WHATEVER deficiencies Bernard Bailyn may have had, reticence about the practice of history, fortunately, was not one of them.1 During five decades as a teacher at Harvard, he devoted his research seminar in Early American history to introducing first-year graduate students to the discipline's essential skills and practices. Simultaneously he instructed scores of individual doctoral candidates in matters of research, argument, and writing whenever their drafts diverged from his acute sense of the relevant standards. Between 1951 and 2000, he performed a similar service for authors and scholarly readers in the incisive book reviews and review essays he published in learned journals, delivering thirty verdicts on works from La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II—a critical debut as auspicious as it was audacious—to the first two volumes of The Oxford History of the British Empire, the subject of his last review.2In seminars, thesis supervisions, and reviews Bailyn typically directed his comments to individual works and writers; that they reflected aspects of a larger, unified sense of historical standards and practice was often less clear to his students and readers than the deficiencies or merits of the specific case under discussion. Only in December 1981, as his professional career reached its zenith, did he speak publicly in general terms about the discipline of history in “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” his presidential address to the American Historical Association.3 Thereafter he discussed aspects of the subject in invited lectures delivered in 1985 (on creative imagination in history), 1995 (on context in historical writing), and 1998 (a comment on history and memory that concluded a scholarly conference on the slave trade). He also spoke in personal terms on the teaching and writing of history in long retrospective interviews recorded in 1991 just before he retired, and in 1993 just after.4Becoming professor emeritus at age seventy did not end Bailyn's commitment to sharing his views on the practice of history with students. He remained engaged as advisor and co-advisor of history doctoral dissertations until his eightieth year, while returning from retirement to offer an introductory methods course to first-year graduate students.5 He first taught that seminar, History 2910: The Practice of History, in the fall term of 1993 when he was seventy-one. If its twenty students imagined that the pass/fail grading format foretold a ramble through historiography under the guidance of a genial emeritus, rigorous weekly discussions based on hundreds of pages of readings soon disabused them of the illusion. In fact, the course was an expansion and generalization of the Early American research seminar he had taught for decades and nothing less than the summa of Bailyn's thinking on historical method.6 Even when that seminar was last offered, in the fall term of 1999, he had not uttered his final word: he last commented publicly on historical writing in Illuminating History, the intellectual memoir that appeared in the final year of his life.These activities and writings trace an extraordinary effort to explain a discipline that Bailyn maintained “can be an art, is never a science,” but “is always a craft.”7 At one level this dictum paid homage to Marc Bloch, who prefaced his unfinished manuscript on the historical method by disclaiming any philosophical intention. “I submit it for what it is,” he wrote in the introduction to The Historian's Craft: “the memorandum of a craftsman who has always liked to reflect over his daily task, the notebook of a journeyman who has long handled the rule and the level, without imagining himself to be a mathematician.”8 There was, however, much more to the claim than self-effacement, for to call history a craft was to declare disciplinary independence from the social sciences and their orientation toward building general systems, models, and theories. Construing historical writing as craftwork put in brackets a number of philosophical issues—the strength or weakness of history's claims to represent objective truth, the definition of what qualifies as a historical fact, and so on—which, while important in themselves, tend to emphasize the epistemology of history rather than the investigation, analysis, and narration of the past. To define history as a craft also had important practical consequences by implying that its skills are better taught by example and practice than by precept, and that standards of historical scholarship and writing are best transmitted not as rules but as understandings shared among acknowledged practitioners. Professional training in history-as-craft therefore required students not merely to command a body of knowledge but to be acculturated to the community of working scholars. The claim of craft, in this sense, embraced medieval guild traditions as an analogue for modern graduate education even as it attempted to describe the lived reality of historians’ practice.9But what, specifically, did Bailyn believe could be gained by construing historical work as a kind of craft production? What basic skills were needed, and how were they best nurtured in students and scholars? What knowledge of rhetoric and traditions, what grasp of the standards by which historical writings could be understood as successful or deficient, were essential? Where did the boundary lie between ordinary scholarship and historical works of art? Tracing Bailyn's own trajectory—from acquiring the discipline's fundamental skills as a graduate student to imparting them to his own students as a teacher and mentor, to expounding his views on the character and practice of history to professional and lay audiences—allows us to address these questions. In answering them it becomes possible to understand Bailyn's writings, from the mid-1960s onward, as the work of a master craftsman determined to create literary art.Two indispensable steps in the long march to learning any craft depend upon emulation: developing the habit of analyzing excellent work to understand its essential features and finding a mentor whose practice exemplifies qualities the student most admires. That Bailyn achieved both during his first two years in graduate school was not a foregone conclusion. An incomplete undergraduate education in English literature, interrupted by military service in World War II, meant that he entered Harvard's History graduate program in 1946 with “a general orientation to social and economic history” for which his previous academic work offered minimal preparation. During the first year he succeeded in identifying a potential focus for study—the intersections “between mental, interior states and socioeconomic conditions and forces” in the lives of people who lived and worked at the “intersection between Europe and America” during the long transition between the early modern period and the modern era—without securing a mentor who could help him translate that inchoate ambition into a dissertation project.10 Bailyn's assigned advisor, Samuel Eliot Morison, was personally aloof and professionally dismissive of analytical history “as a betrayal of the historian's obligation to tell the human story of what has happened,” and it was only during his second year that he gravitated to Oscar Handlin as an alternative.11 Handlin was only recently tenured, but Bailyn admired his lectures as “tightly woven analyses of the structures of events and circumstances that explained how things came to be the way they were” and was drawn to his understanding of history as “a form of intellection, a cognitive process.” When Morison took a leave of absence to write The History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Bailyn switched advisors.12Late in life he described a crucial encounter with Handlin, probably in 1948, as an awakening to history “essentially as a craft with rigorous demands and standards”: As a largely unsupervised graduate student, I was struggling with a dissertation on religion and economic development and had got myself tangled up in the theories of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and others, and was told that the person to see was young Professor Handlin, who knew about such things. When he asked me what the problem was, I explained at length, exhaustively, with every twist and detail. Then I waited for his response. I can still recall it. He said “ECH,” and waved his hand dismissively. I got the message, and it was liberating. I never again got caught up in theoretical issues in approaching a historical problem.13Whether mere seconds or whole weeks elapsed before Bailyn deciphered Handlin's ECH, in the end its meaning was unmistakable: he needed to ask his own questions and make his own arguments to answer them. This did not mean he could disregard Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism (1905), much less R.H. Tawney's challenge to Weber's general arguments in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). Far from it—in 1994, Bailyn noted that he chose to study the New England merchants because “Weber and Tawney had made clear that the one pure case of the influence of Protestant ideology on capitalist development … was in early New England.”14 Handlin's gesture and grunt had, however, relieved Bailyn of any imagined obligation to confirm or challenge Weber's—or anyone's—theory. History was its own discipline, in no sense bound by the system-building imperatives of the social sciences. What historians needed to do was simply to ask the right questions of the sources that intrigued them.This liberating insight, Bailyn realized, converged with a quality he had found compelling in Marc Bloch's masterpiece La Société féodale, which he had read for a medieval field in his General Examination: Everything in Bloch's writing impressed me: the scope and detail and organization, the tightness and clarity of the language, but above all—what I remember most clearly—the sense of movement, change, loss, evanescence, in everything he wrote. He was a master in tracing changes in the meaning and uses of words—the way the expression, the language, persists but the meanings are transformed.15Those “apparent anomalies—things that don't explain themselves, things that are puzzling—are entries into the peculiarities of the past.” Alertness to such surprises was a quality shared by the analytical historians whose work Bailyn most admired, those able to explain why it is that a word meant one thing at one time and another thing at another point. That kind of anomaly … leads you into areas you otherwise wouldn't think about. This is the basis of Handlin's article on the origins of chattel slavery. He observed the difference in the meaning of the word “slave” in the early seventeenth century and at the end of the seventeenth century. The word was used at both times, but it meant different things. To spot these apparently inexplicable developments is a way of entering rather deeply, I think, into the strangeness of a past situation, because they are anomalies only with respect to us, and therefore … distinctive of the past.16Crucial insights flowed from this realization. To recognize anomalies—not just linguistic shifts, but all surprising departures from an expected course of development—required the researcher to imagine the “movement, change, loss, evanescence” reflected in primary sources, to be attuned to their contexts and nuances and inner logic, and hence to be open to discovery. This validated Bailyn's temperamental skepticism of abstraction and reinforced his commitment to investigating the colonial merchants whose daily pursuit of profit had created a treasure-trove of evidence. Like Handlin's investigation of thousands of individuals, families, and households in Boston's Immigrants, Bailyn's deeply contextualized analysis of commercial correspondence, notarial records, ledgers, and other business documents made it possible to understand the merchants not just as entrepreneurs, but as shapers of New England society and founders of a viable regional economy.Two pillars of the historian's craft as Bailyn understood and ultimately taught—relying on primary sources for questions to drive one's research and expecting the unexpected—were thus fixed in place by his early dissertation work and emulation of Handlin's approach. A third followed from Handlin's suggestion that he “read Sylvia Thrupp's book on the merchant class of medieval London.” Reflecting on her arguments brought into focus the theme with which he ended the dissertation: What I discovered, and then tested in the later statistical study of shipping, was that there was no such thing as a [merchant] “class” in any recognizable sense. The merchants were simply a group of people who participated in trade. The social and economic range of these people defies all class definition… So the book begins with one kind of problem and ends with another.17Handlin's seemingly tangential comment enabled Bailyn to see the relationship between his highly focused analysis and a much larger historiographical issue, the influence of social class on the development of eighteenth-century British North America. Handlin well understood the centrality to Progressive historiography of Arthur Meier Schlesinger's pioneering social history, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution: its argument that North American merchants resisted Parliamentary taxation to defend their class interest was regarded as validating Carl Becker's and Charles Beard's contention that from the Stamp Act crisis to the Constitution the leitmotif of American