Download 10051-29076-1-SP - Equinox eBooks Publishing

Harland-Jacobs - 1
Worlds of Brothers
In 1748 Irish masonic authorities issued a warrant for a lodge to be held in the
20th Regiment of Foot. For the next century, the lodge, later named ‘Minden Lodge’ to
commemorate the British-Prussian victory over France in 1759, traveled the globe with
its regiment. The regiment defended Quebec during the American War of Independence.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the 20th was dispatched to the Caribbean, the Continent,
Ireland, the Mediterranean, Egypt, and St. Helena. In the 1820s, it played a role in
staking British claims to more and more territory in the Indian subcontinent. On duty in
the British Isles in the late 1830s, it was sent to Bermuda in 1841 and back to India at the
outbreak of the rebellion in 1857.1
To be sure, Minden Lodge’s membership and activity level waxed and waned
depending on the military demands placed on the regiment. But for over a century, the
lodge was an important part of the regiment’s life and history, as were the hundreds of
other lodges at work in the British Army during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
From India in 1824, lodge master Sergeant Major Henry Hollinsworth reported that
Minden Lodge was in ‘a flourishing state.’ Many of the regiment’s high-ranking officers,
including the Commander-in-Chief, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Colville, had joined
the lodge; by 1829, the lodge enjoyed a membership of 60. It contributed money for the
upkeep of widows and orphans of deceased brothers and supported the Masonic Orphan
Asylum in Dublin. In Poona the members raised funds for the construction of ‘a Temple
to Masonry,’ which would provide ‘a rendezvous for their transitory Brethren in that
distant region of our mighty Empire, where in spite of every difficulty, Masonry has
flourished.’2
The movements and activities of Minden Lodge reveal the extensive workings of
freemasonry’s global network. It is but one of countless examples of wide-scale fraternal
activity evident in the British Empire from the 1730s on. Whether assisting with
hurricane recovery in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, helping British immigrants
adjust to their new surroundings in early New South Wales, contributing to the
ceremonial expression of British imperial power in India during the nineteenth century,
or providing recreational outlets for Canadian soldiers on tour in Europe during the First
World War, freemasonry connected men—and their dependents—across the empire. In
short, freemasonry's widespread network of lodges helped to build the British Empire.
Freemasonry was at once imperial and fraternal. Elsewhere I have defined
fraternalism as ‘the process by which biologically unrelated men undergo a shared ritual
experience designed to create the bonds and obligations that supposedly characterize the
relationship between actual brothers.’ Along these lines, Nicholas Terpstra defines
fraternalism as ‘symbolic kinship.’3 Members of a fraternal organization, connected by
1
[may I add brief acknowledgments?]
H. Hollinsworth to Grand Secretary, Grand Lodge of Ireland, 18 October 1824 in John Clarke, History of
the Minden Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons No. 63 (Kingston, Bermuda: Argus, 1849), 18-20;
Robert F. Gould, Military Lodges (London: Gale & Polden, 1899), 123; Frederick Smyth, “The Master
Mason-at-Arms: A Short Study of Freemasonry in the Armed Forces,” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 104
(1991): 226.
3
Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of Chapel Hill Press, 2007), 17; Nicholas Terpstra, “De-institutionalizing Confraternity Studies:
2
Harland-Jacobs - 2
shared ritual experiences and a shared outlook, engage in a range of activities as brothers
and/or sisters: participating in lodge meetings; learning the history, symbols, and
teachings of their particular fraternity; taking part in convivial gatherings; looking out for
one another; offering assistance to those in need. They function as an exclusive network.
Using this functionalist definition, we can identify an organization as fraternal by what it
does. The authors of the recently published What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African
American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality adopt this kind of
definition when they describe fraternal groups as ‘self-selecting, ritually based
brotherhoods and sisterhoods devoted to mutual aid and community service.’4 At the
same time, we might fruitfully broaden our understanding of fraternalism to include
attention to identities, that is to say, that fraternalism encourages particular ways of
seeing one’s place in the world and one’s relationships to others. Such an understanding
of fraternalism allows us to explore the complex ways fraternal organizations operate at
the intersection of the local and the global.
By in large, fraternalism, whether defined narrowly or broadly, has been
approached from the perspective of nation states. This focus is clearly evident in the
scholarship on fraternalism (especially freemasonry) and in the ways fraternalism is
understood and represented in public history and popular culture. This nation-centered
approach—while necessary and important—causes us, when overemphasized, to miss
crucial dimensions of fraternal activity, as well as a fundamental aspect of fraternalism,
namely the sense of belonging to a world that extends well beyond the nation state.
Adopting the assumptions and approaches of world history and transnational history pays
great dividends for the study of fraternalism, as an examination of several different kinds
of brotherhoods will reveal. My argument, briefly stated, is that we can only understand
the complexities of fraternal history when we adopt multiple and intersecting units and
scales of analysis: localities, nations, empires, and worlds (I am using the plural ‘worlds’
intentionally in the sense of spheres of interest or activity that may or may not extend to
encompass the entire globe).
Fraternalism and the nation state
Scholarship on fraternalism has made tremendous strides in the last decade or so.
While we used to be able to count on one hand the key works on the topic, it is now
possible to construct a fairly extensive bibliography, including works on class, mutual aid,
ritual, gender, and particular groups such as African Americans and the Irish. Moreover,
ten years ago, one was hard pressed to find a panel on fraternalism at a mainstream
historical conference. Now, panels concerning fraternalism appear regularly on
conference programs; moreover, whole conferences, academic centers, and even a journal
are dedicated exclusively to its study.5 These are exciting and welcome developments
Fraternalism and Social Capital in Cross-Cultural Contexts,” in Early Modern Confraternities in Europe
and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Christopher Black and Pamela
Gravestock (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 15. Stephen C. Bullock identifies the freemasons as forming
a “fictive family.” Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the
American Social Order, 1730-1840 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of Chapel Hill Press, 1996), 39.
4
Theda Skocpol, Ariane Laizos, and Marshall Ganz, What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American
Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), xi.
5
For example, the International Conference on the History of Freemasonry meets biannually. In 2010, the
National Heritage Museum recently hosted a symposium on ‘New Perspectives on American Freemasonry
Harland-Jacobs - 3
that will not only contribute to the advancement of our understanding of fraternalism as a
social and historical phenomenon, but also encourage the study of fraternalism for what it
can tell us about wider developments.
As scholarship on fraternalism has expanded and become increasingly
sophisticated in recent years, it has been, for the most part, very receptive to the work of
social, cultural, and gender historians working across the profession. Indeed, I would
even go so far as to say that historians of American fraternalism, and of Freemasonry in
particular, provided some of the pioneering studies of masculinity, which has finally
become a mainstay of gender studies.6 But scholars working on fraternalism have not
been as attuned or contributed nearly as much as they might to the world history turn.
