Building on previous scholarship on “genetic capital” and the politicization of animal economies, this paper examines how animal breeds and their transnational movement became geopolitical issues in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. In particular, it examines how the French government’s efforts to emulate English and Spanish wool production, and to overcome the economic advantage stemming from its rivals’ superior sheep breeds, intensified in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). Despite bans on the exportation of live sheep from Britain and Spain, the French strove to improve their flocks through illicit imports and diplomatic agreements. These efforts culminated in the 1760s, as the Bureau of Commerce began to collaborate with agriculturalists, naturalists, diplomats, and smugglers to bring superior breeds of sheep across the Anglo-French maritime border and the Pyrenean frontier with Spain. These projects developed in tandem with new conceptions of the permanence of race and breed, according to which animals would retain their characteristics in new climates and environments. Combining perspectives from economic, agricultural, political, and cultural history, this article uses the concept of animal mercantilism to open up the geopolitical stakes inherent in understandings of animals, race, and climate.

In 1717, an anonymous petition to the king of Spain expressed concern about the excessive number of Muslims living in Cartagena (Murcia). This complaint prompted the Council of Castile to launch a survey of the Muslim population with the aim of clarifying their status. In addition to galley slaves, the inquiry focused in particular on libertinos, a little-known category of slaves who lived and worked freely in the city but were heavily indebted to their masters due to the sums owed for their ransom. This article reconstructs the condition of these unbound slaves, who lived apart from their masters’ households, and the tensions this provoked between competing systems of norms. On the one hand, the right of slaves to work to finance their own redemption, and that of their masters to live off the rents imposed on them, were deeply rooted in local custom. On the other, rising insecurity along the coast prompted local authorities and the Crown to restrict these overlapping rights by forcing masters to keep their slaves at home. At stake in this conflict between different slavery regimes, the one based on local law and the other on royal jurisdiction, were slaves’ access to the labor market and their right to free residency and the protections afforded by contract law. Finally, by placing the inquiry itself at the heart of the study, the article investigates the meaning of a procedure that was less a demographic enumeration of slaves than a redistribution of rights to the city among its Muslim inhabitants.

Historians have been remarkably incurious about the legal dimensions of “informal empire.” This article shows that legal practices in fact created and sustained sovereign indeterminacy. Our focus is Pitcairn, a small, remote island in the Pacific settled in 1789 by a handful of Britons and Tahitians after the mutiny on the Bounty. British officials, legal professionals, island sojourners, and historians have advanced a jumble of claims, each attached to a particular timeline, about how Pitcairn became British. One prominent view is that a single British navy captain took possession of the island in 1838. We challenge this and other prevailing accounts by showing how repeated reconfigurations of island-imperial connections kept Pitcairn from being either enfolded into the empire or established as an independent entity. Intermittent visits by British naval officers gradually constituted a makeshift legal system, while rival factions of islanders steered imperial agents to support local schemes, including bids for island rule. For a century and a half, these processes held Pitcairn on the threshold of the empire. The significance of the narrative recounted here extends beyond one small island. This microhistory illustrates broad processes of interpolity ordering and locates the origins of sovereign indeterminacy in the “legal circuitry” of nineteenth-century empire.

An expanding scholarship on interracial intimacy in colonial contexts has generally focused on cases of administrative disputes or judicial conflicts that brought “mixed couples,” “mixed-race families,” or “métis” to the attention of colonial authorities. But what of the lives and experiences of those who did not contest their legal status, remaining under the administrative radar and thus virtually invisible in the archives of the colonial state? This article tackles these issues in the context of the French colony of New Caledonia by analyzing the trajectory of a household established out of official sight, made up of a French settler, a Kanak woman, and their descendants. The goal here is to understand what this phenomenon of relative social invisibility reveals about the scope and limits of colonial domination “at ground level.” Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, the article traces the conditions under which this family configuration was able to emerge and then endure for over fifty years. It finally disappeared after the death of the French settler, when each of the wider family groups—European and Kanak—to varying degrees sought to efface this awkward past within their respective social worlds.

