Mitchel Stuffers
Assistant Editor at CIGH Exeter & PhD Candidate in History, University of Exeter

From the recognition of Punjabi soldiers in WW1 to a revived Monroe Doctrine over Latin America, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

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Thousands of forgotten Punjabi WW1 soldiers recognised for first time

Aleem Maqbool
BBC

Thousands of forgotten soldiers from pre-partition India who served and died in World War One are finally being recognised in the biggest update to casualty records in more than 80 years. The names of 9,909 British Indian Army servicemen are now being added to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) casualty database after they were uncovered by researchers. UK volunteers spent years looking for the names in unique registers compiled in the state of Punjab shortly after WW1.

Work is now being done to trace British descendants of those whose sacrifice is now acknowledged. “The circle has closed. I feel much more complete,” says Sunney Palahey, a dentist from Leicester. For years he had been searching for information about his great-grandfather who he heard had gone to war and had never come back. But researchers contacted him to say his great-grandfather’s name, Kesar Singh, had been found in newly examined registers and that it would now be formally added to official lists. [Continue reading]

Syria, Iraq and US plan to unveil Mediterranean pipeline deal to bypass Strait of Hormuz

Sean Mathews & Ragip Soylu
Middle East Eye

Iraq, Syria and the US plan to revive a historic 500-mile pipeline to Syria’s Mediterranean coast as part of efforts to reduce Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, senior Iraqi and regional officials have told Middle East Eye. An agreement to revive the pipeline, originally running from the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk to Syria’s coastal town of Baniyas, is expected to be unveiled next week when Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi meets US President Donald Trump at the White House, the sources told MEE.

Tom Barrack, Trump’s ambassador to Turkey and envoy to Syria and Iraq, has been working on the details of the agreement before Zaidi’s visit, which is also expected to include a stop in Texas, the US’s energy hub state.  The senior Iraqi official told MEE that Barrack has developed a good working relationship with Zaidi and wants to use the pipeline as a model for business projects in the Levant that he has trumpeted as benefiting the US and local governments. [Continue reading]

Can we map The Odyssey? How ancient geographers and modern researchers have traced Odysseus’s travels

Pragya Agarwal
Conversation

Homer’s Odyssey is a quest, following King Odysseus’s ten-year journey back home to Ithaca after the Trojan war. It is a tale with distinct geographic, spatial and temporal dimensions. It is no wonder that for centuries, people have been intrigued by the places mentioned in the Odyssey, wondering how many of them were real. A few historians and classical scholars argue that the Odyssey is only poetry. As a work of art and pure mythology, they claim, there is no point looking for these places on a map.

The ancient Greek polymath Eratosthenes, who was the first person to measure the circumference of the Earth, disputed that the Odyssey had anything to do with geography. He said: “You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds.” I have researched the history of cartography and mental mapping for more than two decades. To me, the geographical elements of this story are what grounds it. [Continue reading]

Black women and their legacies of civil and human rights activism

Keisha Blain
Brookings

In 2016, Nigerian American activist Ayọ (formerly Opal) Tometi appeared before the United Nations to address state-sanctioned violence. Only three years prior, Tometi had joined forces with queer activists Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors to launch Black Lives Matter (BLM). What began as a hashtag on social media evolved into a protest movement that shook the nation to its core. BLM gained national and global attention after the 2014 police shooting of teenager Michael Brown Jr., in Ferguson, Missouri, when the world demanded justice for Brown’s family and unarmed Black people who were killed by police. By spring 2015, BLM marches and demonstrations began to sweep across European cities, including London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Within a few months, the movement boasted an estimated 26 chapters across the globe.  

As one of the founders of the movement, Tometi had been invited to offer remarks at the UN General Assembly in July 2016. To confront the persistent problems of structural racism and discrimination, the UN had organized a two-day meeting that brought together influential leaders from around the world. Tometi’s presence at the UN underscores BLM’s central role in shaping national and global narratives on human rights in the 21st century. [Continue reading]

Pentagon seeks to rally Latin America behind new Monroe Doctrine

Phil Stewart
Reuters

President ​Donald Trump’s administration sought on Wednesday to rally Latin American nations behind a revamped Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century policy ‌asserting U.S. primacy across the Americas that critics associate with decades of U.S. intervention. Invoking the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” — a play on Trump’s name — in the Peruvian city of Cusco, Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby explained a dramatic policy shift in which the U.S. military started striking drug boats in the fall and deposed Venezuelan ​president Nicolas Maduro in January.

The Pentagon is also planning to carry out joint counter-narcotics strikes with like-minded countries, a policy already ​underway in Ecuador. “No longer do we separate America’s defense strategy from the concerns of regular Americans – ⁠from the flood of lethal drugs into their communities and the accompanying horrendous violence, or from the impact of unchecked illegal migration ​into our nation,” Colby said, according to prepared remarks. [Continue reading]