The religious and intellectual history of early modern and modern Islam is often reduced to a teleological and Arabo-centric narrative, in which modernity began with Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition or the Nahḍa, the Arab Renaissance. Within this narrative, the succession of Sufism, Islamic reformism, Islamism, and Salafism is seen as a “genealogy of Islamism.” Using a regressive history approach, and presenting the currents of international historiography on Islam between the fifteenth and the twenty-first century, this article seeks in contrast to illuminate the plurality of possible pathways and the heterogeneous nature of historical moments. Moving backward through time, it attempts to identify ruptures and continuities, and to highlight successive interpretations of medieval authors and concepts (such as salafiyya). In so doing, it endeavors to demonstrate the constructed nature of the received historiographical narrative of late nineteenth-century “Islamic reformism,” as well as that of “Arabic thought in the liberal age.” Historiographical debates on the “neo-Sufism” and Aufklärung of the eighteenth century have led to a better understanding of Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, a thirst for renewal (tajdīd) flourished in hadith, Islamic law, and Sufism. Recent research on the process of “confessionalization” over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has highlighted the importance of political factors in developments of Islam during the age of the three Empires (Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman).

This article proposes an analysis of the Book of the Desert (Kitāb al-Bādiya), a nineteenth-century legal treatise composed by Muḥammad al-Māmī (d. 1282/1865), a Muslim scholar from the Tiris desert in present-day Mauritania. Al-Māmī’s text reflects on the adaptation of sharia—the religious law of Islam—to the needs of pastoral populations in the Saharan West. How to embrace a normative system seemingly incompatible with nomadic life, given that it presupposes a state governed by an Islamic ruler (imām) and considers the city the natural environment of legal institutions? Challenging the narratives of center-periphery and the so-called post-classical “decline” that continue to structure the field of Islamic intellectual history, the article explores the different contextual layers of al-Māmī’s reasoning. He was a religious notable deeply involved in power struggles between nomadic groups and a fervent supporter of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jihad movements in West Africa. But he was also a jurist of the Maliki school, who approached his society from the perspective of Islamic legal thought, and a Bedouin preoccupied with the legal and religious implications of the cultural gulf between his world and that of the towns.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, the Mzab region in the north of the Algerian Sahara, then under French rule, was shaken by controversies over the consumption and lawfulness of European goods. Historians typically analyze these debates as a form of cultural resistance to colonization or as a sign of the allegedly difficult adaptation of “Islam” to “modernity.” They single out two types of reaction: that of self-proclaimed “reformist” scholars and that of “conservatives,” caricatured as shoring up a barren tradition. Based on the case of the Mzab and on a wide range of Islamic legal documents, this article opens up a new perspective on the relations between Islam, modernity, and colonialism, demonstrating that other logics were also at work. For the Islamic scholars involved, the most important issue at stake was the purity of their community and its preservation in a context of cultural and political uncertainty. Using the tools of Islamic law, both advocates and detractors of these “innovations” shaped a particular vision of their community and its boundaries. By bringing together colonial and Islamic sources, and drawing on both colonial and Islamic studies, this article challenges a reading of the modern history of Islam based on notions such as modernity and reform, which were essentially instrumental in these debates. It also moves away from a historiography that is blind to the internal complexity of these societies, drawing attention to the multiple rationales at work in colonized North Africa.

This essay proposes to reframe the twentieth-century history of Islam by rethinking the relationship of that history to some dominant categories of twentieth-century sociology, especially the secularization thesis. The global history of Islam since the late nineteenth century has been shaped by an apparent paradox between its two most significant features. The first of these has consisted of persistent calls for Muslim revival, reform, and unity across the world, tending toward a unification or transcendence of the older forms of variation within the tradition. The second, countervailing tendency has been an increasing fragmentation of structures of authority within the tradition, a proliferation of the meanings attributed to it and of the forms of practice taken to embody it, and a renewed acuity of internal sectarian conflict. This is a paradox that only an understanding of Islam as social practice embedded in the forms of secularity characteristic of modern societies—and emphatically not one of Islam as “medievally” religious and uniquely “secularization-resistant”—can apprehend.

This article analyzes the emergence of the paradigm of “piracy” and “fighting pirates” among the urban elites of the Hanse city of Lübeck in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While recent studies of maritime conflict management in this period have questioned the use of the term “piracy,” this study shows that towns such as Lübeck instrumentalized a discourse on “piracy” to criminalize and marginalize their competitors at a moment of structural economic change. A close reading of the records of the Lübeck Bergenfahrer, a guild of merchants trading to Norway, demonstrates how this concept was mobilized to justify actors’ own violence as a struggle against so-called pirates and thus to stabilize group identities. The notion of “fighting pirates” gradually became a paradigm for urban elites like the Bergenfahrer, representing their social coherence as communities of violence.

