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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. 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