, 1958), 3. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (London: Granta, 2003), especially 94–101; Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York: Random House, 1961), 15. Further treatments of defeat and death as supports for southern nationalism include, e.g., Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (1987; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

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according to historian David Potter, the crucial conflict that both “turned the tide which had been running against nationalism for forty years, or ever since Waterloo,” and “forged a bond between nationalism and liberalism at a time when it appeared that the two might draw apart.” This angle on the conflict was developed a decade later by Thomas Schoonover, who located the war between the Union and Confederacy in a wider Atlantic world context, as a conflict between “industrial capitalism’s ideological and world view,” and “the remnants of mercantilistic, paternalistic, and agrarian institutions supporting monarchical and aristocratic management of society.”7 The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment at the war’s end, and the emancipation of the South’s enslaved population lend considerable moral as well as emotional heft to the story of the Union War. At the same time, the racial realities of postwar America fit uncomfortably, if at all, with either of the narratives that scholars have constructed in respect of American nationalism and America as, again in Lincoln’s words, the “last best, hope of earth” – be that in an inspirational sense as the nation that saved itself from the sin of slavery, or in a wider global sense as the savior of nationalism from a bleak future in which it risked serving solely as the handmaiden of totalitarianism. With its echoes of the revolutionary conflict from which the United States emerged in the eighteenth century, the Civil War proved less of an opportunity to revisit and rectify the original racial “revolution settlement,” to deploy John Murrin’s concept, than the proponents of equality had hoped. This should not, perhaps, surprise us. As John Hutchinson has argued, “war is at best a catalyst of social change which can take many different forms,” and is not, in and of itself, “generative of modern citizenship,” far less an inclusive nationalism. In this respect, America’s civil war is very much a case in point.8 7

8

Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 52; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 489; David M. Potter, “Civil War,” in C. Vann Woodward (ed.), The Comparative Approach to American History (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 135–145, 136, 137–138; Thomas D. Schoonover (trans. and ed.), with Ebba Wesener Schoonover, A Mexican View of America in the 1860s: A Foreign Diplomat Describes the Civil War and Reconstruction (London: Associated University Presses, 1991), 228; see also Thomas D. Schoonover, Dollars over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican–United States Relations, 1861–1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978). Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862,” in Basler, Collected Works, vol. V, 537; Murrin quoted in Greenfeld, Nationalism, 400; John Hutchinson, Nationalism and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 45, 49.

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Charleston The city of Charleston on the coast of South Carolina was, in many respects, the flashpoint for as well as the location of the start of the American Civil War. In the summer of 1860, the city had hosted the contentious Democratic National Convention at which the South’s most vociferous proslavery, secessionist spokesmen, the so-called “Fire Eaters,” at first attempted to disrupt proceedings before walking out in protest. Once the war had begun, it was the port into which many of the material goods that sustained the Confederacy arrived and from which the contracts for, among other things, the blockade runners that carried these goods were organized. For good reason the city held a particular interest for Union military commanders. In the war’s second year, George B. McClellan, then in charge of the Union armies, advised one of his generals that the capture of Charleston would have “the greatest moral effect” on Union forces. “There the rebellion had its birth,” he wrote, “there the unnatural hatred of our Government is most intense; there is the center of the boasted power and courage of the rebels.” For this reason, he argued, an attack on Charleston was “a task well worthy of our greatest efforts and considerable sacrifices.”9 In fact Charleston held out, falling to federal forces only in the war’s final year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at that point the city was still regarded as the fulcrum of disunion, the focus of the threat to the federal Union, its white population the physical embodiment of those forces that had challenged the very existence of the United States. Charleston and secession were “synonymous terms,” Union General William Tecumseh Sherman observed. The destruction wrought upon the city was, in his view, both justified and salutary. “Anyone who is not satisfied with war, should go and see Charleston,” he advised, and “the city should be left as a sample, so that centuries will pass away before that false doctrine is again preached in our Union.”10 (See Figure 13.1.) Sherman’s linking secession with Charleston in 1865 was inevitable, but as far as the longer trajectory of American nationalism was concerned, not wholly accurate. The “drive for secession was inherent in the nature of English nationalism,” according to Greenfeld, and it was English nationalism that crossed the Atlantic, established itself upon the North American continent, and, in time, 9

10

George B. McClellan to William T. Sherman, 14 February 1862, in The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion (ORA), V I, X V, 225. William T. Sherman, General Sherman’s Official Account of his Great March through Georgia and the Carolinas (New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1865), 130.

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Figure 13.1 Ruins in Charleston, South Carolina, seen from the Circular Church, 150 Meeting Street, between 1861 and 1865. L C -D I G -ppmsca-35041 (digital file from original item). Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

mutated into the American variant. The question of why, having so mutated, English/American nationalism further divided along sectional lines such that, by the mid-nineteenth century, several of the southern states no longer believed that the federal government would secure their rights as states under the US Constitution, has engaged scholars for decades. Most track the instability of the antebellum Union back to its source. Ever since the separation from Great Britain, Greenfeld notes, “Americans held some things to be self-evident, but the Union was not among them.”11 The eventual disengagement of eleven southern states from the federal compact may be taken as evidence that the dangers of disunion, however diffused over the decades since independence, were real. Equally, we should remember that the concept of the Confederacy was no more coherent in 1861 11

Greenfeld, Nationalism, 412, 424.

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than the idea of Union had been in 1783, when the Treaty of Paris formally ended hostilities between Great Britain and its former colonies. White southern disgruntlement with the national state had rumbled on for decades before secession actually occurred. This often revolved around the concept of Union – less as an ideal to aspire to and the locus of a new nationalism, and more as a pragmatic political and financial federal arrangement. Historians frequently cite the 1827 speech by the then president of South Carolina College, Dr. Thomas Cooper, delivered in the context of agitation over the tariff, when he urged his fellow white southerners to “calculate the value of our union.” Through the proposed increase in the tariff, he declaimed, “[w] ealth will be transferred to the North, and wealth is power.” Deploying an already familiar trope among slaveholders to invoke slavery as evidence of their own subservient status, Cooper described the “chains” by which southern planter interests were tied to a Union that only “prostrated” the South; chains, clearly, that he believed should be sundered.12 A combination of military threat and political compromise held the Union together for the next three decades. Over the course of these decades, however, as sectional tensions heightened, there was decreasing evidence of a coherent American nationalism and a concomitant increase in separate, southern nationalist sentiment, much of it disproportionately deriving from South Carolina. In this period, Charleston became a hub of hostility to perceived northern dominance and disapproval. This was expressed both by individuals attached to the city, such as southern political spokesman John C. Calhoun, or J. D. B. De Bow, the publisher of the New Orleans-based De Bow’s Review, and through publications produced there, such as the Charleston Mercury and a host of pamphlets and tracts critiquing the Union, northerners in general, and abolitionists in particular. Because ultimately what gave a coherence to, and a motivation for, sectional, later secessionist, and southern nationalist rhetoric was slavery; albeit a coherence couched in the language of American constitutional rights and privileges. Although states’ rights became, after secession, a rhetorical storm-break behind which slavery sheltered, the South’s “peculiar institution” had long cast its shade over political and national discussion. James De Bow himself 12

Dumas Malone, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783–1839 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926), 308; Greenfeld, Nationalism, 431; Robert E. Bonner, “Proslavery Calculations and the Value of Southern Disunion,” in Doyle (ed.), Secession, 117; James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 57.

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penned a think-piece on the subject, stating bluntly “that the greatest danger to the continuance of the Republic lay in the different views taken by the Northern and the Southern states, of the institution of domestic slavery.” In a veiled threat, he observed that “true patriotism does not yet require the agitation of the severance of the political bonds of the country,” but at the same time warned, in an echo of Alexis de Tocqueville, that no “tyranny is so oppressive as that of a majority in a so-called free people.” Developing this point, in an article published on the nation’s many natural opportunities and glorious future that in all other respects would have read well in the North, Georgian author W. J. Sasnett observed that the “doctrine of states rights is, indeed, the great conservative element of our system of government, the balance-wheel by which alone the constitutional adjustments of the system are maintained.” Further, and this was the crucial point, the states’ rights principle rendered “the operations of government so restrained as to be incapable of working change in our institutions.”13 More direct was an 1850 tract openly advocating secession and the creation of a separate southern republic predicated on slavery. Its author, Edward Bryan, presented his readers with a clear choice: “There is Union and Abolition on one hand, and Disunion and Slavery on the other . . . Reader! we can not tell what you and other men may think, but for us, give us S L A V E R Y or give us death.” Bryan’s deliberate echo of revolutionary rhetoric became a theme in the years preceding the Civil War, as southerners drew on the historical precedent of the American Revolution to argue that only south of the Mason–Dixon Line was the true legacy of the nation’s founding maintained. In effect, as historian Paul Quigley has argued from the evidence of Independence Day speeches in Charleston between 1820 and the secession winter of 1860/1861, antebellum southerners increasingly deployed “the testimony of the past to support the idea of a separate southern nation in the present.” Publications followed a similar pattern, with writers elevating the South’s role in the Revolutionary War or, in the case of Andrew Pickens Butler, a senator from South Carolina, writing the northern states out of the story entirely in favor of “Southern slave-holders from Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia.”14 13

14

James D. B. De Bow, “The South and her Remedies,” De Bow’s Review, 10/1 (January 1851), 1; William J. Sasnett, “The United States – her Past and her Future,” De Bow’s Review, 12/6 (June 1852), 626; Jonathan B. Crider, “De Bow’s Revolution: The Memory of the American Revolution in the Politics of the Sectional Crisis, 1850–1861,” American Nineteenth Century History, 10/3 (2009), 317–320. Edward B. Bryan, The Rightful Remedy: Addressed to the Slaveholders of the South (Charleston: Walker and James, 1850), 147; Bonner, “Proslavery Calculations,” 122–123;

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In this respect, the secessionist impulse as it operated in the years prior to the Civil War presents an example of what Hutchinson defines as the mythomoteur, the “constituting myth,” in southern historical consciousness and self-definition, and clear evidence of the ways in which memories of conflict can serve to “erode rather than sustain national cohesion.” Before 1860, however, there was a limit to the efficacy of both secessionist rhetoric and revolutionary memories in constructing a separate sense of “southernness” sufficient to sunder the Union. In the 1860 election year, however, the arguments gathered both pace and momentum when the “Fire-Eaters” sensed secession might finally be effected. Only then did the bombast give way to a sustained defense of secession, largely originating from Charleston and designed to persuade others in the South to follow South Carolina out of the Union. As the Charleston Mercury observed, not without reason, the “other Cotton States will look to South Carolina to recommend the time, place and means of forming a Southern Confederacy.”15 Whether this new Confederacy could be deemed a separate nation was far from clear, even to those who argued for its creation. The propagandist material in support of secession pursued arguments as disengaged from economic and political reality as they were engaged with the idea of racial control. John Townsend’s widely distributed pro-secessionist pamphlet, for example, at first presented what could be read as a purely states’ rights argument in its assertion that “the Constitution of the United States is a compact between sovereign and co-equal States, united on the basis of perfect equality of rights and privileges.” Yet it took only a few pages before Townsend made clear that the rights these states wished to protect were purely racial. “This Union was formed by men of the white race, for white men and their posterity,” he asserted, a chilling statement that would be echoed across the new Confederacy, most notably by Confederate VicePresident Alexander Stephens in his assertion that the Confederate government’s “corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The sentiment was also implicit in the title of Confederate poet, and Charleston resident, Henry Timrod’s “Ethnogenesis” (1861), with its premature assumption that the Confederacy was “A nation among

15

Paul Quigley, “‘That History is Truly the Life of Nations’: History and Southern Nationalism in Antebellum South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 106/1 (January 2005), 10; Mr. Garnett, “The South and the Union: The Union, Past and Present, How it Works, and How to Save It, Part I I I,” De Bow’s Review, 18/4 (April 1855), 441; Andrew P. Butler, “The South’s Sacrifices in the Revolution,” De Bow’s Review, 21/2 (August 1856), 198. Hutchinson, Nationalism and War, 52; Charleston Mercury, 24 December 1860.

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nations,” and its prediction that “the world / Shall soon behold in many a distant port / Another flag unfurled.”16 Timrod was not the only one attempting to write the Confederate nation into reality. De Bow’s Review, briefly also published in Charleston in the first part of the war, bombarded its readers with all that they might gain, economically, from division, and all that they stood to lose from defeat. The economic argument was rather a red herring, however. Profit always took second place to pride, couched in the honor culture of the South. “The war now being waged in defence of the great principles of self-government,” De Bow’s editor asserted in the war’s second year, “must end, sooner or later, in placing the Confederate States among the great nations of the earth.” Defeat, he sermonized, meant “death and desolation,” but even these “should be joyously courted as blessed blooms in exchange for dishonor and subjugation.” The Review’s persistence was unusual as the war progressed. The Charleston Mercury, by contrast, having made its case for secession, largely concentrated on the military progress of the putative nation whose birth it had facilitated and whose future would be determined on the battlefield. At no point, however, did those arguing for a separate Confederacy fully express the idea of a separate nationhood in a geopolitical sense. They desired it in an economic, emotional, and racial sense: a white man’s republic predicated on race in the context of invented ethnic distinctions that assigned the African American a subservient role.17 To understand the implications of this, Allen Buchanan’s discussion of the subject, specifically his identification of two basic theories of secession as a “remedial” or a “primary right,” may be of value. By applying (admittedly anachronistically) these normative theories to the American Civil War from the Confederate side, it becomes evident that the southern states failed to make that distinction with any clarity, deploying both “remedial” and “primary” rights arguments simultaneously and sequentially in support, first, of secession and, second, to justify a distinctive nationalism. Accusing the federal government of having overthrown the constitution such that the “Government of the United States is no longer the Government of the Confederated Republics, but of a consolidated Democracy . . . no longer a free Government, but 16

17

John Townsend, The South Alone Should Govern the South (Charleston: Evans and Cogswell, 1860), 6, 9; Alexander H. Stephens, “The ‘Corner-Stone’ Speech, March 21, 1861),” in Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, in Public and Private (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1866), 721; Henry Timrod, “Ethnogenesis,” in Paul H. Hayne (ed.), The Poems of Henry Timrod (New York: E. J. Hale and Son, 1872), 100. James De Bow, “Editorial,” De Bow’s Review, 32/1–2(January–February 1862), 161; 32/3–4 (March–April 1862), 334.

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a despotism” facilitated the invocation of the American Revolution as a precedent to follow. In this regard, the seceding states were claiming what Buchanan describes as “a remedial right to secede,” arising out of injustices perpetrated upon “the people.”18 At the same time, secessionists claimed for the (white) South distinctive racial traits that were both, under Buchanan’s normative schematic, “ascriptive” and “associative” examples of primary right theory: white southerners had the right to a separate state because they already constituted a distinct people with a “common culture, history, language, a sense of its own distinctiveness, and perhaps a shared aspiration for constituting its own political unit.” Invoking what had long been an antebellum trope of northern “Normans” and southern “Saxons,” of “Cavalier” and “Yankee,” secessionist spokesmen highlighted the “discordant ethnological elements” of North and South that rendered conflict between them all but inevitable in order that a “new era of civilization and power,” of “individual and national activity” be inaugurated in the South. This supports Elie Kedourie’s and John Hutchinson’s arguments that the deployment of historical mythologies to support nationalist claims has the “potential to generate conflicts,” as well as exacerbating already existing differences within states. Ultimately, however, in claiming separate statehood, the Confederacy set too many hares running in defense of secession. This has achieved for it an immortality of sorts. Scholars, arguing over the chicken-and-egg conundrum that was “southern” or “Confederate” nationalism, continue to look for it in the households of the home front, or the graveyards of the postwar era, in the Army of Northern Virginia during the war, or in the white supremacist culture that was the Lost Cause after it. And the search continues.19

Boston Nationalism, as John Breuilly has pointed out, “remains distinctive only for so long as it is unsuccessful.” As a “response to the distinction, peculiar to the modern world, between state and society,” once that distinction is effectively eradicated, nationalism “abolishes its own foundations.” This may explain 18

19

Allen Buchanan, “Theories of Secession,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 26/1 (Winter 1997), 34; Charleston Mercury, 25 December 1860. Buchanan, “Theories of Secession,” 37–38; Anon. [De Bow], “The Conflict of Northern and Southern Races,” De Bow’s Review, 31/4–5 (October–November 1861), 393–394; Hutchinson, Nationalism and War, 169. See the Introduction to Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (1966; repr. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

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why, in contrast to the scholarly fascination with southern or Confederate nationalism, the Union side of the Civil War equation is often assumed to be comparatively straightforward and has, consequently, received less scholarly attention. The impact of the war on the city of Boston, Massachusetts, and vice versa, complicates that assumption, highlighting as it does the most contentious and contradictory aspects of the Union War in respect of the right of secession, the national and nationalist imperative from a northern perspective, and, crucially, the role that opposition to slavery played in both.20 As far as public expressions of the abolitionist imperative were concerned, these were largely martial in character. The Union’s showcase AfricanAmerican regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, marched through the streets of Boston in the spring of 1863 before heading to South Carolina, where its white officer was martyred on the ramparts of Fort Wagner, just off the coast of Charleston Harbor. Its sister regiment, the Massachusetts 55th, marched through the streets of Charleston itself following the city’s surrender in February 1865. Both were powerful symbolic statements of a Union committed to emancipation, but they disguised the tortuous path taken by the North toward this end and, perhaps inevitably, the compromised nature of the nationalism to emerge from the conflict. The first challenge facing the Union over the winter of 1860/1861 was that southern arguments for a separate Confederate state were not wholly without foundation. In this respect, the frequent references to, if not the rewriting of, the nation’s revolutionary past by southerners had some validity. So too did the charge that, as the nation expanded, an imbalance of political and economic power between North and South would inevitably develop, what Buchanan terms “discriminatory redistribution.” Neither northern arguments, developed over the course of the antebellum period, concerning the political dominance of what they termed the “Slave Power,” nor southern confidence in the economic power of cotton, could really counter the hard reality that with each passing year the North’s population, bolstered by immigration, was growing faster than a South hampered both morally and materially by chattel slavery could ever hope to match. Nevertheless, the arguments in defense of separate nationhood were on the table, and the Union had to address them.21 20

21

John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 390. Allen Buchanan, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 69–70.

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The approach adopted by the mainly Harvard-educated elite, who had either been born in or were located in Boston and its immediate environs in 1860, was essentially a tripartite one that changed in emphasis over the course of the conflict. It consisted in, first, a defense of political union and a denial, on both legal and nationalist grounds, of the right of secession; second, an argument designed to encourage Union military efforts which revolved around the idea of loyalty to the nation; and finally, a religiously inflected consolation narrative designed to provide solace to the bereaved whilst simultaneously elevating what had been a colonial covenantal trope into the cornerstone of America’s national mission. One of the first to tackle the issues was Joel Parker, a professor at Harvard Law School, in a widely disseminated pamphlet that examined the Right of Secession. Much of Parker’s argument consisted in a detailed consideration of whether the individual states had acted jointly and severally to form the Union, since the newly formed Confederacy was justifying its existence on the latter. Parker disagreed that this had been the Founders’ intention. He did not deny that there was a right of revolution; he simply asserted that there was a limit to this. “The right of revolution,” he argued, “does not exist in all cases where the power of revolution is found.” Noted author John Lothrop Motley concurred. “Only via the Constitution had America as a nation been created,” he argued, “only through the denial of secession could it be maintained. Secession,” asserted Motley, is “the return to chaos from which we emerged three quarters of a century since,” and whilst the right of revolution was “indisputable,” secession was not revolution; it was rebellion. The argument in defense of nationhood was made repeatedly, if not always confidently. “Our national Union,” it was stressed, “is synonymous with our national existence,” and until the constitutional position on secession was settled, Americans had “neither a flag nor a country . . . Chaos has come again.”22 Some were more confident. Poet James Russell Lowell, Harvardeducated and abolitionist-inclined former editor of the Atlantic Monthly at the start of the war, published a detailed analysis of the sanctity of the American national creed as he saw it. “The United States,” he argued, “are not a German Confederation, but a unitary and indivisible nation, with a national life to protect, a national power to maintain, and national 22

Joel Parker, Right of Secession (Cambridge: Welch, Bigelow and Co., 1861), 12; John Lothrop Motley, The Causes of the American Civil War (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1861), 9, 22; [Anon.]; “Where Will the Rebellion Leave Us?” Atlantic Monthly, 8/46 (August 1861), 238–239.

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rights to defend against any and every assailant.” Lowell struck back at southern accusations of federal despotism. “Rebellion smells no sweeter because it is called Secession,” he charged, “nor does Order lose its divine precedence in human affairs because a knave may nickname it Coercion.” Lowell was not simply defending the nation; in secession he saw it begin to emerge for the first time. Secession, he believed, would awaken Americans’ “sense of national unity, and make them feel that patriotism was . . . more than a pleasing sentiment . . . a feeble reminiscence, rather than a living fact with a direct bearing on the national well-being.” For Lowell, with crisis came a new confidence in the American nation; in secession, nationalism might be born.23 Lowell’s was far from a lone voice on this subject. Fellow Harvard graduate and Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows argued that “when threatening and anxious times come upon us, then all the great realities begin to shine out. Citizenship and nationality again mean something.” For the elites, the issue of loyalty to the nation was significant, not least because of its practical value in encouraging enlistment at a time when the war was going badly for the Union. Both the Union and the Confederacy deployed a military draft, but the bulk of their armies comprised not conscripted but voluntary troops. This can be regarded as blurring the distinction between the military and civilian worlds, but it translated into a growing need to persuade both worlds that the war for the Union was one worth fighting.24 It must be stressed how much of an elite development this was. It represented a top-down, albeit not a state-articulated nationalist imperative. As with so much relating to nationalism and patriotism in the North during the Civil War, the central state had little directly to do with the development of, for example, the Union Leagues, the Loyal Publication Society, or the Sanitary Fairs held across the northern states; the last were about raising funds, but also taking the opportunity to raise public consciousness about the American nation and what it stood for. Above all, as historian George Fredrickson noted, for the elites the imperative was to emphasize that “revolutionary ideology had no further application to American society.” Loyalty to the nation was about maintaining the “established order.” For Bellows, the way forward was clear: “The country should have but one 23

24

James R. Lowell, “E Pluribus Unum,” Atlantic Monthly, 7/40 (February 1861), 235–236, 238. Henry W. Bellows, A Discourse before the Second Unitarian Society of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: C. Sherman and Sons, 1861), 4.

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thought – the protection of the National life.” He urged the northern population to “make a religion of patriotism,” because it was “this holy spirit of devotion on the part of the whole people, this jealous patriotism, this unconditional loyalty that can alone save the land.”25 Although Boston, and Massachusetts more generally, sustained the reputation of being the epicenter of abolitionist sentiments in Civil War-era America, and the church bells rang out all over the city to announce the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day, 1863, the reality was rather more complicated. The New York City Draft Riots are famous, but Boston, too, experienced racially inflected opposition to the draft some six months after the city had celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation. Unitarian minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson regarded the Civil War as an opportunity, indeed an imperative, for northerners to get off the fence on the slavery question. “Either slavery is essential to a community, or it must be fatal to it,” he argued; “there is no middle ground.” And he was swift to dismiss any arguments on the basis of states’ rights, cutting straight to the heart of the cause of the Civil War. “The most bigoted royal house in Europe,” he noted, “never dreamed of throwing down the gauntlet for the actual ownership of man by man.” His city was more ambivalent. An outsider saw this clearly. British journalist Edward Dicey observed that until the outbreak of the Civil War, “to avow the Abolition creed in Boston was to exclude yourself from society.” Secession, he commented, “has brought the Abolitionists and the Republicans into the same camp, but the Abolitionists are still a distant outpost, a sort of enfants perdus of the army of the Union.”26 The problem, as Dicey saw it, was that “the creed of the Republicans consists in being as hostile to slavery as is consistent with loyalty to the Union and the Constitution; while the Abolitionists hold the converse doctrine, and are as loyal to the Union as is consistent with hostility to slavery.” The extent to which the Civil War squared this circle in respect of American nationalism, however, remains debatable. For some, the war achieved this almost instantly. Boston’s most famous abolitionist and editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, had, in 1854, denounced the US Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” With the outbreak of the 25

26

George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 135; Henry W. Bellows, Unconditional Loyalty (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, [1863]), 3, 12. Thomas W. Higginson, “The Ordeal by Battle,” The Atlantic Monthly, 8/45 (July 1861), 91; Edward Dicey, Spectator of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 247, 253.

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Civil War, he declared his support for it once again on the grounds, he explained, that when he had made his original declaration, he “had no idea that I should live to see death and hell secede.” Poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, similarly, believed that the war was productive of “a generosity of mutual and patriotic support” that had not existed before. Now, Emerson declaimed, “we have a country again.”27 Scholars have tended to interpret Emerson’s enthusiasm through the moral lens of antislavery, arguing that he saw the Civil War as a chance to “bring about the moral revolution in American life, that final fulfilment of the covenant that Americans had made in undertaking the political revolution of the eighteenth century.” In this respect his “Boston Hymn,” published in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly in 1863, made the point clearly, linking as it did the lofty ambitions of the colonial era with the antislavery imperative of the Civil War. “I will have never a noble, / No lineage counted great: / Fishers and choppers and ploughmen / Shall constitute a State,” Emerson reminded his readers, and urged them toward a future fulfillment of the national promise: “I break your bonds and masterships, / And I unchain the slave: / Free be his heart and hand henceforth, / As wind and wandering wave.”28 Yet the emphasis on emancipation as both (re)commitment to liberty and consolation for those who had sacrificed in the cause of the Union was, again, an elite-composed – largely an abolitionist-elite-composed – construct. It certainly reflected the perspective of those who, like African-American spokesman Frederick Douglass, had long argued for the conflict to become as much about emancipation as about Union. Speaking in 1860, while the Union yet hung in the balance, Douglass had highlighted the gulf between those who supported abolition and those who opposed it and would silence all debate on the subject. “A man’s right to speak,” Douglass declaimed, “does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color.” Whether Douglass’s views were widespread among the rank and file fighting for the Union and, after 1863, for emancipation, is another matter. Douglass himself felt strongly enough about the Union cause to support both his sons in their decision to join the famous Massachusetts 54th, but not all northerners were 27

28

Dicey, Spectator, 250; Lawrence Lader, The Bold Brahmins: New England’s War against Slavery (1831–1863) (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1961), 262; James E. Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: n.p., 1887), 2, 600–601. Peter D. Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 214–215; Lewis P. Simpson, Mind and the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost Causes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 61–64; R. W. Emerson, “Boston Hymn,” Atlantic Monthly, 11/64 (February 1863), 227.

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as enthusiastic, even those in uniform. Despite Chandra Manning’s arguments that the conception of the war as a campaign against slavery was widely prevalent among Union soldiers, racism did not evaporate overnight and much of the support Union troops accorded the slaves was self-serving. Generals such as Ben Butler, for example, had to issue orders against his officers using escaped slaves as unpaid servants; this was not quite the slavery these refugees had fled from, but it was not quite freedom, either.29 Scholars such as Manning have perhaps been too quick to seize on emancipation as evidence of a spiritual turn in what had been a mainly secular faith, an expression of the covenant of chosenness for the American nation, proof of faith in the nation’s ideals. One example of this is the emphasis that Robert Bellah accords Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic in his examination of the “broken covenant,” a hymn that he describes as “an almost perfect expression of the national spirit,” a summation of “the apocalyptic character of that moment in the nation’s history.” Composed following Howe’s visit to the battlefield but conceived entirely in the abolitionist environment of Boston, Howe’s perspective certainly reflected a society primed through millennialism to regard their country as a “Redeemer Nation.” Arguing that this translated into northerners seeing the Civil War as the “Armageddon of the Republic,” or equated the “Army of the Potomac” with the “glory of the coming of the Lord” may be straining the similes somewhat.30 The tendency persists, however, to listen out for Gabriel’s trumpet in the Union armies and across the northern states, even as the general direction of Civil War scholarship has become grimmer, more concerned with death and suffering than with national redemption and spiritual salvation. As historian Harry Stout sees it, a civil war that had begun in an essentially legal debate over the rights of secession became spiritually inflected over time. Consequently, Americans “incarnated” their antebellum “millennial 29

30

Frederick Douglass, “A Plea for Freedom of Speech in Boston, 9 December, 1860,” in Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. 3, 424: Electronic Repository: https://frederickdouglass .infoset.io/; C. Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008); Susan-Mary Grant, “‘The Contraband’s Death is More Miserable than her Life’: Violence, Visibility and the Medicalization of Freedom in the American Civil War,” in Laura S. Sandy and Marie S. Molloy (eds.), The Civil War and Slavery Reconsidered: Negotiating the Peripheries (London: Routledge, 2019), 145–168, 149. Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 52–53; James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 42, 81; James H. Moorhead, “Between Progress and Apocalypse: A Reassessment of Millennialism in American Religious Thought, 1800–1880,” Journal of American History, 71 (December 1984), 533, 538.

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speculations into nationalism and global salvation in this world.” In part, this process was a response to the numbers sacrificed in the nation’s name. As Drew Gilpin Faust argues, it was the “war’s staggering human cost” that inculcated “a new sense of national destiny.” Yet Americans had sustained a reasonably robust sense of national destiny long before a civil war tore the nation apart. And the rapid demographic overwhelming of the Civil War generation, including by immigrants for whom the 1861–1865 conflict was not even history, should give us pause. For those who lived through it, the war was undoubtedly the defining experience of their lives, but its role in the construction of American nationalism beyond that generation may not be all that we believe it to be.31

Conclusion For Edward Dicey, the nationalizing components of America’s civil conflict were less spiritual and more practical. He believed that the war would “consolidate the country,” but on the grounds that the war itself would become what Americans had in common. Without it, he commented, “it would have been hard to realize that Boston formed part of the same country as Chicago, and St. Louis, and Nashville.” The war constituted “the chief bond of union and identity between the different states of the North.” But the Union war, in his view, was ultimately a practical one: a fight to prevent the dissolution of the nation and its disintegration into “a system of rival republics, with mutual enmities, antagonistic policies, foreign alliances, and intestine wars.” In this respect, Dicey foreshadowed the argument made by Sherman at the war’s end. “[Y]ou cannot have peace and a division of our country,” the general insisted. “If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop,” he argued, “but will go on till we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war.” For Sherman, the Civil War was about nationhood only in the sense that nationalism was about power. The “United States does and must assert its authority wherever it has power,” he asserted; “if it relaxes one bit to pressure it is gone.” There was no sense of spiritual unity or civil religion, no concept of covenant, broken or otherwise, in Sherman’s concept of the nation; so far from being in any way biblically inflected, his view was from the battlefield alone.32 31

32

Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Penguin, 2007) 433; Faust, Republic of Suffering, 268. Dicey, Spectator, 274, 286; Sherman, Official Account, 60.

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For others, the view was different, and they disseminated that view across the northern states. Whether from the pulpit or from the political arena, through poetry or the pamphlets of the Loyal Publication Society, northerners enunciated a national outlook that moved, as the war progressed, from one in which the Republic took center stage as a new, democratic ideal in its own right, to one in which the rights of the formerly enslaved population of the South took precedence. This was the national ideal that Emerson sought to capture in his “Boston Hymn.” With the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments, the Civil War generation seemed to have completed what the revolutionary generation had deferred: the eradication of chattel slavery in the “land of the free,” and the definition, for the first time, of American citizenship based on the nation, not on the individual state. Yet as historian Peter Parish argued, the wartime nationalism that had made this possible “proved to be a hothouse plant, which faded after 1865,” and the “moral commitment” to a nation predicated on equality “was no longer strong enough or clear enough for the tasks that lay ahead.”33 The degree to which a ghostly Confederate nationalism, what Faust terms a “shadow nation,” was the cause of this moral disintegration has been exaggerated. As a putative nation that advertised racial slavery as its defining feature, the defeated Confederate states were not likely to accommodate, or accommodate themselves to, a nationalism that proudly proclaimed racial equality. But the postwar United States did not proclaim any such thing, either in the states of the former Confederacy or on its frontier. For white southerners still wedded to an exclusionary racial outlook, there was more than enough room for manoeuvre in the postwar nation to allow them to locate their national identity within the parameters set out by Sherman: a nation and a nationalism in which military power was dominant. In this respect, postwar nationalism was even more determinedly masculinized than even the antebellum variant had been, as what Amy Greenberg has identified as “martial manhood” became the core of Civil War memory, privileging the men who fought, not the women who facilitated the fighting. This was especially effective for former Confederates, struggling as they were in the postwar era to transform treason into patriotism and relocate themselves in the national narrative. Consequently, they were swift to subscribe to the trope of the Civil War as a “brothers’ war,” and to present themselves as 33

Peter J. Parish, “Partisanship and the Construction of Nationalism,” in Adam I. P. Smith and Susan-Mary Grant (eds.), P. J. Parish, the North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 127.

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Americans who had fought both for and against their “country,” using the term to mean either the United States or the Confederacy as it suited. And the postwar South was quick in establishing what Richard Bessel has summed up as “a system of apartheid through terror,” and to justify its actions by invoking a failed nation-state, a “Lost Cause” designed to evoke pathos, pity, and political justification in equal measure. Ironically, if “historically informed grievance narratives” predicated on the nation’s history had been a prime factor in preventing secession, in the postwar era these, now firmly focused on the Civil War, became the means to national cohesion – a racially and militarily inflected nationalism in which both North and South could lay claim to the nation’s history, albeit from opposite directions.34

Further Reading Doyle, Don H., The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015). Faust, Drew Gilpin, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). Fleche, Andre M., The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Gallagher, Gary W., The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism and Military Strategy Could Not Stave off Defeat, new edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Gallagher, Gary W., The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Grant, Susan-Mary, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000). Hutchinson, John, Nationalism and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism (1966; repr. Oxford : Blackwell, 1993). McCardell, John M., The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). Quigley, Paul, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Rubin, Anne Sarah, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 34

Faust, Republic of Suffering, 83; A. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11; Richard Bessel, Violence: A Modern Obsession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 28; Susan-Mary Grant, “The Lost Boys: Citizen-Soldiers, Disabled Veterans, and Confederate Nationalism in the Age of People’s War,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 2/2 (June 2012), 252–253; Cook, Secession Winter, 79, 84.

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14

The Cycle of Inevitability in Imperial and Republican Identities in China pamela kyle crossley

Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real. Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance. In the case of the Qing Empire (1636–1912) in China, a self-conscious nationalist rhetoric was the apparent convergence of long- and short-term developments, as well as of internal and external influences. An early modern conquest empire established criteria of identity – here, the criteria by which an individual would consciously affiliate with a self-defined group within a society – on which its administrative stability and ideological legitimacy rested.1 By the nineteenth century these criteria had a complex interactivity with domestic tensions, destabilizing some aspects of imperial governance. Mercantilist and imperialist powers from Europe challenged sovereign control of imperial boundaries and eventually intruded into the economy and society of some areas. A massive civil war of the mid-nineteenth century dealt a fatal blow to the imperial state, permitting 1

Pamela Kyle Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 15–16.

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the rise of regional powers, the hollowing of imperial authority, and anxieties about foreign exploitation. The emergence of imperial Japan after the 1870s fulfilled many of the bleakest fears of China’s leading statesmen and intellectuals, intensifying the urgency of nationalist advocacy. The significant nationalist and separatist movements were coincident with the Qing imperial constituencies – ideologically constructed imperial audiences for imperial performance, providing the substance of legitimacy – which is to say that they used the criteria defining them to mount a nationalist movement, while activists in other movements within the Qing imperial territories sought to separate their ascribed homelands from an emerging political order that would be overtly Chinese in orientation. Activists had powerful tools for such campaigns: orthographies, language primers, dictionaries, translations from Chinese classics, narratives of their origins, and formal, duplicated genealogies, all carefully sponsored and edited by the Qing court of the eighteenth century, aided in the range of affective activation – from nostalgia, to pride, to indignation at alleged Chinese assumptions of centrality and superiority. Manchus, Mongols, Uyghurs, and Tibetans – all of whom had had their selfidentifications tempered by Qing ideological intervention – also saw themselves as inevitable, and destined to endure beyond the empire. From sources both domestic and foreign, a Chinese elite of the late nineteenth century shaped a discourse of national revitalization, a vision of China free of the Qing Empire, united under a republican government, economically robust, and able to defend itself militarily against any foreign threat. From the 1890s – when the end of the Qing Empire in name as well as in fact was regarded as imminent – to 1949, this nationalist agenda was defeated repeatedly, in complex ways. In 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong actually succeeded in establishing a unified government that had the power not only to unite but ultimately to transform the political fabric of China and its contiguous territories, nationalist rhetoric was still available as a primary resource for rewriting a residually imperial, corporatist, militarist, regionally segmented regime into an authoritarian, ideologically and culturally monolithic state.

