Berlin, 1878: Prelude to Versailles, 1919

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 210-212, 238-240:

In 1878, representatives of Europe’s major powers convened in the capital of the new German nation-state for negotiations that bear all the hallmarks of the more famous effort in decolonization and democratization that transpired at Paris after World War I. At Berlin in 1878, statesmen determined the boundaries, constitutions, sovereigns, and even citizenship of four national states, which like Poland or Czechoslovakia in 1919, had to be created in the wake of imperial decline so as to secure Europe’s balance of power. We date the independence of modern Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia from July 1878.

But in the interests of balance, the statesmen in Berlin traduced the spirit of nationalism by denying to Serbia territory where a plurality of the inhabitants was Orthodox South Slavs. That was Bosnia-Herzegovina, a quilt of ethnicities, which Austria-Hungary was permitted to occupy in 1878 with no purpose other than making sure it did not go to Serbia. Politicians in Vienna and Budapest viewed the prospect of a “great South Slav state” with horror, all the more so as it promised to be a close ally of Russia.

Some have called this frustrated Serb determination to expand “irredentist,” and that is both correct and misleading. The characterization is correct because Serbia felt there were Serbs beyond its boundaries who had to be included, but it is also misleading in suggesting that this agenda was unusual. In fact, every new state, beginning with Italy (where the word “irredentism” originated) and Germany, was irredentist in the sense that it “redeemed” national territory. Piedmont-Sardinia had not been Italy, nor was Prussia Germany. Without irredentism, there would be no Serbia, or any other new East European state, whether created in 1878 or 1919. Therefore, it is not hard to understand the tremendous affront that many Serbs, in and outside Serbia, felt after 1878.

But where Austria-Hungary was concerned, it was not only an affront but also the bizarre act of a troubled imperial state, now taking millions more Slavs under its rule, just a decade after dividing into Austria-Hungary precisely to keep a lid on the empire’s Slavs. But even more intriguingly and confoundingly, the man who negotiated the inclusion of more Serbs and Croats, as well as millions of Bosnian Muslims, was the beautiful hanged man, Count Gyula Andrássy, who became the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister in 1871, and whose own Hungary was trying to make loyal Magyars out of millions of Slovaks, Serbs, Ruthenes, and Croats. Before the Compromise of 1867, Magyar politicians had assured representatives of those groups that their rights would be legally guaranteed. Afterward, those promises were forgotten, and demands for national autonomy were treated as seditious. Austria was not Germanizing its population, but German liberals were deeply concerned about the growing numerical superiority of Slavs. Now Vienna and Budapest took responsibility for 3 million more. How could they possibly make them into loyal citizens?

This story takes place in three acts. The first is the last major uprising of a Christian people against Ottoman rule in Europe, the Herzegovinian rebellion of 1875. The acts of Herzegovinian and then Bosnian peasants generated the pressures leading to the Berlin Congress. The second is the sanguineous military campaigns of Serbia, Montenegro, and Russia against the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1878, whose success triggered concern among the European powers about the growth of Russian and the decline of Ottoman power. The third is the Berlin Congress itself and how the European powers rescued peace as well as Austria-Hungary, largely by extending their blessings to four new states, each of which considered itself not an end product but rather a toehold from which the respective ethnic nation would expand.

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Internationally, the Congress of Berlin was a major step toward the twentieth century, perhaps its inaugural event. The Congress took a principle implicit in the 1830 London Protocol founding modern Greece—that an ethnicity could be a source of sovereignty—and multiplied it by four. By implication, it also adumbrated the idea of minorities, people in the nation-state who did not belong to the nation and required protection. The idea that ethnicity was the basis of the right to rule—a principle later called national self-determination—had been foreign to the Vienna system of 1815. Berlin was not just a halfway point; it was a rupture with that system. What changed in Paris in 1919 was to make the new principle not simply a result of grudging acceptance, but an explicit and valid—indeed, universal—method of organizing statehood.

For South East European peoples, the events of 1875–1878 had a meaning like that of 1848 in Bohemia: after initial uprisings, events soon cascaded in a way that forced choices about self-identification. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Orthodox still called themselves Bosnians but increasingly desired attachment to Montenegro or Serbia, while Catholics opted for Austria and more clearly than ever identified as Croats. Religious identity was a starting place but not an endpoint; the participants in the 1875 uprising knew that they were united by religion against the “occupier” and were picking up a script from earlier in the century, when Christian populations in Serbia and Greece had likewise risen up and begun carving out autonomous zones from Ottoman territory. Yet the issue was not religion per se—the insurgents did not care about suppression of worship or doctrine—but a sense that religious belonging had condemned much of the population to subservience.

Did Bosnian identity ever stand a chance as a form of nationhood? “Of the basic criteria by which the Serb and Croat nations established themselves during this period, history, language, and religion,” writes Noel Malcolm, “only religion could apply in Bosnia, a country which had its own separate history.” But in fact, history (that is, people’s consciousness of the past) ignored the boundaries of Bosnia and focused instead on a past that Orthodox South Slavs in Bosnia believed they shared with Orthodox South Slavs in Serbia. According to epic poetry, the common history stretched back to the 1389 Kosovo battle and earlier.

In Bosnia, Orthodox and Muslims had separate imaginations: the former told stories in oral poetry of their coreligionists deceiving Turkish authorities; the latter of theirs outwitting the Austrians. And if advocates for Serb nationhood in Bosnia were inspired by the romantic nationalism that was popular at Central Europe’s universities and understood language as a people’s soul, they had to look no further than Vuk Karadžić, who had based his Serb dictionary on a dialect in Herzegovina. Against Karadžić, Benjamin Kállay had not stood a chance; probably ten times the number of schools he built would not have resulted in the Bosnian identity he intended.

If Bosnian identity amounted to anything, it was the beginning of a strategy for Muslims to oppose complete assimilation by Serb and Croat nationalism, each of which expected co-nationals to become Christian, at least nominally. What the Bosnian and Romanian stories share is a hint that twentieth-century European nationalism was vigorously and exclusively Christian, even when its carriers were fiercely secular.

Fatal Ausgleich/Kiegyezés of 1867

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 207-209:

The Compromise provided a stable legal platform for state consolidation and steady economic progress in both halves of the monarchy. From 1867 to 1914, the national income tripled, with a yearly rate of growth between 2.6 and 2.8 percent. In Hungary, agricultural exports grew and industrialization accelerated, though it lagged behind Bohemia and Austria. Still, its advance was remarkable. In the 1850s, an average of 250 kilometers of railroad were built each year, and after 1867, the total jumped to 600. The assets in Hungarian banks more than tripled between 1866 and 1873.

The Compromise would have continued to provide a basis for law and order in the Habsburg lands beyond 1918 had World War I not intervened. But the new arrangement was also marked by tension from the start. Hungarians were never satisfied with junior partner or even partner status, and they hoped that the center of gravity in the monarchy would be Budapest, not Vienna.

In 1867 the monarchy’s majority was Slavic, and in both halves Slavic politicians became deeply alienated. Czechs, Croats, Serbs, and Slovaks said their nations had come to the Habsburgs’ rescue in 1848/1849 but were now abandoned; the latter three had been placed at the mercy of the amnestied rebels! In Hungary, only Croats received any recognition, and that was due to the historic integrity of the Croatian kingdom. The others were simply “nationalities” to be subsumed in the “indivisible Hungarian nation.” Rights applied not to national groups but exclusively to individual citizens, and there was no appreciation of the need to protect local vernaculars. The Cisleithanian [Austrian] constitution respected German sensitivities above all others, not officially establishing the German language, but also not permitting it to be challenged as the dominant language of state. All ethnic groups (Volksstämme) had equal rights to nationality and language, but what constituted a Volksstamm, or how the state might protect it, was not specified.

In neither half of the monarchy did the new arrangement come close to satisfying the desires of the nationalities’ political elites for self-government and legally binding protection of their cultures. The difference between the two halves was that the Hungarian state actively sought to make its subjects into Magyars, while the Austrian government was for the most part nationally agnostic. It even passed a school law in 1869 that gave each nationality the right to a school if forty of its children lived within 4 kilometers of a given locale. Yet once this provision passed, Czechs took it for granted rather than crediting it to the Austrian government, and as the percentage of literate Czechs reached among the top rates in Europe, so did the dissatisfaction of Czech elites with the fact that they had no national autonomy comparable to the that of the Hungarians. The Czech leader Rieger called the Compromise “unnatural injustice,” and in general, Czechs referred to the December Constitution as “artificial.”

Czech passive resistance dated back to 1863 with the partial boycotting of the Vienna Reichsrat, but full-scale abstention by Czech deputies began in 1868 from Vienna and extended to the Bohemian and Moravian diets. It was accompanied by public protests so severe in October 1868 that the government imposed a state of siege in Prague and surrounding communities. Czech politics became what would later be called “extraparliamentary opposition.” Between 1868 and 1871, the movement staged more than a hundred mass meetings, called tabory, or camps, in the countryside, with between 1 and 1.5 million participants. The protesters called for Bohemian state rights, suffrage, education, and Slav solidarity. Authorities in Vienna tried to suppress the agitation through arrests and confiscations of newspapers, measures that were in clear violation of the freshly printed constitution. As we will see in Chapter 9, promising attempts to placate the Czechs were worked out in 1871 and supported by Francis Joseph, but they came to nothing because of Austro-German Magyar opposition. Magyar politicians feared that any concessions to nationalities in the west—“Cisleithania”—would encourage demands from the nationalities in Hungary.