In contrast to other scientific renaissances, the culture forged in seventeenth-century Europe became an enduring phenomenon rather than dissipating within a few generations. In an effort to understand the persistence of European science, this article uses the case study of France under Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) to argue that men of letters played a crucial role in the legitimation of the nascent scientific movement. These men of letters enjoyed a social, intellectual, and aesthetic affinity with the “new science” and developed a narrative of scientific change that foregrounded the idea of a radical break with the past. They diffused this narrative among the cultural elite, mobilizing recent thinkers, discoveries, and scientific instruments as they participated in wide-ranging debates, regardless of whether they supported modern innovations or classical models. In so doing, they invented the narrative of a “scientific revolution,” a construction that has wielded a profound influence over the social and cultural history of European science.

This paper considers the Polish-German workers, mainly from the eastern parts of Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and the Russian Empire, who moved to the Ruhr Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Extrapolating from this case study, it suggests a way of rethinking our conception of societies by analyzing the processes through which demarcation and belonging were produced at local, state, and trans-European levels. During this period, increasing numbers of people arrived in the region, some of whom stayed while others moved on. The intellectual and social figure of the “Ruhr Poles” is particularly revealing because it points to competing spatial affiliations whose meanings shifted according to geographical setting and social context. An analysis of the interwoven processes of differentiation and evaluation surrounding these mobile people demonstrates the influence that regional actors exerted through administrative practices of categorization. It also shows the diverse ways in which newcomers to the area represented and normalized social relationships. Finally, the article discusses the consequences of these processes for the scholarly classification of individuals who moved, in ways not defined by the grid of nation-states, between spaces such as the Ruhr Valley and Polish-speaking areas. Overall, the article demonstrates that even as the model of the nation-state was becoming prevalent in scholarly and public discourse across Europe, different constructions of belonging based on origin, achievement, and visions of the common humanity of subjects coexisted in the Ruhr region as an economic zone shaped by mobilities.

With the efflorescence of palaeoscientific approaches to the past, historians have been confronted with a wealth of new evidence on both human and natural phenomena, from human disease and migration to landscape change and climate. These new data require a rewriting of our narratives of the past, questioning what constitutes an authoritative historical source and who is entitled to recount history to contemporary societies. Humanities-based historical inquiry must embrace this new evidence, but to do so historians need to engage with it critically, just as they do with textual and material sources. This article highlights the most vital methodological issues, ranging from the spatiotemporal scales and heterogeneity of the new evidence to the new roles attributed to quantitative methods and the place of scientific data in narrative construction. It considers areas of study where the palaeosciences have “intruded” into fields and subjects previously reserved for historians, especially socioeconomic, climate, and environmental history. The authors argue that active engagement with new approaches is urgently needed if historians want to contribute to our evolving understanding of the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Catholic artifacts—images and sculptures of Christ, the Virgin, and various saints, as well as rosaries, crucifixes, and liturgical objects—circulated in their thousands throughout the early modern western Mediterranean. This mobility was largely an indirect byproduct of privateering and human trafficking, which bound together Spain’s Mediterranean territories, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers. The disruptive moment of captivity set these otherwise disparate objects on common trajectories, making it interesting to study them as a category. The article argues that Catholic artifacts played surprising roles in the experience of Catholic captives, renegades, and their Muslim masters, and in the economy of ransom that facilitated the rescue of captives. Against the design of their initial distributors, such objects provided captives, converts, and masters with unexpected affordances, and in so doing helped blur the boundary between the religions, creating new entanglements between members of these groups and Catholic materiality. The argument is developed in three stages. First, the article claims that the surge in captivity following the Spanish-Ottoman truce of 1581 meant that more devotional objects were sent from Spain to Catholics held captive in the Maghrib. Second, it asserts that some of these artifacts ended up serving converts to Islam, while others were plundered by Algerian and Moroccan rulers. Third, the article contends that plunder and repurposing afforded captives the power to redeem an emblem of their God, provided Trinitarians and Mercedarians with opportunities to ransom objects and gain fame back home, and helped Maghribi rulers to secure religious privileges for their subjects enslaved in Spain. Focusing on their mobility demonstrates the degree to which Catholic objects continued to articulate and mediate social, political, and economic relations in the western Mediterranean over the long seventeenth century.

