When we think of the period two centuries before our own, then as now it is global conflicts that dominate: the titanic Napoleonic struggles and our own nasty little scrap with England in the War of 1812.
Of course, we remember that Jane Austen was writing at this time, even if she seldom deigned to mention current events; and who can forget the early 19th century Empire style of dresses, which hearkened back to the simplicity of Ancient Greece and foretold the freer fashions of the 1920s?
But in recent decades, historiography has opened up our knowledge of the past by roaming far beyond the conventional confines of warfare and political economy and, in the process, uncovered terrific stories, such as the shameful and tragic tale of the hapless Sara Baartman.
A sensation in its time, the story of the so-called Hottentot Venus seems to us a terrible story of humiliation and degradation, a victimization that continued even after her death, far away from her birthplace in a desolate region of the Eastern Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa.
A member of a small indigenous tribe of herdsmen dubbed the Hottentots by Dutch colonists (but known today by their name Khoikhoi), Baartman was captured in the course of ongoing colonial warfare that effected a genocidal destruction of this peaceful people. Having been enslaved, she was taken to Europe by a member of the family that "owned" and exhibited her much as an exotic animal might be.
Sign of the times
Professors Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully of Emory University have done an excellent job not only of telling this rebarbative story but of putting it into the context of its time. This enables them to explain what permitted such an exhibition while at the same time viewing it through our (thankfully) more humane and enlightened lens.
1810 through '15, when this revolting scene was unfolding on the stages of London and Paris, was an odd time in the deplorable history of slavery. The slave trade in the British Empire had just ended in 1807, a year before the U.S. Constitution mandated the end of importing slaves, but the institution itself would not end in the empire until 1833.
Still, there was already sufficient abolitionist feeling in Britain for Baartman to have been brought before a court in London and examined in Dutch, a process that led to a determination that she was a voluntary participant in what was happening to her and that she was receiving a share of the profits from the enterprise.
