Category Archives: language

by | 19 September 2024 · 5:46 am

Eastern Europe Under Napoleon

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 81-83:

By 1794 France’s army numbered some 800,000, giving it a superiority of 2:1 in most engagements. After pushing intruders from French territory, French troops occupied the Low Countries and Germany west of the Rhine, areas they would hold until 1815. During these years, most of Europe fought France through seven coalitions, aimed first at the Revolution, and after 1799 at the France of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military leader who by 1804 had created a “French Empire,” consisting of an enlarged France with vassal states in Eastern and Central Europe. These states included a new Germany (Rhine Confederation), a new Poland (Duchy of Warsaw), and for the first time ever a state of South Slavs (Illyria).

Austria was a major force in the coalitions but lost decisive battles in 1805 at Austerlitz and 1809 at Wagram and had to cede territory. Still, it never endured direct French occupation, and thus its fate differed sharply from western German areas that were ruled from Paris and saw their traditional legal and social systems revolutionized. For the first time, thanks to Napoleon, everyone in Hamburg, Bremen, and much of the Rhineland was equal before the law, peasants as well as townspeople, nobles, and churchmen, and Jews with Christians. All were free to do as they wished: to move about the map, marry, and buy or sell property. With feudal privileges abolished, for the first time these Germans, regardless of background, were citizens.

Napoleon also began revolutionizing the ancient Holy Roman Empire out of existence by compensating the moderately sized German states for territories lost to the new confederation west of the Rhine with ecclesiastical and free cities east of the Rhine. Within a few years, hundreds of tiny bishoprics, abbeys, and towns had been absorbed into Bavaria, Saxony, or Baden, a crucial step in the process of creating a simpler Germany, more susceptible to unification as a modern nation-state.

In the summer of 1804, responding to Napoleon’s self-coronation as French emperor a few months earlier, Francis proclaimed himself emperor of Austria. As a Habsburg, he remained “Roman Emperor,” but as the empire approached extinction, he wanted to ensure his status on the European stage against the Corsican upstart. The technical name for the Habsburg monarchy was now the “Austrian Empire,” but the point was not to pursue an aggressive, self-confident imperial project of the sort that animated France, Britain, or Russia. The move was instead about seeming not to stand beneath a certain standard of dynastic prestige.

The self-coronation occurred not a moment too soon, as in August 1806 Napoleon declared the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire defunct, and several princes of his Rhine Confederation seceded on August 1. Five days later a proclamation was read from the balcony of the baroque Kirche am Hof in Vienna that the empire no longer existed. In fact, the empire had long been an ineffectual league of tiny entities, unable to defend the German lands. One practical consequence was that Austria’s leadership in Germany came to an end, and indeed, Germany lost all definite political form. Though it had few effective powers of administration, the empire’s constitution had balanced rights of cities and territories and in popular understanding had come to embody the nation in ways not fully tangible.

Reports from the summer of 1806 tell us that people across the German lands were outraged that a willful foreign usurper had simply disbanded the empire. The reports reveal a previously hidden emotional attachment, reminiscent of the indignation that arose in Hungary after Joseph replaced Latin with German. Like that supposedly dead language, the Holy Roman Empire provided a basic coordinate of identity. Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s otherwise buoyant mother Katharina wrote of deep unease, as if an old friend had succumbed to terminal illness. She sensed bitterness among the people of her home city of Frankfurt. For the first time in their lives—indeed for the first time in many centuries—the empire was omitted from prayers said at church, and subtle protests broke out across the German lands. Was one now simply a Prussian or Bavarian? And if one was German, what did that mean?

Rhinelanders had welcomed Napoleon’s rule because his legal code enhanced their freedoms, yet soon sympathies began to erode. The more territory France’s emperor controlled, the less he was satisfied, and the more demands grew on his “allies” for money and soldiers. And west Germans felt humiliated by French victories over the large German states to the east. In 1806 Napoleon crushed the armies of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt, then occupied Berlin. Two years later he forced Austria to join a continental blockade of England; and when Austria rose up the following year, he again smashed it down. The ill-fated Grand Armée that attacked Russia in 1812 was one-third German, and so were its casualties.