The Compromise kept the monarchy afloat but ended any pretense that it might call itself an empire. The monarchy had no “imperial center” and no effective control over more than half the realm in the east, which was becoming a nation-state, while Cisleithania became a partly decentralized territorial conglomeration. Yet if Austria-Hungary was no empire, it was propelled by imperialist energies, based in the joint desires of German and Magyar elites to subjugate Slavs and convert them to the “higher” culture. The combination of condescension and fear led the monarchy forward—and also downward. In 1878, Austria-Hungary took the odd step of occupying Bosnia-Herzegovina, and taking charge of even more Slavs. In the background lay the conviction that it was bringing civilization to yet one more benighted region. In the foreground lay the simple determination to deny this land to a growing Serbia. Yet there was no chance of making Bosnians into Austrians or Hungarians. As the monarchy reformed, it made itself less reformable; as it grew in size, it shrank in self-confidence; and as it entered the imperial age, it was less an empire than ever before.

Czech vs. Magyar Paths to Nationhood

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 120-122:

Many residents in these small-town [Bohemian] communities knew German for the sake of public life, but it stirred no deeper sense of loyalty, whereas Czech was the language of the intimacy of the home. They flocked to spectacles that were extensions of their families’ lives, a “traveling theater nation,” where people sang together, instantly understood allusions, and nodded their heads about things that mattered, comedic or tragic. The punch lines came in rapid succession and served to define the community: Czechs were the people who got the jokes and laughed uncontrollably, while their “betters” stared in befuddlement.

Still, the Czech movement advanced slowly against ideas of respectability and facts of ownership. All the established theaters in Bohemia and Moravia remained in German hands. A barrage of petitions moved imperial authorities to permit the building of a Czech theater at Prague, yet they allotted no money for it. Supporting a “nationalist” undertaking was out of the question, and the authorities wanted the two ethnicities to cooperate as they did in the Estates Theater in Prague, where the same actors appeared in German and Czech operas. But ultimately, no force could stop the dividing of institutions in Bohemia. When Czech patriots got a chance, they separated from the Germans as soon as they could, first in theaters but then on every other stage, whether cultural, scientific, economic, religious, or political.

In the early nineteenth century, theaters also expanded in the Hungarian cities Pest and Pressburg, and Magyar-language productions rapidly displaced German. But by the 1830s, there was little to struggle about. If the Hungarian movement wanted Hungarian theater, the parliament simply decreed it. The gentry political elite that controlled this institution was the national movement, and its prime efforts had moved to the stage of public life: to the most recent speeches of Kossuth, or to debates about political reform between him and more moderate opponents that filled the newspapers.

By the 1830s the Hungarian movement was imagining how to take control of and build the institutions of a nation-state that might stand next to England or France, sharing a point of view that would emerge among Czech politicians only two or three generations later. At this juncture, the Hungarian and Czech movements each desired what the other took for granted. If Czech patriots looked with envy on the museums, high schools, casinos, and theaters sprouting up around the Kingdom of Hungary, Magyar activists looked jealously at the cities and industries, roads, bridges, and urban prosperity of Bohemia, the most economically advanced place in the monarchy.

Bohemia had long stood at the crossroads of commercial routes, and it possessed age-old industries, a diversified and intensive agriculture, and an educated workforce in its innumerable small towns and cities. From the time of Joseph II, we can trace a growth spike that made Bohemia unrecognizable within a generation. The number of linen looms in Moravia went from 8,769 in 1775 to 10,412 in 1780, and 14,349 in 1798. Workers in the Moravian textile industry increased from about 288,000 in 1780 to 504,000 in 1789. Glass, wool, cotton, and stationery manufacturing likewise improved in the late eighteenth century, and agricultural products became more abundant. Such increases in production then fostered the expansion of regional and transregional markets, which in turn promoted the communication and movement of people from villages to growing towns.

At the same time, the transformation from rural to modern was achingly gradual in Hungary, noticeable in reforms accomplished through the strong will of a few workaholics like István Széchenyi, the most spectacular being the Chain Bridge connecting Buda and Pest in 1849, designed by Scottish engineers and financed by Greek capital. Yet Hungary’s vaunted reform parliaments of the 1830s and 1840s did little to advance modernization beyond measures facilitating the litigation of commercial disputes; their major achievement was to firm up the use of Hungarian in the educational system.

Hungary remained overwhelmingly and unproductively agricultural, facing tremendous legal barriers to even the thought of modernization. Seigniorial land could not be bought or sold, and peasants were not a labor force available to emergent industry but instead were bound servants of their lords. Széchenyi understood that agricultural land had to attract credit to prosper, but even after 1848, when seigniorial rights were abolished, Hungary did not bring in much foreign investment. Rather than put their money in the agricultural enterprise of an underdeveloped country, Western credit markets tended to fund transportation and industry in more prosperous regions.

1848: Nationalism's Icarus Moment

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 157-158:

Never before or since have Europeans seen common hopes smashed so rapidly as in 1848, the year of democratic revolutions. In February and March, after a disguised King of France escaped the wrath of his people, populations across the continent rose up against princes and kings, unified as never before, seeming to act according to one script. Divisions of nation or religion that had caused countless wars no longer seemed to matter, and even terms like “east” and “west” became secondary. The watchword was self-rule. Crowds demanding rights and democracy forced divine-right rulers to retreat and negotiate, from Italy and France through central Germany and into Bohemia, Prussian as well as Austrian Poland, all of Hungary (including Transylvania), and even farther east, into the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (the heart of today’s Romania), still under nominal Ottoman rule. Everywhere in this vast space, Europeans were telling the same story: they were leaving feudalism behind for better lives under democracy. If kings or princes survived, they would be bound to constitutions, as was the norm in Britain or the Netherlands.

But as early as April, the push for democracy was exposing divides among populations that few had imagined existed, and the stunned princes began surging back, making use of resources, some old (like a well-trained military), others new and unexpected. For the Habsburgs, virtually every national group turned out to be a potential ally against German and Magyar democrats, but they also exploited class divisions, playing peasants off against urban liberals, and urban liberals off against suburban proletarians. When pogroms broke out across Central Europe in 1848, the House of Habsburg also revealed itself as the defender of Jews and their property against urban mobs, who claimed that Jews stood with their ethnic enemies. That house was not only a bastion of the old order but also a defense of life and liberty against an emerging new order, of liberalism and national self-determination, but also of seemingly intractable interethnic feuding.

By the fall of 1848, the Habsburgs and other monarchs were rebounding, even if the final victories were not scored until the spring and summer of 1849, when imperial authorities closed down the elected parliament in Austria and crushed the democratic revolution in Hungary, with the assistance of Croat, Austro-German, Serb, and Romanian forces recruited from within Habsburg territories. The fighting between Hungary’s democrats trying to establish their national state and these nationalities became so intense that the region became a staging ground for ethnic cleansing: Magyar, Serb, and Romanian forces staked claims for territory by expelling ethnic others and burning their villages.

The difficulties of making a transition from feudalism to freedom were shocking because Habsburg subjects had not known the full extent of the realm’s complexity. The historian Joseph Redlich wrote much later that censorship and poor internal communications had kept the various parts of the monarchy ignorant of one another. There was little critical higher education, and for the elites, the “state almost completely coincided with German Austria,” and they assumed it would govern from Vienna with no concern for the “nationally foreign” inhabitants of the Sudeten and Alpine countries. Little was known about Czechs and South Slavs, and few anticipated that people speaking in their names might demand independence.1 Inhabitants of Central and Eastern European were neighbors who got to know one another only after they had to deal with one another as free human beings for the first time.

Crucible of Serb Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 142-144:

Beyond Poland, only Hungary possessed a large group of nationally conscious gentry. As in Poland, the challenge for the patriotic gentry was to extend its notions of national consciousness to a largely illiterate peasantry. But in contrast to Poland, a Hungarian political entity—the Hungarian kingdom—continued to exist, even if the king was Habsburg. Within that kingdom, institutions thrived that were controlled by the Hungarian gentry, above all a parliament and schools that inculcated in children a sense of duty to the Hungarian nation. The challenge was building even more schools in a largely agricultural country and spreading the message to areas where Hungarian was not spoken.

Yet Serb patriots faced challenges unknown to their neighbors. There had been no kingdom of Serbia for hundreds of years, and over the centuries, the Serb nobility had gradually faded away, either on the field of battle or through emigration, Islamicization, or simple reduction to poverty. In general, the Ottoman rulers did not impose Islam, but they encouraged conversion by reserving positions of influence and distributing land to their coreligionists. Landowners, administrators, and the wealthy tended to be Muslims, and Orthodox Christian peasants formed an underclass of sharecroppers. It was unthinkable that a Christian could have a position of authority or command over a Muslim, whether in the economy or in the state. When a Serb national leadership emerged, it was from the more successful livestock farmers and village notables.