There are some key exceptions, for example Mary Ann Clawson, Margaret Jacob, and
Nicholas Terpstra, whose work will be considered below. But, by in large, the nation
state, or even more narrow units of analysis such as ‘Illinois’ or ‘England’, remain the
central units of analysis for investigating fraternalism. In this regard, the historiography
of fraternalism takes its cue from the broader history profession, in which the nation state
continues to dominate as the primary category of analysis and professional organization.7
Examining the scholarship on American fraternalism, one would be hard pressed
to see its global, transnational, and international dimensions. One of the earliest scholarly
treatments of the subject is Mark Carnes’ Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian
America, published in 1989. This landmark study, which explores the social and
psychological factors that led men to join fraternal lodges as they transitioned from
boyhood to manhood, focuses exclusively on the United States during the second half of
the nineteenth century. The same is true for David Beito’s From Mutual Aid to the
Welfare State (2000), which examines the multifarious ways in which fraternal societies
provide stigma-free social welfare services from the 1890s to the 1960s, and the recently
published Good, Reliable, White Men (2009) by Paul Taillon. Taillon’s book sensitively
explores how fraternalism – in the form of the railroad brotherhoods of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries – was influenced by prevailing attitudes about race and
gender, especially as they shifted in the context of the United States’ acquiring colonies
after the Spanish-American War. But Taillon, like Beito, remains firmly focused on
fraternalism in the United States.8
African-American fraternalism has a particularly well-developed historiography,
and scholars of other aspects of African-American history have also analyzed
fraternalism as part of their larger studies. Yet, the story is the same: studies limited to
and Fraternalism.’ For an overview of recent developments in fraternalism research, see articles by Jan
Snoek, Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire and Natalie Bayer in Journal for Research into Freemasonry and
Fraternalism 1, 2 (2010).
6
Two pioneering studies include Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and
Fraternalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) and Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and
Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
7
For critiques of nation state’s dominance in the field of British history, see Antoinette Burton, “Who
Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History,” Journal of Historical Sociology 10 (1997): 227-49 and
Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003), especially Stuart Ward, “Transcending the Nation: A Global Imperial History?” 44-56.
8
Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood; David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal
Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Paul
Taillon, Good, Reliable, White Men: Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877-1917(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2009).
Harland-Jacobs - 4
particular cities, states, regions, or the nation itself. That said, there are signs of growing
interest in the transnational dimensions of African American fraternalism. Corey Walker
argues that the diasporic condition and experience of African-American freemasons was
crucial to their struggle for democracy.9 Another impressive recent study is the already
cited What a Mighty Power We Can Be. This volume is the result of a very ambitious
collaboration undertaken by six scholars to identify and collect as much information as
possible about African American fraternal associations. Examining fraternal
organizations as ‘schools of government’, the development and range of AfricanAmerican fraternal rituals, and the contributions of fraternal organizations to the civil
rights movement, the authors also observe that African American fraternal federations
‘crossed national borders.’ They highlight the ‘translocal reach of lodge networks’ and
the internationalist traditions and aspirations of black fraternalism. ‘More than
marginally tolerated,’ they argue, ‘transnationalism was featured and celebrated in black
fraternal federations.’ As promising as this is, their discussion extends to only two pages
of a nearly 300-page book.10
The history of freemasonry is likewise rooted in the nation state or narrower
frames of analysis. If one were to compile a bibliography on the topic, it would rather
easily and apparently logically break down along national lines. Sections on freemasonry
in its various national guises would include, for example, key works by Stephen C.
Bullock on American Freemasonry and Stefan Hoffman on German Freemasonry.
Bullock offers a path-breaking and insightful analysis of the brotherhood’s part in
shaping and symbolizing the transition from the aristocratic, hierarchical organization of
eighteenth-century America to the democratic, individualistic and sentimental culture of
the nineteenth century; Hoffman, meanwhile, ‘examines the critical link between
Freemasonry and the evolution of German civil society’ and Freemasons' role in
exacerbating political conflict in nineteenth-century Germany.11 Now, I am not
suggesting that these scholars should have written different books. They are crucial
contributions to our understanding of freemasonry and fraternalism. I merely use these as
examples of the dominant trend. One could not put together a comparable bibliography
on works that use other units of analysis to investigate freemasonry’s complex history.
The publication of an important collaborative volume, Freemasonry on Both
Sides of the Atlantic, in 2003 seemed to signal that the topic was finally receiving some
transnational attention.12 Both its title and its hefty size suggested that the contributors
would be discussing the brotherhood's propensity to cross borders and complicate
categories. One would hope to find, for example, discussions and analysis of
9
Corey Walker, A Noble Fight: African-American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in
America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008). See, especially, Chapter 2 ‘A Cartography of
Democracy.’
10
Skocpol, 92-93. More in-depth coverage of black Freemasonry's cosmopolitan dimensions appears in
Chernoh Sesay, ‘Freemasons of Color: Prince Hall, Revolutionary Black Boston, and the Origins of Black
Freemasonry,’ (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2006).
11
Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood; Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry
and German Civil Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). While there is growing
scholarship on English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish freemasonry, work on “British” freemasonry is sorely
lacking.
12
William Weisberger, ed., Freemasonry on Both Sides of the Atlantic (Boulder: Eastern European
Monographs, 2002).
Harland-Jacobs - 5
freemasonry in the age of Atlantic revolution: how did freemasons in various parts of the
Atlantic basin respond to the turmoil—and possibilities—of the period? What was the
role of masonic lodges in Saint Domingue when rebellion, and then revolution, broke out:
were freemasons on the side of conservatism, radical change, or both (as was the case in
the North American colonies and the British Isles in the 1770s, 80s, and 90s)?
But the book does not approach Freemasonry in this manner. It is not an Atlantic
history along the lines of the methodologies advocated by scholars like Bernard Bailyn,
David Armitage, and Alison Games.13 Rather, true to its title, it is a history of
freemasonry on both sides of the Atlantic. For the eastern side of the Atlantic, it includes
chapters such as ‘The Grand Lodge of Scotland and the Establishment of the Masonic
Community’ and ‘Freemasonry in Hungary between the Eighteenth and Twentieth
Century.’ For the western side, there are several chapters on freemasonry in North
America (including Mexico, but not Canada), such as ‘Religion and Freemasonry in latenineteenth-century America.’ A few chapters do consider Freemasonry comparatively
and in multiple contexts (such as Paul Rich’s and Carlos Cruz's ‘National Differences in
Freemasonry: the Gap between America and Mexico’). That said, the book does not
venture into the southern Atlantic, and it does not adopt other units of analysis, such as
empires or ‘worlds,’ to examine the history of Freemasonry.
Turning from the published scholarship on fraternalism itself to the institutional
structures that nurture it, we once again see the nation state dominating as the
fundamental organizing unit. Of course that such structures even exist is extremely
important. For far too long, professional historians paid little to no attention to
fraternalism – in the United States, it became the subject of scholarly analysis only in the
1980s. Given that European scholars began taking fraternalism seriously long before
their British and American counterparts, it is not surprising that the first chairs and
academic centers for studying freemasonry emerged on the Continent. These include the
Center for Historical Studies of Spanish Freemasonry (Centro de Estudios Históricos de
la Masonería Española) and the OVN, ‘an independent foundation for the advancement
of the academic study of the history of freemasonry in The Netherlands.’14 In both cases,
the focus remains on freemasonry in its national guises. The Centre for Research into
Freemasonry and Fraternalism, founded at the University of Sheffield in 2000, appeared
to have a more broad-ranging remit (there is no mention of ‘British’ or even ‘AngloAmerican’ freemasonry in its title). But recent budget cuts have made the fate of the
Centre uncertain at best.15
The predominance of the nation state as the organizing framework of masonic
scholarship is also clearly evident in the conferences and symposia, in museum exhibits,
and in popular culture. A majority of both individual papers and panels at the biannual
International Conference on the History of Freemasonry are positioned in discrete
13
Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005); David Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History" in The British Atlantic World, eds. Armitage
and Michael Braddick (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 11-27; Alison Games, "Atlantic History: Definitions,
Challenges, and Opportunities," American Historical Review 111, 3 (June 2006): 741-757.
14
OVN blog, http://ovnnews.blogspot.com/ [accessed 4 April 2010].
15
As of January 2010, the activities of the CRFF at the University of Sheffield were, according to
university officials, “suspended for the time being.”
Harland-Jacobs - 6
national contexts.16 The Grand Lodge of California hosts the Annual California Masonic
Symposium; the topic of the 2010 symposium was ‘Masonry, Military, and the
Emergence of American Democracy.’ Turning to public history, most museums and
exhibits dedicated to the topic are housed in national or state grand lodges or in such
nationally oriented institutions as the National Heritage Museum and the Washington
Masonic Memorial. Masonic libraries, such as the Iowa Masonic Library, the Henry Coil
Library, and the Washington Masonic Memorial Library do hold, and at times highlight,
international collections, including minutes, periodicals, and pamphlets that clearly reveal
Freemasonry’s global scope and transnational dimensions. But, by in large, public
historians have perpetuated the examination of freemasonry as a national institution.
Finally, in popular culture, freemasonry is portrayed as the very source and ultimate
guardian of the nation. In National Treasure, Benjamin Franklin Gates (played by
Nicholas Cage) races around the country in search of clues that will reveal the location of
a trove of undefined, yet unimaginable riches. Freemasons like Benjamin Franklin figure
centrally as safe-keepers of the American nation’s treasure through the generations. Dan
Brown’s latest bestseller, The Lost Symbol, both fans the flames of and cashes in on this
national obsession. Such productions have spawned an entire sub-genre of questionable
books claiming to expose the supposedly hidden masonic history of the United States.
Let me be clear: I am not suggesting we discard the nation state as an organizing
principle of fraternal history. It remains a necessary avenue of investigation: it helps us
understand the unique ways fraternalism developed in particular places, such as France
(where women and, later, atheists were first admitted into freemasonry) or India (where
freemasonry was so ensconced in the British Raj). Moreover, this approach is crucial if
we want to use freemasonry as a window onto the history of nations, as Timothy Baycroft
effectively does in his recent article, ‘Nationalism, National Identity and Freemasonry.’17
Along these lines, we have learned much about civil society in the Netherlands from
Margaret C. Jacob, the changing ideals of early American society from Steven C. Bullock,
the intellectual and political networks of eighteenth-century Russia from Douglas Smith,
and the development of German civil society by Stefan Hoffman.18 But studying
freemasonry—and fraternalism more generally—from other vantage points and using
other units of analysis is equally revealing. Combining the two approaches and looking
for intersections between them will result in more multi-dimensional histories of
fraternalism. A brief examination of several different brotherhoods in light of three
alternative, though inter-related, approaches, namely world history, Atlantic history, and
transnational history, demonstrates the necessity—and benefits—of moving beyond the
nation state as our central category of analysis.
Fraternal worlds
For example, at the 2007 conference, representative paper titles included: ‘Turkish Masonry: venerable
past, future hope’; ‘Mexican Freemasonry, 1813-1868’; ‘The History of Freemasonry in China.’
17
Timothy Baycroft, “Nationalism, National Identity and Freemasonry,” Journal for Research into
Freemasonry and Fraternalism 1, 1 (2010): 10-22.
18
Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-century Europe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood; Hoffman, Politics of
Sociability; Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century
Russia (Dekalb, IL: North Illinois University Press, 1999).
16
Harland-Jacobs - 7
World history is not the history of everything, but rather the history of global
interconnectedness – how peoples, locales, nations, and regions became entangled over
time. To practice world history is to pursue ‘scholarship within a global perspective.’19
The best world history explores the connections between the local and the global with
keen attention to both contexts. Another way of practicing world history involves
studying the worlds people have imagined and created, broadly conceived spheres of
interest, activity, and identity, such as the British world, the Islamic world, or the
masonic world.
As I have argued elsewhere, only by adopting the methods of world history can
we fully appreciate the global dimensions of freemasonry’s network, ideology, and
functions. Almost as soon as the first grand lodges were established in England (1717)
and Ireland (1725), the British exported freemasonry to Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
English lodges were working in Gibraltar and in Bengal by 1730. From that point on,
freemasonry spread throughout the world as ambulatory military lodges, provincial grand
masters stationed abroad, and colonists set up lodges far and wide. Indeed, the British
Empire offered fertile ground for freemasonry: by the early nineteenth century, lodges
had been established in all the North American and Caribbean colonies as well as in India,
West Africa, and New South Wales. British freemasonry also appeared outside the
formal empire, in places like Sumatra, China, Florida, and Argentina.20 ‘Where our flag
has gone,’ the Grand Master of Scotland proclaimed in 1888, ‘there has Masonry gone . . .
we have been able to found lodges for those who have left our shores to found fresh
empires.’21 The British were not alone in taking freemasonry around the globe – the
brotherhood became an identifiable feature of the French, Dutch, Iberian, and American
empires as well. In this way, freemasonry was, by definition and by practice, a global
institution, one that, according to an eighteenth-century observer stretched ‘even to the
ends of the Earth.’22
Freemasonry was among the first fraternal organizations to achieve a global scope,
but it was not the first. That distinction arguably belongs to the Jesuits, founded by
Ignatius Loyola in 1540 and spreading outside Europe very shortly thereafter through the
efforts of energetic missionaries such as Francis Xavier, Matteo Ricci, and Roberto de
World History Association, “What is World History?” http://www.thewha.org [accessed 4 April 2010].
For world history, see Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993); Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, ‘World History in a Global Age,’ American Historical
Review 100, 4 (October 1995): 1034-60; Richard Elphick et al., World History: Ideologies, Structures, and
Identities (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998); Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create
a Global Past (New York: Palgrave, 2003); Dominic Sachsenmaier, ‘World History as Ecumenical
History?’ Journal of World History 18, 4 (2007): 465-90.
20
By the 1880s, over 820 British lodges were working in various parts of the world (this figure does not
include the hundreds of lodges under the semi-independent grand lodges in Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and South Africa). For a recent study of Freemasonry and the British Empire, see J. W.
Daniels… (PhD diss., University…., 201?).
21
Grand Lodge of Scotland, Proceedings, 20 Nov 1888, 157, quoted in Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire,
2-3.
22
Thomas Davenport, Love to God and Man inseparable, A Sermon preached before a respectable Ancient
and Honourable Society of Free and Accepted Masons, on the 27 th Day of December, 1764 (Birmingham:
Thomas Davenport, 1765), 6, 8. For a discussion of freemasonry in various European empires, see
Harland-Jacobs, “Freemasonry and Colonialism,” in the Brill Handbook of Freemasonry (Leiden: Brill,
forthcoming).
