Entangling Encounters: Colonies and Empires, Old World and New

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Notes

1. By postmodern thinking (which one would hope a scientist like Dietler would resist, though he sometimes leans that way), this relationship, too, can only be thus, reciprocal, inasmuch as the past can have no objective existence, but only what anyone at a later time “constructs”!

2. One would not know from Dietler’s map of Italy on page 103 that there were Gauls between Liguria and Etruria. Lots of them!

3. Europeans adopted Arabic numerals and mathematics, but not Arabic suzerainty, resisting and, as soon as possible, repelling Saracens across the Straits of Gibraltar and, a tiny vestige of former empire excepted, Turks across the Bosporus.

4. Dietler cites how the Third World consumers have given special social functions to Coca Cola in recent generations, corresponding roughly with the diffusion of grape-wine and its service vessels in the Iron Age and their sometimes unexpected utilization.

5. Under the Romans, no Britannia-as-Minerva appeared such as one would see on Great Britain’s modern coinage until well into the twentieth century. She was, however, often represented as beautiful, warlike, dignified on coins of the Antonines in the second century CE that inspired the modern version.

6. For more on the fate of the sister Habsburg empires, see my review of Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), in The European Legacy 16.5 (2011): 663–66.

7. Which did not so much colonize that vast area as overrun it and expand westward, in a movement whose closest analogues are not colonial but imperial: Chinese, as far back as the Western Han Dynasty, and Russian, from the seventeenth century onward. (Romans never settled in their Cisalpine provinces in such numbers.)

8. At that time France herself suffered slave rebellion in Santo Domingo/Haiti and, to the Republic’s eternal disgrace, un-abolished slavery.