Leave a comment

Filed under Austria, Britain, democracy, France, Germany, language, military, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia, Yugoslavia

by | 18 September 2024 · 6:15 am

Nationalist Fraternities in German Universities

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 85-87:

Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.

Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.

But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. Not only did they not live in national states, no names existed to describe their peoples. The thought of Herder proved more than irresistible: it was a compulsion. Aside from his message that nations truly lived through languages and not states, Herder had written of a great destiny for the Slavic peoples. His studies of history told him that the Slavic tribes that had settled Central and Eastern Europe centuries earlier had supposedly made territories fruitful that others had abandoned. Obedient and peaceful, Slavs disdained robbing and looting, but loved hosting strangers and spending time in merriment. Yet because of this openness, they had fallen victim to conquest by aggressive neighbors, in particular, Germans, who had committed “grave sins” against them. Because they were so numerous, inhabiting the vast area between Berlin and Kamchatka, he believed that history had not heard the last word from the Slavs.

At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.

Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.

Leave a comment

Filed under Bohemia, democracy, Eastern Europe, education, England, France, Germany, Hungary, language, Slovakia

by | 17 September 2024 · 5:53 am

Premodern natio vs. Modern “Nation”

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 54-55:

The word “nation” (natio) existed in the premodern period but did not have the meaning it has in our day. The “nation” in the lands of Croatia, Hungary, or Poland was the hereditary elite, the gentry and nobles who enjoyed privileges that separated them from the “common” people. For example, nobles had a right to be tried by their peers and not imprisoned without charges, to raise soldiers, or to intermarry. In some cases, for example in Central Poland, the gentry were sizable, comprising up to one fourth of the population. The Hungarian gentry were about 6 percent; in France, by contrast, the nobility constituted less than 1 percent of the population. In Poland and Hungary, the rights to self-rule became substantial and made the hereditary nobility more powerful than counterparts in France, not to mention in Russia. By the sixteenth century, the Polish gentry elected its kings; during the seventeenth century, a practice emerged in which passage of legislation in the Sejm (parliament) required unanimous consent, a practice called “liberum veto.”

By the seventeenth century, the Polish nobility thus felt a strong sense of cohesion, politically and culturally, over a vast territory, and increasingly practiced Roman Catholicism, though the Protestant Reformation was at first popular and tolerated. A myth emerged according to which Poland’s nobles derived from “Sarmatians,” an ancient Iranian people who had subjugated Slavic tribes during early Christendom. This had the function of tying the group together even more tightly against all others on Polish territory, reinforcing its sense of privilege, and tending to exclude all others from the idea of nation. But the cultural identity of noble nations was premodern. Polish or Hungarian poets wrote in their own tongues from the fifteenth century (native liturgical texts are much older), producing important literatures, but they did not make a cult of language. And unlike liberal-democratic patriots of the nineteenth century, early modern nobles did not believe that all those who happened to speak Polish or Hungarian constituted a Polish or Hungarian “nation.” From the seventeenth century on, they tended to speak French or Latin among themselves and felt a cultural affinity with other European elites, with whom they shared tastes in architecture and music, and with whose sons their own mingled at universities in France and Italy.

Unlike modern nationalism, the idea of natio was therefore exclusive to a social group rather than insistently inclusive across a complex population ostensibly of one ethnicity. The early modern Polish or Croatian nobility did not think of Polish or Croatian-speaking peasants as part of their nation and often considered these peasants a lower form of humanity. The word for “peasant” was often synonymous with “slave,” evoking coarseness and absence of all taste. In decades when Western European peasants were being freed from the land and from compulsory services, a “second serfdom” was taking hold in much of Eastern Europe: those who worked the land became tied to it and could not leave without the master’s permission. They were people whom he could whip and otherwise humiliate in dozens of ways. No clear line existed dividing Eastern from Western Europe in terms of agricultural regime, but as one traveled to the east, the freedoms of the peasants tended to decrease, as did the productivity of agriculture.

