Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From 1970s colonialism in Lisbon to saving digital archives, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Richard Toye
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @RichardToye
The 5th of March marks the seventieth anniversary of Winston Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he declared that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe. Delivered in the presence of US President Harry Truman, who had been instrumental in securing the former Prime Minister his invitation to speak, the address is well known as a landmark in the onset of the Cold War. Yet it is rarely considered in its full historical context. For the speech – formally entitled ‘The Sinews of Peace’ – was not merely a criticism of Russia. It was the means by which Churchill publicly enunciated his vision for a new world order. Continue reading “Revisiting Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech 70 Years After”
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Living as we do in an era where many of the world’s political elites commonly support free trade initiatives, it is perhaps difficult to imagine that the global economy looked very different in the late 19th century. Aside from the notable case of Free Trade England, most nations in the latter half of the 19th century sought safety from the gales of modern global market competition behind ever higher tariff walls, buttressed with government subsidies to domestic industries and imperial expansion. The United States was the exemplar of this global turn to economic nationalism and empire.
In the wake of the Second World War, the United States would become the leading proponent of free trade. But for nearly a century before, American foreign trade policy was dominated by extreme economic nationalism. What brought about this pronounced ideological, political, and economic about face? How did it affect Anglo-American imperialism? What were the repercussions for the global capitalist order? In answering these questions, my new book, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade (Cambridge University Press, 2016), offers the first detailed account of the controversial Anglo-American struggle over empire and economic globalization in the mid to late 19th century. Continue reading “The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade”
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Richard Toye
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @RichardToye
In today’s world, news is everywhere: news communicated by the press, by other media bodies, and increasingly by anyone who wants to share something with the world via Facebook or Twitter, or via a blog like this one! In this new series of podcasts, based around our Third Year undergraduate module on News, Media, and Communication (HIH 3617) Exeter academics will examine how different societies transmit and receive information. The relationship between oral, visual, and written modes of communication, and the impact of technological advances upon news and the media will be examined, as will debates about the role of the media within societies.
What was the relationship between news, media, and state power; and between money, power, and the press? How did the media influence the conduct of war? What impact did the invention of printing, or of television, have on the communication of news, and how did the new technologies interact with social and cultural assumptions to shape what was considered to be ‘news’?
In this video, Professor Jeremy Black and Professor Richard Toye discuss the role of the local and regional press in Britain.
Embassies in CrisisThis one-day conference will combine academic papers with a seminar session at which serving and former Embassy staff will be invited to present their testimonies and perspectives. The intention is to present a summary of the conference findings to the FCO to help inform future thinking in this area. The event will be held at the British Academy, 9 June 2016.
Embassies have long been integral to international diplomacy, their staff instrumental to inter-governmental dialogue, strategic partnerships, trading relationships and cultural exchange. But Embassies are also discrete political spaces. Notionally sovereign territory ‘immune’ from local jurisdiction, in moments of crisis Embassies have often been targets of protest and sites of confrontation. Embassies in Crisis will revisit flashpoints in the lives of Embassies overseas. Approaching Embassies as distinct communities with their own micro-histories, this conference seeks to explore each of these aspects in the lives of Embassies and the people who run them. Papers are welcomed that discuss instances of international confrontation or mass demonstration, past and present, that placed particular Embassies in the global spotlight. Continue reading “Call For Papers: Embassies in Crisis”
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Cross-posted from the Conversation
As Donald Trump continues his quest for the Republican nomination, free trade agreements remain in his crosshairs.
The billionaire has been making waves by opposing American free trade initiatives like the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – just signed earlier this month by ministers of the 12 Pacific Rim member nations – and even the 21-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As Trump put it in November, right now “free trade’s no good” for the United States.
It may sound strange for the leading GOP candidate for president to be bad-mouthing free trade, but this is a protectionist sentiment that more and more Republicans appear to be warming up to.
It’s also a protectionist sentiment that’s drawn from the party’s paranoid past, as I’ve explored in my new book on Anglo-American trade. Continue reading “Trump’s anti-trade tirades recall GOP’s protectionist past”
Keisha N. Blain*
University of Iowa
Historically, black men and women in the United States frequently linked national and geopolitical concerns. Recognizing that the condition of black people in the United States was “but a local phase of a world problem,” black activists articulated global visions of freedom and employed a range of strategies intent on shaping foreign policies and influencing world events.
During the early twentieth century, John Q. Adams, an African American journalist, called on people of African descent to link their experiences and concerns with those of people of color in other parts of the globe. Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1848, Adams moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1886, where he became associate editor, and subsequent owner, of the Appeal newspaper. The paper’s debut coincided with key historical developments of the period including the hardening of U.S. Jim Crow segregation laws, the rising tide of anti-immigration sentiment, and the rapid growth of American imperial expansion overseas.
Amidst the sociopolitical upheavals of the early twentieth century, Adams utilized the Appeal as a public platform from which to denounce global white supremacy and advocate for the liberation of people of color. These ideas gained increasing currency during World War I, a watershed moment in the history of black internationalist politics. The millions of black people who served the War effort—in the United States and in colonial territories in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean—demanded the immediate end of discrimination, racism, colonialism, and imperialism. Continue reading ““End the Autocracy of Color”: African Americans and Global Visions of Freedom”
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
When: Graz, 30 September – 1 October 2016
Where: Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz, and the University of Exeter
For more than forty years, Yugoslavia was one of the most internationalist and outward looking of all socialist countries in Europe, playing leading roles in various trans-national initiatives – principally as central participant within the Non-Aligned Movement – that sought to remake existing geopolitical hierarchies and rethink international relations. Both moral and pragmatic motives often overlapped in its efforts to enhance cooperation between developing nations, propagate peaceful coexistence in a divided world and pioneer a specific non-orthodox form of socialism.
Introduction
We live surrounded by things. A typical German owns 10,000 objects. In Los Angeles, a middle-class garage often no longer houses a car but several hundred boxes of stuff. The United Kingdom in 2013 was home to 6 billion items of clothing, roughly a hundred per adult; a quarter of these never leave the wardrobe. Of course, people always had things, and used them not only to survive but for ritual, display and fun. But the possessions in a pre-modern village or an indigenous tribe pale when placed next to the growing mountain of things in advanced societies like ours. Continue reading “Empire of Things”
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Jon Piccini
University of Queensland
Follow on Twitter @JonPiccini
Recently, an upturn in indigenous struggles in Australia have seen the legacies of colonialism and genocide forced back onto the national radar. Protests against the closure of indigenous communities, the continued forced removal of Aboriginal children by welfare agencies, and the birth of youth-led groups like Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR) are but a few examples of this. Instead of the sanitised government-sponsored campaign to ‘Recognise’ indigenous peoples in the Australian constitution, many of these activists are looking back to the global struggles of the 1960s and 1970s for their political inspiration. Continue reading ““Malcolm X Exploded in My Mind”: The Transnational Imagination of Australian Indigenous Activists”
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
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