Category: Imperial & Global History

Third Global Humanitarianism Research Academy (GHRA) Starts Next Week

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

Cross-posted from GHRA-IEG

Beginning July 10, the third Global Humanitarianism Research Academy (GHRA) will meet for one week of academic training at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) before continuing with archival research at the ICRC Archives 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.

The GHRA received a huge amount of applications from an extremely talented group of scholars from more than nineteen different countries around the world. The selection committee considered each proposal carefully and has selected these participants for the GHRA 2017: Continue reading “Third Global Humanitarianism Research Academy (GHRA) Starts Next Week” →

Protectionism 100 years ago helped ignite a world war. Could it happen again?

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A pro-Republican cartoon from 1900 depicting “the white light of protection” shining down upon America’s newly acquired empire at the dawn of the 20th century. American Economist, 28 Dec. 1900.

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

[Editor’s note: Below is from my editorial just published in the Washington Post‘s series “Made by History,” a remarkable new initiative for historians to engage with current affairs, co-edited by Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) and Brian Rosenwald (@brianros1).]

The liberal economic order that defined the post-1945 era is disintegrating.

Globalization’s foremost champions have become the first to signal the retreat in the wake of the Great Recession. Economic nationalism, historically popular in times of economic crisis, is once again on the rise in Britain, France and the United States. We are witnessing a return to the antagonistic protectionist politics that defined a bygone era that ended with World War I — suggesting that today’s protectionist revival threatens not just the global economy, but world stability and peace. Continue reading “Protectionism 100 years ago helped ignite a world war. Could it happen again?” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference, Beijing, October 2, 1952

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

From the Cold War art of peace to how ISIS became Islam’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Britain’s imperial ghosts have taken control of Brexit

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File 20170620 32369 o08uja

Marc-William Palen
University of Exeter

As long as Theresa May’s Conservative government is representing the UK at the Brexit negotiating table, Britain’s imperial past will continue to haunt its European withdrawal. The ghost that looms largest is none other than the prime minister’s “political hero” and “new lodestar”, Birmingham’s turn-of-the-century imperial protectionist, Joseph Chamberlain.

Like the early 20th century that Chamberlain lived in, the world has witnessed a resurgence of economic nationalism since the 2007 to 2009 recession. Britain, through Brexit, is leading this retreat from economic globalisation. The May government’s proposal to pursue an economic plan of “Britain for the British” after Brexit harkens back to Chamberlain’s bygone imperial age of Tory protectionism. Continue reading “Britain’s imperial ghosts have taken control of Brexit” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, (undated photo).

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

From newly released files on the 1953 Iran coup to the strange tale of the anti-Nazi bestseller, 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

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
A Caribbean Taste of Technology album cover, Ariwa Sounds, 1985, artist unaccredited.

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

From repressing radicalism to making reggae’s dancehall sound, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Remembering Dutch Decolonization through Historical Fiction

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Paul Doolan
Zurich International School and the University of Konstanz

On May 8th the jury of the Libris Literature Prize announced in Amsterdam and live on television that they had unanimously chosen Alfred Birney as winner of the best Dutch language novel of 2016, for his novel De Tolk van Java [The Interpreter from Java]. According to the jury, Birney has “cast a new light upon a poisonous period of our history“. The book is a relentlessly violent postmemory novel and a searing indictment of not only Dutch colonial brutality, but also the willingness of a society to forget or unremember the uncomfortable parts of the nation’s past. Birney’s work forms a corrective to many historical myths regarding the decolonization of the Dutch East Indies.

