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philosophers. He responds astutely to the requests of demanding patrons, and is

quick to spot career opportunities.
Grafton’s Alberti, in other words, is a man for our times, to replace Burckhardt’s
by now outmoded, idealized ‘uomo universale’. In Grafton’s account, this towering
figure retains his breathtaking range and diversity, but gains, additionally, a hands-
on flair for the practical and technical detail, and a clear-headed understanding of
the exigencies of power-politics.
Several years ago a younger colleague observed to me mischievously that the field
of our choice – Renaissance intellectual history – stood no chance in the academic
market place with other disciplinary competitors. Alongside ‘new historicism’ and
the ‘new social history’, we had, sadly, nothing to offer which we could call ‘new’,

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and thus nothing that might appeal to a generation for whom novelty was of
paramount importance. It is fascinating, then, to observe, that the intellectual
history from below, which I have been characterising as a field whose boundaries
and contours owe so much to the scholarly work of Anthony Grafton, qualifies, with
elegant symmetry, for the title: the ‘new intellectual history’.
This collection of Anthony Grafton’s essays elegantly captures and conveys his
unique version of the Renaissance history of ideas. Bring Out Your Dead belongs, I
believe, alongside Stephen Greenblatt’s pioneering work, Renaissance Self-
Fashioning, founding text for ‘new’ historicism, and Thompson’s The Making of the
English Working Class, originating moment for the ‘new’ social history. In time to
come, we will look back Grafton’s Bring Out Your Dead as an equivalently landmark
book, in the founding tradition of a ‘new’ intellectual history.

Seeing in the Dark

by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

BRYAN D. PALMER, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of

Transgression [From Medieval to Modern], Monthly Review Press, New York,
2000; xiii + 609 pp. cloth $55.00, ISBN 1-58367-026-2; paper $24.00, ISBN 1-58367-
027-0.

One of the main trends in history-writing since the 1950s – one to which this journal
has contributed greatly – has been the steady increase in its objects of scrutiny. One
after another, social groups that earlier generations of historians tended to view as
too homogeneous or insignificant to warrant close study (factory workers, children,
slaves, domestic servants, peasants, prostitutes) have become historical actors
deserving of attention. Similarly, an emphasis on certain geographical regions
(Western Europe, North America) to the exclusion of others (Asia, Africa, Latin
America) has been replaced by a more inclusive vision. And what has been true for
social and geographical landscapes has also been true of cultural terrains, where a
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steady widening of historical perspective has occurred. Topics that previously fell
outside the historical radar – sexuality, friendship patterns, leisure activities,
childhood – are now the subject of innumerable scholarly books and articles. By the
late 1990s, so many different sorts of people and practices had moved from the
margins toward the centre of the discipline that it began to seem likely that the trend
could only bring diminishing returns. This, at any rate, was how it seemed to me at
the turn of the millennium; but Bryan Palmer’s ambitious and provocative new
book, Cultures of Darkness, has unsettled this assumption.
Why? Because at a time when it seemed that all that was left for the followers of
one or other kind of ‘new’ history to do was to make slight refinements to the
paradigm, Palmer takes the whole idea of inclusive history in a truly novel direction.

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He does this via the deceptively simple conceit of treating time of day as a key
definer of centres and peripheries. Historians, he claims, have for too long privileged
the daylight world and so neglected, or at least failed to integrate fully into their
narratives, many of the most interesting features of human existence. Closing our
eyes to the dark hours has meant ignoring much that is deeply disturbing (the night-
time terrors of fascism, for example), or liberating (such as – the title of one chapter
– ‘Blues, Jazz, and Jookin’: Nights of Soul and Swing’). To compensate for this
neglect, Palmer gives us a sprawling narrative (twenty-one chapters, close to 500
pages of text) that traverses the night-time histories of the last four centuries. The
result is a bold stab at a metanarrative focusing on the temporally marginalized that
Palmer argues might, if more fully developed, help ‘counter capitalism’s current
grand story of accomplishment’. Focusing on night instead of day will, he insists,
have political as well as scholarly benefits, throwing into relief hitherto unseen
patterns of exploitation and strategies of resistance and transgression.
I have stressed the novelty of the book’s approach. But this grand synthesis of
night-time themes, as Palmer acknowledges, draws heavily on recent historical
work. Many of its subjects (from witchcraft to tavern sociability to violence carried
out under cover of darkness) have engaged the attention of scholars before him. One
of the pleasures of reading this book, in fact, is seeing arguments and insights from
studies one already knew and admired (Judith Walkowitz’s work on London1 and
Mike Davis’s on Los Angeles,2 for example) brought together in a single work. The
value of Cultures of Darkness, then, lies not in its delivery of new findings, but in the
cumulative effect of a narrative that draws together phenomena and texts that have
previously appeared far removed from one another.
One excellent case in point has to do with, of all things, vampirism. Palmer’s
analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a literary work may have nothing new to offer
the specialist in Victorian literature. His discussion of Karl Marx’s fondness for
likening the capitalist exploitation of labour to vampiric blood-sucking may be
familiar to those immersed in radical political economy, just as his reference to
vampirism as a metaphor for the corruptions responsible for the fall of the Roman
Empire, an analogy drawn from G. E. M. de Ste Croix, may be old hat to some clas-
sicists. And his discussion of twentieth-century Kenyan vampire tales that presented
European colonialists as intent on extracting blood from local residents may be
nothing new to Africanists.3 But the connections Palmer draws between the fictional
Dracula, the metaphoric vampirism of old empires and early capitalism, and the
African response to imperialism are genuinely innovative. The novelty lies, in short,
not in the individual pieces of the puzzle but in the way Palmer fits them together.
There is thus much to like about this wide-ranging and erudite book. Drawing
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back the curtains of the night, Palmer shows us much that was previously hidden or
ignored, from the sufferings of nightshift workers in disparate eras and places, to the
communality of temperament of those individuals, in every society, who only feel
truly alive after dark and so share ‘a tenuous and usually unspoken bond’. His style,
for the most part, is lively and engaging (although occasionally leaning a bit too
heavily, at least for my taste, on academic or Marxisant jargon). Moving smoothly
across great swathes of time and space, with comments about medieval Europe here,
references to contemporary Latin America there, Cultures of Darkness displays a
welcome breadth of vision while at the same time maintaining its conceptual
coherence through an underlying focus on a cluster of favourite symbols (blood is
one) and varieties of individuals (outcasts of all types) that particularly fascinate

