Author: CIGH Exeter

The Imperial and Global Forum is the blog of the Centre for Imperial and Global History at the History Department, University of Exeter. The Centre brings together the strong research expertise of the University's eminent imperial historians. It comprises of one of the largest groups of imperial and global historians currently working in the UK. Our blog offers a dynamic exploration of imperial history. Please also visit our homepage at http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/research/centres/imperialandglobal/

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism – A New Talking Empire Podcast

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lenin-imperialism

V. I. Lenin penned and published his influential pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in the midst of the First World War. Building upon Marxist contemporaries like Hilferding and Bukharin as well as non-Marxist theorists like J. A. Hobson, Lenin’s pamphlet would quickly come to embody the orthodox Marxist critique concerning the relationship between modern capitalism and imperialism. In this Talking Empire podcast, Dr Marc-William Palen discusses Lenin’s Imperialism and its legacy with Professor Richard Toye.

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

battleofalgiers

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

From the end of war in the West to getting high with Hitler, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade – A Book Interview with Marc-William Palen

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Christienna Fryar
SUNY Buffalo State

Cross-posted from New Books in History

conspiracy of free trade coverAccounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of protectionist economic nationalism inspired by German-American economic theorist Friedrich List. The success of Listian protectionism spurred closed-door, aggressive US expansionism and also challenged free-trade orthodoxies in Britain, where political-economic policy also shifted toward protectionism by the end of the nineteenth century.

Listen to the interview here.

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter

fez-library

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

From how to be a global historian to toppling statues of Gandhi, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Podcast – ‘Brexit and food prices: the legacy of the Hungry Forties’

Published on by CIGH Exeter2 Comments

workhouseCross-posted from History & Policy’s Global Economics and History Forum

Plenty of attention is being paid to the political and constitutional effects of Brexit, but what will its economic impact be on life’s most basic commodities? How did food prices inform the debate in the weeks and months leading up to the referendum, and how have they informed debate in the past? How have the spectres of want and hunger been invoked over the last century and a half in political contexts, and are we paying them enough attention now?Screen Shot 2016-08-11 at 12.28.01 PM

Chaired by Dr Marc-William Palen (Exeter), four historians and policy makers debated these questions at King’s College London on 25 August 2016. Their combined expertise covered the period since the 1840s, the “Hungry Forties,” which live in political memory as the UK’s last serious sustained period of food poverty. The discussion, an initiative of History & Policy’s Global Economics & History Forum (@HandPGlobal) and sponsored by the Economic History Society and Imagining Markets, was aimed at policy makers and practitioners working in the area of food poverty and food security, and attendees came from the Food Standards Agency, the health sector, private consultancy and academia as well as interested members of the public. Continue reading “Podcast – ‘Brexit and food prices: the legacy of the Hungry Forties’” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter2 Comments
perrys-landing
Commodore Perry’s landing at Shimoda (Shizuoka), 1854

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

From censoring images of war to uncovering authoritarian internationalism, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Forum Interview – An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival

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african-volk

Dr. Jamie Miller’s new book, An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival (Oxford University Press, 2016), is an ambitious new international history of 1970s apartheid South Africa. In it, he makes sense of the many domestic and foreign political, economic, and ideological forces at work in South Africa at the time: decolonization and European imperialism; economic development and cultural globalization; nationalism and anti-communism; Afrikanerdom and African nationalism; white supremacy and postcolonial rights agendas; local politics and the Cold War in the global south. Based on newly declassified documents and oral histories in multiple languages on three continents, Miller gets inside the “official mind” of South Africa’s apartheid regime in Pretoria and uncovers the ways in which these myriad forces found their complements and contradictions.

Miller, having earned his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in November 2013, has been a Fox Predoctoral International Fellow at Yale University, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at both Cornell and Pittsburgh Universities. He has published articles in the Journal of African History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, and Cold War History. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books and the Imperial & Global Forum, among others. You can follow him on Twitter @JamieMiller85.

Here is the Forum interview with Dr. Jamie Miller. Continue reading “Forum Interview – An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival” →

Call for Applications: Global Humanitarianism Research Academy 2017

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Drs Fabian Klose, Johannes Paulmann, and Andrew Thompson are pleased to announce that the Call for Applications for the third Global Humanitarianism Research Academy (GHRA) 2017 is now open, with a deadline of 31 December 2016.