Conquest and Identity Ascription The process of conquest cannot be separated from the state-generating processes of identity ascription.2 Especially fundamental is the conversion 2

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983); Anthony W. Marx, “Race-making and the Nation-State,” World Politics, 48/2 (January 1996), 180–208; David Theo Goldberg, The

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of the conquered to conquerors, as increasing needs for infantries, specialized technologies, and cultural information required the constant redescription and repositioning of select conquered populations. However, across Eurasia early modern overland conquest looks somewhat different from conquests of earlier times. An important reason was that a defining characteristic of early modern academic cultures was a materialist turn (sometimes interpreted as a revival of classical thinking about environmental determinism), in which the human body, language, temperament, abilities, and destiny were understood as part of the unalterable spectrum of natural phenomena.3 In instances of overseas transmarinal intrusion and domination, such racializing cosmologies could be used to justify and perpetuate political and economic inequalities that had been wrested through temporary technological or immunological advantage. But for overland conquest empires, such as the Ottoman, Mughal, Russian, and Qing, essentializing rhetoric was often at odds with the needs of conquest and occupation. When the Qing Empire came to Beijing in 1644, a materialist, essentialized, racialized rhetoric was well planted in Chinese academic communities. In contrast to the more or less orthodox Confucian rationalism posited on the distinctions between mind and matter, the materialists argued that there was no mind independent of matter, and occasionally that mind was merely derived from matter. But over the course of the sixteenth century this culturalism took on the form of racial historicizing. Material causation in the world gave new valorization to the human body, and differences in material descent as manifested in corporal identity were now argued by these groups of Ming scholars to be essential, eternal, material, and moral all at the same time.4 The contestation over whether identity was learned or arose from natural, essential forces continued to dart in and out of scholarly and court discourse during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In the background was the materialist discourse on identity that had taken

3

4

Racial State (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001); Pamela Kyle Crossley, Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt (eds.), Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (New York: Berghahn, 2011); Leslie G. Carr, “ColorBlind” Racism (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997); Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (eds.), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Joseph Zeigler, “Physiognomy, Science, and Proto-racism, 1200–1500,” in Eliav-Feldon et al. (eds.), The Origins of Racism in the West, 181–199. Ernstjoachim Vierheller, Nation und Elite im Denken von Wang Fu-chih (1619–1692) (Hamburg: Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens, 1968); Frank Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

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shape in the late Ming. Its best-known theorists were a generation of scholars who were born in the last decades of the Ming, experienced the Qing conquest as young men, and afterward had to decide whether to serve the new state or live in obscurity and relative poverty. The most famous of these men, Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), in his private writings expanded the materialist critique to investigate historical causation, human evolution, the workings of nature, and the role of moral obligation in the life of the individual. The inherent attribution of permanence to an undescribed “Chinese” culture and ephemerality to others took on a new connotation with the materialist turn in Chinese thinking of the late Ming and early Qing. The permanence was now attributed not merely to Chinese culture but to the Chinese as a hereditary population, and the ephemerality of other identities was put on the same foundation.5 In its earliest form the Qing ancestral state was transformationalist in all its policies: anybody joining the organization was regarded as equally subject to it, regardless of ancestry or language, and the process of political incorporation was understood to obviate more superficial differences of culture or ancestry. Growth of the regime depended upon its being able to incorporate native Jurchens, nearby Mongols, and Chinese and Korean descendants who had settled in southern Manchuria. Men were distinguished by age, which determined their eligibility to participate in warfare and booty collection, and by literacy, which determined the nature of their service to the ruling family federation. Even ancient distinctions of dependent populations, on a spectrum from slaves to bonded servants, were qualified by the more fundamental criteria of military service and literacy.6 Diverse languages among the population were regarded as minor obstacles to be solved by translators or, better, by widespread fluency in multiple languages. Sumptuary laws prescribed uniform practices among commoners, regardless of ancestral cultural affiliation. In the early seventeenth century these Banner organizations – still the sociomilitary by which the Jurchen aristocracy claimed and governed its subject population – became more elaborate, and in this form underwrote the creation of a khanate (Aisin, or Jin) in 1616. The khanate declared war on the Ming Empire in 1618, and by the 1620s was 5

6

Alison Harley Black, Man and Nature in the Philosophical Thought of Wang Fu-Chih (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989); Jeeloo Liu, “Wang Fuzhi’s Philosophy of Principle (Li) Inherent in Qi,” in John Makeham (ed.), Dao Companion to Neo-Confucian Philosophy (Amsterdam: Springer Netherlands, 2010), 255–279. Evelyn S. Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 171–172.

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engaged in gradual conquest of Liaodong, the Ming province in southeastern Manchuria.7 As a result, its population of conquered Chinese in formerly Ming territories was growing dramatically and the role of identified “Chinese” (nikan) in the military and the bureaucracy was becoming more distinct. The Liaodong conquest forced the khanate to develop its first administrative and legal distinctions between the civil, conquered population and the culturally variegated military-conquest population.8 The achievement of direct control of the former Ming territories meant that the Qing had to generate a process of identity ascription and apply it to the population of Liaodong. The conquest class was governed by the Eight Banners, and civilian Chinese were registered under the former Ming system by county of birth. During the occupation of Liaodong and before, Chinese defectors from Ming who joined the Qing could be granted the status of Bannermen, usually being registered as nikan. The result was that between 1621 and 1643, ascribed Chinese came to vastly outnumber ascribed Jurchens (after 1635, Manchus9) in the Banner organizations. When the Qing forces seized Beijing in 1644 and began the conquest of north China, Chinese families were only rarely incorporated into the Banners, and Chinese men wishing to serve the Qing joined the new professional armies of the Green Standard. At that point, the growth of the Banner populations stopped its steep increase by recruitment. Bannermen, who generally traveled with and lived with their families, were settled into garrisons in each Chinese province as it was conquered (with a preponderance in the vicinity of the capital at Beijing), where they were in principle prohibited from pursuing employment outside the military without explicit permission and forbidden to marry with the local conquered population.10 During this same period from 1621 to 1643, two wars of conquest framed the transition from Aisin khanate to Qing Empire. Defeat of the Chakhar khanate11 in eastern Mongolia in 1634 resulted in absorption of its imperial cult by the enlarged Aisin khanate, then based at Shenyang in Liaodong. This 7

8

9 10 11

Pamela Kyle Crossley, Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, 53– 88. Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 38–88. Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, 89–115; Pamela Kyle Crossley, “The Qianlong Retrospect on the Chinese-martial (hanjun) Banners,” Late Imperial China, 10/1 (June 1989), 63–107; Elliott, The Manchu Way, 133–211. Elliott, The Manchu Way, 70–71; Rawski, The Last Emperors, 36. Elliott, The Manchu Way, 133–211. Lkhamsuren Munkh-Erdene, “The 1640 Great Code: An Inner Asian Parallel to the Treaty of Westphalia,” Central Asian Survey, 29/3 (2010), 269–288.

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led to revision of Aisin military organization, court bureaucracy, and military leadership, laying the foundation for declaration of the Qing Empire in 1636. The new empire pursued its longstanding goal of dominating Korea; in 1636 a Qing invasion forced the Korean king to agree to subordinate status to the Qing, which effectively severed Korea’s former relations to the Ming court in Beijing.12 Qing elaboration of its imperial apparatus, especially in relation to the Banner forces, continued. New institutions – administrative, legal, and monumental – were established – for incorporation of Mongols, Manchus, and nikan. All were given ostensibly equal paths to military or bureaucratic distinction, all were expected to address the court in their ascribed native languages, and all were fundamentally distinguished from the civilian Chinese by enrollment in the Eight Banners armies and inheritance of dependent military affiliation. Bannermen were registered, usually, but not always, on the basis of genealogical descent, within the Manchu, Mongol, nikan (which included a significant portion of bonded servants), or very small units for Muslims or for confederated non-Manchu peoples of northern and eastern Manchuria, and command status within the Banners also became hereditary for certain lineages. Between 1646 and 1685 the Qing gradually established control over the former Ming territories. In central and southern China, the need to quickly establish working government and revenue collection inspired the installation of governors from families of nikan descent born in Liaodong province, as they were considered to be trustworthy and knowledgeable of Chinese language and society. By the 1670s these governorships were turning into independent power-bases, and the Qing court undertook a civil war to wrest power from them and establish direct rule. The large process of gaining control of the former Ming territories led to eventual destruction of the remnant Ming bases, and of the loyalist-rebel operation on Taiwan, the first time Taiwan had been incorporated into an empire based in China.13 It would be hard to prove that establishment and enforcement of criteria of identity is the primary purpose of the state. But it is much easier to argue that states take the form we recognize as part of the process of the construction of criteria of identity, and that overland conquest has historically been a primary 12

13

Yuanchong Wang, Remaking the Chinese Empire: Manchu–Korean Relations, 1616–1911 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Yuanchong Wang, “Provincializing Korea: The Construction of the Chinese Empire in the Borderland and the Rise of the Modern Chinese State,” T’oung Pao (2019), 128–182. Kenneth M. Swope, On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger: War, Trauma, and Social Dislocation in Southwest China during the Ming–Qing Transition (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

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engine of that process. For the earliest states, these criteria of identity were frequently built to distinguish free people from slaves, to protect privileges of paternity, to establish eligibility or obligation for military service, and to position people and property within systems of differential tribute and tax. In later periods, states used the earlier objectification technologies in relation to new criteria. Medieval states across Eurasia added administrative structures and communications techniques to objectify their own criteria of identity, with a new goal – in Europe, the Middle East, India, Russia, and China at a minimum – of introducing religious affiliation as a differentiating reference. Civil status, tax obligations, military service, landownership, access to litigation, marriage options, and some employment eligibility, all were affected by the spread of confessional regimes after the fourth century. These criteria were institutionalized parallel to – and in some instances, in conflict with – inherited criteria relating to civil status (slave, commoner, aristocrat, and so on) and, for aristocrats, to lineage affiliation. Most status identifiers not determined by gender were inherited, but in the confessional regimes, religious conversion was often a determinative factor in revision of identity status.14

Imperial Simultaneity and the Objectification of Identity In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Qing emperorship developed in a pattern that paralleled that of other overland empires of conquest, a pattern I have elsewhere described as “simultaneous” – that is, operating on the conceit that the emperor expresses himself simultaneously in all the official languages of the empire, rather than having one translated into the other.15 By extension, it suggests the unique power of the emperor to occupy the moral center of all civilizations and to embody when he pleased any of the cultures connected to the empire. This means that the emperorship legitimates itself in distinct and perhaps contrasting cultural modes, and that it 14

15

Pamela Kyle Crossley, “The Imaginal Bond of ‘Empire’ and ‘Civilization’ in Eurasian History,” VERGE: Studies in Global Asias, 2/2 (Fall 2016), 84–114; Crossley, Hammer and Anvil, 65–84. Crossley, A Translucent Mirror; Gene R. Garthwaite, “‘What’s in a Name?’: Periodization and ‘18th-Century Iran,’” in Michael Axworthy (ed.), Crisis, Collapse, Militarism and Civil War: The History and Historiography of 18th-Century Iran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 9–20; Michael G. Chang, Ruling from Horseback: Imperial Touring and the Construction of Qing Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2007), 31–33.

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defines its audiences through performance – through the ostensible expectation that each audience receives imperial authority through its own language, through its own ideological expectations, in its own spiritual terms, and mediated by its own rituals. This was not, at least in the case of the Qing, a matter of pretense or deception. It was an ideological truth, and a powerful means of access to the supernatural resources that had assured the successes of Chinggis Khan, of the emperors of China, and of the founders of the Qing dynasty. Because the performance and the audience form a distinct legitimating lever of the rulership, they are its constituent parts – the narrated cultural histories are constituencies of the rulership. Such a rulership has a very significant influence over the early modern processes of identity ascription and the degree of internalization that communities evinced at the end of the nineteenth century. First, it distills favored and represented cultures (always abstracted and formulated) from those that were regarded as subordinate, undocumented, and likely to dissipate under the pressures of conquest or assimilation. The criterion for this distinction was the role of any ascribed constituency in the creation, aggrandizement, and protection of the imperial lineage. In the Qing case, this made Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese represented by the time of the Qing entry into China in 1644; the eighteenth-century incorporations of the remainder of Mongolia, Tibet, and eastern Turkestan – after 1755 the occupied territory of Xinjiang, or “the new frontier” – brought Tibetan clerics and Uyghur Muslim collaborators into the repertoire. At the height of the empire in the later eighteenth century, this gave the Qing emperorship simultaneous translation into five epitomized cultures, each with its own distinct language and script. The countless other cultural communities across the Qing Empire were non-constituent to the emperorship, and were virtually never represented in imperial expression. Second, simultaneous rulership required the state to form the narratives of the constituencies as ancillary to the progress of conquest. Public monuments, awards to living or dead soldiers and officials, a small number of public spectacles, were controlled by these narratives. But most important were the histories commissioned by the imperial court and later published by the imperial printing house. Only the constituencies were historicized in this way.16 The published histories were institutionalized, in the sense that they were given the same status as the existing imperial histories, the classics of 16

Crossley, A Translucent Mirror; Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Manzhou yuanliu kao and the Formalization of the Manchu Heritage,” Journal of Asian Studies, 4 (November 1987), 761–790; Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Making Mongols,” in P. K. Crossley, H. F. Siu, and

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ancient China, and the philosophical works of the Han, Tang, and Song periods. They were endorsed in the same way, published in the same way, distributed and preserved in the same way. Because the Banner constituencies, the Manchus, Mongols, and nikan, were all required to pass the examinations for imperial appointment in their own languages, most of these works, along with select works from the past, were translated into all three languages. These examination standards were supplemented in the case of the Manchus, in particular, by stipulations requiring them to speak and write Manchu, and to make sure this was accessible to all Manchu Bannermen, the court also produced primers, chrestomathies, and dictionaries of Chinese and Manchu at a minimum, and sometimes Manchu, Chinese, and Mongolian together.17 The motives of the court in these projects are fairly transparent. It was not only common sense to the emperors but also a lesson from history, and the history of China in particular, that conquering castes had a tendency over time to interact casually with the locals, learn their language, marry them, and eventually consolidate with them. Forbidding Bannermen to take up employment outside the garrisons or to intermarry with the subject population was a device to keep an ample reserve of troops on hand, though over time it proved a huge financial burden to the state. Through various imperial displays, the Bannermen were stereotyped as above all dedicated soldiers, and the “civilians” (min) – the normal Qing way of referring to the conquered population – were above all agricultural, mercantile, and bureaucratic. But the court also had a strong ideological motivation, since creating each identity as particular and limited underscored the necessary and unique transcendence of the emperorship. These broad alignments of function and identity shaped most of the early Qing state rhetoric on distinctions between the conquerors and the conquered. As in any mutually referential framework, the more distinct and formulaic one identity was made by the court, the more distinct and formulaic it made the others.

17

D. Sutton (eds.), Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 58–82; Pamela Kyle Crossley, “The Conquest Elites of the Ch’ing Empire,” in Willard Peterson (ed.), The Cambridge History of China, vol. I X, Part I: The Ching Empire to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 310–359. Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Manchu Education,” in Alexander Woodside and Benjamin A. Elman (eds.), Education and Society in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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Occupation and Essentialization The Qing ancestor state, the Aisin khanate, had prized fluidity in cultural identity, partly as an authentic reflection of the environment in which it was formed, and partly because of the overriding need to convert the conquered into conquerors. With emergence of a more formal state, the use of genealogies – real or concocted – to control assignment within the Banners and eligibility for command rank introduced an apparently rigid and authoritative standard of identification. In fact, it is apparent that genealogy was not, in this context, regarded as particularly static. Those wishing to change Banner affiliation could apply to an office dedicated to that purpose, and supply a genealogy saying approximately anything they desired. The conquest of the Ming province of Liaodong changed these conditions, as the Bannermen became a distinct population, privileged over the conquered civilian majority, but bound by traditional concepts of servitude to the Qing court. Curatorship of the status and the cultural condition of the Banner population became an increasing concern of the state. At the same time, the importance of winning over and rewarding local Chinese soldiers and officials who could aid in consolidation of Qing control was critical. The terms affirming and highlighting these new commanders of the nikan Banners were essentials of the ongoing conquest, and an inhibition on making Banner affiliation more than an affective and administrative phenomenon. A very visible legal case of 1688 allowed the Qing court to establish as an academic consensus that ancestral identity was natural, immutable, and comprehensive. A Banner lineage with apparent connections to the ruling lineage submitted a petition, backed by a genealogy, requesting that their Banner registration be revised from nikan to Manchu. The genealogy was false, and the impossibility of it being true was obvious. Nevertheless, the imperial court accepted the genealogy and granted the reregistration. By accepting the genealogy, the emperor made it true, superseding the trivialities of fact. More important to our subject, he specifically enshrined the official fiction that identity proceeded from nature, and was only discovered and affirmed – not authored – by the state.18 In the background was the materialist discourse on identity that had taken shape in the late Ming, was still circulating secretly, and presented a threat to Qing attempts to secure the approval of landholding and officeholding elites. The Qing court came face to face with these essentialist ideas – and its own 18

Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, 57–83.

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early history of transformationalist opposition to essentialist identities – in a legal case of 1730, when a particularly vigorous essay by Lü Liuliang (1629– 1683) was discovered in the possession of Zeng Jing, a modest local scribe in Hunan province. The long-circulated manuscript argued that the material, ineradicable differences between “Chinese” and “barbarian” had been noted by the earliest writings of ancient scholars, and affirmed by historians in all centuries after. For that reason, the past occupation of China by the Mongols must be unceasingly condemned and the present occupation of China by the Manchus must be unceasingly resisted. The emperor to whom the treatise and its possessor were presented – the Yongzheng emperor (1723–1735) – chose to seize the opportunity to establish in official court history and ideology the repudiation of this essentialism by the transformative arguments of Confucius: that teaching determines identity, and ancestral origins are of no significance. This was the primary contention of Confucian rationalist orthodoxy, which the Qing court supported in all educational and publishing endeavors. Sure that he had demonstrated the historical and logical deficiencies of the essentialist arguments, the emperor ordered that the transcript of his illumination of the deluded scribe should be published and made required reading for the examinations through which all civil officials were chosen. As for the scribe himself, he was sent home with a recommendation that he look for work.19 This was not, however, the closing scene in this confrontation between Qing efforts to make themselves legitimate as rulers of China and the persisting underground conviction that strong philosophical and historical proofs existed for the irremediable barbarity of the Qing and of all Manchus. In 1735 the new emperor, the Qianlong emperor, gained power after his father’s death and immediately ordered the arrest of the scribe who had been released in 1730. He was condemned for treason and sentenced to an extremely gruesome death. The book derived from the Yongzheng emperor’s disquisition was ordered suppressed. Over the ensuing decades, the Qianlong emperor’s reasons for these actions became evident: unlike his father, he believed in the essentialist logic of the Qing resisters, but found the implied barbarity of the Manchus unacceptable. He believed that Manchus, Chinese, and Mongols were indelibly imprinted with their own spiritual and political characters and destinies – universal disparities that only he as the emperor could transcend. He did not believe that Confucianism or any element of Chinese culture or law could transform the consciousness of Manchus or Mongols, or was needed to make them just rulers of China. Qing rule in China was justified by the inherent 19

Jonathan D. Spence, Treason by the Book (New York: Penguin, 2002).

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worthiness of the imperial lineage, whose conquests to that point had been made continuous by supreme Heaven.20 The emperor may have been personally influenced by many factors in coming to this firm conviction, but the broad dynamics of the transformation of Qing from a conquest state to an occupation state over the course of the eighteenth century were fundamental. Previously the progress of the conquest in China and then in contingent territories had determined individual status. Soldiers received battlefield merit, while civilians either resisted the conquest or aided it; for members of any branch of the imperial lineage and some closely affiliated lineages, this could mean heritable titles, many of which persisted through the entire Qing period. Former Ming officials who made themselves indispensable in the process of Qing conquest were awarded titles (usually not heritable), awards of land or money, and appointments to high office. After the conquests ceased, status in the occupation regime had to be determined by other means. Genealogy created the most direct links to the former criteria of conquest status, but in the Qianlong period in particular, local markers of status were often connected to “chaste” behavior of women (which could be celebrated in imperial grants for local memorial arches or stelae), examination achievement by civilian men from the landowning class, or imperial patents recognizing charitable or publicworks contributions by local landowners, and so on. The consolidation of a civil “gentry” class (shenshi) was underwritten by such reinforcements of imperial objectification, and it was their genealogies that remained the foremost documents of accreditation and approbation.21 These developments were accompanied by a newly rigid, essentializing approach to a variety of heritable status conditions. Civil slavery, which in the earlier eighteenth century had shown signs of ambiguity and negotiability in some regions of China, had by mid-century come under some degree of imperial surveillance.22 In law, mid-eighteenth-century proscriptions against 20 21

22

Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, 250–267. Susan Naquin, “Two Descent Groups in North China: The Wangs of Yung-p’ing Prefecture, 1500–1800,” in Patricia Buckley Ebrey and James Watson (eds.), Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 210–244; Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Michael Szonyi, Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). William T. Rowe, “Social Stability and Social Change,” in Peterson (ed.), The Cambridge History of China, vol. I X , 473–562; William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); Rawski, The Last Emperors, 173.

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Muslims were frankly essentialist, claiming that Muslims were by nature fractious and rebellious, and therefore the laws must treat them more harshly than non-Muslim Chinese.23 A vivid venue for essentialization was the Eight Banners themselves, especially the ambiguous nikan category originally corresponding to Chinese-speaking subjects of the khanate in southern Manchuria. In the later eighteenth century, the court revised both statute and historical narrative to racialize the nikan and claim – counter-historically – that they were monolithically identifiable with the population of China itself. That being the case, their loyalty to the Qing was not above question, and the argument for admitting them to paid positions in the Eight Banners was weak. The nikan component of the Banners – by far the most numerous in 1644 – shrank from the mid-eighteenth century on, and by the end of the empire was the smallest component of the regular Eight Banners.24 The role of the Qing imperial court in the essentialization of identity taxonomies is nicely illustrated in the case of the “Mongols.” For the diverse populations of Mongolia and the descendants of Mongols who had been incorporated into the Eight Banners, the Qing concocted a monolithic “Mongol” identity as its patent discursive object. The Qing were continuing a relationship between Chinggis Khan and the Mongols that predated their own dynasty. The creation of the figure of pious loyalty required that “Mongol” be made historically coherent, which required that the living identities be consolidated to a single narrative to the extent possible. The foundations for creation of an early modern “Mongol” identity had already been laid in the creation of the Mongol Banners in 1638, where men of a variety of cultural groups of eastern Mongolia were consolidated as “Mongols.” As the imperial publishing enterprises moved into institutionalizing a Mongol language and historical narrative, the Khalkha majority of eastern Mongolia became the standard. Language primers took Khalkha dialect as standard Mongolian, and “Mongol” history became the history of the relatively peaceful submission of the eastern Mongolian groups, including the Khalkha, to the early Qing. Chakhars were nearly absent from the imperial history, and western Mongols, particularly the hostile Dzunghars, were not narrated as Mongols as all.25

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24

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Jonathan N. Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Michael Dillon, China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlement and Sects (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013). Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, 90, 126–128, 290–294; Crossley, “The Conquest Elites of the Ch’ing Empire.” Charles Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia (London: Kegan Paul International, 1968), 81–186. Crossley, “Making Mongols”; Johan Elverskog, Our Great Qing: The

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Inevitable and Contingent Identities While Qing court historiography was indefatigable in conflating the various local cultural identities of Mongolia, China, and Tibet into unitary narratives, it was determined to never construct a universalist “Muslim” identity. The persistent narrative segregation of sinophone Muslims from their Türkispeaking coreligionists is in fact a nice test of the importance of being one of the Qing constituencies.26 The constituencies, after all, were built upon literary, religious, philosophical, and political traditions that in some form predated the Qing itself, and in many instances maintained at least a loose connection to the living cultures of the empire’s communities. Late nineteenth-century nationalist movements were able to reclaim from the Qing literary and historical monumentality the transmissible content essential to any nationalist movement. The latitude of these communities publicly associated with constituent objectification to live out their distinct cultures became visible in indirect relationship to the receding ability, in the nineteenth century, of the Qing to enforce cultural orthodoxy among them, or to prescribe that they perform their constituent identities.27 The willingness of the nationalist movements to claim and ultimately to internalize Qing imperial prescriptions of identity in the early twentieth century – this time not as a result of imperial suasion, but as an avenue to legitimacy in an environment of collapsing systems of formality and coercion – is striking, and brings them into some parallel with nationalist movements emerging from the sagging Ottoman and Russian empires. These identities had been narrated under the empires as inevitable and objective. Now, ironically, that objectification suggested that the demise of the current state form did not entail the demise of these identities. Eastern Turkestan, where the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples had lived for centuries, had been under one sort of Mongol domination or another for a century and a half before the Qing forcefully occupied the area in 1755. As in the conquests of China and Mongolia, the final conquest of Xinjiang

26

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Mongols, Buddhism and the State in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 127–165. Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Pluralité impériale et identités subjectives dans la Chine des Qing,” trans. Sophie Nöel, Annales: Revue Histoire, Sciences sociales, 3 (May–June 2008), 597–621. Crossley, Orphan Warriors; Judith Wyman, “The Ambiguities of Chinese Antiforeignism: Chongqing, 1870–1900,” Late Imperial China, 18/2 (1998), 86–122; Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); William Charles Woolridge, Jr., City of Virtues: Nanjing in an Age of Utopian Visions (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015).

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depended upon dividing the opposing forces and enlisting the aid of at least one side of the opposition in the defeat of the other. After the conquest of eastern Turkestan, which the Qing began to call the “new frontier,” the Qianlong emperor decided to assume personal patronage over Uyghur culture. Helpful Uyghur lineages were showered with titles and emoluments, and the famous Xiang Fei, being a relative of the local helpers, was brought into imperial concubinage as part of the rewards to her kinsmen. As a further indulgence, the court gave permission for a Muslim community to settle virtually within the western gate of the Forbidden City, in very close proximity to Xiang Fei’s normal residence. Uyghur language (in Arabic script) was made one of those represented in the simultaneous imperial lexicon. But sponsored narratives of the Xinjiang region reveal a peculiarity of the Qing incorporation of a Uyghur constituency: they are narrated as Türki, as nomads, and as merchants, but not as Muslims. The Hui, who were not a constituency of the rulership and whose population was probably twice that of the Uyghurs, carried the broadest and most enduring label of Muslim. Of most interest to this discussion is that, at the end of the empire, the Uyghurs supported an explicitly nationalist movement, and the Hui did not.28 The experience of the Hui, however, demonstrates what subjective, contingent identity under the Qing was, and what its legacy of ethnicity has been in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The religious authenticity of the Hui and their residence within China (that is, their inability to be identified with the progress of conquest) denied them to the Qing as a constituency of the emperorship. When the simultaneous rulership of the Qing was most refined, in the middle and later eighteenth century, the rejection of the Hui as immoral, uncivilized, lawless, and disloyal was most intense. It was also mutual: unlike Mongols, Tibetans, and Chinese, Muslims could never accept the Qing rulers as religiously enabled rulers, and the Qing could never hope to occupy the moral space of the khalîfah, or even of a legitimate sulta¯n. The Qing were unable to integrate a Muslim persona within the rulership, and for that reason (even without the plain facts of the Qing conquest in China) could not have constructed a Muslim constituency. 28

Joseph F. Fletcher, Jr., “Ch’ing Inner Asia, c. 1800,” in John King Fairbank (ed.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 35–106; James A. Millward, “A Uyghur Muslim in Qianlong’s Court: The Meanings of the Fragrant Concubine,” Journal of Asian Studies, 53/2 (May 1994), 427–458; James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: The Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

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The empire permitted Islamic practice and communities and occasionally recognized their civic contributions, but in general the state advised Hui officials not to behave in a way that would make their religion apparent, and never included a history of the Hui as part of the imperial historicizing projects.29 When the Qing Empire collapsed in 1912, the new nationalist government recognized “Muslims” (along with Tibetans, Mongols, and Manchus) as a group whose personal safety and personal property were to be protected. Beyond that the Hui – as well as all other non-constituent cultures, including the Miao, Yao, Tujia, Kazakh, and many other groups – were frankly considered to be numerical, cultural, and political “minorities” living in Chinese lands. In the 1950s, a new science of ethnology imported from the Soviet Union would not only mark these and other identities as “objective” on the basis of the imperial ascriptions of language, religion, ostensible descent, and homeland, but also mark them for obliteration, since cultural subjectivity and socialist transformation were of necessity mutually exclusive.30 For those resisting the program of transformation, the only alternative to cultural oblivion was to seek an independent, national form of government. And only those with deep histories of Qing documentation and recognition had the political resources for that. The cumulative effect was that for the entire Qing period and the Republican period that followed, Chinese-speaking Muslim communities in China had to nurture, and in some cases defend, themselves. They functioned as self-generating, self-defining (within the universal forms they willingly accepted) communities, ethnic in comparison with the officially acknowledged Chinese (Han) communities beside them, reinforcing their differences from the majority and their affinities with fellow Muslims through difficult and sometimes ingenious long-distance communications. They lived the entire Qing and Republican periods as a distinct (not to say in any sense sealed) cultural world, not only without the support of the empire but despite its persistent coldness and frequent hostility. Hui institutions conformed in some fundamental ways to the genealogical tropes by which Chinese scholarly communities – some also living in constant tension with imperial orthodoxy – had sustained themselves for centuries.31 They 29

30

31

Lipman, Familiar Strangers; Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2005); Crossley, “Pluralité impériale et identités subjectives.” Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Nationality and Difference in China: The Post-Imperial Dilemma,” in Joshua A. Fogel (ed.), Teleologies of the Modern Nation-State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Benite, The Dao of Muhammad.

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sought as many points of affinity as possible with Chinese concepts of lineage, morality, and cosmology. The Hui were the self-cohering community, the self-defining identity, that Manchus in China became on a small scale and only after the pressures of imperial prescription had lessened. The fate of the “Manchu” constituency and the population it emblemized suggests that imperial institutionalization of a constituent identity was not enough to assure inevitable identity after the empire. Until the nineteenth century, the Qing court held Manchu-registered Bannermen to stipulated obligations to be literate in the Manchu language, to be trained in certain military skills, and to live in the Eight Banner garrisons. These legal requirements were regularly unmet in most garrisons. The state provided virtually no elementary education that would support or spread literacy in the language, the economy of the Banner administration had declined to a point at which few installations retained land, equipment, ammunition, or instructors necessary for military training, and after the mid-eighteenth century Bannermen of all categories had been eligible to apply for permission to live and work outside the garrisons. In addition, Qing records carry persistent complaints of Bannermen absconding from their garrisons or disappearing during the repeated large-scale transfers of Bannermen from garrisons in China to state plantations in the northeast.32 More revealing, not only did Manchus generally not voluntarily retain literacy in Manchu and fluency in standard Manchu outside the garrisons, they could not be compelled to do so inside the garrisons either. Manchu speakers and writers were a diminishing minority within the garrisons, mostly of officer rank or connected with prominent lineages; either circumstance would expose them to contact with the court or its representatives who would upbraid them – possibly followed by fines or more serious punishment – if they were found incapable in the language. In addition to the continuous fragmentation of Manchu community solidarity in China before the middle of the nineteenth century, the former Manchu homeland was for the most part ruled directly by the Qing court, without the semi-autonomous self-administration accorded to Mongolia and Tibet. In the nineteenth century, the fading ability of the Qing court to impose Manchu cultural performance upon the “Manchu” Bannermen was, however, met by a rising self-identification of some families and some communities – often legally or financially severed from the garrisons – to identify themselves 32

Joanna Waley-Cohen, Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 7–8, 117n, 182–184.

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as “Manchu.” This was reinforced by events of the Taiping civil war and of the nationalist revolution of 1911/1912, but it did not produce much of a secessionist movement at the end of the empire, which is partly explained by the fact that imperial strategy had called for the early distribution of the Banner population through the Chinese provinces. The ostensible Manchu inevitability of identity derived from Qing literary objectification became instead a tool for a Japanese puppet-state in Manchuria that appropriated virtually all the resources that in the cases of other constituencies helped underwrite separatist, nationalist movements. In the Manchu case, coherent communities survived as “ethnic” conclaves within an overtly Chinese republic, or lineages nursed their own narratives of Manchu and Banner affiliation.33 The question of constituent and non-constituent conquest identities in the Qing period underscores the general value of using a careful definition of “ethnicity” and “nationality” in our discussion of modern history. Not only in eastern Eurasia, but in other parts of the world, the identity legacies of the early modern empires – in scholarship, architecture, monumentality, and geographical conceptions – were readily adaptable in some circumstances to movements addressing questions of national autonomy; it is not too much to suggest that imperial legacies of prescriptive identities, and their ostensibly objective criteria of language, religion, ancestral geography, and common historical narration, are in fact the source of nationalist ideologies that contributed to the disintegration of the empires themselves. From this point of view, nationalism of the late nineteenth century and the vaster portion of the twentieth appears not the antithesis of empire but its final phase, and its ultimate conclusion. Such national histories may be short, sporadic, or preempted by new imperial projects (as in the case of the Manchus), but in basic conception, and in their relationship to the cultural curatorship embedded in the early modern empires, they share the same objective ideologies as contemporaneous national programs that, for topical reasons, have prospered (as in the case of China itself). In contrast, the sources of modern “ethnic” identities lie not only with collapsed nationalist movements of the early twentieth century but also with the long struggle to maintain self-generated and self-defined communities in the face of imperial hostility.34 The Hui, in this perspective, more resemble the early modern experiences of the Persian, Jewish, and other Muslim diaspora communities of Eurasia, or of the Miao, Yao, Dai, and other indigenous communities in 33 34

Crossley, Orphan Warriors. Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Thinking about Ethnicity in Early Modern China,” Late Imperial China, 11/1 (June 1990), 1–35.

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China. The relative difficulty of recovering many of these histories has in fact provided a modern criterion of “ethnicity” – the content, the political risks, and the historical meaning of being the marginal, unorthodox, local, selfreliant, and sometimes undocumented communities under the empires.

Nationalist Rhetoric and Imperial Semantics at the End of the Qing The period of the Taiping War (1851–1864) was transformational for all identity criteria in the empire. What began as a religious uprising in Guangxi province proceeded in only a few years to the creation of an alternative state in the middle of the Qing Empire, with a capital maintained at Nanjing from 1853 to 1864. Its ideology was an alloy of American Baptist Christianity and Chinese folk religion, in which the Qing imperial lineage and the Qing Bannermen were conflated as a Manchu race and denounced as the spawn of Satan. Destruction of the empire and extermination of the Manchus were specified as the requirements for bringing an apocalypse in which the false world of humans would be swept away by the world of God. The Taipings were enemies of Manchus and of Confucianism. They prized literacy and established schools to provide universal education and to run government publishing programs to supply adequate religious and technical texts. They proposed to create a modern state that could initiate and support government monopolies on critical resources and technologies as well as educational programs in agricultural and material sciences. Women were given positions of responsibility in both the civil government and the military.35 The reaction of the Qing court, after some pause, was to reposition itself as exclusively dedicated to the preservation of Chinese tradition, crystallized as Confucianism. Qing officials who came to the forefront of the war against the Taipings, most notably Zeng Guofan (1811–1872), emphasized not only innovative and increasingly effective military tactics, but also a vigorous ideological campaign to reassert the moral primacy of Confucianism, making the Taiping conflict as much a very deadly culture war as anything else. The emperors, who had gradually attenuated imperial public displays and monumentality after the death of the Qianlong emperor in 1796, increasingly assumed the role of Confucian avatars and champions of traditional 35

Huan Jin, “Authenticating the Renewed Heavenly Vision: The Taiping Heavenly Chronicle (Taiping Tianri),” Frontiers of History in China, 13/2 (2018), 173–192; Rebecca E. Karl, China’s Revolutions in the Modern World (London: Verso, 2020), 8–24.

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Chinese culture. Yet Zeng is also exemplary of another side of imperial leadership in the war: he was interested in Taiping ideas in reform of education, government, and economy. Within a short time of the conclusion of the war in 1864, Zeng was himself pursuing initiatives in popular education (including of women), in restructuring of the government, and in modernization of the military. The ideologies of the Taipings were never completely eradicated, particularly among the regional military authorities, who over the course of the Taiping War gained greater and greater autonomy and by the end of the 1860s were acting to displace the imperial government in all but the most ceremonial functions. And it could not be forgotten that the Taiping hatred of the Manchus had been rabidly racialist, and only aggravated by the Qing court posture of being staunch defenders of traditional Chinese culture. The Taipings had been the first to fight for the idea that a Chinese identity could exist independent of Confucian culture, and even in virulent opposition to it. The rising racialism in Chinese scholarly discourse had its counterpart among Manchus and Mongols. During the war, Taiping armies repeatedly descended upon Banner garrisons near the Yangtze, forcing the poorly armed and ill-supplied Banner families to fight for their lives without significant aid from the government. In these circumstances of relative poverty, selective political disavowal, and sporadic violent attacks from Chinese society, an emerging Manchu subjective consciousness can be discerned in various ways. Its language of expression was Chinese or Chinese dialect, its venues of enactment were Chinese cities, its monumental expressions were typical of Chinese memorial architecture, its point of political orientation was the Qing capital at Beijing. But the underlying suggestion was that a Manchu identity, like that of the Chinese, had preceded the Qing state and would endure beyond it. In the decades after the conclusion of the Taiping War, nascent nationalism was not easy to distinguish from loyalist reform. Zeng’s follower Li Hongzhang (1823–1901) framed reforms in education, the economy, and the military in terms of China’s rise as a regional if not world military power. But while this “self-strengthening” proceeded on the avowed principle of making the Qing Empire more secure, it was of necessity increasingly dependent upon foreign aid and advice. When the naval and army forces proved unable to dislodge Japan from Korea after a short war in 1894–1895, the reform movement was seriously discredited. After Japan followed its victory with shockingly ambitious demands for land and for cash reparations, most of which were eventually accepted under Li’s signature, reform was virtually 320

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rejected by elites outside of government circles and a nationalist revolution was favored.36 The transition in China to oppositional, nationalist rhetoric should be placed in the context of the “nation” as an entity that would survive the failing empire and generate a new state based on the geography, culture, institutions, and history of some dominant group. Part of this rhetoric went back in the Chinese scholarly tradition to the seventeenth-century essentialist scholars contemporary with Wang Fuzhi, whose works, along with those of contemporaries such as Lü Liuliang, had been banned by the eighteenthcentury Qing court. In the aftermath of the Taiping War, the Qing Empire was literally fragmenting, and among its patent disabilities was the enforcement of literary censorship, so that under the sponsorship of Zeng, the writings of Wang and his contemporaries became newly available, and readily circulated, among literati. The implication that China and the Chinese would survive the Qing Empire was unquestioned.37 This persisting theme in the history of Chinese thought combined very powerfully, during and after the 1880s, with recently arrived, explicit literature of nationalism. The reform programs of the post-Taiping era had incorporated a significant amount of foreign study for promising Chinese and Manchu students, who were sent to Europe and Japan (then entering the transformations of the Meiji era) to study engineering, chemistry, and military science. After China’s defeat in the war of 1894–1895, the interest of Chinese students in Japan intensified, and the numbers of students in Japan from China rose steeply between 1895 and 1905 – when Japan defeated Russia in another war over dominance in Korea and northeast Asia – and then rose more steeply still. Among the many new influences was importation of European theories – and perhaps more important, terms – of nationalism. Under both state and private sponsorship, young Japanese had translated a few European political works, primarily from Marx and Bluntschli. German Herrenvolk – literally the dominant people – became Japanese minzoku, based on the Chinese characters for the lineage of the dominant or majority people. The term quickly moved into Chinese as minzu, and minzuzhuyi – or minzuism – became what is normally translated back into English as “nationalism.” Embedded as it was in ancient ideas of Chinese culture as the host or master culture that had been translated into early modern racialist concepts by the end of the Ming, minzu now (as of about 1890) presented a curious exact 36 37

Crossley, Orphan Warriors. Stephen R. Platt, Provincial Patriots: The Hunanese and Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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parallel to what Herrenvolk was increasingly meaning in German: a master race.38 Chinese nationalists at the turn of the twentieth century certainly agreed that Chinese identity was inevitable. It was inscribed in Chinese bodies and minds, it would survive demise of the Qing Empire, it would without any doubt generate a new political order based on its own values and protecting the interests of the Chinese people. But quite how this would work was the subject of sharp debate – a debate that rediscovered the eighteenth-century imperial controversy over identity that had produced so much bloodshed and censorship. Nationalist semantics of the 1890s generally followed two lines of argument regarding the identity of the Chinese and their geographical contours.39 One, led by the mercurial, esoteric, materialist, essentialist scholar Zhang Taiyan (Binglin, 1869–1936), recalled the massive campaigns of conquest of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Qing, and contended that most of the afflictions of China in the nineteenth century had arisen from its forced integration into an empire that also incorporated the putatively barbarous peoples of Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Central Asia.40 Sun Yatsen (1866–1925) had come to the fore of the overt nationalists who, by 1895, stridently recited the bloody history of the Qing conquest of China and the unjust identity hierarchies of the imperial system, explicitly denounced the pretensions of the Manchus and the Qing imperial lineage to have assimilated Chinese culture, and targeted the Manchus for personal extermination, without which, he suggested, the Chinese would never be free.41 This essentialism was partly based in the Chinese philosophical and historical classics, which the Qing Empire had edited, reprinted, distributed very deliberately throughout China, and habitually quoted in their persona of the Chinese emperor. But Zhang had a more deeply material orientation: he used 38

39 40

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Wang Mingfu, “‘Minzu’ ban,” Minzu yanjiu, 6 (1983), 1–23; Charlotte Fürth, “The Sage as Rebel: The Inner World of Chang Ping-lin,” in Charlotte Fürth (ed.), The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Crossley, “Thinking about Ethnicity in Early Modern China.” Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, 337–352. Young-tsu Wong, The Search for Modern Nationalism: Zhang Binglin and Revolutionary China, 1869–1936 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989); Kauko Laitinen, Chinese Nationalism in the Late Qing Dynasty: Zhang Binglin as an Anti-Manchu Propagandist (London: Curzon Press, 1990); Viren Murthy, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Crossley, Orphan Warriors, 180–185, 227; Dikotter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, 76–79; James Liebold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese (London: Springer, 2016), 177–183; James Liebold, “Xinhai Remembered: From Han Racial Revolution to Revival of the Chinese Nation,” Asian Ethnicity, 15/1 (2014); Wang Chunxia, “ Paiman” yu minzuzhuyi (Beijing: Shehui Kexue Wenxian Chubanshe, 2005), 223–231.

