Category: Imperial & Global History

Marc-William Palen
University of Exeter

Free trade has become the Republican elephant in the room, thanks to Donald Trump.

The GOP front-runner has helped make trade one of the hot-button issues of the 2016 presidential race. And it’s tearing the Republican Party apart – just like it did in the wake of the U.S. Civil War.

Back then, a third-party run by free trade Republicans put the GOP on a protectionist course that lasted 100 years, as I’ve explored in a recent book on the topic. Could it happen again? Continue reading “History Repeating Itself? Free trade is once again tearing apart the Republican Party” →

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

From the forgotten women behind the British Black Panthers to Berlin’s battle over colonial-era street names, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Nigel Collett
Cross-posted from Asian Review of Books

On 6 November 2002, the Queen inaugurated the Commonwealth Memorial Gates and Memorial Pavilion at the Hyde Park Corner end of London’s Constitution Hill. The Gates are inscribed “In memory of the five million volunteers from the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean who fought with Britain in the two World Wars” and the Pavilion’s ceiling is inscribed with the names of the seventy-four of those volunteers who won the George and Victoria Crosses. It had thus taken the British fifty-seven years to publicly recognize that without the men and women of the British Empire, Britain would not have survived the World Wars.

This seems now an extraordinary and unforgivable lapse, but the denial it manifests had begun to emerge even as even as the second of the two wars in question was still being fought. Bill Slim’s 14th Army, which defeated the Japanese in Burma in 1944 and 1945 and was about two-thirds Indian in composition, ruefully called itself “The Forgotten Army”, and at the time there was more than a little truth in that. In Allied strategy, in the supply of manpower and materiel, even in the newsreels shown at home of the fighting around the world, the theaters of war around the Indian sub-continent always took third place to the campaigns in Europe and the Pacific.

This comparative neglect was followed at the War’s end, and particularly as the Empire then ebbed, by a public and academic amnesia that relegated India’s massive contribution to the War to the memoirs of soldiers who had fought on its borders. As the Empire increasingly grew to be a subject of denigration, India’s contribution to both Wars became unfairly tainted by imperialism and was largely forgotten. Continue reading “India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia” →

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

From Mexico’s Cold War on drugs to the imperial, racist origins of Nixon’s war on drugs, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

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

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s protectionist prescriptions have led to renewed speculation about whether trade wars are on the horizon.

In other words, if, under a Trump presidency, the United States were to raise its tariffs against some of its biggest trading partners – China, Japan, Mexico – would those countries retaliate in kind? And what would this mean for the global economy?

I hadn’t planned on weighing in on the discussion. That is, not until I came across this brazen assertion by Ian Fletcher – former senior economist of the grassroots Coalition for a Prosperous America – in the Huffington Post:

Trade wars are mythical. They simply do not happen. If you google “the trade war of,” you won’t find any historical examples… History is devoid of them.

Based on his Google test, Fletcher precipitously concludes that trade wars are a myth, a bogeyman concocted by free traders.

I was intrigued by his claims, and, to put it mildly, more than a little skeptical.

As any historical sleuth might do in this situation, I decided to check the sources. I googled “trade war of” and the results were anything but empty.

As a historian of trade, however, I thought it might be even more persuasive to look further into some illuminating examples of trade wars in modern history. Continue reading “Are Trade Wars a Historical Myth?” →

David Thackeray
University of Exeter

Cross-posted from History & Policy

Forty-one years ago this month, James Callaghan finalised the renegotiation of Britain’s EEC membership at a Dublin meeting of the European Council. At the subsequent referendum the results were emphatic. The UK voted ‘yes’ to remaining in the EEC, the forerunner of today’s EU, by a two to one margin. Now with the EU referendum date set, this article considers the key differences between the 1975 and 2016 votes and the lessons of the 1975 renegotiation for policy-makers planning for the vote and its aftermath. Continue reading “Planning for the Referendum and After: Lessons from 1975” →