Regardless of wealth, Serbs possessed a sense of national identity. Percentagewise, probably more Serb-speakers were conscious of their identity as Serbs, than Polish-speakers were of their identity as Poles. This is a bit of a mystery. There were no Serb political institutions, and unlike Polish or Hungarian elites, even the wealthiest Serb peasants in Ottoman territories could not read and write. Still, Serb-speakers across a vast space, who might never meet one another, nevertheless felt they were linked. That feeling partly had to do with the Serb Orthodox church, the one institution that the Ottomans permitted to survive, with separate legal jurisdiction for Orthodox believers as well as recognition of Serb identity (as opposed to Greek or Bulgarian). The Serb church assumed almost all civil authority of the defunct Serb state and kept that state’s memory alive by canonizing Serbian kings. Humble worshipers were reminded day in and day out that people of their own language had once ruled them and should do so again. The Patriarchate of Peć, a self-governing Serbian branch of Orthodoxy under the Patriarch of Constantinople, referred to the territory under its jurisdiction as the “Serbian lands.” From 1557 that territory included Kosovo as well as old Serbia and also areas farther north in Hungary.

But equally important was a cultural form that no institution could control, the Serb practice of epic folk poetry, maintained from time immemorial, of Serbs gathering in small circles or in their homes and listening to poems sung to the accompaniment of a one-stringed instrument, the gusle. The songs, produced from memory, could last for hours and were passed down from generation to generation because they gave people consolation and a way to make sense of oppression. Best known is the dramatic “Kosovo cycle,” which recounts the glories of medieval Serbia, up to a moment of heroic sacrifice at the battlefield of Kosovo, where a Serb force met a larger Turkish army on June 28, 1389.

A battle did take place on that date, one of several through which the Ottoman Empire expanded northward, into new territories. The historical facts are unglamorous. The Serb kingdom had been shrinking since death of its last great ruler, Dušan, in 1355. In June 1389, the vassals of the leading Serb prince Lazar met the armies of the sultan on Kosovo polje, the field of blackbirds, and both Lazar and the sultan were killed. The battle was not decisive. After the sultan’s successor consolidated his position, he made Lazar’s widow accept his authority. Her daughter Oliviera entered the sultan’s harem, and her son Stefan fought for the sultan, for example in 1396 at Nicopolis against Hungary, where he saved the day for his brother-in-law. In the meantime, his father, Lazar, had been sanctified in the Serb church. During the following century, all Serbian lands gradually came under Ottoman domination as the empire spread its influence north and westward.

Eastern Europe Under Napoleon

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 81-83:

By 1794 France’s army numbered some 800,000, giving it a superiority of 2:1 in most engagements. After pushing intruders from French territory, French troops occupied the Low Countries and Germany west of the Rhine, areas they would hold until 1815.5 During these years, most of Europe fought France through seven coalitions, aimed first at the Revolution, and after 1799 at the France of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant military leader who by 1804 had created a “French Empire,” consisting of an enlarged France with vassal states in Eastern and Central Europe. These states included a new Germany (Rhine Confederation), a new Poland (Duchy of Warsaw), and for the first time ever a state of South Slavs (Illyria).

Austria was a major force in the coalitions but lost decisive battles in 1805 at Austerlitz and 1809 at Wagram and had to cede territory. Still, it never endured direct French occupation, and thus its fate differed sharply from western German areas that were ruled from Paris and saw their traditional legal and social systems revolutionized. For the first time, thanks to Napoleon, everyone in Hamburg, Bremen, and much of the Rhineland was equal before the law, peasants as well as townspeople, nobles, and churchmen, and Jews with Christians. All were free to do as they wished: to move about the map, marry, and buy or sell property. With feudal privileges abolished, for the first time these Germans, regardless of background, were citizens.

Napoleon also began revolutionizing the ancient Holy Roman Empire out of existence by compensating the moderately sized German states for territories lost to the new confederation west of the Rhine with ecclesiastical and free cities east of the Rhine. Within a few years, hundreds of tiny bishoprics, abbeys, and towns had been absorbed into Bavaria, Saxony, or Baden, a crucial step in the process of creating a simpler Germany, more susceptible to unification as a modern nation-state.

In the summer of 1804, responding to Napoleon’s self-coronation as French emperor a few months earlier, Francis proclaimed himself emperor of Austria. As a Habsburg, he remained “Roman Emperor,” but as the empire approached extinction, he wanted to ensure his status on the European stage against the Corsican upstart. The technical name for the Habsburg monarchy was now the “Austrian Empire,” but the point was not to pursue an aggressive, self-confident imperial project of the sort that animated France, Britain, or Russia. The move was instead about seeming not to stand beneath a certain standard of dynastic prestige.

The self-coronation occurred not a moment too soon, as in August 1806 Napoleon declared the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire defunct, and several princes of his Rhine Confederation seceded on August 1. Five days later a proclamation was read from the balcony of the baroque Kirche am Hof in Vienna that the empire no longer existed. In fact, the empire had long been an ineffectual league of tiny entities, unable to defend the German lands. One practical consequence was that Austria’s leadership in Germany came to an end, and indeed, Germany lost all definite political form. Though it had few effective powers of administration, the empire’s constitution had balanced rights of cities and territories and in popular understanding had come to embody the nation in ways not fully tangible.

Reports from the summer of 1806 tell us that people across the German lands were outraged that a willful foreign usurper had simply disbanded the empire. The reports reveal a previously hidden emotional attachment, reminiscent of the indignation that arose in Hungary after Joseph replaced Latin with German. Like that supposedly dead language, the Holy Roman Empire provided a basic coordinate of identity. Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s otherwise buoyant mother Katharina wrote of deep unease, as if an old friend had succumbed to terminal illness. She sensed bitterness among the people of her home city of Frankfurt. For the first time in their lives—indeed for the first time in many centuries—the empire was omitted from prayers said at church, and subtle protests broke out across the German lands. Was one now simply a Prussian or Bavarian? And if one was German, what did that mean?

Rhinelanders had welcomed Napoleon’s rule because his legal code enhanced their freedoms, yet soon sympathies began to erode. The more territory France’s emperor controlled, the less he was satisfied, and the more demands grew on his “allies” for money and soldiers. And west Germans felt humiliated by French victories over the large German states to the east. In 1806 Napoleon crushed the armies of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt, then occupied Berlin. Two years later he forced Austria to join a continental blockade of England; and when Austria rose up the following year, he again smashed it down. The ill-fated Grand Armée that attacked Russia in 1812 was one-third German, and so were its casualties.

Nationalist Fraternities in German Universities

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 85-87:

Universities were a target because of the new nationalist fraternities, the Burschenschaften, where students, some veterans of the fighting at Leipzig, committed themselves to the German nation, sang the poetry of Arndt, and immersed themselves in the cult of the lost empire, meeting yearly in torchlight at the Wartburg, the medieval castle above Eisenach where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. What is less known in this familiar story is that the participants of these events were not only German. Jena’s faculty included Protestant theologians who attracted students from across Europe, including dozens from the Slavic lands of the Habsburg Empire.

Yet these young speakers of Slovak and Czech proved receptive to Herder’s ideas in a way that English or French intellectuals of that time were not. Indeed, Goethe had been shocked in the 1820s to learn that Herder’s thought was all but unknown in France. The reason was partly practical: French intellectuals did not need linguistic nationalism. French kings had established the boundaries of France generations earlier, and there was no doubt about where France lay, who its subjects or citizens were, or what language they should speak. The national struggle was instead about whether kings or people would rule French territory. In England, the logic of nationalism was similar.

But these Habsburg Slavs were even more insecure about their nations than were German intellectuals living in the shadow of France. Not only did they not live in national states, no names existed to describe their peoples. The thought of Herder proved more than irresistible: it was a compulsion. Aside from his message that nations truly lived through languages and not states, Herder had written of a great destiny for the Slavic peoples. His studies of history told him that the Slavic tribes that had settled Central and Eastern Europe centuries earlier had supposedly made territories fruitful that others had abandoned. Obedient and peaceful, Slavs disdained robbing and looting, but loved hosting strangers and spending time in merriment. Yet because of this openness, they had fallen victim to conquest by aggressive neighbors, in particular, Germans, who had committed “grave sins” against them. Because they were so numerous, inhabiting the vast area between Berlin and Kamchatka, he believed that history had not heard the last word from the Slavs.

At Jena, the young Slavic theologians had arrived at the center of Herder’s teaching. The patriotic historian Heinrich Luden, editor of Herder’s History of Humanity, gave lectures so popular that students listened from ladders at open windows. He said that history, properly understood, should awaken active love for the fatherland. He also held that non-German peoples had a right to national development and, astoundingly, denounced the suppression of the Czechs after the battle of White Mountain. Weimar, where Herder had lived and preached for decades and had many friends, was an easy afternoon’s walk away, and the young theologians gained access to the deceased philosopher’s personal circles.

Among their number, four became gifted poets, linguists, and historians, and they proved to be crucial for the history of East Central Europe: Ján Kollár, Ján Benedikti, Pavel Šafárik, and Juraj Palković. Kollár and Palković wrote poetry that is still read in Slovak schools, and Šafárik became one of the most influential geographers of the nineteenth century. All were of modest backgrounds: Palković and Kollár from farm families, Šafárik and Benedikti from the households of clergymen. Šafárik had upset his irascible father and was forced to live as beggar student, a “supplikant,” who spent holidays soliciting money from a list of donors supplied by school authorities. At first, none had a particular attachment to the national idea, and in keeping with the practices of the time, they enrolled in Jena according to the old sense of natio: they were “Hungarians.” Of the thirty or so students from Northern Hungary, Kollár later recalled, only he and Benedikti initially showed any interest in Czecho-Slovak literature. Later, most of the cohort Magyarized completely.