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new disciplines (all with substantial histories in Chinese thought) of linguistics and archeology, arguing that the essence of identity was to be discovered not only through elite writing but also through the daily expression, activities, and beliefs of the common people, who unconsciously lived the authentic physical identity that intellectuals only attempt to describe and analyze.42 Zhang proposed that a happy China would be one that was reduced to the basic shape of the China of Han and Ming times – south of the Great Wall, east of the Gansu corridor, severed from Tibet. There, the Chinese would rely upon their innate solidarity to create new political institutions compatible with their values and their sense of justice. Chinese who had been forced abroad by the Qing misfortunes of overpopulation, foreign exploitation, and civil war could return and live as their natural selves. Those peoples who were not Chinese should quit China and head back to their homelands, where they could build their own republics and live according to their own values. Zhang’s essentialism owed much to the most radical scholars of the Wang Fuzhi generation, and to Wang himself, who had invoked the classical cosmological term of qun to explain the distinctness and coherence of ancient cultures. Qun was the force that drew like to like and repelled the unlike. It explained the consolidation and coherence of ancient civilizations, and it explained why periods of forced integration – as under the Mongols and Manchus in China – were full of disorder and injustice. But Zhang’s overall philosophy was consonant with that of the Qianlong emperor, who had also argued that essentialist sympathies should keep the conquest castes of the Manchus and Mongols separate and distinct, and that only the emperor, uniquely, could transcend and act as a point of articulation for all the conquest cultures. Like the Qianlong emperor, Zhang argued that cultural and moral identities – that is to say, culture and morality as two sides of any single identity – were inherent, material, unalterable, inevitable. Zhang was opposed by other nationalists, of whom the best known at the time was Liang Qichao (1873–1929).43 A product of very traditional education, and for a time an adherent of a revisionist Confucian school of “New Text” scholarship, Liang had moved quickly after 1895 in the direction of 42

43

Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning across Time and Space in China and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 52–53. Joseph Levenson, Liang Ch’i-Ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953); Hao Chang, Liang Ch’i-Ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Philip C.C. Huang, Liang Chi-ch’ao and Modern Chinese Liberalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972).

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international education. He also invoked Wang’s use of the qun concept, and argued that Chinese identity was coherent – but, for him, it was a learned coherence, a dedication to universal values. In this he was extending a central concept of the Confucian intellectual tradition – the transformational effects of learning – and retracing the arguments of the Yongzheng emperor before the essentialist ideological coup of the Qianlong emperor beginning in 1735.44 Liang pointed out that after nearly three hundred years, the cultures, economies, and fates of all the peoples of the Qing Empire had been intertwined. More Mongol aristocrats lived in Beijing than in Mongolia, more Manchus were distributed throughout the Chinese provinces than lived in Manchuria. They were all participants now in the great historical project to expand the scope of Chinese civilization and bring security to all the “peoples of China.” Because Liang argued that identity was not materially based, but was a product of education and conditioning, he saw a China that had been created through the assimilation of diverse peoples from earliest times, and he expected that a future China would continue to expand and edify. In his view, this was the justification for China’s imperial past and future: an imperial past best exemplified in the cosmopolitan and expanding Tang and Qing periods, and a republican future in which China would lead Asia and perhaps the world in development.

Nations with and without States, 1911–1949 The revolution began in October 1911 and continued to the abdication of the child emperor in 1912, and the chaotic process of creating a republic in China proceeded. Most of the secessionist movements at China’s borders had interested sponsors from abroad: Russia and Japan in the case of Mongolia, Japan in the case of Manchuria, Russia and Britain in the case of Xinjiang, Britain in the case of Tibet. The result was independence in some form, for some time: after the suppression of a separatist movement at the time of the Chinese revolution of 1911/1912, token nationalists in Manchuria finally achieved separatism as a Japanese client state from 1932 to Japan’s defeat in 1945.45 In 1911, the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu – the current incarnation of the spiritual lineage of religious teachers in Mongolia that had been institutionalized under the Qing – became the head of an independent, theocratic Mongolian state; he was permitted to remain a nationalist figurehead for 44 45

Crossley, A Translucent Mirror, 337–362. Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).

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a time even after a communist revolution (under Russian guidance) in 1921 created the Mongolian People’s Republic.46 In Tibet, a complicated and artificial process initiated by British imperial agents created some Tibetan independence on paper after 1905, but this only became meaningful once local militias had succeeded in repulsing a Qing campaign to suppress Tibetan secessionism in 1911; the Dalai Lama returned, and China’s disunion and distraction by inner turmoil allowed Tibet not only to be independent in practice, but to evolve its own institutions of domestic governance and international diplomacy.47 In the case of Xinjiang, the drive for independence had been presaged by several uprisings of the late nineteenth century, most impressive among them the establishment by Yakub Beg of the rebel state of Kashgar, suppressed by the Qing in 1877. Thereafter, governors of the new province (1884) of Xinjiang – whether Qing, independent, or nominally connected to the Republic of China – all administered the area as in practice independent. Formal independence, as the East Turkistan Republic, was in effect for the entire province from 1933 to 1943, after which the Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai governed Xinjiang as his own satrapy.48 In the eyes of political activists reading Liang’s newspaper articles and hearing his lectures, the cosmopolitan theory of future China was never merely philosophical or historical, but was always strongly strategic in its focus. When the predecessor of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, KMT) was founded in Tokyo in 1905 by Sun Yatsen, separatist movements were already well developed in Manchuria, Tibet, and Mongolia. Any government that hoped to rule China in future had to fear these developments. Sun’s 46

47

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Urgungge Onon and Derrick Pritchatt, Asia’s First Modern Revolution: Mongolia Proclaims its Independence in 1911 (New York: E. J. Brill, 1989); Uradyn E. Bulag, Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Christopher Atwood, “Inner Asian Mongolian Nationalism in the 1920s: A Survey of Documentary Information,” Twentieth Century China, 25/2 (April 2000), 75–113. Tsepon W. D. Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Michael C. Van Walt Van Praag, The Status of Tibet: History, Rights and Prospects in International Law (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987). Warren W. Smith, Jr., Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). Andrew D. W. Forbes, Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: A Political History of Republican Sinkiang, 1911–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Linda Benson, The Ili Rebellion: The Moslem Challenge to Chinese Authority in Xinjiang, 1944–1949 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); David D. Wang, Under the Soviet Shadow: The Yining Incident: Ethnic Conflicts and International Rivalry in Xinjiang, 1944–1949 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1999); James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Gardner Bovingdon, The Uyghurs: Strangers in their own Land (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Michael E. Clarke, Xinjiang and China’s Rise in Central Asia: A History (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011).

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awakened response, from his exile in Tokyo, was to vigorously demand that a coalition of the “brotherhood of the five races” – Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, Muslims, and Chinese – band together to overthrow the vestiges of Qing government, while restoring the integrity of the Qing territories as they had been constituted c. 1900. The details of China’s continuing fragmentation until 1928 are not important here, apart from the underscoring of two primary patterns. The first is that the ninety years from 1840 to 1928 mark out an arc, during which power under the Qing was first gradually and then radically decentralized, and that this pattern was partly reversed by Chiang Kaishek’s neutralization of some regional power-bases when he seized the capital at Beijing in 1928. Though Chiang managed to unify China at a superficial level, the following decades saw the decline of Chinese central leadership as a result of many complex factors. Attempted KMT liaison parties in Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and Xinjiang all collapsed in the late 1930s, coeval with Japan’s invasion of north China, Nanjing, and Shanghai. During the next decade, as China was engulfed in the Second World War, its Qing-derived frontiers were shattered, deepening the exposure of the Chinese heartland to foreign invasion. Wartime leaders of the CCP, both in the campaigns during the Second World War and in the civil war against the KMT that followed, incorporated tightly into their progress the very frontiers that the KMT had understood as theoretically necessary but in practice had never successfully incorporated. The communist base areas in Manchuria, Yunnan, Sichuan, the eastern Tibetan borders, northern Shaanxi, Gansu, and the extreme eastern borders of Turkestan incorporated local leaders into their process of civil war and eventually of state building.49 During the latter years of the Second World War, eastern Turkestan had been an independent republic. With the approval of the Soviet Union, the CCP energetically coopted the leaders of the republic as top officials of an “autonomous region” of Xinjiang in a prospective People’s Republic of China (PRC), though some Soviet analysts warned the Kremlin against permitting Mao to approach the “Qianlong line” – boundaries that would have restored the furthest extent of the Qing conquest and encroached upon what was now Soviet territory.50 Mongolia 49

50

George Moseley, “The Party and the National Question,” in Béla Kun (ed.), Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic (New York: International Publishers, 1934), later The Party and the National Question in China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966). Geoffrey Wheeler, “Russia and China in Central Asia,” Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 54 (1967), 254–263.

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was now neutralized as a strategic threat, but Inner Mongolia was quickly reorganized as an autonomous region. Manchuria, newly wrenched from its status as a client state and puppet of Japan, was incorporated as the “eastern three provinces” (Dongsansheng), never again to be united, and constantly watched for signs of independence or sympathy with Japan or the Soviet Union (all figuring in a series of political purges of the 1950s that brought the governance of Manchuria even more tightly under the control of the CCP). Tibet was permitted a loose rein until, in 1959, it showed signs of looking to Britain or the USA for help in throwing off Chinese domination; at that point it was invaded and made into a virtual province, bringing it under the direct and unapologetic rule of the central PRC government. In 1956, the government of the People’s Republic of China promulgated its new “nationality” policies. Ostensibly Stalinist criteria of language, vicinage, genealogy, and religion were to be used to identify “nationalities” – that is, minzu, now not Herrenvölker but merely Völker, implying that China no longer had sovereign nationalities, but only ethnicities (cultural identity being subjective and socialist identity being absolute).51 On the basis of these objective criteria of language, religion, descent, and homeland, the government identified fifty-five nationalities apart from the Chinese (Han). These criteria, of course, were those established by the early modern conquest empires. In retrospect, it highlighted the ostensibly contingent identities that since Ming and Qing times had persisted within China without imperial recognition or curatorship, and with a willingness to live under a state created by others. Nevertheless, the impulsion offered Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols by their centuries as Qing constituencies continues to fuel identities that the government of the CCP would prefer to lose their inevitability and sink into the mass of contingent, rapidly assimilating components of “Han” nationality.52 The official nationality policies of contemporary China suggest the power of nationalism to rewrite the state even beyond the transformative era of the end of empires and emergence of national republics in the early twentieth century. The criteria used were extensions of nineteenth-century European racialist, materialist scholarship insisting that language, vicinage, and ancestry were the foundations of identities that would endure while transient polities would collapse. In the terms of Stalinist theories later replicated in 51 52

Crossley, “Thinking about Ethnicity in Early Modern China.” Crossley, “Nationality and Difference in China”; Yinghong Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 295–304; Liebold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism.

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Chinese social science, they became the objects of the materialist process of socialist transformation – impediments to assimilation that would inevitably be pulverized as the transitions to socialism and communism crushed pastoral and transhumant economies, feudal affiliations, and religious delusions. But the ideology of the Chinese government in the twenty-first century has moved identity science in China away from the Stalinist model in which socialist transformation was inevitable and bourgeois nationalism contingent, and back toward the eighteenth-century model of select inevitable cultural identities and a contingent socialism – “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” in which socialism was no longer a leveler and no longer absolute, but a phenomenon as subjective and transient as the “national minority” identities that the new order is determined to extinguish.

Further Reading Bovingdon, Gardner, The Uyghurs: Strangers in their own Land (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Bulag, Uradyn E., Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Cheng, Yinghong, Discourses of Race and Rising China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Crossley, Pamela Kyle, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Dikotter, Frank. The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). Karl, Rebecca E., China’s Revolutions in the Modern World (London: Verso, 2020). Liebold, James, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese (London: Springer, 2016). Lipman, Jonathan N. Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998). Smith, Warren W., Jr., Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

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15

Colonial Subjects and the Struggle for Self-Determination, 1880–1918 dane kennedy

The overwhelming majority of the United Nations’ 193 member states were once colonies of Western empires. Most of these colonies gained independence during the era of decolonization that followed the Second World War. Despite their numbers and their nationalist struggles, these colonies-cum-countries have not attracted much attention in the standard works on nationalism. As the editors of this volume observe, those works are largely Eurocentric in their orientation. They generally portray the rise of nationalism in colonial dependencies as supplemental to, and largely derivative of, nationalism in the Western world.1 Even Benedict Anderson, a specialist on Southeast Asia who was deeply knowledgeable about nationalist movements in the colonial world, characterized these movements in his hugely influential Imagined Communities as conforming to a modular design that originated with American and European nationalism and nations.2 The neglect of anticolonial nationalism is even more pronounced when attention turns from decolonization in the third quarter of the twentieth century to earlier decades, especially the period running from the late nineteenth century through the end of the First World War. This is usually characterized as the age of high imperialism, marked by Western empires’ partitioning of Africa, China, and other regions of the world and their subsequent consolidation of colonial control over the populations that 1

2

Examples include Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Peter Alter, Nationalism (London: Edward Arnold, 1989); E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991). Various critics have challenged his modular thesis: a notable attempt to revisit and revise it comes from Manu Goswami, “Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44/4 (October 2002), 770–779. For a recent assessment of Anderson’s contribution to studies of nationalism, see Max Bergholz, “Thinking the Nation,” American Historical Review, 123/2 (1 April 2018), 518–528.

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inhabited these lands. It culminated in the cataclysmic crisis of global war, which Vladimir Lenin aptly described as an “annexationist, predatory war of plunder” between the great powers.3 This European-driven narrative has given little notice to the indigenous resistance that arose against Western imperialism, in part because it assumed forms that often failed to conform to conventional notions of nationalism. Yet this is precisely why it is worth examining what the idea of self-determination looked like for those peoples who became subject to foreign domination. How did they work to overcome imperial control? What contributions did they make to the growth of nationalist ideas and aspirations? Rather than regard their varied and fluid responses as either irrelevant to the rise of modern nationalism or, at best, vaguely “proto-nationalist” in intent,4 we would do well to consider the ways they can enrich and expand our understanding of nationalism and the nation.

Self-Strengthening Movements Three late nineteenth-century developments reshaped the relationship between the West and the rest of the world. One was the “new imperialism” that brought about the annexation of colonial territories across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. By the end of the century, even the most remote places and peoples had been touched directly or indirectly by Euro-American imperial ambitions. The second development was closely connected to the first – the integration of these newly conquered territories into the Western-centered global capitalist economy. This process had a corrosive effect on many indigenous societies, undermining traditional states, social hierarchies, and belief systems. These two developments spurred, in turn, the third. Some segments of these societies came to realize that the threats they faced required new strategies of resistance and accommodation. They responded in a number of ways, ranging from royalist state-building projects to political mobilization along pan-ethnic and pan-religious lines to an insistence on imperial citizenship. Few of these groups envisioned the nation-state as it is currently constituted as the object of their political ambitions, but most of them did demonstrate a desire for self-determination, which they expressed in terms that suggested an “imagined community” of the sort proposed by Benedict Anderson. 3

4

Vladimir Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” in Selected Works, vol. I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), 189. The term of choice for Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism, ch. 2.

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A shared goal of those who sought to stem the tide of Western imperial expansion and economic exploitation was to reinvigorate their societies through self-strengthening movements. These efforts took various forms. Some of the most successful examples occurred in societies where longestablished monarchical regimes were able to refurbish their reputations and modernize their states. They carried out what can be described as nation building from above. The preeminent example is Japan, where in 1868 the Meiji Restoration installed the emperor as the titular head of a revamped, modernizing state that undertook to transform Japanese society. It looked to the West for its models, dispatching official delegations to Europe and the United States in order to learn the secrets of their success. They were particularly impressed by Western industry, science, and hard work, among other factors. (One observation made by the Inakura Embassy about the British was that they “extract profits from their colonies just as one extracts juice from a lemon.”)5 Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 revealed to the world the success of its efforts to remake itself in the modernist image of an industrial, militarist West. Japan’s self-strengthening project inspired modernizers across Asia and even further afield, including the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire.6 The Korean kingdom’s struggles to fend off the United States, Britain, and other imperial powers spurred it to send a fact-finding mission to Japan in the 1880s. It hoped to replicate Japan’s economic and military reforms, but it did too little too late to save it from colonial conquest – as it happened, by Japan in 1910. Thailand (Siam) was more fortunate. Though caught between the British and French empires, it managed to keep both at bay by modernizing its society and economy under the leadership of several forward-thinking monarchs. They created a conscript army and centralized bureaucracy, constructed a railway network, promoted export commodities, phased out slavery, and encouraged nationalist sentiments. Thailand survived the colonial era as an independent state, and its royal family has remained integral to Thai national identity ever since. Some African rulers pursued similar strategies. One of the most notable examples was Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia (Abyssinia), who came to power as the scramble for Africa was reaching its climax at the end of the 5

6

Kume Kunitake, Chushichi Tsuzuki, and Jules Young (eds.), Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe, 1871–1873 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 109–110. Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), ch. 4.

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century. He equipped his army with the modern armaments needed to repel Italian forces at the battle of Adowa in 1896. This victory helped give Ethiopia much the same reputation among Africans and Afro-Caribbeans as did Japan’s victory over Russia among Asians. Menelik went on to create a centralized bureaucracy and tax system, construct roads, bridges, and a railway line, and even establish a telephone system.7 Ethiopia’s standing within the international community garnered it admission as a founding member of the League of Nations after the First World War and the United Nations after the Second. Most royal regimes were far less successful than Japan, Thailand, or Ethiopia in responding to Western aggression. Although the hereditary rulers of Egypt, Burma, and Zanzibar made concerted efforts to modernize their states and economies, they succumbed to British imperialism nonetheless. Egypt’s fatal flaw was the foreign debt it incurred in its efforts at modernization. Sovereigns who adamantly resisted any change fared no better. Sumatra’s sultan of Aceh was drawn into a prolonged war with the Dutch in 1873, but even his use of suicide warriors failed to prevent the destruction of the sultanate. In southern Africa, King Cetshweyo of the Zulu and King Lobengula of the Ndebele lost their thrones in conflicts with the British in 1879 and 1893 respectively. Madagascar’s monarchy came to an ignominious end when the French abruptly ordered Queen Ranavalona III into exile. It is a testament to the threat that indigenous monarchs posed to European imperial ambitions that so many of them were dethroned and exiled.8 Some hereditary regimes survived in attenuated, neutered form by surrendering their sovereignty, becoming protectorates or princely states, or accepting other forms of subordination to imperial powers. Examples included the sultans of the Malayan peninsula, the emperor of Vietnam, the kabaka of Buganda, the emir of Sokoto, the sultan of Morocco, and the Barotse, Swazi, and Sotho kings of southern Africa. Even Qing China and the Ottoman Empire, two of the world’s mightiest and most enduring dynasties, were unable to withstand the whirlwind that was sweeping aside so many anciens régimes. Both of them were forced to cede portions of their territory and surrender much of their sovereignty to foreign powers and concessionaires in the late nineteenth century, undermining the regimes’ political power and hollowing out their moral authority. 7

8

Cyrus Veeser, Great Leaps Forward: Modernizers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2010), 77. Robert Aldrich, Banished Potentates: Dethroning and Exiling Indigenous Monarchs under British and French Colonial Rule, 1815–1955 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

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In 1912, a discredited Qing dynasty was overthrown by a group of republican reformers eager to modernize China and restore a sense of nationalist pride among its peoples. The Ottoman regime lasted longer, but it too was wracked by political upheaval, with the Young Turks placing constitutional constraints on the sultan’s power in 1908 and promoting an overtly nationalist agenda. With so many established hereditary regimes disintegrating in the face of Western military and economic pressure, many of their subjects turned instead to religious traditions and leaders for inspiration and direction. Spirit mediums and prophets helped to spur a number of peasant uprisings across the colonial world. These including the Pai Ma¯rire movement in New Zealand, the Tuka disturbance in Fiji (the first of numerous Melanesian “cargo cults”), the Shona/Ndebele rising in Southern Rhodesia, the Birsa rising in India, and the Maji Maji rebellion in German East Africa.9 Dismay at the Qing dynasty’s failure to prevent foreign intrusion gave rise to the Militia United in Righteousness, a millenarian movement also known as the Boxers, which launched a campaign in 1900 to drive Europeans out of China and kill Chinese converts to Christianity. It led instead to the invasion of China by a coalition of European military forces, resulting in the further humiliation of the country. Islam’s broad reach and long history of struggle with Western Christianity made it an especially important source of inspiration for those seeking to mobilize opposition to European colonialism. In Sudan, the Sufi cleric Muhammad Ahmad, a self-proclaimed Mahdi or redeemer of Islam, declared jihad in 1881 against the Anglo-Egyptian forces occupying his country. He captured Khartoum and founded an independent Islamic state that endured till 1898, thirteen years after the Mahdi’s own death. In West Africa, another Muslim cleric and state-builder, Samori Toure, fended off the French armies sent into his lands from the early 1880s through the late 1890s, while the Sanusiyya Sufi brotherhood in eastern Libya resisted Italian rule for two decades in the early twentieth century. In Somalia, Muhammad ‘Abd Hasan, dubbed the “Mad Mullah” by his enemies, led a twenty-year-long guerrilla war against the British, the Italians, and the Ethiopians, each of whom claimed portions of the Horn of Africa. On India’s North-West Frontier, Muslim tribesmen launched a major rebellion against the British in 1897. Winston Churchill, who took part in the military campaign against them, 9

See, for example, Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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issued the standard charge against these religiously inspired rebels: they were “fanatics” whose fierce and relentless resistance required, according to Churchill, the “stopping power” of dum-dum bullets.10

Liberal Modernizers While some non-Western peoples drew on traditional political institutions and religious ideas in their struggles to maintain or regain autonomy in the face of the West’s relentless onslaught, others turned to Western ideas, institutions, and practices. Much of the groundwork for the growth of modern nationalist movements in colonial societies was laid by the new indigenous elites, who found productive and profitable niches as mediators between the colonizers and the colonized. In Abidjan, Batavia, Bombay, Cape Town, Hanoi, Kingston, and countless other colonial port cities and political capitals, “native” lawyers, doctors, merchants, journalists, translators, clerks, and others congregated and coalesced into a nascent bourgeois professional class. Many attended the schools that colonial authorities and missionaries established to disseminate Western knowledge. Some pursued higher education and specialized training in London, Paris, and other imperial capitals. They became fluent in the languages of the colonizers and familiar with their customs and concerns. They adopted or adapted Western dress and demeanor, Western moral sensibilities, and Western modes of sociability.11 And they embraced and asserted Western liberal ideas regarding rights-bearing subjects.12 By way of example, consider the case of the young Sukarno, who would lead Indonesia to independence. The son of a Javanese schoolteacher, he was sent to a Dutch-language primary school, then gained admission to a prestigious secondary school in Surabaya, where many of his classmates were European. In addition to Dutch, he learned French, English, and 10

11

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W. S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode in Frontier War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990 [1898]), 4, 199. On these Muslim rebellions, see B. D. Hopkins, “Islam and Resistance in the British Empire,” in David Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 150–169. There is a vast literature on these Westernized colonial elites. For West Africa alone, examples include G. W. Johnson, Jr., The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Power in the Four Communes, 1900–1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971); Leo Spitzer, The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974); and P. S. Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). See, for example, C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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German, and he read Enlightenment authors like Voltaire and leading nineteenth-century advocates of liberalism and nationalism like William Gladstone, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Count Cavour. Although trained as an engineer, he turned – unsurprisingly – to nationalist politics.13 Sukarno had his counterparts across the colonial world, a growing contingent of Western-educated, politically active men – and, in some cases, women – who became increasingly restive under imperial rule. They enthusiastically embraced the universalist liberal principles espoused by almost all Western empires in one form or another. These principles held that anyone could claim the rights of imperial citizenship so long as they met a set of standards regarding property requirements, cultural practices, and other measures of fiscal and moral responsibility. Although colonial regimes invariably placed racial barriers in the path of native peoples’ efforts to attain those rights, many prewar indigenous elites believed they could use the legal system, political pressure, and direct appeals to ostensibly more enlightened metropolitan authorities to gain greater control over their own affairs. They insisted on their rights as educated, respectable, property-owning imperial subjects. They relied on Western modes of political activism to make their cases, writing pamphlets, signing petitions, organizing rallies, and sending delegations to imperial capitals. The Western style of sociability that had spurred them to form literary, scientific, and fraternal societies found expression in political associations as well. Some of the names they gave to these associations reflected their sense of themselves as spokespeople for their “nations,” by which they meant a people who possessed a shared identity as a civic community. Hence the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885, the South African Native National Congress in 1912, and the National Congress of British West Africa in 1917. Literacy was essential to their cause. For colonized subjects across large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, the Antipodes, and certain other regions, literacy was a new and revelatory technology introduced mainly by missionaries to spread the gospel. While literacy had a much longer lineage in South Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East, there too it acquired new power with the increased availability of the printing press and the proliferation of what Benedict Anderson has termed print capitalism. A plethora of publications – books, newspapers, pamphlets, fliers, and more – spread across the colonial world in the late nineteenth century, written in a multiplicity of languages. 13

J. R. Rush, “Sukarno: Anticipating an Asian Century,” in Ramachandra Guha (ed.), Makers of Modern Asia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 172–198.

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Many leaders of anticolonial movements rose to prominence by founding and editing newspapers, honing their messages of dissatisfaction with colonial rule, and appealing to like-minded readers. Newspapers were crucial to the development of a public sphere and a corresponding sense of “social citizenship” on the part of colonial subjects.14 For these Westernized elites, an identifiably nationalist sensibility first found expression in the cultural realm. Sensitive to the charge that they were “mimic men,” who simply aped their Western superiors and lacked any connections to the common folk they claimed to speak for, some members of this social stratum began to distance themselves from Western culture and don the trappings of indigeneity. They took an interest in collecting and publishing traditional proverbs and folktales. They acquired a new appreciation for the wisdom of their ancestors and the customs of their countrymen. The then-South African lawyer and political activist Mohandas Gandhi turned away from the urban, competitive world he associated with the corrupting influence of the West in favor of a rural, communal life, where he insisted on simple vegetarian fare, self-sufficiency, and self-control (swaraj). The Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, a profoundly cosmopolitan figure, established an ashram in rural Bengal and assumed the guise of the bearded, robed sage. (See Figure 15.1.) In British West Africa, some Christianized elites shed their European names and dress, taking African ones instead. Members of Sierra Leone’s Krio ruling class, the descendants of liberated slaves who had been torn from their natal communities, established a Dress Reform Society that promoted a specially designed, pseudo-African costume in place of Western-style frock coats and starched collars.15 Similar self-fashioning projects arose elsewhere across the colonial world. Women assumed particular symbolic importance for these cultural nationalists. They became the embodied expressions of tradition and authenticity. Few interventions by colonial authorities and missionaries sparked a more hostile response from indigenous communities than attempts to regulate or prohibit customary practices involving women, such as polygamy, sati, female circumcision, child marriage, and widow remarriage. Even modernizing elites 14

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Tony Ballantyne, “Contesting the Empire of Paper: Cultures of Print and AntiColonialism in the Modern British Empire,” in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (eds.), Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014), 222. Spitzer, The Creoles of Sierra Leone, 117–118; also see Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, 59–60, 66–70.

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Figure 15.1 Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913), was a cosmopolitan internationalist and critic of nationalism and Western culture who flirted for a time with the pan-Asian movement. (Photo by Hutton Archive/Stringer via Getty Images).

who shared the conviction that such practices were backward and required reform often resisted colonial states’ efforts to legislate change. They imbibed the Western bourgeois belief in separate spheres, which relegated the woman to the home, a private sphere where she nurtured her children and provided a refuge for her husband from the ruthlessly competitive world of commerce, politics, and war. It was easy enough to recast the private sphere for anticolonial purposes by portraying the home as the sanctuary and the wife and mother as the custodian of cultural values under threat from corrosive foreign forces. For the cultural nationalists who advanced such views, women came to be conceived not merely as the physical reservoir of the past, but as the symbolic bearers of the nation to be born.16 16

For the Indian case, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), ch. 6.

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Those who sought to reclaim the sense of cultural pride that colonialism had done so much to undermine often did so by appealing to religious beliefs and traditions. In India, for example, the subcontinent’s spiritual heritage came to be seen as a realm that was free from, and, indeed, superior to, the materialist West. This conviction drew its strength from the self-conscious contrast it drew between Indians and their oppressors, which turned religious identity into a political statement that became “crucial to the development of national identity.”17 The Arya Samaj, an influential Hindu reform movement founded in 1875, ostensibly aimed to restore the textual authority of the Vedas to Hindu worship, but it also provided a training ground for prominent nationalists like Lala Rajpat Rai. Another Hindu reformer, Swami Vivekananda, introduced Hinduism to an international audience at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893 and inspired some of his Indian adherents to become activists in the Indian nationalist movement. An especially noteworthy example was Aurobindo Ghose, who helped lead the Bengali terrorist campaign against the British in the early 1900s and later transformed himself into Sri Aurobindo, the spiritual founder of neoHinduism, itself a highly politicized project.18 In sub-Saharan Africa, where missionaries had converted large swathes of the population to Christianity, independent African churches began to spring up that blended Christian doctrine and indigenous beliefs into socially potent and potentially subversive mixtures. Their success was aided by the textualization of African vernaculars, allowing translated versions of the Gospels and Christian classics like The Pilgrim’s Progress to become “portmanteau text[s]” that could be used by literate African evangelicals to speak more directly to the spiritual, social, and political concerns of their congregations.19 The prophet William Wade Harris, who preached an idiosyncratic version of the Gospels that included defense of polygamy, attracted enormous crowds as he toured through West Africa in 1913–1914. French authorities, fearful of his ability to mobilize the masses, banished him from the Ivory Coast.20 The British, the Belgians, and the Portuguese nervously monitored the independent black churches that began to spread across southern and central Africa. The Ethiopian movement, introduced by black African Methodist Episcopal 17

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Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3. Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chs. 2–3. Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 28. G. M. Haliburton, The Prophet Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

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Church missionaries from the United States, got a foothold in South Africa in the late nineteenth century and soon spread northward. Another African-American-inspired version of Christianity that attracted widespread support across southern Africa was known as the Zionist movement (to be distinguished from an even more explicitly nationalist project, Jewish Zionism). But perhaps the most worrisome of these independent African denominations for colonial authorities was the Watch Tower movement: its adherents rejected secular government, refused to pay taxes, and believed that the Second Coming was nigh and would sweep away colonial rule. British authorities in Nyasaland and Southern Rhodesia banned it, and other colonial officials carefully monitored its activities.21 Similar independent religious movements sprang up among other Christianized populations, giving voice to their discontent with colonial rule. In New Zealand, for example, Rua Kenana in 1905 proclaimed himself the new messiah, established a community he called “New Jerusalem,” and prophesied the return of Maori lands lost to settlers. After several violent clashes with authorities, a military expedition arrested him and dispersed his followers in 1917.22 Westernized elites of Islamic heritage worked to reshape their faith as well. Influential Indian Muslim voices such as Sayyid Ahmed Khan and Syed Ameer Ali called on Islam to accommodate itself to the demands of Western modernity by embracing scientific learning and liberal institutions. Others sought to mobilize Islam’s transnational networks and institutional structures to resist Western imperialism more effectively. The opening of the Suez Canal, the increase in transoceanic steamship traffic, and the spread of railway lines across India, the Ottoman Empire, and neighboring territories made it possible by the late nineteenth century for many more Muslims than ever before to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca and visit Cairo, Istanbul, and other great urban centers of Islamic culture.23 These travelers acquired an enhanced appreciation of Islam’s transnational reach and mobilizing power, and some of them sought to put that reach and power to political purposes. One of the earliest and most influential advocates of that vision was Jamal al-Afghani, the Persian-born activist-intellectual whose peregrinations took 21

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See, for example, R. I. Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873–1964 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), especially ch. 3. Judith Binney, Gillian Chaplin, and Craig Wallace, Mihaia: The Prophet Rua Kenana and his Community at Maungapohatu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). John Slight, The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

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him from Afghanistan and British India to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, as well as various European countries. Although he believed that the revitalization of Islamic societies required modernization along Western lines, including the embrace of republican constitutional government, secular education, science and technology, and related reforms, he became convinced after spending time in British India that this could not happen under colonial rule: it required dar al-Islam to assume control of its own future. Hence his sharp criticisms of the Islamic rulers in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tehran for their failure to grasp the seriousness of the threat that faced the Muslim world. As Western imperial interference in the Islamic world grew more pronounced and predatory, his own views changed, becoming more insistent on the importance of the Islamic faith to his political project. The views he expressed in his later years are said to have inspired the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi movement.24

The Transnational Struggle for Self-Determination While al-Afghani was in some respects a unique figure, his transnational career was indicative of the mobility of the generation of anticolonial activists who came of age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Michael Goebel has observed, “the historiography on nationalism has remained curiously divorced from the scholarship on historical migration.”25 Yet the West’s unprecedented political, military, and economic incursions into the non-Western world simultaneously undermined traditional institutions and societies and opened up opportunities to imagine alternative futures, often expressed in terms that were broadly nationalist in intent. Transportation and communication networks that had been developed to advance Western interests served other ends as well. Colonial subjects made use of roads, railways, and steamships to travel abroad, seeking redress for political grievances, pursuing educational and occupational opportunities, going on religious pilgrimages, forging alliances with foreign activists, and more. They maintained communication with ever-widening circles 24

25

Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani: A Political Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Also see Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), ch. 2; Umar Ryad, “Anti-Imperialism and the Pan-Islamic Movement,” in Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European Empires, 131–149. Michael Goebel, “‘The Capital of the Men without a Country’: Migrants and Anticolonialism in Interwar Paris,” American Historical Review, 121/5 (December 2016), 1445.

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of political sympathizers and allies via the postal system and the telegraph, and they gathered and disseminated reports of their struggles and those of other colonial peoples through newspapers, pamphlets, and other print media. They managed in many ways to become the beneficiaries of “a world connecting.”26 They were far from the only colonized subjects whose lives were transformed by this increasingly interconnected world. G. Balachandran argues that a “cosmopolitan subaltern sociality” existed in this period among Chinese, Indian, and Malay seafarers and the working poor of the world’s port cities, a racially mixed and mobile underclass who often lay beyond the control of the state.27 Other subaltern communities entered this world of increasing mobility as well, though rarely under conditions of their own choosing. British imperial agents dispatched millions of Indian indentured laborers to such distant destinations as Fiji, Natal and Trinidad, where most were put to work on sugar plantations. Large numbers of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino peasants were drawn into a globalized labor market as well, with unscrupulous recruiters cramming them into ships bound for Australia, California, Cuba, Hawaii, and elsewhere. Small tradespeople, skilled artisans, and others in search of economic opportunity soon followed. Together they formed expatriate communities whose heightened awareness of the larger world often enhanced their appreciation of the homelands they had left behind, making them important reservoirs of financial and political support for nationalist movements. Yet it was the impact of this increasingly interconnected world on the Westernized elites who led colonial campaigns for political rights that deserves particular attention. They were, with rare exceptions, cosmopolitan figures. Many came from relatively prominent or privileged families within their colonial communities. Most were well educated, widely traveled, and multilingual. A number of them resided for extended periods of time in one or another of the world’s great magnet cities, such as London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, and Cairo. Some married or established other bonds of intimacy across cultures. Some blended religious and ethical doctrines from different societies. They embodied some of the central characteristics of cosmopolitanism: an openness to the world, an appreciation of difference, an ability to reconcile a sense of rootedness with a commitment to universal 26

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E. S. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012). Gopalan Balachandran, “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism, Racial Governance and Multiculturalism: Britain, c. 1900–45,” Social History, 39/4 (2014), 529.