When Polish or Hungarian nobles made claims to territory, it was therefore not in order to unite people of the same language or “blood.” They had no idea of including all people of their ethnicity in a particular state. But this early modern noble national identity was also not ethnically exclusive in the sense of modern nationalism. Native Ukrainian-speaking nobles living in Galicia considered themselves part of the Polish noble nation, and many of them over time became culturally Polish with no questions asked. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Vatican had supported arrangements permitting Orthodox believers in Ukraine (under Polish rule) and in Transylvania (under Habsburg rule) to be “reunited” with Rome while maintaining much of their own liturgy and practices, including married clergy. These churches of the Byzantine rite that recognize papal authority are commonly known as “Uniate.”

The importance of the older legacy of noble rights is that feelings of corporate identity and privileges survived in social groups even after political structures supporting them declined or disappeared altogether, and then were spread to other social groups, usually very slowly and unevenly. Thus the Polish, Hungarian, and Croatian gentries continued to insist on rights of self-rule and “freedom” after medieval and early modern statehood was crushed. Among the Polish gentry, even after the destruction of the Polish state in the final partition in 1795, Poland continued as a community of ideas and practices—as a common culture—and was as present among the colony of émigré Polish writers in Paris in the 1840s as it was among Polish-speakers in Polish territories then part of Austria or Russia. The ideas of this “Great Parisian emigration”—that Poland had not perished and had a mission to humanity—made their way back to the Polish lands to inspire young people from other groups, including peasants, especially as Polish education became more widespread (often through the efforts of underground nationalist activists).

Leave a comment

Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, education, France, labor, language, nationalism, religion

by | 16 September 2024 · 6:23 am

Eastern Europe c. 1800

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 31-33:

When Westerners discuss Eastern Europe, they stress its complexity. It seems a place where an endless array of different peoples lay claim to the same spaces—so many, and so different, that the region seems to resist historical understanding. Yugoslavia alone consisted of some ten ethnicities, and there are subgroups and minorities (for example, the Muslims of southern Serbia, in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, or the Hungarians to the north in Vojvodina). Interwar Czechoslovakia had five major nationalities, and the Habsburg Empire contained many more. As I write, three ethnic groups are making claims on parts of tiny Bosnia. Furthermore, the boundaries have changed so often and rapidly in the past two hundred years that it seems impossible to relate nationality to statehood. Poles lived in three states just over a century ago, and currently, Hungarians live in five; while Albanians live in Albania, they also populate Kosovo and parts of Montenegro and Macedonia (and are of three religions).

But on a global background, Eastern Europe appears not so different from much of Africa and Asia, where numerous ethnic groups are settled across smaller regions and where, in certain periods of history, colonial empires have ruled many groups simultaneously, drawing administrative borders with little concern for ethnic homelands. Take a map of Africa around 1900. West European powers had seized huge stretches of diverse territory, and political maps suggested a simplicity at odds with ethnic diversity, for example in German Southwest Africa, French Equatorial Africa, or the Belgian Congo.

In 1800, the peoples of East Central Europe lived in just four states: the Russian and Ottoman Empires, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the lands of the House of Habsburg (officially known as the Austrian Empire from 1804 to 1867). Within these lands, one could identify older political divisions, but if one simplifies a bit, one sees a map that is not difficult to grasp. In the north were the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, defunct from 1795, when Austria, Prussia, and Russia divided the Commonwealth’s lands among themselves. Farther south we find the Hungarian and Bohemian kingdoms, possessions of the Habsburg monarchy from 1526. Hungary comprised the kingdom of Croatia as well as the principality of Transylvania. The Ottoman Empire included the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia—the future heartlands of Romania—as vassal states, but it ruled directly the provinces (eyelets) of Bosna, Rumeli, and Silistre (which would become Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria) and contained the lands of the defunct medieval Bulgarian, Serb, and Bosnian kingdoms. Though nominally under Turkish rule, Montenegro maintained de facto independence because of its location in rugged mountain terrain.1 Finally, the Ottomans occupied much of central Hungary from 1526 to the 1680s, using it as a launching ground for campaigns of aggression on Habsburg lands farther north.