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him. These symbols and groups serve as common threads running through a tapestry
that, though made up of dark materials, has many shades and hues. Finally, the book
is a testament to the power of omnivorous reading, with Palmer deploying a range
of secondary literature – by economists, anthropologists, literary critics, and political
philosophers as well as historians – dazzling in its scale.
So great are these attractions that it’s tempting just to sit back and enjoy this
whirlwind journey through night-time worlds inhabited by figures ranging from
buccaneers to the Beats. But in the end I couldn’t quite do this. Several things held
me back: irritants that seemed minor at first, but loomed larger in my mind as the
book unfolded. I was particularly disturbed by two images that I came to label – for
reasons described below – the ‘land that was neither a colony nor the heart of an
empire’ and the ‘peasant who never tasted bread’.
Before talking about this land and peasant, a confession is in order: I had half-
expected to hate this book. An earlier work by Palmer, Descent into Discourse: the
Reification of Discourse and the Writing of Social History,4 I had found an ill-
tempered tirade. But a colleague whose taste I value highly had raved about Cultures
of Darkness, assuring me that even someone who had disliked Descent into
Discourse (as he also had) could find this new book very appealing, even inspira-
tional in its scope and originality. He was right.
Curiously, though, this is not because Cultures of Darkness is completely unlike
Descent into Discourse. Like the earlier book, this is not a work of primary research
but a synthesis of work by others. The difference between the two books is simple: in
Descent into Discourse Palmer was trying to convince us that books and essays he did
not like had no value; in Cultures of Darkness he is trying to persuade us to appreciate
things that he likes. There are many writers who are at their best when ripping works
to shreds, just as many restaurant critics shine when describing their worst dining
experiences, but with Palmer the inverse is true. He is more interesting telling us what
we can learn from Foucault than he was when griping about Foucault’s alleged misuse
by other scholars. He is more engaging when building on Lynn Hunt’s work on pornog-
raphy than he was when carping about her semiotic approach to 1789. And so on.
But if I ended up admiring this book a great deal, I remain troubled – and Palmer
is by no means the sole culprit in this regard – by what seems to me its flattening of
variations within non-Western historical experiences. It is encouraging for someone
like myself, whose research focuses on China, to see historians like Palmer, who are
primarily concerned with North America and Western Europe, drawing other parts
of the world into their analyses. But this must be done carefully, with an eye not just
to adding new textures but, sometimes, to completely rethinking assumptions about
social categories and structures of power. There is an analogy here to the efforts
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made by feminist-influenced historians to focus on the impact of gender, which

implies not just an ‘add-women-then stir’ approach to history but something much
more fundamental.
Palmer’s engagement with non-Western societies in Cultures of Darkness evades
this need to reconsider historical assumptions. Instead, he seems determined to fit
everything that has occurred in ‘Third World’ settings (to use the term he employs
most often) into familiar patterns, albeit with changes in timing and particulars. The
division of pre-industrial society into peasants and landowners, which a gifted
specialist in the study of the West (Marx) described, is seen as being applicable
globally (with the European peasant serving as a model for all others). And responses
to imperialism outside the West are seen as paralleling responses to capitalist

