Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
The Theosophical Society and Transnational Cultures of Print
Lori Lee Oates
Memorial University of Newfoundland
It has long been established by historians such as Christopher Bayly and scholars of post-colonialism such as Leela Gandhi that theosophy was an important nineteenth-century intellectual current. Bayly, for example, credits theosophy with diffusing the Bhavagad Gita throughout India and bringing it to the attention of the wider world. However, what has been less well-established is how those ideas were moving across international lines or the links between theosophy and empire.
My recently published article in The International History Review drew on new primary sources to demonstrate that the Theosophical Society was actively building print networks to expand and move their occult philosophies across the globe. The article paid closer attention to how theosophical texts were moving internationally than previous research. It also demonstrated how Theosophical Society leaders were using expanding imperial networks such as steam ships, telegraphs, and international banking to grow the society across the globe.
Continue reading “The Theosophical Society and Transnational Cultures of Print”Decolonising public health: India’s COVID crisis is a global one
Nandini Chatterjee, Dora Vargha, Rebecca Williams
University of Exeter
In a widely criticised interview with Sky News on 25 April 2021, the IT billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates Jr. responded to a question whether he supported sharing the ‘recipe’ of the Sars-COV-2 or Covid-19 vaccines with manufacturers worldwide, with an emphatic: ‘No.’ No, he said, because there ‘are only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines.’ Moving the production of a vaccine from Johnson and Johnson’s to a factory in India was already novel, he said, and could only happen because of ‘our grants and our expertise.’ Intellectual property was not holding back anything in this case, he said, because it wasn’t as if there were ‘idle vaccine factories with regulatory approvals, that make magically safe vaccines.’
It would appear from this account that most of the world was a place empty of funds and expertise, waiting for the largesse of saviours such as Bill Gates Jr. and appropriate guidance to be able to protect their own health in a scientific and safe way. Looking at the story of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine with some more attention, however, produces some rather more complicated stories.
On 23 November 2020, an Oxford University-based research team led by Dr Andrew Pollard declared a breakthrough in developing an effective vaccine against Covid-19. The team had been working furiously for months, backed with UK government funding and public donations. Oxford University then announced a permissive protocol for licensing COVID-19 related IP to third parties under ‘these exceptional circumstances.’ Of the 5 points of guidance offered to organisations seeking licences to use Oxford University’s IP (or recipe for vaccine), one was: ‘The default approach of the University and OUI regarding (1) will be to offer non-exclusive, royalty-free licences to support free of charge, at-cost or cost + limited margin supply as appropriate, and only for the duration of the pandemic, as defined by the WHO.’
Such an approach is not unprecedented. In the 1950s polio epidemics swept through the globe, and in the midst of outbreaks two rivaling vaccines were developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, both without patent. When asked about this, Jonas Salk famously remarked ‘Would you patent the sun?’. It seems that the decision for the Salk vaccines lack of patent might have been a practical one, as it would not have been possible by contemporary standards, regardless of Salk’s moral stance. Sabin’s decision was an openly political one: the vaccine was a result of international collaboration between researchers of the two opposing sides of the Cold War, and this scientific exchange was greatly celebrated at the time. Of course, Gates is right that a lack of patent doesn’t automatically mean immediate access and capability of vaccine production everywhere in the world. It took years for many countries, in war-ravaged European states, up to half a decade to establish infrastructure, skill and procure materials (including live animals) for domestic vaccine productions of the Salk vaccine. However, many others had the capability, while standards of production were developed by the WHO, and this, in the end, dampened the dire global vaccine shortage in both the short and long run. More importantly, the lack of patent did not hinder national or global vaccination efforts.
Continue reading “Decolonising public health: India’s COVID crisis is a global one”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From opening secret Northern Ireland files to undoing the myth of Australia’s peaceful settlement, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From rugby’s victims of Argentina’s dirty war to the search for Chinese survivors of the Titanic, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Parliamentary Empire: British Democracy and Settler Colonialism, c.1867-1939
David Thackeray (Exeter) and Amanda Behm (York) have been awarded a Research Project Grant by the Leverhulme Trust for their project ‘Parliamentary Empire: British Democracy and Settler Colonialism, c.1867-1939’, which will run from 2021-24. We will shortly be advertising two funded PhD studentships and will be holding a conference at Westminster, which is planned to lead to a special issue of Parliamentary History. The project team are interested from hearing from colleagues working on topics in this field.
