Category: Other Scholars

OAH Panel on Digital History and the State

In April 2018, I had the pleasure of being on a panel on “Reinterpreting the American State: Digital History’s Intervention” at the Organization of American Historians annual conference. Cameron Blevins organized the session and presented some of his work on the postal service, and our other two presenters were Jamie Pietruska, working on meteorological data collection, and Benjamin Hoy, working on the Canadian presence at the border with the United States. Our commentators were Susan Schulten and Gregory Downs.

My presentation included praise for the process of iterative mapping, as I showed some of the maps I have made for previous presentations.

On the subject of the state, I concluded:

I haven’t yet made up my mind if the lack of knowledge at the center was a help or a hindrance to the daily operation of the US Consular Service. Certainly, some might see it as evidence of a “weak” state. I lean toward the idea that the vacuum at the center allowed for officials to adapt to what was most effective in their local circumstances, thus more effectively projecting US sovereignty abroad.

Studies on the British Consular Service

This is not a complete list, but it provides a starting point for those with an interest in the British consular service.

D. C. M. Platt, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls since 1825 (London: Longman, 1971).

P. D. Coates, The China Consuls: British Consular Officers, 1843-1943 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Lucia Patrizio Gunning, The British Consular Service in the Aegean and the Collection of Antiquities for the British Museum (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

The Works of Rudolf Agstner

Rudolf Agstner, an Austrian foreign service officer, wrote dozens of books and articles about aspects of the Habsburg consular service in various parts of the world. His work is a good source of specific details about the location of posts and who occupied them.

A few of his publications:

Rudolf Agstner, Austria (-Hungary) and Its Consulates in the United States of America since 1820: “Our Nationals Settling Here Count by the Millions Now’’ (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2012).

Rudolf Agstner, “From Apalachicola to Wilkes-Barre: Austria(-Hungary) and Its Consulates in the United States of America, 1820-1917,” Austrian History Yearbook 37 (2006): 163–80.

Rudolf Agstner, From Halifax to Vancouver: Austria (-Hungary) and Her Consular and Diplomatic Presence in Canada, 1855-2005 (Vienna: Institut für Strategie und Sicherheitspolitik, 2005).

Rudolf Agstner, “Austria (-Hungary) and Her Consulates South of the Rio Grande (1828-1918): A Survey,” in Transatlantic Relations: Austria and Latin America in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Klaus Eisterer and Günter Bischof, Transatlantica 1 (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2006), 85–120.

 

F. de Goey’s Consuls and the Institutions of Global Capitalism

Ferry de Goey’s 2014 book, Consuls and the Institutions of Global Capitalism, 1783-1914, was published in the Perspectives in Economic and Social History series from the London-based Pickering & Chatto. It offers a comparison of the British, German, US, and Dutch consular services in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia. Brief case studies of particular consuls make up most of the chapters, and there is considerable emphasis on the first half of the nineteenth century.

De Goey points out that consuls as a whole have an ambiguous record when it comes to generating international trade, but they did facilitate the growth of capitalism by concentrating a wide variety of state functions in one flexible and inexpensive office.

B. Whelan’s American Government in Ireland

Bernadette Whelan’s 2010 book from Manchester University Press, American Government in Ireland, 1790-1913: A History of the US Consular Service, provides a detailed, analytical account of the consuls who represented the United States in Ireland in the long nineteenth century. The consuls’ roles in the US Civil War, immigration and naturalization, and Irish nationalism feature prominently.

Ulbert and Prijic’s Consulship in the 19th Century

Jörg Ulbert and Lukian Prijac, eds., Consuls et Services Consulaires Au XIXe Siecle = Die Welt Der Konsulate Im 19. Jahrhundert = Consulship in the 19th Century (Hamburg: DOBU, Dokumentation & Buch, 2010).

The volume contains an overview of the US Consular Service that emphasizes reform and professionalization: Christoph Strupp, “Das US-amerikanische Konsularwesen im 19. Jarhundert” (218-33).

The thirty-four other essays in the volume include overviews of several services, as well as more focused studies. A few of the essays are in English; most are in French or German.

T. G. Paterson’s “American Businessmen”

Thomas G. Paterson’s 1966 article “American Businessmen and Consular Service Reform, 1890’s-1906” appeared in the January 1966 issue of Business History Review (vol. 40, no. 1, pages 77-97).

Reform-minded officials at the State Department in Washington generally welcomed the assistance of American businessmen in lobbying Congress for consular service reform. The 1906 reform introduced an inspection system and provided salaries for consuls and consuls general. Consular agents continued to work for fees, but after the reform, agents began to be phased out.

R. Kark’s American Consuls in the Holy Land

Ruth Kark’s 1994 book from Magnes Press of Hebrew University and Wayne State University Press, American Consuls in the Holy Land is one of the few book-length treatments of US consuls in a particular part of the world. In the Ottoman Empire, the capitulation system operated, giving consuls extraterritoriality, which meant that, in addition to regular consular duties, they also operated courts and jails for US citizens. Similar systems operated in China and Japan as well.

AHA 2017: Making Digital History Work

At the American Historical Association conference held in Denver in January 2017, I participated in a panel on “Making Digital History Work,” which dealt with challenges of digital projects, especially outside of large-scale, well-funded collaborative projects. Our chair and commentator was Dr. Seth Denbo, the director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives for the AHA, and the other panelists were Dr. Konstantin Dierks of Indiana University, who spoke about the challenges for mid-career historians in learning the myriad skills required for digital projects, and Dr. Fred Gibbs of the University of New Mexico, who stressed the value of failure in constructing digital history projects and the importance of individuals understanding not only the historical content of their projects, but the technical aspects as well.

I showed this website as a form of digital history emphasizing process, small steps, and the value of iterative mapping. I also passed along six tips about building a dataset, based on my experiences to date:

Be prepared to start over. It’s probably better to use Excel than a database program, at least as first, as it is more flexible.

Keep a log or journal that reflects where your information has come from, the notes about the organization of your database (such as what your column headings mean), and where you have saved relevant files.

Use “save as” liberally so you can go back to earlier versions if you make a mistake or otherwise go down the wrong path.

Atomize your data and then concatenate as needed. It’s easier to put pieces of data together than it is to separate it.

If you’re using Excel and you’re unfamiliar with the “vertical lookup” function (VLOOKUP), you should learn that function.

Practice in other venues, like Zotero, iTunes, your grade book, or other administrative tasks. Doing so will help you get a sense of how data needs to be organized to achieve the desired ends.

Walter Burges Smith’s Dataset

In 1986, US Foreign Service Office Walter Burges Smith created a database of US diplomats and consuls who served between 1776 and 1865 and wrote a book interpreting the results and commenting on the source base.

Here’s the full citation:

Walter Burges Smith, America’s Diplomats and Consuls of 1776-1865: A Geographic and Biographic Directory of the Foreign Service from the Declaration of Independence to the End of the Civil War (Arlington VA: Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs, 1986).

The book is available as a free PDF via the Hathi Trust.