Over the course of his maritime career, Francisco García experienced multiple forms of captivity and redemption in North Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. This article analyzes the testimony that García delivered in 1682 before royal officials in Cartagena de Indias. Crucially, in that testimony García used the word rescate to describe not just his redemption in Algiers, but also the interimperial slave trade where he found employment in the Caribbean, the ransoming of Afro-descended captives in Jamaica, and the English raiding and smuggling that he witnessed as a captive of the English pirate Bartholomew Sharp in the Pacific. Rescate, which translates from Spanish as either ransom or redemption, served as a flexible, polysemic term to describe the various contexts in which captivity and cross-confessional trade intersected during García’s life. Those multiple forms of captivity and redemption, however, are not normally discussed together. This essay traces the similarities, differences, and entanglements between the multiple forms of rescate described by García. Through the lens of rescate, this microhistorical analysis of García’s maritime career shows how Mediterranean maritime practices permeated the Caribbean and how those same practices refracted in a Caribbean world shaped by racialized slavery.

This article contributes to the history of knowledge by analyzing power relations at the intersection of the academic and political fields. It focuses on the evolution of Italian administrative science (AS) from its introduction into the legal curriculum in 1875 to its temporary removal from law faculties in 1935. The article begins by describing the naissance of the Italian university model and its foreign influences. It then analyzes the controversy surrounding the epistemological foundations and boundaries of an emerging and contested AS, tracing debates linked to political issues of state sovereignty and the legitimacy of welfare policies. The teaching of AS flourished into the 1880s. However, regulatory changes affected the balance of power in the recruitment of professors, and the field began to decline. This is illustrated by a reconstruction of the links between coparticipants in recruitment juries, based on network analysis. Combined with biographical data, these results show how defenders of a highly formalist legal method imposed their vision on the definition and classification of administrative disciplines. Finally, a study of representative individual trajectories contrasts the ongoing marginalization of those who favored an interventionist AS with the legitimation of its detractors: supporters of the liberal state, who nevertheless adopted disparate positions in the face of the rising tide of Fascism.

Intended as a means of accelerating the process of racial mixing, or mestizaje, that had supposedly been taking place since the Conquest, Mexican Indigenism (indigenismo) set itself the successive goals of first promoting “racial fusion” among the population, and then planning the “acculturation” of indigenous minorities. Developed during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the first indigenista policies, whether implemented by the Autonomous Department of Indigenous Affairs, by the Ministry of Public Education or by the National Indigenist Institute, broadly aimed to “incorporate the Indian into civilization.” Resulting from a vision that was simultaneously occidental, progressive, and paternalist, they thereby transformed the racial category “indigenous” into a legitimate political category, set within an Inter-American frame of reference. Several young Mexicans, having benefited from the first Indian Boarding Schools that spread in the 1930s, could henceforth consider themselves “Indians” or indígenas, reverse the stigma from which they had suffered, and use their alterity strategically as a political tool. This article retraces the history of this generation which, in the 1940s and 1950s, mobilized its “racial brothers” in a series of organizations that sprang up around the National Confederation of Indigenous Youth. These organizations formed a massive national Indian movement, with tens of thousands of members, which sought both to articulate socio-economic, educational, and health claims and to integrate into the Institutional Revolutionary Party, as an official “sector” defined along racial lines.

Captivity, migration, and labor markets—rather than “civilizing” missions or anarchic state evasion—defined the southwest frontier of the Ming Empire. Reframing James C. Scott’s Zomia thesis, this article shows that communities in the inhospitable highlands did not simply flee the Ming state; they competed with it by acquiring people, labor, and expertise. Obtained via forceful capture, targeted recruitment, or voluntary defection, some newcomers were valuable for their manual labor, others for their military or reproductive capacities or knowledge of statecraft. This article uses two case studies to illustrate this labor economy. Duzhang, initially acephalous, turned to regime-building through large-scale raiding in the sixteenth century, absorbing Han and non-Han captives and defectors who supplied it with skills and legitimacy. Bozhou, long ruled by tributary chieftains (tusi), drew willing Han migrants and advisers; the Ming countered not just with arms but with litigation, weaponizing law to fracture the Bozhou polity before the decisive war of 1599–1600 that ended with its “barbarization.” Across the frontier, Miao mercenaries leveraged their military prowess to secure valuable resources like land, women, and silver from the highest bidders. The result was a hybrid political field where coercion and consent were blurred, migration surged, and rival regimes—imperial and indigenous—vied fiercely for control of human labor. Ming imperial expansion emerges not as an inevitable conquest but as a pragmatic, improvised, and contingent reaction to relentless competition for labor at its margins.