Premodern natio vs. Modern "Nation"

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 54-55:

The word “nation” (natio) existed in the premodern period but did not have the meaning it has in our day. The “nation” in the lands of Croatia, Hungary, or Poland was the hereditary elite, the gentry and nobles who enjoyed privileges that separated them from the “common” people. For example, nobles had a right to be tried by their peers and not imprisoned without charges, to raise soldiers, or to intermarry. In some cases, for example in Central Poland, the gentry were sizable, comprising up to one fourth of the population. The Hungarian gentry were about 6 percent; in France, by contrast, the nobility constituted less than 1 percent of the population. In Poland and Hungary, the rights to self-rule became substantial and made the hereditary nobility more powerful than counterparts in France, not to mention in Russia. By the sixteenth century, the Polish gentry elected its kings; during the seventeenth century, a practice emerged in which passage of legislation in the Sejm (parliament) required unanimous consent, a practice called “liberum veto.”

By the seventeenth century, the Polish nobility thus felt a strong sense of cohesion, politically and culturally, over a vast territory, and increasingly practiced Roman Catholicism, though the Protestant Reformation was at first popular and tolerated. A myth emerged according to which Poland’s nobles derived from “Sarmatians,” an ancient Iranian people who had subjugated Slavic tribes during early Christendom. This had the function of tying the group together even more tightly against all others on Polish territory, reinforcing its sense of privilege, and tending to exclude all others from the idea of nation. But the cultural identity of noble nations was premodern. Polish or Hungarian poets wrote in their own tongues from the fifteenth century (native liturgical texts are much older), producing important literatures, but they did not make a cult of language. And unlike liberal-democratic patriots of the nineteenth century, early modern nobles did not believe that all those who happened to speak Polish or Hungarian constituted a Polish or Hungarian “nation.” From the seventeenth century on, they tended to speak French or Latin among themselves and felt a cultural affinity with other European elites, with whom they shared tastes in architecture and music, and with whose sons their own mingled at universities in France and Italy.

Unlike modern nationalism, the idea of natio was therefore exclusive to a social group rather than insistently inclusive across a complex population ostensibly of one ethnicity. The early modern Polish or Croatian nobility did not think of Polish or Croatian-speaking peasants as part of their nation and often considered these peasants a lower form of humanity. The word for “peasant” was often synonymous with “slave,” evoking coarseness and absence of all taste. In decades when Western European peasants were being freed from the land and from compulsory services, a “second serfdom” was taking hold in much of Eastern Europe: those who worked the land became tied to it and could not leave without the master’s permission. They were people whom he could whip and otherwise humiliate in dozens of ways. No clear line existed dividing Eastern from Western Europe in terms of agricultural regime, but as one traveled to the east, the freedoms of the peasants tended to decrease, as did the productivity of agriculture.

When Polish or Hungarian nobles made claims to territory, it was therefore not in order to unite people of the same language or “blood.” They had no idea of including all people of their ethnicity in a particular state. But this early modern noble national identity was also not ethnically exclusive in the sense of modern nationalism. Native Ukrainian-speaking nobles living in Galicia considered themselves part of the Polish noble nation, and many of them over time became culturally Polish with no questions asked. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Vatican had supported arrangements permitting Orthodox believers in Ukraine (under Polish rule) and in Transylvania (under Habsburg rule) to be “reunited” with Rome while maintaining much of their own liturgy and practices, including married clergy. These churches of the Byzantine rite that recognize papal authority are commonly known as “Uniate.”

The importance of the older legacy of noble rights is that feelings of corporate identity and privileges survived in social groups even after political structures supporting them declined or disappeared altogether, and then were spread to other social groups, usually very slowly and unevenly. Thus the Polish, Hungarian, and Croatian gentries continued to insist on rights of self-rule and “freedom” after medieval and early modern statehood was crushed. Among the Polish gentry, even after the destruction of the Polish state in the final partition in 1795, Poland continued as a community of ideas and practices—as a common culture—and was as present among the colony of émigré Polish writers in Paris in the 1840s as it was among Polish-speakers in Polish territories then part of Austria or Russia. The ideas of this “Great Parisian emigration”—that Poland had not perished and had a mission to humanity—made their way back to the Polish lands to inspire young people from other groups, including peasants, especially as Polish education became more widespread (often through the efforts of underground nationalist activists).

Eastern Europe c. 1800

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 31-33:

When Westerners discuss Eastern Europe, they stress its complexity. It seems a place where an endless array of different peoples lay claim to the same spaces—so many, and so different, that the region seems to resist historical understanding. Yugoslavia alone consisted of some ten ethnicities, and there are subgroups and minorities (for example, the Muslims of southern Serbia, in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, or the Hungarians to the north in Vojvodina). Interwar Czechoslovakia had five major nationalities, and the Habsburg Empire contained many more. As I write, three ethnic groups are making claims on parts of tiny Bosnia. Furthermore, the boundaries have changed so often and rapidly in the past two hundred years that it seems impossible to relate nationality to statehood. Poles lived in three states just over a century ago, and currently, Hungarians live in five; while Albanians live in Albania, they also populate Kosovo and parts of Montenegro and Macedonia (and are of three religions).

But on a global background, Eastern Europe appears not so different from much of Africa and Asia, where numerous ethnic groups are settled across smaller regions and where, in certain periods of history, colonial empires have ruled many groups simultaneously, drawing administrative borders with little concern for ethnic homelands. Take a map of Africa around 1900. West European powers had seized huge stretches of diverse territory, and political maps suggested a simplicity at odds with ethnic diversity, for example in German Southwest Africa, French Equatorial Africa, or the Belgian Congo.

In 1800, the peoples of East Central Europe lived in just four states: the Russian and Ottoman Empires, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the lands of the House of Habsburg (officially known as the Austrian Empire from 1804 to 1867). Within these lands, one could identify older political divisions, but if one simplifies a bit, one sees a map that is not difficult to grasp. In the north were the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, defunct from 1795, when Austria, Prussia, and Russia divided the Commonwealth’s lands among themselves. Farther south we find the Hungarian and Bohemian kingdoms, possessions of the Habsburg monarchy from 1526. Hungary comprised the kingdom of Croatia as well as the principality of Transylvania. The Ottoman Empire included the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia—the future heartlands of Romania—as vassal states, but it ruled directly the provinces (eyelets) of Bosna, Rumeli, and Silistre (which would become Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria) and contained the lands of the defunct medieval Bulgarian, Serb, and Bosnian kingdoms. Though nominally under Turkish rule, Montenegro maintained de facto independence because of its location in rugged mountain terrain.1 Finally, the Ottomans occupied much of central Hungary from 1526 to the 1680s, using it as a launching ground for campaigns of aggression on Habsburg lands farther north.

As in any imperial space, the political borders imposed by foreign powers belied the linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity that had resulted from the settlement and mixing of diverse tribes centuries earlier. Much of this region had been ruled from Rome and later Constantinople (for example, the provinces of Pannonia, Dalmatia, and Macedonia on the Balkan Peninsula) but some of it, especially north of the Danube, remained beyond Roman power, and the documentary record is scantier. Still, in broad terms, we know what transpired.

Boundaries of Eastern Europe

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 25-26:

This book ascribes no stereotypes to Eastern Europe beyond saying that it is an anti-imperial space of small peoples. In the corners of its political nightmares dwells this indistinct fear of being absorbed into larger powers. The anti-imperial struggle kept ethnic cultures alive, but it also promoted ideologies of exclusion that can become racist. The old empires, especially the Habsburg empire, inspire nostalgia, because they protected human rights and indeed nations and peoples better than did many nation-states that came later. This book uses “Eastern Europe” interchangeably with “East Central Europe” to cut down verbiage, but also because both terms are understood to refer to a band of countries that were Soviet satellites not in control of their own destinies. It denotes not so much a space on the map as shared experience, such that peoples from opposite ends of the region, despite all cultural or linguistic differences, employ a common narrative about the past. When he made his odd invocation of national survival, Viktor Orbán used words that would resonate not only in Hungary and Slovenia but also in Poland, the Czech Republic, or Serbia.

The former western republics of the Soviet Union—the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Belarus—are not included, because they formed a separate story throughout much of the period studied, subject to Sovietization that tested local cultures to a degree not seen in East Central Europe. For the same reason, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is included: this small country shared the destiny of being controlled by a superpower without being absorbed into it. But the GDR was also special. The East German regime eagerly took part in efforts to crush dissent in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980, home to small-time co-imperialists with enough hubris to tell the Motherland of socialism what socialism was really about.

The inclusion of the GDR underscores the fact that Germans cannot be thought to be outside East Central Europe, and not only because millions have lived in this space for centuries. The question of how Germany would form a nation-state after the Holy Roman Empire became defunct in 1806 has shaped the region’s fortunes and misfortunes. Bismarck’s supposed resolution of the question in the “second empire” of 1871 only exacerbated the German question by provoking a sense of abandonment among the Habsburg Germans, one in three of the total number. It was no coincidence that the original Nazi Party was founded in Bohemia in 1903. What happened when German nationalism entered Eastern European space in a time of imperial decline—first of the Holy Roman Empire, then of the Habsburg monarchy—was that it gradually moved from the old practice of absorbing Slavs into German culture to a new one of displacing them from a vast supposedly German space.

