Histories, Volume 1, Issue 4 (December 2021) – 6 articles

This work intends to explore the nature of socio-political change in historical periods usually referred to as interregnal which, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as a period of discontinuity or gap in political and social organization. It traces the survival of a historical monument through two interregnal centuries of medieval Indian sub-continental history (11th–12th and 14th) to argue that modern historiographical templates which study these periods as precursors or remnants of succeeding and preceding centuries, respectively, do not sufficiently explore the socio-political possibilities innate in these periods of distributed political agency. In the context of Indian history, while historians have focused on the confrontational aspect of Hindu-Muslim polities or communities in interregnal centuries, I suggest that these periods provided fertile ground for political innovation and negotiation, thus breaking the confrontational stasis usually associated with regnal centuries. Full article

This article considers the historiography of the British Jacobites and American loyalists. It argues that they have been treated unfairly by history. In short, their importance has been minimized out of regard for dominant narratives. The article looks at older and newer historical accounts that reinterpret events in 17th and 18th century Britain and in revolutionary America to give Jacobites and loyalists a fairer share in these events. In conclusion, the article states that historiography will soon have to integrate the experience of these hitherto neglected currents into its main narrative. Full article

Like in most places around the world, childbirth assistance in Brazil was traditionally performed by women. In 1832, however, a law was passed requiring a license for the exercise of medicine, pharmacy, and midwifery. That event marked the differentiation between the traditional and the modern kind of childbirth assistants, leading to an increasing process of medicalization of birth. Hence, the historiography on the subject has pointed out the appropriation by men of a traditional women’s world. This article seeks to understand the gender dynamics in the birthing room by focusing on the new kind of professional that emerged in Brazil in the early nineteenth century: the “graduated midwife.” To what extent was there cooperation or competition between physicians and graduated midwives? How different were their obstetrical practices? After examining the Annaes Brasiliensis de Medicina—the official publication of the Imperial Academy of Medicine—I argue that the graduated midwife was the historical intermediate in transitioning from traditional midwifery to scientific obstetrics. Finally, I conclude that, as a woman of science, the graduated midwife filled the gap that isolated the female sphere of care from the male sphere of science, paving the road for the entrance of women in medicine in 1879. Full article

After the establishment of the communist regime in Albania, many Albanian students, mainly males, went to study in the Mecca of Revolution—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). Many of them fell in love there and married Soviet girls who returned with them to the tiny Balkan country to build socialism with their Albanian husbands. These women were considered as missionaries who were helping Albania to build a communist future. In 1960, however, their position changed when the Albanian leadership refused de-Stalinization and denounced the Soviet Union as an imperialist power. After Enver Hoxha’s split with Khrushchev, many Soviet women left Albania, but others decided to remain with their husbands in that country. Albanian authorities, considering Soviet women spies of the KGB (The Soviet Committee of State Security), persecuted many of them. Full article

The (secular-humanist) philosophical theology governing (positivist) disciplines such as International Law and International Relations precludes a priori any communicative examination of how the exclusion of Arab-Ottoman jurisprudence is necessary for the ontological coherence of jurisprudent concepts such as society and sovereignty, together with teleological narratives constellating the “Age of Reason” such as modernity and civilization. The exercise of sovereignty by the British Crown—in 19th and 20th century Arabia—consisted of (positivist) legal doctrines comprising “scientific processes” denying Ottoman legal sovereignty, thereby proceeding to “order” societies situated in Dar al-Islam and “detach” Ottoman-Arab subjects from their Ummah. This “rational exercise” of power by the British Crown—mythologizing an unbridgeable epistemological gap between a Latin-European subject as civic and an objectified Ottoman-Arab as despotic—legalized (regulatory) measures referencing ethno/sect-centric paradigms which not only “deported” Ottoman-Arab ijtihad (Eng. legal reasoning and exegetic hermeneutics) from the realm of “international law”, but also rationalized geographic demarcations and demographic alterations across Ottoman-Arab vilayets. Both inter-related disciplines, therefore, affirm an “exclusionary self-image” when dealing with “foreign epistemologies” by transforming “cultural difference” into “legal difference”, thus suing that it is in the protection of jus gentium that “recognized sovereigns” exercise redeeming measures on “Turks”, “Moors”, or “Arabs”. It is precisely the knowledge lost ensuing from such irreflexive “positivist image” that this legal-historical research seeks to deconstruct by moving beyond a myopic analysis claiming Ottoman-Arab ‘Umran (Eng. civilization) as homme malade (i.e., sick man); or that the Caliphate attempted but failed to become reasonable during the 18th and 19th century because it adhered to Arab-Islamic philosophical theology. Therefore, this research commits to deconstructing “mainstream” Ottoman historiography claiming that tanzimat (Eng. reorganization) and tahdith (Eng. modernization) were simply “degenerative periods” affirming the temporal “backwardness” of Ottoman civilization and/or the innate incapacity of its epistemology in furnishing a (modern) civil society. Full article