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values. These qualities led them to consider a range of possibilities for reshaping the colonial order on behalf of nationalist sentiments. As Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny point out, “it was perfectly possible to satisfy nationalist grievance within a variety of state forms or political arrangements.”28 Colonial cosmopolitans imagined forms of sovereignty that reflected their own enlarged sense of the connections that could be forged across social, cultural, and geographical boundaries. For many critics of colonial rule in the prewar decades, the liberal imperial promise of equal partnership in the empire was their lodestar. This was especially true of activists from long-established British and French colonies. Dadabhai Naoroji, the Bombay-born Parsi merchant who helped found the Indian National Congress, embraced this position: he was both a sharp critic of British rule in India, whose “drain theory” of economic exploitation was immensely influential among Indian nationalists, and a committed campaigner for home rule within the empire. He was the first South Asian to win election to the British Parliament, becoming a member for Finsbury, London, in 1892.29 Similarly, in 1914 the Senegalese-born Blaise Diagne became the first black African delegate to France’s Parliament, representing Senegal’s communes, whose residents held French citizenship. He had served as a civil servant in various French colonies for more than twenty years and saw himself as “a citizen of the empire.” He sought to show that the republic’s African subjects were “truly worthy” to be “voters and French citizens.”30 While Diagne and Naoroji shared the conviction that self-determination was possible within the framework of empire, they dealt with different empires that posed different challenges. For French colonial subjects like Blaise, political rights required assimilation to French culture and access to French citizenship, which provided representation in the French state. This was only feasible, however, for a small minority of colonial subjects. Those who came from long-established French possessions like the West Indian colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique, the four communes of Senegal, and the northern departments of Algeria had a better claim to the rights and privileges of Frenchmen than those from Indochina, Madagascar, and other 28

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Geoff Eley and R. G. Suny, “Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation,” in Eley and Suny (eds.), Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 10. S. R. Mehrotra and Dinyar Patel, “Introduction,” to Mehrotra and Patel (eds.), Dadabhai Naoroji: Selected Private Papers (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016). Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal, 168, 184.

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newly acquired territories, but even in the former possessions there were large groups of people, such as Algerian Muslims, for whom the possibility of assimilated status was remote at best. In contrast to the French promise of political integration for assimilated colonials, the British offered colonial subjects varying degrees of internal selfgovernment, culminating in the prospect of home rule. In the prewar decades, important critics of British colonial governance like G. K. Gokhale of India, J. E. Casely-Hayford of the Gold Coast, and Sol Plaatje of South Africa campaigned to achieve this goal. Its most famous proponent, however, was Mohandas Gandhi. The moral and intellectual inspiration he drew from Western thinkers like Ruskin, Thoreau, and Tolstoy is well known.31 Only recently, however, have scholars demonstrated the depth and persistence of Gandhi’s empire loyalism in the prewar years. Gandhi argued that Indians, unlike Africans, deserved imperial citizenship because they shared the civilizational values and Indo-European heritage of the British. “We belong to the Imperial family,” he declared, “and are children, adopted . . . of the same mother, having the same rights and privileges guaranteed to us as to the European children.”32 He dutifully organized stretcher corps for the British army during the Anglo-Boer War, the Bambatha Rebellion by the Zulu, and the First World War, insisting that these non-combatant contributions to warfare were consistent with his principle of satyagraha. Gandhi hoped these demonstrations of empire loyalty would cause British authorities to safeguard Indians’ rights as imperial subjects in South Africa and persuade them that India deserved the same political status as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.33 This status consisted of a system of layered sovereignty that granted these states control over their domestic affairs while remaining subject to British suzerainty. This fostered a dual identity on the part of colonists: they were both imperial subjects who retained a sense of loyalty to Britain and citizens of self-governing states that fostered a sense of national belonging. Why wasn’t this possible for Indians, Gandhi asked? The answer, as Gandhi and other Indian empire loyalists would learn, was that Britain’s liberal imperial promise of “responsible government” was effectively color-coded white. For Indians, Africans, and others, access to 31

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Patrick Brantlinger, “A Postindustrial Prelude to Postcolonialism: John Ruskin, William Morris, and Gandhism,” Critical Inquiry, 22 (Spring 1996), 466–485. Gandhi, quoted in Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the LateVictorian Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 95–96. See, especially, Ashwin Desai and G. H. Vahed, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).

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these privileges was continually deferred. Westernized elites in French colonies encountered similar problems as their assimilationist aspirations ran up against racial barriers. The prevalence of imperial race thinking in the prewar decades became both a provocation and an inspiration for the growing contingent of anticolonial activists who adopted a very different strategy for self-determination: they launched pan-ethnic political projects. Modern pan-African, pan-Asian, pan-Arab, and pan-Islamic movements all arose in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Not only did these pan-movements turn the categories of difference that the Western imperial powers applied to other peoples to their own political ends; they also gave anticolonial activists a way to transcend the constraints of colonies’ narrow and often arbitrary territorial boundaries, establishing an empowering sense of shared identity on broader racial or ethnic or religious grounds. Like the pan-German and pan-Slav campaigns that sprang up in central and eastern Europe at this time, these pan-movements were inspired by what can be characterized as nationalist sentiments. But unlike their European counterparts, which sought to establish nation-states sheltered by and subordinate to Germany or Russia, they sought to operate outside the gravitational fields of the great powers, forming transcolonial and transnational connections that could create effective counterweights to empires. The pan-African movement was one of the most important and enduring of these projects.34 Among its earliest proponents was Edward Blyden. He was born in the Danish Caribbean colony of St. Thomas, immigrated to Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, and became a prominent public intellectual and activist in neighboring, British-ruled Sierra Leone. Blyden insisted on the centrality of race to social and political life, a conviction that led him to urge black people in the Americas to return to Africa and accounted for his intense hostility to mixed-race people. “The heart of every true Negro,” he declared, “yearns for a distinct and separate nationality.”35 Another early pan-Africanist was the Trinidadian-born Henry Sylvester Williams, who settled in London after traveling through the United States and attending college in Canada. In 1900 he organized the first international pan-African conference and founded a short-lived periodical, Pan-African. He then moved to South 34

35

A dated but still useful survey of this subject is Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa (New York: Africana Publishing Co., 1968). H. R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot, 1832–1912 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 30.

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Africa for two years to agitate on behalf of the pan-African cause.36 Similar sentiments percolated among anticolonial activists of African heritage in the Francophone world. Although the négritude movement, the best known of these pan-Africanist projects, did not arise until the 1930s, black subjects of the French Empire were already forging transcolonial connections that drew on a shared racial identity. An important source of inspiration for their efforts was the Haitian Revolution, which had produced the first black-ruled postcolonial nation-state. Similarly, pan-Asianists drew inspiration from Japan’s rise to international prominence, especially after its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Tokyo became a magnet for anticolonial activists from Burma, India, the Philippines, Indochina, and elsewhere across Asia. Even Chinese nationalists who lamented their country’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 turned to Japan as a refuge from Qing persecution.37 Rabindranath Tagore flirted with pan-Asianism, collaborating with one of its leading Japanese proponents, Okakura Tenshin, in an attempt to make Buddhism the basis for Asian solidarity.38 The rhetoric of race, however, proved a far more powerful source of pan-Asian mobilization. Despite the demonstrable ethnic, cultural, and linguistic differences among the peoples of Asia, the West’s own orientalist stereotypes and “yellow peril” hysteria gave the advocates of panAsianism a powerful motive for framing their movement in racialist terms. The pan-movements that sprang up in the Middle East and North Africa offered two different strategies of mobilization, one rooted in the Islamic faith, the other in Arabic ethnicity and language. Ottoman, Persian, and other Islamic authorities had viewed Pan-Islam’s founding father, Jamal al-Afghani, with deep suspicion, but as the European imperial threat to their regimes loomed larger, his message attracted increasing interest. The Young Turks, whose 1908 revolution aimed to modernize the Ottoman Empire, promoted a pan-Islamic national identity as a means to that end. Among the intellectual exponents of this initiative was Halil Halid, who returned from years of political exile in England to win election to the Ottoman Assembly and later to teach at the University of Istanbul. In a series of publications, he condemned Western imperialism and argued for Islam as the logical basis for resistance and renewal.39 36

37 38

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Marika Sherwood, Origins of Pan-Africanism: Henry Sylvester Williams, Africa, and the African Diaspora (New York: Routledge, 2011). Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, ch. 3. Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). S. T. Wasti, “Halil Halid: Anti-Imperialist Muslim Intellectual,” Middle Eastern Studies, 29/3 (July 1993), 559–579.

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Pan-Islam, however, held no appeal for Christians and other minority religious communities within the Ottoman Empire, and the Young Turks’ efforts to mobilize it as an ideological agent of Ottoman power alienated them even further. Some turned to pan-Arabism as an alternative strategy for forging unity in the face of oppression. A prominent prewar voice of panArabism was Jurji Zaydan, a Syrian Christian author and journalist who moved to Cairo after Ottoman authorities cracked down on dissent. Its appeal, however, remained limited in the prewar era.40 Nationalist sentiments in the Middle East also coalesced along cultural and regional lines, laying the groundwork for the modern countries of Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. Egypt is a particularly striking case. The first significant manifestation of Egyptian nationalism was the Urabi revolt of 1881–1882, which sought to rein in the Khedive because of his regime’s subordination to Western powers. When the British responded by occupying Egypt in 1882, nationalist politics became even more overtly anti-imperial. They found expression in a wide range of protests, publications, and organizations, including the Egyptian National Party, founded in 1892. Some frustrated Egyptian nationalists turned to revolutionary violence against British authorities, adopting a strategy that attracted anticolonial militants from other subjugated lands as well. Insofar as they drew inspiration from a shared system of belief, it was not Marxism that motivated them, but anarchism. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, anarchists assassinated a large number of European leaders (as well as two American presidents) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and they created an international network that aided and abetted anticolonial revolutionaries.41 The nationalist movement in Bengal turned deadly after 1908 as swadeshi (“of one’s own country”) radicals, several of whom had received armaments training from anarchists in Europe, began raiding armories, planting bombs, and assassinating British officials. The repressive Spanish Empire also drove discontented colonial subjects to insurrection. One notable example was the Cuban exile José Martí, who recruited fellow émigrés to invade their home island in an unsuccessful effort to expel the Spanish in 1895. Another was the Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo, who proclaimed his country’s independence from Spain after its defeat in the war against the United States, only to renew

40

41

Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), ch. 2. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005).

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the struggle for liberation when the Americans imposed their own form of colonial rule over the islands.

The Impact of War The First World War was less a rupture from the preceding developments than an impetus for intensifying their pace. For colonial subjects who saw imperial loyalty as the route to self-determination, the war opened up new opportunities to demonstrate their value to the empire. Mass slaughter on the Western Front and elsewhere forced Britain and France to tap their colonial populations for military manpower. Blaise Diagne won concessions from French authorities on taxes and social benefits for his Senegalese constituents in return for recruiting volunteers for military service. Of the 135,000 Senegalese Tirailleurs who served in combat, 30,000 were killed, giving rise to the saying, “We have paid the blood tax.”42 Algeria’s subject population became an even more important source of manpower: 170,000 Muslim troops fought in Europe, suffering 36,000 casualties. Many of them expected this service to be rewarded with citizenship rights at the war’s conclusion. India provided Britain with its principal source of colonial manpower. Over one million Indian troops served – and 62,000 died – in campaigns on the Western Front, in Mesopotamia, at Gallipoli, and elsewhere. Gandhi and other moderate Indian nationalists carried out recruitment drives and gave other demonstrations of their support for the British war effort in hopes that they would receive self-government in recognition of their loyalty.43 The war also gave greater intensity to most of the pan-movements. The Ottoman sultan-caliph sought to mobilize pan-Islamic sentiments by calling on the faithful to rise up against the enemies of Islam, which he equated with the enemies of the Ottoman Empire. By fanning the flames of pan-Islamic nationalism, the regime laid the groundwork for the wartime genocide against Armenian Christians. Pan-Arabism, in turn, provided a rationale for the rebellion against Ottoman rule by Arab tribes under the leadership of Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons. The war strengthened pan-Asianist sentiments as well. Although Japan took part in the war as an ally of Britain and France, some Japanese intellectuals concluded that the war exposed the decadence of the West and demonstrated the need to “awaken the East” by 42 43

Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal, 195. For an introduction to the war’s impact on empires and their colonial subjects, see Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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pursuing pan-Asianist policies.44 Only the pan-African movement was quiescent, constrained by wartime restrictions on transatlantic travel. Yet pent-up pressures found release immediately after the war with three international Pan-African Congresses between 1919 and 1923. Finally, the war’s violence gave new impetus to anticolonial violence. Each side in the global conflict sought to stir up unrest among the other side’s colonial subjects. The Arab revolt against Ottoman rule was financed and supplied with weapons by British authorities operating out of Cairo. The British Empire’s size and scope made it even more vulnerable to this sort of subversion. The Ghadar Party, a revolutionary network of Indian expatriates in California, conspired with German agents to ship arms to India to support an uprising. Germans also attempted to aid the Irish nationalists who launched the Easter Rising. And M. N. Roy began his remarkable international odyssey as a revolutionary antiimperialist when he slipped out of India during the war to seek German military support. At the same time, the war strengthened imperial security measures, making it more difficult for the conspirators to carry out their schemes.

Conclusion Most accounts of anticolonial nationalism are meant to preview its outcome, concentrating on those movements that can claim a direct lineage to the postcolonial nation-states that sprang up across Asia, Africa, and elsewhere in the decades following the Second World War. This chapter has adopted a wider perspective, examining a greater array of colonial struggles for selfdetermination. In so doing, it has tried to show that notions of nationhood took many forms in the pre-First World War decades and envisioned a greater variety of postcolonial futures than is commonly supposed. One notable example was the nation nested in empire, its citizens serving as partners in the liberal imperial project; another was the nation as a pan-ethnic or panreligious polity, intent on transcending established territorial boundaries. While neither of these options would come to be realized in the era of decolonization, their advocates included many of those activists – Gandhi is perhaps the best known – who subsequently shifted their strategies, mobilizing the movements that brought into existence the postcolonial nation-states that comprise such a large portion of today’s United Nations. Why draw attention to those alternative, unsuccessful visions of nationhood? One important reason is to suggest that our understanding of the nation 44

Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia, 124.

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and nationalism may be too closely bound up with the territorial system of sovereign states that became the standard feature of the international order after the collapse of the colonial empires. Perhaps it is not the nation or nationalism that took modular form, as Benedict Anderson has taught us, but rather the territorial state that served as its institutional vessel. In a largely neglected book that appeared in the same year as Anderson’s Imagined Communities, the historian of nationalism Anthony Smith made essentially this point. He argued that the West’s main contribution to the new countries of the Third World was “the primacy and dominance of the specialized, territorially defined and coercively monopolistic state.”45 Western colonialism, in effect, became a mechanism for transmitting the institutional structure of the modular state to non-Western territories. The result of this transmission was that the range of options available to anticolonial movements in their struggles for self-determination were sharply reduced. However varied their conceptions of the nation, those who led campaigns for self-determination were forced to tailor their ambitions to the political and institutional structures of the modern, modular state.

Further Reading Adas, Michael, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Aydin, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Dawisha, Adeed, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Geiss, Imanuel, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa (New York: Africana Publishing Co., 1968). Gerwarth, Robert, and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Guha, Ramachandra (ed.), Makers of Modern Asia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). Smith, Anthony D., State and Nation in the Third World (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983). 45

Anthony D. Smith, State and Nation in the Third World (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983), 17.

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Introduction The First World War was a fundamental watershed in the history of Europe and the world, causing deep and long-lasting shifts in politics, society, the economy, and the cultural sphere. The human costs were enormous. More than 70 million soldiers were mobilized between 1914 and 1918, of whom up to 9.3 million died. Many more were hurt and often had to live with their injuries and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. The civilian casualties were unprecedented, too: almost 8 million non-combatants fell victim to the direct and indirect consequences of the war, including displacement, captivity, and forced labor, but also starvation and epidemics. The experience of loss and destruction, of economic decline and social deprivation, traumatized whole generations for many years to come. Given the large-scale devastation of settlements, infrastructure, and industrial facilities, but also the staggering increase in state expenditure and inflation, the economic and financial recovery often represented a major challenge to postwar governments and societies. As regards politics, the conflict introduced novel models of organizing state and society, altered party landscapes and ideological positions, and created demands for political reform and participation. It brought about fundamental regime changes and broke empires, establishing a different international order with new problems and areas of confrontation.1 1

For comprehensive accounts of the First World War, see David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004); John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Jörn Leonhard, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018). Very useful reference works include: Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker (eds.), Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918: histoire et culture (Paris: Bayard, 2004); Gerhard Hirschfeld et al. (eds.), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, 2nd rev. and exp. edition (Paderborn: Schöningh,

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Much of this is captured in George F. Kennan’s famous interpretation of the First World War as “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century, but this story has long been told from a narrowly Eurocentric perspective.2 Occasionally, even the central and eastern European theater of operations is still labeled as the “forgotten front” or the “unknown war,” to use the title of the relevant volume of Winston Churchill’s history of the conflict from more than ninety years ago.3 Reflecting recent shifts in the historiography and in line with the fundamental premises of this volume, this contribution will emphasize the global dimension of the war and discuss the evolution of nations and nationalism from an integrated comparative perspective, proceeding thematically rather than by case study. It will also pay particular attention to other powerful concepts of identity and solidarity, beyond the nation and the nation-state, such as religion, race, and empire. While nationalism represented a potent political force, it is important to acknowledge that its rise and radicalization was far from inevitable and ubiquitous. Numerous studies have investigated the extent of war enthusiasm and national unity at the outbreak of the conflict, the role of state propaganda and war ideology, patterns of myth construction and collective memory, as well as the various cases of imperial collapse and nation-state formation. They have typically highlighted the intensification of national sentiments and ethnic differentiation, and the radicalization of national discourses and demands.4 There is still relatively little awareness, however,

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2014); 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War (https://encyclo pedia.1914-1918-online.net/home). George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875–1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 5 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1923–1931), vol. V: The Unknown War: The Eastern Front (1931). Compare with Gerhard P. Gross, The Forgotten Front: The Eastern Theater of World War I, 1914–1915, trans. Janice W. Ancker (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2018); Wlodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny, Der vergessene Weltkrieg. Europas Osten 1912–1923, trans. Bernhard Hartmann, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: WBG Theiss, 2018). For some of the most important comparative works, see Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds.), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914– 1923 (London: Routledge, 2001); François Bouloc, Rémy Cazals, and André Loez (eds.), Identités troublées, 1914–1918: les appartenances sociales et nationales à l’épreuve de la guerre (Toulouse: Privat, 2011); Ernst Piper, Nacht über Europa. Kulturgeschichte des Ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin: Propyläen, 2013); Nico Wouters and Laurence van Ypersele (eds.), Nations, Identities and the First World War: Shifting Loyalties to the Fatherland (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Stimulating: Michael Mann, “The Role of Nationalism in the Two World Wars,” in John A. Hall and Siniša Malešević (eds.), Nationalism and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 172–196.

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of the variety and coexistence of different national ideas within those polities and ethnic communities, ranging from pacifist and internationalist conceptions to xenophobic and even racist models of belonging and selfidentification. Moreover, much less is known about the prevalence and impact of cultural encounters, or the role of discourses of friendship and solidarity, for instance as regards military allies, as opposed to the rhetoric of enmity and confrontation. This chapter attempts to offer a more comprehensive survey of those phenomena, questioning some established interpretations and doing more justice to the multiplicity of war experiences and attitudes across the world. Following John Breuilly’s categorization, it will try to investigate wartime nationalism as politics, idea, and sentiment, although these forms are often interrelated and difficult to distinguish.5 In the first case, this means looking at certain measures and actions of state officials, for instance as regards the treatment of minorities or the development of war aims, but it also includes the efforts of national activists to gain political independence. The spiritual mobilization of the population through state propaganda and intellectual discourse, the construction of enemy images and narratives of national belonging, as well as religious imaginations and practices, belong to the second type. Nationalism as sentiment refers to the attitudes of broader sections of the population, to shifting feelings of loyalty and popular support for political programs and national projects.

War Experiences in Global Perspective The First World War has long been perceived as a war of nations and nationstates, some with a long history of political independence and accomplishments, others relatively new and still trying to find their role in international affairs, some ethnically and culturally homogeneous, others with a more diverse population. Above all, however, it was a clash of empires. Most major belligerents were imperial domains with continental or overseas possessions, quickly exporting the European conflict to other parts of the world. Indeed, while much of the academic and popular discussion, at least in the Frenchand English-speaking world, has focused on the war efforts of the Western powers and the battlefields in Flanders and northern France, the differences from the expansive central and eastern European theater of operations alone, 5

John Breuilly, “Introduction: Concepts, Approaches, Theories,” in John Breuilly (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–20; John Breuilly, “Popular Nationalism, State Forms and Modernity,” in Wouters and van Ypersele (eds.), Nations, 97–114.

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not to mention the bloodshed in the Middle East, in Africa, and the Pacific, are enormous. It is important to keep these in mind, as they informed war experiences, political demands, and national aspirations, as well as collective identity and memory.6 Most combatant countries entered or quit the war at other times than summer 1914 and autumn 1918. The Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in October 1914 and September 1915, while on the side of the Entente, Italy (May 1915), Romania (August 1916), and the United States (April 1917) – to name but a few – committed themselves long after the first shots of the war had been fired. For Japan, the fighting was practically over with the surrender of German troops at Tsingtao in November 1914, although it did send several ships for escort duties to the Mediterranean Sea and Africa, and dispatched tens of thousands of troops to Siberia in August 1918 as part of the Allied intervention in the civil war in Russia. In the collective memory of most Balkan states, the First World War is part of a longer, localized history of conflict and warfare, stretching from 1912 to 1918. Many central and eastern European countries experienced a “war after the war” in the form of domestic clashes and border conflicts, often lasting until the early 1920s, most famously the Polish–Soviet and Hungarian–Romanian wars. With the Franco-Syrian conflict and the Turkish War of Independence, the fighting continued in the Middle East, too, until the international settlement in the Treaty of Lausanne of July 1923.7 The campaigns on the Western Front involved a limited number of countries, although the main combatants there were soon joined by troops from India and the British dominions, the French colonies in North and West Africa, Portugal, the United States, and Siam. However, the situation was incomparably more complex in eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The war in the non-western parts of the continent featured many more 6

7

Most recent surveys of First World War history take the global and imperial dimension into account. See John H. Morrow, Jr., The Great War: An Imperial History (London: Routledge, 2004); Michael S. Neiberg, Fighting the Great War: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Lawrence Sondhaus, World War One: The Global Revolution, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). For more specific studies, see Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Helmut Bley and Anorthe Kremers (eds.), The World during the First World War (Essen: Klartext, 2014); Andrew T. Jarboe and Richard S. Fogarty (eds.), Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014); David Olusoga, The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (London: Head of Zeus, 2014). See Peter Gatrell, “War after the War: Conflicts, 1919–23,” in Horne (ed.), Companion, 558–575; Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Allen Lane, 2016).

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belligerents, even if we exclude complicated cases such as Albania and developments after the Russian Revolutions (e.g. Finland and Ukraine). As members or subjects of large multinational entities, numerous ethnic groups and nationalities took part in the fighting, too, such as the Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Slovenes, and Croats, and, in the case of the Poles, Italians, Serbs, Romanians, or Ukrainians (Ruthenians), even on opposite sides. About onehalf of the tsarist troops were of non-Russian ethnicity, while the Ottoman army included up to one-quarter Arab conscripts (plus many members of other ethnic and religious minorities, such as Armenians, Kurds, and Assyrians). Hundreds of thousands of Africans from various parts of the continent were drafted by the colonial powers to serve as soldiers and laborers, instigating rebellions of local tribes and non-state actors, such as the Senussi and the Somali Dervish movement. The protracted East African campaign involved, amongst others, parts of modern Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, Rwanda, and Burundi.8 Many of those belligerents fought on several fronts, although this also applied to France and the United Kingdom and their involvement on the Salonika front, in the Middle East, and Africa, not to mention some of the naval campaigns in the Pacific and Indian oceans. But for many other combatant countries, the fighting on multiple fronts was of a much more existential significance, contributing to a feeling of encirclement and strengthening national resolve. Serbia, for example, managed to withstand foreign invasion and defeat until the joint attack of the Central Powers from several sides in October 1915. Over the course of the war, Imperial Germany was engaged not only in the west, but, together with Austria-Hungary, on at least four different fronts in the east, most notably against the tsarist empire, but also against Italy and Romania, as well as Serbia and a coalition of allied troops in the Balkans. Their Ottoman ally, on the other hand, fought for its reexpansion and then survival in the Caucasus and Persia, Mesopotamia and Arabia, Sinai and Palestine, as well as on the Gallipoli peninsula. Despite notable exceptions, for instance on the Isonzo front, at Gallipoli, or along the Greek border, the war in the non-western operational zones was characterized by large-scale military maneuvers and the conquest of vast areas, rather than rigid trench warfare, stalemate, and attrition. As 8

For the Middle East and Africa, see Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, The First World War in the Middle East (London: Hurst, 2014); Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 (London: Allen Lane, 2015); Hew Strachan, The First World War in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Anne Samson, World War I in Africa: The Forgotten Conflict among the European Powers (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019).

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a consequence, the civilian population in central and eastern Europe, in the Middle East, and parts of Africa was affected much more. France and Belgium suffered terrible atrocities against up to 6,500 non-combatants and wide-scale destruction, some confiscations and arrests, various restrictions of daily life, and thousands of cases of forced labor, but elsewhere millions of people became victims of displacement and ethnic cleansing or perished of famine and illness. It is estimated that in German East Africa up to 20 percent of the civilian population died as carriers or owing to food shortages and disease. The genocidal measures of the Ottoman government killed between 1 and 1.5 million civilian Armenians, significantly more than half the prewar population, while the various military operations in Persia are often overlooked but greatly contributed to the outbreak of mass starvation and disease in the region, leading to approximately 2 million fatalities amongst the local population.9 Any discussion of the impact of the war on non-combatants needs to consider neutral countries, too, a topic which has, however, only recently attracted more scholarly attention, especially as regards the disruptive effects of naval warfare and blockades, the various humanitarian relief efforts, or their role in wartime diplomacy and as gathering places for pacifist groups and intellectuals. Much less is known about the sociocultural impact of the war on public opinion and national identity, with many neutral societies experiencing political strife and heated debates about cultural affinities and ideological preferences. In non-European parts of the world, such as Latin America, the war not only triggered more efforts toward economic self-sufficiency but also fostered anti-imperialist tendencies and a distinct (often regional and transnational) identity in contradistinction to European civilization, long considered the model of modernity and progress.10 9

10

See Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Alan Kramer, “Combatants and Noncombatants: Atrocities, Massacres and War Crimes,” in Horne (ed.), Companion, 188–201; John Horne, “Atrocities and War Crimes,” in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History, vol. I : Global War, 561–584. For a more comprehensive discussion of the impact of the war on civilians, see Tammy M. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York: New York University Press, 2010). See Johan den Hertoga and Samuël Kruizinga (eds.), Caught in the Middle: Neutrals, Neutrality and the First World War (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2011); Samuël Kruizinga, “Neutrality,” in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History, vol. I I: The State, 542–575. On Latin America, see Olivier Compagnon, L’adieu à l’Europe: l’Amérique latine et la Grande Guerre (Paris: Fayard, 2013); Stefan Rinke, Im Sog der Katastrophe. Lateinamerika und der Erste Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015). For an excellent summary in English, see Michael Goebel and María Inés Tato, “Making Sense of the War (Latin America),” 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, at: https:// encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/making_sense_of_the_war_latin_america.

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The Mobilization of State and Society: The Enemy Without and the Enemy Within Over the past few years, historians have questioned the prevalence of war enthusiasm during the July Crisis and after the outbreak of war. Patriotic crowds demanding harsh action from their government or celebrating their own country’s entry into the war were often motivated by a sense of adventure and excitement rather than deep-seated nationalism and militarist sentiments. Many more people were involved in the various antiwar demonstrations: as late as 2 August 1914, for instance, an estimated 100,000 protesters took to the streets across the United Kingdom. Numerous young men and their families believed in a short and victorious war, but there were also feelings of fear, anxiety, and even despair. Serbs and Belgians had no choice but to defend their fatherland against foreign invaders, while the conscripts in most belligerent countries were expected to follow orders and to accept the decisions made by their political and military leaders. There were many volunteers, too, most prominently in the United Kingdom and its dominions, leaving their homes and families out of a sense of duty to king and country, but also because of economic difficulties, careerism, and peer pressure (pal battalions).11 Initially, most belligerent countries experienced a period of domestic unity. Known in France as “union sacrée” and in Germany as “Burgfrieden,” this meant that party-political, socioeconomic, confessional, and other differences were to be put aside for the sake of the common war effort. Following the notion of a defensive war, the whole nation was to stand together for the protection of the fatherland, including organized labor and the churches, despite their international links and solidarities. The situation seems to have been more complicated in countries with later war entries, such as Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, and the United States, where ideas of selfpreservation were difficult to sustain, and parts of the populace remained much more reluctant. In all countries, although to varying degrees, state officials used a variety of measures against critical voices and to ensure 11

Key studies include Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a comparative survey, see Jean-Jacques Becker, “Willingly to War: Public Response to the Outbreak of War,” trans. Heather Jones, 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, at: https://encyclopedia.1914-1918online.net/article/willingly_to_war_public_response_to_the_outbreak_of_war.

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domestic stability, including propaganda, censorship provisions, surveillance, confiscations, and arrests. The large continental empires faced particular challenges in this regard, but it appears that the mobilization of all national groups proceeded relatively smoothly. Ethnic tensions and domestic disputes were suspended or forcibly suppressed. In the United Kingdom, too, the difficult issue of Irish home rule was to be resumed only after the end of the war.12 The almost total mobilization of state and society, and the demands for ultimate loyalty and sacrifice, required compelling justification and clearly identifiable enemies against whom the polity defined and affirmed its identity. While the actual act of going to war was determined by foreign policy and national security considerations, the state of belligerency became ideologically charged and discursively elaborated by politicians, journalists, and intellectuals. The United Kingdom, for instance, presented itself as the selfless defender of the rights and independence of small nations, and as the guardian of freedom and democracy in Europe. Drawing on and amplifying prewar stereotypes, Germany was depicted as a brutal invader (the “Hun”), an autocratic and militaristic regime that disregarded international law and willingly assaulted civilized moral standards. This was a powerful narrative and employed to great effect in state propaganda and public debate, but it completely ignored the political despotism of the tsarist ally, the oppressive nature of British imperial rule itself, London’s own breach of Greek neutrality later on, or the severe impact of the naval blockade on German civilians.13 Yet such notions of fighting a just and ultimately defensive war were commonplace amongst most belligerents, and often couched in universal terms as a legitimate cause not just in the national interest but for the sake of a common good, such as peace, stability, and justice. The enemy, in turn, was portrayed as inferior in terms of morals and civilizational progress, as a scheming, ruthless, and dishonorable threat to the international order.14 12

13

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Hew Strachan, The First World War, vol. I: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Michael S. Neiberg, Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Max Hastings, Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War, 1914 (London: Williams Collins, 2013). Still very useful: Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914– 1918 (Edinburgh: Donald, 1988). Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1982). For recent overviews, see John Horne, “Public Opinion and Politics” and Christophe Prochasson, “Intellectuals and Writers,” in Horne (ed.), Companion, 279–294, 323–337; Anne Rasmussen, “Mobilising Minds,” in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History, vol. I I I: Civil Society, 390–417. On propaganda, see Troy R. E. Paddock (ed.), World War I and Propaganda (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Eberhard Demm, Censorship and Propaganda in World War I: A Comprehensive History (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

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Remarkably, the “war of words” often focused on one particular adversary. Germany was widely perceived as the leading representative and most dangerous member of the Central Powers, threatening the status quo with its aggressive expansionism and brutal militarism. German politicians and intellectuals, on the other hand, concentrated primarily on “perfidious Albion,” which in their opinion had always tried to protect its superior but unwarranted status through deception and conspiracy, and denied emerging nations their rightful place in global affairs and trade relations. Such Anglophobia was part of a wider war ideology, according to which Germany was defending not only its own nation but European values of fairness, dignity, tradition, and community (Kultur) against a decadent and materialistic West (Zivilisation) and a brutal and backward East.15 For obvious geographical and historical reasons, but also in the hope of finally liberating conationals from foreign rule, Serbia, Italy, and Romania turned to Austria-Hungary, which was denounced as a tyrannical and anachronistic people’s prison. Habsburg apologists, per contra, highlighted the Danube Monarchy’s balancing and peacekeeping role in central Europe and the ostensible benefits of its time-honored supranational order, heavily criticizing Belgrade and its allies for their terrorist machinations and irredentist ambitions, which would lead to a radical reconfiguration of the European state system and bring about an era of international anarchy.16 These antagonisms and discourses are very revealing. They tell us as much about perceptions of the enemy as about the self-identification, motivation, and interests of the belligerents. They informed and justified war aims, as discussed in decisionmaking circles but increasingly also amongst the general public, often going beyond the status quo ante bellum and including extensive territorial and economic acquisitions, although these were usually presented as defensive measures to weaken the enemy in the long term, to ensure future security, or to rectify injustice, inequality, and oppression. Strategic and economic arguments were most common in this context, yet ideological, ethnocultural, and religious beliefs and aspirations could matter, too.17 15

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On German war ideology, see, with further references, Matthew Stibbe, German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jan Vermeiren, “In Defence of Europe: Russia in German Intellectual Discourse, 1914–1918,” in Matthew D’Auria and Jan Vermeiren (eds.), Visions and Ideas of Europe during the First World War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 43–61. On Austria-Hungary during the war, see Manfried Rauchensteiner, The First World War and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918, trans. Alex J. Kay and Anna GüttelBellert, 2nd rev. and exp. edition (Vienna: Böhlau, 2014); Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (London: Allen Lane, 2014). David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Georges-Henri Soutou, L’or et le sang: les buts de guerre

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Especially in the first months of the war, some publicists employed generalizing and dehumanizing rhetoric, refusing to distinguish between the decision-making leadership and the wider population of the hostile country, and describing the enemy as “animals” and “vermin” that needed to be eliminated. While a number of factors contributed to the various atrocities against civilians in Belgium, northern France, East Prussia, and Serbia, including confusion, panic, frustration, and the fear of francs-tireurs (rather than deliberate planning and orders from above), such violent language and imagery will have played a role, too. Domestically, the war led to a purge from public and cultural life of anything that was associated with the enemy, from the boycott of foreign products and the ban of musical performances to the closure of language courses and the renaming of streets and cities. From September 1914, St. Petersburg was called Petrograd, while in September 1916 the Canadian city of Berlin changed its name to Kitchener, after Britain’s former Secretary of State for War. In June 1917, the British royal family abandoned its German titles and surnames, and henceforth used Windsor, rather than Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Driven by xenophobic sentiments and spy fever, members of the public attacked not only foreign nationals but also naturalized immigrants, while officials followed a more systematic policy of confiscation, surveillance, and internment. Concerned about disloyalty and internal security, but also to protect those groups against hostile attacks, France incarcerated about 60,000 enemy aliens, the United Kingdom about half as many, while the figure reached 110,000 people in the United States.18 Given the complex multinational composition of the continental empires, such measures quickly affected indigenous minority groups, too, providing evidence for the radicalization of wartime societies and the blurring of ethnicity and citizenship in such polities. In the Habsburg Monarchy, thousands of Southern Slavs (in particular Slovenes and Serbs), Italians, and Ruthenians were arrested – and many even executed – on the suspicion of sympathy with the enemy and conspiring against the state. Tsarist authorities deported hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans, Poles, Ruthenians, and others from the border regions and the hinterland of the front. Up to 600,000 Russian Jews were forcibly displaced, too. The Ottoman Empire acted against

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économiques de la Première Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Holger Afflerbach (ed.), The Purpose of the First World War: War Aims and Military Strategies (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015). Matthew Stibbe, Civilian Internment during the First World War: A European and Global History, 1914–1920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Stefan Manz, Panikos Panayi, and Matthew Stibbe (eds.), Internment during the First World War: A Mass Global Phenomenon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).

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Kurds, Assyrians, and other groups, but considered the sizeable Armenian population, especially in the northeast of the realm, a main threat to the war effort and territorial integrity. Following military setbacks in the region, the desertion of Armenian fighters to the Russian side, and local insurgencies, Ottoman officials started to disarm Armenian conscripts, to round up leading intellectuals and businessmen in Constantinople and other cities in the west, and to deport hundreds of thousands of civilians, including women and children, with genocidal intent to the barren deserts in the south.19

Beyond the Nation: Other Types of Group Identity and Political Solidarity As indicated before, much less is known about the prevalence and significance of wartime discourses of friendship and solidarity; cultural encounters with foreign soldiers, workers, refugees, and ideas; or the role of panmovements.20 Indeed, it can be argued that the war did not only lead to an intensification of nationalist sentiments and hatred, but also fostered cultural exchange and a better understanding of other states and societies. Military alliances, usually going back to prewar arrangements but now acquiring special significance, are an obvious example. British and French intellectuals praised the wartime partnership between their countries as a natural and superior coalition of like-minded and freedom-loving nations, while the German public learned about the Bulgarian and Ottoman allies. AustriaHungary’s defeat at the battle of Cer in August 1914 was praised as the first Allied victory of the war and contributed to Serbophile initiatives in the 19

20

For Austria-Hungary, see Martin Moll, Kein Burgfrieden. Der deutsch-slowenische Nationalitätenkonflikt in der Steiermark, 1900–1918 (Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag, 2007); Anton Holzer, Das Lächeln der Henker. Der unbekannte Krieg gegen die Zivilbevölkerung, 1914–1918 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2008). For Russia, see Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2003); Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); William C. Fuller, The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). On the Armenian genocide, see Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ronald G. Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). For further examples, see Hannah Ewence and Tim Grady (eds.), Minorities and the First World War: From War to Peace (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). For some initial ideas in the context of the idea of Europe, see Jan Vermeiren, “Notions of Solidarity and Integration in Times of War: The Idea of Europe, 1914–1918,” European Review of History, 24/6 (2017), 874–888.

