Search

This dissertation investigates the relationship between late-eighteenth-century electrical vitalism and the theories of political energy at the heart of the French Revolution and the revolutionary politics of the Francophone Atlantic world. Working from archival and published sources, it focuses on how electrical language was taken up into revolutionary politics, and what a close look at this intersection reveals about war, terror, and radical democracy in the 1790s. While historians of science have viewed electricity as having radical connotations, historians of the French Revolution have viewed its politics as “scientific” in some significant way. Bringing the two together, I argue, remedies the tendency in both historiographies to view the other as a kind of black box. In uncovering the scientific roots of revolutionary electricity, the project aims to reconstruct the vitalist history of a metaphor we use today to describe the experience of collective political sentiment. Ultimately, the project elucidates a rich historical moment of intersection between the development of electrical science and the development of democratic politics, and in so doing argues for a new way to relate energy in the material world to political energy.

Triangulating the material and cultural forces that connected the French Revolution, the French occupation of Egypt (1798-1801), and the Ottoman Empire’s New Order reforms (1792-1807) during the global Age of Revolutions (1760s-1820s), this dissertation examines portraiture’s varied and complex roles in the production of modern French and Ottoman subjectivities. As a genre of representation common to both early modern European and Ottoman pictorial traditions, portraiture emerges at this historical juncture as a vital mechanism for articulating new political subjectivities coordinated between French and Ottoman worlds. The pressures exerted on representation by the transcultural dialectics of social upheaval and empire-building that defined the global Age of Revolutions compelled portraiture across Cairo, Paris, and Istanbul to undergo radical adaptations of materials, meanings, and modalities to accommodate the demands of modern depiction. This dissertation argues that French and Ottoman portraits in this period functioned as border regimes, systems essential to calibrating, classifying, and demarcating difference and affiliation. Oriented precisely against the understanding of these artworks as “hybridized” or “cross-cultural,” which sees in them the alloy of essentially distinct cultures, the border regime takes seriously portraiture’s unique capacities to produce and inscribe cultural contours, political aspirations, and social identities across inherited borders. Most importantly, the border regime acknowledges that any transgression of established cultural, political, or social barriers necessarily entails the erection of new ones. This dissertation demonstrates that the ostensibly cosmopolitan incorporations of “others” in portraiture’s production of new “selves” in French and Ottoman portraiture primarily served the inscription of new modes of hierarchical differentiation, transimperial competition, and chauvinist ideologies.The account begins in French-occupied Cairo (1798-1801) with an examination of the ways French artists in the colony adapted subgenres of Revolutionary portraiture to represent the French and Ottoman-Egyptian subjects of the new Republican colony. The chapter focuses on a collection of painted and drawn portraits by the academic painter and draftsman André Dutertre. Dutertre came to Egypt as part of a large corps of French scientists, engineers, and artists who assisted the Revolutionary army in building France’s first sister republic in the Ottoman world. The French regime deployed portraiture alongside other colonial technologies, especially Orientalist philology, to interpellate Ottoman Egyptians and their Republican colonizers into new political and cultural affiliations serviceable to the ideology of the French colonial regime. This chapter also examines the local political and social terms on which colonized Egyptians engaged with Dutertre’s portraiture. Close analysis of Dutertre’s portraits and their Arabic inscriptions reveals that Egyptians sat for French artists to further indigenous political and social agendas. By centering the Ottoman conditions of possibility for French portraiture in Egypt, this chapter demonstrates that Dutertre’s portraits belong as much to the history of Ottoman political modernity as they do to the history of post-Revolutionary French colonialism.Following the path of Ottoman-Egyptian refugees who immigrated to France after the collapse of the occupation in 1801, the account moves to Paris for a close analysis of Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Katchef Dahouth (1804). Girodet’s large-scale and publicly-exhibited oil portrait depicts an Ottoman-Egyptian Mamluk refugee recently retired from Napoleon’s corps of “Mamelouk” soldiers. This chapter provides an identification of Girodet’s sitter for the first time and outlines his biography in order to reconstitute the historical circumstances under which Ottoman refugees posed for French artists in the reactionary social environment of Napoleonic France. Girodet’s portrait avails itself of the conceptual and pictorial freedoms offered by portraiture during the Revolutionary period in order to transform the image of an individual Ottoman subject into a complex meditation on the Revolutionary meaning of the Egyptian occupation in the shadow of its collapse. In the process, the chapter offers a new genealogy of French Orientalist painting that not only foregrounds portraiture’s unique contributions, but illustrates Orientalism’s emergence out of discrete principles of post-Revolutionary academic painting. In examining the contributions of both artist and sitter to the portrait’s final form, the chapter recuperates the role of Ottoman refugees in the elaboration of Orientalist painting in early nineteenth-century France. The account concludes in Istanbul, where in the same year that Girodet exhibited Dahouth in Paris, the Ottoman-Greek painter Kostantin Kapıdağlı completed his elaborate oil portrait of Sultan Selim III, Portrait of Selim III in His Chamber (AH1218/1803-1804). Heavily indebted to ancien régime ambassadorial portraits produced in eighteenth-century Istanbul, Kapıdağlı’s portrait creatively combines the techniques, compositional principles, and aesthetic values of European and Ottoman portraiture to produce a new cosmopolitan image of sultanic authority. The terms for Kapıdağlı’s innovative experiments with sultanic portraiture were dictated directly by the dynamics of a fluctuating Ottoman social landscape under the New Order. This chapter highlights the Islamic justifications for and debates surrounding Selim’s New Order reforms, which provoked Ottoman reformers and the clerical establishment (ulema) into stormy debates about the permissibility of adopting technologies from Europe (whether political, scientific, or artistic). As relations with France normalized after the French evacuated Egypt, Kapıdağlı’s portrait served to reinvigorate the legitimacy of Selim’s New Order reforms against mounting threats of popular unrest in the lead up to the May 1807 revolution. Selim tapped his official portraitist Kapıdağlı to capture this new ideal of Muslim rulership, which articulated Ottoman imperial superiority through explicit adaptation and recontextualization of European artistic elements.

