Outside, Below, Beyond

Historical boundaries and their echoes

Callodine Camodeca-Schmitz
HIS504 Early Modern Europe Core
Professor Claire Schen
12/17/21
1

The periphery, broadly construed, is a category of analysis that has immense bearing on

nearly any study which seeks to critique or break from historiographical traditions which,

answering to dominant power structures which prioritized certain viewpoints by virtue of their

proximity to that power, silenced or minimalized the historical agency of people whose

perspectives were not given equal weight. “Broadly construed,” admittedly, is an important

modifier here, and in this work it specifically refers to a conception of the periphery as a

category that is produced automatically by the identification of a “center;” social peripheries, of

class, gender, race, or any other relevant social category, are the sites where the historical record

has traditionally relegated women, the working classes, minority genders and sexualities,

religious minorities, and, of course, an incredibly broad range of cultural and linguistic groups at

various points categorized in othering terms of foreignness and racial difference. Physical

peripheries, e.g. borders, are in this model also social peripheries, insofar as borders are social

impositions that arise from the same processes of centering and othering that produce

impositions e.g. of gender or class.

The subject of this paper is not an interrogation of historical processes of othering and

production of social peripheries. Rather, what concerns this paper is the way that modern

historians, engaging with these historical processes of othering, can unconsciously reproduce

categories of periphery and other as a result of an insufficiently critical relationship with the

peripheries that emerge from the historian’s own choice of subject, e.g. how a focus on a given

market actor produces a periphery consisting of consumers and workers. Specifically, an

examination will be held into how the allocation of agency and responsibility can both promote

and counteract this reproduction of historical bias, in ways which complicate and subvert any

simplified perception of agency as a direct corollary to respect and humanization; in contexts

2

where certain actors and groups are relegated to the periphery, and this relegation is not

adequately interrogated by the historian, the attribution of agency and motive force to these

actors and groups can in fact contribute to their peripheralization, as they are reduced to mere

factors and causes emerging from outside the “central” narrative, often implicitly cast as

single-minded, one-dimensional, or ignorant of the “true” consequences of their actions. This is a

reproduction of the perspective of the historian’s chosen subject individual or group, which

naturally prioritizes its own logics and its own relevant processes over those of the peripheral

groups who appear to it as external and objectified. This is a particularly important question for

historians invested in deconstructing and investigating precisely these sorts of cases of historical

othering and textual replications of historical class structures, as an eagerness to attribute a

corrective agency to “the other” as it appears in the mind of a given historical subject1 can subtly

reproduce the assumptions and perceptions of that historical subject regarding the other.

For example, Linda Colley’s Britishness and Otherness: An Argument is a work which

stands out for its critical investigation into how categories of “other” and “foreigner” worked in

the minds of Britons during the early modern period to shape and mold conceptions of

Britishness. However, in her investigation, Colley’s positioning of certain groups deemed “other”

as actors shaping this emerging British consciousness seems to sometimes involve an

essentialized idea of what these “others'' were, casually joining the Britons she documents in

their assumptions regarding the actions and motivations of these groups. In her opening pages,

she begins with a narrative of George MacCartney’s pivotal British embassy to the Chinese court

in 17932 which relies wholly on the diaries of MacCartney himself and one of his associates to

construct its image of events, a decision which, though perhaps understandable in a limited way

1
Especially those whose perspectives have been overrepresented in the historical record
2
Colley, Linda, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies, 31:4 (Oct. 1992), pp.
309-329
3

as a consequence of her orientation towards British discourses, is nonetheless historiographically

questionable given that she offers this one sided account as a real and complete narrative of

events, for instance informing the audience of “...the fury of the watching Chinese courtiers who

had wanted [MacCartney] to execute the full kowtow,”3 in so doing evaluating not just emotive

content, but even motivation and desire, based on an entirely one-sided set of historical sources.