East European Communist Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 17-19:

What Hitler, the “Bohemian corporal” (he was actually Austrian) achieved through his war was to make northern parts of Eastern Europe much simpler. With the aid of local collaborators, his regime segregated and then killed the overwhelming majority of East European Jews. But when the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht back to Vienna and Berlin in 1945, millions of Germans fled Eastern Europe as well, never to return. At the war’s conclusion, as a result of allied decisions, Polish and Czech authorities placed the remainder of Germans from Bohemia and eastern Germany in railway cars and deported them to a Germany that was much smaller than Bismarck’s Reich, let alone the Holy Roman Empire.

The most avid ethnic cleansers among the East Europeans were Polish and Czech Communists, and indeed, Communists everywhere proved enthusiastic nationalists. This is astounding for two reasons. First, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had little concern for national identity: workers had no fatherland. Nationhood was not a lasting site of human subjectivity but something ephemeral, which diminished in importance as capitalism advanced. They had little but derision for East Europeans wanting to create their own nation-states. Engels called the small peoples to Germany’s east “relics.” Czechs were destined to be “absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles.” Other “remnants of bygone Slavonian peoples” slotted for assimilation included Serbs, Croats, and Slovaks. In 1852, Engels blithely predicted that the next world war would cause entire reactionary peoples to “disappear from the face of the earth.”

Second, when the world divided into two camps, appearances suggested that there was little room for East European nationalism. By 1949, every state in the region seemed to be a miniature USSR, with the same sort of ruling Communist Party, five-year plan, economy based on heavy industry, collectivized agriculture, and socialist realism. Few Poles or Hungarians, even within the Party, doubted that the annual pageant in red of May Day reflected doctrines and practices whose nerve center was in Moscow. For the first time, millions of East Europeans learned Russian, and many became as proficient in copying Soviet reality as they could. Hundreds of thousands became “self-Sovietizers,” even holding their cigarettes the Russian way, or dressing in the militaristic style of the Bolshevik party. The Yugoslav Communists, with red stars on their caps, went so far that the Soviets tried to hold them back.

But these states were not Soviet replicas, nor were they (unlike Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Belorussia) actual parts of the Soviet Union. Beyond the façades of May Day processions in Warsaw in 1949, one saw banners in Polish, not Russian, and placards honoring Polish heroes. A few blocks from the parade route the Polish socialist state, governed by a Marxian party, was lovingly resurrecting old Warsaw, razed by the Nazis in 1944. This included rebuilding many of its churches, according to plans from the eighteenth century, with attention to the details of a saint’s halo. Bookstores across the state socialist world stocked romantic authors like Jan Kollár, but also the Polish, Hungarian, or Romanian national bards Adam Mickiewicz, Sándor Petofi, and Vasile Alecsandri; the philologists Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić; and the ethnographer Pavel Šafárik, who had studied theology with Kollár in Jena. In Poland’s west, the state fostered the destruction of all signs of the German past, including cemeteries, and proclaimed the new territories Polish to the core, though they had been German for centuries.

What Unites East Central Europe?

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 3-4:

What unites this dramatic and unsettling history is a band of countries that runs from the Baltic Sea down to the Adriatic and Black Seas, between the much larger, historically imperial Russia and Turkey in the east, and Prussian and Austrian Germany in the west. These small countries constitute East Central Europe, a space where more of the twentieth century happened—for good and for bad—than anywhere else on the planet.

If one seeks a simple explanation for the energies that caused this area to produce so much drama and so many new concepts, a glance at the map suggests nationalism: no other region has witnessed such frequent, radical, and violent changing of borders to make nations fit states. Two maps, one from 1800, one from 2000, tell the basic story: a shift from simplicity to complexity, from one small and three large multinational powers to more than twenty national states.

The story was carried forward by the demands of East European nationalists to control territory, demands that triggered resistance, because they contested imperial power and the European order. Since the 1820s, the work of nationalists has brought independent states into being in three stages: the first in 1878, when the Congress of Berlin produced Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; the second, in 1919, when revolution and peace making generated Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland; and most recently, in the 1990s, when Czechoslovakia broke peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Yugoslavia fragmented violently into Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, two entities in Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Hungary became de facto independent in 1867, when the Austrian Empire divided into Austria-Hungary; after 1920, it emerged much reduced from World War I, two-thirds of its territory going to its neighbors.

What can be debated is whether the degree of violence, especially in World War I, was necessary to break loose the nation-states that now constitute the map of Eastern Europe. Austria-Hungary was more resilient than critics gave it credit for and only began unraveling in the final year of a war that had been costly beyond any expectations. And there was little relation between intention and outcome: World War I did not begin as a war of national liberation. Yet by 1917, as the causality lists soared and any relation between intention and outcome was lost, it was interpreted to be one. It was a war for democracy—for Wilson’s national self-determination—and that helped spawn the new nation-states.

At the same time, without the cause Gavrilo Princip claimed to represent (that South Slavs should live in one state), there would have been no assassination, no Habsburg ultimatum to Serbia (which had trained Princip and supplied him with his pistol) in July 1914, and no war. Seen in rational terms, the Habsburgs’ belief that Serbia, a state of three million, represented a challenge requiring a full-scale military assault launched from their state of fifty-two million, seems one of history’s great overreactions. But Princip, the frail eighteen-year-old rejected from the Serb army for his small stature, embodied the challenge of an idea, the idea of ethnic nationalism, and the Habsburg monarchy had no response other than naked force.

Caribbean Syncretic & Creole Religions

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 409-412:

Caribbean religions are among the most complex examples of the emergence and transformation of cultural lifeworlds in the Americas. Given their numerous sources and formations, and their tendency to eschew orthodox axioms in favor of heterodox practices guided by a few broad principles, religions emerging from the Caribbean are characterized by amalgamation and recombination. Added to syncretic or creole religions deriving from the Caribbean context are religions whose doctrines and belief systems, themselves varied and changing over time, derive from “Old World” origins. Thus, today even a cursory list of religions in the region would be long—Catholicism, Protestantism, evangelical and Pentecostal movements, Judaism, Hinduism, vodou, Santería, Islam, espiritismo, Rastafari, and orisha—made even longer by a number of demographically smaller but socially significant traditions such as Kali worship in Guyana, brujería and Mita worship in Puerto Rico, Quimbois in Martinique, and Winti in Suriname.

Equally important are historical and contemporary magical practices (often subsumed under the term “obeah”) that involve supernatural powers, deriving largely from West African divination and healing practices and, to a lesser extent, Hindu and Christian cosmologies. The meaning of obeah has changed over the centuries. Among 17th- to 19th-century Africans and Afro-Caribbeans it was associated with salutary objectives, such as alleviating illness, protecting against harm, and avenging wrongs. Euro-colonial and local bourgeois ideologies emphasized the dangerous aspects of obeah, often equating it with Judeo-Christian interpretations of evil forces. Often, positive and negative assessments existed simultaneously, making local opinion about obeah ambiguous. Today, as in earlier eras, its practice represents tensions between the ways in which practitioners interpret obeah’s methods and objectives, and the ways in which those methods and objectives are perceived by outsiders.

Caribbean religions are expressions of traditions of creativity, resistance, and flexibility that continuously build on as well as disassemble older and current forms of knowledge, heritage, and custom. The challenge in understanding them is to grasp that difference and similarity exist at the same time. Hinduism, as practiced by the progeny of indentured laborers, reflects both the remembered traditions that early immigrants brought with them from India and a contemporary global Hinduism that travels across the Hindu diaspora. While Caribbean Hindus may interpret their forms of worship as replicating those in India, they also recognize that certain transformations and syncretisms have occurred for almost 170 years in the Caribbean.

In contrast, Rastafari’s origins are in Jamaica, where religious movements based in Afro-Caribbean folk Christianity, the pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey, grassroots reinterpretations of the Old Testament, and the veneration of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia coalesced in the 1930s, giving rise to the religious, philosophical, and political worldview of today’s Rastafari movement. In it, Africa plays a great symbolic role as a place of desired return and the antithesis of “Babylon”—all places and forms of consciousness in which predatory relationships and “mental slavery” abound. Yet although thus memorialized, Africa is not literally remembered by many Rastafari, the vast majority of whom have never had direct experience with societies and cultures in Africa or Ethiopia (two terms often used synonymously). Nonetheless, Africa/Ethiopia represents for them an indispensable emblem of unity, self-determination, authenticity, and morality.

Islam, meanwhile, first came to the Caribbean as the religion of some African slaves. With the advent of indentured laborers from India, Islam gained an increased presence in the region. Notable today are the numerous masjids (mosques) that dot the landscape of many countries, from Trinidad to Guyana, Puerto Rico, and Suriname. Some masjids are humble, built to serve small communities and local villages; others are grand, built as centers of learning as well as centers of worship for larger populations in the towns and cities. In these places of worship that serve jamaats (congregations) large and small, imams (religious leaders) work to preserve the Sunnah (Muslim way of life). At the same time, Islam in the Caribbean encapsulates the simultaneous inclusiveness and exclusions of a religion claimed by different ethnic groups, practiced according to divergent interpretations of doctrine, and, in certain contexts, participated in by non-Muslims. This is perhaps best seen in the ritual of Hosay, the Caribbean version of Shi’a Islam’s commemoration, Muharram.