In recent years we have seen Dutch courts finding the Dutch state guilty of massacring hundreds of civilians in Indonesia during the Indonesian War of Liberation (1945-1949). In 2016 Remy Limpach’s historical thesis, that the Dutch political and military leadership at the time had been responsible for the use of structural violence that amounted to war crimes, was well received in both the popular press as well as among academics. Last month’s decision of the jury of the Libris Literature Prize marks another milestone in the Dutch coming to terms with their past by working through the trauma of decolonization. Continue reading “Remembering Dutch Decolonization through Historical Fiction” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter3 Comments
A watercolour of a British-flagged ship that arrived off the coast of Mugi, in Shikoku, Japan in 1830, chronicled by low-ranking Samurai artist Makita Hamaguchi in documents from the Tokushima prefectural archive. Photograph: Courtesy of Tokushima prefectural archive

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

From the invention of the Muslim World to the true meaning of globalism, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

A Talk by Philippa Levine – “Slavery and the Aesthetics of Abjection”

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Slavery and the Aesthetics of Abjection

A Talk by

Professor Philippa Levine

When: Wed., 21 June 2017, 3-4:30pm, with a wine reception to follow

Where: Reed Hall, Ibrahim Ahmed Room, University of Exeter

Exeter’s Sexual Knowledge Cultures Seminar series, in conjunction with the Centre for Imperial and Global History and Global Engagement and Development, is delighted to welcome Professor Philippa Levine (University of Texas at Austin) to Exeter to speak on “Slavery and the Aesthetics of Abjection”.

There will be tea, coffee and cake, and a wine reception following the paper. All are very welcome!

Abstract: Humanitarian photographers have long known the value of a well-shot picture, one that induces pathos and opens wallets for charitable causes. Yet they tread a careful line to ensure that their images produce empathy or at least sorrow rather than revulsion.  Artists and photographers learn (and sometimes challenge) the boundaries that separate acceptable from objectionable images, and one figure that has constantly been at issue is the naked body. The visual representations of enslavement invoked an aesthetics of abjection in stark contrast to the nudity portrayed in high art as the pinnacle of human worth. Drawing on images of  the unclothed body in particular, this talk explores the iconography of slavery as a historical example of how aesthetic choices can serve widely differing purposes even before the advent of photography.

Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and the Co-Director of the Program in British Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics and she has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and British Empire history, as well as on science, sexuality, and medicine.

Of Maps and Empire: Charting an Evasive East

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Daniel Foliard
Paris Ouest University

It took some time in 1852 to convince the Imam of the Great Mosque of Al-Nuri in Mosul, but James Felix Jones eventually got the permission he needed to climb up the stairs of the famous “hunchback” minaret. It was from this vantage point that Jones, an Indian army surveyor and officer, started to take measurements. He established the leaning minaret’s longitude and latitude, one of the first fixed points from which it became possible to triangulate the plain of Al-Iraq and to begin an accurate mapping of the area with mixed results (fig.1).

Figure 1

In the early 1850s, Mesopotamia stood in the middle of the overland route to India and, surprisingly, no reliable map of this territory existed until Jones published an account in 1855.[1] Austen Henry Layard’s discovery of Nineveh in the mid-1840s and Francis R. Chesney’s exploration of the Tigris and the Euphrates a decade before had helped placing the area from a European standpoint, but, all in all, many in France or Britain failed to grasp the geography of the Ottoman province. Some of Jones’s original maps were even lost in India and his pioneering work partly forgotten: a testimony to the disorderly nature of Western knowledge in the area. Continue reading “Of Maps and Empire: Charting an Evasive East” →

Non-Aligned Punk: The Last Yugoslav Generation

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Ljubica Spaskovska
University of Exeter

‘As a regular reader of NME I feel insulted by the way you write about Yugoslavia in your issues of May 3 and May 17′, wrote a New Musical Express reader from Zagreb in 1975.