Her description of the embassy shows a repeating pattern, as British motivations, objectives, and

backgrounds are interrogated in depth,4 listing in minute detail the names, birthplaces, and

careers of British diplomats, and offering a similarly detailed description, not only of each of the

British government’s objectives, but even of each specific gift offered by the British government

in pursuit of these objectives, while giving, at most, single sentence summations of Chinese

actions and motivations,5 an imbalance which is all the more striking given that it is the Chinese

response to MacCartney’s mission, and its impacts on British identity-formation, that is

ostensibly being interrogated. This produces the distinct rhetorical effect of framing Chinese

actions, and the logic behind these actions, as rooted in misapprehension and misunderstanding,

the product of an “introverted society”6 with a “contemptuous culture”7 rather than the more

value-neutral and supportable framing of two cultures, each with presuppositions and vanities

which clouded their perception of the other, attempting to navigate a diplomatic encounter in a

way which preserved prestige while securing desired outcomes abroad. One is left to speculate as

to why Aeneas Anderson’s reference to “the crown and dignity of the first nation in the world” 8

does not equally merit descriptors like “contemptuous” or “introverted,” or whether an array of

3
Colley p.309
4
Ibid p.310-311
5
Loc.cit. e.g. the precise breakdown of “His instructions were…” vs the brief summary of“ In the eyes of the
Chinese court…” or the casually implied dismissal of the “hundreds (!) of delicate watercolors” offered by the
Chinese state as a self-evidently lackluster reward for British manufactured goods.
6
Ibid p.311
7
Loc.cit.
8
Loc.cit.
4

novel industrial goods offered as obvious proof of the desirability of British imports may have

seemed, to the court of a country with one of the oldest linguistic traditions on earth, with a size

and population which dwarfed that of the British Isles, like an arrogant, presumptuous gesture in

its own right. Likewise, one is left largely in the dark regarding what the relationship was

between the official edicts of the Chinese state, and the logics which motivated the Chinese

attitude. From the perspective of the British embassy, it might well have been the case that

Chinese posturing sprung simply and directly from some kind of civilizational arrogance and

misapprehension of Britain. From the perspective of the Chinese, however, it might have sprung

from any number of inward-oriented motivations, pressures, or interests, including exactly the

kind of maintenance of “crown and dignity” that the British delegation purportedly rallied

around following the Chinese court’s delegation.

This is particularly striking when one compares Colley’s representation of the “imperial

edict” issued by the Chinese court in response to the British delegation, with the actual text of

that letter. Colley cites the most well-known portions of the letter, the two sentences which most

conformed to British stereotypes regarding the Chinese (a conformity which arguably

contributed to their eventual fame): the emperor’s declaration, occurring in the letter’s first

section, that “We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your

country's manufactures,” and the following injunction to “forever obey our edict, so that we may

both enjoy the blessings of peace.”9 This brief summation, following the aforementioned

summary of the British government’s demands and the brief characterization of a contradictory

Chinese attitude towards the British embassy, is clearly intended to reaffirm Colley’s attribution

of the emperor’s rebuff with an attitude of sweeping, insular arrogance.

9
Ibid p.310
5

However, neither of these two statements occur in the section of the letter dealing with

the British government’s trade demands, and in fact refer to the British attempt to appoint a

permanent British representative (with full jurisdiction over Sino-British trade) at the Chinese

court,10 the refusal of which by the court is explained with reference to a wide range of reasons;

As to your entreaty to send one of your nationals to be accredited to my Celestial

Court and to be in control of your country's trade with China, this request is
contrary to all usage of my dynasty and cannot possibly be entertained….tribute
missions from the dependencies are provided for by the Department for Tributary
States, which ministers to their wants and exercises strict control over their
movements. It would be quite impossible to leave them to their own devices.
Supposing that your Envoy should come to our Court, his language and national
dress differ from that of our people, and there would be no place in which to
bestow him. It may be suggested that he might imitate the Europeans permanently
resident in Peking and adopt the dress and customs of China, but, it has never
been our dynasty's wish to force people to do things unseemly and inconvenient.

Besides, supposing I sent an Ambassador to reside in your country, how could

you possibly make for him the requisite arrangements? Europe consists of many
other nations besides your own: if each and all demanded to be represented at our
Court, how could we possibly consent? The thing is utterly impracticable. How
can our dynasty alter its whole procedure and system of etiquette, established for
more than a century, in order to meet your individual views?11
In the following section detailing the British government’s requests (including some omitted by

Colley, like for instance the right to unrestricted missionary activity in China,12 or the cession of

an entire small island near Chusan),13 the emperor offers a similarly detailed explanation for each

of his rejections, including the concern that concessions to Britain which exceed those granted to

other powers will invite ever increasing demands from Europe,14 the lack of existing

infrastructure and translators to accommodate British merchants in yet more of the country’s

