Towards an Environmental History of the War on Drugs

April Merleaux, Hampshire College

This paper explores how the production of drugs, especially its environmental impact and geographical setting, intersect with the U.S. efforts to regulate its commerce and consumption, both in the United States and abroad.

 

Plantation Transformation: A World History Perspective

Kris Manjapra, Tufts University

This paper proposes that the plantation complex offers a lens through which to better observe a large-scale historical transformation taking place from the 1750s to the 1850s, from the time of the Seven Years’ War to the American Civil War. Plantations, we argue, were not satellites of this transformation, but were centers of action in generating world-historical processes. In particular, we are interested in how the narrative of a supposed transformation from the Old World to Modern Times is complicated by the study of plantation transformations. Here, we consider developments in intellectual life and ideology, processes of labor subjection, scientific knowledge production, and the changing organization of capital. In each of these domains, we observe a more complex and ambiguous process than a mere shift between the ‘old’ and the ‘new.’ And we point instead to the necessity to conceive of the coming of ‘modern times’ in terms of conversions, transformed continuities, and arrhythmias. With the birth of Man, Citizen, Nation also came the simultaneous dialectical birth of freedman, coolie, and postslavery archipelagic society. Seeing these arrhythmic histories as in relation to each other, as conditions for each other, is a critical challenge for historical study today.

 

The Reinvention and Legacies of the Amboyna Massacre (1623)

Alison Games, Georgetown University

This paper analyzes the long-term legacies of a seventeenth-century incident known as the Amboyna Massacre. In 1619, the English and Dutch East India Companies joined in a consortium in which the English were junior partners, an arrangement forged in Europe and forced on reluctant traders in the East Indies. Four years later, on the clove trading post of Ambon, in the Indonesian archipelago, the Dutch became convinced that English traders were plotting with both Japanese soldiers who worked for the Dutch and the overseer of the Dutch company’s slaves to kill the Dutch and take over the trade. A trial, featuring torture, ended in the execution of twenty men. The English traders in the region immediately characterized this incident as a massacre, and it endured in British culture with this appellation for centuries. In this paper, I investigate the legacies of the incident from the late eighteenth century to (practically) the present day. I explore the reinvention of the incident, as the meaning of the word ‘massacre’ shifted; and I focus especially on the important role the episode came to play in nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of the British Empire and on the print culture and the rise of the historical profession that together sustained and elaborated Amboyna’s new position as the linchpin of empire.

Immigration and Geopolitics

This paper explores the ways in which geopolitical considerations, and not just domestic pressures, have shaped U.S. immigration policies from the 1870s until today. It in particular focuses on the role of international enmity, labor and commercial networks, norm diffusion, and other international dynamics.

Paul Kramer, Vanderbilt University