Historically spread throughout the Anglophone Caribbean, today Hosay is practiced on a major scale only in Trinidad, where it is simultaneously an important religious event, a freighted political statement, an embattled heritage claim, and a multicultural symbol. Mourners of Hussain march with enormous, elaborate representations of the tadjas (tazzias, or representations of the martyrs’ tombs; see fig. 27.2). This procession has been treated by some local participants less like a sacred commemoration than like a parade, where music and general revelry may occur on the sidelines. Despite its Muslim origins, Hosay in Trinidad also has always involved Hindus and Afro-Trinidadians. Hindus have long been key participants in the building of the tadjas, and Afro-Trinidadians traditionally have played a significant role as drummers as well as bearers (along with Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians) of the tadjas in procession. Moreover, Hindus sometimes make their own vows and offerings during Hosay. This ritual was the only significant element in the Indian cultural repertoire that provided a social bridge to the rest of 19th-century Trinidadian society (Singh 1988, 4). Given its multiple interpretations and diverse participants, Hosay lends a distinctive religious and cultural tenor to Trinidad’s national culture. The combination of participants and their varied forms of involvement has given rise to debates among Muslims and non-Muslims about the authenticity of Hosay and its appropriateness in Islam. Other observers argue that this ceremony’s heterogeneity and cooperation counters the divide-and-rule antagonism among subordinate groups (notably Afro- and Indo-Caribbeans) encouraged by British colonizers, offering a natural space for a creole unity.

Religion is just one of innumerable examples of the ways in which Africa, Europe, and Asia have together produced the 20th-century Caribbean.

I hope the author of this chapter (Aisha Khan) and the editors and publisher forgive my multiple extracts from this chapter, which is my favorite in this meaty volume from U. Chicago Press.

Aisha Khan is an associate professor of anthropology at New York University. She is the author of Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad and co-editor of Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz.

Caribbean Categories of Race, Color, Class

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 405-406:

From the earliest days of colonial rule, the Caribbean social and moral order was based on ranked gradations of “races” and “colors” represented by such physical attributes as skin color, hair texture, and facial features. These criteria were treated as literal descriptions of appearance, and their presumed fixed qualities formed a hierarchy of identities—from “white” at the top to “black” at the bottom, with various mixtures and gradations in between—supported by legal structures as well as social values and mores. Consequently, for much of Caribbean history, race and color also have connoted social position and class status. Yet the recognition of a vertical color continuum separates the Caribbean from the rigid binary racial logic of the United States.

Given the legacies of colonial rule and ideology, color and race are still commonly used in daily conversation as idioms for social organization. In Jamaica, for example, the color term “brown” (or “colored”) serves as a category of racial identity but also connotes middle-class status. Color terms are necessarily relational; being “white” or “brown” or “black” necessarily means not being something else. In Haiti, mulâtre is an in-between term connoting a mixture of “black” and “white,” flexible in its interpretation yet typically positioned above “black” and below “white.” In the Dominican Republic, indio literally translates as “Indian,” suggesting indigenous heritage, but its contemporary application signifies a lighter skin color (and perhaps straight hair)—someone not “black,” yet also not “white.” In Martinique, beke refers to French “white” slave owners and their descendants. “Trinidad white” and “French creole” have served as categories of racial identity in Trinidad, specifically distinguished from British, French, and Spanish “whites,” who, in this racial accounting system, historically could claim to be “pure” white and, concomitantly, members of the upper classes. In Trinidad, the term “red” generally refers to a light-skinned individual of mixed “black” and “white” parentage (positioned toward the upper-status end), while in Barbados it is also a historical reference to “red legs” communities—poor whites who, from the days of the slave plantation, labored outdoors and hence were likely to get sunburned.

Mixedness can also refer to multiple combinations, not simply the amalgamation of “black” and “white.” Thus, in the Francophone Caribbean, the term marabou refers to a black-white-Amerindian combination. In Trinidad the term “Spanish” should be interpreted as if in quotation marks, indicating a particular and fluctuating combination of local criteria, including area of origin (Venezuela, or certain locations in Trinidad with historical concentrations of Spaniards, Amerindians, and Venezuelan immigrant labor), skin color (some variation of “brown” or “red’), hair texture (not curly), and self-ascription (Khan 1993).

Notably, these terminologies are based on an African-European axis: the hierarchical color continuum does not lexically include South Asians or Chinese, or the mixed offspring of South Asian or Chinese and European parents. Though the term achinado is used in Cuba to index Chinese phenotypical features (as, for example, in mulato achinado), there is only one term, dougla—common in Guyana and Trinidad—indicating individuals of mixed South Asian and African descent. Indio (Amerindian) in the Hispanophone Caribbean and “Spanish” or “French creole” in Trinidad are not color terms per se, but are measured along the continuum of black and white ancestry. “Indian” (South Asian), “Chinese,” and “Syrian-Lebanese” in the Anglophone Caribbean, “Hindustani” in the Dutch Caribbean, and Hindou in the Francophone Caribbean are common categories not amalgamated into the black-white lexicon.

Caribbean Language Demographics

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 402-405:

Four major languages are spoken in the Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, and Dutch. The 17 Caribbean countries that are predominantly Anglophone comprise more than 17% of the region’s population, yet the total English-speaking population of the Caribbean is less than that of the Dominican Republic alone. These statistics clarify the demographic predominance of the Spanish-speaking countries of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, which represent 61% of the Caribbean population. Of the 20% of Caribbean peoples who speak French or variations of French, three-quarters live in Haiti. The Dutch speakers of Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles represent another 2% (Knight 1995, 34). Other languages, spoken by fewer numbers of people, include Hindi and Javanese. The languages of the European colonizers remain the official languages of formal Caribbean education and legal systems, but numerous African languages brought by the slaves fused with European, Asian, and Amerinidian languages to create numerous “creole” languages, which are the spoken vernaculars of everyday life in a number of Caribbean countries. Most Caribbean creole languages are young as languages go, having existed for not more than two or three centuries. Today, however, there are growing written literatures in creole languages, and movements to promote the languages to equal standing as vehicles of formal instruction and communication. Among the most familiar examples is Haitian Kreyol, the spoken language of approximately 12 million insular and diasporic Haitians, which along with French has been an official language in Haiti since 1961. Other widely spoken creoles include Jamaican patois, which is spoken by about four million people in and outside Jamaica, and the patois of Trinidad and Tobago, a historical legacy primarily of French on Trinidadian English, which has been in decline since about the mid-20th century. In Suriname, Sranan Tongo is the language of approximately 300,000 people; in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, Papiamento is spoken by more than 350,000. And although the varieties of Spanish spoken in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic share a number of linguistic properties, they also have discernable differences based on geographic location and local histories.

...

From its colonization, the Caribbean has represented newness, which Europeans captured in the term “creole.” When applied to the region, the Spanish word criollo and the Portuguese word crioulo (derived from the verb criar, “to raise or bring up”) signified something or someone originating in Europe (or Africa) and reproducing itself in the New World. Thus animals, plants, and people could all be designated as creole. Creole people were the descendants of Europeans or Africans born in the Caribbean, as well as the offspring of African and European parents. Inherent in the idea of creole identity was an assumption that being born in the Caribbean or being the “mixed” descendant of two racially differentiated parents meant losing one’s ancestral cultural heritage.

...

In the Anglophone Caribbean, Brathwaite’s analysis of what he called the “creole society” of Jamaica emphasized the creation of new forms through the synthesis of existing ones. Arguing against understanding black and white populations as “separate nuclear units,” Brathwaite saw them as being “contributory parts of a whole” that produce a uniquely Caribbean culture. Creolization here represents the potential for social integration and unity, where the “mixed” population serves “as a bridge, a kind of social cement” that integrates society (Brathwaite 1971, 307, 305). In calling for a renewed emphasis on creole identity and the literary value of the creole language, the most recent Francophone creoliste writers and activists celebrate the heterogeneous dimensions that together comprise the Caribbean or, in the words of Martinican poet and writer Edouard Glissant, constitute Antillanité (Caribbeanness). The creoliste position, along with those of other thinkers, points to the abiding debates about how to characterize and give meaning to the forms of diversity so apparent in the region.

Caribbean Return to Indentured Labor

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 399-402:

The Caribbean of today began to form half a millennium ago, impelled by European colonial expansion harnessed to nascent capitalism and centered on resource extraction and sugar plantations producing for a global market. Within 50 years of Columbus’s landing, indigenous Caribbean populations had been dramatically reduced, largely due to disease and the harsh conditions of labor imposed by the Spanish colonizers. This diminution of indigenous peoples was accompanied by the addition of foreigners from the “Old World” of Europe, Africa, and later Asia—a socially engineered assemblage of disparate ethnolinguistic groups under conditions of coerced labor and massive wealth accumulation. The imported groups included indentured Europeans, enslaved Africans, and, later, indentured Africans and Asians.

The transformations of the plantation system had various effects on the racial and demographic composition of different colonial territories. For example, the Hispanophone Caribbean, particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico, was not significantly developed for the global sugar market until the 19th century (although by mid-century Cuba and Puerto Rico had emerged as the first and third largest producers of sugar in the hemisphere), and the proportion of European populations compared to non-European populations was far greater there than in the Francophone and Anglophone colonies.

Over the 19th century, slavery was gradually abolished in the Caribbean. Newly independent Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue) abolished slavery in 1804, followed by the British West Indies in 1838, the French possessions in 1848, all Dutch territories by 1863, and Cuba in 1886. Emancipation presented plantation owners with a dilemma: ensuring sugar and other production at high levels without the benefit of enslaved labor, or with diminishing numbers of freed workers willing to engage in plantation labor under the conditions offered by the plantocracy. One strategy implemented by Britain and France was that of freeing Africans from the slave trade of other European colonizers (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) and then sending them to British and French Caribbean colonies as indentured laborers. Almost 40,000 Africans were thus sent to the British West Indies and approximately 16,000 to the French West Indies (Schuler 1980).

