Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

From the Cold War trap to the Jamaican roots of the British industrial revolution, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

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The Cold War Trap

Justin Winokur
Foreign Policy

When U.S. policymakers and commentators need guidance, they habitually turn to the Cold War. They mine its events for lessons, consult its characters for advice, and compare its features to the present. Cold War history sets the terms of debate over the United States’ approach to the world. U.S. President Joe Biden’s recent assertion that there “need not be a new Cold War” with China is only the highest-profile example of an analytic reflex that grips the entire foreign policy community.

This Cold War compulsion hinders more than it helps. The incongruence between today’s realities and the history of the Cold War has stunted the search for a new American strategy. For roughly 80 years, U.S. policy has been predicated on the country’s preponderance of economic, military, technological, and political strength. This dominance allowed the United States to seek the unconditional surrender of the overstretched Axis powers in World War II, the containment of a rising but war-ruined Soviet Union, and regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, most analysts agree that the United States’ declining share of global GDP, narrowing military advantages, decreasing technological supremacy, and waning diplomatic influence mean that Washington will soon face a multipolar world for the first time since World War II. Yet Americans remain captured by ideas from a vanishing era when their power reigned supreme. [continue reading]

Archaeologists dig for children who died at Nebraska Native American boarding school

Associated Press
Guardian

Archaeologists have started digging for the remains of children who died at a Native American boarding school in Nebraska. Grave sites of dozens of children who died at the Genoa Indian industrial school have been lost for decades, a mystery that archaeologists aim to unravel as they dig in a field that a century ago was part of the sprawling campus.

Genoa was part of a national system of more than 400 Native American boarding schools that separated Indigenous children from their families and cut them off from their heritage. [continue reading]

Africa for Africans

Frank Gerits
Africa is a Country

On the night of March 6, 1957, as Kwame Nkrumah was wiping away tears, he declared the former British colony of the Gold Coast, renamed Ghana, independent. The Ghanaian prime minister proclaimed that “From now on there is a new African in the world … ready to fight its own battles and to show that after all, the black man is capable of managing his own affairs.” According to Nkrumah, the “African Personality”—a confident, independently-minded African—had to be promoted if the African version of modernity was to have any impact. Nkrumah’s words, however (like the declarations and ideas of other postcolonial leaders) have often been labeled as inconsequential, obscure, and utopian. Instead, leaders of newly independent states in Africa and Asia in the 1950s were seen as forging fragile alliances with each other out of fear of being crushed by declining empires or ascending Cold War superpowers. They maximized their interests within a bipolar world by playing off the Soviet Union and the US against each other.

It is clear that our thinking about international relations still suffers from a myopic focus on Europe and the Cold War. Since 1945, Washington and Moscow have had their own spheres of influence in Eastern and Western Europe and have sought to carve up the rest of the globe. What is absent in those narratives, however, is the centrality of ideology and worldviews in the formation of those poles, something historians have picked up on. [continue reading]

Portraiture and Colonial Plunder

Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth
Verso

In the years before the French Revolution, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) fashioned a remarkable career in portraiture, a craft dominated by men. She did so by applying her considerable talent to the depiction of beauty and status in pre-revolutionary France, cultivating connections at the court of King Louis XVI, and occasionally taking calculated artistic risks. In 1783, for example, she painted Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, in a simple cotton dress, scandalizing critics accustomed to high royal fashion. Four years later, “persons of taste” throughout Paris howled in protest when Vigée Le Brun’s smiling self-portrait broke with convention by showing her teeth.

Vigée Le Brun’s 1784 portrait of Joseph Hyacinthe François-de-Paule de Rigaud, comte de Vaudreuil (hereafter “the Count”)—which was acquired by The Huntington with support from The Ahmanson Foundation in 2022—took no such chances. Vigée Le Brun’s most important patron aside from the queen, the Count sat for the painting upon receiving membership in the Order of the Holy Spirit, among the most venerable and exclusive institutions of the French monarchy, from Louis XVI himself. Vigée Le Brun’s brushstrokes—creating a range of elements from a powdered wig to a sumptuous coat and a ceremonial sword—reveal a man with no shortage of money, cachet, and self-assurance born of male authority, aristocratic rank, and powerful friends at Versailles. [continue reading]

Industrial Revolution iron method ‘was taken from Jamaica by Briton’

Hannah Devlin
Guardian

An innovation that propelled Britain to become the world’s leading iron exporter during the Industrial Revolution was appropriated from an 18th-century Jamaican foundry, historical records suggest. The Cort process, which allowed wrought iron to be mass-produced from scrap iron for the first time, has long been attributed to the British financier turned ironmaster Henry Cort. It helped launch Britain as an economic superpower and transformed the face of the country with “iron palaces”, including Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens’ Temperate House and the arches at St Pancras train station.

Now, an analysis of correspondence, shipping records and contemporary newspaper reports reveals the innovation was first developed by 76 black Jamaican metallurgists at an ironworks near Morant Bay, Jamaica. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from west and central Africa, which had thriving iron-working industries at the time. [continue reading]