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During nearly a century, between the 1851 London Great Exhibition and (at least) the eve of WWII a very ancient practice of putting on display human beings of exotic origins established itself in Europe and, in general, in the Western world, modifying their previous significance and scope and assuming the aspect of a highly organized commercial activity and a regular spectacular happening within the great expositions of different size and extent – national, international, colonial, imperial, universal – which became a frequently recurring international rendezvous. On such occasions, groups of human beings were systematically brought from every part of the non-European world toward the Western capitals and other cities seats of the expositions to be variously put on display as actors of what has also been termed ‘human zoo’, but we can better call an ‘exhibitionary complex’, whose script in fact was the result of different and often competing agencies engaged in defining how those ethnic types were placed in the great map of mankind, civilization and societies. What was at stake in a more or less explicit way was their possessing all the requisites of a fully developed human nature and their rightful or conditional or limited belonging to a proper human condition. The interplay between the several actors involved in the living ethno-exhibitions determined the degree of de-humanization or animalization or commodification, or else of positive appreciation, to which those peoples were exposed. This paper intends – by reference to a series of historical examples and by discussing the ‘human zoos’ paradigm – to offer a summary interpretation of a phenomenon through which the nature of the displayed individuals as human beings and as members of cultural groups was questioned and interpreted according to the different paradigms concurring to define roles and meanings of the participants to the exhibitionary devices.

Between the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as a consequence of the increasing intercourse between China and the West, private collections of Chinese arts and crafts by European residents in China are growing. Diplomats, officials, merchants take these often-impressive collections back home to embellish residences with prestigious and attractive decoration. In the 1820s and 1830s such collections are transformed by entrepreneurs into public exhibitions or itinerant museums of Chinese material culture, for educational and commercial purpose. After introducing English Dutch and American examples, the article focuses on the case of Italian globetrotter businessman Onorato Martucci. On his return to Rome after a multi-year residence in China, he brings with him a vast assortment of Chinese objects and set up a public exhibition to promote knowledge of the Chinese world and sell the collection. The article also reconstructs Martucci’s writings as a passionate popularizer of the reality of the Chinese empire.

I cosiddetti “zoo umani” rappresentarono un fenomeno di vastissima diffusione e popolarità nell’Europa delle grandi esposizioni nazionali, internazionali e universali a partire dalla metà dell’800. Forme spesso brutali di pubblica esibizione di esemplari di umanità selvaggia, gli “zoo umani”, completi di “villaggi” ricostruiti nel dettaglio e popolati di “indigeni” importati come animali da esposizione, costituirono un ingrediente importante – per quanto raccapricciante – della mentalità e dell’auto-rappresentazione dell’Occidente “progredito”, imperialista e colonizzatore. Grazie a questo libro, dopo che numerosi studi hanno indagato il fenomeno in larga parte del mondo occidentale (Germania, Francia, Inghilterra, Stati Uniti, Spagna, Svizzera, Russia, Danimarca) disponiamo ora della prima ricerca sistematica sulle “esposizioni umane” nell’Italia liberale e fascista, viste non solo nella loro funzione politico-ideologica, ma anche in rapporto ai loro antecedenti storici più antichi e nella varietà di declinazioni che, ben oltre la nozione restrittiva di “zoo umani”, esse assunsero nel mondo dello spettacolo, in quello delle attività missionarie oltremare e negli ambienti della ricerca medica e antropologica. L’interesse suscitato dal libro ne ha reso necessaria una seconda edizione riveduta e accresciuta e con una Prefazione di Sandra Puccini. ll volume è attualmente in corso di traduzione presso la prestigiosa casa editrice inglese Routledge.

This essay explores the several questions raised by the growing political and administrative presence of the British in India in the second half of the eighteenth century. It tries to connect them to the general context of the debates on European colonialism, its forms and its consequences, not only in the specific perspective of British politics with regard to India but also in terms of some of the basic problems faced by Enlightenment culture with reference to themes like empire, conquest, colonial dominion. The essay tries to elucidate the ideas emerging in the British and European debates out of the necessity of dealing not just with theoretical issues but with practical duties of government and administration in cultural settings entirely different from the European ones. The contributions elaborated in particular in Great Britain and France from the 1770s onwards delineate an approach revealing the sensibility to what can be termed the ‘rule of difference’. This expression is used here not in the po...