Another form of 19th-century indenture brought immigrant laborers from Asia into the region. Organized as either state projects or private enterprises, indenture schemes evolved over eight decades and changed the demographic, cultural, and social terrain of the Caribbean as irrevocably as African slavery had done earlier. Between 1890 and 1939, for example, the Dutch recruited almost 33,000 Javanese, primarily from Central Java and Batavia, for their Caribbean colony of Suriname. The two principal source regions of indentured labor, however, were India and China. Itself a British colony, India experienced indenture as a government-regulated industry, with laborers recruited primarily from the regions of Oudh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh and shipped out from the ports of Calcutta and Madras. Between 1838 and 1917, almost 400,000 Indians arrived in the British Caribbean, the majority in Guyana and Trinidad. Although China was never colonized, its political vulnerability allowed private interests to orchestrate indenture schemes, largely from Canton. Between 1840 and 1875, approximately 142,000 indentured Chinese arrived in Cuba (Helly 1993, 20); from 1853 until 1866 and in trickles thereafter, about 18,000 Chinese were indentured in the British West Indies (Look Lai 1993, 18). Later—beginning around 1890, and concentrated between 1910 and 1940—a second wave of Chinese immigrants, this time not under indenture, arrived in the Caribbean.

The relationships of Asian indentured laborers with the local populations they encountered have influenced the values, identities, and cultural practices of their respective societies. To one extent or another, all the Asian immigrants were initially viewed by the locals as labor competition. Particularly where they constitute a large percentage of the population, Indians have been represented by local anti-indenture interests as “scab” labor, yet historically they also have been pitted against Afro-Caribbean workers. The tensions arising from perceived and actual labor conflicts have left a monumental legacy of racial politics in such contemporary societies as Guyana and Trinidad, where Indians represent more than 40% of the population. Perhaps because of their relatively smaller numbers, Chinese and Javanese laborers have had less fraught relationships with established populations, especially with those in similar occupational and class positions. In Cuba, for example, Chinese indentured laborers worked side by side with enslaved Africans. Enmity between these two groups was encouraged by colonial authorities as a divide-and-rule strategy, but tensions expressed in racial terms did not significantly persist into the present, either in Cuba or in other parts of the region. Once the Chinese found their economic niche primarily in the retail trades and shopkeeping, they no longer represented labor competition to other populations.

Migrants to the Caribbean from the Levant—known as “Syrians,” “Syrian-Lebanese,” or árabes—also began to arrive in the 1860s, increasing their numbers significantly by the 1890s. Most were Maronite Christians leaving Ottoman-occupied regions. Lebanese immigrants came first, followed by Syrians and Palestinians. Although they spread out across the Caribbean (and into Latin America, where they are also called turcos), certain communities predominated in particular countries. For example, of the three groups from the Levant, Lebanese comprise the largest population in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, and Palestinians in Haiti (Nicholls 1980). These immigrants came as individuals, or sometimes in families, rather than in an organized migration arrangement; over the years, other family members followed. Although a few went into agricultural production, others became itinerant peddlers. Within a few generations these communities branched out into import-export trading, and today they comprise a large population of affluent and politically active citizens.

Capt. Cook's Americans

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle p. 345-347:

WHILE IN MACAU, Captain Gore learned the distressing news that not only was the American Revolution going badly for the English, but both France and Spain had declared war on Britain. Consequently, for the voyage home, facing the danger of seizure or attack, his two ships would remain on a war footing. The Resolution and the Discovery left Macau in January 1780, stopping briefly south of Vietnam and then in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, not far from the seething volcano on Krakatoa. By April, the vessels were anchored in False Bay, near Cape Town. In early August, as the two ships approached England, contrary winds forced them far to the west. Gore had to make a long, awkward circuit around Ireland and over Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The vessels plied down the east coast of Britain, finally arriving in London on October 7, 1780. The Resolution had been gone from England for 1,548 days. At the time, it was believed to be the longest exploratory voyage—in terms of both miles and duration—ever undertaken on the high seas. And yet, despite the odyssey’s historic length, once again, not a single person on either ship had died of scurvy.

...

AFTER RETURNING TO London, the Americans on board the ships had to face the difficult decision whether to cast their loyalties with Britain or find their way back to their native-born colonies and take up the cause against the mother country under whose flag they had been sailing for the past four years. Because he was still a member of the Royal Marines, John Ledyard was promptly sent to Canada to fight for the British in the waning actions of the American Revolution. He deserted, returned to his native New England, and in 1783 published an unauthorized account of his travels with Cook that became the first written work protected by copyright in the United States. In 1786, not done with epic traveling, Ledyard embarked on a trek of more than six thousand miles, mostly on foot, across Europe and Russia in an attempt to reach Alaska, but he was arrested in Siberia under orders from Catherine the Great. Ledyard died in Cairo in 1788, aged thirty-seven, while preparing an expedition to search for the source of the Niger River.

Ledyard’s fellow countryman John Gore, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the land of his birth. The Admiralty appointed him as one of the captains of the Greenwich Hospital, the same position Cook had vacated when he embarked on his final voyage. Gore served ten years at Greenwich. He was a popular figure among the old salts and died there in 1790.

Capt. Cook's Family

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 347-348:

ELIZABETH COOK NEVER remarried and remained a widow for fifty-six years. Sadly, she outlived all of her children, none of whom had children of their own. In October of 1780, the same month the Resolution and the Discovery returned to England, Nathaniel Cook, a midshipman serving on the HMS Thunderer, went down with more than six hundred other souls in a massive hurricane off Jamaica. He was only sixteen. Thirteen years later, in 1793, Hugh Cook perished from scarlet fever while at Cambridge, where he was studying to be an Anglican minister. Only a month after that, the eldest of the Cook boys, James, drowned near the Isle of Wight. The shock of losing her last two sons in such rapid succession proved too much for Elizabeth—it was said she spent almost three years confined to her bed.

At least, thanks to Lord Sandwich, she received a pension of £200 each year from the Admiralty, which, together with her husband’s share of the royalties from the publication of his voyage accounts, saw her into old age. “She kept her faculties to the end,” wrote Elizabeth’s cousin Canon Bennett, describing her as “a handsome and venerable lady, her white hair rolled back in ancient fashion, always dressed in black satin. She wore a ring with her husband’s hair in it, and she entertained the highest respect for his memory, measuring everything by his standard of honor and morality. Her keenest expression of disapprobation was that ‘Mr. Cook’—to her he was always Mr. Cook, not Captain—‘would never have done so.’ Like many widows of sailors, she could never sleep in high wind for thinking of the men at sea.”

Elizabeth Cook died in 1835, aged ninety-three.

Capt. Cook & Sea Otters

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 244-246:

COOK’S MONTH AT Nootka Sound would have far-reaching impacts—and not only in terms of establishing England’s early presence in the region that would eventually become British Columbia. Of the many ripple effects emanating from Cook’s visit here, perhaps the most consequential had to do with a single vulnerable creature: Enhydra lutris, otherwise known as the sea otter. These marine mammals, affectionate and mischievously cute, flourished here, feasting as they did on the huge populations of urchins and shellfish found throughout this extensive waterway. Sea otters appeared to lead a charmed existence, most of it spent cavorting on their backs.

But the trait that made them so beautiful, their thick, glossy coat, was also their curse, for in certain parts of the world—Asia, especially—the pelts were considered “soft gold.” Affluent Chinese men coveted sea otter cloaks as a status symbol and would pay astronomical sums for them. The lustrous fur was soft but also resilient, and it could be brushed in any direction, a result of its incomparably high fiber count—sea otters produce upwards of six hundred thousand hairs per square inch, twice the density of the fur seal.

During those heady days of the Manchu Dynasty, the market for pelts was becoming frenzied, akin to the tulip mania that gripped Holland in the 1630s. The potential profits staggered the imagination. Up until that time, most of the sea otter pelts that found their way into Chinese ports came from the Russian Far East and from the first, tentative Russian forays into Alaska. But stories from Cook’s visit here would lure crass armies of European and American fur hunters to Nootka and nearby locales, setting in motion a brutal industry that became so wildly competitive it would nearly ignite a war between England and Spain to control access to the sound.

Relentless hunting of sea otters, combined with the fact that they are slow breeders—typically producing only one pup every other year—meant that within a few decades of Cook’s arrival they would become virtually extinct. The fur trade springing up around Nootka Sound would doom the sea otter and cause enormous dislocations among the Mowachaht and other tribes living here—for the Europeans brought the deadly triad of alcohol, guns, and disease, which in short order would cast the Native cultures into a tailspin.

In their trading with the Mowachaht, Cook’s men procured many hundreds of sea otter pelts. The sailors called them “sea beaver,” and they well understood, as Midshipman George Gilbert put it, that their fur “is supposed to be superior to any that is known.” At the time, though, the men were not scheming to earn fortunes in Asia. They simply thought the velvety furs would come in handy in the Arctic—and, indeed, they would fashion the pelts into handsome greatcoats, caps, and gloves that would see them through many an Alaskan cold front. “To us who were bound for the North Pole,” said Samwell, the pelts “were extremely valuable articles and every one endeavored to supply himself with some of them.”