As in any imperial space, the political borders imposed by foreign powers belied the linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity that had resulted from the settlement and mixing of diverse tribes centuries earlier. Much of this region had been ruled from Rome and later Constantinople (for example, the provinces of Pannonia, Dalmatia, and Macedonia on the Balkan Peninsula) but some of it, especially north of the Danube, remained beyond Roman power, and the documentary record is scantier. Still, in broad terms, we know what transpired.

Leave a comment

Filed under Africa, Eastern Europe, language, migration, nationalism, religion

by | 14 September 2024 · 6:41 am

East European Communist Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 17-19:

What Hitler, the “Bohemian corporal” (he was actually Austrian) achieved through his war was to make northern parts of Eastern Europe much simpler. With the aid of local collaborators, his regime segregated and then killed the overwhelming majority of East European Jews. But when the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht back to Vienna and Berlin in 1945, millions of Germans fled Eastern Europe as well, never to return. At the war’s conclusion, as a result of allied decisions, Polish and Czech authorities placed the remainder of Germans from Bohemia and eastern Germany in railway cars and deported them to a Germany that was much smaller than Bismarck’s Reich, let alone the Holy Roman Empire.

The most avid ethnic cleansers among the East Europeans were Polish and Czech Communists, and indeed, Communists everywhere proved enthusiastic nationalists. This is astounding for two reasons. First, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had little concern for national identity: workers had no fatherland. Nationhood was not a lasting site of human subjectivity but something ephemeral, which diminished in importance as capitalism advanced. They had little but derision for East Europeans wanting to create their own nation-states. Engels called the small peoples to Germany’s east “relics.” Czechs were destined to be “absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles.” Other “remnants of bygone Slavonian peoples” slotted for assimilation included Serbs, Croats, and Slovaks. In 1852, Engels blithely predicted that the next world war would cause entire reactionary peoples to “disappear from the face of the earth.”

Second, when the world divided into two camps, appearances suggested that there was little room for East European nationalism. By 1949, every state in the region seemed to be a miniature USSR, with the same sort of ruling Communist Party, five-year plan, economy based on heavy industry, collectivized agriculture, and socialist realism. Few Poles or Hungarians, even within the Party, doubted that the annual pageant in red of May Day reflected doctrines and practices whose nerve center was in Moscow. For the first time, millions of East Europeans learned Russian, and many became as proficient in copying Soviet reality as they could. Hundreds of thousands became “self-Sovietizers,” even holding their cigarettes the Russian way, or dressing in the militaristic style of the Bolshevik party. The Yugoslav Communists, with red stars on their caps, went so far that the Soviets tried to hold them back.

But these states were not Soviet replicas, nor were they (unlike Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Belorussia) actual parts of the Soviet Union. Beyond the façades of May Day processions in Warsaw in 1949, one saw banners in Polish, not Russian, and placards honoring Polish heroes. A few blocks from the parade route the Polish socialist state, governed by a Marxian party, was lovingly resurrecting old Warsaw, razed by the Nazis in 1944. This included rebuilding many of its churches, according to plans from the eighteenth century, with attention to the details of a saint’s halo. Bookstores across the state socialist world stocked romantic authors like Jan Kollár, but also the Polish, Hungarian, or Romanian national bards Adam Mickiewicz, Sándor Petofi, and Vasile Alecsandri; the philologists Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić; and the ethnographer Pavel Šafárik, who had studied theology with Kollár in Jena. In Poland’s west, the state fostered the destruction of all signs of the German past, including cemeteries, and proclaimed the new territories Polish to the core, though they had been German for centuries.

