Wharton, Carolyn

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

476 HISTOIRE SOCIALE- SOCIAL HISTORY and Chaudhuri's history increasingly general and vague. For, generally speaking, Chaudhuri's Indian Ocean is a Muslim Ocean. After the opening chapter, which states and develops the thesis regarding the unity of the area, four chapters follow on the rise of Islam, the Portuguese seaborne empire in the Indian Ocean, the Dutch and English trade, and the emporia trade and the great port-towns in the Indian Ocean. This last chapter includes material on the Far East. In Part Two, entitled "Structure and Ia longue duree" six chapters describe seamanship, geography, navigation, ships and shipbuilding, caravan trade, commodities and rnarlcets, and money and investment. While this material is not formally restricted geographically or chronologically it is overwhelmingly drawn from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and from the Western Indian Ocean. His own background of work on the English East India Company, the availability of European company sources and the historical reality of Islam's leading role in drawing together the civilizations of the Indian Ocean easily account for this bias. On the other hand, by specific attention the trade diaspora of the Hindu Chetti and Kling merchants in the Andaman Sea and Indonesia and the Bugis and Chinese in the Java Sea and Malacca Straits a more substantive piecing together of non-Islamic and non-European trade in the Far East might have been achieved. In an obiter dictum near the end of his book Chaudhuri observes that the notion of trade diaspora does not have much to contribute to this history of trade in the Indian Ocean, and so it does not. That it does not is a weakness- or perhaps more fairly a limitation- of Chaudhuri 's excellent and provocative history and not one of its strengths. * * * David P. McGinnis University of Calgary David R. Colburn- Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877-1980. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Pp. xi, 258. Notes, index. The medieval German proverb, "die Stadtluft macht frei," promised to the mindset of the Middle Ages that urban residency would erase servile status. David R. Colburn's Racial Change and Community Crisis traces the slow eradication of Jim Crow laws in a city where the air certainly did not automatically make one free. Because of St. Augustine's status as a target city by Martin Luther King, Jr, and the SCLC in 1964, Colburn believes that it is important to review the history of race relations in St. Augustine from the post-reconstruction period to the beginning of this decade. But he is especially concerned with the civil rights movement and the critical events of 1963-65. Readers wishing a more detailed analysis of the Jim Crow era or even the post-Voting Rights Act period will be disappointed by the scant discussion here. Despite this flaw, however, Colburn's work is an excellent study of Southern urban race relations and the conflicts emerging from black demands for economic and political equality. Colburn argues that contact between blacks and whites in America's oldest city was more relaxed in comparison with other Southern regions because of the tourist industry which blossomed around the tum of the century. White St. Augustinians depended on blacks to work the new service-related jobs; blacks eager to escape rural poverty gladly accepted employment in tourism. This interdependence not only eased racial tension, but also engendered the false impression that St. Augustine would prove easy to integrate. Colburn cites three major obstacles to desegregation: lack of moderate leadership; almost complete apathy in the business community towards integration; and white civic and local government leaders who had "no intention of surrendering their control of the political and social process" (p. 24). COMPTES REND US- BOOK REVIEWS 477 The dearth of moderates was the most important roadblock. The staid, sometimes reactionary city government clashed bitterly with the civil rights leadership of Dr Robert Hay ling and the NAACP. In the minds of civic authoritarians such as Mayor Joseph Shelley, the civil rights movement was Communist-backed extremism. Struggling to combat this Cold War mentality by supporting such measures as the biracial committee set up in June, 1963 to review race relations, white moderates were denounced and ostracized. Older black St. Augustinians, whose leadership would have been invaluable, saw Hay ling, a newcomer to their city, as too aggressive, and consequently withheld support from demonstrations, the biracial committee and other integration strategies. Without a restraining centre, leadership on both sides often assumed the most unyielding forms as Cold Wanior whites faced militant blacks. These two poles battled for St. Augustine over three long years. Equally as crippling was the disinterest of St. Augustine businessmen in promoting racial change. Emphasizing traditional mores, the economic community responded to black civil rights demands with threats of unemployment. Ancient City businessmen shared not only an inherent belief in black inferiority but also the conviction that property rights took precedence over civil rights. To coerce these traditionalists into accepting a new era of integration, local black leaders and the SCLC moved to cut tourism profits thirty to sixty percent in 1964 from 1963 levels. Violent dem-onstrations and mass arrests sent a very anti-Ancient City message to northern and mid-western va-cationers. Only after facing a vigorous civil rights effort did businessmen retrench from unwavering commitment to the past. The refusal of St. Augustine's bankers and merchants to adopt a more liberal policy toward racial change reflected an attitude of obstinacy prevalent among the city's white ruling class . The perceived necessity of white dominance in education, government, and economic life, reinforced by years of conservative social interchange, made whites hostile to the most innocuous innovations. The tragic irony, which the author all but ignores, is that the city leaders' fierce determination to maintain control left blacks with little alternative but to seek the outside intervention a closed, conservative system fears most. Although Colburn retells many violent episodes in St. Augustine's integration history, his book is not obsessed with local militance. Rather, the author astutely shows how the real victories came from judicial rulings. Yet Racial Clumge tends to be too methodical in its old-fashioned, day-to-day account of 1963-65. Its narrative is strong, particularly in describing white and black paranoia in the early 1960s; its analysis of origins, on Jim Crow patterns of development and eventual disuse, is much weaker. Focusing on a short period in a small city, however, Colburn makes clear that "die Stadtluft macht frei" becomes status quo- comparatively- only after the most violent of storms. * * * Carolyn Q. Wharton, University of South Carolina Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerl!ard Haupt, eds. -Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe. London: Methuen, 1984. This is an ambitious anthology . Intended to help fill a gap in the record of social historical research, its net effect is rather to make the reader appreciate that gap all the more acutely. The ''petite bourgeoisie", defined from the beginning by its neither/nor status in the capitalist order of things, carrier of no one's hopes for utopia, subject to no special suffering, perpetrator of no special evil, has languished in undeserved neglect. In this book are six specialized studies (on Birmingham metal wares, Parisian groceries, French and British shopkeepers' movements, Viennese artisan families, and rural artisans of the Beauce) plus four national surveys of the petites bourgeoisies of Germany, Britain, France, and Belgium. 

David R. Colburn — Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877-1980.

https://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/37909/34378

David R. Colburn — Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877-1980.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)