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/

Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance

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lester book cover

Alan Lester, Fae Dussart. Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. x + 283pp. £65, US$99.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781107007833.

Reviewed by Richard Batten (University of Exeter)
Follow on Twitter @Richard_Batten

Through the early to mid-nineteenth century, the suffering of Aboriginal populations that resulted from violent settler colonization would provide the impetus for some individuals to endeavour to reconcile colonialism with ‘humanitarianism’. The endeavours that represented the project of ‘humane’ colonial governance towards indigenous peoples, like the Aborigines of Australia and the Māori of New Zealand, are the subject of this ambitious and important monograph. Published as part of the Cambridge University Press Critical Perspectives on Empire series, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance explores how British colonial actors such as missionaries and governors attempted to reform colonial rule through the integration of ‘humanitarian’ aims into various colonial government initiatives. The authors, Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, suggest that humanitarian governance – the administration and regulation of colonial societies through a range of ‘humane’ approaches – became a key imperative in the mission to spread ‘Civilization’ across the British Empire. Continue reading “Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance” →

CFP: Empire and Humanitarianism, 13 and 14 June 2016, The University of Exeter

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U of exeter image (1)

Gareth Curless
University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @IGHN_Exeter

20140422113135-Core ID_204_mediumThe Imperial and Global History Network’s second conference will take place at the University of Exeter in June 2016. The theme of the conference will be ‘Empire and Humanitarianism’ and we’re delighted to announce that Professor Matthew Hilton (University of Birmingham) and Dr Emily Baughan (University of Bristol) will be delivering the keynote lectures.

As with our first conference in 2014, we’re particularly keen to have submissions from PhD students and early career researchers but proposals from more established historians are welcome too. A selection of papers from the first conference are scheduled to appear in the Journal of World History in 2016 and we anticipate that our second conference will result in a special issue or edited collection.  Continue reading “CFP: Empire and Humanitarianism, 13 and 14 June 2016, The University of Exeter” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean (catalogue reference: FCO 158/6)
Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean (catalogue reference: FCO 158/6). National Archives.

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

From the Enlightenment’s decolonial future to debating the new history of capitalism, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

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

CFP: CON-IH 16 || Global and International History: The Economic Dimension

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harvard history

The organizing committee for the Harvard Graduate Student Conference on International History (Con-IH) invites graduate students to submit proposals for its sixteenth annual conference. This year’s theme is the economic dimension in international and global history. The conference will take place at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Thursday March 10 & Friday March 11, 2016.

Financial, economic and political-economy issues have played a fundamental role in world development and continue to do so. They involve multiple agents besides the nation state; they prompt refined policy analysis; and they challenge historians to turn to the broadest range of sources and demand interdisciplinary analysis. Con-IH 16 seeks to discuss cutting-edge studies that take up the dimensions of economics in international, regional, and global historical study, for any era from Antiquity to the present, and proceeding outward from any world region.

We especially welcome submissions that address one or more of the following themes, but the list is suggestive only: Continue reading “CFP: CON-IH 16 || Global and International History: The Economic Dimension” →

Ruling the Waves – Episode 5 – ‘The White Man’s Burden’

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Udo J. Keppler, "From the Cape to Cairo," Puck Magazine, 10 December 1902. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Udo J. Keppler, “From the Cape to Cairo,” Puck Magazine, 10 December 1902. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Stefan Piotrowski
Against the Current Productions

Historians – filmmakers, too – should always be careful about sweeping all particulars into a grand overarching narrative. Attitudes to race are a case in point. They are always complex, at both an individual and a societal level, but there does seem to be evidence from the historical record that over the course of the nineteenth century there is what we might describe as a hardening of opinions over questions of race.

At just over 10 minutes long, this episode cannot do justice to the complexity of the subject or the tremendous amount of research on the subject. In this introduction, I wanted to raise some points that hadn’t been properly addressed in the film or had only been touched on briefly. For that reason you may want watch it first and then read what I have written below. Continue reading “Ruling the Waves – Episode 5 – ‘The White Man’s Burden’” →

How Uruguay Helped Spark a Global Financial Crisis in 1890

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Races organized by the Montevideo Rowing Club in Montevideo Bay. The Hotel Nacional, in the background, was one of the greatest schemes of the National Company of Credit and Public Works. Victim of the 1890 crisis, the building was never operational, and the French manager stayed some years in the empty hotel waiting for an inauguration that never happened.
Races organized by the Montevideo Rowing Club in Montevideo Bay, c. 1890. The Hotel Nacional, in the background, was one of the greatest schemes of the National Company of Credit and Public Works. Victim of the 1890 crisis, the building was never operational, and the French manager stayed some years in the empty hotel waiting for an inauguration that never happened.