Leave a comment

Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, language, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, USSR, war

by | 11 September 2024 · 1:56 am

Caribbean Categories of Race, Color, Class

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 405-406:

From the earliest days of colonial rule, the Caribbean social and moral order was based on ranked gradations of “races” and “colors” represented by such physical attributes as skin color, hair texture, and facial features. These criteria were treated as literal descriptions of appearance, and their presumed fixed qualities formed a hierarchy of identities—from “white” at the top to “black” at the bottom, with various mixtures and gradations in between—supported by legal structures as well as social values and mores. Consequently, for much of Caribbean history, race and color also have connoted social position and class status. Yet the recognition of a vertical color continuum separates the Caribbean from the rigid binary racial logic of the United States.

Given the legacies of colonial rule and ideology, color and race are still commonly used in daily conversation as idioms for social organization. In Jamaica, for example, the color term “brown” (or “colored”) serves as a category of racial identity but also connotes middle-class status. Color terms are necessarily relational; being “white” or “brown” or “black” necessarily means not being something else. In Haiti, mulâtre is an in-between term connoting a mixture of “black” and “white,” flexible in its interpretation yet typically positioned above “black” and below “white.” In the Dominican Republic, indio literally translates as “Indian,” suggesting indigenous heritage, but its contemporary application signifies a lighter skin color (and perhaps straight hair)—someone not “black,” yet also not “white.” In Martinique, beke refers to French “white” slave owners and their descendants. “Trinidad white” and “French creole” have served as categories of racial identity in Trinidad, specifically distinguished from British, French, and Spanish “whites,” who, in this racial accounting system, historically could claim to be “pure” white and, concomitantly, members of the upper classes. In Trinidad, the term “red” generally refers to a light-skinned individual of mixed “black” and “white” parentage (positioned toward the upper-status end), while in Barbados it is also a historical reference to “red legs” communities—poor whites who, from the days of the slave plantation, labored outdoors and hence were likely to get sunburned.

Mixedness can also refer to multiple combinations, not simply the amalgamation of “black” and “white.” Thus, in the Francophone Caribbean, the term marabou refers to a black-white-Amerindian combination. In Trinidad the term “Spanish” should be interpreted as if in quotation marks, indicating a particular and fluctuating combination of local criteria, including area of origin (Venezuela, or certain locations in Trinidad with historical concentrations of Spaniards, Amerindians, and Venezuelan immigrant labor), skin color (some variation of “brown” or “red’), hair texture (not curly), and self-ascription (Khan 1993).

Notably, these terminologies are based on an African-European axis: the hierarchical color continuum does not lexically include South Asians or Chinese, or the mixed offspring of South Asian or Chinese and European parents. Though the term achinado is used in Cuba to index Chinese phenotypical features (as, for example, in mulato achinado), there is only one term, dougla—common in Guyana and Trinidad—indicating individuals of mixed South Asian and African descent. Indio (Amerindian) in the Hispanophone Caribbean and “Spanish” or “French creole” in Trinidad are not color terms per se, but are measured along the continuum of black and white ancestry. “Indian” (South Asian), “Chinese,” and “Syrian-Lebanese” in the Anglophone Caribbean, “Hindustani” in the Dutch Caribbean, and Hindou in the Francophone Caribbean are common categories not amalgamated into the black-white lexicon.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Caribbean, democracy, France, language, migration, nationalism, Spain

by | 10 September 2024 · 6:16 am

Caribbean Language Demographics

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 402-405:

