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The February issue opens with the 2012 AHA Presidential Address, followed by an article on antislavery in the Atlantic world and an AHR Forum on “Liberal Empire and International Law.” There are also three featured reviews, followed by our usual extensive book review section. “In Back Issues” draws attention to articles and fea­tures in the AHR from one hundred, seventy-five, and fifty years ago.

Presidential Address

In “The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies: Francis Daniel Pastorius Makes a Notebook,” outgoing AHA President Anthony Grafton introduces us to a man of many parts, whose work and life both exemplify a transnational intellectual community and highlight the curious position of a humanist, steeped in venerable European traditions, living in colonial America. Pastorius was born in Germany but migrated to America, settling in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683, where he lived for the rest of his life. Although he came to the New World in search of a simpler existence, his life was happily burdened by intellectual and scholarly endeavors that took him deep into the culture of antiquarian erudition that still flourished at the end of the seventeenth century. Posterity remembers him for his commonplace book Bee-Hive, which, as Grafton points out, was only one of the “magnificent informa­tion-retrieval machines” he produced among a vast storehouse of notes, bibliogra­phies, commentaries, marginalia, and the like that reflect his ceaseless curiosity and intellectual appetite. In looking at Pastorius’s activities, Grafton shows us how sev­enteenth-century scholars read, and especially how they valued books. “Pastorius’s ways of using . . . books,” he notes, “mark him off as an inhabitant of a world we have lost: a world of relative textual scarcity.” But in other ways it is a familiar world, where even the most energetic and capacious minds were challenged by the ever-increasing volume of information. And despite his antiquarian bent and deep com­mitment to traditional scholarship, Pastorius was, as Grafton argues, an exemplar of an overlooked source of the Enlightenment, with “roots deeply set in an older world of European learning and Christian belief.”

Article

The Haitian Revolution has, in recent years, moved from a peripheral event to a central concern for historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In “Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” Ada Ferrer looks at the impact of that emancipatory movement on neighboring societies that were still very much invested in slavery. Focusing on a little-known case in 1817, the article explores the ways in which notions of freedom among slaves were shaped not only by the example of the Haitian Revolution but also by the actions of the Haitian state after independence. Historians have tended to argue that an independent Haiti did not intervene to promote antislavery in the region. Indeed, in its early years, every Hai­tian constitution explicitly disavowed such foreign intervention. Ferrer argues, how­ever, that the 1817 case reveals an important form of engagement on the part of the government of Alexandre Pe´tion that has gone largely unexplored. With this case, she demonstrates that the early Haitian republic, drawing on both Old Regime at­tempts to restrict slavery geographically (such as “free soil” policy) and revolutionary notions of total emancipation, did in fact project its antislavery influence abroad, thus participating in the international debates on both slavery and freedom.

AHR Forum

The history of empires and imperialism has long been a prominent theme in history of all periods, but with the advent of transnational history, its centrality is greater than ever. For the most part, however, the emphasis has been on the dynamics of conquest, colonization, exploitation, and the modalities of imperial rule. And yet, despite the fact that coercion fundamentally characterized the relations between the agents of imperial power and subject peoples, Western nations with imperial am­bitions were also committed to the rule of law, or at least were sensitive to the con­tradiction between lawless conquest and constitutional rule.

This AHR Forum, “Liberal Empire and International Law,” confronts aspects of that contradiction from three perspectives. In “The Liberal Traditions in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism,” Greg Grandin be­gins by suggesting that one aspect of the much-celebrated “exceptionalism” of the United States is rarely noted: its unique relationship to Latin America. Other world powers, such as France, Holland, and Great Britain, ruled over culturally, racially, and religiously distinct peoples, whom, moreover, they regarded as such. The settlers who colonized North America, by contrast, looked to Iberian America not as fun­damentally “other” but as a competitor in a struggle to define a set of nominally shared—and also contested—values and political concepts: Christianity, republican­ism, liberalism, democracy, sovereignty, rights, and, above all, the very idea of “America.” After the republican revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nine­teenth centuries, the relationship between the U.S. and the new nations of Spanish America was characterized by both contention and intimacy—a rivalry over a shared republican legacy. To be sure, England’s rule over its “Celtic fringe,” especially Ire­land and Scotland, produced a somewhat similar relationship, which ultimately gen­erated the legal basis for the latter British Empire. But in the Americas, the rela­tionship between the U.S. and Latin American nations was played out over a longer period of time and across much vaster spaces, yielding a unique and complex history. Grandin’s essay compares and contrasts the two sides of this rivalry, focusing es­pecially on the contested notions of rights and sovereignty.