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United Kingdom, France, and other countries, which sent volunteer doctors and nurses or set up relief organizations for Serbian refugees. Governments funded friendship associations, language courses and public lectures, mutual visits, and the exchange of journalists and experts, and publicly celebrated common victories or certain anniversaries of the coalition partner.21 Alliance discourse often referred to the common enemy, but politicians and publicists were also eager to identify and highlight commonalities in terms of aims and values, culture, or history. When the United States joined the war in early 1917 and started to send troops to France, both sides quickly pointed to French support during the American Revolutionary War and honored Marquis de Lafayette as a common hero. Ethnocultural ties could matter, too: many Catholics and south Germans as well as German speakers of the Habsburg Monarchy glorified the Dual Alliance as a Greater German coalition of fate, a brotherhood of arms that had finally brought the nation together again after half a century of political separation. Such sentiments contributed to the popularity of the Mitteleuropa idea of a central European economic union with Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary as core members, although many schemes were driven by more sober geopolitical and commercial considerations. Some pan-German circles, on the other hand, promoted völkisch designs of a German-dominated continental empire in the European east, which involved the resettlement of certain ethnic groups. Pan-Slav tendencies had carried considerable weight in tsarist Russia already before the outbreak of the conflict, whereas the war encouraged some French and Italian intellectuals to emphasize pan-Latin affinities between their countries. While the former macronationalisms referred primarily to historical, cultural, and linguistic commonalities (and occasionally to racial criteria), the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, promoted pan-Islamic ideas when it proclaimed a holy war in November 1914 and called upon all Muslims to 21

All this requires much further research. For the Central Powers, however, see Jan Vermeiren, The First World War and German National Identity: The Dual Alliance at War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For the Entente, although largely focusing on military relations, see Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Chris Kempshall, British, French and American Relations on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Robert Tombs and Emile Chabal (eds.), Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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rise against their infidel rulers and enemies of Islam, in particular Britain, France, and Russia. These efforts famously contributed to the 1915 Singapore Mutiny of Indian soldiers in British service but only had a limited impact overall.22 Religion did serve a powerful role for the mobilization of belligerent societies, justifying the war as righteous and promoting the belief in ultimate victory, but this came at the expense of its fundamentally universal dimension and confessional solidarity. In most cases, it remained subordinate to the national or imperial cause, as states and societies of the same denomination fought against each other, while promoting interconfessional harmony and cooperation at home.23 In any case, such revolutionizing efforts, while not always successful, were surprisingly common and challenge notions of ubiquitous nationalist antagonism.24 Somewhat ironically, given their own imperial rule over foreign people, both Germany and Britain declared themselves to be fighting for national self-determination and supported separatist tendencies amongst their rivals. Berlin presented itself as the selfless (and, in fact, Slavophile) liberator of various nationalities from tsarist despotism, including the Poles, Ruthenians, and Balts, and secretly sponsored Irish nationalists in their struggle for independence from London. Hoping to extend its influence and to win new allies, it introduced pro-Flemish policies in occupied Belgium, establishing in Ghent a Dutch-language university and setting up a puppet parliament in Flanders. Expecting new volunteers for their war against the Russian Empire, in November 1916 Germany and Austria-Hungary proclaimed the restoration of Polish statehood, although the new polity was clearly to remain a dependency of the Central Powers. Indeed, the constant recourse to the principle of national self-determination was a mere pretext for German 22

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On pan-Germanism and Mitteleuropa, see Vermeiren, The First World War, 145–182. On jihad, see Tilman Lüdke, Jihad Made in Germany: Ottoman and German Propaganda and Intelligence Operations in the First World War (Münster: Lit, 2005); Erik-Jan Zürcher (ed.), Jihad and Islam in World War I: Studies on the Ottoman Jihad at the Centenary of Snouck Hurgronje’s “Holy War Made in Germany” (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016). The role of pan-Slav and pan-Latin ideas during the war is much less studied. See, however, Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology, 2 vols. (New York, Vintage, 1960); Amotz Giladi, “Origins and Characteristics of Macro-Nationalism: A Reflection on PanLatinism’s Emergence at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” History, 105/365 (April 2020), 252–267. Annette Becker, “Faith, Ideologies, and the ‘Cultures of War,’” in Horne (ed.), Companion, 234–247; Adrian Gregory, “Beliefs and Religion,” in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History, vol. I I I, 418–444; Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade (New York: HarperOne, 2014). On the following, see also John Horne, “Patriotism and the Enemy: Political Identity as a Weapon,” in Wouters and van Ypersele (eds.), Nations, 17–38.

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imperial ambitions, especially in the European east, where the Treaty of BrestLitovsk in March 1918 established a new order and a range of puppet states on the territory of the former tsarist empire.25 The Entente powers also tried to mobilize minorities to destabilize the enemy. The United Kingdom, for example, supported the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule with money and military supplies, promising independent statehood but at the same time secretly concluding the Sykes–Picot Agreement with France about future spheres of influence and control in the region after the defeat of Constantinople. In the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, it also promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, thus boosting the Zionist cause and gaining the support of many Jewish communities worldwide.26 St. Petersburg, on the other hand, had issued a manifesto to the Polish nation as early as August 1914, pledging the reunification of all Poles (i.e. including those from Germany and the Habsburg Monarchy) and autonomy within the tsarist empire. It also formed units of Czech and Slovak volunteers, later augmented by prisoners of war and developing into the Czechoslovak legion (similar formations fought with the French and Italian armies). London and Paris soon took an interest in the nationality question in Austria-Hungary, too, offering refuge for émigré politicians and support for their demands, in line with the professed aim to protect and promote the rights of small nations.27 In their struggle for independence, many of these activists formed national committees and liaised with each other, famously meeting in April 1918 at the Rome Congress of Oppressed Nationalities. They also drew up plans for postwar cooperation, such as the Corfu Declaration of July 1917, leading to the creation of a Yugoslav entity (Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes) after the war, or Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s vision of a free association of 25

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Vejas G. Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Borislav Chernev, Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2017); Klaus Richter, Fragmentation in East Central Europe: Poland and the Baltics, 1915–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East (London: Simon and Schuster, 2011); Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923 (New York: Penguin, 2016). Horst Günther Linke, Das zarische Rußland und der Erste Weltkrieg. Diplomatie und Kriegsziele, 1914–1917 (Munich: Fink, 1982); Wiktor Sukiennicki, East Central Europe during World War I: From Foreign Domination to National Independence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Kenneth J. Calder, Britain and the Origins of the New Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Hugh and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe: R. W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years of Austria-Hungary (London: Methuen, 1981).

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emancipated central and eastern European nations (New Europe). A small minority of intellectuals from belligerent countries, such as Romain Rolland, Bertrand Russell, Georg Friedrich Nicolai, and Benedetto Croce, refrained from participating in war propaganda and nationalist discourse, emphasizing instead the commonalities of European civilization and culture, and in some cases suggesting some sort of continental federation. Others, like the Central Organization for a Durable Peace, the Bryce Group, and the League of Nations Society in Britain, or the USA-based League to Enforce Peace, were drawing up plans for a global postwar order and campaigning for the establishment of a new international organization to maintain peace by arbitration. Many of these ideas of a new diplomacy and international cooperation, of disarmament, and of a “general association of nations” to ensure peace and justice were of course taken up by US President Wilson in his Fourteen Points from January 1918.28

Race and Empire: Loyalty and Discontent in Overseas Colonies Many belligerent states were more ethnically diverse and heterogeneous in language, culture, and religion than is often acknowledged, including Belgium (Flemings and Walloons), Germany (Poles, Danes, Sorbs, Frisians, French speakers from Alsace-Lorraine), France (Basques, Bretons, Flemings, Italians, Occitans), and Bulgaria (Macedonians, Turks, Greeks). There were strong local and regional differences in Italy, where the population had been nationalized only to a limited degree and long remained reluctant to rally behind the war effort. The armed forces of the Habsburg Monarchy, imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire reflected the complex ethnic composition of their populations, with all its concomitant problems and challenges concerning the language of command, confessional support, and the issue of obedience and commitment. All European colonial powers, including Germany, Belgium, and Portugal, recruited tens of thousands of native soldiers for their campaigns in Africa and employed a much larger number of civilians to serve as carriers of military supplies. 28

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916–1931 (London: Allen Lane, 2014); Matthew D’Auria and Jan Vermeiren (eds.), Visions and Ideas of Europe during the First World War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019); Larry Wolff, Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).

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For the United Kingdom and France, however, their overseas possessions were of a much higher significance.29 The considerable contribution of colonial troops, workers, and materials to the war effort here challenged established forms of imperial rule and identity. Introducing conscription only in early 1916, London had long relied on volunteers and the mobilization of imperial resources, especially from the dominions and India. The latter sent more than 820,000 soldiers to the various theaters of war, followed by around 458,000 Canadians, 332,000 Australians, 136,000 white South Africans, 112,000 New Zealanders, as well as troops from Newfoundland, the West Indies, and other parts of the empire. As semi-independent and self-governing polities with certain constitutional links to London, not least in terms of foreign policy, the dominions joined the United Kingdom when it declared war in August 1914. Emphasizing the bonds of empire, they relied initially on volunteer troops, too, but military conscription soon became a highly contested issue. While New Zealand followed the British example and, after a longer moral campaign about “shirkers” and the “equality of sacrifice,” introduced conscription by ballot in August 1916 (with effect from November), the situation in Australia was very different. Prime Minister Billy Hughes held two unsuccessful referenda on overseas military service there, bitterly dividing public opinion between those who felt strong ties to the British motherland and wanted to defeat German militarism and autocracy, and those – Roman Catholics, representatives of the political left, and also many Irish Australians – who opposed forced enlistment or the war more generally for pacifist reasons or because they did not feel that Australian interests were affected. In Canada, the introduction of conscription deepened the rift between the English- and French-speaking communities over Ottawa’s overseas military commitment, the relationship between imperial patriotism and Canadian identity, and the country’s political and social order more generally. In late March 1918, violent riots broke out in Quebec, involving several thousand protesters all together and leading to as many as 150 casualties, including several fatalities. In South Africa, too, the domestic situation was far from stable: in September 1914, up to 12,000 nationalist Afrikaners under the leadership of Manie Maritz and Christiaan de Wet instigated a rebellion against their government and British rule, proclaiming a provisional government and allying themselves with the Germans. By 29

For a short overview of the following, see Robert Aldrich and Christopher Hilliard, “The French and British Empires,” in Horne (ed.), Companion, 524–539; John H. Morrow, “The Imperial Framework,” in Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History, vol. I : Global War, 405–432.

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February 1915, the last rebels had surrendered to loyal troops (mostly Boers as well), and South Africa fully rallied behind the British war effort. The largest contingent of non-white soldiers (and colonial workers) came from India, with some units fighting on the Western Front as early as October 1914, although the large majority was engaged in the Middle East, in particular in Mesopotamia, and in East Africa. Enlistment was voluntary, but some of the recruitment efforts of the local British authorities were characterized by coercion and intimidation. Higher taxes and rising prices led to growing resentment and contributed to increasing demands for home rule and a stronger sense of pan-Indian unity, as demonstrated by the Lucknow Pact (October 1916) between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League.30 Given the different size and make-up of its empire, France relied much more on the native people of its colonies rather than on white settler populations. In addition to around 130,000 overseas French citizens, Paris recruited 540,000 indigenous soldiers, including 270,000 North African Muslims, 180,000 Black Africans mostly from the west of the continent, 49,000 soldiers from Indochina, and 41,000 from Madagascar. More than in the British case, there were repeated protests and even armed resistance against French recruitment practices and forced conscription, most famously the Grande Rivière uprising in French West Africa (1915–1916), which involved tens of thousands of rebels over several months. Even though French official rhetoric depicted their subjects as noble and hard-working savages or as heroic and brave warriors, colonial soldiers and workers often encountered hostility and racial prejudice amongst the local population in France, who perceived them as inferior primitives, competitors for jobs, or a sexual threat. The ruling elites as well disagreed about the suitability and military effectiveness of those troops, the costs of transport and training, and potential misgivings amongst the public, but ultimately had to recognize their essential role for the war effort. German propaganda, on the other hand, condemned France (and to a lesser extent also Britain) for employing such “brutal” and “half-animal”-like troops as a treason of European civilization and the white race. Historians seem divided over the extent to which 30

See, with further references on specific countries, Robert Holland, “The British Empire and the Great War, 1914-1918,” in Judith M. Brown and W. Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. I V: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 114–137; Stephen Garton, “The Dominions, Ireland, and India,” in Gerwarth and Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 152–177; Ashley Jackson (ed.), The British Empire and the First World War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

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colonial soldiers were occasionally used as an expendable stopgap (“cannon fodder”), but there is consensus over the harsh conditions, low wages, surveillance, and racial segregation. Importantly, apart from a few exceptions, their legal status did not improve in recognition of their war service as soldiers and workers: they remained inferior subjects of the French nation, rather than becoming a part of it.31 Many, however, took new experiences and skills back home, along with a new awareness of the vulnerability of the “white man” and a sense of national identification with strong demands for political recognition, often with a pronounced anticolonial tendency. This was in stark contrast to the new status of the British dominions, whose contributions to the war effort were recognized by the creation of the joint Imperial Cabinet in 1917. After the war, they signed the Treaty of Versailles separately from the United Kingdom and became independent members of the League of Nations. Here, too, many veterans and those at home had acquired a stronger sense of distinctiveness and pride as a consequence of their war experience, with the battles of Gallipoli and Vimy Ridge becoming important focal points of emerging Australian and Canadian national identities, although for most this still stood in a complementary rather than contradictory relationship to their imperial heritage and membership. In other territories under British rule, however, the war left bitter memories and a feeling of betrayal. Following the bloody suppression of the 1916 Easter Rising and anticonscription campaigns, Irish politics radicalized, ultimately leading to a war of independence and the partition of the country (1919–1921). One year later, Britain granted formal independence to Egypt while retaining a military presence and extensive influence in the country. The concession, such as it was, was a response to growing nationalism in the protectorate and the country-wide unrest that had followed the arrest of prominent politicians on their way to the Paris peace negotiations in 1919. Postwar India, on the other hand, experienced widespread protests against limited constitutional reforms and the prolongation of the emergency measures from the war period, which culminated in the fateful 31

See Richard S. Fogarty, “The French Empire,” in Gerwarth and Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 109–129; Dick van Galen Last and Ralf Futselaar, Black Shame: African Soldiers in Europe, 1914–1922, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Ulrich Braukämper, Afrika 1914–1918. Antikolonialer Widerstand jenseits der Weltkriegsfronten (Berlin: Reimer, 2015); Philippe Buton and Marc Michel (eds.), Combattants de l’Empire: les troupes coloniales dans la Grande Guerre (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2018).

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Amritsar Massacre, a key episode contributing to the end of the British Raj, although much later than in the case of Ireland or Egypt.

Revolution and Collapse: The Breakdown of the Continental Empires The sacrifices made during the war raised issues of legitimacy and participation. Over time, the appeals to collective solidarity and absolute commitment caused discord and destabilization.32 In fact, the war not only fostered communal spirit but also uncovered and strengthened conflicts of interests, increasingly undermining the notion of civil truce and (multi)national harmony. In some cases, it offered the opportunity to challenge and renegotiate the dominant idea of the nation and to enforce certain values and ideas. Organized labor and religious minorities (including Jews) affirmed their loyalty and hoped to gain recognition as full and equal members of the national community.33 The largest marginalized group in all wartime societies, however, were women, who contributed significantly to the national war effort, often for significantly lower wages than their male peers and under hazardous and unhealthy conditions. While it is important not to generalize, many females did support the war in public and private life, thus relativizing the notion of powerless or inherently peaceful victims in a male-dominated, belligerent world. The countless war poems submitted by female amateur writers to German newspapers or the White Feather Campaign in Britain, publicly shaming young men into signing up for military service, may serve as examples here. Some women even experienced combat, often as nurses and ambulance drivers, but in some cases also as active fighters, for instance in the Finnish Red Guards or the Russian Women’s Battalions. A small minority, however, participated in pacifist activities, most famously the international socialist meeting in Berne in March 1915 or the women’s peace conference in The Hague one month later, which was attended by more than a thousand participants from various 32

33

On the final years of the war, see David Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011); David Stevenson, 1917: War, Peace and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). The Jewish experience of the First World War has only recently received more substantial attention. See, e.g., Marsha L. Rozenblit and Jonathan Karp (eds.), World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (New York: Berghahn, 2017); Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady, and Julia Barbara Köhne (eds.), Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2019).

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neutral and belligerent countries. The new economic role of many women enhanced their self-confidence and led to certain demands for political recognition and social equality. Women often played a leading role in riots against food shortages and high prices, such as in Vienna in May 1915 and in Berlin in October of the same year, or took to the streets to demand higher wages, as in Leeds and Paris in January 1917. Their wartime efforts and activities had a major impact on gender relations and family life as well as on popular images of masculinity and femininity. They also broadened concepts of the national community – although many of these changes remained highly contested or were even revoked, as the postwar period was to demonstrate. In Belgium, France, and Italy, for example, it took another major war before women received full voting rights.34 In a similar way, many ethnic groups had expected political rewards in return for their commitment and sacrifices. Without ignoring important prewar developments, such as the nationalization measures in tsarist Russia, the suppression of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, or the rise of irredentist movements in Austria-Hungary, recent research has challenged old orthodoxies and emphasized that the disintegration of the continental empires and the formation of new states on their territory was far from inevitable or straightforward. Ethnocultural identities and imperial allegiances were not mutually exclusive but in fact often coexisted with and complemented each other. Few representatives of national minorities had demanded full independence before the outbreak of the war and developed such ambitions only much later as a consequence of domestic repression, the enormous costs of the conflict, and the failure of the central governments to conclude a quick and convenient peace.35 It was above all such short-term developments which contributed to the politicization of ethnic differences and the breakdown of supranational state loyalty in the Habsburg Monarchy. Still, there were no popular nationalist uprisings, and the efforts of Masaryk, Ante Trumbić, Roman Dmowski, and other pro-independence émigrés would not have been successful without the military victory and support of the Entente.36 34

35

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Susan R. Grayzel, Women and the First World War (London: Longman, 2002); Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.), Gender and the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger, and Birgitta Bader-Zaar (eds.), Gender and the First World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). See Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism; Gerwarth and Manela (eds.), Empires; Jarboe and Fogarty (eds.), Empires; Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller (eds.), Nationalizing Empires (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015). John Deak and Jonathan E. Gumz, “How to Break a State: The Habsburg Monarchy’s Internal War, 1914–1918,” American History Review, 122/4 (October 2017), 1105–1136; Pieter M. Judson, “‘Where our Commonality is Necessary . . .’: Rethinking the End of the

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External factors played an important role in the dissolution of the tsarist realm, too, especially the military advance of the Central Powers and Berlin’s support for the national independence of the Russian Empire’s western territories. What was decisive, however, was the decline of dynastic authority and a fatal socioeconomic crisis, culminating in two revolutions and the end of the monarchy. The most serious threat to Russian imperial rule had been the Central Asian revolt of 1916 against the labor conscription of Muslim men. Although resentment against Russian settlers had contributed to it as well, it was above all a case of resistance against a specific wartime measure, involving several Turkic ethnic groups, rather than a veritable struggle for national emancipation. The suppression by military force caused the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and a massive refugee wave of Kyrgyz and Kazakhs into China, but unrest flared up later again in combination with anti-Bolshevik sentiments (Basmachi movement). In the western and southern peripheries, however, the fall of the tsarist regime created more favorable conditions for political independence. The resulting power vacuum and instability initiated complex state-building processes in Finland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic region, and Transcaucasia, where national aspirations were challenged and overlaid by changing geopolitical dynamics (peace treaties) and ideological struggles (anti-Bolshevism).37 Even though the Ottoman Empire had been under immense pressure since at least 1908, both domestically and externally, it was the only one of the three continental empires that did not experience a wartime collapse but was dissolved in a gradual process as a consequence of military conquest and foreign occupation. Moreover, as had become evident already in the prewar period, the main threats to established Ottoman ethnoreligious plurality were not separatist movements against the central government but Turkish nationalism and the increasing suppression of non-Turkish and non-Muslim minorities. The famous wartime revolt in the Hejaz was, ultimately, the action of a small minority of Arab activists which did not inspire a general uprising, despite much subsequent mythmaking. The multinational

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Habsburg Monarchy,” Austrian History Yearbook, 48 (2017), 1–21; Laurence Cole, “Questions of Nationalization in the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Wouters and van Ypersele (eds.), Nations, 115–134; Mario Cattaruzza, “Das Ende Österreich-Ungarns im Ersten Weltkrieg. Akteure, Öffentlichkeiten, Kontingenzen,” Historische Zeitschrift, 308/ 1 (2019), 81–107. Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History (London: Routledge, 2005); Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Aminat Chokobaeva, Cloé Drieu, and Alexander Morrison (eds.), The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A Collapsing Empire in the Age of War and Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

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status quo was much more affected and undermined by the official program of national homogenization and ethnic cleansing with the aim to transform (rather than disband) and expand the imperial realm. This included not only the genocide against the Armenians, but also the attempt to incorporate the ethnically related Turkic peoples of the Caucasus, and in fact continued after the war with the exchange of the Muslim and Greek Orthodox populations between Turkey and Greece.38 More generally, the established narrative of imperial decline and the victory of national self-determination as a consequence of war and revolution needs to be revisited. Many of the new countries in central and eastern Europe were in fact multinational polities, most famously the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929), the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia, but given the complex ethnocultural situation in the region most states contained significant minority groups and experienced much conflict over territorial control and the question of autonomy. Determined by strategic and power-political considerations, the Wilsonian principle was applied in an inconsistent manner, usually to the detriment of the defeated powers and their populations, as in the case of the banned unification of the German and Austrian republics or the Italian annexation of South Tyrol. In the non-European world, the mandate system of the League of Nations allowed the French, British, and Japanese empires to expand their power and influence in the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific, justifying foreign tutelage, often against the expressed will of the people, on the basis of ostensible civilizational superiority and experience. Indeed, the confirmation of these imperial ambitions in the various peace settlements radicalized anticolonial national movements and contributed to a growing alienation from the West, whose claim to moral supremacy and to have fought for freedom, progress, and democracy appeared questionable at best now. As mentioned above, Irish, Egyptian, and Indian demands were largely ignored after 1918, but Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese requests for equal rights and self-determination were rejected too. Racial hierarchies and discrimination remained a highly controversial matter, as evidenced by the 38

Eliezer Tauber, The Arab Movements in World War I (London: Frank Cass, 1993); Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Aviel Roshwald, “Nationalism in the Middle East, 1876–1945,” in Breuilly (ed.), Oxford Handbook, 220–241.

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dismissal of Japan’s proposal for a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations and the demands of the Pan-African Congress, not least because of British and American reluctance.39 Despite his commitment to a new international order based on popular sovereignty and collective security, Woodrow Wilson’s reputation as the leader of the free world appears in a different light given continued racial segregation and widespread violence against black people in the United States, regardless of the considerable contribution of approximately 200,000 African Americans to the national war effort. Further exacerbated by economic problems and fears of Bolshevism, interracial tensions culminated in white supremacist mob attacks during the Red Summer of 1919.40

Conclusion For many belligerents, the First World War represented an existential crisis and enhanced a sense of togetherness and national belonging amongst broader sections of the population. Against this background, the nation appeared as a community of suffering and sacrifice, a supreme good that was to be defended against external threats, and offered an emotional vehicle to cope with hardship and loss. In such respects, the war often contributed to national homogenization and social integration. National unity and group cohesion were fostered by a range of cultural practices of inclusion and exclusion, such as the demonization of the enemy and references to national traditions and history, thus presenting the fighting community as an organic and unchanging entity, obliging current generations to honor and protect the legacy of their forefathers. However, several points are worth emphasizing. First, national ideas and war ideology remained contested, with various groups within society clashing over war narratives and war aims, the domestic political order, or the 39

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Manela, The Wilsonian Moment; Robert Gerwarth and James E. Kitchen (eds.), The Crisis of Empire after 1918, special issue of Journal of Modern European History, 13/2 (2015); Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “Empires after 1919: Old, New, Transformed,” International Affairs, 95/1 (January 2019), 81–100; Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011); David F. Krugler, 1919, the Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jennifer D. Keene, “Wilson and Race Relations,” in Ross A. Kennedy (ed.), A Companion to Woodrow Wilson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 133–151.

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immense social and economic costs of the conflict. Over the course of time, appeals to patriotic duty and collective solidarity faced growing disillusionment and war weariness. It is important to pay attention to chronological changes and the impact of certain military, political, and socioeconomic events and developments on national discourse and identities. Moreover, the various contributions of publicists, scholars, and artists to the spiritual mobilization of the nation need to be differentiated from and complemented by governmental statements and propaganda, party-political positions, the views and interests of certain pressure groups, and popular national sentiments. Second, it is essential to acknowledge the multitude of experiences and the state-political complexity of the belligerents (and indeed neutral actors), which included nation-states, multinational countries, continental empires, and entities with substantial overseas possessions, but also various non-state groups striving for recognition and independence. The notion of a steady radicalization and ethnicization of nationalism during the war is too general. It ignores the persistence of more moderate views within society and other powerful concepts of political solidarity and state loyalty, including imperial patriotism and dynastic allegiance. Arguably, there were at least three different forms of nationalism during the war: state nationalism, concerned above all with survival, security, and possibly the expansion of economic and geopolitical influence of the polity; unifying or irredentist nationalism, as in the case of Serbia, Romania, or Italy; and separatist or anticolonial nationalism. Furthermore, while the conflict ruptured commercial and scientific networks, undermined the transnational interaction and mutual support of dynastic houses, religious communities, and organized labor, and often replaced prewar patterns of cultural exchange and international understanding with an atmosphere of hatred and prejudice, it did not cut off all links and in fact created many new ties of friendship and support. Last but not least, the question of continuity and change as regards the end of the war needs to be considered more carefully. In many cases, the outcome of the conflict and the postwar settlements rather than the war itself proved more influential and decisive for collective memory and national identity in the long term. Russia (or rather, the Soviet Union) long commemorated the October Revolution of 1917 and the protracted Civil War rather than the war effort of the tsarist regime, while many central and eastern European countries celebrated the conflict as a decisive turning point in their struggle for national liberation. In Poland, for example, the successful defense of political independence and victory in the Polish–Soviet War has always occupied 373

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a more prominent place in the national consciousness than the clash of the continental empires which had forced conationals to fight on opposite sides. The former Central Powers, on the other hand, experienced defeat, the loss of territory, and other harsh terms of the imposed peace treaties as national humiliation which greatly undermined the new political order, although some of the victorious powers were equally dissatisfied, such as Italy. Combined with revolutionary upheaval and domestic instability, border conflicts, the fear of Bolshevism, and the mythology of trench camaraderie and national truce, this often contributed to widespread paramilitary violence and the breakthrough of a new nationalism that was much more aggressive and less tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities than the old nationalism of the educated urban elites.41 In the non-European world, the failure to honor the substantial contributions of the overseas colonies, the persistence of racial hierarchies, and the transformation and expansion (rather than abolition) of imperial rule also led to much resentment and initiated or intensified national identification and political mobilization processes with enormous consequences long beyond the immediate postwar period.

Further Reading Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, and Jean-Jacques Becker (eds.), Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918: Histoire et culture (Paris: Bayard, 2004). Bley, Helmut, and Anorthe Kremers (eds.), The World during the First World War (Essen: Klartext, 2014). Gerwarth, Robert, and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Horne, John (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Leonhard, Jörn, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018). Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Olusoga, David, The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of the Empire (London: Head of Zeus, 2014). Roshwald, Aviel, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London: Routledge, 2001). Sondhaus, Lawrence, World War One: The Global Revolution, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

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Lawrence Rosenthal and Vesna Rodic (eds.), The New Nationalism and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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The First World War Stevenson, David, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004). Winter, Jay (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Wouters, Nico, and Laurence van Ypersele (eds.), Nations, Identities and the First World War: Shifting Loyalties to the Fatherland (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

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Anticolonialism and Nationalism in the French Empire michael goebel

Over recent years the traditionally Eurocentric field of nationalism studies has changed, so as to include Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Although there have long been prominent exceptions to these regions’ previous neglect in studies of nationalism,1 such accounts have had a limited impact on the field’s theory building. This earlier marginality was all the more lamentable considering that these regions’ histories are central to the historical question of why and how the nation-state became something like a global gold standard of political organization during the past 250 years – and with reinvigorated speed in the two decades following the Second World War, during which many European colonies in Asia and Africa gained independent statehood. Tellingly, proponents of a quantitative approach to the question of how the nation-state spread globally, relying on a dataset of nation-state foundations, are confronted with an overpopulation of cases that are the results of the breakups of empires in what today is often called the Global South, including the Spanish Empire in the Americas in the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, and the European overseas empires following the Second World War.2

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Most notably, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition (London: Verso, 1991), 47–66, famously identified the “Creole pioneers” of late eighteenth-century Spanish America as early proponents of nationalism. Ironically, Latin Americanists have been particularly critical of this notion: see Claudio Lomnitz, “Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson’s Theory of Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America,” in M. A. Centeno and Fernando López-Alves (eds.), The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 329–359. Another exception is Elie Kedourie, Nationalism in Asia and Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1970), 1–152, but this book was rather peripheral to Kedourie’s own, as well as anyone else’s, theorizing about nationalism. Andreas Wimmer and Yuval Feinstein, “The Rise of the Nation-State across the World, 1816 to 2001,” American Sociological Review, 75/5 (2010), 764–790.

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Nationalism, it should be noted, is only one among several forces that drove historical transitions from multiethnic, or multinational, empires to polities that legitimized themselves as nation-states, a process that only in the case of non-contiguous overseas empires is commonly called “decolonization.”3 How central nationalism was to that process partly depends on our understanding of terms. Relying on Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism as “a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent,”4 inevitably makes nationalism central to the story of decolonization: after all, only the sufficient acceptance of this principle both among (former) colonizers and (formerly) colonized allowed for the theoretical investment of political sovereignty in the nation. Such a reading, however, which potentially turns into “nationalist” Whitehall administrators accepting the principle of congruency for the political and the national unit in India in 1947, does not conform to standard usage of the term “nationalism,” whether in common parlance today or in the historiography of decolonization. For most people, the only “nationalists” in the history of decolonization were the anticolonialists. But how important were these nationalists? Was the serial national independence of former European colonies in Asia and Africa granted by voluntarily receding imperial powers, or rather something achieved by anticolonial nationalists? This question long dominated scholarly discussions about nationalism and decolonization.5 By the 1990s, this older debate of whether decolonization should be explained from London or from Lagos was replaced by another question, concerning the degree to which anticolonial nationalisms were intellectually derivative of European nationalisms. Some scholars explicitly or implicitly argued as much, while a younger generation of historians influenced by postcolonial studies, in turn, highlighted the originality of anticolonial and postcolonial nationalisms.6 No longer primarily concerned with explaining why former colonies had achieved independent statehood, postcolonial 3

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Martin Shipway, Decolonization and its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 1. E.g. A. N. Porter and A. J. Stockwell, British Imperial Policy and Decolonization, 1938–1964 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), who highlight voluntary retreat over anticolonial nationalism. Kedourie, Nationalism in Asia and Africa, 1–152; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 113–140. Criticisms: Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3–13; Manu Goswami, “Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Socio-Historical Conception of Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44/4 (2002), 770–799.

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scholars instead developed a particular interest in the intellectual roots of anticolonial nationalism and these origins’ implications for postindependence politics, with which a widespread disillusion had set in. There continued to be little dispute, however, concerning the term “nationalism” itself and its uses. With few exceptions, there was agreement that most forms of anticolonialism were precursors of independent statehood and thus instances of “nationalism” in one way or another. This chapter, focusing on the French Empire after 1919, in turn addresses precisely this former consensus: should anticolonialism be interpreted as a form of nationalism at all? In recent years, a growing number of historians have argued that nationalism on the whole has long been overestimated as a force in decolonization. Although this revisionist historiography has been especially well developed for parts of the French Empire, notably French West Africa and Algeria,7 there has been a similar tendency to prune the importance of nationalism in the historiography of other imperial breakups, such as that of the Habsburg Empire.8 These revisionist accounts usually adopt an “anti-teleological approach” to nation-state formation,9 arguing that there was little support for the nation-state principle until these new states came into being and that national outcomes were “not inevitable.” Lest rejections of teleology lapse into sterile philosophical debates about the purpose of history, both revisionists and other historians, at first sight, seem to agree on what the guiding question should be. In the words of Frederick Cooper, one of the leading revisionists, we should ask: “How and why did Africa end up with . . . independence in the form of a territorial nation-state?”10 Even as the empirical materials assembled by these recent historiographies implicitly furnish a long list of potential explanations, their explicit arguments highlight the deep-seated and long-lasting attractiveness of alternatives to the nation-state. In the case of European empires in Africa, these alternatives mainly took the form of federalist experimentation following the Second World War, which supposedly should have entailed an 7

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Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). P. M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Michael Collins, “Nation, State, and Agency: Evolving Historiographies of African Decolonization,” in A. W. M. Smith and Chris Jeppesen (eds.), Britain, France, and the Decolonization of Africa (London: UCL Press, 2017), 29. Frederick Cooper, “Routes out of Empire,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37/2 (2017), 407.

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outcome that was to be neither imperial nor national.11 Yet, unless this experimentation is interpreted as a stage in the transition from empire to nation-state (a reading that revisionists emphatically reject), emphasizing the viability of federalist visions is ill-suited to explaining the victory of the national model. As Samuel Moyn has put it in a critique of revisionist accounts: “Neo-federalist historians rarely take it upon themselves to solve what ought to be the central puzzle: why did the nation-state model win out, when the alternatives were supposedly so compelling?”12 If this is the question, nationalism, understood in the broad sense suggested by Gellner, must be a central part of the answer, this chapter contends. It is possible, of course, to ask altogether different questions. With a view to the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, Jörn Leonhard has remarked that, “in contrast to the long-held premise of [their] unavoidable disintegration, the present focus is rather on the questions of why empires were able to last for so long.”13 This question is worth exploring in light of an older linear historiography about the presumably inevitable rise of the nation-state, which indeed may have made readers wonder why empires disintegrated so much later than that older literature made plausible. Yet, while useful as a corrective to triumphalist nationalist accounts, the interest in this question is ultimately premised on an assumption derived from that very traditional historiography: that, for all we know, empires should have given way to nation-states earlier than they did. Revisionist scholars have by now done enough to render that assumption obsolete. Questions about the longevity of empire, or the tardiness of the nation-state, therefore do not significantly alter the terms of debate, as long as there is relatively little disagreement about whether and when the empires in question effectively gave way to formal nation-states. Admittedly, the endurance of imperial structures across formal thresholds of national sovereignty is a debate worth having.14 But, essentially concerning the question of whether postimperial polities became truly sovereign nation-states, it is one that tangentially cuts across the line of inquiry 11

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Michael Collins, “Decolonization and the ‘Federal Moment,’” Diplomacy and Statecraft, 24/1 (2013), 21–40; Frederick Cooper, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 66–89. Samuel Moyn, “Fantasies of Federalism,” Dissent, 62/1 (2015), 145–151. Jörn Leonhard, “Multi-ethnic Empires and Nation-Building: Comparative Perspectives on the Late Nineteenth Century and the First World War,” in Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller (eds.), Nationalizing Empires (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), 631. This has recently become an acrimonious issue in the historiography of US Empire again. See Paul Kramer, “How Not to Write a History of the US Empire,” Diplomatic History, 42/5 (2018), 911–931.

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pursued both by revisionists and by this chapter. What is examined in the following pages, then, is not the degree to which the sovereignty of the states that arose from the breakup of the French Empire was curtailed. Instead, this chapter asks when (as well as where, how, and why) the “principle . . . that the political and the national unit should be congruent” gained traction. Arguing that it did so from 1919 onwards, the chapter deliberately adopts a more longterm perspective ranging from the First World War until roughly 1960.15

Citizenship, Empire, and National Independence Whereas recent revisionist historians writing about the unmaking of the Habsburg Empire have focused on the severe limitations of popular feelings of national belonging, underlining the functional bilingualism and “national indifference” of ordinary people prior to the First World War,16 the discussion of decolonization in French West Africa has instead concentrated on whether anticolonial elites wanted a nation-state.17 As Richard Drayton has stressed, the answer to this question depends both on which anticolonial elites we look at and on how inclined we are to take their public statements as genuine expressions of their political ideals, as opposed to strategic maneuvering within a range of options limited by what the imperial state made appear realistically obtainable.18 In contrast to a history of feelings of national belonging from below, the focus on high politics has the virtue of making easily verifiable what these elites said they wanted. As it turns out, there are many examples of elite politicians, notably in French West Africa, who, until surprisingly late, indeed did not advocate nation-states as the best antidote to colonial disenfranchisement. A well-known example is that of Léopold Sédar Senghor, West Africa’s most prominent critic of colonialism during the postwar decades and later the president of independent Senegal. Alongside other West African politicians, 15

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In this, it resembles the arguments made by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Empires and the Reach of the Global,” in Emily Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 285–431. Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, passim; Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Richard Drayton, “Federal Utopias and the Realities of Power,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37/ 2 (2017), 401–406.