Alvaro Cuenca
Montevideo, Uruguay

Greece’s potential financial downfall and semi-colonial economic status monopolized the news this summer. Much ink has been spilled on the apocalyptic consequences the crisis might yet hold for European Union finances and for the global monetary system. However, much less is known of a similar situation that happened more than a hundred years before in Uruguay, the effects of which would also reverberate across the Atlantic to shake the very foundations of the global financial world. Continue reading “How Uruguay Helped Spark a Global Financial Crisis in 1890” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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From the Intercept
From the Intercept.

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

From inside Iran’s revolutionary courts to today’s secret Scramble for Africa, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Ruling the Waves – Episode 4 – ‘Greater Britain’

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Greater Britain exhibition

Stefan Piotrowski
Against the Current Productions

Communications technologies have played a sizable role in the shaping of political communities – national and otherwise. Not only had the invention of the telegraph brought about an immediacy in communication with far flung parts of the globe, this so-called collapse of space and time had also – in some minds – opened up the possibility for the creation of a new trans-national British state. By the second half of the nineteenth century, individuals within Britain’s political elite had begun to try to come to terms with the Empire as some kind of conceptual whole.

These technological developments were accompanied by a more general shifting of attitudes towards Britain’s settler colonies. Whereas in the first half of the century these lands had been seen as places for criminals, the disgraced or destitute, from the 1850s and 60s they increasingly came to be seen in a more positive light, as extensions of a clearly superior British civilisation or even as better versions of a tired and degenerate motherland.

This second view of the settlement colonies – as places of improvement and transformation – captured the imaginations of those on both left and right. To socialists the development of democratic ideals in the southern hemisphere had the potential to renew Britain’s hierarchical and profoundly unequal political system. To conservatives the Empire could act as a safety value for industrial discontent and associated radicalism – emigration could transform an urban underclass into property owning settlers. Continue reading “Ruling the Waves – Episode 4 – ‘Greater Britain’” →

Developing a Postgraduate Research Career in the Humanities – FREE Webinar

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webinar

20140422113135-Core ID_204_mediumAre you thinking of beginning a postgraduate research career, but uncertain of how to begin? On 11 November at 16.00 GMT experts from the University of Exeter will be sharing their guidance and answering your questions about how to develop a successful Ph.D. application in the Humanities.

Themes to be covered include:

  • How do I know if a Ph.D. is for me? What are the qualities required and what career paths can it lead to?
  • What is distinctive about a UK Ph.D. in contrast with postgraduate study in other countries, and how does the supervision system operate?
  • What are the keys to a successful research proposal, and how do expectations differ across disciplines?
  • How can I identify a university with a strong research culture, and how should I go about locating and contacting prospective supervisors?
  • Once I have embarked on a Ph.D., what kinds of training and career guidance can I expect to receive?

Continue reading “Developing a Postgraduate Research Career in the Humanities – FREE Webinar” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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France_in_XXI_Century._Air_battle-1280x814-1074x683
“An Aerial Battle.” What France would look like in the year 2000. Jean-Marc Côté, c. 1900

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

From an imperial view of women’s suffrage to what people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Zanzibar’s Past, Tanzania’s Future: From the 1964 Revolution to the 2015 Elections

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A CUF supporter holds up a placard: 'A new constitution is necessary'.
A Civic United Front supporter (Zanzibar) holds up a placard: ‘A new constitution is necessary’.

George Roberts
University of Warwick
george.roberts@warwick.ac.uk

On Sunday, October 25th, Tanzania goes to the polls. This year’s parliamentary and presidential elections appear to be the most closely contested since multiparty democracy returned to the country in 1992. President Jakaya Kikwete will stand down after finishing the second of two five year terms in office. Kikwete’s Chama Cha Mapinduzi – ‘Party of the Revolution’, or CCM – now faces unprecedented competition from an increasingly self-confident opposition coalition. Much of the campaign has consisted of wars-of-words and the making of extravagant promises which any winner would find difficult keeping. Scrape beneath the mudslinging, however, and some central issues emerge. Among them is the question of Zanzibar – a problem rooted in the years of decolonisation in East Africa.

On 12 January 1964, the government of Zanzibar was overthrown in a violent revolution. The island archipelago, which lay a short distance off the coast of mainland Tanganyika, had become independent from Britain just a month beforehand. The ruling Sultan was forced into exile and a new regime under the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) took power. Zanzibar’s position at the centre of Indian Ocean trading networks had created a concentrated cosmopolitanism on the islands – a melting pot of competing identities and interests, which spilled over into bloodshed. In the aftermath of the revolution, thousands of Zanzibaris were killed in a wave of violence grounded in long-standing ethnoracial tensions on the islands.