Four major languages are spoken in the Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, and Dutch. The 17 Caribbean countries that are predominantly Anglophone comprise more than 17% of the region’s population, yet the total English-speaking population of the Caribbean is less than that of the Dominican Republic alone. These statistics clarify the demographic predominance of the Spanish-speaking countries of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, which represent 61% of the Caribbean population. Of the 20% of Caribbean peoples who speak French or variations of French, three-quarters live in Haiti. The Dutch speakers of Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles represent another 2% (Knight 1995, 34). Other languages, spoken by fewer numbers of people, include Hindi and Javanese. The languages of the European colonizers remain the official languages of formal Caribbean education and legal systems, but numerous African languages brought by the slaves fused with European, Asian, and Amerinidian languages to create numerous “creole” languages, which are the spoken vernaculars of everyday life in a number of Caribbean countries. Most Caribbean creole languages are young as languages go, having existed for not more than two or three centuries. Today, however, there are growing written literatures in creole languages, and movements to promote the languages to equal standing as vehicles of formal instruction and communication. Among the most familiar examples is Haitian Kreyol, the spoken language of approximately 12 million insular and diasporic Haitians, which along with French has been an official language in Haiti since 1961. Other widely spoken creoles include Jamaican patois, which is spoken by about four million people in and outside Jamaica, and the patois of Trinidad and Tobago, a historical legacy primarily of French on Trinidadian English, which has been in decline since about the mid-20th century. In Suriname, Sranan Tongo is the language of approximately 300,000 people; in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, Papiamento is spoken by more than 350,000. And although the varieties of Spanish spoken in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic share a number of linguistic properties, they also have discernable differences based on geographic location and local histories.

…

From its colonization, the Caribbean has represented newness, which Europeans captured in the term “creole.” When applied to the region, the Spanish word criollo and the Portuguese word crioulo (derived from the verb criar, “to raise or bring up”) signified something or someone originating in Europe (or Africa) and reproducing itself in the New World. Thus animals, plants, and people could all be designated as creole. Creole people were the descendants of Europeans or Africans born in the Caribbean, as well as the offspring of African and European parents. Inherent in the idea of creole identity was an assumption that being born in the Caribbean or being the “mixed” descendant of two racially differentiated parents meant losing one’s ancestral cultural heritage.

…

In the Anglophone Caribbean, Brathwaite’s analysis of what he called the “creole society” of Jamaica emphasized the creation of new forms through the synthesis of existing ones. Arguing against understanding black and white populations as “separate nuclear units,” Brathwaite saw them as being “contributory parts of a whole” that produce a uniquely Caribbean culture. Creolization here represents the potential for social integration and unity, where the “mixed” population serves “as a bridge, a kind of social cement” that integrates society (Brathwaite 1971, 307, 305). In calling for a renewed emphasis on creole identity and the literary value of the creole language, the most recent Francophone creoliste writers and activists celebrate the heterogeneous dimensions that together comprise the Caribbean or, in the words of Martinican poet and writer Edouard Glissant, constitute Antillanité (Caribbeanness). The creoliste position, along with those of other thinkers, points to the abiding debates about how to characterize and give meaning to the forms of diversity so apparent in the region.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Caribbean, France, language, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, Spain

by | 31 August 2024 · 6:07 am

Capt. Cook’s Tasmanians Unimpressed

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 100-101, 103-104:

This was probably the first time these particular people had encountered Europeans, or, for that matter, members of any other race. The Palawa, the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, had been separated from the mainland of Australia for at least ten thousand years—with the flooding of the Bassian Land Bridge that occurred at the end of the last ice age. And all Indigenous people of Australia, in turn, had been isolated from the rest of the world for at least fifty thousand years, reaching back to the fogs of the Dreamtime and the primordial days of their earliest myths. Yet, judging by the stolid expressions on the faces of these tribesmen, their first encounter with a people so dramatically different from them appeared to be a nonevent. In his published account, Cook adopted a neutral anthropological tone, evenhanded and remarkably devoid of judgment or religiosity, jingoism or national pride:

They approached us from the woods, without betraying any marks of fear, with the greatest confidence imaginable. None of them had weapons except one who held in his hand a stick about 2 feet long and pointed at one end. They were naked and wore no ornaments except some large punctures or ridges raised on different parts of their bodies, some in straight, and others in curved lines. They were of common stature and rather slender. Their skin was black and also their hair. Most of them had their hair and beards smeared with a red ointment and some of their faces were painted with the same composition. They received every present we made without the least appearance of satisfaction. They seemed to set no value on iron or iron tools. When some bread was given, as soon as they understood that it was to be eaten, they either returned it or threw it away without even tasting it. They also refused some fish, both raw and dressed, which we offered them. But upon giving some birds to them they did not return these and easily made us comprehend that they were fond of such foods.

…

THE NEXT MORNING, Cook took heart: A group of about twenty inhabitants were seen congregating on the beach, clearly hoping to interact again with the white-skinned visitors. The Natives seemed to have recovered from Mai’s ballistics display the day before. “They were convinced that we intended them no mischief,” thought Cook, “and were desirous of renewing the intercourse.”

Cook promptly went out to meet and mingle again with the Palawa, this time much more freely than the previous day. Though he was outnumbered, he seemed to have no fear and took no precautions; he walked unarmed among them and engaged in the cryptic, often awkward, and sometimes comical effort of trying to understand an utterly unfamiliar people—bartering and gesturing, smiling and pointing, occasionally making grunts and other strange sounds. The cerebral Cook was far from being a gregarious or voluble man, but he had a knack for these sorts of rough-and-tumble interactions.

This forthright curiosity was an admirable trait, one he’d shown during his previous voyages. Many navigators during the Age of Exploration were content to exploit whatever resources they could quickly locate and move on. Far too many first encounters between Europeans and isolated tribes transpired without the feeblest attempt at cultural understanding—and, sadly, they too often ended in bloodshed.

But Cook’s inquisitiveness was genuine. He wanted to know who the Palawa were, what they ate, how they thought and talked and dressed, how they worshipped their gods. One senses that of all the different roles his voyages required him to carry out, Cook derived the most pleasure and satisfaction from playing the part of anthropological observer.

It was strange to Cook how little acquainted the Palawa appeared to be with the sea. Unlike Polynesians, they didn’t seem to like to swim, and Cook noted that he did not see a single “canoe or any vessel in which they could go upon the water.” They ate mussels and other mollusks but showed no interest in other kinds of seafood; they ran away in seeming horror several times when Cook’s men presented fish as a gift. When shown a fishhook, they appeared to have no idea what it was. They seemed curious about, but also fearful of, Cook’s small boats moored beside the beach, and though some of the Englishmen tried to coax the Natives out for a short ride in the bay, the Palawa couldn’t be persuaded to come aboard. “With all our dumb oratory we could not prevail [upon] any of them to accompany us,” wrote Samwell, “though it was easily perceived that one of them was very desirous of going and had a long struggle between his fears and his inclinations.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Australia, Britain, food, language, migration, science

by | 29 August 2024 · 8:52 am

A Polynesian in England, 1775

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 38-39:

PEOPLE WHO ENCOUNTERED Mai grew to love his playful and curious manner of speech. He freely invented his own words and expressions. A bull was a “man-cow.” Snow was “white rain.” At a country estate where he stayed, he referred to the butler as “king of the bottles.” He called ice “stone water.”

One morning he was stung by a wasp. When asked what had bitten him and caused his hand to swell, he replied that it was a “soldier bird.” Later, a member of the local gentry pinched him a bit of snuff to snort. “No thank you,” he replied. “The nose not hungry.”

His hosts were pleased to learn that he was an excellent cook. Banks asked Mai to roast an assortment of fowl in a traditional Polynesian style. Mai constructed an umu, an earth oven. He dug a hole, built a fire there, then partially filled it with stones. He laid the birds in the pit, wrapping them in butter-smeared paper, for want of his usual plantain leaves. He covered it all with dirt and let the mess of fowl smolder for hours. The result was scrumptious. “Nothing could be better dressed, or more savory,” gushed a critic. “The smoldering pebble-stones and embers…had given a certain flavor to the fowls, a soupçon of smokiness, which made them taste as if a ham accompanied them.”