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Senghor did not publicly champion a nation-state until he ended up with one (Senegal) nonetheless, in 1960. Fearing that full-fledged national sovereignty – for political communities of which the precise future territorial and demographic contours at any rate were unclear to contemporaries – would leave West Africa poor and isolated, Senghor and others instead campaigned for greater citizenship rights within a federation that was being transformed and renamed, first as French Union in 1946, then as French Community in 1958. There were, to be sure, more radical anticolonialists in French West Africa, too, who worked for a more clear-cut break with France. One of them was the Guinean Ahmed Sékou Touré, who persuaded his compatriots to opt out of the French Community in a referendum in 1958. But even Sékou Touré was demonstrably a late public convert to the nation-state solution.19 It is true, therefore, that as late as 1957 there was no West African majority favoring the “principle . . . that the political and the national unit should be congruent,” at least not among the region’s foremost political elites. If nationalism requires a demand for independent sovereign statehood for the nation, there are good grounds to challenge narratives of nationalism’s inexorable rise from the First World War, at least if we look at French West Africa. However, in many other parts of the French Empire, support for outright national sovereignty grew earlier than in West Africa. The asynchronous timing owed much to questions surrounding the one issue on which attempts at politically reforming the French Empire had long focused: citizenship. Though a matter of dispute in other empires, too, citizenship was a particularly palpable bone of contention in the case of France, which in contrast to other European empires had been a republic since 1870. The premium that French political culture had put on the legal figure of the citizen since the revolution of 1789 lent additional urgency to the headaches arising from the legal pluralism that in truth characterized the French Empire as much as other empires.20 The legal patchwork to which French colonialism had given rise by 1919 was one of multiple nested sovereignties with countless jurisdictional differences and exceptions: the “old colonies” of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion, whose inhabitants had acquired 19

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Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 214–325. On Guinean nationalism, see also Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005). Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “Rules of Law, Politics of Empire,” in Lauren Benton and R. J. Ross (eds.), Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 279–293, especially 289–290.

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French citizenship in 1848; the colonial federations of West Africa, Equatorial Africa, and Indochina, plus Madagascar, whose populations were overwhelmingly “subjects”; the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, as well as the League of Nations mandates of Syria, Cameroun, and Togo, all of which were subjected to yet other legal regimes in which the extension of French citizenship was much less imaginable; and finally, French Algeria, considered an integral part of metropolitan France, even as its Muslim inhabitants were in their vast majority “subjects” rather than citizens, ruled through a legal regime of exception called the code de l’indigénat (Native Code). If one compares these various territories from a global angle, as a rule of thumb demands for independent and sovereign nation-states remained weaker for longer in such places in which French citizenship was given to significant numbers of former colonial subjects, or wherever such an extension appeared potentially achievable.21 At one extreme end of the spectrum, in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion, whose male residents had been French citizens since 1848, demands for independent statehood never acquired much momentum (until the present day). In Algeria and West Africa, calls for independence were fitful prior to the Second World War. In both territories some populations were French citizens already by the First World War: European settlers, including many Italian and Spanish immigrants, and Jews in Algeria; and those born in the so-called quatre communes in Senegal. In 1946, the French Union abolished the status of “subjects” and extended citizenship to all its remaining inhabitants. While the practical implications of this move remained confusing and contentious, it did create, as Samuel Moyn has put it, “an incentive to buy into imperial experimentation,” particularly in Senegal.22 In Indochina, especially in Vietnam, things were different. Some anticolonial reformers pressed for an extension of citizenship for bourgeois southern Vietnamese in the 1920s, but already then appeals to national independence outshone such reformist proposals.23 Mired in war after the end of the Japanese occupation and Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence in 1945, Indochina’s role in the French Union of 1946 remained an ongoing source of uncertainty and anxiety until the battle of Dien Bien Phu 21

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The history of citizenship across the postwar French Empire is best followed through Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, passim. Moyn, “Fantasies of Federalism,” passim. Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Héméry, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 281–335.

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and the Geneva Conference in 1954, which settled the matter in favor of independence, albeit of two Vietnams. The protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco, meanwhile, had never formally given up their sovereignty (however hollowed out that sovereignty may have been in practice), had never toyed with the option of French citizenship, never joined the French Union, and instead transitioned directly into independent statehood in 1956. As Mary Lewis has pointed out, “although the creation of the French Union offered some colonial subjects a greater stake in associating with France, in Tunisia, it in some ways achieved the opposite effect, by underscoring Tunisia’s sovereign status under international law.”24 Finally, Syria and Lebanon, a League of Nations mandate of the A category, had already by 1919, according to the League’s covenant, “reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized,” though the French mandate expired only in 1946.25 As even such a superficial bird’s-eye view reveals, decolonization was a drawn-out and messy process – and one in which the West African case was not necessarily representative of the whole. Since, from a legal viewpoint, the demand for French citizenship logically precluded a simultaneous call for national independence, at first sight, it makes sense to assume that one was stronger wherever the other was weaker. Both the claim for imperial citizenship and the demand for independent statehood at core aimed at remedying the steep rights differentials, or legal discrimination, within the imperial edifice, but they represented mutually incompatible solutions. As such, it was impossible to champion both at once. For much the same reason, at any given moment of time in which the legal status of a given part of the empire seemed to be up for renegotiation, political movements and individual politicians tended to favor one or the other solution. With hindsight, those who rejected federalism and imperial citizenship reforms in favor of independence were usually called “nationalists.” For instance, both in 1937 and in 1946, Algerian “nationalists” implored their compatriots to reject offers of French citizenship.26 24

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Mary D. Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 170. Cited in Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 29. On citizenship in mandate Syria, see Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 237 (concerning the year 1937); Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 39–40 (concerning 1946).

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However, the negative correlation between the two claims holds true only when comparing either different territories of the empire or different political platforms in a single locale, not if it is charted over time. Au contraire: when surveying the whole empire in the entire period from 1919 through 1960, both claims for the widening of French citizenship and calls for independent statehood grew in crescendo from one decade to the next. This is not too surprising to historians of empire more broadly, since imperial breakups and the ensuing formation of new nation-states were often preceded, and partly fueled, by greater juridical integration into imperial structures.27 This is admittedly true only from a very broad angle. If we zoom in on one place within shorter time periods, the two claims clearly did not rise in lockstep: granting additional rights – which usually meant a form of citizenship, the precise meaning of which remained open to negotiations and disputes – to the inhabitants of what after 1946 were called overseas territories usually had the effect, as well as the purpose (from a French viewpoint), of mitigating demands for independence. Federalist reforms and widening citizenship could thus temporarily sideline the appeal of independent statehood. However, the crux of the relationship between these two options was that they were not equally capable of lastingly muting the other. On the one hand, it has always been perfectly possible to envisage an extension of citizenship as a first step on the road to self-rule and ultimately independence, as Vietnamese reformers in fact did in the 1920s.28 Even the most substantial and oldest kinds of legal integration, as in the old colonies, have not been able to shut the door on the imaginability of national independence.29 For that reason, Senghor took pains to explain his opting into the French Community of 1958 as the expression of a “freedom of choice,” which according to him was a requirement on the road to “independence and nation-building.”30 Radical advocates of independence, such as the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, famously denounced this version of federalism as the business of 27

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One could think of the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America or turn-of-the-century reforms in the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Lewis, Divided Rule makes a similar point about the Tunisian protectorate. Bui Quang Chieu, “France d’Asie,” leaflet, n.d. [1925], F7/13405, Archives Nationales de France (hereafter AN). Although independence does not command widespread popular support there, this is true even of Martinique and Guadeloupe: Peter Clegg, “Independence Movements in the Caribbean: Withering on the Vine?,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 50/4 (2012), 422–438, especially 433–435. L. S. Senghor, “On African Socialism,” in Omar Dahbour and M. R. Ishay (eds.), The Nationalism Reader (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanity Books, 1995), 272, emphases in the original.

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“Pharisees.”31 But Senghor’s interpretation of the Constitution of 1958 as offering a freedom of choice for Africans also implied the possibility to opt out, as Guinea had done – and as Senegal soon would – if the newly acquired rights for Africans proved insufficiently equal to those of the metropolitan French, as indeed they did. On the other hand, it was much less possible to imagine an inversion of this sequencing: independent statehood did foreclose the possibility of French citizenship much more definitely, which is why world history so far does not abound in examples of postimperial states seeking, or being granted, readmission into their former polity.32 That the nation-state turned out to be the final word, then, perhaps was not because everyone agreed that it would be a superior provider of the rights sought by colonial subjects, but because it was much easier to imagine it as a one-strike and permanent solution to increasingly tangled legal, political, and social quagmires. Chastising teleology should not blind us to this dynamic of the struggle over rights, in which the parameters of the acceptable and the bounds of the conceivably achievable evolved over time. As Cooper has demonstrated for French West Africa, after the Second World War it dawned on French administrators that they had to offer enticements and benefits in order to keep some semblance of empire intact. Meanwhile, French notions of the boundedness of their own nation curtailed such offers. Hence, just as the former prime minister Édouard Herriot voiced the fear that the provisions of the French Union of 1946 might turn France into “the colony of its former colonies,” Africans grew more assertive in claiming their rightful share.33 During the encounters at the bargaining table between 1946 and 1960 African satisfaction unavoidably hinged in part on what the French were willing to concede – which turned out to be only so much before they themselves turned to the formula of “decolonization” in order to portray the breakdown of negotiations, and thus of empire, as the least bad outcome.34 Interpreting both demands for French citizenship and calls for national independence as two different expressions of the same underlying struggle for greater rights allows a better understanding of why, in spite of their mutual incompatibility, 31 32

33 34

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 245. Tellingly, what John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 96–122, discusses under the label “unification nationalism” concerns nineteenth-century Europe. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 105. This is the key argument of Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, passim.

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both claims grew more prominent over time and why one could be converted into the other at a moment’s notice. For the same reason, anticolonialists’ propositions for the enfranchisement of colonial subjects qua the dismantling of legal pluralism – that is, juridical homogenization through French citizenship – had long coexisted happily with the seemingly contradictory demand for greater political autonomy. In interwar Syria, social rights claims directed at French authorities grew alongside demands for independence.35 Around the same time, Vietnamese constitutionalists simultaneously demanded French citizenship for bourgeois colonial subjects in southern Vietnam and some sort of dominion status for Indochina.36 In 1922, the Algerian communist Hadj Ali likewise championed French citizenship for Algeria’s colonial subjects, yet did so on the pages of Le Paria, a communist anticolonial newspaper that consistently followed the Comintern’s boilerplate call for independent statehood for all oppressed nations, including Algeria.37 Four years later, the French communists financing Le Paria persuaded Hadj Ali and his compatriot Messali Hadj, who by then were the leaders of the most important Algerian anticolonial organization, the Étoile Nord-Africaine, to explicitly champion Algerian independence. They briefly obliged, only to sidestep the issue again thereafter, instead pursuing their signature topic of demanding the abrogation of the code de l’indigénat – a request that would have been superfluous in the event of Algerian independence, insofar as the disappearance of discriminatory French legislation would have naturally flowed from the more encompassing solution of independent statehood. Only from the 1930s did the Étoile Nord-Africaine more self-consciously adopt the label of “nationalism” and consistently oppose French citizenship for Algerian Muslims.38 These examples show not only that the nation-state model had been identified as a one-stroke solution to imperial discrimination well before the Second World War, but also that there were multiple conduits along which the notional possibility of the nation-state traveled transnationally. On the most basic level, in the years from 1946 to 1960, critics of empire had a large and fast-growing number of nation-states to ponder over as potential models to emulate. In fact, the whole period could be, and traditionally has been, seen as a drawn-out wave of imperial disintegration and nation-state formation, which David Armitage has 35

36 38

Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 163. Bui Quang Chieu, “France d’Asie,” passim. 37 Le Paria, no. 9, 1 December 1922, 2. Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis, 202–203. 272.

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dubbed a “contagion of sovereignty.”39 Armitage describes this contagiousness as a bandwagon effect in which opponents of empire chase after the external trappings of statehood, rather than as a struggle for civic rights. But the vocabulary of contagion captures the surging dynamic of nation-state formation, which increased the onus on federalists like Senghor to explain why, unlike their Ghanaian and Guinean peers, they did not believe that the civic rights they coveted were best enshrined in the nation-state – a burden manifest in the rhetorical pirouette of packaging permanence in the French Community as evidence of “independence and nation-building.” Although the plot thickened after 1945, transnational transfers of calls for national sovereignty rested on an older pedigree, too. As Erez Manela has shown, Wilson’s talk of self-determination fueled a global moment of anticolonial nationalism in 1919.40 Extrapolation from another country to one’s own was a central part of this moment: the Egyptian National Party, for instance, put forth its 1919 claims by pointing to “Tschecs [sic], Slavs, Serbians, and others.”41 The Vietnamese activist later known as Ho Chi Minh, who in 1919 found himself in Paris to help draft a document entitled “Demands of the Annamite People,” also contrasted French colonialism in Indochina with what he viewed as the greater autonomy that the Americans granted to Filipinos, the Japanese to Koreans, and the French to Tunisians.42 Enthusiasm for Wilson soon gave way to bitter disappointment among anticolonialists, but demands for national independence did not entirely wither. On the contrary, whereas Ho’s “Demands of the Annamite People” had stopped short of exactly that demand (a nation-state), in mid-1921 he cofounded a communist-sponsored anticolonial organization named Union Intercoloniale, the mouthpiece of which, Le Paria, specialized in relaying calls for national independence between its constituent member groups from different parts of the French Empire. Thus, some of the earliest recorded claims for independent nation-states in West Africa emerged out of the Union Intercoloniale. More broadly, some of the interwar period’s most important nationalist organizations from across the empire, such as the Étoile NordAfricaine and the Parti Annamite de l’Indépendence, which was partly 39

40

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David Armitage, “The Contagion of Sovereignty: Declarations of Independence since 1776,” South African Historical Journal, 52 (2005), 1–18. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). “Mémoires présentés par le Parti National Égyptien” (1919), 16, F7/13412, AN. Undercover report by Agent Jean, 17 November 1919, F7/13405, AN.

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modeled on the Chinese Guomindang, arose out of this Parisian intercolonial organization.43 Once the Union Intercoloniale had crumbled in 1926, the Comintern’s one-size-fits-all recipe of sovereign statehood for all nations oppressed by imperialism helped globalize, synchronize, and routinize the nation-state model on a far wider scale than in the French Empire alone.44

Cultural Nationhood and Emotional Plausibility Seeing anticolonialism mainly as a struggle for rights against discriminatory imperial legal regimes, which federalist reforms ultimately were unable to placate, might make it easier to understand why anticolonialists eventually opted out even of a federation that was much less unequal than the preceding empire. But a focus on rights does not explain why such withdrawal would entail a nation-state, that is a state in which sovereignty was thought of as resting in an imagined “nation.” Nations as the most common fallout of crumbling empires look all the more inexplicable in light of recent attempts by historians to rescue from oblivion anticolonial thinkers who opposed imperialism, yet envisioned future sovereignties other than national.45 The question is thus: why and how did postcolonial nations, the boundaries of which rarely mapped on to demarcations of language, religion, folk customs, or ethnic myths, gain emotional plausibility?46 This question, it should be underlined, is not the same as asking whether in postcolonial states the political and the national unit effectively were congruent. If this were the criterion for qualifying as a nation-state, we would risk defining nation-states out of existence. The issue is merely why historical actors increasingly accepted that such congruency was a worthwhile principle to evoke. Again, the emotional plausibility of nations varied between different parts of the French Empire, as can be gleaned through a historical survey of demonymic adjectives used in conjunction with the noun “nation.” By the 1920s, the existence of an “Annamite [a Frenchified Chinese term for who and what was called Vietnamese after 1945] nation” was widely accepted and the terms frequently used, for instance in the name of the mouthpiece of the Parti 43 44

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Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis, 187–199. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50–55; Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 78–100. E.g. Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review, 5/1 (2012), 1461–1485. I take this question from Anderson, Imagined Communities, 47–66, who raised it with regard to the independence of Spanish American countries.

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Annamite de l’Indépendence, La Nation Annamite. As the French philosopher Félicien Challaye, a critic of colonialism, remarked in 1927, no one seriously doubted that “Annamites” possessed a “true nationality.” In his eyes, its distinctive hallmarks were a “clearly defined soil,” a common and distinctive language, a “proper civilization,” a “noble history that does not lack great men,” and a “soul, a spiritual principle.”47 In comparison, the demonyms Algerian, Moroccan, and Syrian were also common, but less so in conjunction with the noun “nation.” This did not dissuade French authorities from fearing “Syrian nationalists,” such as the Geneva-based activist Shakib Arslan. But while Arslan could be called Syrian, or Lebanese, the nation in the name of which he proselytized was La Nation Arabe, as the name of his mouthpiece clarified. Arslan’s foremost biographer meanwhile saw him as an exemplar of “Islamic nationalism.”48 This terminological indeterminacy was mirrored by European colonial administrators, testifying to much greater fuzziness about the possible contours of potential nations, but also to relatively fluid conduits of anticolonial ideas across the Muslim, and particularly the Arabic-speaking, world – a state of affairs that changed with independence (see Figure 17.1). “Nation” proved an even more unwieldy category for black anticolonialists, on both sides of the Atlantic. In light of political ties across the African diaspora, racial labels such as noire or nègre became the prime principles of political organization and denomination for many critics of colonialism in the Caribbean and in sub-Saharan Africa. Out of the Union Intercoloniale thus emerged not only the Parti Annamite de l’Indépendence and the Étoile NordAfricaine, but also the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre, which had Antillean, West African, and Malagasy members.49 Linguistic fragmentation presented an additional burden for black anticolonialists, as Senghor enviously remarked in 1937, when he contrasted Vietnam’s unity in language to the situation in West Africa.50 Though “race” trumped “nation” for most black activists, the latter term was not unheard of: in the 1920s, French imperial bureaucrats occasionally spoke of “black nationalists” or of “African nationalism,” often referring to the Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey who indeed proposed an African nation-state. Still, black activists were mired in the most troublesome imbroglio when pressed to trim their imaginary 47 48

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“Le problème de l’Indochine,” La Tribune Indochinoise, no. 1, August 1927, 3. William Cleveland, Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). Jennifer A. Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 82–83. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Négritude et humanisme, vol. I (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 18.

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Figure 17.1 Celebrating the outcome of the 1962 referendum on Algerian independence in Algiers. (Photo by Dominique BERRETTY/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.)

demographic unit of belonging into a territorially contiguous state. All of this led to an even greater degree of uncertainty regarding the future role, and the very meaning, of “nation” in places such as West Africa – surely an additional factor to explain why federalist experimentation from 1946 onwards encountered a friendlier reception in Dakar than in Hanoi. But did such differences make it less likely in West Africa than in Vietnam that whatever state was to emerge out of, or replace, the interwar version of the French Empire would be national in form? In order to answer this question, it is worthwhile to consider for a moment the counterfactual of a state that would have been neither imperial nor national. On one level, the French Union of 1946 and the French Community of 1958 – or, to put it in more abstract terms, a federation – were no more than the names given to proposals that shunned the labels of both empire and nation-state – or that deserved neither, if you prefer. Much like other federations, such as the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, this one too was characterized by what its architects did not want to call it, namely an empire or a nation-state. Both the French Union and the French Community, while retaining some sovereignties in Paris, entrusted others to non-French authorities overseas. Though less unequal in the distribution of power than the interwar empire,

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metropolitan understandings of French nationhood as bounded continued to demarcate the limits of the possible. French negotiators thus took care to block proposals that would have completely flattened the hierarchies between the metropole and the overseas parts of the federation.51 Short of coercion, such a federation’s chances of survival ultimately hinged on the degree to which it commanded emotional plausibility as something more than a half-way compromise on the route out of empire toward the nationstate. Yet, its very nature as a residual category somewhere in between the two ends of the conceptual dichotomy between empire and nation, combined with the zeitgeist of decolonization, left it ill-prepared to meet this requirement. And indeed, it did not, as negotiations eventually broke down. What with the brand of federalism including France exhausted, it was clear that future states would exclude the former imperial power. In theory such a state could still be non-imperial and non-national in name, while excluding the former imperial center – a little like Yugoslavia perhaps? And indeed, in the form of the Mali Federation, which from April 1959 comprised what later became Mali and Senegal, such an entity did emerge out of the French Empire.52 Dropping out of the French Community in June 1960, only to break apart itself two months later into the new nation-states of Mali and Senegal, this ephemeral federation, as that term implied, was non-national insofar as it “federated” two administrative units that within French West Africa (itself a federation of eight colonial territories) had long been separate. Yet, even if we leave aside the Mali Federation’s fugacity and counterfactually assume its long-term survival, it is worth pausing to query what exactly distinguished it from a nation-state. In fact, it is hard to find a principled reason as to why the Mali Federation, omitting the term “federation,” could not be reimagined as a nation-state. In fact, this was exactly how its interior minister, Madeira Keita, summed up its spirit in negotiations over the state’s relationship with the French Community in May 1960: “we decided that the nation is situated at the level of the Federation of Mali.”53 Whether Keita could muster sufficient support for this choice of the nation’s location, should perhaps be seen as less of a question of whether future states arising out of the French Community would be national in form, but rather of which nation would provide these states with a name. The problem ultimately points to a philosophical conundrum arising from the principle of popular sovereignty. As Bernard Yack has argued, the notion 51 52

This is what emerges from Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, passim. Ibid., 372–429, provides the best account. 53 Cited in ibid., 387.

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of popular sovereignty requires imagining the people as a bounded community.54 At first sight, these boundaries can be arbitrary insofar as the existing state delimits its nation – as in Keita’s “decision” of where the nation was located. In the global history of imperial disintegrations, this was a common pattern inasmuch as the emotional plausibility of nations rarely trumped existing boundaries in delimiting nascent territories and their demos. Just like the Spanish Empire in the Americas roughly 150 years earlier, French West Africa essentially broke apart along the territorial divisions established by the imperial power. While the members of the Étoile Nord-Africaine and its leader, Messali Hadj, for most of the organization’s lifespan (1926–1936) envisioned a North African, rather than an Algerian, nation, Moroccans’ and Tunisians’ limited enthusiasm for the sacrifices necessary to realize such a cause left Algerians to grapple with their neighbors’ defection. This foreshadowed what would happen in 1956, when Morocco and Tunisia became independent, leaving behind an Algerian rump of the North African nation imagined earlier, which was then left to fight for itself, eventually resulting in nation-states whose limits matched colonial boundaries (see Figure 17.2).55 It

Figure 17.2 Street scene with Algerian flags, Algiers, July 1962 (Photo by Reporters Associés/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images). 54

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Bernard Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism,” Political Theory, 29/4 (2001), 517–536. Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis, 275.

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is true, therefore, as the revisionists’ diagnosis has it, that the boundaries of postcolonial nation-states in North and West Africa were not primarily defined by a vigorous ethnic nationalism, in which the imagined ethnie corresponded to the later nation. The seeming weakness of such an ethnic nationalism prior to independence, however, makes its sudden postcolonial rise, which Cooper understandably laments,56 all the harder to understand. It may have been weak, but was it non-existent? Postcolonial leaders like Keita, after all, could not simply decide all by themselves where to locate the nations they found politically most expedient. Again, the problem of popular sovereignty furnishes valuable clues as to what may have limited their creative freedom. If the people are imagined as a bounded community, yet the power of the state is claimed to derive from the people, then the people must logically have preceded the existence of the (current) state. To borrow Yack’s words, this line of reasoning “raises questions about the prepolitical sources of community, [which] visions of national community [i.e. of the people as ethnos] are much better equipped to answer than are visions of the sovereign people [i.e. as demos].” For this reason, “the assertion of particular cultural loyalties follows directly on the heels of the assertion of popular sovereignty.”57 Much in line with some of the longstanding arguments of modernist accounts of nationalism, many postcolonial states very quickly proceeded to construe emotional plausibility, or feelings of national belonging, for nations that until recently had not commanded a great deal of loyalty among their newfound demos. Postcolonial leaders thus tended to evoke nations for which they could expect a minimum of cultural plausibility. This is where various forms of cultural nationalism came into play. The problem with them was not so much that they were non-existent prior to the Second World War, but rather that some of the nations they envisaged – like in the examples of a North African nation, an African nation, or an Arab nation – could not easily be made congruent with viable states. Back in the days when independent statehood seemed far-fetched, cultural nationalism could flourish freely. As yet unburdened by requests to square state and nation – and either unsuspecting or wary of the slippery slope from demos to ethnos introduced by the notion of popular sovereignty – many historical actors skeptical of the nation-state solution, such as Senghor, were nonetheless heavily invested in buttressing the emotional plausibility of nations. In 56 57

Cooper, Africa in the World, 86–89. Yack, “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism,” 523, 525.

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fact, they were often much more devoted to this task than the political actors who most consistently championed sovereign statehood for every nation, namely communists. Prior to his postwar career as a politician, Senghor had been known primarily as a leading figure of the négritude movement, which emphasized the racial and spiritual particularity of African-descended peoples. Since négritude writers, including Senghor, drew from Herderian notions of the distinctive spiritual traits of peoples, Toyin Falola has treated them, precisely, as “ideologues of cultural nationalism” – an epithet for which it matters little that Senghor’s nation of interest at the time was African, not Senegalese.58 While warning against the nationalism of a nation-state – and thus falling outside Gellner’s definition of a nationalist – Senghor had no qualms with the assumption that true nations existed and that political communities should mainly serve the aim of fulfilling these nations’ spiritual aspirations. His line of reasoning thereby fulfilled Anthony Smith’s less demanding definition of nationalism as “an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity and identity of a human population, some of whose members conceive it to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation.’”59 The point was merely that, according to Senghor, the autonomy and identity of his nation was best preserved within a federation including France – until he changed his mind, anyway. As Senghor’s example, as well as the entire category of cultural nationalism, suggests, nationalism was ultimately about both more and less than the pure advocacy of political sovereignty outside the imperial realm. Contemporary uses of the term “nationalism” before the Second World War did not coincide with the criteria applied by today’s historians who reserve the term for the champions of independent statehood alone. Particularly between 1928 and 1935, when the Comintern refused to cooperate with those its official lexicon dubbed “bourgeois nationalists,” in both English and French “nationalism” became something like a residual term for all critics of empire who were not communists. In many settings, this meant that the nationalists were exactly the ones who did not advocate immediate independence, but instead espoused the preservation of what they viewed as their respective peoples’ cultural authenticity. Senghor, for instance, remembered in 1962 that one major inspiration in his search for an African spirituality was 58

59

Toyin Falola, Nationalism and African Intellectuals (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2001), 66. Then again, a closer look at Senghor’s writings will reveal that his Africanness was quite Senegalese-inflected. Anthony D. Smith, “The Nation: Real or Imagined?,” Nations and Nationalism, 2/3 (1996), 359.

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the right-wing French author and anti-Dreyfusard Maurice Barrès, who around the turn of the century had helped popularize the term nationalisme. In reading Barrès’s 1897 novel Les déracinés, Senghor claimed, “I became one with my land and with the values of its civilization.”60 Across the French Empire, the term “nationalism” could thus be used to describe the views of people who may have qualified as cultural nationalists, but who opposed independent nation-states. The Vietnamese neotraditionalist Pham Quynh, another reader and admirer of Barrès and other authors of the French right, considered himself a “nationalist,” but clarified that “my nationalism, rather than being political, has begun to be applied in the domain of language and culture.”61 As an ardent champion of monarchy, patriarchy, and Confucianism, as well as the interior minister of the Annamite crown during the Vichy years, Pham Quynh’s politics differed sharply from Senghor’s.62 But they were both examples of the possibility of a disjuncture between cultural and political nationalism. French imperial bureaucrats, meanwhile, also dissociated the term “nationalism” from the demand for independent states. In an example of the term’s usage to denote non-communist critics of colonialism, a 1921 letter of the general controller of Indochinese troops in France dubbed Phan Chu Trinh, by then the most famous Vietnamese anticolonialist, a “nationalist,” since, unlike the communists, he “believe[d] in the current necessity of maintaining our protectorate over Annam.”63 Conversely, when anticolonialists in the 1920s disowned the tag “nationalism,” it was not because they rejected the principle of congruity of nation and state, but because the word had acquired a bad reputation in the course of the First World War, because it was used for and by their bourgeois or right-wing adversaries, or because it was associated with Western claims of superiority. In a 1927 article in La Nation Annamite, for example, the Vietnamese activist Nguyen The Truyen repudiated nationalism for being a driver of the West’s “murder and pillage,” even as his entire political program was geared toward achieving an independent Vietnamese nation-state, as evident from the very name he chose for 60

61 62

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Cited in J. C. Vaillant, Black, French, and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 75. Pham Quynh, Essais franco-annamite (1929–1932) (Huê: Éditions Buy-Hui-Tin, 1937), 201. See, generally, Eric Jennings, “Conservative Confluences, ‘Nativist’ Synergy: Reinscribing Vichy’s National Revolution in Indochina, 1940–1945,” French Historical Studies, 27/3 (2004), 601–635, especially 628. General Controller of Indochinese Troops to Governor-General of Indochina, 22 December 1921, SLOTFOM 1/11, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-enProvence.

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his political party, Parti Annamite de l’Indépendance, and its organ, La Nation Annamite.64 In contrast to the historians skeptical of applying the label of “nationalism” to the interwar period’s anticolonialists, many of these activists did not hesitate to use that term with hindsight to describe their own activism. In his memoirs, written in 1970–1971, Messali classified his admiration for Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in the early 1920s as evidence of “nationalist feelings.”65 Today’s historian may find this wording odd, insofar as this fondness for Atatürk obviously did not translate into plans for any clearly demarcated future nation-state comprising both Turkey and Algeria, but merely a vague affection for the nation-state model realized in another predominantly Muslim country. Yet it therefore does testify to the growing sense of possibility after the First World War that cultural belonging would enmesh with demands for civic rights, to produce political communities claiming to enshrine such rights for those who culturally belonged to them – entities conventionally called nation-states. Many recent historians of the disintegration of European empires have been writing against what they view as the “inevitability thesis” of imperial decline and nation-state formation, or against the notion that decolonization was “a predetermined end point.”66 Yet, as E. H. Carr pointed out long ago, the case against inevitability is either purely philosophical or “barren and pointless” because “[n]othing in history is inevitable except in the formal sense that, for it to have happened otherwise, the antecedent causes would have had to be different.”67 Instead of trading in the unrealistic, and thus always impugnable, absolute of inevitability, we should discuss shades of likelihood, when we try to explain processes and events such as decolonization. Insofar as such likelihoods are concerned, it is indeed important to point out that the demographic and territorial contours of the nation-states that had come into existence by 1965 were not set in stone by 1945, let alone by 1919, even though their territorial boundaries coincided to a remarkable degree with those of earlier political or administrative entities. The concept of the nation was and remained fluid, with different meanings and implications depending on who used it when and where, and for what purpose. Yet, 64 65 66

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La Nation Annamite, no. 1 June 1927, 8. Messali Hadj, Les mémoires de Messali Hadj (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1982), 108. First formulation in Frederick Cooper, “Routes out of Empire,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37/2 (2017), 406–411, here 406. Second in Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 4. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 96.

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the more we step back from individual cases so as to survey the global history of the French Empire from 1919 through 1960, the clearer it becomes that, by and large, the likelihood of nation-state solutions grew over time – if by nation-states we merely mean political entities claiming to represent imagined communities widely called “nations.” This definition of the nation-state is an important caveat to the story, as well as a warning not to reify this particular form of political organization. Independence day celebrations of postcolonial countries, world maps from before and after decolonization, and the rituals of international relations have all accustomed us to the binary assumption that the nation-state is something that you either have or have not. But, as much recent imperial history has persuasively shown,68 sovereignty is dividable, layered, and compromised. The seeming precision of dates of independence all too easily obscures that neither imperial power prior to these dates, nor national sovereignty afterwards, were, or ever could have been, absolute. In the sense of enormous disparities of power and wealth, empire never ended. Senghor and other skeptics of the nation-state model feared as much and correctly cautioned that nation-states would not necessarily be more reliable purveyors of good governance, substantive rights, and material wellbeing. Alas, the historical likelihood of such clairvoyance to produce durable ways out of empire with a better track record than the nation-states that fell into the hands of Senghor and his peers was a different matter altogether. From the historian’s viewpoint, the realization that even historical actors who did not want a nationstate ended up with one only increases the need to explain why nationalism became, and still is, such a potent political force in our world.

Further Reading Cooper, Frederick, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Goebel, Michael, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Jennings, Eric, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–1944 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Lewis, Mary Dewhurst, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). Pedersen, Susan, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 68

E.g. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, passim; Judson, The Habsburg Empire, passim.

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michael goebel Shepard, Todd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Shipway, Martin, Decolonization and its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). Thomas, Martin, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads from Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Thompson, Elizabeth, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

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Patriotism in the Second World War: Comparative Perspectives on Countries under Axis Occupation aviel roshwald

Introduction While much of the literature on nationalism focuses on the formation or construction of national identities and nation-states, the story does not end with the creation of a polity claiming to embody a nation’s identity. Conceptions of nationhood continue to be contested and to change over time within the framework of national sovereignty, even as the breadth and depth of popular attachment to, and identification with, the nation-state wax and wane under changing conditions. This is just as true of long-established nation-states as it is of recently formed ones. Terminological usage may obscure this, insofar as nationalism is commonly used to describe movements or efforts directed at gaining a people’s independence or asserting its purported rights to contested territory or resources. Loyalty to a long-established country is more often referred to as patriotism – and by virtue of being consigned to this category, has been subject to less thorough analytical scrutiny in the theoretical and comparative literature on nationalism. To be patriotic can certainly be defined with disarming simplicity as placing one’s country’s interests above one’s own.1 Yet behind this seemingly straightforward formulation lies a welter of complications. For one thing, the matter of what constitutes a country’s interests and who can best determine that is an inherently contested issue. Moreover, even as self-sacrifice is esteemed as the highest expression of patriotism, the rhetoric of political leaders and publicists tends to hold forth the promise of what one might term 1

For a much more restrictive definition, which seeks to link patriotism to a project of emotionally particularistic yet politically progressive and inclusive republicanism, see Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Introduction and passim.

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a patriotic version of theodicy, whereby those who defend their nation’s collective security and dignity will duly find their material recompense (or at least will help secure it for their surviving families and compatriots in the event they make the ultimate sacrifice on the field of battle). The longer an allegedly patriotic agenda is manifestly at odds with the welfare of a large proportion of a country’s citizens, the harder it becomes to sustain the claim that it is in fact patriotic. During periods of relative peace and prosperity, such inherent tensions and contradictions may not be fully exposed; at such times, the price of behaving in what is conventionally seen as a patriotic manner is low and the level of reward is high. One pays one’s taxes (or finds loopholes to avoid them), obeys the law, perhaps waves a flag or watches a parade during national holidays, and in return enjoys relative security and the opportunity to pursue one’s own and one’s family’s wellbeing. This is a patriotism that is stable by virtue of being vacuous.2 By the same token, in times of war, ordinary citizens are likely to perceive a significant overlap between their country’s interest and their own individual security. Much more may now be expected of them, but at least initially, there may be little questioning of those expectations, for the alternative to accepting the burdens of war is – many fear – to acquiesce in the endangerment of all one holds dear. Some of the social responses to the total wars of the twentieth century seemed to fit such a pattern: the readiness of populations to suffer through the deprivation and losses of these conflicts seemed at times to exceed their own governments’ expectations. The toll taken by the First World War did finally lead to the splintering of domestic coalitions and the outbreak of political revolts and internal conflicts among some of the most sorely pressed among the belligerents. The Russian Revolution culminated in the triumph of a Bolshevik Party that explicitly repudiated the patriotism and nationalism that had fueled interstate warfare in favor of transnational class warfare. On the eve of the Second World War, there were serious fears among many governments over their populations’ capacity to maintain morale in the face of another conflict so soon after the seemingly futile devastation of the earlier one. Yet those countries that remained belligerents for most of the war (rather than experiencing early defeat and occupation) proved remarkably capable at maintaining overall social discipline and cohesion in the face of unprecedented losses and destruction suffered not only on the frontlines but also on home fronts devastated by 2

See Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).

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enemy bombing campaigns and ruthless sieges (notably in the case of Leningrad). Patriotism seemed to constitute the lowest common denominator to which all governments appealed in the face of these challenges, even in the cases of regimes whose official ideologies had held conventional notions of the territorially bounded fatherland rather in contempt (as in the case of the Nazis’ open-ended racial expansionism or – at least back in Lenin’s day – the Soviet Union’s communist internationalism).3 Yet, on the other hand, the Second World War also gave rise on an unusually wide scale to a condition that called into question the viability of any conventional conception of patriotism: that of enemy occupation. It is this aspect of the Second World War experience that lends itself particularly well to a comparative consideration of the complexities and contradictions, the elasticity and limits, of the patriotic. What makes the subject both problematic and interesting is that, in countries occupied by Axis powers, patriotic values were invoked by resisters and collaborators alike in justifying their seemingly incompatible positions. If nationalist and patriotic rationales were employed to validate opposite reactions to enemy occupation, then we might conclude that patriotism, under these unusual and extreme conditions, proved devoid of meaning.4 Yet my sense is that looking comparatively at a selection of Axis-occupied countries during the Second World War may lead us to discern patterns that reflect, not only how elastic patriotism can be, but also what the limits of that flexibility are. That is to say, it may allow us to delineate certain parameters – capacious though they might be – of the plausibly patriotic, as well as to chart how those parameters may shift in the face of evolving conditions, contexts, and experiences. To leave ourselves open to such a possibility does not require that we revert to a naïve understanding of patriotism. It does require that we take seriously the question of how 3

4

On the cooptation of conventional German patriotism by the Nazis, see Nichlas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939–1945 (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, trans. Oliver Pretzel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). On the wartime deployment of Russian nationalism in association with Soviet patriotism, see David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). For a study challenging the mythology of a Russian people united in patriotic resistance to the German invasion, see Johannes Due Enstad, Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile Loyalties in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Matthew A. Kocher, Adria K. Lawrence, and Nuno P. Monteiro, “Nationalism, Collaboration, and Resistance: France under Nazi Occupation,” International Security, 43/2 (Fall 2019), 117–150.

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effective patriotic arguments made by competing political leaders, activists, and movements were in winning them acquiescence, acceptance, and/or active support among significant cross-sections of society. It also requires that we explore how patriotic and nationalist themes were varyingly selected, massaged, manipulated, and deployed to fit diverse agendas under volatile and fast-changing conditions. The cases on which I focus in this chapter are the Netherlands, France, and Thailand. What they have in common is that they all involve countries of which the governments and/or senior administrators remained at least initially in place under Axis hegemony, establishing a potential institutional locus for the definition and dissemination – or alienation – of patriotic attitudes and values under the circumstances of occupation. Particularly during the early phases of occupation, these leaders were left with at least some limited measure of autonomy in their interactions with the occupiers as well as in their relationship with their own citizenry. What choices did they make under those circumstances, to what extent and in what ways did they seek to legitimize them in patriotic terms, and to what degree did their publics appear to accept or reject such justifications?5 Addressing these questions comparatively may help identify general patterns that transcended national differences. By the same token, I am interested in exploring how variations among political cultures, as well as among contingent choices and initial conditions of occupation, may have contributed to differences in the ways debates and conflicts about the meaning of patriotism played out over time in each case.

From Accommodationist Solidarisms to Backlashes against Collaboration: The Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible The radically contrasting images and rhetoric associated with the two historical bookends of initial conquest and eventual liberation seem to suggest such a fluidity to wartime patriotism in occupied countries as to render the concept meaningless. Upon liberation, it was, generally speaking, the triumphant resistance movements that claimed the patriotic high ground amidst public displays of mass emotion that combined celebratory manifestations with the violent settling of political scores and – across much of 5

For an excellent comparative analysis of contestations over political legitimacy in wartime Europe, see Martin Conway and Peter Romijn (eds.), The War for Legitimacy in Politics and Culture, 1938–1948 (Oxford: Berg, 2004).

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western Europe – the public scapegoating and humiliation of women accused of sleeping with the enemy.6 The nation was seen as collectively reclaiming its sovereignty and masculinity after years of humiliating disempowerment at the hands of the enemy. These outpourings of celebratory, in some cases over-compensatory, liberationist patriotism stood in stark contrast to the forms of patriotic solidarism that crystallized in the early months of occupation around an accommodationist consensus, which reflected a sense that the war was – to all intents and purposes – over, the victory and hegemony of the Axis powers was thus an irreversible fact, and the nation would have to accommodate itself to that new reality if it were to have any hope of regaining some form of political self-determination in the future. If, at first glance, the crystallization of patriotic sentiments around accommodationist and resistancialist positions at the start and finish of occupation leaves us feeling that what was termed “patriotism” consisted of little more than unmoored, exceptional, and fleeting moments of widespread despair or euphoria, the picture becomes a little more nuanced and interesting when we focus on some of the moments of transition between the two extremes of responses to initial conquest and liberation, respectively. I am particularly intrigued by the period of initial doubts and strains that each of the accommodationist regimes or movements faced within a few months to a year of the initial occupations. Looking at the relatively subtle shifts associated with this period can shed light on how evolving military, economic, and geopolitical conditions helped define the ever-shifting parameters of the patriotically plausible. What was patriotically plausible depended heavily on exogenous circumstances, as the powerful tides of global war repeatedly reshaped the landscape of expectations. But it was shaped by the intersection of those fluid circumstances with more durable conceptions which, in turn, helped determine the relative viability of competing political agendas and ambitions within the occupied lands.

Vichy France In France, in the early months following the country’s disastrous military defeat at German hands, an initial period of patriotic solidarity was associated with a broad acceptance of the armistice and the widespread popularity of Marshal Pétain. Yet, as soon as late 1940, Pierre Laborie established, much of French public opinion was taken aback by Pétain’s embrace of collaboration 6

Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France, trans. John Flower (Oxford: Berg, 2002).

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with (as distinct from accommodation of) the Germans.7 What this suggests is that, even as people were reluctant to embrace a still-fragmented, isolated, and seemingly foolhardy resistance movement, they did expect their government to stand as firmly as it could for the eventual restoration of French independence – something that popular sentiment still perceived as contingent on the Germans’ eventual defeat by the British rather than as compatible with long-term Nazi ascendance. There may have been a nationwide tendency to retreat into the shell of one’s own family and narrowly defined community amidst the traumas and trials of defeat and isolation.8 But people still seem to have expected their political leaders to conduct themselves differently in the name of the nation. It was not the Vichy regime’s negotiation of an armistice, its demolition of democratic institutions, or even its initiation of antisemitic legislation (banning French citizens who were Jewish from the civil service, military, and journalism and providing for the internment of Jewish resident aliens), but its transition from accommodation of, to open pursuit of collaboration with, the German enemy that led to the first clear rift between regime and public opinion. It was following his widely publicized October 1940 meeting with Hitler at Montoire that Pétain declared his government’s intention to set out upon “a path of collaboration” with Germany.9 But under the circumstances of Germany’s occupation of three-fifths of France and its domination of the European continent, this could hardly be a collaboration of equals. Pétain’s calculation seems to have been that he would be able to negotiate his way to a restoration of some version of full French sovereignty and the end of occupation in exchange for active cooperation with a victorious, hegemonic Germany. The French navy and overseas colonies remained substantive attributes of power in Vichy’s hands, which lent some semblance of substance to Pétain’s offer to work with Germany in the mutual interest of both countries.10 Yet clearly, in so doing, his government would be contributing to the very German hegemony that was compromising French national self-determination in the first place. Moreover, in practice, it turned out that Hitler had little to no interest in elevating France to the status of ally. Instead, the Nazi authorities 7

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Pierre Laborie, L’opinion française sous Vichy: les Français et la crise d’identité nationale, 1936–1944, 2nd edition (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2001). Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France during the German Occupation (London: Macmillan, 2002). Philippe Pétain, Radio broadcast of 30 October 1940, in Philippe Pétain, Discours aux Français, 17 juin 1940–20 aoȗ t 1944, ed. Jean-Claude Barbas (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 95. Philippe Burrin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 1996; orig. pub. 1993), 65–66.

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exploited Vichy’s eagerness for negotiation to extract far-reaching economic and geostrategic (in the North African and Middle Eastern spheres of French imperial control) cooperation from Vichy in exchange for token rewards, such as slight reductions in French payments for the costs of German occupation, or periodic, small-batch releases of some among the more than 1.5 million French soldiers who had fallen captive to the Germans.11 The vague and uncertain prospect of an eventual end to the occupation became a chain to which the Vichy government became tethered, and which dragged it ever further into actions that compromised and eroded the very freedom of action it aspired to regain. The regime’s own internal records indicate a clear recognition that its policy of actively seeking out collaboration with the Germans risked undercutting its patriotic credentials in the eyes of the public. In the longer term, recasting patriotism in terms of the familial and domestic – and in terms of the suppression or expulsion of “alien” elements from the French national body – would not suffice to uphold Vichy’s legitimacy, especially so long as the regime’s policies failed to bring appreciable improvement in the conditions of domestic life. Some of Vichy’s leaders themselves seemed to recognize that the regime’s ability to counter the growing perception of its relationship with Germany as degrading to itself and the nation would prove crucial to its credibility and viability. In a June 1941 meeting with his departmental delegates, the newly appointed Secretary-General for Information and Propaganda – former-communist-turned-right-wing-extremist Paul Marion – summed up his strategy by insisting that what he euphemistically termed “European” collaboration needed to be presented to the public as serving above all to advance French national interests. In phrases that seemed to confirm that which they denied, he insisted that any aspect of “European cooperation” that “might be construed as a form of abasement . . . before the victor . . . must be excluded from your thoughts as well as your comments. If I am an advocate of collaboration, it is as the Marshal . . . and the members of his government are: from an exclusively patriotic point of view.”12 He went on

11

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Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 168; Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 233. Comments by Paul Marion in minutes of Monthly Conference of [Vichy] Departmental Propaganda Delegates, Session of 13 June 1941, in Denis Peschanski (ed.), Vichy, 1940–1944: archives de guerre d’Angelo Tasca (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1986), 275–284, at 275–276 (my translation).

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to emphasize that, over and above the appeal to economic and humanitarian considerations, it was on the foundation of “the sacred interests of the fatherland” that the case for collaboration needed to be made. This was followed by a lengthy excursus about why active collaboration with Germany was the best way of securing long-term French national interests no matter which side ended up prevailing in the war. By the same token, Marion fulminated over what he portrayed as the hypocrisy of those French people who eagerly followed Gaullist and British radio broadcasts while remaining functionally collaborationist in their daily lives. Yet in the midst of this tirade, he made a curious aside: “I am speaking, obviously, of honorary Gaullists, who call themselves Gaullists but remain in France: but I doff my hat before a certain number of these young men, of generous heart, who, in my view, are lost in a historical impasse, but who know what it means to give their flesh and blood to the cause they have chosen.”13 This was a telling admission from one of Vichy’s keenest advocates of collaboration with Germany, whose own words clearly reflected the ever-increasing strain between stereotypical notions of honorable patriotic conduct and the predicament in which Pétain’s regime increasingly found itself, by virtue of its attachment to the trappings of sovereignty at the price of ever more substantive concessions to, and cooperation with, the Nazi conquerors.14 On 17 June 1940, in his very first radio broadcast after coming to power, Pétain had laid down a marker for his own government by clarifying that the terms of the armistice he was seeking to negotiate would have to be honorable.15 He was subsequently able to claim that, onerous though the final terms proved, French honor had been salvaged by virtue of a portion of the country being left unoccupied, his government’s authority being recognized, the navy and empire being left intact, etc. But as the months and years passed and the impositions accepted by Vichy became ever more painful and humiliating, the insistence that acquiescence in these conditions reflected an honorable and patriotic spirit of self-sacrifice rang ever more hollow. In October 1940, Pétain improbably informed his radio audience that it was “with honor and in order to maintain French unity in the framework of an active construction of the new European order that I enter today on the path of collaboration.” Yet the idea of collaboration as an honorable project between mutually respectful equals was undercut in the very following 13 14 15

Paul Marion in Peschanski (ed.), Vichy, 1940–1944, 276–277. On this theme, see Burrin, France under the Germans, passim. This point is emphasized in Jean-Michel Adam, La linguistique textuelle: introduction à l’analyse textuelle des discours, 3rd edition (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), ch. 7.

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lines, where Pétain spoke of the likely immediate consequences of collaboration as nothing more than a slight easing of some of the burdens of occupation (e.g. communication across the internal demarcation line, occupation costs charged to the French government, and conditions under which French POWs were held).16 The strain was clearly apparent in 1941 in the hysterically over-compensatory words of the head of the North African branch of Vichy’s highly politicized veterans’ organization, the Légion Française des Combattants, who insisted on blind faith in the Marshal as the path to true honor for French patriots.17 Evidently, the picture that would greet open eyes was unlikely to conform to any standard conception of patriotic dignity. As the regime’s internal reporting continued to indicate widespread public aversion to the policy of collaboration, and as radio broadcasts from London continued to question the patriotism of Pétain’s government, Vichy propaganda assumed an ever more defensive tone. One pamphlet, consisting largely of quotations from prominent public figures in support of collaboration, concluded with a series of rhetorical questions asking its readers how illustrious leaders and military commanders such as Marshal Pétain, Admiral Darlan, General Weygand – each of whom had at one point endorsed collaboration – could possibly be considered traitors.18 And in a speech delivered in June 1941, Pétain countered Gaullist and British charges against his regime’s patriotic credentials with a similarly hollow-sounding riposte that might well have done more to remind his audience of the accusation than convince them of its falseness: “You are neither betrayed, nor sold, nor abandoned. Those who tell you this are lying to you and pushing you into the arms of Communism.”19 That Vichy’s claim to the patriotic high ground was being expressed through fervent denials of treachery was symptomatic of how significantly the political terrain was in fact shifting under the regime’s feet.

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Philippe Pétain, “Message du 30 octobre 1940,” in Pétain, Pétain: Discours aux Français, 94–96, at 95 (my translation). Général Paquin, “Préface,” in Théophile D’Apery, Pétain: histoire actuelle à l’occasion du 1er anniversaire de la Légion Française des Combattants (Algiers: Imprimerie Baconnier, 1941). Paroles Françaises, Paroles d’Espoir (n.a., n.d.) (Clermont-Ferrand: Imprimerie Spéciale, 1942?), D C 397 [Vichy government era pamphlets], #97, Collection Level Cataloguing (CLC), Library of Congress (hereafter referred to as LC), Washington, DC. Philippe Pétain, speech of 17 June 1941, in Pétain: Discours, 145 (my translation).

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Nederlandse Unie During the German invasion of the Netherlands, queen and cabinet fled to London, where a Dutch government in exile was established. At the same time, the state’s bureaucratic apparatus under the leadership of the secretariesgeneral – the top functionaries in the various ministries – remained in place under German occupation in accordance with prearranged contingency plans that called on civil servants to remain in place as long as doing so served “the interests of the population.” The italicized phrase introduced a crucial element of conditionality: the framework essentially left it to the bureaucrats to judge at what point their continuation in office was doing more harm than good for the population they were charged with serving.20 Parallel to these semi-planned developments came an unanticipated event: the formation of a new movement called the Nederlandse Unie (Dutch Union). The Unie was formed and led by three men associated with the right-wing (albeit anti-Nazi) “Renewal” movement that had been active in Dutch public life throughout much of the 1930s.21 With the authorization of the German occupation administration, the Nederlandse Unie strove to fill the void left by the Germans’ suspension of parliament and effective marginalization of the mainstream political parties, and to fashion itself into the new institutional expression of, and conduit for, Dutch identity, patriotic sentiment, and national interest.22 That is precisely what appeared to happen, for what followed was a mobilization of mass support on a scale that had no precedent in Dutch history and few parallels in any other part of Axis-occupied Eurasia. The first office the Unie opened in Amsterdam was virtually overwhelmed by the scale of the public’s immediate response to the organization’s initial membership drive. Within a few months, membership of the Unie had swelled to more than 800,000 out of a total Dutch population of fewer than 9 million people, making it by far the largest political movement in the country’s history.23 Local chapters dotted the land, and vendors hawked the movement’s weekly newspaper, De Unie, on the street corners of every town. At a time when in 20

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From text of Aanwijzingen, as quoted in Paul Bronzwaer, Maastricht en Luik bezet: een comparatief onderzoek naar vijf aspecten van de Duitse bezetting van Maastricht en Luik tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Hilversum: Verloren, 2010), 97–98 (my translation). See Wichert ten Have, De Nederlandse Unie: Aanpassing, vernieuwing en confrontatie in bezettingstijd, 1940–1941 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1999). Gerhard Hirschfeld, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1988), ch. 2. Louis de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, vol. iv: Mei ‘40Maart ‘41), Part 2 (‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1972), 507–508; Philip Morgan, Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 73–78.

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France the predominant initial response to enemy occupation was a withdrawal from national politics into a preoccupation with the needs, intrigues, and solidarities of local community,24 the Dutch were streaming into the largest mass movement in their nation’s history and actively participating in a countrywide debate about how best to reorganize and reinvigorate the collective life of the nation. As M. I. Smith has pointed out, for this brief interval in their history, the Dutch did actually seem to transcend the pillarization that had been such a bugbear of the prewar parliamentary regime’s critics.25 For many in the Unie’s rank-and-file membership, it seems clear that this unprecedented upwelling of national solidarity was a reaction to the shock of defeat and occupation, when the differences of interest and ideology that normally divided people suddenly seemed insignificant compared with the plight they shared in common. A key advantage enjoyed by the Unie was the German occupation administration’s calculated decision to permit its existence and to tolerate its activities at a time when mainstream political parties were banned. The Germans hoped this would allow popular sentiment to be channeled in a direction compatible with the occupiers’ interests more effectively than if the NSB – the Dutch Nazi movement, which had never enjoyed significant electoral success and was widely seen as representing values that were alien to Dutch political culture – was imposed from above. By the same token, one of the key elements of the Unie’s mass appeal was its self-presentation as the best hedge against the creation of a Dutch counterpart to Vidkun Quisling’s collaborationist government in Norway. Yet the fact of German authorization of the Unie was also its Achilles’ heel, for it begged the question, at what price would this forbearance continue to be purchased? Readers of the organization’s newspaper, De Unie, might have been forgiven if they thought the publication went a little overboard in its demonstration of the movement’s promised loyalty to the German administration. Notably, the paper’s coverage of the war against Britain was clearly slanted in favor of the German perspective. To be sure, taking a sympathetic line toward Germany’s prosecution of the war could be seen as little more than a symbolic gesture (although it could potentially legitimize cooperation with German war-manufacturing needs on the part of Dutch industry). However, the decision taken by the Unie’s threeman executive (the Triumvirate) to propitiate the German authorities by 24 25

Gildea, Marianne in Chains. M. I. Smith, “Neither Resistance nor Collaboration: Historians and the Problem of the Nederlandse Unie,” History, 72/235 (June 1987), 251–278, especially 259.

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agreeing to take part in Germany’s Winter Relief campaign (Winterhilfswerk) raised serious concerns among some rank-and-file members, for this represented substantive cooperation with a Nazi organization.26 The resultant dissension was clearly reflected in the pages of De Unie’s 28 December issue, where the Triumvirate called on the membership to lend its active support to the second collection drive for the Dutch section of the Winter Relief. Casting their appeal in defensive terms, the Unie’s three leaders acknowledged that the Winter Relief organization had committed some missteps and that there were those who would have preferred that the organization had arisen out of a purely Dutch initiative. This they countered by asking their members not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good: it would be unjust to let the nation’s needy go wanting merely because people did not like certain aspects of the relief organization. Perhaps more crucially, they went on to call for a certain degree of what one might term party discipline: they did not expect blind acceptance of every dictate from the Unie’s leadership, but they did call on members either to avoid open challenges to important policy decisions by the Triumvirate or to withdraw from membership of the organization.27 But the most radical paradigm shift brought on by German pressure concerned the status of Jews in the organization. Having invoked the Dutch tradition of tolerance in its opening manifesto, the Nederlandse Unie had, at its founding, welcomed Dutch Jews into its fold. Indeed, the movement’s initial adherence to this principled stance had been a key distinguishing feature that set it apart from the Dutch Nazis (NSB) and defense of it was an expression of the organization’s claim to embody an autonomous Dutch national tradition. In the autumn of 1940, in response to initial German pressure on this issue, the leadership asked one of the movement’s most fascistic members – Groeninx van Zoelen – to write a confidential report for the German authorities on the Netherlands’ lack of a Jewish problem. Van Zoelen did just that, emphasizing the foundational nature of tolerance in Dutch society, and the danger further antisemitic measures could pose for German–Dutch collaboration.28 When the secretaries-general of the government ministries passively acquiesced in German demands for an exclusion of Jews from the civil service, following their ineffectual voicing of objections to the inflexible German authorities, there were some within the Unie’s leadership who pushed for a public criticism of this alien imposition. Linthorst Homan, the most right-wing member of the Triumvirate, pulled an article along these lines 26 27

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Ten Have, Nederlandse Unie, 341–344. L. Einthoven, J. Linthorst Homan, and J. E. de Quay, “Winterhulp Nederland: De tweede inzameling,” De Unie, 19 (28 December 1940), 2. Ten Have, Nederlandse Unie, 338.

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from publication in De Unie, replacing it with a more mealy-mouthed essay of his own in which he suggested that foreign Jews needed to be regulated, while still insisting that Jews who were Dutch citizens did not constitute a problem requiring special measures. Unlike other countries, he argued, the Netherlands did not have a Jewish Question.29 Such gestures made no impression on the Nazi authorities, especially given their success in imposing their antisemitic agenda on the Dutch civil service without triggering mass resignations or any other significant form of opposition beyond initial verbal objections. Over time, the occupation authorities’ persistence was rewarded with further success. Indeed, the Unie had all along avoided appointing Jews to prominent administrative positions, for fear of directly provoking the Germans.30 The more pressure the Germans applied – including a January 1941 raid on Unie headquarters and brief arrests and questionings of a number of the organization’s leaders – the more willing the Unie’s leadership became to cede further ground on the issue. The organization denounced as counterproductive the famous Amsterdam workers’ strike of February 1941, which had been organized by the underground Communist Party in protest over the Nazi authorities’ seizure (and subsequent deportation to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where all but two died) of several hundred of the city’s young Jewish men.31 In June, plans were announced to create an elite inner corps of the Nederlandse Unie, to be known as the Working Membership (Werkend Lidmaatschap); enrollment was to be limited to those of Christian background. The idea was to find some sort of middle ground between tolerance and antisemitism, but such backsliding was the occasion of consternation among many rank-and-file members of the movement. To add insult to injury, the Unie’s leadership had sought to gain support for this move beforehand from leaders of the Jewish community, only to be rebuffed. Privately accusing the Jewish leaders of an incomprehensible “lack of trust,” the Triumvirate had proceeded to claim in public that the move had their endorsement.32 By the end of October, Jews had been barred from any form of membership in the Unie, in accord with new Nazi directives explicitly banning Jewish participation in any organization that included non-Jews. The decision to acquiesce in this rather than dissolve the organization came even as the Triumvirate was taking a firm stance against the occupation authorities’ demand that the Unie mobilize Dutch citizens to actively support and join the German war effort against the Soviet Union. On 31 December 1941, the Nazis banned the 29

Ibid., 335–336.

30

Ibid., 335.

31

Ibid., 432.

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32

Ibid., 463–467.

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organization altogether, declaring the NSB the only legal political movement in the country. With that, the prospect of a long-term political basis for reconciling any credible version of Dutch patriotism with the acceptance of the Nazi yoke began to fade steadily, even as significant segments of the Dutch civil administration continued to engage in collaborationist behavior.

Thailand under Phibun Thailand was invaded by Japanese forces at approximately the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. After a few hours’ token resistance, the country’s political and military elite quickly reached a consensus to the effect that acceptance of Japanese troop-transit rights and continued sovereignty within the framework of Japanese regional hegemony was preferable to active resistance. The country’s military-backed prime minister and strongman, Phibun, was able to reinforce his position and consolidate his power in association with this new conception of where the Thai patriotic path lay. On the diplomatic front, Phibun moved the country rapidly from acquiescent neutrality to the embrace of a formal alliance with Japan. As the one Southeast Asian country that had retained its independence in the face of Western imperial expansion, Thailand might now have an equally distinctive role to play as Japan’s partner in the dismantling of European colonialism across the region. Putting up with a Japanese military presence (which never fell to fewer than 50,000 troops) for the duration of the war would – so it seemed – be a small price to pay if the ultimate outcome was a place of pride in the new Asian order and an opportunity to unite the various regional minorities and ethnic groups (both within and beyond the country’s existing borders) identified as “Thai” under the auspices of a revitalized, expansionist, and assimilationist nation-state.33 It was in the framework of the alliance with, and effective occupation by, Japan that the Phibun regime’s program of nationalizing the masses reached its apogee.34 From 1942 until Phibun’s resignation in 1944, a veritable 33

34

E. Bruce Reynolds, Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance, 1940–1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), ch. 5; Judith A. Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand: A Story of Intrigue (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), ch. 10; Scot Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai Identity (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 151; Craig J. Reynolds, “Introduction” in Craig J. Reynolds, National Identity and its Defenders: Thailand Today, rev. edition (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2002), 16–17. The details that follow on the intensified national reform programs of 1942–1944 are drawn from Thamsook Numnonda, Thailand and the Japanese Presence, 1941–45, Research Notes and Discussions Series 6 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1977), 27–41; Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, ch. 10; Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian, Thailand’s

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avalanche of linguistic and cultural reforms came raining down on the population from on high. An orthographic reform was introduced in May 1942 (only to prove unpopular, finally being reversed by Phibun’s successor in 1944) with a view to spreading literacy via a simplification and standardization of the Thai written language.35 The use of pronouns was to be simplified, with an elimination of status-related distinctions in favor of a more egalitarian language. Traditional titles were to be dropped in favor of unadorned names across the entire population; by the same token, the government mandated the disambiguation of gender-neutral names by compiling officially sanctioned lists of names divided into exclusively male and female categories. The image of Phibun as the Phunam (Leader) was to be projected on the screen of movie theaters prior to every show and film audiences were required to stand up and bow in his honor. The government’s zeal to modernize the Thai nation overnight reached extremes of micro-managerial absurdity: the traditional chewing of betel nuts (a habit typically accompanied by spitting) was outlawed; the citizenry was instructed to use forks and knives (rather than fingers) at table; traditional forms of dress were outlawed in favor of Western norms for males and females, respectively – including the mandatory wearing of hats in public by all Thai men (the slogan being that “Hats Lead a Nation to Power”). Men were urged to kiss their wives before leaving for work, and the ideal division of time among sleep, work, and family life was delineated in government-issued pamphlets.36 On the face of it, it seems difficult to see the connection between the Phibun government’s heightened commitment to an ever more intrusive cultural-reform agenda and the circumstances of war and de facto occupation. But then, what did the Pétainist cults of family and peasantry – held up in the Vichy regime’s rhetoric and propaganda as quasi-sacralized repositories of national virtue and authenticity – have to do with the realities of France’s predicament in 1940? It may have been precisely the lack of connection between these preoccupations and the country’s immediate situation that made such forms of patriotic activism – with their focus on sociocultural

35

36

Durable Premier: Phibun through Three Decades, 1932–1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 110–135. Thomas John Hudak, “Spelling Reforms of Field Marshall [sic] Pibulsongkram,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 3/1 (1986), 123–133. Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, ch. 10; Maurizio Peleggi, “Refashioning Civilization: Dress and Bodily Practice in Thai Nation-Building,” in Mina Roces and Louise Edwards (eds.), The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (Brighton: Sussex University Press, 2007), 72–76.

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norms, home life, and personal conduct – so appealing to regimes whose freedom of action in more conventional areas of policymaking was so narrowly circumscribed by the intrusive presence of a foreign power. The cultural sphere was, essentially, the one arena where the government really could act autonomously at a time when other, more substantive forms of national self-determination were radically curtailed by virtue of the country’s de facto occupation. As in the case of many European countries under occupation, the criteria for membership in the national community became more restrictive in wartime Thailand. The Phibun regime’s strident insistence that Buddhism – as defined and shaped by a set of religious institutions over which the government was consolidating its control – constituted an intrinsic and defining aspect of Thai national culture and served to marginalize Muslims in the country’s south, among other minorities.37 At the same time, the government sought to continue its marginalization of the country’s sizeable and economically influential Chinese minority through further legislative measures designed to break the dominance of, or stop inroads into, various sectors of the economy by noncitizens (a proxy category for the many ethnic Chinese who remained resident aliens). Twenty-seven professions (ranging from practicing law to vending noodles) were reserved for Thai citizens only.38 The government sought to place Thais in charge of commerce in key commodities, in an effort to ethnonationalize the country’s economy; the result was only to create opportunities for corruption and to disrupt the flow of goods at a time when wartime conditions were already contributing to inflation and shortages.39 At the same time, the prospect of naturalization was left open to some of the most economically influential members of the Chinese community, provided they were willing to break their ties with the old royalists in favor of regimeaffiliated power brokers.40 If a fragile consensus had crystallized around Phibun’s initial acceptance of de facto Japanese occupation, his subsequent moves (in December 1941– January 1942) to ally the country with Japan and declare war on Britain and the United States were a different matter. Overseas, the Thai minister to Washington (Seni Pramoj, a member of the royal family) publicly repudiated his government’s actions and initiated the organization of Thai exiles into 37 39

40

Kobkua, Thailand’s Durable Premier, 129–133. 38 Stowe, Siam Becomes Thailand, 237. Undated (late 1943?) report presumably authored by Vichy colonial officials in Japaneseoccupied Indochina, found in R G 226 (OSS), Entry 190, Box 744, Folder 61473, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland. Kobkua, Thailand’s Durable Premier, 147–149.

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a Free Thai movement. On the home front, Phibun’s perennial political rival, Pridi, discreetly began to distance himself from Phibun’s strategic choices.41 There is some evidence to suggest that Pridi’s growing skepticism over Phibun’s decision to embrace, and take part in, Japan’s pursuit of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” was in line with sentiments among broader cross-sections of Thai society. In his broadcast announcement (on 12 December 1941) of the conclusion of the Thai–Japanese Offensive and Defensive Alliance, Phibun himself implicitly acknowledged the hostility of Thai public opinion to such an alignment. According to one of the country’s leading English-language newspapers, the Bangkok Chronicle, Phibun “attributed the bad feeling towards the Japanese people among some sections of the Thais recently to personal affairs and foreign propaganda.” He went on to insist that “[t]he Government cannot follow only public opinion in forming the nation’s policy, nor can the public act independently from the Government’s views.”42 Subsequently, US intelligence continued to note evidence of public disaffection – and not only among well-educated elites.43 In November 1942, US Military Intelligence debriefed a number from among the several dozen American residents of Thailand who had been detained in Bangkok for half a year following the Japanese incursion, before being allowed to depart the country at the end of June. The relatively lenient terms of their internment having left them in contact with a number of Thai citizens, they reported a general attitude of passive and attentiste hostility toward the Japanese among their local interlocutors. By the same token, they suggested that many politically informed Thais were also disinclined to take risks on behalf of the Allied cause in the absence of clear indications about what Thailand’s status would be in the aftermath of an Axis defeat. As one person put it, “they figure it costs nothing to hold out, and who knows, they might get something out of it at somebody else’s expense.”44 41

42

43

44

Pridi Banomyong, “Establishment of the Anti-Japanese Resistance Movement and Seri Thai,” (essay originally published in 1981), in Pridi Banomyong, Pridi by Pridi: Selected Writings on Life, Politics, and Economy, trans. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2000), 201–202. “Premier in Radio Address Explains Why Thailand Signed New Alliance Pact,” Bangkok Chronicle, 13 December 1941, 1. “Review of Developments in Siam during June 1942,” OSS (Washington, DC), Intelligence Reports (“Regular Series”) 1941–1945, R G 226, Entry 190, Box 162, Folder 21710, NARA. OSS copies of G -2 Report Thailand, no. 881 (Source: Mr. Harry Dougherty), 12 November 1942, and G -2 Report Thailand, no. 890 (Source: Mr. Leon Von

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In fact, given the circumstances of Japan’s overwhelming regional power at this juncture, Phibun’s collaboration with his country’s de facto occupiers seems to have been less of a liability to him in the court of public opinion than were his regime’s autonomous moves to force through the rapid modernization and national homogenization of Thai social mores and culture. It is no surprise that, in rural settings, the officially mandated dress codes were met with widespread derision and were very difficult to enforce, notwithstanding the government’s propagation of the sartorial-reform campaign through a scripted radio-dialogue series and despite the zealous efforts of the National Institute of Culture’s roving propaganda and education squads.45 Japan’s functional occupation of the country had created a situation in which open opposition to Phibun and his brand of nationalism initially seemed pointless and self-destructive, allowing Phibun and his ideological and political allies to seize the occasion to push through their vision of Thai national rebirth combined with their own personal aggrandizement. Given the strong elements of continuity with his prewar (1939–1941) initiatives, it would appear that Phibun’s modus operandi was not simply to employ the cultural-reform program as a means of diverting attention from his regime’s subservience to the Japanese (as suggested by the former Third Secretary of the American Legation in Bangkok).46 It was also – as in the cases of Pétain and of the Dutch secretaries-general and Nederlandse Unie’s Triumvirate – to treat occupation as an unparalleled opportunity to be exploited for the vigorous implementation of a preexisting, right-wing agenda under the guise of meeting the patriotic need for unity in the face of alien hegemony and ongoing global conflict. Public responses to these visions of patriotism initially ranged from active embrace to passive acceptance. But such attitudes remained dominant only so long as the new status quo was seen as minimizing the “core population’s” exposure to the ravages of war and to the roughest edges of occupation, while simultaneously maximizing the potential for retaining or eventually regaining a modicum of national independence and self-determination. Over time, as conditions both domestically and globally shifted, various, initially marginalized, resistancialist alternatives began to appear less unrealistic and

45

46

Haverbeck), 13 November 1942, Military Intelligence Division, War Department General Staff, R G 226, Entry 190, Box 465, Folder 41058, NARA. Ibid.; “Report on Bangkok,” R G 165, Entry 77, Box 3013, Folder 3020, NARA; Peleggi, “Refashioning Civilization,” 75. “Report on Japanese Wartime Propaganda in Thailand,” 21 August 1942, R G 165, Entry 77, Box 3013, Folder 2930, NARA.

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self-destructive, even as the patriotic credibility of accommodationist stances and collaborationist regimes suffered progressive erosion.

Conclusion Unusual as the situations of Axis-occupied countries were, it is precisely the extreme nature of their experiences that may reveal patterns in popular conceptions of patriotism that are less clearly visible under more mundane circumstances. More specifically, they highlight the parameters of what I term patriotic plausibility. Patriotic plausibility can be understood as denoting the set of personal and political choices that are seen as defending or promoting the independent standing of the nation without flagrantly violating broadly accepted standards of feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and utility. Thus, the French resistance’s shooting of a German soldier in 1942 or 1943 could be seen by ordinary French people as an irresponsible act of terrorism if its only practical consequence was likely to be massive retaliation against uninvolved French civilians; it was much more likely to be regarded as a plausible and even laudable act of patriotism in the context of the liberation of Paris in 1944, when Anglo-American forces were on the outskirts of the city, the Germans were clearly on the retreat, and firing on them could be understood as a form of participation in the honorable and imminently attainable auto-emancipation of the nation’s capital. Our cases suggest that popular perceptions of the patriotically plausible may tend to rest on a tacit assumption about the division of functions and responsibilities, such that specific figures and institutions – notably, governmental authorities and the military – are expected to take the lead in defending the nation’s honor and sovereignty, while “ordinary citizens” are to remain shielded against the dangers potentially associated with this stance. The diverse political configurations during wartime occupation could variously be seen as either reinforcing or reversing, validating or challenging, these roles. One of Pétain’s main arguments for staying in France and negotiating an armistice rather than continuing the fight from overseas was that, as his nation’s new leader, it was his obligation to bear the burden of defending whatever could be salvaged of its sovereignty while sharing in his people’s suffering and sacrificing his own wellbeing in an effort to spare the nation the worst (which he had seen at Verdun in 1916). Conversely, the Dutch queen and cabinet took the position that they could best continue to play their roles as upholders of Dutch sovereignty by placing themselves beyond the Germans’ reach. Yet this risked being perceived as abandoning 417

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their people to suffer the consequences of the government’s patriotically honorable refusal to negotiate political terms. This problem was mitigated by the arrangement that left a certain element of governmental continuity in place by leaving the secretaries-general in charge of the ministries. But that, in turn, led to a slippery slope of ever greater Dutch administrative complicity in the increasingly intrusive and brutal German policy initiatives. For its part, the Nederlandse Unie offered substantive patriotic appeal as a hedge against the empowerment of the Dutch Nazis, even as the Unie’s Triumvirate sought to exploit the situation to channel patriotic sentiments into an “authentically Dutch” form of postdemocratic political culture. These delicate balancing acts began to fall apart within months of the initial occupations, due in part to the increasingly onerous character of the occupation regimes, which undermined the credibility of patriotic accommodationism. In the Netherlands, the increasingly obnoxious impositions of the German occupation authorities left the Unie’s leadership with ever less room to maneuver between the German ambition to use the organization as an instrument for the country’s incremental Nazification and the rank-and-file membership’s conception of the organization as a hedge against Nazification.47 By 1943, with the onset of the German labor draft amidst the growing prospects of an eventual German defeat, the patriotic plausibility of the division of functions between defiant government-in-exile and compliant civil service had also reached the limits of its elasticity, leading to the former’s renunciation of the secretaries-general and its embrace instead of the resistance movement.48 In France, the Vichy government stubbornly clung to the outward appurtenances of power while the substance of its autonomy and its ability to shield the French population against the ever more onerous qualities of the occupation were eroded. This served to undercut the plausibility of its claims to patriotic leadership – to the growing advantage of the Free French and the internal resistance. In Thailand, the Japanese ended up adopting a relatively nuanced approach, given Thailand’s symbolic value to them as an independent Southeast Asian country whose formal alliance with Japan was supposed to validate the benignly non-imperialist character of Tokyo’s vision for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The result was to leave the Thai regime with sufficient room to maneuver in a way that allowed for a relatively smooth and peaceful change of leadership in 1944, followed by a non-violent end to the

47

De Jong, Het Koninkrijk, 507.

48

Morgan, Hitler’s Collaborators, 86–87.

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Japanese military presence after the end of hostilities in the Pacific theater in August 1945.49 The fact that most rival claimants to legitimate national leadership under conditions of occupation tended to pitch their appeals in patriotic terms may seem at first to empty the concept of significance. And it is certainly true that, under these circumstances, most people did not act patriotically in a heroic, romanticized manner. That is, they were not inclined to risk everything they held personally dear for the sake of freeing their country from occupation, no matter the odds. But, by the same token, most people do not appear to have remained indifferent to, or unaware of, a certain patriotic calculus. This calculus established the rough parameters of what might be termed the patriotically plausible under a given set of conditions. As conditions were continually shifting, the parameters of the patriotically plausible were likewise in constant flux, albeit in a generally directional way: that is, the fulcrum of the opinion spectrum tended to shift over time toward greater resentment of the alien occupiers. This, in turn, placed political elites between a rock and a hard place, as they struggled to maneuver between the ever more onerous demands of the occupying powers and the ever greater discontent of the populations on whose behalf they claimed to act. A variety of factors, ranging from the degree of internal polarization characteristic of a given country’s prewar history, to the initial conditions set in place at the onset of occupation, to the choices subsequently made by all parties, helped to determine whether a political or administrative regime that had struck an understanding with the occupiers would succeed in navigating its way through to continued legitimacy or would eventually fall victim to an external challenge (typically, from a resistance movement). In either case, I would argue, the parameters of patriotic plausibility helped determine the locus of political legitimacy.

Further Reading Deák, István, Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution in World War II Europe (Boulder: Westview Press, 2015). Gildea, Robert, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France during the German Occupation (London: Macmillan, 2002). Hirschfeld, Gerhard, Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1988). Mazower, Mark, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008). 49

Reynolds, Thailand’s Secret War, 227; Pridi Banyomyong, “What Happened inside the Regency Council,” essay first published in 1972, in Pridi, Pridi by Pridi, 224–226.

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aviel roshwald Morgan, Philip, Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Reynolds, E. Bruce, Thailand and Japan’s Southern Advance, 1940–1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). Tarling, Nicholas, A Sudden Rampage: The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, 1941–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).

