Contact & Empire

This week I am participating in what should be a stellar conference that is rethinking the revolutions of 1848 in global perspectives. It is hosted by the European University Institute, and showcases some excellent scholars. To prepare, I’ve read M’hamed Ouladi’s A Slave Between Empires. It is a history of one man’s death and the legacy of his estate in the late nineteenth century. But, of course, it is so much more than that. It rethinks the categories of colonialism and how to tell the histories of colonialized places. One way he does this is by expanding the source base away from European colonial archives. Doing that reveals “significant financial, intellectual, and kinship networks across the Mediterranean that historians have either underestimated or simply ignored.” The big conclusion for me at least his conclusion that this history “forces us to stop thinking of the territories, categories, and languages within which people move as something predetermined.”

 I’m struck by the fact that, although this book studies the twentieth century Maghreb, his methodological and conceptual points are directly in dialog with many of the conversations that scholars of the colonial Americas are having. He is productively rethinking the archives we use to tell big histories of contact and conflict. And more than that, the is breaking down the divisions between colonial and post-colonial that have structured far too much of the scholarship.

 I’m left thinking about how easily this book would fit into a syllabus on colonialism in the Americas, despite the fact that it covers different centuries and continents. That convergence is a sign that, following the impulse of the conference, we need to talk and think globally with each other.