This article considers the role of Greek war workers, often called “mercenaries,” in the transmission of culture from the Near East and Egypt to Greece, as well as the impact of their activities on the formulation of their own ethnic identity, from the eighth to the sixth century BCE. It opens with a discussion of the scholarly terminology applied to foreign war workers from ancient Greece to the present, showing its ambiguities and limitations. The evidence for the presence and activities of Greek war workers in the eastern Mediterranean is then presented in a comparative framework, leveraging case studies from other periods, with special attention paid to the army of the Neo-Assyrian kings and the role of Scandinavians in the Byzantine army of the Macedonian dynasty. In conclusion, a broader overview of ethnic formations and subdivisions within imperial armies, drawing on case studies from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and beyond, makes it possible to reevaluate the formation of an Ionian identity in the archaic eastern Mediterranean.

Focusing on two books that seek to renew the study of Native North American history, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen (2022), and The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (2023), this review article offers an opportunity to survey the current state of the field. Both authors raise two of the major questions that animate the scholarship: that of Native Americans’ agency, widely acknowledged and accepted by the historical community, and that of their rationale for action, for which contrasting visions divide historians. Here, I consider the extent to which Blackhawk’s and Hämäläinen’s emphasis on Native agency may in fact have the effect of obscuring reflection on those logics. Although Hämäläinen, unlike Blackhawk, insists on the risks of teleology and strives to highlight the variety of modes of colonial intrusion, the two historians are united in their renouncement of a form of anthropology that once sought to render the cultural integrity of Native Americans. The analytical lexicon they propose (for example, the term “empire”) sometimes leads to an erasure of cultural difference and a distortion of history. This article therefore argues for a renewed complementarity between history and anthropology.

Prehispanic antiquities from the Americas became a recognizable aesthetic, scientific, commercial, and legal category over the long nineteenth century. This article maps out the actors, sites, and material and ideological configurations involved in its creation and development. The first section examines the Iberian antiquarian tradition that brought preconquest artefacts into circulation as epistemic objects from the mid-1700s, against the backdrop of growing interest in material vestiges as objects of investigation. The article then turns to the collecting scenes in the newly independent Spanish American countries, where creole elites, local museums, and foreigners competed for antiquities, driven by their own diverse interests. The third section explores the ways in which, by the mid-1800s, “paper technologies” functioned as heuristic tools for knowing, organizing, and interpreting antiquities, affording ontological density to specific objects and groups of objects and leading to the construction of regimes of knowledge and expertise devoted specifically to them. Finally, the fourth section reconstructs the national and international institutionalization of the preconquest past in the late 1800s and early 1900s—through the consolidation of national museums and the establishment of archaeology and ethnography as scientific disciplines—to consider how these processes entrenched these antiquities’ significance and meaning.

A number of recent monographs testify to the dynamism of transimperial analyses of the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the late modern period. In particular, the study of prisoners of war, refugees, and pilgrims has enabled three young scholars, Will Smiley, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, and Lâle Can, to offer fresh perspectives on the history of institutions central to political modernity. By exploiting new sources, focusing on interactions between state and non-state actors, exploring ordinary practices of government, and decentering perspectives, these volumes contribute to shaping a powerful historiographical renewal. Reading them together, this article considers the dynamics of the co-construction of imperial orders based on shared conceptions of sovereignty, subjecthood, and protection. It underlines the systemic entanglement of the two empires’ colonization projects, the centrality of borderland actors, and the complex redefinition of affiliations and belonging that took place in the course of these often violent processes of modernization.

This article explores the ways that social groups represented political strife in the late medieval Low Countries, considering how these events were remembered but also how they could be recycled and manipulated. It has already been shown that late medieval politics must have been generational, with those involved in revolts actively maintaining the memories of their predecessors’ struggles. This study argues, however, that the forms of these cyclical memories were also shaped by the fundamental social and religious matrix that was Christian liturgical time, as reflected in the telling names—such as “Good Friday” or “Evil Wednesday”—that urban craftsmen gave to their uprisings. This practice of remembering political conflicts through days of the week that seem to be allusions to the Passion cycle is frequently attested, especially in fourteenth-century Flanders. The study of such name-giving, along with the performance and use of liturgical symbols in revolts, shows that late medieval citizens were not merely passive receptors of ecclesiastical categorizations of time imposed from above; they also actively reinterpreted chronological elements as they shaped and altered the representation of events, political and otherwise, with specific audiences in mind. Ways of naming important political events thus offer an indication of how social groups constructed ideology to represent common pasts within a “social time” relevant to their group identities—even if those discourses were based on a widely shared Christian conception of historical time influenced by liturgical practice.

Fishing, the last practice of exploiting nature based on the large-scale predation and commercialization of wild animal resources, has not always received the attention it deserves from the social sciences in terms of its ecological, anthropological, and historical significance.1 Studies devoted to the subject, long confined to narrowly specialized and spatially compartmentalized subfields of research such as maritime history and anthropology, have remained comparatively niche.2 The fact that a generalist journal such as the Annales has devoted an entire special issue to the history of fishing worlds is therefore significant. It is a sign of the increased recognition and visibility of the many studies currently being carried out on the subject, and also an indication of a new interest in the ocean, or at least of a different way of looking at it.3 Until recently, most historical accounts were written about or from dry land.4 This “default” land-based perspective began to be criticized and then countered in the 2000s, particularly in the context of reflections on the Anthropocene. Over the last two decades, the liquid part of the globe has become an object and a field of investigation in its own right, to the point that this decentering (or refocusing, depending on one’s perspective) has been described by its proponents as a genuine “oceanic turn.”5 The novelty, amplitude, and radical nature of this shift still need to be qualified. Nevertheless, as the anthropologist Hélène Artaud has shown in a recent book,6 studies “of the sea” are currently demonstrating a hitherto unprecedented level of reflexivity, contributing to a different perception of the ocean: no longer an empty, virgin, and threatening space, but an inhabited, transformed, and threatened environment.

This article is based on an analysis of some thirty fishing experiments carried out on the coast of the English Channel between the 1680s and the 1860s. It describes the early development of an experimental way of governing marine resources under the ancien régime, followed by its gradual normalization over the course of the nineteenth century. As the article shows, the fishing policies designed to ensure the conservation of these resources were the result of negotiation between the French ministry of the Navy and fishing communities, whose monopoly on the production of fishing knowledge enabled them to defend their technical and legal specificities.

This article discusses ab intestat succession within the Republic of Venice as a way to analyze the interaction between legal procedure and political economy. By focusing on those who died intestate on Venetian vessels, and contextualizing intestate succession rules within the political economy of the Republic, it argues for the importance of mobile wealth in both economic and social terms. In so doing, it discusses the ways in which regulations and procedures concerning intestate succession were designed to protect credit networks and trade interests, from the dealings of rich merchants to the small-scale transactions of seamen and seafarers, commenting also on how this affected their wives. The essay argues that Venice utilized reciprocity in these matters as a way to support its economic goals. Finally, it suggests how this documentary evidence can enable future research to reevaluate the material wealth and micro-entrepreneurial activities of seamen in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean.

