Cet article propose une relecture de l’exposition du Louvre « Revoir Watteau. Un comédien sans réplique. Pierrot, dit le Gilles » (2024) en confrontant la scénographie et le catalogue. Le propos met en évidence la polyphonie du personnage de Pierrot comme de l’œuvre de Watteau. Parce qu’il circule entre le théâtre, les arts visuels et la littérature, Pierrot permet d’éclairer plusieurs siècles de recompositions scéniques et de faire dialoguer l’histoire et l’historiographie de l’art, des spectacles et de la ville.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.