Browsing by Subject "World history"

Bridging the disciplines of art history and cross-cultural studies using a feminist interpretive lens, this dissertation challenges historical narratives of exceptionalism and Eurocentrism through analysis of patterns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s engagement with expanding worlds through their networks and visual representations of world-traveling people and imported objects. To arrive at an inclusive understanding of the significant relationship between the visual arts and cultural exchange, this dissertation offers a new perspective on the cross-cultural circulation that hallmarked early modern Europe by foregrounding women artists, who as a group have been traditionally excluded from the historical record. A data-driven methodology is used to analyze European women’s access to cross-cultural encounters with cosmopolitan courtiers, enslaved people, and imported curios of Asia, Africa, and the Americas through a database of 249 artists designed and populated for this dissertation. Visual analysis of artworks by a subset of these artists is conducted to understand the relationship between women’s worldly encounters and their subsequent creative choices in depicting artistic subjects that came to be considered exotic, thus positioning the artist as cultural mediator. This research makes a dual contribution: first, it challenges persistent narratives that frame women artists’ access to the world as unavoidably limited by gendered social norms. Second, it constructs a new narrative centered on cross-cultural exchange that moves beyond the limits imposed by traditional accounts that focus exclusively on male artists or treat women artists as anomalies. The first key finding of this dissertation challenges popular narratives that present early modern women artists as “magnificent exceptions” or as products of unusually tolerant environments. This project decenters traditional focal points of individual artists and cities through a database used to map artists’ connections and sites of encounter. The data visualized through maps, graphs, and tables demonstrate the geographic breadth and continuity of European women’s artistic activity. These analyses evince many nodes of activity to support the artists’ cross-cultural exposure. The volume of representations in which women artists engaged with wider worlds demonstrates that they actively participated in the history of cross-cultural circulation, rather than existing outside it. By restoring women’s rightful places in this history, we gain the opportunity to assess whether women artists challenged pre-existing imagery and attitudes of cultural imperialism. The second key finding stems from case studies organized by scales of physical and cultural distance, a structure that enables assessment of the relationship between the intimacy of the artist-subject encounter and the quality of the resulting representation. First, investigation of portraits of world-travelers artists encountered in courtly settings addresses whether women’s depictions aligned with conventional representations of the same subjects. Then, examination of women’s representations of manufactured curiosities and naturalia from Asia, Africa, and the Americas explores how such depictions distinctively relate to European desires for universal power and possession. Finally, this dissertation works to center the erasures of Black figures in visual constructions by women artists in early modern Italy by assessing how women’s representational choices participate in the perpetuation or subversion of pre-existing cultural narratives. These three lines of analysis circumvent the draw to exceptionalize certain figures by focusing on sets of relationships and bringing unnamed figures into the framework. Ultimately, although the artists’ choices conform to some racially biased conventions, they also open the possibility of collaboration with foreign individuals; pay homage to the production of artists from different continents; and create expansive roles for imaginary characters represented as Black. This analysis contributes to our understanding of women’s complex intersectional positions in matrices of variable power and access, and to the debate on their roles as producers of knowledge and culture.

This dissertation asks how Europe’s multinational states legitimized themselves in the face of new, nation-based theories of sovereignty around the turn of the twentieth century. It answers this question by analyzing the production, reception, and circulation of the concept of “empire” in and between Central and Eastern Europe, and between the European continent and European colonies. It argues that a binary distinction between “modern,” unitary, mononational states and backward, decentralized, multinational “empires” emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century among European nationalist jurists, who used these paired concepts to justify both ethnonational homogenization and overseas expansion. It also shows that Habsburg subjects in linguistically and religiously diverse regions of the Dual Monarchy, and especially Hapsburg Jews, successfully challenged this discursive construction of multinational states as abnormal, archaic, and “imperial.” The redefinition of Austria as an “empire,” that is, an association of nations with historic rights to territory, posed challenges that could only be overcome, scholars from the Monarchy realized, by replacing the dichotomy of nation and empire with a new set of legal, political, and sociological concepts. Social analysis of the state provided, they believed, the means by which to produce these new concepts. A century before the “imperial turn” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, legal scholars from Habsburg Austria turned to the sociology of the state and articulated an influential, if now forgotten, critique of the increasingly hegemonic nationalist legal principles that both undergirded European imperial projects and threatened the continued existence of pluralistic multinational states.

Identifying the major figures and institutions involved in the elaboration of this critique, this dissertation reveals an alternative to Britain, France, and Germany’s national-imperial sociologies and a distinct tradition of international law. Members of this alternative school reconfigured “society” as a transnational category of analysis and the state as a space of competition and negotiation between interest groups. They also highlighted the processes of internal colonization that produced supposed nation-states and drew attention to the hazy boundary between the European metropole and colony. Some even questioned the distinction between “multiracial” Western European and “multinational” Eastern European states and the reality of the nation as a transhistorical entity. The Bukovinian-Jewish sociologist of law Eugen Ehrlich, for example, reframed international law as an already-existing global network of transborder normative communities and legal pluralism as a fundamental element of, rather than hindrance to, political modernization, while the Galician-Jewish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz advanced the thesis that the origin of states, including supposed nation-states, lay in foreign conquest and imperial expansion, rather than in the organic growth of pre-existing ethnic units. These jurists-turned-sociologists were enthusiastically received by scholars in other ethnolinguistically diverse and stratified regions of the European periphery, such as by Manuel González Prada in Peru and Benoy Kumar Sarkar in Bengal, who creatively adapted Habsburg critiques of the European nation-state to their own political needs.