Our project examines the role of parliament and the parliamentary idea in civic life in the UK and the British settler colonial world. While we might take for granted constitutional history as the bedrock of historical and civic education across imperial countries from the mid-nineteenth century until 1945, our project proposes a more daunting problem. At the heart of constitutional history lay a reverence for parliament, which found its most celebrated expression in Walter Bagehot’s 1867 description of the Commons as a ‘mirror’ of the British nation, expressing the popular will, educating the people politically, hearing grievances, and legislating.
Yet for all its studied neutrality, parliamentarianism emerged and remained as a cipher at the heart of British imperial politics. In that ‘golden age’ of constitutional history writing, there simmered widespread anxieties about the ability of parliament to mediate the body politic while confronting questions of an expanding electorate and votes for women. Equally significant was the ferment pitting settler colonial groups against the legislative and moral claims of their fellow imperial subjects across a vast transoceanic space.
By exploring how a range of constituencies through and beyond the settler colonies appealed to values of British parliamentarianism, we shed new light on the connected debates about democratic governance and political inclusion that characterised the emergence of nations within a fractious British Empire. The late nineteenth century witnessed a flourishing of local parliaments, parliamentary debating societies, petitions to parliament, and women’s parliaments. This culture was not confined to ‘overseas’ Britons and masculine settler colonists. Maori parliamentary movements, in particular, indicate how indigenous peoples could adopt and adapt the practices of British parliamentary culture to seek redress and assert notions of sovereignty. Women’s mock parliaments, which spread across Britain and the settler colonies, satirised transimperial parliamentary culture and highlighted women’s exclusion from national bodies.
We look forward to exploring how being ‘parliamentary’ was central to diverse claimants’ appeals for political inclusion and authority as they contested ‘British’ values and appealed particularly to those supposedly on the fringes of the political nation, such as working men, women, indigenous peoples, and foreign and intra-imperial migrants. Our focus is on how ideas of ‘British’ parliamentarianism were performedand contested: how some forms of popular parliamentarianism such as debating societies could promote reverence for the Westminster model while others rejected parliament as an adequate ‘mirror’ of nation and empire. These challenges to, and alternative models of, parliament’s role in public life shine new light on the transnational flow of ideas and networks which continue to connect and divide the British Empire through its tumultuous redrawing.
Continue reading “Parliamentary Empire: British Democracy and Settler Colonialism, c.1867-1939”
Decolonizing History, Provincializing Europe
Sumit Guha
University of Texas at Austin
The West is a world region that has often presented itself as the crucible of modern historical practice. It has claimed possession a continuous tradition of rational inquiry from Thucydides and Suetonius to Hume and Mommsen. Colonial rule then imposed faith in this genealogy upon imperial subjects world-wide.
I argue that a decolonial history has to provincialize Europe itself (as Dipesh Chakrabarti said twenty years ago). But to provincialize the West is not to deny its existence. Rather we should re-situate Western protocols of history in a comparative frame and investigate the actual working of collective memory there, past and present. Continue reading “Decolonizing History, Provincializing Europe”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From Berlin’s plan to return Benin statues to trouble at the V&A, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Meghan Markle and the Colonial Roots of Tabloid Media
Lori Lee Oates
Memorial University of Newfoundland
The tabloid press in the United Kingdom was on the receiving end of serious allegations of racism from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on 7 March 2021. This occurred after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sat down with Oprah Winfrey to discuss the exit from their royal roles in January 2020. Women Members of Parliament had previously signed an open letter condemning the “colonial undertones” of the media coverage of Markle in October of 2019.
And yet many remain unaware of the extent to which today’s tabloid media was forged by the British political class to control and distribute colonial narratives, particularly during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. This has, of course, been well documented by scholars such as Simon Potter in News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System (2003) and Chandrika Kaul in Reporting the Raj (2004). Gauri Viswanathan has also demonstrated how the education system and English literature was used as a tool of imperial control in Masks of Conquest (2014). Such work highlights the longstanding desire of colonial powers to control narratives about empire, the colonies, and the relationships between Indigenous citizens and colonial settlers. Continue reading “Meghan Markle and the Colonial Roots of Tabloid Media”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From the Spanish electrician who sabotaged the Nazis to the remarkable influence of Walter LaFeber, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From the socialist origins of International Women’s Day to Hong Kong in the neoliberal imagination, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Recovering the Socialist Free-Trade Tradition
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
[The following has been adapted from Marc-William Palen, “Marx and Manchester: The Evolution of the Socialist Internationalist Free-Trade Tradition, c1846-1946,” International History Review 43 (March 2021): 381-398.]