This article is based on fieldwork carried out between 2011 and 2017 at two Protestant places of worship in Tianjin, a city to the southeast of Beijing: an official church and a “domestic gathering point.” Based on the observation of eighty-three services as well as exchanges with preachers and worshippers, this study was conducted in a context of religious growth, particularly in the case of Protestantism, that saw the multiplication of public gatherings despite restrictions. The analysis shows how, in a context where references to the past cannot be mobilized to make sense of present experiences, preachers and witnesses draw on the Bible and its “true stories” to propose a less equivocal understanding of situations encountered in everyday life. In this way, the Bible offers new linguistic models that enable new forms of interpretation, at a distance from the uncertainties but also the ideological rigidities of the language available in twenty-first-century China. It also offers reference points that, freed from notions of doubt, can absorb the expression of all sorts of anxieties and uncertainties. The figure of the “false believer” and that of the bad fellow citizen are thus deplored for the same evil: false pretenses. Language, often denounced as misleading and full of dissimulation, is here used to name and contain such suspicions and to develop shared references and interpretations deemed less ambivalent.

This review article seeks to analyze the main contributions of historical research and, to a lesser extent, sociology and anthropology, over the last twenty years in three distinct but closely interwoven domains: the history of eugenics, the history of heredity, and the history of the biological notion of race. After clarifying the relations between these too-often conflated subjects, the article compares the evolution of their respective fields of research, distinguishing between the development of previously addressed themes and the exploration of new perspectives. It considers historiographical reflections on eugenicist policies of forced sterilization, on the close relations established between eugenics and natalism in certain countries such as France, and on the genealogy of the category of race and mechanisms for objectifying racial diversity. The profound renewal of the three domains of research over the period is analyzed via two complementary perspectives: the significant broadening of their geographical horizons and the reproblematization of their scientific objects. Though the focus of earlier work on the European and North-American experience may have suggested that biopolitics, eugenics, and “scientific racism” were the prerogative of Western countries, the recent increase in studies of Latin America, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East and Africa, has definitively discredited this reductive vision. In parallel, a better awareness of gender perspectives, the exploration of historical continuities between eugenics and medical genetics, and the reevaluation of the role of biomedicine in debates on human heredity and the notion of race have profoundly renewed the three fields of research studied here.

When the adjective “vegetarian” first appeared in a published text, in 1842, it was hardly intended as a daring neologism: derived from the Latin vegetus, it was meant to indicate a healthy state of body and mind, and was employed as an alternative to various other terms such as “abstinent,” “Pythagorean,” or “frugivorous.” The nineteenth-century “vegetarians” sought to emphasize the conceptual continuity between their choice to abstain from meat, or from animal products altogether, and the long tradition of ancient philosophers like Porphyry and Plutarch, as well as biblical imagery regarding human diet before the Fall. This article examines the intellectual milieu in which the word “vegetarianism” was coined in order to establish the connections both with current understandings of this diet and with discussions on abstaining from meat before the term itself started to be employed. The result is a case study of the intersections between the history of a concept and the entangled histories of the various words accompanying it. The methodology of controlled anachronism is presented as a productive tool that allows historians (of philosophy) to identify conceptual trajectories while safeguarding contextualization, and thus to trace the history of an idea amidst terminological change. The article is a plaidoyer for the application of anachronisms to historical research, moving beyond the view that they are incompatible with history’s alleged need for neutrality.

Building on previous scholarship on “genetic capital” and the politicization of animal economies, this paper examines how animal breeds and their transnational movement became geopolitical issues in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. In particular, it examines how the French government’s efforts to emulate English and Spanish wool pro-duction, and to overcome the economic advantage stemming from its rivals’ superior sheep breeds, intensified in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Despite bans on the exportation of live sheep from Britain and Spain, the French strove to improve their flocks through illicit imports and diplomatic agreements. These efforts culminated in the 1760s, as the Bureau of Commerce began to collaborate with agriculturalists, naturalists, diplomats, and smugglers to bring superior breeds of sheep across the Anglo-French maritime border and the Pyrenean frontier with Spain. These projects developed in tandem with new conceptions of the permanence of race and breed, according to which animals would retain their characteristics in new climates and environments. Combining perspectives from economic, agricultural, political, and cultural history, this article uses the concept of animal mercantilism to open up the geopolitical stakes inherent in understandings of animals, race, and climate.

In 1717, an anonymous petition to the king of Spain expressed concern about the excessive number of Muslims living in Cartagena (Murcia). This complaint prompted the Council of Castile to launch a survey of the Muslim population with the aim of clarifying their status. In addition to galley slaves, the inquiry focused in particular on libertinos, a little-known category of slaves who lived and worked freely in the city but were heavily indebted to their masters due to the sums owed for their ransom. This article reconstructs the condition of these unbound slaves, who lived apart from their masters’ households, and the tensions this provoked between competing systems of norms. On the one hand, the right of slaves to work to finance their own redemption, and that of their masters to live off the rents imposed on them, were deeply rooted in local custom. On the other, rising insecurity along the coast prompted local authorities and the Crown to restrict these overlapping rights by forcing masters to keep their slaves at home. At stake in this conflict between different slavery regimes, the one based on local law and the other on royal jurisdiction, were slaves’ access to the labor market and their right to free residency and the protections afforded by contract law. Finally, by placing the inquiry itself at the heart of the study, the article investigates the meaning of a procedure that was less a demographic enumeration of slaves than a redistribution of rights to the city among its Muslim inhabitants.

Historians have been remarkably incurious about the legal dimensions of “informal empire.” This article shows that legal practices in fact created and sustained sovereign indeterminacy. Our focus is Pitcairn, a small, remote island in the Pacific settled in 1789 by a handful of Britons and Tahitians after the mutiny on the Bounty. British officials, legal professionals, island sojourners, and historians have advanced a jumble of claims, each attached to a particular timeline, about how Pitcairn became British. One prominent view is that a single British navy captain took possession of the island in 1838. We challenge this and other prevailing accounts by showing how repeated reconfigurations of island-imperial connections kept Pitcairn from being either enfolded into the empire or established as an independent entity. Intermittent visits by British naval officers gradually constituted a makeshift legal system, while rival factions of islanders steered imperial agents to support local schemes, including bids for island rule. For a century and a half, these processes held Pitcairn on the threshold of the empire. The significance of the narrative recounted here extends beyond one small island. This microhistory illustrates broad processes of interpolity ordering and locates the origins of sovereign indeterminacy in the “legal circuitry” of nineteenth-century empire.

An expanding scholarship on interracial intimacy in colonial contexts has generally focused on cases of administrative disputes or judicial conflicts that brought “mixed couples,” “mixed-race families,” or “métis” to the attention of colonial authorities. But what of the lives and experiences of those who did not contest their legal status, remaining under the administrative radar and thus virtually invisible in the archives of the colonial state? This article tackles these issues in the context of the French colony of New Caledonia by analyzing the trajectory of a household established out of official sight, made up of a French settler, a Kanak woman, and their descendants. The goal here is to understand what this phenomenon of relative social invisibility reveals about the scope and limits of colonial domination “at ground level.” Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, the article traces the conditions under which this family configuration was able to emerge and then endure for over fifty years. It finally disappeared after the death of the French settler, when each of the wider family groups—European and Kanak—to varying degrees sought to efface this awkward past within their respective social worlds.

This response to the Annales’ forum on my Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions focuses on the Southern framework of my analysis, on the place of the Greece case within this context, and on the chronology of the age of revolutions. It highlights that the term “South” was adopted by the revolutionaries themselves in Portugal, Spain, Piedmont, and Naples—but not in Greece. It argues that a comparative framework enables us to explore the Greek revolution not only as a war of independence but also as a moment of political apprenticeship. Finally, it suggests that this Southern focus invites us to reintegrate what Franco Venturi termed the “first crisis” of the ancien régime in the 1760s and 1770s into the chronology of the age of revolutions.