Volume 57 part 2 (August 2012)

Summaries

Marcel van der Linden, David Montgomery (1927–2011)

Chitra Joshi. Dak Roads, Dak Runners, and the Reordering of Communication Networks
With the expansion of its territory in India in the first half of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company increasingly felt the need to widen postal networks and speed up communications. This essay looks at the crucial role of the dauriya (mail runner) in the development of postal networks by exploring the narratives around popular images of this “traditional” communication worker. Accounts of the lives of mail runners were interwoven with stories of their extraordinary physical strength and the dangers they negotiated along the way, their encounters with tigers, and their commitment to carry the imperial mail through rain and flood. Behind such narratives lay a history of regulations, a story of the making of a “modern” postal system. This entailed an effort to rationalize the system, calculating the speed of running, ensuring regularity, projecting estimated times of travel, and enforcing contracts. This essay aims to understand the logic of these changes, and the implications of these regulations.

E. Attila Aytekin. Peasant Protest in the Late Ottoman Empire: Moral Economy, Revolt, and the Tanzimat Reforms
This article argues that despite the different contexts of the Ottoman peasant uprisings in Vidin, Canik, and Kisrawan during the mid-nineteenth century, the attitudes and actions of peasants in the three revolts were remarkably similar. The moral economy of the peasants played an important role in determining their attitudes to the upper classes and to the state. During agrarian conflicts, the peasants received no support from outside but were well organized, used violence selectively, refused to pay taxes they deemed unfair, tended to radicalize, and preferred to deal with central instead of local authorities. Their preference for dealing with central authorities stemmed not from any naive monarchism, but from their realistic assessment of the local balance of power and a pragmatic desire to bypass it; and from their wish to have recourse to the moral authority of the sultan. The article will conclude that the rebels did not rise up against the Tanzimat reforms, nor did they simply misunderstand them; rather, they endorsed the reform programme, reinterpreted it through rumour, and strove to radicalize it.

Frank Wolff. Eastern Europe Abroad: Exploring Actor-Networks in Transnational Movements and Migration History, The Case of the Bund
The “transnational turn” is one of the most discussed topics in historiography, yet it has inspired more theoretical tension than empirically saturated studies. This article combines both aspects by examining the transnational network formation of one of the most important social movements in late imperial Russia, the Jewish Labour Bund. It furthermore introduces into historiography one of the most fruitful theories in recent social sciences, “actor-network theory”. This opens the view on the steady recreation of a social movement and reveals how closely the history of the Bund in eastern Europe was interwoven with large socialist organizations in the New World. Based on a large number of sources, this contribution to migration and movement history captures the creation and the limits of global socialist networks. As a result, it shows that globalization did not only create economic or political networks but that it impacted the everyday lives of authors and journalists as well as those of tailors and shoemakers.