This article argues that the territorialization of the ocean was one of the crucial inflection points of the twentieth century, transforming the sovereignty of states and profoundly reshaping their territories. In terms of scale, it is the most planetary of the many remappings that have marked the twentieth century. A close study of the globalization of the Japanese tuna industry serves to illustrate this transition and can help us understand why and how this process evolved. The Japanese Empire was a key actor in the transimperial hotspot of the Indo-Pacific, where multiple empires met and interacted. Transimperial “brokers”—both human migrants and migratory species such as tuna—moved across boundaries and created an open oceanic frontier dependent on shifting ecological conditions. These transimperial entanglements did not end in 1945. Their legacies weighed heavy in the decolonization process that followed the Second World War, with new states seeking to establish their territories at sea as well as on land. Japan’s success in maintaining access to fishing grounds shows how these entanglements transcended the so-called Age of Empires to influence the establishment of a new global order and a new oceanic sovereignty.

Medieval Hungary has been called a “guestland” because of the multiplicity of immigrant peoples living in the realm. Yet the real experiences of immigrants and narrative constructions about immigration were not always in sync. This article explores medieval tales of different types of migration into the Kingdom of Hungary: first, the mythic migration of the entire people (gens) from a supposed original homeland to a new territory; second, the family histories of noble immigrants; and finally representations of mass immigration into the Christian kingdom. To understand how medieval authors constructed such tales, we need to identify the models they used and the purposes such stories served. Biblical and literary sources inspired the story of “the Hungarians,” while noble families sought to increase their prestige by identifying early immigrant ancestors. In neither case can these medieval narratives be used as historical sources without fully engaging with their genesis. The analysis of explicit medieval reflections on the arrival of various groups into the Kingdom of Hungary also reveals how immigration could be seen in both positive and negative ways. Resting on these medieval foundations, tales of migration have persisted into the present, but they have also gained a sharper distinction: old migration is valorized, while new migration is demonized and instrumentalized in a brutally exclusionary way.

In the early sixteenth century, European mariners established a commercial fishery and site of permanent occupation in the northwest Atlantic. What are we to call this place? This article argues that mariners developed their own concept of space through the creation of the fishery, reflecting mental maps that evolved via the practice of fishwork. It contends that rather than modern terminology like “Newfoundland,” scholars should utilize this distinct geographic framework when discussing the early fishery and colonization. Mariners across Europe used variations of the term Terra Nova to label a malleable, vast, and watery world in the northwest Atlantic. Their usage was consistent across time and space, and tied geography to the act of fishing. The article reconstructs the nature of sixteenth-century mental maps, traces the origin and spread of the term Terra Nova, and considers how it differed from the geographies and labels of cartographers. In its final section, it reflects on the relationship between work, water, and space, and the ways this contributed to the use of Terra Nova. In so doing, it offers a way to recover lost mental maps and demonstrates the flexibility of maritime geographies in the early history of European expansion into the Atlantic.

This article compares the cartographical representationsof the Caspian region produced around 1560 in Goa and Venice, with references toother centers of mapmaking such as Lisbon, Seville, and Antwerp. It explores thescientific, cultural, technical, and commercial logics that led to profoundlydissimilar cartographies of the Caspian and its surroundings in differentcenters of map production around the same time. It asks questions about thecontrasts between maritime and terrestrial cartography in the Renaissance, andthe cartographical languages associated with each of these cartographical modes.The habitus of maritime cartographers in Goa, Lisbon, and Seville differedprofoundly, it is argued, from that of mapmakers in Italy, and particularlyVenice, who aimed for an integration of all available data as part of atradition of commenting on Ptolemy, and produced highly desirable printed mapsfor a growing consumer audience. The article thus advocates a comparativeapproach to maps, and critiques the assumption that knowledge “flows” betweenregions. It proposes instead a “(dis)connected history” of knowledge productionand consumption to throw new light on the origins of the cartographical printingrevolution.

This article examines the martyrdom of the Jesuitmissionary Saint João de Brito (1647-1693) and the beginnings of his cult, atonce embedded in the local dynamics of the Tamil country and extending towardsbroad imperial horizons. How did a Portuguese Jesuit, an agent of modern globalCatholicism, become such a locally anchored figure? And how did the last momentsof Brito’s life initiate a Tamil devotion that has lasted for over threecenturies? A diverse array of sources is used to address these questions: themultilingual archives produced during early inquiries in support of Brito’scanonization (particularly the witness statements of his catechists), amissionary treatise in Tamil, and a life of Brito composed in Tamil by one ofhis catechists and preserved in a palm-leaf manuscript. Two conclusions emergefrom this study. In the early eighteenth century, witnessing a martyrdom couldbe a means of acquiring a certain degree of sanctity, and thus a spiritual andsocial authority transmissible within family lineages. Moreover, by witnessingBrito’s life and death, Tamil Christian laymen found a way of inscribing theirown lives into the history of Catholicism on both local and global scales.

