Author: CIGH Exeter

Editor’s Note: It is hard to believe that the Imperial & Global Forum went live just a year ago. In the weeks leading up to the new year, please help us celebrate by checking out the year’s 10 most popular posts.

6. Covering Up the Dark Side of Decolonisation

Gareth Curless
History Department, University of Exeter

Historians of empire have long suspected that documents from the colonies were transferred back to Britain during the last days of imperial rule, only never to enter into the public domain. It was no small surprise therefore when in April 2011 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), under pressure from a high court judge, admitted that it had a secret archive of nearly 9,000 files from 37 colonies. Perhaps the biggest surprise from the ruling was how easy it was for the FCO to keep these documents hidden from historians for so long.

The FCO claims that it was simply unaware that these files existed. Historians, however, are sceptical of this claim. As David Anderson points out, it is easy for an archive to misplace one document or one file but it is harder to lose what amounts in the case of the ‘migrated’ colonial archive to over 100 linear feet of files. [1] Indeed, the subsequent ‘discovery’ of a further 1.2 million Foreign Office files held at the same site has only served to further undermine the FCO’s claim that it had misplaced or forgotten about the migrated archives. [continue reading]

Congratulations to Dr. Ned Richardson-Little on being awarded the German Historical Institute’s Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for “Between Dictatorship and Dissent: Ideology, Legitimacy and Human Rights in East Germany, 1945-1990” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013). Dr. Richardson-Little is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Exeter. Continue reading “Exeter Postdoc Receives Fritz Stern Prize” →

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

From the international origins of ‘turkey’, to the global response to Ferguson, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Editor’s Note: It is hard to believe that the Imperial & Global Forum went live just a year ago. In the weeks leading up to the new year, please help us celebrate by checking out the year’s 10 most popular posts.

9. Prelude to Bandung: The Interwar Origins of Anti-Colonialism

Fredrik Petersson
Åbo Akademi University
Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU), Moscow

In 1927, the “First International Congress against Imperialism and Colonialism” convened in Brussels at Palais d’Egmont. The event celebrated the establishment of the League against Imperialism, and as the congress reached its crescendo, Willi Münzenberg, the German communist and General Secretary of International Arbeiterhilfe (IAH), declared that this was “neither the end, nor the beginning of a new powerful movement”.[1] Nearly 28 years later, amid the aftermath of the brutality of the Second World War, Münzenberg’s anti-colonial vision was revitalized at the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia.

In the 1955 Bandung Conference’s opening address, Achmed Sukarno, the Indonesian president, declared to the leaders of the twenty-nine countries in attendance: “I recognise that we are gathered here today as a result of sacrifices. . . . I recall in this connection the Conference of the ‘League against Imperialism and Colonialism’ which was held in Brussels almost thirty years ago.”[2] Separated by many decades and vast distance, these two events illustrate why a global history of transnational anti-colonial movements in the 20th century cannot be fixed around a particular moment in time and space – rather, it is a history enacted in radical spaces in a changing world. [continue reading]

Lori Lee Oates
PhD Candidate, History Department, University of Exeter

My research was born when I posed a single question: Why are people so interested in the texts of New Age religion at a time when church attendance and the power of traditional religion are declining in many parts of the world?

It was obvious to me that the way the world engages with religion had changed in recent decades as books like The Power of Now, Eat Pray Love, and Return to Love topped the New York Times bestseller list. I soon discovered that scholars have argued for some time that New Age religion is rooted in nineteenth-century occultism, the meeting of Eastern and Western religions, and the rise of secular society. Religious Studies scholars have used these factors to explain why Western society is now racing to meditation and yoga classes, or reifying New Age texts as contemporary religious symbols. Through my research, I discovered that scholars had already effectively established that New Age religion is rooted in the Hellenistic religious philosophies of the ancient world, combined with a synthesis of Eastern religion in the nineteenth century.

My project, however, seeks to set the emergence of commercialized religion within the context of nineteenth-century globalization, imperialism in India, growth in the printing activity, growth in liberalism, and the development of the market economy. Largely, I am doing this by examining the globalization and movement of literature between 1833 and 1900, in a way that has not been done previously. Continue reading “Postgraduate Profile – Lori Lee Oates” →

Editor’s Note: It is hard to believe that the Imperial & Global Forum went live just a year ago. In the weeks leading up to the new year, please help us celebrate by checking out the year’s 10 most popular posts.

10. Diminishing Returns of the Global Turn

David A. Bell
Lapidus Professor of History, Princeton University
Contributing Editor, The New Republic

I am grateful to Marc-William  Palen for his smart, sharp comments on my New Republic essay, and also for his generous offer to let me respond to them on this blog.

Palen calls my essay ‘provocative’ and ‘eloquent’, but also ‘unfair’. I certainly prefer this judgment to ‘balanced, but dull and inarticulate’, but the adjective ‘unfair’ still rankles a little. In particular, Palen charges me with confusing page counts and criticism; with mixing up Atlantic history and global history; and with ‘expect[ing] the impossible’ from the volume that I was reviewing.

Of these charges, it is the third that really gets to the substantive differences between us.

My use of page — and reference — counts in the review was simply a convenient shorthand, of the sort that is necessary in short essays, to give readers a quick sense of what a book under review does, and does not emphasize. Of course, historians can often ‘transmit an impressive amount of information and analysis’ in a small number of pages, as Palen says, but the overall allocation of space still has more than a little to tell us. The fact that A World Connecting allocated just three sentences (out of 1,168 pages) to the First and Second Socialist Internationales suggests pretty strongly, however crude the measurement, that the authors did not consider the Internationales an important subject. [continue reading]

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

From the demise of the world’s largest monopoly to the smells of empire, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →