Academic Essays

While scholarly in tone, the writings posted below are intended for educated readers in general, not specialists. Fair warning, though: the fourth one, “Stirring Words,” is somewhat heavier sledding.

Since they date from before 2010, when I changed my surname to Brunette, these essays and articles bear my former name, Peter Rogers.
A Term Paper
The first essay, “Plantation Slavery—Industrial Revolution: Historical Foundations of Progress, Modernity, and Liberalism,” was written for an undergraduate history course at Simon Fraser University. It argues that the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the essential precondition of the triumph of a liberal ideology celebrating freedom and progress, had a precondition of its own. It was possible only within the context of colonial oppression and plantation slavery in the New World. In short, the liberty of some was predicated on the bondage of others.
My Master’s Thesis
The second essay, Indians and Indianism in Revolutionary Mexico, was my master’s thesis in History at the University of British Columbia. Here my aim is to demonstrate that the revolution of 1910–1920 wasn’t just a struggle for Mexico’s independence from Spain. For indigenous people in the countryside, especially the Nahua insurgents who fought under the leadership of Emiliano Zapata, it was also a struggle for political and cultural autonomy; or, in other words, for independence from Mexico’s homegrown ruling class.
My Essay in Working Papers
“Mexico’s Virgin, Peru’s Utopia: An Essay in Comparative Ethnohistory” was published in 1996 in Working Papers (no. 4), the journal of the Department of Latin American Studies at Simon Fraser University. This essay begins by comparing the relative political stability Mexico has enjoyed since 1920 with the violence and recurrent crises that have meanwhile plagued Peru. Why, it asks, has the process of building a multiethnic state met with considerable success in the one country and dismal failure in the other? The answer, I argue, must be sought in Latin America’s pre-Columbian past, in an equally sharp, but mirror-image contrast between the regimes that ruled the Aztec and Inca empires.
My Essay in Past Imperfect
The fourth essay is the one with the longest, most forbiddingly academic title: “Stirring Words, Ruling Ideas, and the Price of Bread: Considerations on a Gramscian-Thompsonian Approach to Cultural History.” Published in Past Imperfect (vol. 10, 2004), a University of Alberta journal for graduate students, this is a study in Marxist historiography. Specifically, it discusses Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony” and E. P. Thompson’s notion of “the moral economy of the poor” and shows how these ideas, taken together, can deepen our insight into the significance of historical events and processes.
Tags: Peter Brunette, essayist, essays, historian, history, ethnohistory, historiography