19
Harland-Jacobs - 8
Nobili. The Jesuits operated within and beyond the early modern Catholic empires of
Spain, Portugal, and France. They took their message and institution to India, Japan, and
the Congo in the 1540s; Brazil and Ethiopia in the 1550s; Florida, Mexico, and Peru in
the 1560s; China in the 1570s; and Tibet, Vietnam, and Canada in the early 1600s. As
Bernard Bailyn has put it, ‘the Jesuits were globalists.’23
Notably, the historiography of the Jesuits, though somewhat tied to the nation
state, is more attuned to the wider context than most work on freemasonry and
fraternalism. Almost all histories of the Jesuits include significant sections on their
overseas activities. This more global approach is evident, for example, in Dauril Alden's
The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, its Empire and Beyond
(1996), and in God's Soldiers (2004) by Jonathan Wright, which includes chapters
entitled ‘One World Is Not Enough: the First Jesuit Century’ and ‘Over Many Vast
Worlds of Water: The Jesuit Missionary Enterprise.’ Assessing the state of Jesuit
historiography, John O’Malley observed over a decade ago: ‘the interaction between
Europeans and the Other, as a reciprocal process, must be part of any study of ‘what
Catholicism was like.’ The importance of this perspective for the study of the Jesuits is
so obvious, as the contributions in this volume show, that it requires no further
comment.’24 Indeed, in the years since O’Malley made this pronouncement, more and
more historians have been working at the intersection of European and global history,
exploring not only Jesuit overseas missions, but also their information, financial,
educational, and administrative networks that stretched across the early modern world.25
While most scholars of the Jesuits now acknowledge that ‘a global perspective is
essential to understanding the Jesuits,’ most have not written about the Society as a
fraternal organization.26 To be sure, religious orders have unique forms and functions
that distinguish them from fraternities like the freemasons. But they also share
characteristics with fraternal organizations: members engage in an elaborate ritual life,
they have a corporate identity and outlook based on their organization’s teachings, they
develop a sense of belonging to a ‘fictive family’ that takes care of its own, and they
operate as a network. With this in mind, it is possible to identify a broad continuum of
fraternal organizations that ranges from religious orders and lay confraternities to
improvement brotherhoods and friendly societies and also includes political brotherhoods.
The Jesuits and other religious orders, therefore, may fruitfully be studied in light of other
groups – the Misericórdia, the Freemasons, the Odd Fellows, the Irish Republican
Brotherhood – organized along fraternal lines. Paying attention to the shared features as
well as distinctive characteristics of various fraternal groups, we might ask, for example,
Simon Ditchfield, “The Jesuits: the Making of a World Religion,” History Today 57, 7 (July 2007): 5260; Bernard Bailyn, “Reflections on Some Major Themes,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent
Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830, eds. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia Denault (Boston:
Harvard University Press, 2009), 21.
24
John W. O’Malley, “The historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where does it stand today?” in The
Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, ed. John W. O’Malley (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1999), 25-26.
25
For but three of many examples, see Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives
and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and New (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Steven J. Harris, “Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1530-1773,” Isis 96, 1 (March 2005):
71-79; Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
26
Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, i.
23
Harland-Jacobs - 9
in the case of the Jesuits, how fraternalism contributed to a sense of group cohesion and
the operation of an impressive global administration? How did fraternal ideas affect
Jesuit perceptions of indigenous people and Jesuit relations with the empires in which
they operated?
Departing from the general tendency, one historian – Nicholas Terpstra – does
analyze the Jesuits as a fraternal organization. In ‘De-institutionalizing Confraternity
Studies: Fraternalism and Social Capital in Cross-Cultural Contexts,’ Terpstra argues that
fraternalism was central to the Jesuit project. ‘Loyola certainly embraced fraternalism as
a cultural form and a social resource, and he built the Society of Jesus on fraternalism – it
began as a confraternity, and all of its extensive missionary and charitable outreach was
structured around and funded by confraternities and by the Marian congregations.’
Fraternalism allowed the Jesuits to acculturate people into the Catholic worldview by
emphasizing Catholics’ obligations, providing ways for Catholics to exercise their
obligations, and ‘habituating’ them into a ‘deeper and more activist practice of the faith.’
Yet, according to Terpstra, ‘Jesuit fraternalism’ departed in important ways from other
forms of contemporary fraternalism. It emphasized hierarchy, rather than cross-class
brotherhood; it also subordinated the laity to the clergy. ‘Loyola believed that only with
these changes could fraternalism respond effectively to the Protestant threat, be central to
Europe’s missionary drive overseas and acculturate marginals and deviants into the
Christian mainstream.’27
Yet, while fraternalism did at times serve to acculturate various ‘others’, it also
offered a means of resisting the very acculturation it was designed to effect.
‘Fraternalism could be simultaneously transformative and reactionary, egalitarian and
elitist, a vehicle of resistance or of acculturation.’28 What allows Terpstra to make this
sophisticated argument about fraternalism – in its Jesuit and other forms – is his attention
to fraternalism in multiple contexts (continental Europe, the British Isles, Asia, Latin
America) and his willingness to cross not only geographic but also confessional and
chronological boundaries.29 He also argues that scholars be less rigid in their approach to
fraternalism. Rather than focus so much on specific institutions, we should be attuned to
the multiple forms and functions of fraternal activity. By ‘de-institutionalizing’
con/fraternity studies and by transgressing disciplinary boundaries, scholars will not only
arrive at enriched studies of fraternalism, but also use fraternalism to develop new
understandings of broader topics (in Terpstra’s case, the nature of the late medieval
church and the Reformation). Terpstra’s work, therefore, clearly demonstrates the
substantial benefits of combining an emphasis on fraternalism with macro-historical
approaches.
Like the Jesuits, the freemasons should be studied as a global fraternity, not only
because they founded lodges all over the world but also because their ideology and
operations were global in scope.30 They promoted an ideology of cosmopolitan
Terpstra, “De-institutionalizing Confraternity Studies,” 266-7. Jonathan Wright concurs that “Loyola’s
spiritual vision was rooted in notions of fraternity.” Wright, God’s Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue,
and Power (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 18.
28
Terpstra, “De-institutionalizing Confraternity Studies,” 277.
29
Notably, this chapter appears at the end of an edited volume entitled Early Modern Confraternities in
Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
30
In no way do I intend to equate freemasonry and the Society of Jesus, or any other distinct fraternal
organizations, for that matter. Indeed, the differences between them (in terms of organization, ideology,
27
Harland-Jacobs - 10
fraternalism based on five main pillars: tolerance, belief in the family of man, global
citizenship, sociability and affection, and benevolence. These themes frequently arise
and interact in contemporary writings, published and manuscript, on freemasonry. In the
best-selling Illustrations of Freemasonry (1772), for example, William Preston claimed
that the brotherhood ‘unites men of the most opposite religions, of the most distant
countries, and of the most contradictory opinions, in one indissoluble bond of unfeigned
affection. . . . Thus, in every nation a mason may find a friend, and in every climate he
may find a home.’31 The Constitutions themselves declared: ‘we are of all Nations,
Tongues, Kindreds, and Languages.’32 Indeed, eighteenth-century freemasonry included
men of wide-ranging political, religious, and racial backgrounds, who drew on masonry’s
cosmopolitan ideology in various ways. For example, as Chernoh Sesay has shown,
African Americans like Prince Hall identified Freemasonry as an important ideological
and institutional resource as they assumed leadership over Boston’s free but severely
constrained African American community during the turn of the nineteenth century.
