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”→
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex sitting down with Oprah Winfrey on her prime time special.
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”→
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”→
“The Iraq Inquiry, London” by chrisjohnbeckett is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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 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.
Imperial & Global Forum 
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