Revolutionary history was class conflict.18 Because social classes formed over generations and maintained structural coherence over time, the demonstration that New England merchants c. 1690 were an occupational group rather than a class had enormous implications for interpreting the political response of merchants, seventy-five years later, to changes in British trade policies.19 Understanding this, Bailyn staked a bold claim for the significance of his findings for “the decade after 1765” in his book's final sentence: “And this time, too, as in those distant days when Randolph and Andros had darkened the horizon, the New England merchants reacted not as a unit but as individuals whose social differences were at least as strong as their common interests.”20A decade after defending his thesis, Bailyn quipped that “one of the greatest values of the doctoral dissertation … is the almost universal experience … that one has given the right answers to the wrong questions.”21 His own questions, defined by the sources and refined by stages as the project progressed, were in fact excellent but narrowly drawn: their historiographical implications eluded him until Handlin's suggestion helped him recognize their larger significance and prodded him to make it clear to readers. The third great lesson in the craft of history that Bailyn took away from his dissertation, therefore, was that the final, hardest, most elusive question that the historian must answer is always “So what?”.Bailyn chose his words carefully in the Preface to The New England Merchants when he acknowledged Handlin's “wise counsel and the example of his remarkable scholarship,” his thorough reading of the manuscript “at every stage of its preparation,” and the critical remarks that “conveyed something of his own inspiration which makes of history a subtle, penetrating analysis of society.” They summed up his understanding, as a newly certified member of the historical guild, of the essential qualities of a master craftsman.22By the time Bailyn joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in 1953, his understanding of the historian's craft rested on three pillars: the knowledge of how and where to find topics worthy of exploration in all kinds of sources; the recognition that research and rigorous analysis depended above all on asking the right questions; and the conviction that the historian's work is finished only when he or she can articulate its significance. Continued professional growth now required him both to produce scholarly work and to impart historical knowledge to undergraduate and graduate students, groups which he knew had fundamentally different needs. Undergraduate instruction, which dominated in his early teaching and until he retired, meant about the past in a and students, by needed above all to be to essential … tested through that them to a analysis, of is or To be attuned to these was because in history, as in other craft, standards of quality can be among those who practice it. That is why … the training in the graduate when it is handled makes sense. how craft skills have and tested through the the of undergraduate most of his time and because obligation is to at an level, a whole subject in an form for but Only a of those who in his classes or history but all of them needed to understand that the discipline of history an essential way of the is an of human a way of of the of one's own life and and of more of what human experience has it is the way of the so that you where you are and where have from and so you don't about the past and make up to you can make based … on what has on knowledge of of undergraduate were thus to to grasp the and the of the subject and at the time to their so that they can ask their own he also from Handlin work his in and that undergraduate teaching could scholarly as well as Handlin, who not to his was by their carefully to his lectures as a of scholarly arguments to lay The from he noted that everything published has in one form or in which are because you can it is a way of own because you can was crucial in teaching undergraduate that came to the than he the question was, What issues you for analysis and The for is that the … … to an understanding of critical in the by which a distant and different past toward these critical have to be without any sense of or they have to be in all their and with all the as I with no that or that his in this way was not merely a but the of how he understood the discipline and its History was not merely knowledge of the it was a way of the that was no less rigorous no less than the of was another did not the writing and of and Bailyn found them less to and more to Because students are to do what I he as he he on imparting “the discipline of the The is to them and to create and over the to make them that there are and important questions and that there are questions; to them to understand the difference and to what significance Bailyn meant building the to historical works from those that were merely To such he a Handlin used to seminar to such fundamental issues as how to and as historical and with over time in the meanings of the for Handlin a seemingly question a the students to answer with no more guidance than to tell them when they were on the wrong asked you what a not what waited until they then a answer is the of a or At that he the and leave the students to the meaning of what had just they achieved was but in sense the more and because of Handlin, who and analysis, Bailyn used the of to to how historians did their His to readings without any of his was graduate to all of creative by in works on the history of education what he to focus on and about had nothing to do with the history of but or literary or how not to a In this specific he had assigned two a modern book by a and modern and … a book about by an which as and I then in the course of to people to see that there is at least as a historical understanding in that book as in the professional and so by of the basic qualities of in at that of but leave … thinking about basic of historical the early discussions to leave the students “a a of creative that for time, not The time, they don't what to at the end of a number of weeks of this, their are open to all of and they read in That to be a way of them to of and and a way also of a sense of and practice the students they could be as it was for the from who three decades later Bailyn's and seminar as the intellectual that him into a student of early American for the did not so other and other Bailyn could as because introductory not just to students to the practice of history but to them His from Morison to Handlin had the critical in his own students to the in a he not have that the the he never from in introducing students to the craft during the years he taught the the over