Staking claim to equality and fraternity, they engaged in an activism inspired by black
cosmopolitanism and organized through freemasonry on behalf of not only blacks in New
England but throughout the Atlantic world.33
Putting their ideology of fraternal cosmopolitanism into practice, freemasons
operated a global network of lodges that met the needs of members wherever they went.
In 1785, the Reverend Joshua Weeks explained to masons gathered in Halifax, Nova
Scotia that they possessed a ‘key’ that would give them ‘admittance to the brotherhood’
anywhere in the world. ‘Were the providence of God to cast you on an unknown shore;
were you to travel through any distant country, though ignorant of its language, ignorant
of its inhabitants, ignorant of its customs,’ he assured his listeners, the key would ‘open
the treasures of their charity.’34 Evidence from eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentiethcentury freemasonry certainly bears out this claim. The brotherhood was an invaluable
form of association for eighteenth-century cosmopolites as they travelled around the
world. They could find lodges just about everywhere they went. The famous Loge des
Neuf Soeurs in Paris welcomed Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones during their
sojourns in France during the late 1770s. The English Lodge of Perfect Unanimity, in
Madras, was in regular communication with La Fraternité Cosmopolite at Pondicherry
during the 1780s. British Masons were received in the preeminent Dutch lodge at the
Cape Colony, the Lodge de Goede Hoop, during the 1790s. Brazilian-born Hipolito da
Costa, a major critic of the Portuguese monarchy in the first decades of the nineteenth
century, visited lodges in Philadelphia in 1799. Imprisoned for three years by the
Inquisition for his masonic activities in Lisbon, he escaped to London in 1805 and
affiliated with the circle around the Duke of Sussex and the Moderns.35 Here was a
purpose, membership, etc.) are significant. I am only suggesting that considering both under the broad
umbrella of fraternalism is revealing, and that both should be approached from the perspective of world
history.
31
William Preston, Illustrations of Masonry (London: William Preston, 1772), 15.
32
James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free-Masons (London: John Senex and John Hooke, 1723).
33
Sesay, Freemasons of Color.
34
Joshua Wingate Weeks, Sermon Presented at St. Paul's Church in Halifax (Halifax: John Howe, 1785),
23.
35
Neil Safier, ‘A Courier between Empires: Hipolita da Costa and the Atlantic World’ in Soundings in
Atlantic History, eds. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault,, 265-293.
Harland-Jacobs - 11
brotherhood that reached across national borders, even in the midst of the international
conflicts of the age of revolution. How can we capture these aspects of the history of
fraternalism if scholarship remains hemmed in by nations?
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, masonic fraternalism continued to
facilitate the processes of migration, trade, and empire building that made the world a
more interconnected place. Lodge charity funds were used to buy passages for masons
who had fallen on hard times and were moving on. Lodge officers wrote
recommendation letters for members journeying to other parts of the empire. When a
migrating freemason arrived at his destination, he was likely to find a network of lodges
that could provide fellowship, recreation, and perhaps even employment opportunities.36
A migrant to New South Wales explained in a letter to the English Grand Lodge in 1827
that "the greater part of the free community have been admitted as Masons in England
from the prevailing notion of the necessity of being so on becoming Travellers."37 For
travelers, soldiers, merchants, colonial administrators, and migrants of all backgrounds,
freemasonry was indeed a global, fraternal resource.
Of course, freemasonry encountered challenges realizing its inclusive promises as
it spread across the world. Indeed the tension between its inclusive ideology and its
exclusive practices is a central theme of the brotherhood's story, as many historians of
freemasonry have demonstrated.38 Cosmopolitanism often floundered on the shoals of
xenophobia and racism. And freemasons were not out to challenge the system of nation
states; in fact, they liked to describe themselves as exemplary citizens of the nation states
to which they belonged. But while they acknowledged and upheld nations, freemasons
also sought to transcend them. As one eighteenth-century masonic handbook (1798) put
it: "By the Exercise of Brotherly Love, we are taught to regard the whole human Species
as one Family, the High, Low, Rich and Poor; all created by one Almighty Being, and
sent into the World for the Aid, Support, and Protection of each other. On this grand
Principle, Masonry unites Men of every Country, Sect and Opinion."39
The British Empire offers a clear case of fraternalism’s serving as an ideology and
mechanism of empire building, but it is not yet clear the extent to which it served these
functions in other empires. At the same time freemasonry spread through Britain’s
formal and informal empires, it became established in the empires of France, the
Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal and into parts of the world where no European empires
prevailed. Were the same mechanisms at work in all cases? Why did it take root in so
many different parts of the world? What role did freemasonry play in merchant networks
that crossed imperial boundaries and entangled the histories of far-flung people and
places? A nation-based approach does not let us answer these questions, nor is it
adequate for examining other forms of fraternalism, which are best approached, I would
argue by using another unit of analysis, the Atlantic.
Atlantic
36
Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, passim.
John Stephen to the United Grand Lodge of England, 1 Sept 1827, quoted in Builders of Empire, 1-2.
38
See especially Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, and Smith, Working the Rough Stone.
39
J. Browne, The Master Key through all the Degrees of a Freemason's Lodge, (London: n. p., 1798), 28.
37
Harland-Jacobs - 12
Atlantic history is a close relative of world history; as historian Alison Games
puts it, Atlantic history is ‘a slice of world history.’40 Atlantic history has emerged as an
increasingly widespread historical practice in the last ten years or so and is most closely
associated with scholars such as Paul Gilroy, John Thornton, David Hancock, Bernard
Bailyn, and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. Rather than focusing their research on a particular
nation or colony, scholars practicing Atlantic history take the Atlantic Ocean basin as
their primary unit of historical analysis. Various forces of integration – ranging from
trade to migration to religious networks – brought this world, ‘an immensely complex but
cohesive multicultural entity,’ into being between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Atlantic historians, therefore, study ‘the evolving history of the zone of interaction among
the peoples of Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas.’41
Atlantic history is a necessary approach for understanding many developments in
the history of fraternalism; at the same time, the study of fraternalism can shed revealing
light on understudied aspects of the Atlantic world. Take, for example, the cofradía of
the Iberian Atlantic. Tracing their roots to the cults and sodalities of the ancient world,
confraternities were flourishing in Iberia by thirteenth century. They performed many
important religious and secular functions, including saintly veneration and the provision
of social security.42 The confraternities were quite inclusive, welcoming men, and often
women, of diverse religious, racial, and linguistic backgrounds and, according to RussellWood, ‘afford[ing] opportunities for frequent intercultural contacts.’43 While the
institution, as a whole, was inclusive, most local cofradía were exclusive in their
membership practices.44 It is the same tension that is at the heart of Freemasonry’s
history and, arguably, the history of fraternalism writ large.
Both Spaniards and Portuguese transferred the institution of the cofradía to their
American colonies during the fifteenth century; it remained a conspicuous and important
part of Latin American societies through the colonial period and beyond. The scholarship
40
Games, "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, Opportunities," 748.
Bailyn and Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History, 1, 3. See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Nicholas Canny,
"Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America," Journal of America
History 86, 2 (December 1999): 1093-114; Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World; Jack
Greene and Philip Morgan, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. For critiques of Atlantic history, see
Peter Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,”
Journal of World History 13, 1 (Spring 2002): 169-182; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "Some Caveats about
the Atlantic Paradigm," History Compass (2003); "William and Mary Quarterly Forum: Beyond the
Atlantic" William and Mary Quarterly 63, 4 (October 2006): 675-74.