The Resolution and the Discovery, thoroughly refurbished, were towed out of the cove on April 26, 1778. Mowachaht men, keening songs in their canoes, accompanied the two ships almost to the mouth of the sound. As a parting gift, a chief bestowed upon Cook a handsome cloak made of “soft gold,” a fur raiment that nearly reached down to Cook’s ankles. In return, the captain presented the chief with a fine broadsword with a brass hilt—which, Cook thought, “made him as happy as a prince.” The Mowachaht implored the Englishmen to return soon. “By way of encouragement,” Cook wrote, the chief promised that he and his people would “lay in a good stock of skins for us, and I have not the least doubt but they will.”

The two ships, their sails rapidly filling, turned out of the sound and into the open sea.

Capt. Cook & the Americans, 1778

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 226-227:

On the other side of North America, the revolt against England had deepened into a bitter war that showed no signs of abating. At that very moment, British troops were occupying Philadelphia, while George Washington’s bedraggled army was beginning to stir from its winter quarters at Valley Forge. The war was taking on an international flavor. Shortly after the Resolution and the Discovery left the Hawaiian Islands, Benjamin Franklin and two other American commissioners had signed a treaty in Paris that intimately bound France to the rebellious colonies. With the stroke of a pen, France became the first nation to recognize the United States as a sovereign country. An outraged Britain would soon declare war on France, thus fully bringing the French into the American conflict.

Despite all of this, Benjamin Franklin would later make a point of lobbying among his colleagues for Captain Cook and the Resolution to be granted special immunity not afforded to other British ships. Should American vessels encounter Cook anywhere on the high seas, they were to give him leeway and clemency. Cook was on an assignment of transcendent importance for humanity, Franklin’s proclamation asserted, one too important to be detained by squabbles between nations. Franklin made his remarks in what he called a “passport” addressed to the captains and commanders of all American ships. In case Cook’s vessel should “happen to fall into your hands,” Franklin advised, “you should not consider her as an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England.” Americans, he said, should “treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness, affording them as common friends to mankind, all the assistance in your power which they may happen to stand in need of.”

The Spanish, who would soon be joining France in declaring war against England, were already well aware that Captain Cook was supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific, headed for the northwest coast of America—and they were highly displeased with England’s encroachments upon the region. They had informed officials in Mexico to keep a lookout for Cook and, if possible, to intercept and arrest him. Spanish shipwrights were constructing two new vessels—one in Mexico, another in Peru—for a voyage that aimed to halt and overtake Cook while reasserting Spanish claims in the Pacific Northwest.

Omai's Little Pretani in Huahine

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 185-187, 191-192:

ON OCTOBER 26, when the house was nearly finished, Mai started bringing his English treasures and souvenirs ashore from the Resolution: the regiments of tin soldiers, the metal helmet and suit of armor, the mechanical Punch and Judy, the serpent jack-in-the-box, the barrel organ that could be cranked by hand. The globe of the earth, the portraits of King George and Queen Charlotte, the illustrated Bible, the “electrifying machine” that could give unsuspecting parties a jolt. The compasses and beads, the mirrors and looking glasses, the menagerie of toy animals. The kettles and crockery, the mugs and cutlery, and case after case of port wine. The saddles and bridles and horse tack. The wardrobe of English clothing—riding boots, velvet jackets, satins and linens, and numerous hats. Last but not least, the swords and cutlasses, the muskets and pistols, the fowling piece, the cartridges and pistol balls, and additional kegs of gunpowder.

Mai had wanted far more of these last items; he had originally asked for enough war implements to outfit an entire army. But Cook feared that the guns would do Mai more harm than good. “I was always of [the] opinion,” said Cook, that “he would have been better without firearms than with them.”

Mai took up residence in his new digs and seemed happy with them. The house was a piece of Britain, smelling of fresh-hewn wood, with a Latin carving over its door meant to signify that its occupant was under the protectorship of King George III: GEORGIUS TERTIUS REX. (The locals began to call that part of the island “Pretani,” and the name would stick for generations to come.) Whenever Mai left his cottage—to visit the ships or to ride his horse down the beach—he locked the front door and dropped the key in his pocket, just as he had done with the key to his apartment when he went out on strolls around London.

In the final days, as Cook and Clerke readied their ships for departure, Mai threw a succession of torchlit parties for the officers, dining under the stars beside his English house. They drank port and gorged themselves on fresh-caught fish and barbecued pork. Some of the chiefs, including the boy king Teri‘i-tari‘a, joined in the festivities, while Mai leaped among his guests, grinding his barrel organ. The Huahine people were astonished by the contraption and smiled in wonderment at the treacly mechanized melodies that issued from it.

Mai had a modest assortment of animals penned around his house—a stallion and a mare that was believed to be with foal, four sheep, a pair of ducks, a pair of rabbits, a pair of peafowl, and some cats, among other species that the Huahine people had never seen before. Mai also had a monkey—presumably he had brought it aboard while in Cape Town, but the accounts are vague on this point. The locals were delighted by the nimble creature, which they called “Hairy Man.”

On those last nights, members of Cook’s crew brought out their bagpipes, flutes, and fiddles. Mai set off fireworks, and there was much “mirth and jollity,” said Bayly. “We have nothing but good humor subsisting among us.”

...

Local lore concerning Mai is practically nonexistent, so nearly everything that is understood about him comes to us through the anecdotes of English sailors, the descriptions of English observers, and the brushstrokes of English painters. One thing is glaringly missing from the record: Mai’s own voice.

Like so many cases of cross-cultural transplantation, Mai’s odyssey led him, in the end, to an ambiguous place. His journey served as an allegory of colonialism and its unintended consequences. England, by showing off her riches and advancements and sending Mai back with a trove of mostly meaningless treasures, had doomed him to a jumbled, deracinated existence. Like the tiare apetahi flower of Raiatea, Mai, after all his travels, couldn’t take root in other soils.

Polynesian scholars recently located the spot where Mai’s house stood and where his remains were buried. It’s set back from the shore, on the outskirts of Fare. A modest yellow church called Iehova Saloma, with a corrugated roof of galvanized metal, had been built on the site. In back of the chapel, thickets of tropical trees, laden with fragrant flowers, swayed in the salt breeze.

This would have been Mai’s vista from the front door of his house, the only door in all of Polynesia that had a lock. Gazing west past the lagoon and the waves smashing on the reef, he would have had a perfect view of Raiatea, the sacred isle, a snaggy mountain on the horizon, just twenty-five miles away.

Mai had sailed around the world and back again in the hope of returning there, to build a life on the shores of his “faraway heaven.” And in his last days, there it stood, right in front of him.

Capt. Cook's Cruelty, 1777

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 173-174:

Several months earlier, when Cook was passing through islands in the Tonga group, he had shown a taste for cruelty that some of his officers found both surprising and alarming. In the face of what he called the “repeated insolence” of the Natives—jackets, shoes, and a pewter basin had gone missing, as had daggers, bayonets, and muskets—Cook’s fury smoldered. On Tongatapu and its nearby atolls, he took to flogging Natives far past the daily limit of twelve lashes per man allowed by navy rules; in one instance, he had a Native whipped a sadistic seventy-two times. He cut off the ears of some of the most egregious thieves, and in at least one case, on his orders, a cross was carved into a Native man’s shoulder, all the way to the bone.

Yet Cook had never visited on anyone the kind of widespread retribution that he was now unleashing on the people of Moorea—punishing the many for the misdeeds of an individual. It seemed Cook had taken leave of his senses. The wanton destruction of the homes of people he had no proof were actually connected to the theft—this was a first. Although some of his men threw themselves into the vandalistic acts with gusto, most were appalled by the harshness of their captain’s orders. They understood Cook’s initial frustration over the theft, but his lust for retaliation had grown into something terrifyingly toxic, with no sense of proportion.

“I doubt not,” thought one lieutenant, “but Captain Cook had good reasons for carrying his punishment to these people to so great a length, but what his reasons were are yet a secret.” It was “all about such a trifle as a small goat,” wrote Midshipman George Gilbert. Cook’s reprisals “were so different from his conduct in like cases in former voyages.”

Later in the day, for good measure, Cook had members of his party stalk down to the water’s edge and rip apart every canoe they could find. This was much more than a passing insult. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of a canoe in Polynesian society—the labor and craftsmanship it entailed, the utility it provided, the livelihood it advanced. Canoes were transportation, but they were also art. What the horse was to the American West, the canoe was to the Society Islands. To destroy canoes was to strike at the people’s independence, their means of sustenance and of getting about, their sense of aesthetics—and, to some extent, their sense of identity, too.

Cook, who surely understood this, persisted through the day, and the day after that: He sent teams of men along the coast to smash up every outrigger they encountered. Some Mooreans filled their beloved vessels with heavy rocks and sunk them in the lagoon shallows, thinking this might deter Cook. It didn’t. “The Captain,” wrote Lieutenant John Rickman in horror, “ordered the canoes that were sunk to be weighed up and destroyed.”

It is extraordinary that the islanders didn’t rise in defiance and kill these white-skinned invaders. The Native weapons may have been no match for muskets, but the Mooreans outnumbered Cook’s small party by a thousandfold. They could have made quick work of the Englishmen, but for some reason they remained pacific, even as parts of their island were consumed in flames.