Lara Putnam

To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World

This article looks at existing and potential connections between two disparate subfields of historical inquiry: microhistory and Atlantic history. New research in the latter has utilized microlevel sources (those that allow the researcher to track an individual life) to challenge long-accepted generalizations about which kinds of people did what where in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic. But, the author suggests, such research raises specific methodological challenges and epistemological caveats. The risk is that we may borrow some of the more attractive elements of microhistory—in particular, the chance to tell extraordinary stories about ordinary lives—without addressing the elements of research design that give rigor and weight to the most persuasive microhistorical studies. Can microhistorical evidence from the Atlantic world serve as a basis for explanatory as well as descriptive claims? The article explores this question by discussing the authors own attempts to use microhistorical inquiry to answer macrolevel questions about the origins and breadth of anti-imperialism in the interwar British Caribbean.

Honor, status, and law in modern Latin America

This collection brings together recent scholarship that examines how understandings of honor changed in Latin America between political independence in the early nineteenth century and the rise of nationalist challenges to liberalism in the 1930s. These rich historical case studies reveal the uneven processes through which ideas of honor and status came to depend more on achievements such as education and employment and less on the birthright privileges that were the mainstays of honor during the colonial period. Whether considering court battles over lost virginity or police conflicts with prostitutes, vagrants, and the poor over public decorum, the contributors illuminate shifting ideas about public and private spheres, changing conceptions of race, the growing intervention of the state in defining and arbitrating individual reputations, and the enduring role of patriarchy in apportioning both honor and legal rights. Each essay examines honor in the context of specific historical processes, including early republican nation-building in Peru; the transformation in Mexican villages of the cargo system, by which men rose in rank through service to the community; the abolition of slavery in Rio de Janeiro; the growth of local commerce and shifts in women’s status in highland Bolivia; the formation of a multiethnic society on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast; and the development of nationalist cultural responses to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. By connecting liberal projects that aimed to modernize law and society with popular understandings of honor and status, this volume sheds new light on broad changes and continuities in Latin America over the course of the long nineteenth century. Contributors. Jose Amador de Jesus, Rossana Barragan, Sueann Caulfield, Sidney Chalhoub, Sarah C. Chambers, Eileen J. Findley, Brodwyn Fischer, Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Laura Gotkowitz, Keila Grinberg, Peter Guardino, Cristiana Schettini Pereira, Lara Elizabeth Putnam

Borderlands and Border Crossers: Migrants and Boundaries in the Greater Caribbean, 1840–1940

This essay assesses recent scholarship on Caribbean borderlands and Caribbean migrations in the century after emancipation. Despite the wealth of scholarly contributions, collective knowledge has been radically limited. Centralized migratory flows that carried (usually male) workers to labor for large-scale foreign-owned employers tended to generate social boundaries and ideologies of racial difference. Such cases have set the paradigm for scholars’ understanding of Caribbean migration. Meanwhile, diffuse migrations toward dispersed opportunity—an equally or more common pattern, as population figures show—generated blurry sociocultural boundaries at the time and little scholarly attention since. As a result, significant swathes of experience are invisible in the cumulative historiography of Caribbean borderlands and border crossers. The essay points to pre-World War II migration to New York, women’s migration everywhere, and interactions between the anglophone and hispanophone Caribbeans in immigrant destinations as key areas for further research.

The Ties Allowed to Bind: Kinship Legalities and Migration Restriction in the Interwar Americas

New immigration restrictions in the United States and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s made legal entry dependent on specific kinship formalities. This article explores the impact of the new system through a study of British Caribbean migrants. Because family patterns and the place of church and state sanction within them varied greatly by class‐‐here, as in many parts of the world‐‐the result was a curtailment of mobility that affected elites very little, and working-class would-be migrants enormously. In order to elucidate de facto patterns of exclusion, the author concludes, historians of transnational labor must begin paying more attention to the work “family” does. Modern states make kinship legalities into criteria for access to rights in ways large and small, and the wonder is that something that generates such pervasive difficulties and inequities manages to seem both innocent and natural. The pattern is not eternal, and it got worse precisely as other things got better. The first decades of the twentieth century saw modern states expanding their social commitments, widening the kinds of rights they guaranteed and the range of people who could claim them. Family status was built into many of the rules governing access to these social and economic guarantees. (This point was established by scholars two decades ago but has only recently gained public acknowledgment, thanks to gay rights activism over marriage equality.) Meanwhile, the same early-twentieth-century era saw states systematize barriers to entry‐‐in a sense, policing access to the expanding social compact-in-the-making. Family status, central to the internal entitlements of modern citizenship, was equally fundamental to this “external” dimension, that is, to the policing of boundaries through the new international mobility control regime. One way to open up this phenomenon for analysis is to listen to people for whom it was not natural at all: those who lived through its moment of creation. The new United States immigration system relied on numerical limits along varying lines. In 1924, the British Caribbean was placed under this emergent “quota control” system for the first time. Suddenly, very specific kinship legalities had enormous weight in regulating entry and employment. Legitimate spouses and children of US citizens could enter the United States as nonquota migrants. Consensual partners and illegitimate children could not, nor could siblings or parents of citizens, whether or not those ties were formalized and documented. To those who lived through this transition, such rules were the opposite

Global child-saving, transatlantic maternalism, and the pathologization of Caribbean childhood, 1930s–1940s

In a rapid shift between the 1920s and 1940s, British imperial policy went from paying almost no attention to child-rearing among colonized populations to hailing family order among the colonized as essential to economic progress and social stability. The shift resulted from the intersection of processes occurring on three different scales: global scientific and ideological developments, transimperial gendered professionalization, and local social and political struggles. This paper illuminates those multi-scalar dynamics by examining a specific subfield of empire, the British Caribbean. As riots and general strikes in Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, and other colonies shook the imperial order in the late 1930s, metropolitan observers discovered the “native” family as the crucial incubator of proper working-class citizens. This article uses British Caribbean newspapers and unpublished Colonial Office correspondence generated by the 1938–39 West India Royal Commission (Moyne Commission) to make visible the global and transatlantic dialogs that brought the “problem” of the Caribbean family to the forefront of policy debate. Although imperial rule would not last, the pathologization of Caribbean parenting would prove painfully persistent.

Introduction: Subjects of Militarization

The introduction argues that militarization has been a defining feature of modernity in the Greater Caribbean. It frames the case-studies presented in the volume by placing them in relation to a wider and longer history of Caribbean military encounters that includes but is not confined to US interventions, revealing commonalities in Caribbean experiences of militarization that are obscured by studies that focus on only one language area of the Caribbean. The introduction lays out the volume’s humanities-driven emphasis on everyday life, subjectivity, and culture as they interact with systemic forces. It recognizes the massive imposition of power through violence and extremes of inequality, and massive resistance to it, while also noting how ordinary people from positions of subordination negotiated, appropriated, and strategically manipulated whatever limited opportunities relationships with militaries afforded.

Daily Life and Digital Reach: Place-based Research and History’s Transnational Turn

Historians’ expanding access to digitized sources means that international research requires less and less international residence. This has been an unacknowledged driver of history’s “transnational” turn. What risks being lost as a result? This chapter suggests ethical, methodological, and interpretive dimensions. The examples of area studies research and international social history suggest that learning about place and learning in place—and through them, being forced to think critically about one’s own place—can provide vital foundations. I argue that an intentional recommitment to fieldwork is necessary to ensure that our discipline’s transnational turn does not become, in practice, a neo-imperial whirl.