This response to the Annales’ forum on my Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions focuses on the Southern framework of my analysis, on the place of the Greece case within this context, and on the chronology of the age of revolutions. It highlights that the term “South” was adopted by the revolutionaries themselves in Portugal, Spain, Piedmont, and Naples—but not in Greece. It argues that a comparative framework enables us to explore the Greek revolution not only as a war of independence but also as a moment of political apprenticeship. Finally, it suggests that this Southern focus invites us to reintegrate what Franco Venturi termed the “first crisis” of the ancien régime in the 1760s and 1770s into the chronology of the age of revolutions.

Holding on precariously to their small steeds, the Spanish conquerors attempt to break through the ranks of Atahualpa’s army, whose men defend on foot the fate of the Inca Empire. The scene is messy, at once tense and playful owing to the performers’ advanced state of inebriation. This choreography, which plays out the tragic events of 1532, has been reenacted on various patronal festivals throughout the central Peruvian Sierra since the first half of the seventeenth century. Although nowadays these reenactments may vary in configuration from one place to the next, all are financed by lay volunteers and include masses, processions, drinking, banquets, collective dances, fights, musical entertainment, and occasionally a bullfight. These festive performances are part of a connected history of the circulation and reconfiguration of representations of moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians) in the Iberian world. This article attempts to grasp the institutional dynamics, at the intersection between politics and religion, that have ensured the success and longevity of these performances in the Andes. It also questions the texture of this long time-span and its articulation with other temporalities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Chiquián (Áncash), the analysis focuses on the temporalities of the ritual: What past, present, and future horizons are woven into these performances’ frameworks of interaction?

This article focuses on an exceptional primary source—nearly eighty letters addressed to the crew of a single French ship captured during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) but never read, as their still-sealed envelopes attest. Letters to sailors, which helped maintain relations endangered by distance and uncertainty over whether they would return, offer clues to the resilience of familial bonds in wartime. Rather than interpreting these documents as a sign of the emergence of the nuclear family and modern intimacy, they are here approached as an object of social history. This correspondence played a key role in the circulation of information and the survival of familial unity. Letters were not markers of personal, private, and intimate exchanges, but rather part of the very fabric of complex social relations structured by both family ties and neighborliness. Both their writing and their reading engaged multiple individuals well beyond their signatory and their addressee. Ultimately, the article highlights, in their very materiality, the social dynamics that formalized the expression of emotions.

On the first landing of the staircase, there is a door with a name tag: “D. Graeber.” I am inside an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo, Ca’ Corner della Regina, which since 2011 has been turned into an exhibition space by the Fondazione Prada (the contemporary art foundation of the famous fashion brand). From 1834 to 1969 the palazzo was home to the municipal pawnshop, called Monte di pietà after the lending institutions for the poor established in the fifteenth century by Franciscan friars in various Italian cities, although not in Venice. These Franciscan lenders were partly conceived to counteract Jewish pawnbrokers. Monte di pietà is also currently the title of an immersive installation housed in the same palazzo, designed by the Swiss conceptual artist Christoph Büchel and timed to coincide with the Sixtieth Venice Art Biennale, which runs from April to November 2024.

In the 1710s, under pressure from an ongoing war, Sweden’s absolute king, Charles XII, implemented a number of fiscal and monetary measures that displayed a disdain for traditional privileges and carried a potential for social change. Taxation was made progressive and credit became more important to finance the war. Liquidity was radically expanded, most significantly by the release of very large amounts of fiat coins. Following the death of Charles XII in November 1718, there was a political reaction against the war policies and the fiscal and monetary measures were reversed, resulting in the dismantling of royal absolutism and a partial government default. This study consists of two parts. In the first, we investigate the impact of the war policy and the monetary measures of Charles XII’s regime on the social redistribution of resources in Swedish society, especially in the years 1715 to 1718. In the second, we focus on how the socioeconomic changes were addressed by political agents between the death of Charles XII and the default of 1719. Our results show that the fiat money permeated the economy and reached all social groups, and that in some locations its distribution upset the prevailing social order. Peasants and other low-ranking groups were targeted by the partial default, which largely deprived them of their monetary assets.