10
Backhouse p.325
11
Ibid. p.323-324
12
Ibid p.330
13
Ibid p.328
14
Ibid p.326
6

ports,15 concerns regarding territorial integrity,16 and the belief that greater European presence

(especially missionary presence) would produce tensions with the local population.17 Many of

these concerns would be sadly vindicated by the later course of Chinese history, and Colley is

clearly not unaware of this fact, though she elides historical specifics (e.g. the disastrous British

introduction of opiates into China, the burning of the Summer Palace) in favor of simply

approving Aeneas Anderson’s claim that “this vast, ancient, and introverted society would

crumble were it ever to be confronted with the guns of the Royal Navy.”18 However, these

concerns, and by extension, the many rational and at times outward-facing logics of governance

and statecraft which inform these concerns, do not make it into Colley’s account of the actions

which correspond to those concerns. In place of this, she substitutes a one-sided set of British

assumptions and interpretive leaps, situating the reader firmly within the mind of MacCartney,

Aeneas, and the British diplomatic corps generally, with no more information than they had, and

indeed less, given her truncated presentation of the communication received by that delegation.

One might be inclined to defend this decision given the aforementioned orientation of Colley’s

writing towards documenting those minds, and the minds of Britons generally, were it not for the

immense agency she assigns to the Chinese government in shaping the outcomes of the embassy

for the British, hinging the entire narrative around the Chinese state’s attitudes and responses to

British overtures,19 and almost exclusively considering British action in the context of private,

reflective reaction. This is, of course, conducive to her broader project of giving greater force to

“the other” as an actor shaping British identity, and perhaps seems, at first glance, to be

15
Ibid p.327
16
Ibid p.328
17
Ibid p.330
18
Colley p.311
19
Ibid p.310, specifically the section beginning at “As it turned out,” and ending with “the center of the civilized
world.” Colley describes the mission as a failure, and explains this by elaborating British objectives, before turning
with a “however,” to the supposed Chinese attitude, with no further examination given into potential factors that
resulted in the mission’s failure
7

foregrounding the agency of that other and thus correcting an inappropriate tendency to arrogate

all agency in forming British identity to British actors, but in reality she merely animates a

caricature, plucking a simplified, static image of the Chinese state out of the journals of 18th

century Britons, imbuing it with agency and power over those Britons, and then resituating it in

the pages of history as an authentic account of how forces at the periphery of British identity

shaped that identity at the center. In this context, her attribution of agency to the Chinese state

actually functions to perpetuate and strengthen a limited, stereotyping British perception of

China, by assigning greater explanatory power to “Chinese” motivations that in fact existed

primarily in British stereotypes, and in the process implicitly casting the real logics and

motivations behind Chinese actions as fundamentally misguided or ignorant, simply because

they did not correspond to British expectations and thus appeared to the British as a confusing

and illogical force emerging from the periphery of the (British) world.

This particular nexus of concepts, between action, ramification, and misunderstanding, is

something which often emerges as part of the process of identifying (and misidentifying) agency

at the historical periphery. Kate Jarvis’s work, Politics in the Marketplace, is laudable in similar

terms to Colley’s, as an endeavor in pulling a set of historical actors (in this case, Parisian

women retailers known as the Dames de Halles) out of the relative historical obscurity to which

popular narratives had relegated them and re-emphasizing their importance in the historical

record. Jarvis’s work does differ from Colley’s, in that it contains a much more detailed

examination of the relevant actors besides the Dames, especially exploring the material causes

and motivations behind their respective actions and stances taken in relation to the Dames.

However, this examination often entails a limiting of the identities of these actors to the identities

which characterized them most strongly in the eyes of the Dames, and whose role in this history
8

of the Dames can sometimes be reduced to that of perennial outsiders to the center stage i.e. the

market, despite their very real participation in and knowledge of that market, in an echo of the

Dames’ self-perception as the definitive proprietors of Parisian market space. Specifically, when

dealing with the history of the General Maximum, a system of price controls implemented by the

French state in September, 1793,20 the demands of the sans-culottes and Citoyennes

republicaines in favor of the Maximum, and the beliefs and conceptions of the market which

motivated those demands, are repeatedly and subtly cast in terms of irrationality or intransigence,

or which juxtapose them to those of the Dames de Halles as mere “factors” in the Dames’

history. For instance, in Jarvis’s introduction to the concept of “economic citizenship,” an

interesting disparity can be seen in her summary that “retailers demanded legal profit margins for

their trade, club women denounced merchants as conspiring hoarders, and the Convention

attempted to balance prices and wages.”21 While the activities of the retailers are framed in terms

of a self-directed protective action to preserve the legal margins of their proprietary industry, the

“club women,” rhetorically denied an economic citizenship and instead defined in terms of a

political special interest group, are framed as intrusive actors with a single-minded hostility

towards merchants, rather than as consumers demanding livable prices for their necessary goods.