Seen from beyond Zanzibar’s shores, however, the prevailing winds in 1964 were not the monsoon breeze of the spice trade, but the icier fronts of the Cold War. As Jonathon Glassman has shown, during the final years of colonial rule, known locally the zama za siasa (‘time of politics’), Zanzibari politics became superheated with the language of superpower rivalry, the American neoimperialist threat, and the revolutionary dictums of Marxism.[1] Though the revolution was not a communist seizure of power, it was given this veneer by the presence in the new regime of far-left politicians with connections to Beijing and Moscow. Afflicted by Cold War paranoia, Britain, the United States, and other Western states delayed recognising the new ASP government headed by Abeid Karume, fearing the emergence of a ‘Cuba in Africa’. This vacuum was exploited by China, the Soviet Union, and East Germany, which showered Zanzibar with aid and entrenched their influence on the islands. Continue reading “Zanzibar’s Past, Tanzania’s Future: From the 1964 Revolution to the 2015 Elections” →

Ruling the Waves – Episode 3 – ‘The Workshop of The World’

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Great Exhibition

Stefan Piotrowski
Against the Current Productions

Featuring Andrew Thompson, Bernard Porter, and Stephen Howe, this film focuses on the curious absence of Empire – or what might be called an imperial perspective – in mid-Victorian Britain. The first part explores other powerful ideas of Britain that compete with and at times overshadow the idea of Britain as an imperial nation. The second examines the extent to which these national ideas – imperial or otherwise – reverberated with the wider population.

Following on from – and inspired by – Hume’s History of England, nineteenth-century historians set great store by the country’s domestic progress. The central British story was a political narrative; its main characters those great men who had been at the heart of the nation’s affairs. The violence and ongoing instability unleashed by the revolution in France – in my opinion – also played a part in strengthening this tradition. The British political system, now newly reformed, had, it seemed, managed to steer a steady course between the extremes of tyrannical monarchy and anarchic democracy. Continue reading “Ruling the Waves – Episode 3 – ‘The Workshop of The World’” →

Applying for Graduate Study in Imperial & Global History at Exeter

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Imperial_Federation,_map_of_the_world_showing_the_extent_of_the_British_Empire_in_1886

The Centre for Imperial and Global History offers internationally-recognised supervision with geographical coverage from 30 staff across African, Asian (including Chinese), Middle Eastern, North American, Latin American, European, Imperial, and Global history from early-modern to contemporary eras. We have strong inter-disciplinary links with colleagues across the humanities and social sciences at Exeter, particularly with the Centre for War, State and Society and the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. The Centre has particular research interests in:

  • Globalisation’s past and present
  • Comparative empires and transnationalism
  • Humanitarianism, development and human rights
  • Law and colonialism
  • Political economy and the imperial state
  • Europe, decolonisation and the legacies of empire
  • The impact of armed conflict on society
  • Colonial warfare and counterinsurgency

Continue reading “Applying for Graduate Study in Imperial & Global History at Exeter” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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Yehudi Menuhin playing with Benjamin Britten, circa 1955. Getty Images.
Yehudi Menuhin playing with Benjamin Britten, circa 1955. Getty Images.

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

From Kissinger’s shadow to endless war, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Ruling the Waves – Episode 2 – ‘Imperialists and Others’

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victorian

Stefan Piotrowski
Against the Current Productions

The title for this film was adapted from a chapter title in Bernard Porter’s Absent Minded Imperialists (as you may know Prof. Porter’s book was – and still is – the subject of quite considerable debate, and I will return to this in a later section). Following Prof. Porter’s lead, I have in this chapter examined the relationship of different social groups to empire – and how their socio-economic status back home shaped their interaction with empire.

Class, a word out of favour with today’s sociologists, although a broad term, is still a useful categorisation from which to explore the British relationship to Empire. Attitudes formed within a certain social milieu at home were very often carried outward into empire and had considerable influence over how individuals interpreted this new space and their place within it.

But I would also want to stress, that although it might be a powerful factor in shaping them, social class didn’t automatically define or limit attitudes towards empire. People from the within the same social group could have conflicting attitudes towards the spread of capitalism, technology, or even the Christian faith. When Britons came into contact with Empire there was no simple uniformity of imperial experience.

Did the settler on the Canadian prairies share the same worldview as the opium trader, or the plantation owner, or the shipping magnate? What about settlers who came to the cities looking not for land but for work? What about the factory worker whose mill processed Indian cotton? Were they motivated by the same things? Did they share the same ideology or set of principles? Continue reading “Ruling the Waves – Episode 2 – ‘Imperialists and Others’” →