And so it could be said that barbecue—or at least a South Seas strain of it—had arrived in Great Britain.

At the estates he visited, Mai liked to practice his marksmanship and became a devoted hunter, especially during grouse season. Much to the chagrin of the local groundskeepers, the trigger-happy Mai “popped at all the feathered creation which came in his way”—not only grouse but chickens, geese, even ducks haplessly playing in a pond. “His slaughter of domestic birds,” the observer lamented, “was by no means inconsiderable.”

Guns lay at the heart of why Mai had volunteered to travel to England in the first place. He knew he had to master firearms, to collect them, to understand their inner workings and the ammunition that made them lethal. “He had a sense of mission,” wrote historian Michael Alexander in his book Omai: Noble Savage, and he knew that “these people he had come amongst held the key to his intrinsic purpose, the avenging of his father.”

Other times, Mai would set aside his fowling piece and revert to the hunting techniques he’d learned as a boy. A friend later recalled how Mai crouched in a stubble field and crept up on his prey. “His eye sparkled,” the friend reminisced, when “on a sudden, he darted forward like a cat, and sprang upon a covey of partridges, one of which he caught and took home alive, in great triumph.”

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, education, food, language, migration, Polynesia

by | 12 August 2024 · 6:22 am

Redefining “Plantation” in 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 131-133:

At least in the British case, the very word “plantation” offers a clue to the continuities between Old and New World histories of violent expansion, for it entered the English language during the Tudor period, in the context of the English conquest of Ireland. When the English broke up the previous social and political structures of the Celtic Irish, installed themselves as lords of the land, and pressed their new subjects into agricultural service, they called the result “planting.” To the 16th-century English, planting meant improving the land—in the sense not just of planting crops, but of implanting a social order they thought superior to what had been there before. The phrase speaks to migration and agriculture, but also to political domination. This is the sense in which Francis Bacon used it in his “Essay on Plantations” in 1625. Some 30 years later, Thomas Hobbes was even more precise in referring to a plantation as “numbers of men sent out from the commonwealth, under a conductor, or governor, to inhabit a foreign country, either formerly void of inhabitants, or made void then by war.”

The plantation was thus not simply a type of agricultural enterprise, but a political institution deployed in organizing colonial social space. It also welded a model of political domination to one of economic enterprise. As sociologist Edgar Thompson (1935) argued, at least since Tudor times, planting had come to signify “a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital; and it looked to a profitable return from capital.” Planting meant colonizing, but in a rather specific sense: it involved capital investment and the anticipation of profit. A plantation colony is one established not for military purposes, or as a place where individuals from overpopulated areas migrate to gain access to land (although it may come to serve such purposes as well). It is a planned enterprise geared toward generating return on capital by transplanting people who are expected to produce commercially valuable crops in a colonized territory.

This is what the British charter companies so important in the colonization of North America were about: their goal was to transplant people for profit. It just so happened that the settlers in Virginia found the right kind of crop (tobacco), whereas those in New England did not—which is part of the reason why the term “Plymouth plantation” sounds quaint to us. The Puritans certainly “planted,” and quite violently so; but the result was something rather different from a plantation colony as generally understood today. The intriguing historical semantics of the English term “plantation” notwithstanding, the forms of violent, agriculturally based settler colonialism it implied did not set the precedent for the institution that would leave its indelible imprint on the history of the Caribbean: the agro-industrial complex of the slave labor–based sugar plantation and its tri-continental economic articulation that linked New World colonial production sites with markets for commodified human labor from Africa and networks of capital, credit, distribution, and consumption in Europe. The origins of the institution arguably lie in the very first phase of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Caribbean, economics, industry, language, migration, military, Spain