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When Switzerland was created in 1848, one of its founding fathers went by the name of 'Borneo Louis'. Before becoming a Swiss state builder, he had served as a mercenary in the Dutch East Indies. There he had founded a family with his native 'housekeeper', Silla. In Switzerland, he continued to benefit from Silla's exploited labour. Stories such as these seem unusual today, not for historical but for historiographical reasons. Borneo Louis was only one of c. 70,000 mercenaries from all over Europe in Dutch imperial services. Silla was one of the countless 'native concubines' who were forced to support these men and thereby help the Dutch build their nineteenth-century empire in South East Asia. Other empires, too, depended on auxiliary services from Europeans hailing from regions with intra-European or short-lived empires, or none at all. Recent new imperial histories, however, have remained conceptually limited to the study of interconnections within national empires (mostly the British Empire). Pan-European dimensions of colonial histories have continued to lie outside their focus. Explaining how Switzerland became part of the Dutch imperial project, this article therefore calls for a renewed new imperial history: a history that explains how Europe emerged out of continuous connections across the boundaries of national empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of generations throughout world history and the historiography of generations, including generations throughout European history. An overview of the generations in African history, including the African diaspora's generational self-awareness and social identity in Africa, is provided.

This article contends that the Western European figure of the fanatic - the ideational basis of today's surveillance order - has since its birth in the Reformation possessed a particular political form: that of the rebel against Christian sovereignty. Western European political thought has not, however, considered this revolutionary state to be the inevitable result of an inherent ontology. Rather, suspect populations have been understood as being in a state of imminent fanaticism, which is only realized through a contingent process of becoming. The article argues that this template for understanding the fanatic was articulated through a Christian episteme of political theology that grouped Christianity, Judaism, and Islam together within a single referential frame. Finally, it asserts that the Christian subject disappeared from this frame as a consequence of the Enlightenment project of revolutionary secularism, leaving the colonized Muslim and the minority Jew as the West's potential fanatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the Enlightenment as a cultural and intellectual phenomenon and actual illumination in the long 18th century. Focused on street lighting in Paris, it nonetheless seeks to situate the French case in the broader context of developments in public lighting in the French provinces, Europe, and the Atlantic World. In the concerted effort to illuminate dark streets, the Enlightenment was operationalized in ways that bore fundamentally on commerce, sociability, and perceptions of progress, enlightened government, and enlightened space. At the same time, the attempt to illuminate formerly dark spaces generated reactions. A ‘dialectic of illumination’ was the counterpart to the dialectic of Enlightenment, fostering resistance to the new regime of light and its efforts to impose, through human ingenuity and instrumental reason, greater security and social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, the study of early modern women has been predicated on the assumption that patriarchy was a powerful force in early modern society, subsuming women’s interests to those of men and repressing women’s opportunities and thoughts to such a degree that most if not all women had to struggle to find personal satisfaction and be recognised for individual achievement. However, for more than forty years, the research by scholars of early modern women has vividly demonstrated that large numbers of women, both as individuals and in groups, successfully resisted patriarchal expectations and institutions. In this article, I argue that although patriarchy existed in early modern society, an examination of the scholarship in the aggregate indicates that we can no longer assume that it was the dominant or sole set of gender expectations. Early modern patriarchy was weak and easily challenged by everyone from peasant women to queens, suggesting that many people (both women and men) expressed an agentic set of gender norms that valued and expected women’s political, economic and intellectual activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay mainly focuses on what is problematic about the notion of ‘patriarchy’. It argues that ‘patriarchy’ is inadequate for talking about the lives and life-cycles of most people in human society, and endorses instead a version of intersectionality theory that emphasises intersecting and mutually constitutive relations of domination. To illustrate some of the ways this worked it examines three key relations of domination that structured some or most European and Middle Eastern societies, first, marriage (and especially the relationship of married women to unmarried women); second, slavery (here the focus is on slave concubinage in the Ottoman lands); and thirdly, the domination of humans over other species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critiques of modernity advanced since at least the 1980s have seldom focused on North Africa/the Maghrib, where Europe and non-Europe impinge so closely on each other. Nor have they often allowed us to recover an historical account of the making of modernity as a global condition, beyond the largely dichotomous or bifurcating categories introduced by modern relations of power and unequal exchange themselves. As an introduction to this collection of articles, this essay sketches what I call a "tectonic" approach to modernity as an historical process, with the aim of recapturing the dynamics by which, between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, differently located people and places came to occupy divergent positions both in socioeconomic and political structures and in narratives of "modern" history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence from eighteenth-century library auction catalogues suggests that among the most widely-circulated books in the eighteenth century was a category of religious-pedagogical works constituting an eighteenth-century "middlebrow literature". This paper argues, firstly, that these texts meet the criteria often proposed to define middlebrow: female overrepresentation, mediating function between "high" and "low" culture, supposedly "middling" literary quality, and pedagogical intent. Secondly, their commercial success drew on their synthesis of elite ideals of reason and local, traditional practices of faith, foregrounding a supra-confessional natural theology, toleration, and civic notions of social utility. Thirdly, these texts were part of a transnational literary system of center-periphery relations between higher- and lower-prestige texts, nations, and authors. Interrogating the secularization paradigm of the Enlightenment, this paper therefore proposes a bottom-up approach to debate on the nature of "the" Enlightenment, and draws on an innovative DH-supported book history project, MEDIATE, to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how local middle class Europeans in certain areas were responsible for writing and maintaining local, personal chronicles from the late middle ages until the nineteenth century in locales including Bristol, England, Augsburg, Germany, and Barcelona, Spain. It presents a comparative study of such accounts of both local and persoanl news written between 1500 and 1800 in Western and Central Europe. It reports how accounts were copied and shared in various urban centers, generally among men, which encouraged others to write their own accounts.