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Global Humanitarianism | Research Academy

International Research Academy on the History of Global Humanitarianism

Academy Leaders:   

Fabian Klose, Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz

Johannes Paulmann, Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz

Andrew Thompson, University of Exeter

in co-operation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (Geneva)

and with support by the German Historical Institute London

Venues:                     

Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz &

Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross Geneva

Dates:                         10-21 July 2017

Deadline:                    31 December 2016

Information at:          http://ghra.ieg-mainz.de/

ExeterIEGICRCghil

The international Global Humanitarianism | Research Academy (GHRA) offers research training to PhD candidates and early postdocs. It combines academic sessions at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz and the Imperial and Global History Centre at the University of Exeter with archival sessions at the Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. The Research Academy addresses early career researchers who are working in the related fields of humanitarianism, international humanitarian law, peace and conflict studies as well as human rights covering the period from the 18th to the 20th century. It supports scholarship on the ideas and practices of humanitarianism in the context of international, imperial and global history thus advancing our understanding of global governance in humanitarian crises of the present. Continue reading “Call for Applications: Global Humanitarianism Research Academy 2017” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
alice
The Mad Tea Party, 1885, Hand-colored proof. Morgan Library & Museum.

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

From imprisoning ‘bad’ historians to Alice in a world of wonderlands, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World

Published on by CIGH Exeter

Review of Taras Grescoe, Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World (St. Martin’s Press, June 2016; HarperCollins Canada, May 2016).

Nigel Collett
Cross-posted from Asian Review of Books

Shanghai GrandOf all human societies of which we have knowledge, Shanghai in the late 1930s perhaps comes closest to the sci-fi dystopias beloved of Hollywood, societies in which the gilded, sophisticated inhabitants of a fabulous city live surrounded but cut off from wasted badlands, served by an abject underclass living as far from the light of day as it does from the consciousness of its masters. For inside the self-policed boundaries of Shanghai’s International Settlement and its French Concession lay both one of the greatest concentrations of wealth on the face of the planet and some of the most sordid scenes of human misery.

The taipans of British, American, French, Japanese and other stock who controlled and owned the wealth of Shanghai lived hedonistic lives of truly decadent luxury. For the wealthy, life was sweet, as Noël Coward, who passed through in 1930 and wrote Private Lives while laid up with influenza in a suite in the Cathay Hotel, remembered. “I entered the social whirl of Shanghai with zest,” he wrote. Continue reading “Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
One of many maps portraying impending inter-imperialist apocalypse, via
One of many maps portraying impending inter-imperialist apocalypse, via Charnel- House.

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

From teaching indigenous studies to Hong Kong’s forgotten independence movement, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century

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Review of Johannes Paulmann (ed.) Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century. London: Oxford University Press, 2016. 460 pp. £75 (hardback), ISBN: 9780198778974

Ben Holmes
History Department, University of Exeter

Dilemmas HumanitarianismDilemmas of Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century (2016), edited by Johannes Paulmann (Director of the Leibniz Institute of European History and Professor of Modern History at the University of Mainz), exemplifies the burgeoning field of the history of humanitarianism. In providing historical context to a sector that is often stuck in the ‘perpetual present’, the volume shares a common purpose with a fast-growing body of literature.[1] Specifically, the volume examines 150 years of history to demonstrate that the technical and ethical crises central to modern humanitarianism – such as competition between aid organisations, the tendency of aid to ‘do more harm than good’, and the manipulation of aid by political actors – are not unique to the twenty first century. They have, in fact, ‘been inherent in humanitarian practice for more than a century’ [3].[2] Continue reading “Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid in the Twentieth Century” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
Copy of the Asian-African Conference Bulletin held at the Foreign Affairs Archives in Belgium. The Indonesian government produced a Bulletin on the Bandung Conference, intended to bolster its prestige, 1955.
Copy of the Asian-African Conference Bulletin held at the Foreign Affairs Archives in Belgium. The Indonesian government produced a Bulletin on the Bandung Conference, intended to bolster its prestige, 1955.

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

From Christian imperialism to 1945’s forgotten heroes of Paris, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America

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Adam Nadeau
University of New Brunswick

Review of Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. $45.00 (Cloth).

JacketJonathan Eacott’s Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600– 1830 (2016) reinforces two important historiographical points. One is that, contrary to David Armitage’s insistence that ‘the emergence of the concept of the “British Empire” . . . was long drawn out, and only achieved by the late seventeenth century at the earliest’,[1] the English polity that later incorporated the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland was consciously imperial as early as the late sixteenth century. The second is that Britain’s imperial efforts were, from the start, transoceanic in nature. On the latter point, Selling Empire breaks with the older historiographical trend of distinguishing between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ British Empire delineated by a late eighteenth-century ‘swing to the east’.[2] Instead, Eacott asks readers to consider ‘America the India’ as well as ‘India the place’, for it was the idea of India that ‘fostered, propelled, and supported English and British imperial expansion and power in America’ (1–3). Rather than ‘separate “worlds” of empire’, Eacott sees ‘the British empire in the world’ (7), an important shift in perspective that, along with other recent studies of the peripheries of Britain’s American empire,[3] will continue to push scholars of early modern British imperialism nearer towards contemporary interdisciplinary debates surrounding notions of indigeneity and the legacies of settler colonialism.[4] Continue reading “Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

elkins

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

From uncovering the brutal truth about the British Empire to the false economic promise of global governance, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →