Review
Author(s): Seymour Drescher
Review by: Seymour Drescher
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Jun., 2001), pp. 932-933
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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932
Reviews
of
Books
dealing with a vast array of literature, and she adeptly
ginning to study the history of sexuality and gender will
avoids the obvious trap of developing a Eurocentric
find the book extraordinarily useful, particularly the
analysis. In fact, Wiesner-Hanks shows a great ability
to read and analyze the African, Asian, Latin Ameri-
extensive annotated bibliographies included at the end
can, and North American situations.
broadly, and she seems to have captured virtually every
Wiesner-Hanks divides her book into a series of
of each chapter. Wiesner-Hanks has read extremely
English-language publication that relates to early mod-
chapters that focuses first on Europe (including the
ern sexuality (the inclusion of some non-English-
premodern development of Christianity, Judaism, and
language sources would have been helpful). Finally,
classical intellectual and religious life, followed by a
for the experienced scholar in the history of sexuality,
discussion of early modern Protestantism, Catholicism,
and Orthodoxy), then on Latin America, Africa, Asia,
and North America. She divides each chapter into
the author's comparative framework provides an ex-
sections that roughly correspond to what she calls
to the field.
cellent way to refer to various areas of the world.
Overall, this book will become a remarkable addition
PETER SIGAL
"ideas, institutions, and effects." To Wiesner-Hanks,
the production of early modern sexual regulation and
California State University,
practice were intimately linked with Christianity, a by
no means obvious thesis. Scholars who have studied
Los Angeles
sexuality have sometimes failed to see this relationship
and have assumed that regulation and practice have
PAUL BUTEL. The Atlantic. (Seas in History.) Translated by IAIN HAMILTON GRANT. New York: Routledge.
little to do with each other. Others have suggested that
all practice is created by regulation or vice versa.
Wiesner-Hanks ably navigates her way through this
morass by reading reports of both practice and regulation as related to, but not necessarily dependent on
This book opens a welcome new series of volumes on
each other.
focus. Paul Butel conscientiously sweeps through two
In an attempt to provide a clear story, WiesnerHanks avoids many historiographical controversies,
sometimes to her detriment. For example, in her
discussion of the Native American berdache, she posits
and a half millennia of human interaction around
1999. Pp. xiii, 330. $65.00.
"Seas in History." Previous syntheses of Atlantic history have been more limited in thematic or temporal
and across the ocean. He begins with the imaginary
lands projected by antiquity into the terrifying expanse
of the Sea of Perpetual Gloom and ends with the era of
these historical figures as "two-spirit people," a thor-
air travel, containerization, and cruise hotels. The
oughly modern interpretation of identity not supported, in this reader's view, by the early modern
sources. Further, probably in an attempt to keep the
book follows familiar lines of exploration, appropriation and conflict, moving outward from the Mediter-
book short, the author does not always provide sufficient detail on various topics. However, if she had
finish, the author's perspective is the Atlantic "as
attempted to deal with the historiographical controversies or provided us with more details, it certainly
would have taken away from the story presented.
In each chapter, Wiesner-Hanks is very careful to
discuss a wide diversity of issues related to sexuality. If
a student with little knowledge of religion reads this
moves the reader through two thousand years of
book, that student will come away with some knowledge of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations and
the relationship between Christianity and colonization,
as well as of indigenous religions in the various
regions. In most chapters, Wiesner-Hanks discusses
the intellectual history of sexuality within the region,
followed by the influence of Christianity and its institutions. She then moves on to look at clerical sexuality,
the family and heterosexuality among the laity, pros-
titution, sodomy, and sexual magic. Her inclusion of
such a diversity of reproductive and non-reproductive
sexuality makes the book both more interesting and
ranean basin and Northern Europe. From start to
seen from Europe" (p. 1). The first chapter quickly
seaborne ventures from the Phoenicians to the Viking
feats of conquest and exploration along the northern
arc of islands between the British Isles and Newfoundland.
The remainder of the book is devoted to the "New
Atlantic," initially opened up by the Iberians in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and subsequently
dominated by the Northwestern European powers and
the United States. The "Colonial Atlantic" has pride of
place in Butel's account. Spain's aborted seaborne
invasion of England in 1588 is allotted two well-
wrought pages. The somewhat more successful and far
more massive amphibious invasion of France in 1944
goes unmentioned. The author's most favored Atlantic
moment is the seventeenth and the eighteenth century
(colonialism's "golden age"). Four of the book's six
tables deal with just fifty years, between 1761 and 1810,
level. Undergraduate students in courses in early
and more space is devoted to the late-eighteenth
century "battle of the Atlantic" than to the combined
battles of both twentieth-century world wars. The
modern world history (or even early modern European
temporal phases identified are the familiar sequences
history) will be able to follow the argument, and they
will discover a rich diversity of sexual practices and
of power and trade: Iberia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Northwestern Europe in the seven-
regulations. Graduate and undergraduate students be-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, and Euro-America
more useful to a wide audience.
Instructors will find this book useful at almost any
AMERICAN
HISTORICAL
REVIEW
JUNE
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2001
Comparative/World
933
during the past two centuries. Butel devotes ample
subsequent volumes will be more rigorously scruti-
space to transnational aspects of his story, including
nized.
fundamental movements of technology and products.
SEYMOUR DRESCHER
The ebb and flow of human migrations also receives
University of Pittsburgh
considerable attention, especially the streams of Africans and Europeans before 1800 and the great Euro-
pean migration between the fall of Napoleon
Bonaparte and World War I.
Butel's book is more of an introductory narrative
than a scholarly monograph. The flow of events, goods,
and people is uninterrupted by discussions of major
historiographical disputes, and the reader's attention
is rarely turned toward discussions of long-term
change and large-scale comparisons. This is especially
obvious in the way non-Europeans are fitted into
Butel's account. The demographic disaster of the
Euro-African encounter with the Amerindians is intro-
duced only after the chapter on the eighteenth-century
colonial Atlantic. The section on the transatlantic slave
trade, although treated more fully, is similarly posi-
tioned. Readers are therefore unlikely to recall the
first chapter's mention that the Vikings made use of
enslaved Europeans on their first settlement of Iceland
and reached the Western hemisphere at a time when
Amerindians were less vulnerable to European domi-
DARLENE CLARK HINE and JACQUELINE McLEOD, editors. Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black
People in Diaspora. (Blacks in the Diaspora.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1999. Pp. xxv, 491.
$29.95.
How best to understand the historical experiences and
identities of peoples of African descent in the Americas is the common query in Darlene Clark Hine and
Jacqueline McLeod's edited collection. The eighteen
essays, divided into four parts, explore how peoples of
African descent have shaped and been shaped by the
developing Atlantic world since the 1500s. Except for
Earl Lewis's opening essay, "To Turn on a Pivot:
Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas" (which first appeared in the American
Historical Review [June 1995]), the collected pieces
represent revised papers from an international symposium that Michigan State University hosted in April
1995.
European encounters in the New. Nineteenth-century
In search of more serviceable paradigms to relocate
Africa and its descendants from the periphery to the
core of the modern Atlantic world, the broad themes
of the parts-Comparative Diaspora Historiography;
Identity and Culture; Domination and Resistance;
Geo-Social History and the Atlantic World-suggest
shared challenges and confrontations. Slavery and
emancipation dominate, figuring in the titles of ten of
European migrants are allotted a separate section on
the pieces.
nation, They are even more unlikely to ponder the
significance of the fact that enslaved Europeans were
not used in the settlement of the New Atlantic after
1400. There are likewise no discussions of the myths
and seafaring technologies of Africans and Amerindians in the Old Atlantic, nor of their responses to
"Sufferings on the Atlantic." There is no analogous
section on the Middle Passage of African slaves. The
one reference to the African cultural heritage is a
passing reference to the "African system of magic
thought" as a possible explanation for the ability of the
small European minority to sustain its dominance in
the slave islands. Comparative analysis is in short
supply even within the Euro-American Atlantic. Ironically, in view of the book's European perspective,
Butel accounts for the crucial difference between the
magnitude of British and French colonial populations
before 1800 primarily in terms of conditions in the
New World.
The most distressing aspect of this comprehensive
history of the Atlantic has nothing to do with the
author. In the English translation, Curacao becomes
Caracas (p. 69); Jamaica's sugar economy reaches its
pinnacle in 1672 (p. 112), the "regne personnel" of
Louis XIV becomes the "selfish reign of Louis XVI"
(p. 120). A causal analysis of the ending of slavery that
Butel considers to be dubious is transformed into a
statement of affirmation (p. 160). For purposes of
citation or quotation scholars are well advised to refer
back to the author's original Histoire de l'Atlantique
(1997). For the sake of the series, one hopes that
The second part, treating identity and culture, is the
most coherent in the collection. Allison Blakely initiates the part by tracing Europeans' creation of the
racial vocabulary of black identity. He concludes that
culture, not color, has marked the real problem of the
differential treatment labeled racism. Yet is not culture merely another trope, albeit one more complex
than color? Is it not clear that the wars of the color line
have been and continue to be culture wars? The battle
in significant part has been for self-determination that
begins with self-identification.
Three pieces in succession after Blakely's localize
the self-identity struggle. Dwayne E. Williams shows
how Portuguese-speaking immigrants from the Cape
Verde archipelago off the West African coast came to
the United States in waves that brought differing
self-identities and received differing identities. Kim D.
Butler traces Afro-Brazilians' post-abolition struggle
in the cities of Sao Paulo and Salvador to undermine
imposed identities and to construct their own from a
shared African cultural heritage. Philip A. Howard
further details the battle to control identity and to use
it in a strategy to divide and unite peoples by color and
caste in Cuba from 1878 to 1895.
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn's contribution closes the fiveessay second part. Using as examples Nancy Prince of
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2001
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