42
Albert Meyers, “Religious Brotherhoods in Latin America: A Sketch of Two Peruvian Case Studies,” in
Manipulating the Saints: Religious Brotherhoods and Social Integration in Postconquest Latin America,
eds. A. Meyers and D. E. Hopkins (Hamburg: Wayasbah, 1988), 1-21; Gary Wendell Graff, Cofradias in
the New Kingdom of Granada: Lay Fraternities in a Spanish-American Frontier Society, 1600-1755 (PhD
diss.,University of Wisconsin, 1973), 9-17; Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social
Welfare in Spain, 1400-1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Ida Altman, Emigrants and Society:
Extramadura and America in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 39-40.
43
A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1982), 128; Graff, Cofradias in the New Kingdom of Granada, 1-2; Meyers, “Religious
Brotherhoods in Latin America,” 7-8.
44
For example, William Christian notes that most brotherhoods in Toledo were class-based, or based on
occupations. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press,
1981),149-50.
41
Harland-Jacobs - 13
on colonial Latin American cofradías is well developed and generally attentive to the
European context and to European precedents.45 But, as Meyers has pointed out,
historians have focused on individual case studies: ‘Comparative or general studies,
including those limited to a specific continent or organizational type, are extremely
limited in scope.’46 There is minimal analysis of the cofradía as an institution that was at
once Atlantic and local (e.g., studies comparing brotherhoods in Iberia and Latin America
or examinations of the connections they forged throughout the region, both across the
ocean and between the American colonies).
An Atlantic approach is especially crucial for understanding the history of a
particular subset of cofradía, the black confraternities that first emerged in late sixteenthcentury Iberia and subsequently throughout colonial Latin America. In their earliest
incarnations on the Iberian Peninsula, the black brotherhoods were made up of both
slaves and freedmen and maintained an impressive public presence; according to Pike,
they played an important role in facilitating the Hispanicization of blacks in sixteenthcentury Seville.47 Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the brotherhoods ‘constituted a
corporate response to a collective and individual need felt by blacks and mulattos in the
colony’ and ‘provided a cushion against a competitive, white-dominated society, not only
for the black brought from Africa as a slave, but also for blacks and mulattos born in
Brazil, be they slaves or freemen.’48 As might be expected, the scholarship on black
cofradía is more Atlantic (if not explicitly so) in its assumptions and approach. Patricia
Mulvey and Barry Crouch provide an insightfully broad-ranging, if brief, examination of
these brotherhoods in ‘Black Solidarity: A Comparative Perspective on Slave Sodalities
in Latin America.’ ‘In every Latin American country where slavery existed,’ they argue,
‘slaves responded in a like manner. Religious brotherhoods provided the means for
passive and active resistance by the slaves to the institution of bondage.’ They proceed to
survey black confraternities in Brazil and throughout Spanish America, demonstrating
their provision of social welfare services, their multivalent religious functions, and their
role in community formation.49
Graff, Cofradias in the New Kingdom of Granada, 9-38; Murdo J. MacLeod, “The Social and Economic
Roles of Indian Cofradias in Colonial Chiapas,” in The Church and Society in Latin America: Selected
papers from the conference at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 29-30, 1982, ed. Jeffrey A.
Cole (New Orleans: Center for Latin American Studies, Tulane University, 1984): 73-96. For the role of
cofradia in the forging of post-conquest “Indian” ethnicity, see Paul Charney, “A Sense of Belonging:
Colonial Indian Cofradías and Ethnicity in the Valley of Lima, Peru,” The Americas 54, 3 (January 1998):
379-407. For a eighteenth-century Mexico City, see Susan Schroeder, “Jesuits, Nahuas, and the Good
Death Society in Mexico City, 1710-1767,” Hispanic American Historical Review 80, 1 (2000)” 43-76.
46
Meyers, “Religious Brotherhoods in Latin America,” 2.
47
Ruth Pike, Aristocrats and Traders: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press), 188.
48
Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom, 129-30.
49
Patricia A. Mulvey and Barry A. Crouch, “Black Solidarity: A Comparative Perspective on Slave
Sodalities in Latin America,” in Manipulating the Saints: Religious Brotherhoods and Social Integration in
Postconquest Latin America, eds. Albert Meyers and Diane Elizabeth Hopkins (Hamburg: Wayasbah,
1988), 51-65 (quotation from 52). For Brazil, see Julita Scarano, “Black Brotherhoods: Integration or
Contradiction?” Luso-Brazilian Review 16, 1 (Summer 1979), 1-17; Patricia A. Mulvey, “Black Brothers
and Sisters: Membership in the Black Lay Brotherhoods of Colonial Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review 17, 2
(Winter, 1980): 253-279; Patricia A. Mulvey, “Slave Confraternities in Brazil: Their Role in Colonial
Society,” The Americas 39, 1 (Jul 1982): 39-68; Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in
Colonial Brazil, 128-160.
45
Harland-Jacobs - 14
But much remains to be done. For example, how did “Atlantic creoles” use
religious brotherhoods to their advantage? According to Ira Berlin, Atlantic creoles were
men of mixed African and European lineage who played a crucial brokerage role in the
port towns of the Atlantic littorals. They displayed linguistic dexterity, intimate
knowledge of both African and European societies, and great familiarity with Atlantic
commerce. Berlin mentions that as Atlantic creole communities became established in
port towns throughout the southern Atlantic, their network of religious brotherhoods
became intercontinental in scope and provided them with access to support and
fellowship almost anywhere they went. But his treatment of this topic stops there.50
Given the striking parallels with the world of freemasonry, a broader and more detailed
analysis – under the rubric of Atlantic fraternalism— is certainly called for.
Even though, as noted earlier, the Jesuits were profoundly global, the Atlantic
remains a useful framework for analyzing their organization and activities. Indeed,
Bailyn argues that while Jesuit activities did take them across the Indian Ocean and into
Asia, the movement’s center of gravity was in the Atlantic.51 A recent study of Jesuit
activities in the early modern Atlantic reveals a vast administrative network of
procurators, managers hired by the order to oversee its properties, keep records, and serve
as intermediaries between the society and the state. ‘Along the system’s many
intersecting lines of transnational, pan-Atlantic communication,’ writes J. Gabriel
Martinez-Serna, ‘flowed orders, requests, reports, funds, goods, equipment, books, and
people.’52 The success of this administrative network allowed Jesuit missionaries to
apply their particular conceptions of Christian brotherhood widely and, in some cases,
deeply to communities of native Americans from New France to Patagonia.
Only through Atlantic history can we get at the full scope and significance of
another fraternal organization – the Orange Order – an ultra-Protestant political fraternity
that emerged in Ireland in 1790s. The Orangemen named their brotherhood in honor and
memory of William of Orange who took the British throne from the Catholic Stuart
monarch, James II, in 1688. Unnerved by the radicalism infecting Irish politics at the end
of the eighteenth century, Protestants who joined the Orange Order summoned the
memory and symbol of their community’s seventeenth-century deliverer and pledged
themselves to maintaining Ireland's political connection to Britain. They created a lodgebased organization modeled on the freemasons, engaged in rituals and parades, developed
an elaborate symbolism, and practiced mutual aid. The Orange Order was among the
first in a long line of Irish organizations that adopted a fraternal form to pursue
simultaneously political, social, and religious objectives.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Orange Order crossed the
Atlantic and took root in British North America. Successive waves of Irish migration
strengthened and spread the brotherhood in Canada; it connected men, institutionally,
ideologically, and even emotionally, to a community that spanned the vast ocean. By the
50
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap, 1998), 28.
51
Bailyn, “Reflections,” 22-24.
52
J. Gabriel Martinez-Serna, “Procurators and the Making of the Jesuits’ Atlantic Network” in Soundings
in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830, eds. Bernard Bailyn and
Patricia Denault (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009); Bailyn, “Reflections,” 17.
Harland-Jacobs - 15
end of the century, there were more Orangemen in Canada than in Ireland itself.53 Using
an Atlantic approach allows us not only to see how the fraternity became a connective
force, but also how it fared differently in different parts of the British Atlantic world.54
In sum, studying such brotherhoods from an Atlantic perspective enables us to see
how fraternalism connected people across vast distances, helped them negotiate life in
various Atlantic empires, and encouraged them to adopt particular identities. Whether
looking at the Jesuits’ Atlantic hub, the Atlantic dimensions of early modern cofradía or
freemasonry during the age of revolution, or the adaptations of a peculiarly Irish
brotherhood in different parts of the North Atlantic world, the ocean rather than the
nation is the appropriate unit of analysis.
Transnational
In addition to world history and Atlantic history, transnational history has much to
offer scholars of Freemasonry and other global brotherhoods. For some practitioners,
transnational history differs little from world history, as I have described it here. That is,
they are concerned with ‘movements or ideas or conditions that cross national borders
and that are not best examined through the structure of the nation-state.’55 Other
practitioners of transnational history, as its name implies, preserve the nation as a vital
category of analysis while situating it within broader analytical frameworks. As it
examines encounters and exchanges and traces how distant places became entangled,
transnational history is more explicitly comparative than world history.56 In either
variation, transnational history is concerned ‘with movements, flows, and circulation, not
simply as a theme or motif but as an analytic set of methods which defines the endeavor
itself.’57
Historians of fraternalism are very lucky to have some key precedents for this
kind of study in the historiography of freemasonry. One example is William
Weisberger's comparative study of freemasonry in eighteenth-century London, Paris,
Prague, and Vienna. Synthesizing sources on these four urban contexts, Weisberger
argues that ‘the institutional operations of Masonic lodges were important to the cultural
and social life of major cities in eighteenth- century Europe and that the cultural functions
of many Masons were involved with the promotion of the ideas of the Enlightenment.’58
53
Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links,
Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 187.
54
I develop this argument in "'Maintaining the Connexion': Orangeism in the British North Atlantic World,
1795-1844," Atlantic Studies 5, 1 (April 2008): 29-51. As I indicate in the conclusion, however, studies of
the Orange Order in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries would do better to adopt a world history
approach, given that the Order had spread to Australia, New Zealand, and even Africa by then.
55
“History Beyond the Nation-State,” Inside Higher Ed,
www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/05/transnational [accessed 13 November 2010]. See also the
special issue of the Journal of American History ‘The Nation and Beyond’ 86, 3 (December 1999) and
Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Houndsmill: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).
56
In "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," Armitage similarly describes ‘trans-Atlantic history’ as
‘international’ history, as ‘the history of the Atlantic world told through comparisons.’
57
C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wend Kozol, and Patricia Seed, "AHR
Conversation: On Transnational History," American Historical Review 111, 5 (December 2006), 1440-64.
58
William Weisberger, Speculative Freemasonry and the Enlightenment: A Study of the Craft in London,
Paris, Prague, and Vienna (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 9. While it is framed as a
Harland-Jacobs - 16
There is also the impressive and hugely important work of Margaret C. Jacob, which
traces connections and draws comparisons between British, French, and Dutch
freemasonry.59 For over 20 years, Jacob has been at the vanguard of scholars’ efforts
both to take freemasonry seriously as a topic of academic investigation and to
conceptualize and examine freemasonry as a transnational brotherhood. Few scholars
have followed her lead. Finally, I would place Mary Ann Clawson's Constructing
Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism in the category of pioneering, broadly
conceived, comparative studies of fraternalism. Her work is as attuned to fraternalism in
Europe as the United States. What makes this possible is her focus on gender rather than
nation as her central unit of analysis.
Transnational history is an ideal approach for historians of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century fraternalism. The methodology's continued emphasis on the nation
state makes it appropriate for studying periods when fraternal organizations were clearly
ensconced in discrete national contexts. Its emphasis on comparison allows us to explore
how the same fraternal organization could take on different forms in different countries
(by examining ritual, for example). But transnational history’s commitment to
connections, flows, and exchanges also allows us to attend to the transnational
dimensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fraternities – the global circulation of
fraternal correspondence and periodicals, the exchange of grand lodge representatives,
the practice of visiting lodges while traveling abroad, and the extension of mutual
assistance across international borders. Also of interest is how fraternalism intertwined
with supra-national ideologies such as Christianity and imperialism.
Although it created a fascinating fraternal world that spanned the Atlantic (and,
eventually, the world), the Order of Odd Fellows has received very little attention from
any historians, let alone those adopting transnational approaches.60 The Odd Fellows
were solidly established in London by the mid-eighteenth century. It was both a social
and a benefit fraternity (and ultimately a friendly society) whose members paid dues, held
meetings in taverns, conducted rituals, and provided mutual assistance. By 1813, the
center of Odd Fellow activity had shifted to Manchester with the founding of the
Independent Order of Oddfellows, Manchester Unity. Unlike freemasonry, the order
emerged in North America after the founding of the United States, in the 1810s. Early on,
lodges operated in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Thomas Wildey, a British
immigrant, is credited with establishing the first formally chartered lodge in Baltimore in
1819. Only two years later, a grand lodge emerged, also in Baltimore, and in 1825 a
Grand Lodge of Odd Fellows of the United States came into being. These and
comparative study, the book could do more in terms of comparative analysis -- each chapter functions as a
kind of stand-alone study. That said, Weisberger has done much to combat the parochialism of Masonic
historiography. He was the moving spirit behind and editor of Freemasonry on Both Sides of the Atlantic,
and he is to be commended for getting scholars of Freemasonry in various national contexts to talk to each
other and publish together.
59
Weisberger, Speculative Freemasonry and the Enlightenment; Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood;
Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment (London: George, Allen, and Unwin, 1981) and Living the
Enlightenment.
60
Institutional histories include Don R. Smith and Wayne Roberts, The Three Link Fraternity: Odd
Fellowship in California (Linden, CA: Linden Publications, 1993); Peter Sellars, The History of the
Independent Order of Odd Fellows in the City of San Francisco: An Early Fraternal Organization (P.
Sellars, 2007) and Daniel Weinbren, The Oddfellows, 1810-2010, Two Hundred Years of Making Friends
and Helping People (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2010).
Harland-Jacobs - 17
subsequently founded grand lodges operated under Manchester Unity until 1843 when
the American Odd Fellows declared their independence. In 1861, there were 42 state
grand lodges and more than 200,000 members. 61 Meanwhile, the Odd Fellows began
taking root in Britain’s other settlement colonies into which migrants were pouring. Like
the freemasons, the Odd Fellows promote a cosmopolitan fraternalism. Their second
degree ‘teaches that brotherly love extends its helping hand to those who suffer,
regardless of race, creed or nationality’; one key symbol of the second degree is the globe,
‘which reminds us that we are citizens of the world, and suggests that Odd Fellows reach
out their helping hands throughout the world whenever and wherever possible.’62
At present, the historiography concerning the Order of Odd Fellows is in its
infancy, and it remains firmly based on the nation state.63 But the history of the order
lends itself to transnational investigation. One might examine the institutional
connections between the British and American orders as well as the different forms,
practices, and traditions that emerged in each context.64 Another intriguing possibility is
to study the role of Odd Fellow lodges in the continental expansion of nations with
comparative attention to the U. S., Canadian, and Australian contexts. Also in need of
close study is the history of black Odd Fellowship. Much like African-American
freemasons, black Odd Fellows in North America sought to establish their legitimacy by
maintaining close connections with Odd Fellows in England. They received a charter
from England and adopted the name, passwords, and rituals of the English order. Again
like black freemasons, they were excluded from the world of nineteenth-century white
brotherhoods. In fact, it was when black Odd Fellows received their charter from
England that the American Grand Lodge declared their independence from Manchester
Unity.
The Odd Fellows are but one example. All of the fraternal organizations
examined here, the freemasons, the Jesuits, the confradias, and the Orange Order (as well
as many others), should be subjected to transnational analysis. That is because while
each fraternity did establish a network that reached across an ocean basin or throughout
the world, it also took root in distinct colonial and national contexts. English and
Brazilian freemasons, for example, belonged to the same fraternal organization, but they
experienced freemasonry differently. One key difference was the freemason’s
involvement in politics—while Brazilian freemasons played a highly public and
instrumental role in Brazil’s independence movement during the 1820s, nineteenthcentury English freemasons proudly claimed their order took no part in politics. That
said, when we broaden our understanding of ‘political’ to include expressions of loyalty
61
Alvin J. Schmidt, Fraternal Organizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 342-45; Smith and
Roberts, The Three Link Fraternity, 5-10; “Order of Oddfellows,” Encyclopedia Britannica 14th edition
(NY: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1929-30).
62
Smith and Roberts, The Three Link Fraternity, 12-13.
63
Scholarly treatments are limited to Geoffrey Blainey, Odd Fellows: A History of the Independent Order
of Odd Fellows Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991); George Emery and J. C. Herbert Emery, A
Young Man’s Benefit: The Independent Order of Odd Fellows and Sickness Insurance in the United States
and Canada, 1860-1929 (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1998); and Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch,
Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum
Virginia (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010).
64
In 1826, Thomas Wildey, as head of the Grand Lodge of Odd Fellows of the United States, went to
England where he was “honored for having formally brought Odd Fellowship to the US.” Schmidt, 244.
Harland-Jacobs - 18
as well as acts of rebellion, it is clear that freemasons in both contexts were active
politically – just in different ways. A comparative discussion of freemasonry’s
relationship to politics, one that takes into account connections and comparisons, one that
is attuned to the global as well as the local, would elucidate many such complexities.
Conclusion
In a seminal chapter entitled ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History,’ David
Armitage breaks Atlantic history into three categories: circum, cis, and trans Atlantic
history. Circum-Atlantic history is ‘the history of the Atlantic as a particular zone of
exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission’; trans-Atlantic is ‘the history of
the Atlantic world told through comparisons’; cis-Atlantic is the study of ‘particular
places as unique locations within an Atlantic world… [that] seeks to define that
uniqueness as the result of the interaction between local particularity and a wider web of
connections (and comparisons).’ At the end of the chapter, after separately exploring each
approach and drawing on many illuminating examples to illustrate them, he posits that
they are mutually enforcing rather than exclusive. In other words, the best Atlantic
history would incorporate aspects of each. ‘Taken together, they offer the possibility of a
three-dimensional history of the Atlantic world.’65
We might make the same argument for the methods discussed here. By
combining the methods of world, Atlantic, and transnational history, and crosspollinating these macro historical approaches with more traditional nation-based
approaches, we will arrive at a multi-dimensional history of fraternalism. In the process,
we will shed light on both the history of various fraternal organizations and on broader
topics such as the history of empire, the nation state, ideas, race relations, gender, and
industrialization, to name a few.
Historians of fraternalism will, I hope, not only draw on the methods of macro
history, but also contribute to its development as a field. As Matt Connelly points out in
an AHR conversation on transnational history, non-governmental international
organizations and institutions have received much less attention from scholars of
transnational history than states and economies.66 Examinations of fraternalism can, I
submit, help fill this gap.
Selected References
Armitage, David. "Three Concepts of Atlantic History" in The British Atlantic World, eds.
Armitage and Michael Braddick (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 11-27.
Bailyn, Bernard. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005).
Bailyn, Bernard and Patricia Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent
Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830 (Boston: Harvard University Press,
2009).
65
66
Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," 16-23.
“AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” 1461-2.
Harland-Jacobs - 19
Bayly, C. A., Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wend Kozol, and
Patricia Seed, "AHR Conversation: On Transnational History," American Historical
Review 111, 5 (December 2006), 1440-64.
Burton, Antoinette, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Clawson, Mary Ann. Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)
Clossey, Luke. Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Elphick, Richard et al., World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 1998).
Games, Alison. "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities," American
Historical Review 111, 3 (June 2006): 741-757.
Harland-Jacobs, Jessica. Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of Chapel Hill Press, 2007).
----------, "'Maintaining the Connexion': Orangeism in the British North Atlantic World,
1795-1844," Atlantic Studies 5, 1 (April 2008): 29-51.
Jacob, Margaret C. Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenthcentury Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Manning, Patrick. Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New
York: Palgrave, 2003).
Meyers, Patricia A. and D. E. Hopkins, eds., Manipulating the Saints: Religious
Brotherhoods and Social Integration in Postconquest Latin America (Hamburg:
Wayasbah, 1988).
O’Malley, John W. ed., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773,
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
Sachsenmaier, Dominic. ‘World History as Ecumenical History?’ Journal of World
History 18, 4 (2007): 465-90.
Sesay, Chernoh. “Freemasons of Color: Prince Hall, Revolutionary Black Boston, and the
Origins of Black Freemasonry,” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2006).
Harland-Jacobs - 20
Skocpol, Theda, Ariane Laizos, and Marshall Ganz. What a Mighty Power We Can Be:
African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006).
Snoek, Jan, Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire and Natalie Bayer. “Trends in Scholarship,” Journal
for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism 1, 2 (2010): 225-262.
Terpstra, Nicholas. “De-institutionalizing Confraternity Studies: Fraternalism and Social
Capital in Cross-Cultural Contexts,” in Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the
Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Christopher Black and
Pamela Gravestock (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).
Walker, Corey. A Noble Fight: African-American Freemasonry and the Struggle for
Democracy in America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
Weisberger, William. Speculative Freemasonry and the Enlightenment: A Study of the
Craft in London, Paris, Prague, and Vienna (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993).
Weisberger, ed., Freemasonry on Both Sides of the Atlantic (Boulder: Eastern European
Monographs, 2002).