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19

Decolonization and the Cold War leslie james

There is a rather obvious convergence point between the Cold War, decolonization, and nationhood. The end of formal European colonial rule across most of the globe in the mid-twentieth century precipitated new states, on old territory, which required a national identity for legitimacy. In colonies where colonial rule ended through violent armed struggle, that armed struggle required a particularly potent vision of what people were fighting for. Once independence came, the consolidation of the state also demanded an answer to the question: who are we as a people, what binds us together? The Cold War, founded on an assumed clash between ideas and cultures even if activated as military and strategic conflict, prompted the same questions. The Cold War demanded a statement of national identity in two respects. First, as an ideological conflict the Cold War influenced the language by which nations articulated the belief systems that supposedly bound them together and informed their relationship with others. Second and relatedly, the Cold War influenced national identity by way of alliances, whether they be communist, capitalist, or an attempt to carve a third path of non-alignment. The conventional conclusion was, therefore, that the Cold War constrained how decolonization could occur. The underdeveloped and weak new states that colonialism and subsequently decolonization produced had few real options in how they comported themselves, at least on an international stage. And whatever narrative emerged for how new states were bound together, their nation had to be legible within the Cold War binary. There is some truth to this. But the logic behind this assumes that these two historical processes – decolonization and the Cold War – functioned only as constructive agents in rendering nations. What if, however, nationhood was also an element of these processes themselves? This perspective is important because it takes into consideration the instability of all three categories as historical formations and as ideologies.

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How did the nation figure in the Cold War equation? The Cold War agendas aimed to transform the world based on a set of ideas that were set out as fundamentally universal. The American project espoused individual liberty and a market-based economy as the best way to build societies, while the Soviets believed in collectivism and state planning. The United States emphasized voluntarism against the direction or compulsion of institutions and opposed the centralization of authority. The Soviet Union emphasized the proletariat and class conflict, rather than individualism, as means of overcoming old hierarchies of power. Secularism was at the heart of each project, but the American belief in individual liberty meant that this secularism took the path of separation of Church and state and the protection of freedom of religion, while Soviet communism was more explicitly materialist in opposing spirituality as well as more adamantly against the institution of the Church. Universalism, as well as the stated belief that ethnonationalism was a scourge on society, meant that the nation was mainly a negative factor for Cold War logics. Narrow nationalism was the antithesis of each project. Yet two ingredients complicate this. First, as Arne Westad has emphasized, despite the supposed ideological clash, both projects shared a common lineage and common traits. Rapid and efficient industrial growth was at the core of each model. Both claimed to be against traditions of privilege, heritage, family, and locality. At the core of each was the belief that people could break with the past, reinvent themselves, and, in this reinvention, proactively choose the communities to which they belonged. Identity and belonging could be chosen. This, of course, had radical implications for nationhood. It is also why, fundamentally, this became a global history. The implication of these shared traits for nationhood was not only that national identity could have elements that were cultivated rather than innate. If both projects shared core aims and rationale, if both traded in a similar language of transformation and progress, then how were they ultimately different? In practice, each ideology shared the same development language but coded their meaning through geographic references that signaled the ideological difference.1 The second complicating factor for the supposed antinationalism of each project is therefore that in their activation these universalist ideas mixed with older and/or specific cultural traits that infused them with meaning as emblematic of a community. In the case of the United 1

Rachel Leow, “Asian Lessons in the Cold War Classroom: Trade Union Networks and the Multidirectional Pedagogies of the Cold War in Asia,” Journal of Social History, 53/2 (2019), 429–453.

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States, a person could select the American nation as that which they wished to belong to and, by adhering to a set of principles, they could be a member not only of that state but of that nation. A citizen could also be “unAmerican” by adhering to supposedly incompatible ideas. My point, therefore, is that the Cold War did not simply dictate how nations could be formed in new postcolonial states. Both the Soviet and American states conceived their ideological projects within the frameworks of their own national identities, just as their projects were implemented in ways that incorporated and reflected supposedly national characteristics. What, conversely, were decolonization’s nationalisms? If we take the decolonizing world of the mid-1940s to the 1970s as a whole, very few states had anything like a primordial claim to a single national identity. Whether it was the decades of European colonialism in Africa and, even more briefly, the Middle East, or the centuries of colonial rule in Indonesia, in the Caribbean, or South Asia, the states that emerged at independence contained multiple communities whose shared history was, primarily, colonial rule. Their nationalism was, in the first instance, anticolonial. Independence only made more palpable the fact that colonial rule had fundamentally changed these societies – whether it be by gluing various religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups together into one state, or by conveying people into new territories through imperial migration; these were states whose claim to a coherent nationhood on any of the typical grounds was slim. This meant two things. First, these were new states with contested internal nationalisms that would affect any nation-state identity. Second, however, the foundation for nationhood could be debated based on a sense not just of what was old, not just on history, but of what could be new. More importantly then, the Cold War’s ideological focus also offered identifications new nation-states could engage. For many of the anticolonial nationalists who assumed leadership of these new states, their goal was to forge new projects: to eradicate the destructive force of colonialism not by turning back the clock, but by creating something new. Aimé Césaire’s rallying call in 1956 to his fellow colonized sisters and brothers to create a new society “rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days,” encapsulated this program for novel forms of life that still drew upon fraternal histories.2 What I am driving at is that the process of decolonization itself could serve as a representation of national characteristics. Indeed, this was perhaps even more true for metropolitan societies than for new postcolonial states. Stuart Ward’s 2

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 52.

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work on the provenance of the term “decolonization” emphasizes that far from being a term deployed by radical anticolonial nationalists, the idea of “decolonization” was first conceived “as a way of deflecting the stigma of national failure” by European intellectuals, elites, and politicians.3 Our contemporary usage in the early twenty-first century has largely applied the term more widely and inserted a vocabulary into colonial movements that at the time largely used terms like “independence,” “self-government,” or “freedom.” It was not until after the 1960s that decolonization came to signify its current usage (and the one taken for this chapter): a historical period and a set of processes that aimed to transition out of the political, economic, social, and cultural system of colonialism. The origin of the term is important for understanding decolonization’s nationalisms, however, because it highlights how the conduct of the end of European countries’ formal control over their colonies was perceived as an indication of national identity. Where possible, Britain placed a great deal of emphasis on the appearance of benevolent “transfer” of power, orderly and given up willingly in a mutual exchange. This façade was in many cases a thin veneer. But it remains potent for British national identity. And in the context of bloody and protracted warfare in French Indochina and Algeria, France expanded citizenship and voting rights and held referendums in its African and Caribbean territory that showcased its democratic credentials. Through the incorporation of Overseas Departments into the French Union, French “decolonization” attempted to affirm that the French nation was expansive and inclusive. Homi Bhabha’s work on nation and narratives investigates the “nation-space in the process of the articulation of elements” (emphasis in original).4 Nations are unstable beings. Similarly, a fixed idea of communism, capitalism, freedom, or independence was not glued on to any national identities. When the ideologies of the Cold War met the ideology of the nation at the moment of new nation-state formations out of colonialism, these elements were all in process. At the historical moment that these converged, one appeared to be disintegrating while the other appeared to be on the rise. But if communities perceived a period of decolonizing, there is also, as Kuan-Hsing Chen emphasizes, another process of “de-cold war.”5 3

4

5

Stuart Ward, “The European Provenance of Decolonization,” Past and Present, 230 (February 2016), 227–260, at 245. Homi Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narrative (London: Routledge, 1990), 3. Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 115–160.

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Many things, old and new, thus drove the conception of nationhood in territory that had been colonized by Europe. And although the state and the nation are not the same enterprise (and can certainly be at odds), the specific configuration of the Cold War and decolonization examined in this chapter does mean that state activity figures prominently. It is worth emphasizing, therefore, that nationalism is not necessarily reified, made real, in statism. Rather, we should recognize, as Rebecca Karl argues, that while nationalism and the state are related, “the relationship is historical, not inevitable, and it needs to be specified contingently, not teleologically.”6 What this history does highlight is a strong sense that nations could be made upon ideas rather than just kin networks, linguistic groups, shared history, and cultural traits. This chapter focuses on a few key ideas that had universalist logics and particular application, and which frequently appeared in articulations of nationhood amidst the twin dynamic of the Cold War and decolonization during the mid-twentieth century. Broadly conceived, these can be grouped into logics of modernity and of internationalism. How did ideas within these logics become part of how nations defined themselves? This history is a particularly tangible illustration of the theoretical argument that nations are not static constructions. Rather, nationhood can contain within its logic a capacity for change at the same time as it hardens assumed essences.

The Cold War and the Territorial Logic of New Nations Both decolonization and the Cold War had implications for territorial nationhood. Independent states needed to establish their own territorial logic outside that of colonial rule. This fueled border disputes, and consequently the need for matériel to conduct those disputes. The need for international support to back assertions over territory brought those disputes into superpower rivalries. Some nationalists were able to invert the technologies and rhetorics provided in the name of the Cold War to their own ends.7 But even border disputes which appeared to have no superpower connection could 6

7

Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 24. C. C. Mavhunga, “A Plundering Tiger with its Deadly Cubs? The USSR and China as Weapons in the Engineering of a ‘Zimbabwean Nation’, 1945–2009,” in Gabrielle Hecht (ed.), Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 231–266.

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still play out within the superpower orbit. This occurred not simply because the Cold War geostrategic logic of allies and “influence” over territory encompassed the globe. It was also because border disputes fundamentally contested the grounds (pun intended) for the nation’s identity. One example of the articulation of national identity through border disputes, and the reach of superpower influence, was the Sino-Indian War of 1962. This border war, which lasted from 20 October to 21 November 1962, contested territorial claims over parts of India’s northeast and northwest frontier that had been an ambiguous border zone since Britain left India in 1947. Claims by the Indian government that this territory formed part of the national homeland meant that by the end of the 1950s, Indian public opinion was primed to defend the area as their own.8 Defining the nation’s territoriality via the border war in 1962 resulted in an active campaign to forge an Indian national identity in significant ways against a Chinese outsider. Government publications drew upon images of India and the Indian way of life as rooted in non-violence, generosity, democratic equality, benevolence, adherence to tradition, and respect for boundaries and rights. On the other hand, the treatment of Indian citizens of Chinese descent involved statesanctioned harassment and violence during and after the war. Large-scale internment, arrests, stripping of citizenship status, repatriation, and deportation occurred. Indian citizenry was therefore reconstituted during and after this war to exclude portions of its citizenry on ethnonational lines.9 Ideologically Nehru and other Indian politicians, without renouncing the principle of non-alignment and while retaining their own socialist path, framed Chinese communism as an aggressive imperialism. In 1965 a “Cartoon Exhibition on Chinese Expansionism in Asia and Africa,” which presented cartoons from the world press during the dispute, traveled through India, China, and Africa. A pamphlet reproduction of this tour began with a quote extolling the commitment to shed blood for the freedom of the nation, a quotation from Nehru on the inset page, and statements of support from the vice president, home minister, and former governor general of India.10 While the Indian government took credit for the content, the pamphlet was actually produced and published by Tarantel Press International of 8

9

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Paul McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 149–182. Payal Banerjee, “Chinese Indians in Fire: Refractions of Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship in Post-Colonial India’s Memories of the Sino-Indian War,” China Report, 43/4 (2007), 437–463. “Cartoon Exhibition on Chinese Expansionism in Asia and Africa,” National Archives UK, F O 1110/1980. I am grateful to Paul McGarr for sharing this research.

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West Berlin, a front for CIA operations in Europe. The cartoons came directly from Tarantel Press cartoonists. The images typically featured Nehru and Mao as stand-ins for the nation, with an upright and civil Nehru being belittled or humiliated by an obese, frothing Mao. When these two individuals were not the national symbols, the imagery conveyed a bestial China, cutting its way through Asia. This imagery played on anti-Japanese propaganda from the Second World War, transposing to China the qualities formerly ascribed to Japan. The text included a historical account of “China’s Betrayal of India” since 1949, as well as further statements of support for the exhibition and against the expansionist aggression of China from the chair of the Socialist Party, the general secretary of the All-India Congress Committee, Indira Gandhi, and various ministers. The sources for this endeavor were thus multiple: they came from a longer political history between India and China, from American anti-Japanese and anti-Asian propaganda, and from physical and financial resources of American Cold War strategy. In the latter case then, the material of national identity was literally produced by an ideological warfare that had little to do with the national identity being constructed. The point, however, is not that the cultural propaganda of postcolonial nation-building was simply a proxy for superpower machinations. Rather, it is that the Cold War did in fact render certain kinds of nation-building productive, even as these projects tied together multiple reference points that were separate from, or preceded, these identifications.

The Nation as Project What, then, were the most productive ways new states could articulate their national identity? It is not inconsequential to our understanding of nationhood that the temporally unstable discourse of modernity is one of the most prominent ways nations were rendered legible. Nations, Mikhail Bakhtin argues, transform “a part of terrestrial space into a place of historical life for people.”11 Yet that historical life is in reality, in Frantz Fanon’s words, a “zone of occult instability” marked by changing cultural significations. The nation, for Homi Bhabha, thus “comes to be articulated as a dialectic of various temporalities – modern, colonial, postcolonial, ‘native.’”12 The formation of the nation is often rendered as the fulfillment of a process of passing down 11

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Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 31. Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” in Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narrative, 303.

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traits over generations, such that the nation “appears as the fulfillment of a ‘project.’”13 If the nation appeared as the fulfillment of a historical project, then the proliferation of development projects by the mid-twentieth century combined the historical destiny of national development with the material development of communities. In other words, it was through a diverse range of meanings of modernity, development, and progress that national formation at the ending of colonial control entangled with an ideological conflict between communism and capitalism at the state and non-state level. This is slightly incongruous, admittedly, because while nations are perceived as the fulfillment of a process, the idea of development progresses toward an endpoint that has not been reached. Yet modernity always simultaneously held different temporalities of backward and advanced that hinged on a logic of progress. The claims, which both communism and capitalism made, to provide practical means for modernizing were themselves based upon a historically imperial and racist objectification of societies that had grouped the world into a rubric of primitive and advanced peoples.14 What this meant in practical terms was that “[t]he convergence of the Cold War and the processes of decolonization had the effect of imbuing national identities with a functional rationale: the purpose of the nation was development.”15 Here, it could be argued that the state and the nation are being conflated. After all, it was mainly state-led projects, or international non-governmental organization projects, that were the development actors. Modernization, as a mid-twentieth-century development project, was a technocratic project to more rapidly inhabit the historical and cultural conception of modernity. It was the purpose of the state to develop the people as an already existing nation. In reality, however, the boundary is far less clear. “Oppositions like ‘state’ and ‘society,’” Artemy Kalinovsky argues, “are misleading because they suggest one unitary actor confronting another.”16 As the Bolsheviks worked to incorporate the various linguistic and ethnic groups of the former Russian Empire into the Soviet state, to “decolonize,” they created multiple agencies at various levels that were staffed with people from inside and outside local 13

14 15

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Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” Review, 13/3 (1990), 329–361, at 338. Gabrielle Hecht, “Introduction,” in Hecht, Entangled Geographies, 5. J. J. Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 9. Artemy Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 8.

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communities. The more historians examine postcolonial development projects, the more they recognize that even in cases when development appeared to be vociferously and centrally imposed, the reality involved local participants who shaped the course of these projects. In the Soviet case, rather than the word “development” the Soviet Union referred to kul’turnost (culturedness), broadly understood as a set of practices aimed at transforming the external and internal features of the individual. This approach left the Bolsheviks in an awkward position since they could appear to be reimposing imperial styles of control. Yet the Russian Empire had recognized the non-Slavic and partly non-Christian peoples of its empire as different and had institutionalized that difference. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, subscribed to a universalist ideal that viewed humans and their cultures as somewhat mutable. Socialism was not intrinsic to the nation, it was the method for existence. Stalin proclaimed that the various ethnicities contained in the Soviet Union would be “national in form, socialist in content.” Nations could exist, in objective terms, but they would flourish best under socialism. That rationale meant that unlike under the rule of colonial difference, the Soviet Union began a project to bring its populace out of backwardness, which brooked no exclusions or excuses because all were now held to the same standard.17 It is possible that it was precisely because the peoples of formerly colonized states were now meant to exist together in equality, not just in the Soviet Union but in many postcolonial spaces, that the imposition of projects to modernize could become particularly adamant. If development helps us to see the blurred relationship between state and society, then another factor in the configuring of nationhood through development is that the ideological configuration of the Cold War meant that people identified choices about their way of life with socioeconomic organization. And many formerly colonized countries debated and combined socialist, communist, populist, capitalist ideologies with their own identifiers and principles of social, political, and economic organization. Most of these initiatives, whatever their ideological proclivities, followed a similar directional trajectory to the relationship between ideology and nation that was visible in the Soviet approach. Nations existed, but they could develop or wither according to the ideological strategies that they adopted. 17

Adeeb Khalid, “The Soviet Union as an Imperial Formation: A View from Central Asia,” in Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (eds.), Imperial Formations (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press 2007), 118–123.

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There was, therefore, a convergence of essential, rooted, and associational bonds of the nation alongside idealized social progress as the fulfillment of the national project. This relationship is epitomized by the roles and representation of women in postcolonial nations. On the one hand, women’s maternal role meant that they were often positioned at the core of the nation in at least two ways. Artistic renderings of the nation in sculptures and paintings often rendered the nation in female form. More than this, women as mothers, as the core of the family, were both literally and figuratively rendered as the reproducers of their new nations. As the biological bearers of children, women were essential to the reproduction of the population. But, as the base of the household and the family, women were also the repositories and protectors of culture and tradition. In newly independent, majority Frenchspeaking Cameroon, for example, Anglophone female journalists celebrated African attire as a counter to Western dress, as well as food and cookery as means by which women could stake out a position vital to the national project of becoming “modern” but not inherently “Western.”18 Women could, therefore, stand at the juncture between postcolonial modernity and specific national identity by arbitrating between old and new articulations of a national integrity. Finally, as Philippa Levine has emphasized, women were often rendered most visible in decolonization’s national narratives as freedom fighters.19 In line with the progressive claim to female emancipation, the female freedom fighter became an important motif in propaganda art from China and from the Tricontinental Congress after 1966. The Tricontinental, led by Cuba, worked to shift the non-aligned movement of Third World solidarity nevertheless to a more proactive stance by supporting continued liberation struggles around the world. The female soldier, fierce and often with a child strapped to her back and a gun in hand, became a prominent image in this movement. Adeeb Khalid argues that a balance between “national authenticity (language, custom, folklore) [and] the demands of progress . . . lies at the heart of all nationalist movements.”20 This observation helps focus on two important elements of nationalism. Nations are made through discourse. But they are also made through soldiers and government leaders, teachers and journalists, 18

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Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, “Intellectual Housewives, Journalism, and Anglophone Nationalism in Cameroon, 1961–1972,” Journal of West African History, 3/2 (2017), 67–92. Philippa Levine, “Gendering Decolonisation,” Histoire@Politique: Histoire, Politique, Société, 11 (2010), 1–15. Khalid, “The Soviet Union,” 120.

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and brought together physically through towns, transit, and communication lines. Nations “have a social as well as a discursive history, and the two must be told together.”21 A focus on that social history reveals the cruelties and the inequalities, the unfulfilled aspects and the myopic blindspots of the vision of nations.

The National and the International Both the rival ideologies of the Cold War and the postcolonial imaginaries of decolonization made claims to global purview. These non-national identifications emerged in some respects from their own backdrop: communism and capitalism were not nationally bounded ideas, and the empires that were meant to be unraveling during decolonization had for centuries plied a notion of shared imperial belonging. What, then, did these global epistemes mean for nationhood? Working definitions of the nation, even in volumes that include postcolonial histories, still hold that the nation refers to “a group of people who imagine themselves to be a political community distinct from the rest of mankind, deserving self-determination, which usually entails self-rule, control of their own territory.”22 But if what makes a nation is that which distinguishes (and makes unique) one group from another, then what do we do with postcolonial projects that cultivated their nationhood through a discourse of shared solidarity, identification, and belonging with others. How should historians understand how nationhood is functioning in cases where part of what makes a group unique is their outwardness, not their inwardness? The complicated relationship between building national and international identity is clearly visible during the early independence period in Ghana under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party. When the Gold Coast established its independence from colonial rule in 1957, it adopted several internationalist, pan-African symbols for its national flag: the Ethiopian tri-colours and the black star. The red, yellow, and green of Ghana’s flag are an inversion of the flag of the Ethiopian Empire under Haile Selassie I and II, which was the only African country to militarily defeat a European power and maintain its independence for most of the 21

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R. G. Suny, “Nationalism, Nation Making, and the Postcolonial States of Asia, Africa and Eurasia,” in L. W. Barrington (ed.), After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 283. Ibid., 280.

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colonial period across the African continent. To create its national flag, Ghana inverted the colours and replaced the Selassie royal emblem of the Lion of Judah with a black star. This black star gestured to the Black Star Line (1919–1922), a steamship corporation organized and funded by supporters of the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). The UNIA was a massive worldwide movement of black peoples, at its peak in the 1920s. With more than 1,900 chapters worldwide in Africa, Europe, the UK, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the UNIA’s slogan of “Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad” espoused a commanding philosophy of black nationalism. The Black Star Line, although ultimately a failure, was a material effort to build up black business ventures and, in part, to support the return of African diaspora peoples to Africa. Selecting a black star for the centerpiece of Ghana’s national symbol served as a potent sign that Ghana’s national character and identity were tied to a diaspora relationship. Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana built its meaning of freedom on the history not only of the decades of British rule within the borders of the colonial Gold Coast, but of European rule over the African continent and the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade that created a worldwide African people. These ideas were made real in more than just the aesthetics of a flag. Buildings, national memorials, archways, and stadiums were erected with the black star stamped upon them. A Bureau of African Affairs coordinated support for African freedom fighters in other parts of the continent, communicating directly with Nkrumah. Intellectuals from the Caribbean like Sir William Arthur Lewis and George Padmore were recruited to serve the new government. Professionals from the diaspora like lawyers, doctors, and trade unionists contributed to training Ghana’s workforce, and artists and activists traveled to Ghana from across the diaspora to learn from – and participate in – the building of this new state. When George Padmore died in 1959, Ghana held its first state funeral and Nkrumah installed Padmore’s ashes in the walls of Christiansborg Castle, a former slave fortress and seat of government, delivering a defiant speech in which he declared that this grandson of a slave born in the Caribbean had been brought “home.” Were these symbolic gestures meaningful for anything more than a cosmopolitan educated elite? How would the internationalist nationalism of Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party seep into any kind of national consciousness? First, these pan-African ideals were embedded in the personal history of Nkrumah’s travels and education in the United States and Britain and subsequently in an ideology of “Nkrumahism.” Nkrumahism was a developmental and liberationist strategy of political, social, and economic 432

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programs to modernize the country materially and psychologically. As Jeffrey Ahlman shows, Nkrumahism was as much a civic as a politically international program to root out the vestiges of colonial rule by reorienting the population. Like many decolonization projects, this “dialectic of destruction and rebirth” was one where emergent societies would destroy what they viewed as antique and unprogressive elements of the past. The party created and utilized institutions like the Ghana Young Pioneers, the Ghana Builders/ Workers Brigade, the Trades Union Congress, the National Council of Ghana Women, and the Young Farmers’ League in order to disseminate their ideals of “discipline, order, political and civic awareness, and collective national and continental development combined with a socialist and pan-African ethos rooted in a transnational anti-imperialism.”23 To organize their associational life, these undertakings borrowed from the Israeli Kibbutz as well as Soviet models. While organizations like the Builders Brigade and the Young Pioneers were specifically designed to create loyal and patriotic citizens who would build and defend the nation, they were also part of an international socialist youth movement. The internationalist component of Ghana’s founding symbols therefore revealed itself in specific programs to build the nation both materially and in terms of its identity. But these symbols and these programs were not embraced equally by everyone within Ghana’s borders. Protests over land reclamation projects, new suburbs, and ports in southeastern Ghana demanded “Ga lands for Ga people,” for example, calling up other national identities against the new national project. In the Ashanti region, an area that historically housed the Asante kingdom, flying the new national black star flag became part of a defiant contest. While the government banned the flying of what it called “tribal” flags, the Ashanti-based National Liberation Movement expressed their status as the official opposition party by flying flags with traditional Asante royal symbols. The irony of this particular defiance to the government’s nationalist project was that the selection of the tricolour flag had already been a strategy, not only to connect Ghana to Ethiopia, but also to appease Asante sentiment since the colours were also those of the royal Asante nation. At the core of Ghana’s new national symbols, then, lay both national and international meanings. And Nkrumah’s strategy, as Ali Mazrui has argued, involved a paradox: it sought “to modernize and ancientize at the same time.”24 23

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J. S. Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017), 16. Ali Mazrui, “The Leninist Czar,” Transition, 26 (1966), 8–17, at 1, emphasis in original.

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Naming forms a perfect example of this task. In order to renounce its history of British colonial rule, the Gold Coast became Ghana, the medieval name of a West African kingdom that actually existed to the north of the Gold Coast’s colonial and postcolonial borders. In 1960 the Mali Federation emerged out of part of French West African territory, taking its name from the Mali Empire that ruled over a much larger territory and emerged after the decline of the Ghana Empire in the thirteenth century. When freedom fighters defeated white-settler rule in Southern Rhodesia, they named the independent state after the medieval kingdom of Zimbabwe. Richard Rathbone argues that “like nationalists everywhere, [African nationalists] used the clustered histories of their putative nations romantically and instrumentally.”25 This required establishing a genealogy that connected independence-era political movements to a longer tradition that would lend them legitimacy as national heirs and leaders. To achieve this task in Ghana, Nkrumah appropriated Asante symbols as those not just of the Ashanti region but of the entire nation in museum exhibits, and monetary and postal iconography. Many of those in the Ashanti region vocally objected to this state appropriation of their traditional symbols. But Asante history called up a useful image of an expansive trading and warring kingdom that held a glorious past. To facilitate Nkrumah’s project for a United States of Africa, he also identified with other great African civilizations to anchor Ghana within a continental heritage.26 The brief existence of the Ghana–Guinea–Mali Union (1960–1963) brought together ancient African imperial histories with new national and continental modern state building. Ultimately, Nkrumahism emphasized that liberation must be undertaken beyond one colonial territory: the ideology of Nkrumahism embedded an anti-imperial pan-Africanism at its core. And Nkrumah-era Ghana worked to instill this internationalism into the youth of the country, challenging and contesting simultaneously networks of family, generational authority, and local allegiance. This was therefore an ideological project that combined nationalism and internationalism, socialism and antiimperialism. That internationalism was part of two larger concepts of nations of races and nations of workers: the socialist international of a proletariat nation and the internationalism of racial identity. This internationalist nationalism was specific to Ghana between 1957 and 1966, oriented around an increasing cult of one individual, Nkrumah, and 25

26

Richard Rathbone, Nkrumah and the Chiefs: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana, 1951–1960 (Oxford: J. Currey, 1999), 7. Harcourt Fuller, Building the Ghanaian Nation-State: Kwame Nkrumah’s Symbolic Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 144.

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buttressed by political party loyalty. Yet tied as they were to the politics of Nkrumahism, symbols like the national flag outlived this personal and ideological mooring. After a coup deposed Nkrumah and the CPP in 1966, public debates questioned the use of the black star and suggested other colours for Ghana’s flag. But the black star flag remains. It is a potent national symbol and Ghana has revived its cultivation of a diaspora relationship. In 2000 the government passed the “Right of Abode” law, which allows people of African descent to apply to live in Ghana indefinitely. Nkrumahism’s internationalism did not exist in a binary relationship with ethnic nationalism, nor did it “fail” because it challenged deep-rooted “tribal” loyalties. These supposedly oppositional national frames did not exist in a vacuum outside of locational, ethnic, linguistic, age, and class contestations. Rather, Ghana’s national identity, its borders, and relationship to diaspora peoples were made through this entire debate. In the Cold War ideological framing of nationhood and in decolonization’s debate about freedom and sovereignty, Ghana’s patriotic nationalism functioned not only through a dialectic of the new and the old, but also through an idea that it held an ancient distinctive heritage as well as an expansive, outward-looking character. What is crucial here is that internal to the dynamic of Ghana’s national identity there was an external identification with race. In this case, racial nationalism did not function separately or in contestation with a more determined concept of the polis: racial nationalism overlapped with another format of nationhood. If racial identities that criss-cross other bonds of the nation were one arena of intra-identification in this period, then religion was another. In Southeast Asia, several new nation-states worked to enshrine religion as a core characteristic of their spiritually plural societies. In Indonesia, President Sukarno announced that faith in God (rather than Islam specifically) was one of five core principles of the Indonesian nation, enshrining it in the official foundational theory of the state, the panca sila, in 1945. The Vietnamese struggle for independence from France after 1945, and the internal struggle after 1954 between communist North and capitalist South Vietnam, meant reckoning with a spiritually diverse population that included folk traditions, Buddhism, Catholicism, and other syncretic religious traditions. Both the processes of decolonization and the Cold War served to politicize spiritual activity in this context while also rendering it part of the conversation about national formation. Religious institutions proliferated in French Indochina because the colonial authorities viewed religions, unlike political associations, as having 435

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a positive moral influence. But the Vietnamese declaration of independence in 1945 and the subsequent war for independence required a reckoning between spiritual allegiance and national solidarity. Would religious institutions engage in politics and support the struggle against French colonial rule? Many did. Buddhist monks called upon each other to “become involved in national salvation” since Buddhists were “the people of the nation.”27 Clergy in certain Catholic dioceses formed alliances with the Viet Minh in the late 1940s against the French. But a second question thus emerged in the Vietnamese context. If religious groups allied with the Viet Minh to oppose French occupation, how would their faith be reconciled with the Viet Minh’s communist atheism? The Cold War contest complicated the place of religion within new nation-states because it facilitated the association of religious belief with politically ideological allegiance. As already mentioned, one of the main forces that both the communist and democratic capitalist projects sought to overcome was “unreasonable” religion. At the core of Cold War dispute there was also “a debate about the nature of human societies and the opposition of spirituality and materialism.”28 Both the Soviet and American projects aimed to eclipse the sovereignty of religious allegiance as a relic of the past. While both in theory adhered to the secularity of the state, American evangelicalism remained firmly rooted in the discourse of the state and the beliefs of politicians. It was communism’s materialist emphasis that more fervently opposed religion’s dominion. Communism’s atheist stance meant that anticommunism could be articulated on a religious plane and that, when communism was perceived to come from outside influence, religious practice could serve as a symbol of nationalist defiance. In Poland, for example, Pope John Paul II was more than just an anticommunist legate, he was a symbol of national pride. Poles actively practiced their Catholic faith as an act of rebellion against what they saw as the USSR’s Eastern Bloc empire, as well as a means of preserving tradition. In the early years of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) after 1955, the political leadership pursued a policy of praising religion as a central value of their non-communist nationalism. The Republic’s constitution, drafted in 1956, recognized what it eventually called “spiritualism” as a unifying term that was intrinsic to Vietnamese national identity. The constitution also enshrined a new idea that spirituality was a force that opposed communism. 27

28

Quoted in Phi-Vân Nguyen, “A Secular State for a Religious Nation: The Republic of Vietnam and Religious Nationalism, 1946–1963,” Journal of Asian Studies, 77/3 (2018), 747. Ibid., 764.

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The strategy of the state was to harness the politicization of religious forces, which occurred during the war against France, into a religious alliance against communism. Works, mainly by Catholic intellectuals, appeared in the second half of the 1950s that traced the roots of Vietnam’s various religions in order to argue for a common spiritual solidarity among the members of a nation that was “inherently religious.” Catholic intellectuals located spirituality at the core of Vietnamese national identity in order to argue that communism was a national as well as a global threat, which united all people of faith against its atheism. Alongside the Republic’s national spiritualism, then, there coexisted a concept of religious solidarity transcending the borders of Vietnam. All Catholics, Buddhists, Confucianists, etc. were united. The ambiguous pursuit of a spiritualism without a precise policy, PhiVân Nguyen argues, ultimately backfired in South Vietnam since it encouraged a religious nationalism that challenged the secular state of the Republic by the early 1960s. Ultimately, the relationship among religion, communism, and anticommunism was not uniform in Vietnam and individuals still made their own individual reckonings with this equation. While Buddhists associated their faith with nationalism during the war against France, those in the South also openly acknowledged Buddhism’s incompatibility with communism during the early years of the Republic in the mid-1950s. But the example of South Vietnam combined two broad components – spirituality and anticommunism – not unique to their nationhood nor with an exclusive membership, into a national identity. The tremendous power which religious and racial solidarities held for anticolonial movements has been captured most clearly by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, a scathing critique of colonialism that also captured his experience as a psychiatrist treating victims during the Algerian war for independence from France. Fanon was sympathetic to the passionate search for a national past and culture because of the colonial practice of devaluing precolonial knowledge and traditions. But, importantly, he pointed out that the nature of that devaluation was not on the national level. Intellectuals in Africa who sought to rehabilitate their culture did so on a continental level because colonialism generalized “the Negro.” Arab territories in the 1940s and 1950s witnessed an “awakening of Islam” that accompanied the struggle for national liberty. Arabic literature and history flourished. For Fanon, it was not surprising that racial and religious movements accompanied nationalist movements because colonialism “tends to oversimplify.” It had never really discriminated on a national level. 437

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Yet Fanon distinguished between national consciousness and nationalism and was particularly concerned about the distance between intellectuals and peasants that would create a thin aesthetic attachment to “tradition” as nationalism. Culture, for Fanon, was not a static but a kinetic and dynamic form. It was the struggle for national existence that “sets culture moving,” and, once the nation had been solidified, it was the nation that would ensure a framework and conditions for culture’s “creative power.” In this process national culture would be transformed, not back to its former shape but into a “new humanism.” It is this move, which influential anticolonial thinkers and political actors like Fanon and Césaire made, that is important for an understanding of nationalism and internationalism in this period. Internationalism was a major component of what many argued would generate the newness of the nations that had emerged out of European imperialism. “What Fanon and Césaire required of their own partisans,” Edward Said later argued, “was to abandon fixed ideas of settled identity and culturally authorized definition. Become different, they said, in order that your fate as colonized peoples can be different.”29 This formula of national consciousness, creative newness, and non-national forms of solidarity generated an array of interpretations by postcolonial nationstates. Perhaps the preeminent examples are the activities of the non-aligned movement and “Third Worldism” to cultivate solidarities among those at the economic periphery who had experienced, or continued to experience, colonial rule. Cuba sent soldiers and doctors to Angola. Ghana and Algeria harbored “freedom fighters” as a sign of their internationalist commitments. Both Cuba and Algeria constructed their integrated national identity using an outward-looking frame of reference. Algeria emphasized its particular locale and its history as a nation that bridged the Arab and African worlds, making it a valuable intermediary force for global networks. The Preamble to the Cuban Constitution, adopted in 1976, enshrined an identity for Cubans as the heirs of multiple combative peoples, tracing their ancestry from the native population and imported enslaved peoples to multiple wars of independence from “imperialist domination” made successful through the support of “proletarian internationalism.” Part of what defined Cubans in this configuration, then, was the generations of migration that made up the peoples, their experience of colonialism, and the outward-looking internationalist missions under the principle of socialism, which post-1959 Cuba aimed to convey. 29

Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry, 15/2 (1989), 205–225, at 225.

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Decolonization and the Cold War

What is important here is that while initiatives that discussed national consciousness at the non-state level brought many writers, artists, and activists together, such as at the several Afro-Asian Writers Conferences, much of this activity occurred in relation to the state. Importantly then, this points in some way to how Cold War ideological pronouncements and decolonization’s emphasis on national sovereignty magnified what Fanon noted was a distinction between nationalism and national consciousness. Algeria is a preeminent example of this. The range of different Muslim communities and practices along with smaller Jewish and Christian communities meant that the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), who led the fight against France and took political control at independence, were always acutely concerned about schisms among the different religious, linguistic, ethnic, and political variations. During the war, discussions about Algeria’s identity were therefore often avoided in order to create a broad coalition. After independence and in the wake of the Congo crisis and its secessionist wars, the same fear of division meant the FLN government marginalized or delegitimized identities that might threaten secession. In the service of nationalism, the FLN constrained its definition of nationhood. And the FLN’s efforts to establish Algeria as a key node and leader of the Third World, which included advice to Iraq at an Arab League meeting on how to deal with its minority Kurdish population, were a strategy for consolidating both the state and the nation. Ultimately, as Jeffrey Byrne argues, Third Worldism was an ideal and a project that also “legitimized and zealously defended the authority of the postcolonial state.”30 One of the cumulative effects of viewing imperialism as an integrated system that required solidarity and collective resistance to secure its defeat was this: if anticolonial solidarity was central to securing national independence, then it could also be seen as integral to building the new nation-state.

Conclusion Both decolonization and the rival solidarities of the Cold War contained within their patriotic calls the promise of a more equitable society. That more equitable society buttressed its vision upon logics of modernity and of associational bonds beyond the nation. Importantly, the people on the ground who conducted the work of building nationhood, through discourses of modernity and development, came from both new Cold War rivalries and 30

Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 225, 10.

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old imperial nodes. The individuals who engaged in projects to build nations, both physically and epistemologically, in the mid-twentieth century engaged in their efforts through frameworks that came from both Cold War and decolonization logics. And these were all in process. The People’s Republic of China, itself an empire containing many “nations” as well as an integral node in the Cold War, debated and configured its national identities through a process that involved Communist Party officials but mainly the research of Chinese ethnologists and linguists, who set the basis for determining the number and classification of China’s diverse ethnicities.31 Chinese nationhood was made not through obedience to a Soviet line, or obedience to a party diktat, but in a debate involving a variety of interested groups trying to reckon with the unresolved legacies of China’s multiethnic Qing Empire and the question of whether there was a Chinese identity or identities. This last example of China also highlights something that should be emphasized: the Cold War was always multipolar rather than bipolar. The twentieth century, much recent history suggests, witnessed a dramatic increase in internationalism. Yet, as Glenda Sluga’s work on the rise of international institutions in liberal mainstream thought suggests, nationalism and internationalism were “entwined” and sometimes mutually supportive rather than separate projects as their theorists often suggest.32 More than mutually supportive, the relationship between nationalism and internationalism was mutually constitutive in ambivalent and surprising ways. One major reason these histories are more than simply entwined is that associational bonds of race, religion, and ideological orientation were an essential component of how European colonialism functioned. They proved generative, therefore, in opposing colonialism and were enlivened by the universalizing ideologies of Cold War rivalry.

Further Reading Barrington, L.W. (ed.), After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). Bhabha, Homi (ed.), Nation and Narrative (London: Routledge, 1990). Chen, Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

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T. S. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

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Decolonization and the Cold War Hecht, Gabrielle (ed.), Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Lazarus, Neil, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Sluga, Glenda, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

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