In “Empire and Legal Universalisms in the Eighteenth Century,” Jennifer Pitts looks at various figures who commented critically from a legal perspective on European imperialism. She notes that throughout the modern period, the law of nations has been both distinctively European and universal in its aspirations. Its possible or prac­tical universality, however, has been a vexed issue, with significant moral and political implications. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the consensus among all but a few Western European jurists was that international law, though exclusively Eu­ropean in origin, was authoritative for all: Europeans could and should dictate the terms of legal interaction to so-called backward peoples. For a brief period in the eighteenth century, however, there flourished largely forgotten critical approaches to the question of the scope of the European law of nations and the nature of legal relations between European and non-European states and peoples. These ap­proaches regarded a global legal order, or a network of orders, as a constraint on the exercise and abuse of European states’ power. Pitts focuses on the writings and interventions of a range of European figures, including Edmund Burke, the French orientalist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, and the influential Admiralty Court judge William Scott, Lord Stowell.

In “Liberalism and Empire in Nineteenth-Century International Law,” Andrew Fitz­maurice continues along the lines of demonstrating the critical possibilities of lib­eralism and law in relationship to imperialism. For the most part, he notes, inter­national law was employed to justify the domination of European states over the rest of the world. And it is assumed that the liberal apology for empire reached its apo­theosis in the nineteenth century to carve up the globe. His article examines the debates over the justice of empire in international law and diplomacy in just this period. The debates focused on the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 over the par­tition of Africa in general and the colonization of the Congo in particular. In this context, liberal international lawyers developed a new legal vocabulary to justify the expansion of empire. But some also opposed empire, giving rise to an opposition that only strengthened as the race for empire gathered pace. The opposition was based not on humanitarian sentiment (which, in fact, often served as an apology for im­perial rule), but rather on self-interested concerns about the security of liberal re­forms and revolutionary changes within Europe. Evoking the concerns about empire and imperialism in the present, Fitzmaurice concludes by reminding us that while the liberal tradition has often justified expansionism, it also contains the resources to oppose it.

In his Forum comment, “Empire and Its Anxieties,” Anthony Pagden provides a learned survey of the history of imperial rule and empires with an emphasis, in keep­ing with the theme of this forum, on both the law of nations and international law. He plays on the distinction, brought out in Pitts’s and Fitzmaurice’s articles, between European empires before the nineteenth century, where cosmopolitan attitudes, moral concerns, migration from the metropole, and the potential for mutuality char­acterized overseas settlements; and those of the later period, where international law legitimizing the right to occupy and colonize prevailed over all other considerations. The key to this difference, he argues, is to be found in the liberal revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which joined rights with citizenship in the nation-state, for it was sovereignty that conferred the legal status by which non-European peoples were found lacking and thereby were subject to conquest. As products of those revolutions, the new nations of the Americas had even less claim to empire than their European counterparts. Nevertheless, they still were confronted with peoples and lands that had to be incorporated into the nation-state, although not through the kind of imperial conquest that would have entailed shared sover­eignty. Instead, the U.S., at least, has either relied upon de facto justifications for intervention or foreign occupation, or “fallen back on robustly Roman declarations of political and cultural superiority in defense of supposedly universal political val­ues.” The result, Pagden concludes, has led us to the present, where “the old anx­ieties about the consequences for the metropolis of what its citizens do in its name beyond its frontiers have become even more acute today than they were for Edmund Burke.”

April’s issue of the AHR will include articles on the cultural history of scholastic disputation, the colonization of North America, the “Mexicanization” of American politics in the late nineteenth century, the Mediterranean slave trade in the nine­teenth century, and Parisian modernism and African sculpture in the twentieth cen­tury.