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Articles

The New England puritans were famously disciplined—intense in their drive for moral righteousness and a more fully Christianized society. In “Puritan Godly Discipline in Comparative Perspective: Legal Pluralism and the Sources of ‘Intensity,'” Richard J. Ross attempts to explain this disposition by situating the colony in two contexts not normally considered together. The first is a comparative exploration of post-Reformation campaigns for godly discipline and confession-building. A comparative investigation of legal pluralism among New World settlements constitutes the second. His study begins by considering the assumption by European Reformation historians of an inverse relationship between the effectiveness of godly discipline and a territory's social complexity and legal pluralism. Contemporary critics of Massachusetts, in fact, viewed the New England way as deficient in precisely those sorts of mechanisms, available in other Reformed polities such as Calvin's Geneva and seventeenth-century Scotland, which could coordinate among different congregations and police the boundaries between the civil and ecclesiastical realms. These critics predicted that schism, oscillations between enthusiasm and lethargy, and inconsistent standards of judgment and administration between clashing churches and civil authorities would together undermine the colony's discipline. They were, however, wrong. And part of the reason lies in Massachusetts's low level of social complexity, at least as compared to European Reformed societies, and its relatively modest degree of legal pluralism. The colony's experience challenges the expectation of scholars of New World pluralism. Rather, the historiography of European confession-building offers an insight into family resemblances among settlements in different regions that were pursuing parallel programs of intense godly discipline and Christian education. In short, evidence from the New World can contribute to debates among scholars of the “confessional age” by demonstrating the importance of legal history in understanding the level of godly discipline.

In “‘As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends': The Emergence of African American Politics in the British Atlantic, 1772–1861,” Van Gosse argues that black Americans first gained significant political leverage not within the United States, but rather around it, in the extended arc of the British Empire. He begins by examining the various locations where English solidarity exerted itself, in Canada and Britain's Caribbean possessions, on the high seas, and in Great Britain itself. As African Americans moved through these spaces, a combination of state policy, public empathy, and British schadenfreude regarding the slaveholding Americans afforded them multiple opportunities for effective agency, from notorious agitators such as Frederick Douglass to the thousands who expatriated themselves to Canada. Gosse also documents the impact of the Anglo–African American connection on domestic political discourse in the United States itself, from a virulent southern Anglophobia regarding “New England and Old England” to African Americans' constant evocation of the “British Lion” as their protector from the “American Eagle.” He concludes that imperial solidarity had a distinct political logic: in demonstrations of Britain's superior appreciation of the value of human freedom, it served to accumulate moral capital and discredit American republicanism. Like other recent scholarship, his article challenges the national-historical narrative of American democracy, pointing out how compromised that story was before the Civil War, especially if one looks at U.S. politics from the outside—as African Americans emphatically did.

AHR Forum

The AHR Forum, “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Revisited,” takes a look at one of the great historical controversies of the post–World War II era. Initiated by Eric Hobsbawm in two articles published in 1954, it continued in a stream of interesting and provocative research and writings until the 1980s. In “Crisis, Chronology, and the Shape of European Social History,” Jonathan Dewald surveys the historiography of the “crisis” controversy during that period. He focuses on two especially influential traditions of historical writing, one deriving from Anglo-American social science and associated with the journal Past and Present, the other linked to the French Annales school. In both traditions, scholars agreed that the confusing events of the seventeenth century should be understood as constituting a single “general crisis,” but they differed in their interpretations of that crisis. British and American historians tended to view it as a crisis of modernization, a turning point on the way to the European and global present. French historians instead interpreted crisis as a sign of European backwardness during the early modern period. Both groups of historians, however, were heavily influenced by events in the world around them, notably by the experiences of former colonial territories undergoing economic development; in this setting, historians of early modern society could present their findings as relevant for thinking about the present. Finally, Dewald suggests that advances in scholarly research only partially explain the profession's increasing skepticism about the crisis idea after 1970.

In the second article in the Forum, “Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Reconsidered,” Geoffrey Parker offers new ways of looking at, and perhaps reviving, the concept of “crisis” for the seventeenth century. His perspective is global, not merely European or Western. He offers a plethora of evidence. For example, the 1640s witnessed more state breakdowns around the world than any previous or subsequent period. Ming China, the most populous state in the world, collapsed; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the largest state in Europe, temporarily disappeared; large parts of the Spanish monarchy, the first global empire in history, seceded; the entire Stuart monarchy (England, Scotland, Ireland, and its North American colonies) rebelled. Two regicides—one in Istanbul and the other in London—and the suicide of the last Ming emperor to rule from Beijing also occurred in the 1640s. In addition, political insurgency and a spate of popular revolts seldom equaled shook the foundations of most states in Europe and Asia. More wars took place around the world in the mid-seventeenth century than in almost any other period of recorded history. Finally, throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the mid-seventeenth century witnessed almost unprecedented human mortality. In seeking to explain these disasters, Parker turns to environmental factors, and in particular evidence of global cooling. He suggests that this “Little Ice Age” furnishes links between climate change and global catastrophe.

These articles are followed by two comments. In the first, “Locating Linkages or Painting Bull's-Eyes around Bullet Holes? An East Asian Perspective on the Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” Michael Marmé considers the relevance of a seventeenth-century general crisis to our understanding of East Asian history. Agreeing that far-distant places faced a common (climate-driven) crisis, he reminds us that the societies experiencing that crisis differed dramatically, and hence their responses differed dramatically as well. He further suggests that it is more fruitful to conceive of those responses as shaping a number of alternate paths to the present than to posit a single successful (English) path, on the one hand, and a large number of historical dead ends, on the other. The second comment, offered by J. B. Shank, is “Crisis: A Useful Category of Post–Social Scientific Historical Analysis?” Shank answers his question with a qualified yes. He first explains how the term entered modern historical writing through its association with medical science and social scientific approaches to history. It was this association that determined our understanding of the concept in the “general crisis of the seventeenth century.” In the wake of recent work in critical science studies, and with the general skepticism about social science history that this scholarship has engendered, Shank asserts that this understanding is no longer tenable. As a rhetorical category, however, and as a concept connected to dramatic narrative art, he argues that crisis can and should remain a viable category of historical analysis. The value of the “general crisis of the seventeenth century” framework to historians today rests, therefore, in recognizing the limitations of its original social scientific approaches and deploying the rubric instead toward rethinking and rewriting the place of the seventeenth century in stories about the making of modernity.