Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

The article examines the significance of J. G. Herder's analogical thinking in the history of comparative practices. It shows how Herder's comparative method, of positing one phenomenon as another in its own singular and inimitable manner, emerges from his concept of God and nature as informed by Baruch Spinoza, as well as his study of scientific and cultural phenomena, including the active mechanisms of poesis as sensory perception. While Herder's concept of comparison and his analogical practices influenced prominent thinkers contemporary to him such as J.W. Goethe, the specificity of his comparative method has been overlooked by scholars past and present, such as Michel Foucault, as Herder's approach resists assimilation in histories of comparativism centered on nineteenth-century projects of comparison. Yet his outlook on the tension between difference and identity offers fresh insight into relations between distinct cultures and entities without effacing their particularity or placing them in static hierarchies. Herder's comparative method provides new perspectives on contemporary debates on the benefits of and dangers of historical analogies.

This article presents a broad and comparative examination of property formation in the French and English plantation colonies of the Caribbean and the southern North American mainland. It considers the connections between claims to exclusive control over human beings and claims to portions of the earth's surface. In the two early modern empires, planters pushed consistently and successfully to remove social, legal, and ecological constraints that limited their full control over their human and terrestrial property. Moreover, they insisted on legally fusing fields and workers, assimilating slaves to the category of real estate for purposes of inheritance and legal liability for debt. By the mid-eighteenth century, the French and British colonies had developed precociously modern capitalist property forms. In the Age of Revolutions, ideologues from plantation colonies, such as Thomas Jefferson and Michel-René Hilliard d'Auberteuil, emerged as radical advocates of absolute private property rights.

The deists have commonly been characterized as irreligious thinkers who believed in a distant and inactive deity. This characterization of deism is undermined by the large number of French Revolutionary deists who believed that God worked miracles. Some French Revolutionary deists claimed that God continually led the French armies to victory, while others said that God worked a single miracle. After eliminating the French Revolutionaries who were following the party line when Maximilien Robespierre was in power, there were 72 French Revolutionary deists who believed God worked miracles to help the French Revolution. The French Revolutionary deists shared a common theology with the earlier deists, and many earlier deists also believed that God worked miracles. The Enlightenment deists were much more religious than commonly thought.

This article examines the pedagogic creeds published in New York and Chicago during 1896 and 1897 in The School Journal. The configuration of ideas framing the creeds reveals the dynamics of modernities and transatlantic crossings, mainly the ideas of Georg W. F. Hegel, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Froebel, Johann Friedrich Herbart, and Wilhelm Wundt and their contextual adaptation. The creeds are analyzed at the interplay of evolutionism and its versions, including Lamarckianism, developments in psychology, the intersection of Protestantism, and the gendered and racial ordering of society. The child study movement and theories of recapitulation also had a presence. The creeds provide a picture of the ideas at the fin de siècle. They were aimed at reform with various agendas that included social reconstruction with a modernist civilizing agenda, segregationism, and residential/boarding schools for Indigenous children. John Dewey's more well-known and influential creed brought its own unique avenues through his embracement of pragmatism.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Georg W. F. Hegel labeled it a “world-historical” event. Just a few decades later, Karl Marx was equally fascinated by this Revolution, contributing to the notion that it served as a global turning point that would bend European society toward a post-feudal, modern world. Though scholars of postcolonial studies have long scrutinized these nineteenth-century thinkers’ narratives of progress, they played a large part in cementing the French Revolution's place in world history. Scholars of French studies have recently challenged long-held notions of French exceptionalism. This article explores the relationship between postcolonial studies and global history, both tenuous and complementary, as they relate to the emerging field of global French studies. Providing a reading of these intersecting methods in the historiography of both the French Revolution and 1968 in France, I contend that postcolonial studies is a form of global history.

François Hartog. Chronos: The West Confronts Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Chapter endnotes and index. 285 pp. (Hb) ISBN 978-0-231- 20312-8; (eBook) ISBN 978-0-231-55488-6. Hb $35; eBook $34.99.

Neil Kenny, ed. Literature, Learning and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe. Proceedings of the British Academy no. 246. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Index. 21 b/w ill. 291 pp. (Hb) ISBN 978-0-19-726733-2. $100

Arunima Datta. Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Bibliography and index. 150 b/w ill. 320 pp. (Hb) ISBN: 978-0-19-284823-9; $45.

Gunnar Broberg. The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus. Trans. Anna Paterson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. Bibliography and index. 55 b/w ill. 17 color plates. 512 pp. (Hb) ISBN 978-0-691-21342-2. $39.95.