JSTOR

Articles

In “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” Jeremy Adelman explores the relationship between the crises of empires and the making of nations during the so‐called age of revolutions in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Looking especially at the Iberian Atlantic, with comparisons to the British and French imperial spheres, he argues that colonies did not repudiate empire in the name of a new model of sovereignty, thereby simply hastening the demise of old imperial regimes. Empires had much more elasticity, and nations more contingent origins. Indeed, the article questions the familiar formulation of the age of revolutions as marking a definitive transition from empires to nations. Features of empires proved durable and found a place within successor nations. At the same time, the upheavals of the period revealed characteristics of sovereignty once present in imperial regimes that were not so easily reassembled under the mantle of nation‐states.

“Reforestation, Landscape Conservation, and the Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial Algeria,” by Caroline Ford, explores the ideological nature of forest conservation policies and their impact on the indigenous population in French colonial Algeria from the 1860s to the First World War. Ford notes that land management in European empires was hardly uniform; it depended upon local factors and particular forms of colonization. In Algeria, it was shaped more by patterns of settler colonialism, and by how the French conceived their country's historic role in North Africa, than by other factors, such as ecological conditions. Her article argues that France's policies toward the environment reflected deep‐seated colonial anxieties about climate, race, and the relationship between “East” and “West” at a particular moment in the history of French colonialism. It also shows that French initiatives in this context reflected the intense imperial competition between European empires in the so‐called “scramble for Africa” at the end of the nineteenth century.

Review Essay

Recent histories of popular political activity in Europe offer new perspectives on postwar political history, the sources of “democratization,” and political change more generally. In “What's Left? Popular Political Participation in Postwar Europe,” Belinda Davis focuses on the importance of popular movements and their success in asserting the legitimacy of broad, usually extra‐electoral forms of political involvement. By looking at unconventional sorts of activism, recent historians have illustrated the patterns of informal opposition to regimes and governments by a wide range of groups and populations and even across a divided continent. They also have suggested that regular and repeated mobilizations fostered the process of recasting and expanding democracy. Davis frames this work as a challenge to conventional political concepts, such as “revolution” and the ideological division between right and left. She also notes that many authors have been forced to struggle with this challenge; many too have confronted the difficulty of writing history as a historian‐activist.

AHR Forum

The subject of the AHR Forum in this issue is Geoff Eley's book A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005), which provides at once an analysis of the various transformations of historical thinking in the last forty years, a personal narrative of how one historian experienced them, and an argument for how we should proceed in their wake. Three historians with different perspectives and expertise offer their comments on the book, followed by a response from the author himself. William Sewell takes issue with Eley's explanation for the transition from social to cultural history, pointing to larger forces at play relating to transformations in the nature of capitalism, forces that are not easily overcome. Gabrielle M. Spiegel suggests alternatives to Eley's arguments for ways to recapture some of the methodological virtues of social history while holding on to the insights of cultural history. Finally, Manu Goswami offers a critical though appreciative reading of Eley's book, with particular emphasis on the place of subaltern studies in recent historiography. The concluding essay by Geoff Eley is in part a restatement of some of the principal arguments of his book, and in part a response to these three comments.