Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Category: Imperial & Global History
How not to do international intervention
Stephanie Carvin, Igor Istomin, Valérie Rosoux and Richard Toye
Cross-posted from International Affairs Blog
Over a year after the US completed its ill-fated withdrawal from Afghanistan the limitations for those states looking to pursue forms of international intervention have been thrown into sharp relief. In this blogpost we bring together experts on different forms of intervention to discuss the challenges different approaches face. From war to political interference and conflict mediation, they discuss the key factors that can render interventions ineffective and contribute to policy failure.
Continue reading “How not to do international intervention“Mobility and Mutability: Lessons from Two Infrastructural Icons
John Munro*
An imposing monument to ideology and power, it stood as a marker of urban division from its construction during the height of the Cold War until its fate was sealed in 1989. Featured in films from noir to arthouse, its austere aesthetics absorbed observers on the scene and around the world. With its grey, alienating appearance, it also attracted no shortage of denunciators. “Oppressive,” one urban design expert opined in retrospect, “does not begin to describe it.” It’s still remembered by history, even if most people now enjoy inhabiting or traversing the public space its absence affords with little thought to this once formidable fabrication.
I refer, of course, to San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway.
But this reference also recalls that structure’s infrastructural doppelgänger; Berlin’s infamous edifice was also built to control mobility and to shore up a system of unequally distributed power.
Standing as they did across the same temporal span, the Freeway and the Wall, despite their differences, invite comparison for the lessons they hold. Two of those lessons – that mobility is power, and that nothing lasts forever – might issue from the twentieth century, but they are particularly salient for thinking about the city of the twenty-first.
Continue reading “Mobility and Mutability: Lessons from Two Infrastructural Icons”Call for proposals: Parliamentary Empire workshop
Settler Colonialism and Parliamentary Democracy: Histories and Legacies, 1867 to the Present (History of Parliament, London, 12 Apr 2023- participants are welcome to present papers in-person or via Zoom)
Over recent years, growing attention has been paid to how histories of settler colonialism have shaped people’s engagement with parliaments and parliamentary culture across and beyond the former British Empire. Calls for improved representation by and for peoples of colour, such as the Australian campaign for a greater ‘indigenous voice’ to parliament, have responded to historical imbalances in power and built on historical struggles to define the political nation. We wish to facilitate discussion across disciplines from scholars interested in the histories and legacies of parliamentary culture, settler colonialism, and resistance. This will lead to a special issue of Parliamentary History to be published in 2025.
Continue reading “Call for proposals: Parliamentary Empire workshop”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From the next shockwave to hit Puerto Rico to why trade couldn’t buy peace, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From escaping the Taliban to the Du Bois Doctrine, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From how Jiro Dreams of Sushi transformed US sushi culture to the lost world of Kyoto’s jazz kissas, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”Das on Downs’s Maladies of Empire (2021)
Jim Downs. Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery and War Transformed Medicine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 272 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780674971721.
Reviewed by Shibani Das (University of Exeter)
Jim Downs’s Maladies of Empire studies the impact that colonialism, war, and slavery had on the field of epidemiology in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its geographical focus stretches across North America, the Atlantic, West Africa, the United Kingdom, and its colonial possessions in the Indian Subcontinent. It addresses the inability of historians of science, until the 1970s, to question scientific thought and embrace what Warwick Anderson calls ‘universal knowledge’.[1] Through this book, Downs, a professor of Civil War era studies and history, attempts to adjusts popular and academic perceptions of our medical past, as well as of our understanding of inventions, innovations, and intellectual achievements by highlighting the forgotten contributions of the colored, conscripted, enslaved, and oppressed in the production of new ideas about medicine. Downs’s overarching argument is that epidemiology ‘developed not just from studies of European urban centers but also from the international slave trade, colonialism, warfare and the population migrations that followed all of these’ (3).
Continue reading “Das on Downs’s Maladies of Empire (2021)”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From Putin the reactionary imperialist to exaggerating the death of neoliberalism, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”Hanley on Lester’s Deny & Disavow: Distancing the Imperial Past in the Culture Wars (2022)
Alan Lester. Deny & Disavow: Distancing the Imperial Past in the Culture Wars. London: SunRise Publishing, 2022. ISBN 978-1-9144891-4-3. Softcover. 203pp. £7.99.
Reviewed by Ryan Hanley (University of Exeter)
I was cornered at a party recently by someone who had overheard that I was an historian of slavery and the British Empire. People like me, they had been warned, were teaching students about how uniquely evil the British were, how we should all be ashamed of our history. They were no cheerleader for Empire, but they also had no patience for the ‘woke’ activists rampaging across the country tearing down statues, cancelling people they didn’t agree with, and generally trying to erase the bits of the past they didn’t like. Above all, they wanted to impress upon me the importance of balance in historical analyses of Empire. Slavery was obviously A Bad Thing, but had I considered that we were the ones who abolished it, and also (here they hesitated for a moment, but pressed on), why don’t we ever hear about the African side of the slave trade? Perhaps I should teach that in my ‘course’. As I tried to respond to some of these points, wearily reproducing rebuttals that are by now so familiar to me that I’m never sure if I’ve already said them in any given conversation, the dialogue pivoted without me. Now we were talking about Hong Kong. Surely even I would admit that British imperialism in Hong Kong was largely benign? That’s the Empire, isn’t it? Some of it was good, some of it was bad. Why can’t people handle complexity nowadays?