By starting from a series of practical manuscript manualsproduced by Spanish inquisitors for daily use in their work, then followingtheir references to Latin legal treatises, it is possible to gain a betterunderstanding of the theoretical, theological, philosophical, and pastoralunderpinnings of inquisitorial practice. Further information can be gleaned bycomparing the procedural structure of trials with the relaciones de causas, the reports that summarizedthose trials and justified inquisitors’ decisions to their superiors. Thisdouble approach reveals that the inquisitorial trial of faith can beconceptualized on two different levels: the formal judicial proceedings thatshaped the organizational sequence of the trial, and another process thatfollowed a less explicit internal logic and sought to produce a penitentialrather than a judicial truth. Though less evident for modern readers of theInquisition’s archives, this second level formed a key part of the theoreticalapparatus described in the Latin treatises. The first level was repressive and,once the offense was proved in conformity with all judicial forms, imposedpunishment. The second was integrative and ecclesiastic, and aimed toreintegrate defendants into the fold of the Catholic Church even when foundguilty. The inquisitors mobilized these two levels with a certain flexibilitythat has not always been evident to historians: seen from this angle, theirexpressions of interest in defendants’ spiritual well-being were more thansimple hypocrisy. The two conflictual logics nevertheless meant that theinquisitorial trial of faith was an unbalanced edifice that could easily sway inone direction or the other, depending on the inquisitors’ choices. Over time, itappears that the penitential aspect of the trial took precedence over the purelyjudicial dimension. There are several indications that a similar double logicgoverned the criminal trials of other jurisdictions, meaning that such anapproach may shed a broader light on early modern institutions and theirresolution of conflicts.

This article presents a comparative analysis ofthe commons in two broad regions of medieval southern Europe: northernItaly and the Iberian Peninsula’s Duero Plateau. Recent scholarship ondifferent regions of northern Europe has highlighted the centrality ofcommon lands to both agrosystems and the organization of communities,drawing on the economic theories of Elinor Ostrom and generallyfocusing on the early modern period. It has also suggested a contrastbetween resilient communities in northern Europe, where the presenceof stable commons helped absorb social inequality, and those ofsouthern Europe, where less solid commons supposedly resulted in lowercohesion among communities. Our longue-durée comparative study of these tworegions shows, however, that commons existed in southern Europe fromthe early medieval period on. It also reveals how they evolved andadapted throughout the High and late Middle Ages, in tandem with thedocumentary practices that recorded them. This resilience tookdifferent forms in each of the areas studied, reflecting the influenceof a range of different factors across southern Europe. The commonsendured because they were part of a “moral economy” of collective use,which, in constant dialogue with notions of property and ownership,helped forge lasting identities in both rural and urban contexts andon different scales.

This paper applies to ancient Greece an approachdeveloped by Pierre Rosanvallon: the integration of philosophicaltexts with the most everyday documents to better grasp a society’sunderstanding of its political life. For the ancient polis, this meansfocusing on the more prosaic evidence offered by cities’ inscriptions,especially their collective decisions published on stone. It is usedhere to consider the changing ideas about the nature of political andprivate life—and especially the space between them. In a veryinfluential model, Classical Athenian democrats and philosopherstended to insist on a sharp binary distinction between public/political life and private life, leaving little room for a notion ofan intermediate third space of polis life, similar to a “socialsphere” or “civil society.” This pattern remained dominant in theHellenistic and Roman periods, but, especially after c. 150 BC, someGreek citizens and intellectuals developed, above all in inscriptions,a much more explicit, complex, and subtle notion of “social life” assomething between politics and private life. The article concludes byasking what the different ancient concepts discussed can contribute tocurrent historiographical debates about the nature of the Greek cityafter c. 150 BC, especially when it comes to moving beyond thetraditional picture of “depoliticization.” It also calls into questionthe orthodox narrative of the development of ideas of “the social”over many centuries up to the present.

This essay analyzes a recently discovered French play, Les esclaves livournais à Alger, authored by François Gariel in Livorno in 1786. The protagonist of the piece, which is full of allusions to contemporary Tuscan and European events and subtle references to classics of French Enlightenment literature, is a virtuous, Algiers-based Jewish merchant who preaches toleration for all peoples and religions and greatly admires the grand duke of Tuscany. Important context for understanding Gariel’s play and the Jewish question in Livorno is provided by the relocation in the 1780s of prominent Algerian Jewish families who had built their fortunes on the ransom of captives, as well as the active but contested Jewish participation in the Livornese theatrical scene. Once the play’s many allusions are decoded and its layers are peeled back, Les esclaves takes us to the heart of Tuscan political debates about Jewish participation in the public sphere and illuminates widespread anxieties about Jewish power, intertwined with ambivalence about the prominent role of Jews in the commerce and ransom of captives. Livorno’s historical ties with the Maghreb are thus central to assessing the public discourse about the Jewish condition in Tuscany. A Mediterranean perspective in turn complicates our understanding of minority-majority relations as Enlightenment debates on toleration and Jewish integration flourished in Western Europe.