By offering a transnational legal and intellectual history of “empire” and its contested transition from a discursive to an analytical category, this dissertation contributes to larger debates about the viability of Europe’s multinational monarchies, the roots of twentieth-century federalism and internationalism, and the relationship between the social sciences, nationalism, and imperialism. It bridges the divide between two transformational moments in twentieth-century global history: the partial, though, to many, deeply significant, nationalization of European empires before 1918 and the frustrated efforts of anticolonial leaders to construct multiracial, democratic European empires in the era after 1945. Methodologically, my research challenges historians to look beyond more familiar intra-imperial and inter-colonial networks of exchange, to reconsider our use of “empire” and “nation-state” as units of comparative historical analysis, and to break down the artificial distinction between “Europe” and non-Europe that was drawn by nationalist social scientists in the late nineteenth century. Most significantly, it compels us to see methodological nationalism as a geographically and temporally limited phenomenon whose rise to dominance in the twentieth century was resisted by both European and non-European actors.

On Christmas Day in 1788, on the eve of a year which was to see the entire Atlantic world once more convulsed with revolution and war, a struggling farmer and occasional fisherman from the village of Mousehole in western Cornwall turned his back on the sea. William Carvosso had never found maritime life to his liking, and for some time been looking for an opportunity to, in his words, support himself and his family "wholly on the land." So when that opportunity finally did arise Carvosso was quick to move his young family to a rented farm near the inland village of Ponsanooth. With a little capital and zealous stewardship Carvosso began to thrive in his new home. The move, which at first glance seemed to take the family from cosmopolitan littoral to parochial isolation, was actually the first step of an intergenerational journey that saw Carvosso's children and grandchildren witness convict hangings in Van Diemen's Land, the Tai-ping Rebellion in Shanghai, Blackfoot and Plains Cree horse raids on the Great Plains, and the trafficking of indentured labor from India to the Caribbean. The vehicle which transported the Carvossos about the globe - and which facilitated their rise as a family from the laboring classes to the lower reaches of respectability and beyond - was the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion and its ancillary Missionary Society. The following dissertation is concerned with the Carvossos' movements, and the ideology by which they encouraged, made sense of, and justified their imperial adventures.

The Carvossos left evidence of their activities scattered about the globe. The greatest concentration of material is in church and missionary collections in London, but they also have a presence in a wide range of provincial and colonial archives and newspapers. Their movement allows us to attend to not just the Empire and the Nation, but to the transnational and the local, the provincial and the metropolitan, and the mutual constitution of those various categories. They were never fixed in one site but travelled from their original home in the village of Mousehole, to Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales, Shanghai, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, Jamaica and frequently back to England. The Carvossos identified themselves by turn as Cornish, English, British, or Colonial, depending on their circumstances. Their active participation in transatlantic Methodism, global Evangelicalism, and Cornish Revivalism further complicated the issue of their various imperial identities, and helps reveal the complexities and contradictions of colonial life in the nineteenth-century British Empire.

It is received wisdom that Britain and France played the leading role in overseas expansion in the eighteenth century while the German lands lacked both a central political authority and colonies of their own. We know from the work of scholars such as Susanne Zantop that German intellectuals were fascinated by encounters with non-European cultures, and German genres of travel writing, popular drama, and the philosophy of history all manifest an obsession with thinking about forms of cultural difference. In many cases, such efforts are wrought with ambivalence. The German world traveler Georg Forster is torn between the passionate admiration for a paradise-like Tahiti and the judgment of Tahiti as uncivilized. August von Kotzebue, Germany's most popular playwright around 1800, wrote dramas set in the New World and other exotic locales. In his Bruder Moritz (1791, Brother Moritz), the protagonist seeks to educate the child-like Arabs at the same time as he criticizes his aunt's racial condescension as lacking empathy. In Johann Gottfried Herder's philosophy of history, sympathy for the slaves in European colonies is accompanied by a belief in European cultural superiority. In all these examples, there is more at stake than the fantasies of German colonial rule that Zantop called our attention to a decade ago. My dissertation targets precisely the equivocal nature of the German colonial imagination around 1800 and suggests a different reading strategy.

Postcolonial scholarship has critiqued the ways in which visions of European cultural and racial superiority supported the expansion of colonialism. Recently, scholars have also foregrounded how European culture gave rise to a critique of colonial atrocity. My dissertation, however, stresses the co-existence of both Eurocentrism and the critique of colonial violence and understands this seeming contradiction as a response to the challenge from cultural and colonial difference. I identify emotion or the mode of sentimentalism as the channel through which the alleged cultural otherness questions both colonial violence and European superiority with universal claims. In my analysis, non-Europeans are not only the colonized or the oppressed but also regain their agency in co-constructing a distinct vision of global modernity.

The dissertation concerns itself with both canonical works and popular culture. I first explore Georg Forster's highly influential travelogue Reise um die Welt (1777/1778, A Voyage Round the World), documenting the interplay between Enlightenment anthropology and the impact of South Pacific cultures. Kotzebue's cross-cultural melodramas imagine different orders of love, sexuality, and marriage and challenge the noble form of bourgeois tragedy as theorized by Friedrich Schiller. Contested by Immanuel Kant, Herder's universal history inaugurates a new logic of organizing different cultures into an organic ongoing process of historical development and, at the same time, articulates cultural relativism as a paradigm shift. My reading strategy through cultural and colonial difference unearths the pivotal roles which the impulses from the non-European world played in the construction of German culture around 1800.

By acknowledging both Eurocentrism and anticolonial critiques in these German texts, this dissertation stresses the impact of cultural otherness on the architecture of German thought through sentimentalism and provides both historically and theoretically differentiated understandings of the German colonial imagination in the global eighteenth century.