A similar erasure of sincere material and commercial interests occurs elsewhere in the

introduction, when Jarvis describes the brawls between the Dames and the Citoyennes

republicaines in strikingly unbalanced terms, describing in emotive terms the ways that “The

Maximum threatened to cripple their livelihood and ruin their retail trade in fish, vegetables,

cheese, and butter” while describing the Citoyennes in terms of political alliances, as “club

20
Jarvis, Katie. Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2019. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2019. Doi: 10.1093/oso/9780190917111.001.0001.
p.135
21
Jarvis p.137
9

women [who] aligned with the Enragés and [who] agitated for proconsumer legislation like price

controls.”22 While acknowledging the proconsumer nature of price control legislation, and the

political agency of the Citoyennes as advocates, rather than as simply opponents of the Dames,

Jarvis nonetheless withholds an identification of the Citoyennes as consumers themselves,

instead framing them in terms which seem to reflect the perceptions of the Dames, as politically

motivated intruders into market affairs. While it is true that the Citoyennes are at one point

admitted to have direct material interests in the markets, it is only in the concession that the

Citoyennes “primarily acted as consumers,” in the context of a longer passage casting the

Citoyennes as relatively well-off and disconnected from the impacts of the Maximum compared

to the Dames, on the statistical basis that only 16 percent of the Citoyennes whose employment

can be documented worked as food retailers.23 The strong characterization of the Citoyennes, as

misguided bourgeois activists whose enormously consequential political and economic activity

was motivated by overridingly radical political ideologies, seems almost to come straight from

the mouths of the Dames themselves, which is troubling given the centrality of the Citoyennes in

the narrative of this chapter as the principal antagonists in the Dames’ march towards demanding

the abolition of women’s political clubs, a centrality which surely necessitates a more direct

accounting of the Citoyennes, and specifically of their motivations as economic citizens. The

omission of this is all the more puzzling given that elsewhere Jarvis seems to understand

perfectly well the ways in which consumer interests guided responses to the Maximum, for

instance in her characterization of the Dames themselves as consumers,24 or in her repeated

references to “merchants” and “consumers” as the two great market constituencies whose

22
Jarvis p.136
23
Jarvis p.148
24
Jarvis p.170
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interests the convention sought to balance.25 This, however, seems again to reflect the

perspectives of the Dames; consumers can only be conceived of as consumers in the abstract, as

the vast, undifferentiated crowd at one end of the periphery surrounding the perceived economic

world of the Dames, which naturally centered around the retailer as its principal economic actor,

and described all other economic actors in terms of their relationship to and distance from the

Dames themselves. When elements of this periphery act in explicitly self conscious political

ways which both challenge the interests of the Dames, even when those elements are in fact

consumers, they thus appear to the Dames as separated from “the consumers” as an abstract

category, precisely by virtue of their concrete reality as political actors. This constitutes an act of

peripheralization, as the Dames understand and categorize the Citoyennes solely with reference

to their apparent intrusion from the political periphery of economic life, collapsing the entirety of

their experience and motivations into the Dames’ subjective experience of that singular moment

of contact with the political periphery. Jarvis, by virtue of emphasizing the political agency of the

Citoyennes, yet at times opposing it rhetorically to their economic citizenship as consumers,

unconsciously replicates this peripheralization of the Citoyennes and their related simplification

into the static political caricatures which they appeared to be to the Dames.