Perhaps I am attending the wrong parties. But to be fair to my cross-examiner, they could hardly be blamed for their alarm. As Alan Lester skilfully vivisects in this forthright, illuminating, and hugely readable primer, a culture war over Empire is being assiduously propagated by a small but tenacious group of British politicians, academics, and journalists. Billed as ‘boldly confront[ing] apologists for the British Empire (including the Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretaries)’, Deny and Disavow tackles the deliberate misrepresentations of recent calls for recognition and reform made by Black Lives Matter and other campaigning organisations, as well as the clear majority of historians working in the field. Lester intersperses an admirably dispassionate anatomy of the culture warriors’ various strategies to distance Britain from its own history with punchy ‘snapshot’ accounts of some of the key events and figures that are now, apparently, controversial.
Continue reading “Hanley on Lester’s Deny & Disavow: Distancing the Imperial Past in the Culture Wars (2022)”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From erasing Hong Kong’s colonial past to Left internationalism in the heart 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”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From the run up to perestroika to why companies with long histories should open up their archives, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”We are hiring! Lecturer in Modern British and/or Irish History
Lecturer in Modern British and/or Irish History (Education and Research)
Application closing date: 09/06/2022
Location: Exeter
Salary: The starting salary will be from £36,382 per annum on Grade F, depending on qualifications and experience.
Package: Generous holiday allowances, flexible working, pension scheme and relocation package (if applicable).
Basis: Full-time
Job category/type: Academic
This full time, permanent post is available 1st August 2022.
The role
The successful applicant will be based in the Department of History, a diverse and thriving community of over 65 staff and 1000 undergraduate students, which is consistently rated among the Top 10 History Departments in the UK.
You will be expected to contribute to delivering research of the highest international quality, drive innovative research and education at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and expand interdisciplinary collaboration. We are keen to receive applications from candidates with research expertise in any aspect of modern British and/or Irish (post c.1900). This includes innovative areas of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research expertise that consolidates and extends our existing strengths connecting British history with wider global histories. These include the legacies of colonialism, Transatlantic history, migration, violence, and conflict. Preference will be given for candidates with demonstrable capability to deliver teaching within a Liberal Arts programme. We particularly welcome applications from candidates whose research engages with questions of gender and sexuality, disability, race and/or ethnicity, and adopts decolonizing approaches to dominant paradigms in the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century Britain. The College also welcomes applications from candidates with experience or interests in digital humanities.
Continue reading “We are hiring! Lecturer in Modern British and/or Irish History”Modern Transimperial and Interimperial Histories: Forms, Questions, Prospects
THURSDAY 12 MAY 2022 – SATURDAY 14 MAY 2022
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Maison de la paix, chemin Eugène-Rigot 2, 1202 Genève
The Annual Pierre du Bois Conference, organized by the Graduate Institute in partnership with the Pierre du Bois Foundation, will take place at Maison de la Paix in Geneva from 12-14 May 2022. Professor Cyrus Schayegh is organizing the conference.
Louise Young, the ‘Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’ will give the Keynote Lecture titled, Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Changing Sightlines on the Japanese Empire.
Background
The scholarly context for the Pierre du Bois Annual Conference 2022 is a fascinating development in the discipline of history in the last decade: the rising interest in trans- and interimperial histories. These build on studies showing that a single empire’s metropole and colonies need to be empirically and conceptually integrated. In the first decade of the 21st century, such more contextualized and decentered histories of empire started evolving into trans- and interimperial histories proper. Inspired by an earlier turn to transnational and global histories, respective historians have been critiquing a deeply rooted and ultimately nationally-biased tendency, by many historians of empire, to focus empirical research and even conceptual conclusions on one single empire. The rise of trans- and interimperial histories crystallized by the 2010s—though it was, one may say, predated by older studies of nonEuropean modern empires. While methodologically dissimilar to present trans- and interimperial studies, these studies quasi by necessity paid considerable attention to (often unequal) relationships especially with modern European and American empires.
Continue reading “Modern Transimperial and Interimperial Histories: Forms, Questions, Prospects”Brexit One Year On: The Will of the People: Did Brexit Break the British Constitution?
British, Irish and Empire Studies
University of Texas at Austin
Scholars Stuart Ward and Robert Saunders explore the complicated relationships among Brexit, the British people and the British Constitution
Wednesday April 27, 2022 • Virtual
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Please join us at noon CDT on Wednesday, April 27, for the final installment in our spring virtual speaker series, Brexit One Year On: “The Will of the People: Did Brexit Break the British Constitution?” Scholars Stuart Ward of Copenhagen University and Robert Saunders of Queen Mary College University of London will delve into the complex relationships of Brexit, the British people, and the British Constitution. Marc-William Palen of Exeter University will chair.
Please register in advance using this Zoom link:
https://utexas.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIsdOCgrjgrHt3wb9OwR_f_Wc-C4V_zii09
After you register, you will receive information on how to join the meeting.
Questions? Contact the BIES staff at Marian.Barber@austin.utexas.edu.
Continue reading “Brexit One Year On: The Will of the People: Did Brexit Break the British Constitution?”
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