Free trade, or Freihandel, was a hot-button issue at the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) Congress held in Stuttgart in 1898, most notably because of the policy’s numerous advocates. SPD leader Karl Kautsky kicked things off with a resolution denouncing protectionism for counteracting ‘international solidarity.’ Luise Zietz, a German feminist and head of the SPD women’s movement, seconded Kautsky’s call: ‘We have to adopt a principled stance, and that is in favor of free trade and against protective tariffs.’ August Bebel, SPD chairman and longtime pacifist, followed up on Kautsky and Zietz’s free-trade endorsements, and the congress adopted a qualified resolution along these lines. Free trade would receive an even stronger SPD endorsement in 1900 because ‘free international exchange is . . . before all, a working-class question,’ German Marxist revisionist Eduard Bernstein explained in a subsequent letter to London’s 1908 International Free Trade Congress.[1] Their efforts were part of a rich socialist free-trade tradition that began germinating when Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx migrated to Britain in the 1840s, just as the island-nation was embracing free trade as both policy and ideology. The same British free-trade embrace was also giving rise at this time to the Manchester School (Manchester liberalism, Cobdenism), an economic ideology that tied international trade liberalization together with cheap food, democratization, anti-imperialism, and peace – a cosmopolitan concoction that socialist internationalists increasingly imbibed by the turn of the century.[2]
Recovering the free-trade dimensions of socialist internationalism, and the pacific influence of Britain’s Manchester School upon it, upends the commonly held assumption that socialists the world over have supported nationalism and protectionism amid their collectivist opposition to free-market capitalism.[3] Doing so also provides a much-needed prehistory to the growing body of literature on ‘socialist globalization’. This scholarship has focused primarily on socialist attempts to deepen regional and global interdependence through market integration and supranational governance amid the Manichean ideological divide of the Cold War.[4] By contrast, earlier attempts have received far less attention, and the role of free trade within the socialist internationalist tradition less still. As a partial corrective, this article traces the evolution of socialist internationalist support for free trade across the century before the Cold War, wherein the cosmopolitan subscription to free trade increasingly made strange bedfellows among those capitalists and socialists seeking a more interdependent and peaceful world order. Continue reading “Recovering the Socialist Free-Trade Tradition”
CFP: State-Led Inquiries as Political Devices: Lessons Learned and Lost from British Interventions, 1853 to the Present Day
9th September 2021
We invite proposals for an interdisciplinary one-day virtual workshop hosted by the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict (CHVC) and the Leverhulme-funded Warnings from the Archive project at the University of Exeter. This workshop reflects a renewed interest in research into processes and politics of truth-telling and lesson-learning in the wake of state-sponsored violence, intervention, and transgression. The focus of the workshop will be on the political conditions and cultural norms that determine the composition and scope of inquiries and lesson-learning. Rather than treating inquiries as objective vessels of knowledge, we approach them as political devices. Our interests are in how contingent processes of investigation shape elite and popular understandings of the history and character of British military operations from the Crimean War to the present day.
The outcome of this workshop will be a special issue with a top-tier interdisciplinary journal for History, Politics and International Relations with a target publication date of 2023. Continue reading “CFP: State-Led Inquiries as Political Devices: Lessons Learned and Lost from British Interventions, 1853 to the Present Day”
Book Launch event for The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People (March 11)
“The People in Times of Crisis: Past and Present: Book Launch event for The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People”
About this Event
Convened by Prof. Julie Gottlieb (University of Sheffield), Prof. Daniel Hucker (University of Nottingham) and Prof. Richard Toye (Exeter University), and chaired by Prof. Gaynor Johnson (University of Kent)
Please join us for this event when we will launch our new collaborative book The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People. The authors came together for a conference in 2018, the 80th anniversary of the signing of the highly controversial but pivotal Munich Agreement, a diplomatic event that was all-absorbing for people throughout Europe and beyond. The days, weeks, and months when the world was on the brink of another global conflict war were days of acute crisis, uncertainty, anxiety, and private and public suspense and nervousness. At this event we will come together to reflect on the Munich Crisis in light of the current global crisis, hearing unmistakable resonances, drawing some parallels, as well as thinking about how the ‘People’s Crisis’ of 1938 differed in important ways from the all-consuming global pandemic today.
This event will be chaired by Prof. Gaynor Johnson, with short presentations by the editors, and Q&A with the contributors.
Date And Time
Thu, 11 March 2021
17:00 – 18:30 GMT
Click here to register
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