What is especially interesting about this phenomenon is that, despite the impression

perhaps created by the examples above, it need not take place in contexts which center the

peripheralized actors, and in fact is perhaps most effective when these actors occur, not just on

the periphery produced by historical subjects’ identification of central spaces and actors, but on

the periphery produced within the text itself in the normal course of a historian’s demarcation

between actors and the environment, between persons and groups whose naming and

examination serves to produce a greater degree of detail or individuation, and those for whom
25
e.g. Jarvis pp. 135, 136, 137, 152, 155, 165
11

naming and categorization serves to place them more firmly in the periphery, essentializing them

by their position there. Historians themselves construct peripheries as a corollary to the process

of identifying a subject of study, placing other historical subjects in the role of causes or factors

to be explained. While this process is in some ways unavoidable (any finite text must have a

limit for the degree of detail to be furnished on all persons, places, and things mentioned in the

course of its analysis), it is nonetheless an important object of study, insofar as it can reveal the

individual and social priorities which inform the historical work in question, and additionally

provide a valuable starting-point for identifying further potential subjects for research. For

example, in Francesca Trivellato’s work The Promise and Peril of Credit, the dangers of

long-distance merchant trade are repeatedly explicated with reference to pirates, robbers, and

other kinds of endemic social threats to capital in transit, in the process converting a wide range

of groups, and along with them, their practices and motivations, into simply part of the landscape

of the periphery, a quantity to be accounted along with weather.26 Whether these were hardened

career criminals (if such a concept is even relevant to the period), deserters from European

armies, or local peasants engaging in low-level theft to aid in subsistence, the reader does not

know, because these backgrounds are ultimately irrelevant to how they featured in the ledgers of

the merchants, as a monetary quantity of loss. This then is reproduced in Trivellato’s book

because said book is concerned with primarily with an anti-Semitic myth, and secondarily with

the origins of this myth in perspectives and concerns of merchants, as well as writers and

political leaders whose own interests and needs caused them to engage with the commercial

issues of those merchants.

26
Trivellato, Francesca, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us
about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). pp. 2, 15
12

Unlike in other examples, it is difficult to see how Trivellato could have (or indeed to

argue that she should have) handled these passages in a meaningfully different way without

changing the entire nature and focus of her work. It is, however, interesting as an insight into

how the periphery and individuals existing within the periphery appeared to the period’s

financial actors in terms of inevitable, de-individualized danger, threat, and loss, in ways which

cause these peripheral actors to assume a great deal of agency in a history of the period’s

navigation of, and rhetorical response to, the financial risk emerging from long-distance trade. Of

further interest is how this construction sheds light on the complications that can arise from

attempting to apply “agency” as a concept to real material history. Trivellato’s robbers and

pirates are immensely important as a foundational reality of the phenomenon documented; the

very existence of the bills of exchange which form a central concern of her work is predicated on

an omnipresent social risk to capital that must be mitigated with financial instruments, and in this

sense, there is an enormous agency assigned to the actors who provide the explanation for this

risk and danger. However, this agency is so foundational that the actors themselves become

nearly invisible, assumed into the backdrop as an eternal, natural force, looming silently behind

the historical record for the simple reason that the inclusion of its voice would ultimately

overcomplicate and destabilize the very narrative grounded in its agency. It is striking how

radically agency and humanization can be disjoined, with the foundational, primordial nature of

the former to a given narrative foreclosing on the possibility of including the latter, and it is

fascinating to see these processes play out at the most subaltern and obscure layers of a text

which, in its explicit focus, deals with a similar process of dehumanization and agency in the

form of the attribution of the invention of bills of exchange to a simplified caricature of Jews.

The crossing of borders, the most obvious physical manifestations of “periphery” as a concept, is
13

a process which seems especially fraught with regards to this kind of limitations of the

humanizing effects of agency, perhaps because figures who are identified with the physical

periphery of the border are immediately associated, by virtue of this placement at the border,

with unknowable external “others.” Those who form the boundaries of a conceived map are

particularly prone to this dehumanizing agency, serving as stand-ins for the limitations of

knowledge or interest which correspond to the limits of the map, yet paradoxically being

invested with great explanatory power, both for the existence of these limits and for the forces

which emerge from beyond them.

It is ultimately necessary to return to the language employed in the introduction, of a

periphery automatically produced by the identification of a central subject or space. Even the

most exhaustive historical study ultimately must terminate the chain of interrelated causes and

effects at a certain point, and the decision of where to terminate this chain, of what actors or

forces constitute causes whose effects fall beyond the purview of a study, is inextricably bound

up with the production of peripheries in historical narrative. For this reason, it is impossible to

regard this peripheralizing attribution of terminal agency as something to be avoided or

eliminated, and necessary to instead adopt a pose of active, continual interrogation of the causes,

functions, and implications of both the conceptual peripheries of the subject, and the textual

peripheries of the historian’s own work. A variety of approaches have already been traced above,

showing the degrees to which such conceptual peripheries loom large or small, acknowledged or

unacknowledged, as a result of different methodologies. Of these approaches, Trivellato’s

arguably emerges as an exemplar of minimal or ultimately defensible peripheralization, and it

does not seem coincidental that her work is one which is consciously centered around an

investigation of a periphery myth, in an approach which necessitates a mutual consideration of

14

both the mythmakers and the objects of myth. This connection is reinforced by the existence of

other examples,27 like Dror Warhman’s The English Problem of Identity in the American

Revolution, or Samuel Cohn’s The Black Death and the Burning of Jews. Warhman’s28 is

arguably more direct in this, focusing as it does on “the significance of the fact that, in contrast to

other wars in recent memory, the American war was irreducible to any reliable map of "us" and

"them" based on a stable criterion of difference,”29 but Cohn’s30 approach is also interesting, and

in its own way is closer to Trivellato’s work in its implications for the present study, for how its

emphasis on the agency of central, powerful actors, as a necessary corollary to his investigation

of their responsibility for propagating anti-semitism, mitigates the impact of the peripheralizing

mentions of “Jews, Catalans, foreign beggars [and]… the poor”31 as an indiscriminate group of

“outsiders” subject to violence as a result of the Black Death, because these groups are not

assigned agency or responsibility for any of the effects examined in the story, and there are thus

no relevant motivations for any actions to omit or include. Cohn’s article is focused on centers of

power as agents, and the effects radiating out of those centers of agency, more so than on forces

moving inwards from a periphery (specifically, in Cohn’s case, the periphery found “below,” i.e.

in a lower class strata) to inform the actions made by those centers of power.

What connects Cohn and Trivellato, and what seems to tie most directly back to the

questions of agency introduced in this paper, is a preoccupation with social power and its

relationship, both to historical delineations of periphery and core, and to historical discourses

27
Serving here more as references and comparisons the more detailed studies above, and one might say, situated at
the periphery of this paper itself
28
Wahrman, Dror, “The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution,” American Historical Review,
106:4 (Oct. 2001), 1236-1262
29
Dror p.1238
30
Cohn, Jr., Samuel K., “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” Past and Present, no. 196 (Aug. 2007): 3-36
31
Cohn p.9
15

regarding those delineations. Power and agency are so closely linked that in some contexts the

two can be indistinguishable, and this is particularly true with regards to responsibility and

humanization of the historical subject. Peripheralization, a fraught process in its own right, can

be lethal to the humanity and respect afforded to a historical subject when it is combined with a

neglect of the epistemological burdens entailed by the attribution of agency, to explain and

investigate the motivations which inform and guide that agency. The association between agency

and humanization is thus far from automatic, and in order for that association to be realized, it

must be consciously engaged with, an engagement which in turn often necessitates an

investigation of the real power relations in history. The explanation of the “whys” of a given

historical power center, the focus on the humanity and subjectivity of those in or near power,

even when conceived of as an attempt to break down the replication of that power in the text by

employing a slightly different kind of humanization than the one described thus far, highlighting

fallibility, or objectivity in relation to broader historical forces, carries with it the risk of

minimizing the responsibility of power for its effects. This shifts the burden of responsibility to

those actors who appear on the periphery of power centers, in ways which often unwittingly

reproduce dominant or historically dominant narratives and conceptualizations which are

ultimately inaccurate. Above all, the power most relevant to these particular questions regarding

the formation of the historical record is the power of the historian themself to delineate and

focus, and this too is a power which entails responsibilities that cannot be shifted onto the

peripheries evident in the past.

16
17

Bibliography

Backhouse, E. (Edmund), and J. O. P. Bland. Annals & Memoirs of the Court of Peking (from
the
16th to the 20th Century). New York: AMS Press, 1970.

Cohn, Jr., Samuel K., “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” Past and Present, no. 196
(Aug. 2007): 3-36

Colley, Linda, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies, 31:4 (Oct.
1992), pp. 309-329

Jarvis, Katie. Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary
France.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2019. doi:
10.1093/oso/9780190917111.001.0001.

Trivellato, Francesca, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews
and
Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton:
Princeton
University Press, 2019)

Wahrman, Dror, “The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution,” American
Historical Review, 106:4 (Oct. 2001), 1236-1262