Abolitionists from the Eighteenth Century to the mid-Nineteenth Century tended to be remembered by William Wilberforce, Joseph Soul, Thomas Clarkson, Samuel Bowly, and William Lloyd Garrison. All of these men have been extremely well represented throughout scholarship and the archives. The voices that are often left out of the archives are the men and women who fought on the frontlines for their freedom. Enslaved men and women fought to the death for their freedom and are often overshadowed by White missionaries and abolitionists in the archives. Black leaders often have less representation throughout history and scholarship due to the lack of archival sources on these men and women. The Baptist War of 1831 was credited to having started because of the inspirations of Black religious leaders such as Samuel Sharpe and George Taylor; however, the historiography on the Baptist War has an overwhelming amount of information on British missionaries such as William Knibb, Thomas Burchell, Henry Bleby, and James Phillippo. This is due to the overwhelming archival sources on these men and the lack of sources on the Black religious leaders. Black religious leaders used Christianity as a means to organize, inform, inspire, and justify their plans of resistance against slavery. By exploring personal documentation, including diaries, letters, and memories, along with the court cases, testimonies, confessions, and other legal documents directly following the Baptist War of 1831, this thesis will show how Black Baptist leaders in Jamaica used Christianity and other religions to house, organize, justify, and empower their plans for acts of resistance such as the Baptist War. It also will show that following this rebellion, the British officials gave credit and legacy to the British missionaries, thus denying the Black Baptist leaders their agency and causing there to be hardly any archival remembrance of these leaders.

Scholarship on St. Vincent during the Age of Revolutions has grappled with building a fuller narrative of the Black Caribs that explores their lives beyond the limitations of colonial warfare. Because the Caribs left little to no written documentation, scholars have had to rely on the biased accounts of British and French administrators to extract a wider field of possibilities. New methodologies have emerged over time that answer to these challenges of building narratives around groups that have been historically neglected in the Assembly and care of traditional archives. More recently, articles and histories of the Black Caribs have been written with a critical eye towards racialization, colonialism, and claims of genocide. However still, the Caribs are still historicized in relation to a framework of colonial warfare that considers declarations of success and defeat as finite, overlooking the potentials of a variety of experiences of the Black indigenous population, and others on the island. In this dissertation, I examine British colonial anxieties in the “interwar” periods and the points of departure from prominent logics of differentiation on the island. Specifically, I look at the political and social ruptures that occurred in between moments of official warfare and treaties, to determine what that meant for attempts at racialization and class structure for the rest of the island’s inhabitants. By exposing the colonial anxieties during times of “ceasefire,” and their panicked attempts at legislation to remedy both interior and exterior attack, I uncover a much more complex system of precarity, fear, and subversion in the British settlement. Through problematizing ideas of what it meant to win, lose, conquer, own, succeed, defeat, and petition, this work reveals the unstable modes of hierarchy that the British settlement desperately tried to enact. In this revealing, more possibilities for who the Black Caribs were, as well as other criminalized populations on the island, ultimately transpired. The research for this dissertation draws from a close reading of British Council Assembly meeting notes, property petitions, letters to parliament, newspapers, and governmental and military records from the National Archives in Kew, Britain. I examine British colonial insecurity and the Black Caribs during the final two decades of the eighteenth century, starting before the British claimed control of the island through the Treaty of Paris, up until the months following the end of the Second Carib war. I look at the condition of British militias, struggles for land holdings, precarious support from the metropole, prolonged legislation, and interior and exterior threats, and how these factors rendered frail the colonial settlement in St. Vincent. Throughout, I employ a method of “corroborated imagination” for Black Carib groups and individuals, that is grounded in evidence from primary documents, but also fills in the phantom context with details from secondary source materials and critical supposition. This dissertation argues that changing racial, gender, and class logics towards populations in St. Vincent were vital in erecting and maintaining the frail British settlement. These logics of differentiation and hierarchy were unstable, and constantly refused by the Black Caribs. These periods of social and political instability contribute towards my reframing of St. Vincent, “unmaking” the settlement and stripping it from its historicity of a unified and ideologically secure colonial state. Ultimately this dissertation explores how St. Vincent was a multi-space of possibility, not just for land surveyors and capitalists, but for Black indigenous people as well.