Giulia Iannuzzi, Geografie del tempo. Viaggiatori europei tra i popoli nativi nel Nord America del Settecento (Rome: Viella, 2022), 324 pp. ISBN 9788833139968. https://www.viella.it/libro/9788833139968.
Titled Geographies of Time: European travellers and indigenous peoples in eighteenth-century North America, this book investigates the consequences that contact with the indigenous peoples of North America had on the idea of historical time in the eighteenth-century European mind. Against the backdrop of the historiography devoted to the theories of progress with which the culture of the Old World hypostatised in the societies of the globe different stages in the development of humanity, the primary corpus of this study consists of travel accounts, reports, and treatises based on direct observation. The purpose of this choice is to add, to the attention enjoyed by historical-philosophical and erudite thought and writing, the complementary exploration of the cultural uses of given ideas of time in the context of the encounter with North American human otherness. This perspective allows us to focus on and problematise the interplay that representations based on first-hand experiences reveal between pre-existing cultural palimpsest and empirical validation of knowledge. The identification of a humanity perceived as different from oneself with one’s own ancestors has been a common trope since the early modern age – between conceptual domestication of a radical difference, geographical projections of a golden age, and stratification of textual and figurative conventions.
Imperial Times. How Europe Used Time to Rule the World (XVIII-XIX Centuries) – introducing History of Historiography 77 (2020)
Aim of the introduction to the monographic issue Imperial Times. How Europe Used Time to Rule the World (XVIII-XIX Centuries) is to throw into relief current debates demonstrating the need for greater academic research into imperial times.
The question that underlies the contributions to the special issue is how to synchronise the study of history in a postcolonial age; how to navigate history while accounting for the traditional uses of concepts like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernity.
This introduction critically distances the logic underpinning periodisations by challenging the uncritical use of a given interval of time as the basis of a neutral partitioning, and takes stock of how postcolonial studies and global historians have drawn attention, in recent years, to the contingent and political origins of these timeframes.
It contends that, for all the talk about a “temporal” and an “imperial turn”, time and empire still appear, at times, to be largely undertheorized in relation to each other. It highlights new conceptualisations brought to the study of temporality in relation to empire by the history of emotions, and of material cultures, put forward by the study of gendered subjectivities, and stimulated by the attention to long-term shifts favoured by novel methodology of environmental history. It takes stock of Reinhart Koselleck’s influence on these historiographical turns, and of recent re-evaluations of his work on time and concepts.
A special emphasis on the eighteenth century seeks to contribute new perspectives on overlooked imperial dynamics that influenced the politics of time during that period. Industrialisation; modern timekeeping; the growth of the novel; the combination of the antiquarian’s methods and philosophical history, all were once said to have changed the experience of time in eighteenth-century Europe.
Drawing on the hypothesis that conceptions of the future are crucial to our understanding of ideas and practices of time, tradition, history, and change, this introduction also discusses our conception of the history of utopian times, and the specific ties the future has to the history of imperial conceptions and projects.
The concluding section is devoted to present the methodological purpose behind the special issue: to set out four case studies to trace new pathways for the study of the imperial legacies in the making of a global history of time.
I am very grateful to the other contributors of Imperial Times for the productive discussions we had while working together on this project.
Full bibliographical data:
Matilde Cazzola, Edward Jones Corredera, Giulia Iannuzzi, and Guido G. Beduschi, Introduction. Imperial Times. Towards a History of Imperial Uses of Time pp. 11-23, DOI: 10.19272/202011501001
STORIA DELLA STORIOGRAFIA Histoire de l’Historiographie · History of Historiography · Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung Fabrizio Serra editore, Pisa – Roma * 77, 2020/1
How Europe Used Time to Rule the World (XVIII-XIX Centuries)
History of Historiography monographic issue: towards a history of imperial uses of time.
STORIA DELLA STORIOGRAFIA Histoire de l’Historiographie · History of Historiography · Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung Fabrizio Serra editore, Pisa – Roma * 77, 2020/1 here on the publisher website
ToC: Matilde Cazzola, Edward Jones Corredera, Giulia Iannuzzi, and Guido G. Beduschi Introduction. Imperial Times. Towards a History of Imperial Uses of Time pp. 11-23, DOI: 10.19272/202011501001 * Guido G. Beduschi “To Imitate the Ancients, Having Adopted the Corrections of the Moderns”. Scipione Maffei’s Consiglio politico pp. 27-52, DOI: 10.19272/202011501002 * Giulia Iannuzzi “This New and Unexampled Way of Writing the History of Future Times”. The Rise and Fall of Empires and the Acceleration of History in Samuel Madden’s Eighteenth-Century Memoirs from the Future pp. 53-88, DOI: 10.19272/202011501003 * Edward Jones Corredera Investing in the Enlightenment. The Financial Revolution and the Global Origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire pp. 89-111, DOI: 10.19272/202011501004 * Matilde Cazzola “Sometimes, the Past is the Present”. Electoral Reforms, the Working Classes, and the British Empire pp. 113-148, DOI: 10.19272/202011501005
I am very grateful to the other contributors of Imperial Times for the productive discussions we had while working together on this project.