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development within the West, as in the aforementioned example of vampirism, in
which visions of blood-sucking English bourgeoisie are juxtaposed with images of
foreign conquerors of African nations. It is here that the ‘land that is neither a colony
nor the heart of an empire’ and the ‘peasant who never tasted bread’ come in. Palmer
has no time for either of these, and yet each has played too large a role in modern
history to be ignored by anyone seeking to create a metanarrative to compete with
triumphal tales of capitalist progress. Where, in a grand tale that only has room for
Western conquerors and the ‘Third World’ conquered, do the people of China – to
choose my own specialism – find a place? Unlike India, China was not incorporated
into an empire based in the West, yet neither was it free of imperialist incursions
(coming both from the West and Japan). And at some points in the recent past it has
made its own stabs at imperialist moves to expand its dominion. I can find in the rich
history of China’s night-time actors and noirish symbols many analogues to things
that Palmer describes. Yet, with China, the analogous phenomena seldom line up
neatly along either of the two axes (capitalism at home, empire abroad) that Palmer
presents as paradigmatic. Nor do racial and ethnic divides in China conform to the
black/white axis that looms so large in Palmer’s account. To take just two examples,
each of them seen in Cultures of Darkness as linked to industrialization or imperial-
ism: images of monstrosity – including vampirism – and visions of land conquest as
sexual domination have both played important roles in modern Chinese political
struggles. The most prevalent use of the epithet ‘blood-sucker’, though, came not in
struggles against outside invaders or capitalist exploiters but rather in Cultural Revol-
ution-era factional battles. And discourses linking imperialism with sexual domi-
nation flourished not only when China was being threatened by Western powers but
also when the invading armies were Japanese. Tropes of invasion as rape were also
commonly used to describe a conquest that preceded the gunboat diplomacy of the
Opium War (1839–1842): the Manchu take-over of China in the 1600s.
Palmer isn’t claiming to be offering a total global history, and he makes no bones
about being more familiar with some parts of the world than with others. He is free
to ignore China or any other country; and indeed it would be unfair to expect him
to cover everything in a book that, despite its considerable length, is presented as a
series of inter-connected fragments. Nevertheless, as a book that sees itself as laying
the groundwork for a new kind of story about the road to the global present, it seems
fair to judge it in the terms I’ve suggested. Leaving out China is not the issue. Many
other places – parts of Latin America in the early 1900s, for example – simply do
not fit into a binary division of colonizers and colonized. Also troubling is Palmer’s
tendency to assume that finding a common economic thread linking a Western group
to one located in another part of the world establishes a basis for cultural
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commonality as well. Here, the best example has to do with the peasantry. I will
leave aside the questions that China specialists have raised about how apt the label
‘peasant’ is for many Chinese rural dwellers of the past, since some of these were
more likely to own small plots of land than the term implies. Instead, what I want
to focus on is a passing reference Palmer makes to Japan as a ‘dramatic case’ of a
country that has undergone urbanization and seen a decline in its ‘peasant’ popu-
lation in modern times.
In an early chapter of Cultures of Darkness (titled ‘Blood, Bread, and Blasphemy:
Peasant Nights’), Palmer writes as follows: ‘53 percent of [Japan’s] population
laboured on the land in 1947; less than forty years later the figure had fallen to 9
percent’. He uses this statistic to introduce a quote from Eric Hobsbawm on the

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modern ‘death of the peasantry’ that ‘cuts us off from the world of the past’. Palmer
then describes some key features of that past world of which Japanese living off the
land prior to industrialization and urbanization were presumably a part, a world in
which ‘bread symbolized peasant survival’. This fascination with bread as symbol as
well as substance shows up again in later chapters that take as their backdrop the
decline of the peasantry. For example, in Chapter 7 (titled ‘Productions of the Night:
Dark and Dangerous Labours’), Palmer describes the dire situation of bakers in an
era when peasants were disappearing amidst processes of urbanization. ‘Eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century urban tastes and the problem of perishability dictated that
bread be fresh, hot, and available for morning’, Palmer argues. ‘Bakers thus came
to symbolize the limitless exploitation of capitalist production’, doomed as they were
to ‘endless night toil’ in service of new urban classes. The problem for me with these
discussions of bread and bakers is not what they reveal about the European case; it
is Palmer’s move from treating the ‘peasant’ as a global type to using the term to
refer merely to those who lived off the land in particular ways in particular regions:
that is, his willingness to treat the European peasant and European urbanization as
unmarked cases. The Japanese peasant who entered the city during Japan’s pre
twentieth-century periods of urbanization – there, as well as in Europe, cities grew
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – did not desire hot bread each morning.
And for many of the ‘53 percent’ of Japan’s population that lived off the land in
1947, bread had no particular symbolic or material significance.
Palmer has given us a wonderful book that foregrounds many sorts of difference
and variation. But a book that had room for peasants who had never eaten bread,
as well as for people who lived the last century not as denizens of either colonizing
or colonized lands, would have been still worthier of praise.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late

Victorian London, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
2 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Verso, London, 1992.
3 In his discussion of the idea of the vampire in Africa, Palmer draws heavily on works by
Luise White, including her ‘Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and
Central Africa’, Representations 43, summer 1993, pp. 27–50. For more on the topic, see
White’s recent book, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa,
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000.
4 Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990.