time, but the essential skills he to impart remained Bailyn in them in during a at New on and the to historians and in issues of common of historical the of historical and the of in Bailyn's was to comment on the an delivered in a on “The of the the to his own work of the philosophical of and about the to which who shared his could claim their findings were Bailyn the interest of these but their for historians their he three of less but more that they needed in to with their If of history to help historians think he they on those three areas before such as the of in Bailyn's of the they the skills and he was to his graduate students. In his Harvard seminar he expected students to their own understandings from the of at he the the effort by simply first crucial issue, “the of to for a scholarly of the of the American in the historical or the and The last intrigued him because historical from “the of … in primary sources that research and writing or from between and that required a of and because every project … is and every question is a it was possible imagine such a thing as a historical was in this he be more to the working historian than volumes of on it is to the or what is the of a the historian had found a the second task, “the of that “a of thinking through a body of that required the of the question to it with the evidence. thus needed to be to and which required them to focus on the with who remained attuned to the and their of the of their such that a project to “a as a can into a and end up as a the to which may be in a Because the and of “the problem of the or of Bailyn historians needed to research more than they than on the that their work is the confirm the historians needed to more carefully to logic, between the mere of and the of literary and to the of Bailyn historians must carefully how to their findings and the potential of this he two word and the of In he historians needed always to a critical between and the and they the and focused on the historical situation, not on even a or can the in to his by the and the to from the past to the historians needed to in “the of the of which “The way in which a historian … he to the of knowledge he has to the reality of the past as
James WhaleThe Monster Man Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Portrait of James Whale, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum [End Page 89] In 1917, while serving as a second lieutenant in the British Army on the Western Front, twenty-six-year-old James Whale was captured by the Germans at Aisne Farm in France. Led off at bayonet point, he felt lucky; most of his platoon had been killed. He was transported to Holzminden, a prison camp in the heart of enemy territory where six hundred officers were already imprisoned. The brutal camp commander, Hauptmann Karl Niemeyer, claimed that the camp was escape-proof. Prisoners dug a hundred-yard tunnel with knives, forks, and frying pans, and twenty-nine men crawled free. Another seventy might have made it through if not for a New Zealand aviator who got stuck in the hole, blocking their passage. Indifferent to the escapees’ plans, Whale stayed put. Despite a meager diet of potato rations and occasional horsemeat and the camp’s reputation as the worst in Germany, he made effective use of his time, gambling, painting, and producing amateur theatrical productions. For his plays, he designed and painted the scenery and wrote original material. On Saturday nights after dinner, the tables were pushed together, creating a solid platform for a makeshift stage at the far end of the barracks. For two hours, in the small theater space, inmates performed a James Whale production, forgetting about their harsh circumstances until the final curtain dropped. His plays became popular among both prisoners and camp officials, who would send to Cologne for special costumes and props. After fifteen months, he left Holzminden with his career path set: he would make a life in theater. He said, “I couldn’t follow anything seriously after that.” When he left Holzminden, IOUs scribbled on paper scraps filled his pockets, winnings from the camp’s many poker and bridge games. The officers, most from wealthy British families, paid their debts, and with the sales of his prison drawings, Whale had several hundred pounds to stake a new life in London. He freelanced cartoons and illustrations for commercial magazines, but the postwar housing shortage made rents prohibitively expensive. He moved to Birmingham, six miles from where he’d grown up, worked for the Birmingham Repertory Company, and enrolled in Ryland Memorial School of Art. The world of theater offered Whale an escape from a life of hard physical labor and poverty. He was born in 1889 in Dudley, a mining and ironworking town in the West Midlands, to working-class parents in a house crowded with siblings. Unusually thin, with intense blue eyes, red hair, and “faun-like charm,” he carried himself with a regal bearing. [End Page 90] Family and friends thought that he was meant for a life grander than what Dudley could offer. Click for larger view View full resolution Frankenstein, 1931, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum With a large family to help support, Whale left school in his teens to work for a cobbler, salvaging nails from shoe soles for scrap metal before burning the leather. His talent as a draftsman made him extra money lettering fancy price tags for local merchants, which he saved for tuition at the Dudley School of Arts and Crafts. In 1910, he enrolled and took classes at night while working during the day in a sheet-metal factory hammering ornamental designs into buggy fenders. Other than his attendance at the occasional performances at the Dudley Opera House, [End Page 91] there was no indication when he left art school in 1914 that he would seek a life in theater. Click for larger view View full resolution Frankenstein, 1931, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum Whale understood that success and recognition, as well as money, would be hard to come by. He said, “No one should wish to become an actor or have anything to do with the theater for any other reason than an inner compulsion.” Yet he pursued his dream as soon as he was liberated, thin and frail, from Holzminden. After a stint in Stratford-upon-Avon playing small parts in the Shakespearean Festival...
This dissertation analyzes the institutional development and policy performance of the Federal Reserve System from 1913-1968. Whereas existing scholarship assumes Federal Reserve institutions have remained static since 1913, this project demonstrates that the Federal Reserve was a site of extensive institutional experimentation across its first half century of operations. The 1913 Federal Reserve Act created thirteen autonomous agencies without offering guidance regarding how these units should function as a coherent system. The extent to which this institutional jumble congealed into a central bank-like organization has fluctuated over time. Institutional changes were driven by external shocks and shaped by an ongoing internal debate about normative systemic governance. Some agents called for greater institutional centralization to increase the system’s strategic capacity. Others drew upon shared liberal ideals to defend the system’s decentralized governance traditions. These debates resulted in frequent reconstitutions of the policy-making regime. This dissertation argues the Fed’s temporally-specific institutional configurations were consequential for United States monetary and exchange rate policies. During periods of relatively centralized Federal Reserve governance, internationally-oriented agents wielded control over the system’s policy-making levers to help stabilize the dollar’s exchange rate. During periods of institutional fragmentation, by contrast, monetary policies grew increasingly rigid, promoting dollar instability. Consequently, the structure of American central banking institutions has important implications for both the domestic and international political economies. This project suggests that insights from the positive study of institutions should be applied to the design of central banking institutions. Although institutional fragmentation can check arbitrary power, it likewise can paralyze the policy-making process and undermine the formation and steady pursuit of long-term strategic goals.
Reviewed by: The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860 James H. Thomas (bio) The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics, 1790–1860, by Anthony Webster; pp. viii + 205. Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2009, £50.00, $90.00. Within 205 pages and eight chapters, and drawing on an impressive range of sources, Anthony Webster sets out to examine and explain an important development—the East India Company's decline. His imaginative archival research has repaid handsome dividends. Between 1790 and 1860, the once-successful Company was in retreat. Webster analyses and scrutinises key players and developments, marking the emergence of new business interests and the 1793 Charter Act as the first steps in withdrawal. The struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France altered the Company's stance, while the 1813 Charter Act terminated its much-vaunted and jealously treasured monopoly of trade with India. The resultant liberalisation of trade with the subcontinent affected the British and Indian economies and British patterns of trade with Asia. Indicative of change, the Straits Settlements sought to be administered by the Colonial Office rather than by John Company's bureaucrats. The early 1830s saw economic crisis in India, removal of the Company's monopoly of trade with China, and a new pattern of commercial activity with both India and the Far East. Developments in agriculture, banking, and railways in the Indian subcontinent, while uneven, were rocked by a second crisis from 1847 to 1848. The Government of India Act of 1858 ended Company rule in India. Webster deals incisively with all of this and more. Using the legislation that underwrote and confirmed the once-great commercial enterprise's retreat, the author has made it easier for lay and professional readers to grasp and evaluate the crucial issues at stake. There are some instances of repetition, particularly with regard to opium's illicit passage to China, and some stylistic shortcomings. Rather than making reference to "the end of the 1810s," for instance, use of "by 1820" would have been neater (71). There are some proof-reading slips as well as some inconsistencies and infelicities in the references. While this may appear to cavil, such problems do detract slightly from the book's overall impact. Some elements, moreover, could have been explored further. The licensed private trade, or the "privilege trade" (25), merits closer examination given its financial and social significance in the context of both family and Company fortunes—as the careers of John Wordsworth and John Wyche ably demonstrate. Did this system, for example, work against Company fortunes? Was there any link between this practice and the abolition of the Company's trade monopoly in 1813? Similarly, Webster informs the reader of the rise of agency houses in the Company's three presidencies—Bombay, Madras, and Bengal—from the 1780s and that their sister agency houses in London had by the 1820s "become a powerful interest group within the East India Company's Courts of Proprietors and Directors" (26). Just how powerful, and how this power might be calibrated—by stock amounts, by connections, or a combination thereof—is not made apparent. Such elements are important if the Company's decline and demise is to be seen in its full and proper context. Webster is correct in stressing the significance of the changes between 1810 and 1830. Monopoly loss, the strain of prolonged war against France (with the Indian Ocean forming the key theatre of operations post-1805), acquisition of Singapore in February 1819, and the run-up to the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty were not without effect. [End Page 125] Similarly, the activities and influence of structures outside of the Company, including trade committees and John Palmer's abortive attempt to establish a Calcutta Chamber of Commerce, meant that by 1830 the structures and the neat and well-recorded dimensions of the Company's world were faltering. Strength, order, and unity of purpose were replaced by their very antitheses. The once-mighty Company, particularly in the financial context of the City of London, began to look like a shadow of its former self. By the...
V. S. Naipaul's bookA Way in the World (1994) is perhaps most strikingly about obsession—about historical figures obsessed by an idea: dreams of new worlds, the fulfillment of large schemes, and the universal failure of such visions. In his long chapter “In the Gulf of Desolation: An Unwritten Story,” Naipaul imagines the wasted year that the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco Miranda spent on the island of Trinidad in 1806, marooned after an abortive insurrection across the gulf on the mainland. Nine years before Miranda's arrival in Port of Spain, Trinidad was part of the Spanish empire, but now it is British. The island is dominated by plantations: “no place for a metropolitan man like Miranda,” writes Naipaul.1 And yet his work turns on the often hidden or forgotten exchanges between metropolitan spaces of empire and subjugated spaces of colonization. At Port of Spain, Miranda is met by General Thomas Hislop, the British governor. “Hislop is a man of jangled nerves,” Naipaul tells readers. And for good reason. The brutal repression of incipient slave revolt—“the hangings and the mutilations”—has raised legal questions back in London. Much of the chapter centers on imagined conversations between Miranda and Hislop. Hislop is deeply troubled by uncertainties, by the shaky foundations of Britain's Trinidad regime and his responsibility for actions, inhumane and possibly illegal, taken to maintain order. Most particularly, he is anxious about the investigation of General Thomas Picton, the island's first British governor, and by Picton's conviction in the court of King's Bench. “Strange,” Hislop observes, “that all the bigger charges of hanging and theft should have been thrown out, and this case of petty theft should have brought Picton down. Signing the order that the very respectable magistrate brought him for the torture of the young mulatto girl.”2 In fact, this glancing reference to an anonymous “young mulatto girl” marks a return, a reworking of themes and characters that Naipaul introduced twenty-five years earlier in The Loss of El Dorado: A History (1969). As he notes, his earlier book “is made up of two forgotten stories,” two moments when his native Trinidad “was touched by ‘history’” or was brought within European historical consciousness.3 The first story marks the final chapter in the search for El Dorado with Sir Walter Raleigh's return to Trinidad in 1617; the second is that of Louisa Calderon, the young mulatto girl whose torture brought Governor Picton to trial and whose case became a cause célèbre. Calderon now appears at the fringes of British history, given a walk-on part in histories of Trinidad.4 Picton is generally remembered not as a colonial governor but for his role in the Peninsular Campaign and as the highest-ranking officer killed at the Battle of Waterloo; his portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, and his heroic death is commemorated by a statue erected in St. Paul's Cathedral.5 In his Nobel Prize lecture for 2001, Naipaul describes growing up without a sense of his own family's historical past: “All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. But for the French child, say, that knowledge is waiting. That knowledge will be all around them … In Trinidad, bright boy though I was, I was surrounded by areas of darkness.” Those “areas of darkness … became my subjects,” writes Naipaul, and that darkness sent him “to the documents in the British Museum and elsewhere, to get the true feel of the history of the colony.”6 The “postcolonial” moment has been one of recovery, as well as one for redrawing boundaries and identities. The blurring of cultural and spatial boundaries has led historians, as well as novelists and other writers, to rethink our own work, sending us back to the archives to get “the true feel,” or at least a new sense, of history. As Antoinette Burton explains, “the imperial turn” “is not a turn toward empire so as a return to the between and and the and the of the on to the case of Picton and the cause of Calderon, with new historical questions and of us who work on British have Picton's case legal that an of In my own A Way in the World and it to a to the to the trial the and the the But as historians, our or the documents after the of the and with other and to the story deeply on And Britain's historical is of the of that history, the by Picton's trial In or British about empire, it is on the of empire as a in empire in on the of colonial to the between a of and the of colonial As cause but one in the long and history of colonial one of The and us of the of empire and of the of exchanges between and this the of British in the and metropolitan about the of that by Picton's trial for Louisa Calderon colonial for a the of as observes, metropolitan was on of colonial the of often the between and and the of on was to The Picton's most the of cultural of and that the and of of to be the of and to and The of was The dominated British an of all British in this that the was an and of and not the the of British and French they the most A of in in all the British and of and a was by and the French of with of of and as the Trinidad was of a The island's and the of very with who French the of of and the island to a Spanish Trinidad became an and the slave to was a large of of who The British Trinidad in but after the of was it to the British Trinidad and it the of with the Spanish British in the and French Trinidad a for the of In the of the General Picton in of Trinidad with a he was governor in and to the of Picton and his within the of a thrown into by and the of the the the of or legal to in a by British his of Picton was by a with long that the of the in the of the him or of Picton this to it in of his was the he was brought to after the of on 1806, Picton's case before and a in the court of King's Bench. Picton was for a the to be Calderon, a in The case first before King's two years in but been sent on to Port of for the case has a the trial was a of a one in a legal The case the as it of death brought a to for or the In Picton been taken into in order to charges before the case was the charges of and was brought to King's for other that Picton was of and of the and of the by Picton around the that Calderon was Most at least for the was the that he without a young of and a of the case in on to when Picton was all charges and his of Picton's case was, in fact, part of a the of British colonial in the A colonial the In the of Picton as governor of Trinidad and him with a by with Picton as second and as and Picton of colonial and Picton was a of his own in and to a In this he was of with British for for and the who was to in to the as an of of imperial responsibility been at an earlier moment of imperial he as a the as an of and a of Picton was a who his at was a of the his at he as to the British in at he and as a of the of and he on in and in The between Picton and and a with a of in that documents at into The of the and to the imperial us to King's the of the the court was to have been a of the to after The trial was for Picton was brought to court on the the trial as the for him to the of the case to As in the the case Picton was of the most to our and has for a of Picton was he was the of the case was by the role of a for his who led the The was brought and by the the the case raised questions about Spanish or British the British of And Spanish was the legal and the case questions about of and the of colonial was the case by his that Picton, in his role as of our and governor of one of our colonial and to his … has the to he was been by the of the of that after the British Spanish to be but to the to his Picton's of British introduced the of Louisa At the of or been by “to with him as his to the court that such to us in this … yet in that the of is it is for them to at the of at that they or into a of with Calderon “was in an with one to him to of a of and Calderon taken into to in the and at the of the or Picton the the torture was first brought to the of and two or who to the on a of and a British governor for the first torture into a British as a for and and as a of a this Calderon in at the was The of torture was The was by one to a other was to and was by of a a the of on The for to by to this was that but was of a that the torture not be for an Calderon but was up but not to the was The the torture was for Louisa Calderon on the The of Governor Picton for the on Louisa Calderon was a British but that it be a the to the torture on Calderon by the the should be “that it be by the most by it be and be as a to such the of British and history. on the of the of was Picton's that it was to have the of the of this new a conviction of the they of the they the and of British to that of to of a to to the of Picton's to the now around was the In a the that was and was that of a and that was in with a on in the of the was and two one for Spanish and one for “the the of the was to in or to with that was to the years in this and the of was that not who taken “the was to his the at who the and who the and two to an of by in the so was by the to the with to and the in … in with the and his the of the that it was an to that he his have him to “the of the of the at the to of this before the it to be with the of the the that that should be made by the Calderon the court that on the was to to in and and a was in in a between for without a to be before arrival and his of the inhumane At the of the marks of torture in the of or on two Port of Spain, or and to British the to the of of torture and the of the by that the case was not and but of the to Picton and the at In Picton's the the between and the was a whose been “the of by and the a and in a to that of Louisa was as as a in the of and in a of with in a with the court that to the and of this have met on the … a a to a of this … the is to and the is by an The not in Picton introduced the to to the to and two years to the to torture he that Picton to the order after all other been As it was that Spanish was to be British Picton's case on that Spanish and that in this he without the between and well that two of be the of our and that of the the that a who for years on the island of St. to and was taken into on charges brought by a who in court and with his and his and that his been by the as for his a was him to be for his that of the been not and the of his that a of death been a man for his a and man who this But when the to the in St. that a slave who a was to the death the an is the of Spain, but the of an and was in that a to his at At was the Spanish as it was to be in a British court was to Spanish legal the island as a of that it a for of and other Picton was “no a man of he been with order colonial As for the of torture to the of inhumane and of this The of on Calderon was as in of and the this of is for the of the of the is it who and in the and for the of was for of of Spanish the was a The was to the of Spanish to torture in the to the that Picton's torture been in A for the was was to a of as it became that he about Spanish he his to Spanish without the of a The was by who was in A in who the Spanish he that he of that The case to a the Spanish torture in the that the that Picton with As in his Picton should have not be a but was an and governor of a British who should have or him in this his for the to as to who by the of the British have and will the in the of has the of his his to for his before a court of The a of but this was the of the for a new A case that with torture in that first in King's in when it was sent on to Port of and that to King's in 1806, was two years in a it torture to be legal in Trinidad at the of the island to and Picton not to have been by Calderon of the of the as on British But the case to come to as legal on the the of In the court the the case was Picton was on the the him this of cause was Louisa At one Picton's case and the his regime in Trinidad of within a a for colonial at other the case the of a between metropolitan and colonial of between of and cause with of British own this of was legal was to be the of a British The case raised British was in to other European as well as to of the world for colonial such with Picton's torture of it about in the of a British governor the Spanish brought torture to of the of Picton's was that the and Trinidad, Trinidad to In order to of Picton's the of torture and to the death that and have in for the In was or about was a to British of to Picton's actions, the of the of Britain's own and the St. of the man with his and as a colonial British slave generally of or The trial of the of of British in the Louisa was not a but was a of to been into In to this Picton and his by of Calderon as an of Picton that a been made to the of the in of a of the and most who with a or introduced into the of “to his and him of his between two was around the of a of to the of colonial In the role of or of became a of of the of the In the in Trinidad and the of a of torture to the British of the of colonial the of or was to a for As a into own in the but as a of a long one to colonial to of as with the of of and the of the was the in Louisa to the the of the imagined of and was perhaps to the As has the of torture is In at trial and the of trial the to the of the of Louisa and when the of the torture of torture and by to the the was given the was As Louisa to the The of and to Picton's In fact, of the to the was the most of the it is to the about the of given that and British legal The that own the was in the that was by a that the in was and in a for the that in have been by the of the in and of King's Bench. Picton to in to in the and in the as “the Governor of the case to the the by the of the and the The most of the the that in The this a of in of that it not be the and the of this the this trial is to be of Picton's that he his own to the British into in order to the by the in of the of Louisa that and the and of the part of the the and and has been to such and by the of the and the of torture the been in in and in all at to and in the the and with the the on his was so so so so of all to and that he have to and taken a lecture him to to the of his and of and us to the In the of Picton and his a be about as well as for cause was of of to the to this was was with the of with the by the of by the as and As the “was not so a and as an of themes and be taken and in or The of as the of the and the first of the a for the by the of and that be to the and of The of as on on new of and a of Louisa and story in and between and often with between the and the the it was a or story was by of to and trial to the of the was the was not to be and in when the was to a of it with a of the most the As to and Louisa appears in in of the torture appears The Picton Picton the of the the of the is a of very about years of and was in The was it to the of on the first of The the is as the of a is in the of this man … was of a the of a and As the governor of a Spanish island by Spanish Picton into the of the so in The was an a of was The of Port of Spain, with and on a of darkness and to a place by an in Trinidad and the of Picton's to the first him to the of Picton's within a of he to the about “the of that In a of and was on first a of was taken the so that on and in order to to was so young at the that not the is but by years was for without trial on Picton's with of work to The colonial was by Louisa Calderon other figures in a of with slave of and the of by was and for like the for of was the and the part of the charges brought Picton to of was by the of the to with the of on large “the of was before the and as a was and … the into the it the when the in the of the and a it to of it was on the a was one of the or so who on Picton's the the of to be the least of Picton's so on the brutal of a colonial regime of to a of metropolitan the of the and the was to the of the of the … The as the of repression in slave by of out, with As of and of “to a “the to into the of such not be but to metropolitan as well as colonial At the of the in a of to the in this with the And as the of and with the in “the of The was In the case of Louisa Calderon, was a with and case on a with the of colonial As have European on be without reference to a As a mulatto Louisa was a of for mulatto a of and they often in European as by and to work, and to the of British the of not the of European but “the of and for and slave and of about boundaries of the in the of on for European and Calderon an imagined between and was a of but was an of for to be taken into as his In metropolitan of Picton's trial with of torture in order to The of one of the by is of as it Calderon with in the to to in the the torture and the around the of the the is and a of of revolutionary The on of the to the perhaps on of of a for of a the of an that became part of the In the of is the as they be by But the slave is is a of on a a to the Louisa torture of Thomas Picton … Governor of the of Trinidad for Louisa Calderon by of The of the torture of a of a the of by of The The of story was that it brought the of the colonial to the between and in of and by the of colonial in such they an the on the of own into a by it at a the by the for to the and to the with to be about as it was him that cause touched on that of as a man of and on the fringes of metropolitan in the of such as he his own he at a young to the of the before at the slave he to have arrival at Port of in with A he Picton him of as a in not long for to get into at Port of Spain, cause with British for Picton him and the book in Trinidad, his return to was the most of Picton's As a of Picton's he the of a The the book as an given that the of the French of of and the the a for for as the of imperial and the a of for a such as that the by the to the and In a of other on the he the first was to a his he for in the for a in … this of his in all … the of all he is at into the of the of not Picton was of Picton brought and to Picton up with a mulatto his he to and “to Picton the for the and the this to all the in the to the of … Those who or on his became the of his of to of of and the British of the British Thomas the of on the island “is by the or of a of the has to Picton across an it was not for a colonial to a of as his or to such a was was in the in about the of and of the of as was a the of the of his was a to back the on to to the court of was an of The of figures to was a man on the he was a after his own he been to Picton's with Calderon as a of he was at Picton's trial to he have as a or at least as a British the of The of of the trial Louisa Calderon as of the of or in the of of colonial British British to the the in the of the the the slave the of The of Governor Picton General The and The is not As was in a British who not in to be as In the of the of questions with in the colonial slave in and for in in the British raised the of for in and questions about the legal and to such in Trinidad, part of the to British and an colonial about the of of and to be with revolutionary who colonial And about the an of to and to slave and other British troubled by in the as and the of in of the of as and by a of come within the of a in cultural history toward he As with work in this one the of historical it is not by of this but that and cultural As the story of torture the colonial the trial and it up cultural in of and The was to as well as to The story not in of but and it and on colonial and Calderon the of of as the case Picton the of colonial of and brought to be metropolitan The the metropolitan to colonial and the historical in a between it us to it to the as a an as of a of across made and the Britain's imperial and and about of the of imperial and the of colonial The of empire as a the of by to as the the of colonial to of to the of of the on and the as a of In fact, in the and brought before by in an to a of and to Picton's But the the place at they of and to the governor to the the of colonial in the of one the of colonial an of and the of imperial In Trinidad, Picton's as a to General Hislop, his whose regime Britain's to the a or to British legal and to The characters Picton's was in when the governor to the at of good Picton for the Peninsular Campaign on the of Miranda's the Calderon case At the Picton was an to a in part of the of the in that for the case Picton, in his to in a that the of his in the Picton a of As for Picton's him the of the of the between and and he became deeply in the most as for the of who was of before his death in A and a to the of And about Louisa is like to about at the in a Trinidad, in a my when I was that, with with his a the and about with them in they as the who was the of Picton's that the was introduced by to in be to that his young has a of by an to all his In before King's at Picton's new The St. to be and in knowledge of with and a in the that be a to return to be the as the in the of the of the in Port of as given in to an this be the of the to by A in History of Trinidad, in that Louisa Calderon of in on to Louisa As a colonial was the of became an of metropolitan and as well as in and a young of and as an within the boundaries to a of Most the world of cultural a of and perhaps Naipaul has that he one a to the the other the world that one In Louisa the of the our to or to story to a sense of that has to turn the historical to the in an to the of