Cromohs - Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, Vol 16 (2011)

This essay is devoted to a relatively minor episode in Edmund Burke’s parliamentary career and political speculation involving the rights of war and international law in the final years of the American War of Independence. The starting point for Burke’s consideration of these questions was the affair of St. Eustatius, that is to say Britain’s conquest in 1781 of the Dutch West-Indian island early in the “fourth Anglo-Dutch War” of 1780-1784. The harsh treatment of the Dutch colony’s cosmopolitan community by the commanding officers of the British Navy and Army provoked a series of reactions in Britain and the colonies. The essay starts by outlining the identity of St. Eustatius with its economic, demographic and social features, its peculiar role in the eighteenth-century West Indies and its emblematic meaning in the historical literature of the Enlightenment as a symbol of the virtues of commerce and of economic liberty. It goes on to analyse the facts of the military conquest in 1781 and the ensuing occupation realized by Admiral George Rodney and Major-General John Vaughan, particularly as this affected the “poor Jews at St. Eustatius” (as Burke himself qualified them in his second speech on 4 December 1781), with the subsequent reactions of the Dutch and especially the British Atlantic world. We then examine Edmund Burke’s reasons for taking up this affair, including the political and ideological motives and the sources of arguments he used in the two parliamentary speeches he made on the topic during 1781, relating this to Burke’s ideas on international relations and imperial government during the 1770s and 1780s. We end by pointing to cultural links between Burke’s positions and a wider political, commercial and civic culture emerging in the British Atlantic world which reflected some of the most typical European Enlightenment values and ideological commitments., Cromohs - Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, Vol 13 (2008)

Guido Abbattista - Rolando Minuti, Premessa Marcel Dorigny, Yves Benot (1920-2005) Guido Abbattista, Africains en exposition (Italie XIXe siècle) entre racialisme, spectacularité et humanitarisme Sophie Audidière, Nature humaine et diversité: la facticité selon Helvétius Yves Benot, Les Sauvages d’Amérique du nord: modèle ou épouvantail? Carminella Biondi, "De la littérature des nègres" de l’abbé Grégoire: un plaidoyer manqué? Andrew Curran, Imaginer l’Afrique au siècle des Lumières Thierry Hoquet, La nouveauté du Nouveau Monde du point de vue de l'histoire naturelle Girolamo Imbruglia, Un impero d'età moderna: la Compagnia di Gesù Renato G. Mazzolini, L’interpretazione simbolica della pigmentazione umana nell’antropologia fisica del primo Ottocento Rolando Minuti, Tolleranza e islam. Aspetti di un dibattito tra Seicento e Settecento Marco Platania, Formes de la liberté: images politiques des Indiens d’Amérique dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle Emmanuelle Sibeud, "Comment peut-on etre noir ?" Le parcours d'un intellectuel haïtien a la fin du XIXe siècle Ann Thomson, L'Europe des lumieres et le monde musulman: une alterite ambiguë Larry Wolff, The Adriatic Origins of European Anthropology

Guido Abbattista - Rolando Minuti, Introduction. Ann Thomson, Issues at stake in eighteenth-century racial classification. Annette Meyer, The experience of human diversity and the search for unity. Concepts of mankind in the late Enlightenment. Silvia Sebastiani, Race and national characters in eighteenth-century Scotland: the polygenetic discourses of Kames and Pinkerton. Monika Niewójt, Races humaines et liberté dans la pensée politique de Jan Potocki à la veille de la Révolution. Carminella Biondi, Le problème des gens de couleur aux colonies et en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle.

1. World History as the Story of Globalization; 2. Multiple Modernities and Dynamic Interactions in the Transition to the Globalized World; 3. The “Interactive Emergence” of the British Empire in Afro-Eurasia; 4. The World Historical Impact of “British Nationalism” in the Age of Revolution; 5. A Global Past for a Common Future: Bayly’s “Ethics of World History”.

Bibliografia degli scritti di Christopher Alan Bayly.

The foreword syntetizes the aim of the conference on Christopher A. Bayly historiography, held in Naples on 10 March 2016, summarizing the various contributions collected in the volume of the proceedings

It was for a planned future section of his war museum entitled “Storia dell’avvenirismo – Precursori della Futurologia” (“The History of Futurism – The Forerunners of Futurology) that in 1957 Diego de Henriquez, ex-soldier and passionate collector, bought fifteen of Albert Robida’s original sketches for Pierre Giffard’s La Guerre infernale (1908) from a bookstand in Rome. Of these original illustrations (today at the Civico Museo di guerra per la pace “Diego de Henriquez” of the City of Trieste), eight are reproduced in Law, Justice and Codification in Qing China. Accompanying and drawing on their publication, this essay critically assesses Giffard and Robida’s work, outlining precedents and coeval trends as regards the representation of Chinese tortures and the Yellow Peril in early science fiction and Western public discourse. La Guerre infernale is an early work of science fiction which offers, today, a graphic example of the collective imagery of coeval times related to future wars and technologies, Chinese punishments and atrocities, and fears of the Yellow Peril. By 1908, the theme of Chinese torture, and the topos of Oriental cruelty was not unprecedented in Robida’s work, nor was it an isolated case in popular French and Western publications. Be that as it may (and perhaps precisely because it taps into broader cultural currents), the clash, in La Guerre infernale, between ethnic stereotypes, which informed the representation of Oriental brutality and sadism, and visions of a future driven by technological progress, offers a unique vantage point from which to observe and critically assess Sino-Western cultural relationships at the dawn of the Twentieth century (or at the end of a “long” Nineteenth century).

This paper explores, from a comparative law perspective, the making of a civil code in modern and contemporary China, as a part of the process of Chinese legal modernization, focusing on the dynamics of legal transplants from the Western legal tradition into the Chinese legal system.

This chapter examines the role African Americans had in the 1900 Paris Exposition. It focuses on the "American Negro Exhibit”, set up by prominent African American activists and intellectuals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Thomas J. Calloway, in order to represent the progress and achievements of blacks in the U.S. in the three decades following the end of the Civil War. Based on research carried out in the Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection and the Booker T. Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, the Archives Nationales and the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, this chapter highlights the ways in which the 1900 Paris Exposition became a way for African Americans of challenging the forms of racism against blacks and colonized people carried out in the so-called “native villages”, and more broadly in society, and establish new forms of solidarity and political activism, domestically and internationally. At the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in 1893 in Chicago, African Americans had already criticized the U.S. government for denying them fair representations, through the pamphlet, e Reason why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. In 1900, they demanded the right to be assigned a space where to set up “an exhibit of the progress of the American negroes in education and industry”. “The American Negro Exhibit” presented African Americans’ success in education, literature, industry and commerce, by making wide use of photography, charts and graphs. Its main aim was to challenge the idea that African Americans were “a mass of rapists, ready to attack every white woman exposed, and a drug in civilized society”, and highlighted the achievements of the so-called New Negroes. The images showed middle-class, respectable urban blacks, members of a generation that had not experienced slavery, while at the same time emphasizing the emergence of new forms of racism and violence in the South. “The American Negro Exhibit” served as a turning point in the history of African American activism. Indeed, in the context of the 1900 Paris Exposition, Washington and Du Bois grew further apart, offering profoundly different understandings of race relations in the U.S. and globally. On the one hand, Washington advanced the idea that the forms of racial integration promoted by the Tuskegee Institute should serve as a model for African colonies, uplifting Africans through work and discipline. On the other hand, in one of the plates displayed at the exhibition, Du Bois introduced the notion that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line”, a statement he later presented at the First Pan-African Conference, held in London in July 1900. For both leaders, the 1900 Paris Exposition allowed for the establishment of new transnational alliances with activists in Europe and Africa, which flourished after the First World War.

A consideration of the phenomenon of international exhibitions in the political and cultural history of central-European powers as opposed to the models represented by the London and Paris great exhibitions offers relevant insights into this topic. The Exposition organized in Vienna in 1873 – the first in the German language area – should be studied in the light of the strategic urgency which impelled the Habsburg Empire to fashion or redefine a representation of its multinational formation, in the wake of the military defeats it suffered on the French-Piedmont and Prussian fronts. As will become apparent in the later Berlin exhibition of 1879, the Wiener Weltausstellung already makes clear its desire to exhibit the network of global relations in which the central-European Empires were also trying to gain prominence, despite the essential irrelevance of their extraEuropean colonial enterprise, as compared to British and French imperialist ventures. The essay comprises a critical reassessment of the existing historiographies specifically devoted to the Viennese Exposition (the most significant of which dates to 1989), to be revised in the light of updated interpretive paradigms, and a further analysis which aims at a first systematic taxonomy of the most significant literary and journalistic echoes of this first central-European Weltausstellung. More specifically, the investigation will focus on the hundreds of articles, correspondence and notes which appeared in the Triester Zeitung, the principal newspaper in German in Habsburg Trieste. These textual sources have not as yet received scholarly attention and they make it possible to investigate the reception of the exhibition within the geographical and cultural context of the multilingual and multicultural port of Trieste which, despite its peripheral position, was, nonetheless, of primary strategic importance to the central Austrian government.

The essay focuses on the international activism of African American women between 1893 and 1960 identifying it as an essential area of study, calling for the longue durée and stressing the importance of the presence of African American women at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago for understanding the origins of that activism and reconstructing political networks that would endure many decades. It seeks to respond at least in part to some critical questions: how did African American women use Pan-Africanism as a resource in their battle for racial progress and gender equality? What roles did these women play in the various Pan-African movements? To what extent could they hold leadership positions within these movements, at least during certain phases? To do this it analyzes the foreign policy views of different African American Women associations – the National Association of Colored Women, the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, the National Council of Negro Women – and the political experience of many of their leaders. The participation of African American women in universal expositions, especially the one in Chicago in 1893, has rarely been explored from the perspective of Pan- Africanism. Yet this context can reveal much about the life experiences that interwove with international ideas and public speeches and brought together women’s rights, the creation of a global community of the ‘darker races’, anticolonialism, peace, social justice and human rights.

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