History

There is a long tradition of describing Sindh as peculiarly prone to Sayyid veneration. On the face of it, the biographical section of Tuhfat al-Kiram or Gift for the Noble, an eighteenth-century history and geography written in Persian in Sindh, appears to confirm this idea. In listing the notables of Thatta, Sindh's premier city, the author, Mir ʻAli Shir Qaniʻ, orders them by groups, giving priority in his hierarchical arrangement to Sayyids. However, this article examines Tuhfat al-Kiram not as a transparent description of Sindh, but rather as a normative exposition of a Sayyid-led social order. It draws attention to Qaniʻ's project of reconciling individual excellence with lineage in a post-Mughal context without a discerning sovereign to uphold a meritorious order. By exploring Qaniʻ's silences, particularly on Hindus and women, this article investigates the anxieties that run through this text about the threat to the old Persianate elite of Thatta. This threat spurred Qaniʻ to reimagine a social order in Sindh where claims of descent served to close off mobility in an otherwise meritocratic Persianate society. Sayyid priority in eighteenth-century Sindh was not an established fact, but a newly-fashioned claim, which remained contested and contradictory, even within Tuhfat al-Kiram.

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This article examines a turn towards the region in two genres related to Persian poetry in eighteenth-century Sindh, the bayāẓ or poetic anthology and taẕkira or biographical dictionary. I argue that poets in Sindh's premier city, Thatta, established Sindh as an organizing principle for poetry and the poetic community, initiating a process of regionalization in Persian after the end of Mughal rule. Notably, this was done without the patronage or encouragement of the regional successors to the Mughals in Sindh. These poets neither sought out vernaculars, nor predicated regionalization upon cultural difference. Rather, regionalization without vernacularization was the basis for their participation in the transregional enterprise of Persian poetry in a milieu where the Mughals and their officials were no longer sources of patronage or of poetic standards. The case of Persian poetry in Sindh calls for rethinking the function and status of Persian beyond its role as a language of power and for considering the role of Persian poets in bringing the region to renewed cultural salience in eighteenth-century Sindh.

The ethnicity concept frames discussions of regional politics in Pakistan today, as in many other parts of the world. However, this concept only became established in popular and academic discourse in Pakistan in the late 1980s. This article considers the conceptual apparatus for apprehending the region, in particular the region of Sindh, that was in place before ethnicity. It argues that Sindh was a heterogeneous idea articulated at times at the intersection, and at other times in the divergence, of concepts of religion, race, language, and nation. The article considers three historic moments in the context of broad global transformations: Sindh’s communalization and racialization in the nineteenth century; provincialization in the early twentieth century; and finally its culturalization in the early decades of Pakistan’s history. In doing so, it charts a history of the region before ethnicity and also offers a genealogy of the region as a cultural entity.

This article historicizes the ethnicity idea, which has anachronistically come to shape academic understanding of Sindh and Pakistan across a broad period of history. Instead, the Four-Nationality Thesis, and other ideas, animated politics in Pakistan’s earlier decades. The Four Nationality Thesis, which drew on global leftist thought, conceived Pakistan as a set of nationalities, corresponding to its provinces, which were conceived to be distinct, culturally, linguistically, historically, and territorially. It provided the conceptual framework for a federalist politics against the unitary state of Pakistan. When the Sindh government made Sindhi the sole official provincial language in 1972, the ensuing conflict highlighted the conceptual limitations of the nationality idea, and its territorialization of culture. In short, this article argues that the history of concepts is necessary to understand politics in Sindh and Pakistan.

Comparison of the political orders that sustained slavery and the slave trade in the Spanish and Brazilian empires in the nineteenth century and the forces that threw both slavery and conservative states into crisis. Part of two special issues (31.2 and 31.3) of "Review" edited by Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske on the "second slavery." See contents of both issues at the link to the Braudel Center.

African slavery was pervasive in Spain’s Atlantic empire yet remained in the margins of the imperial economy until the end of the eighteenth century when the plantation revolution in the Caribbean colonies put the slave traffic and the plantation at the center of colonial exploitation and conflict. The international group of scholars brought together in this volume explain Spain’s role as a colonial pioneer in the Atlantic world and its latecomer status as a slave-trading, plantation-based empire. These contributors map the broad contours and transformations of slave-trafficking, the plantation, and antislavery in the Hispanic Atlantic while also delving into specific topics that include: the institutional and economic foundations of colonial slavery; the law and religion; the influences of the Haitian Revolution and British abolitionism; antislavery and proslavery movements in Spain; race and citizenship; and the business of the illegal slave trade.

This article traces the career and migrations of George Dawson Flinter, a naturalized Spanish subject of Irish origin, who became a prominent apologist for slavery and Spanish colonial rule in the Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s. It argues that Flinter’s experiences in the revolutionary Americas, especially in Venezuela, shaped his attitudes toward slavery, freedom, race, and social order, which he promoted on behalf of the Spanish regime as a propagandist in Britain and in Puerto Rico. Flinter’s writings, loyalties, and migrations throw new light on the sources of proslavery thought, not only in the Spanish Caribbean, but also in the broader Atlantic world during the consolidation of the second slavery.