In your ‘Teazers’ column you worry about »How will the Communist Bloc take to British pub rock when Kilburn And The High Roads tour Yugoslavia and Poland in August.« Now try to get this: Yugoslavia does not belong to any bloc, so you better don’t try to make jokes about something that may be irrelevant to you, but is of principal meaning for Yugoslav people […] This is not fair toward your Yugoslav readers and many other rock fans in our country. The same singles, albums, groups and singers that top the Pop Polls in Britain are very popular in Yugoslavia, too.[1]

Similarly a Tomaz Domicelj from Ljubljana complained in a 1978 issue of Melody Maker that he was ‘fed up with reading again and again about Yugoslavia being behind the Iron Curtain. We are, if anything, on the border of that Curtain, which MM staff and other British people involved in the music business should know by now. Remember 1948, when we told Stalin off? If not, ask some historians about that.’[2] Two years later, Melody Maker columnist Chris Bohn visited Yugoslavia, a visit that he summarised in a two-page article entitled ‘Non-aligned punk’.[3]

The geopolitical positioning of Yugoslavia had a significant impact on the way the youth conceptualised and articulated their self-identification and sense of belonging in wider global terms. It also enabled the development of a burgeoning youth culture. Continue reading “Non-Aligned Punk: The Last Yugoslav Generation” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
Clock showing the time the Bolsheviks seized power on October 26 1917, Winter Palace, St Petersburg, via Verso Books.

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

From feminism, fascism, and frogs to the end(s) of the international order, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

What Does it Mean to Act with Humanity?

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Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (eds.), Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016. 324 pp. £75 (hardback), ISBN: 9783525101452

Reviewed by Ben Holmes (University of Exeter)

What does it mean to belong to the human race? Does this belonging bring with it particular rights as well as responsibilities? What does it mean to act with humanity? These are some of the big questions lying at the heart of a new edited collection from Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin, Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present (2016). Based on a 2015 conference at the Leibniz Institute in Mainz, the book, as the title suggests, is not a purely conceptual history of the term ‘humanity’.[1] Rather it looks to discover ‘the concrete implications of theoretical discourses on the concept of humanity’ [page 18]. In other words, how did ideas of ‘humanity’ guide European practices in areas like humanism, imperialism, international law, humanitarianism, and human rights?[2] The editors argue that despite the implied timeless, universal nature of the term, humanity is both a changing, dynamic concept, and has been prone to create divisions as much as it promotes commonality. Although the volume is a study of European conceptions of humanity, the contributions are transnational, displaying how conceptions of humanity were practiced in Europe and in the continent’s interactions with the wider world over the course of five-hundred years. Continue reading “What Does it Mean to Act with Humanity?” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
Claude McKay speaking in the Throne Room of the Kremlin, The Crisis magazine, 1923, via Verso Books.

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

From Russia’s imperial amnesia to 21st-century American slavery, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Call for Papers: Imperial Labour History and the Global Turn

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Call for Papers: Imperial Labour History and the Global Turn

The Second European Labour History Network Conference

Paris, 2nd to 4th November 2017

Gareth Curless
University of Exeter

Labour historians have been particularly attuned to the global turn. Over the last decade labour historians have become not only more global in their outlook, but they have also begun to pay greater attention to subjects that speak to contemporary concerns associated with globalization. This has given rise to a number of studies considering a diverse array of subjects, including ‘global’ occupations, forms of free and unfree labour migration, and the global dimensions of working-class formation. The benefits of this global approach are immeasurable. Among other things it has highlighted the importance of studying labour in globalized sectors over the longue durée; it has brought into question the teleological assumption that labour movements inevitably develop a national character; and it has underscored the point that working-class formation was driven by processes that occurred across territorial borders.

The danger with global approaches, however, is that they can flatten and homogenize the experience of labour, emphasizing connection over disconnection, and privileging subaltern agency, co-operation, and mobility over class-, gender-, and race-based hierarchies of power. These issues are particularly pertinent to colonial contexts. Racialised labour recruitment practices, punitive and draconian labour legislation, and the deployment of state violence in response to worker protest all served to accentuate differences and inhibit collective action. Put simply, the task for labour historians is to focus not only the ‘free’ movement of labour and the associated flow of ideas, discourses, and practices across territorial borders but to investigate the role of coercion and state regulation in facilitating and restricting such movements.

For the second European Labour History Network conference, the co-ordinators of the Imperial Labour History group welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers. Potential topics include but are not limited to: Continue reading “Call for Papers: Imperial Labour History and the Global Turn” →