Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 124, Issue 1, 2011

During the Dutch reign in Brazil (1624/30-54) the country was inhabited by a heterogeneous population, which included Europeans of different religions and origins, but also African slaves and native Indians. Manoel de Moraes was a product of this ethnic and social diversity. As a mixed-race Portuguese he spoke different languages and possessed a thorough knowledge of his homeland. This was a valuable asset in colonial Brazil: he could circulate and bridge between conflicting colonial spaces and became a go-between. But Manoel was also known as a traitor – at different times by the Portuguese and by the Dutch – and had to appear twice before the Inquisition. Through an analysis of his life and work, I investigate how his mixed origin gave him the tools to play with the boundaries of his identity and to succeed in the colony. The concept of the go-between, as elaborated by Alida Metcalf, helps to cast a new light upon betrayal in an early modern colonial context.

Recent medical and cultural-historical research suggests that the experience of physical pain, far from being an purely bodily sensation, is powerfully mediated by personal factors and wider cultural beliefs. This article explores the meanings attached to pain during the early modern period. The first part examines three important early modern pain discourses: medical, neo-Stoical, and religious. The second part analyses the role of pain in the Essais of Michel de Montaigne. The Essais show a sustained preoccupation with the question of pain, while also drawing in highly creative and often subversive ways on early modern medical, philosophical, and religious discourses. Montaigne’s approach illustrates early modern understandings of pain in an idiosyncratic and innovative manner. His Essais also shed light on important changes in early modern conceptions of pain, while his interest in the ways in which pain acquires meaning bears a surprising resemblance to modern medical thinking.

This article evaluates social protest in Belgium during the First World War. Even more than elsewhere in Europe, the war temporarily reversed the shift from old forms of collective action (e.g. food riots) to new ones (e.g. strikes). This reversal of long-term trends was caused by specific features of the German occupation. The capitalist national market disintegrated. The earliest and most industrialized country on the European continent de-industrialized, and agriculture became once again the basis of the economy. The authority of the state weakened dramatically. Political organisations and unions became less active. Life once again took place mostly within a local framework. Informal horizontal ties among neighbours and vertical power relations between local elites and village and city residents regained importance. Confronted with scarcity, earlier forms of collective action (e.g. food riots), local in focus, were revived in order to defend people’s entitlement to food.

The First World War is considered by many historians to have produced the great cultural turn of the twentieth century. The boom in memory which occurred across Europe after the war is part of its impact. Dutch historians have argued that the Netherlands, as a neutral country, never fully experienced the far-reaching intellectual and cultural consequences of the war. This article questions this proposition by examining how the memory of the First World War appeared in the Netherlands. The author argues that in the interwar period the First World War was remembered publicly in a number of different ways. First, the commemoration of national mobilisation (1924) emphasised the military achievements of this period. Later, in the second half of the 1920s, a memory more oriented towards peace and internationalism dominated the public sphere. Initialized by the No More War Federation, this memory was promoted in particular by means of a Dutch armistice commemoration.

This article examines how the politics of apartheid manifested itself in networks that linked South Africa with the Netherlands. It examines the transfer of narratives, images, ideas, and political practices within a transnational kinship network, as well as through a network of political activists. The film material of a Dutch documentary maker, especially the footage including his relatives from South Africa, is used to trace these transnational dynamics. It reveals the various ways in which his relatives presented as normal their privileged position as whites in South Africa, and how the film-maker reformulated their performances within a different political discourse as part of a critical narrative. The political and moral dillemas this involved are still felt today.

During apartheid, the teaching of history was used to promote the government’s interpretation of the national past. All textbooks were based on a restricted selection of sources made by a national committee. In this way the government made sure that only the Afrikaner interpretation of history was reflected in the history handbooks. When more recent history was discussed, the apartheid system was justified and the opposition discredited as communist. These textbooks purported to present a factual survey of the past, and they contained no sources. In spite of progress in the development of South African textbooks, not all problems in history education have been resolved. Apartheid has left the country with differences that are not easy to overcome. The way the curriculum is presented in the classrooms depends on many factors. Apart from the textbook, the teacher plays an important role, and this is where problems arise. The majority of teachers were trained and began teaching in times when censorship was a daily occurrence. These teachers therefore need training if they are to keep up with new approaches to the history of South Africa.

Jesus praised the Good Samaritan who understood that the stranger we encounter in daily life is in fact our neighbour. For Siep Stuurman the tale of the Samaritan symbolizes the fundamental insight that humanity is a universal category transcending cultural differences. It would be perfectly legitimate, however, to interpret Luke 10:25-37 as an ethical injunction to help our neighbour even though regarding him or her as inferior to ourselves. Indeed, why should an ethics of compassion based on cultural inequality be morally reprehensible? In De uitvinding van de mensheid (The invention of mankind) Stuurman takes for granted that equality is theoretically more acceptable than inequality. He can do this only by consistently neglecting a powerful inegalitarian train of thought intrinsic to all world religions and cultures and which, in the West, surfaced among others in Plato, Augustine, the Romantics, and conservatism. Stuurman’s take on equality becomes clear when he addresses the contradictory Enlightenment claim that all men are equal but that some (the Enlightened) are more equal than others. He solves the conundrum by treating the claim as an irresolvable duality. This duality can be borne, he argues, if the Enlightened majority condescends to view society through the eyes of (less Enlightened) minorities. It is more realistic to view the Enlightenment claim not as a duality, but as a paradox. Enlightenment necessarily implies cultural inequality, and in this sense there is no distinction between it and the religions of the Axial Age. Belief in cultural inequality seems to be ingrained in humankind.