Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter/X @MWPalen
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Category: Imperial & Global History
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter/X @MWPalen
From how to define a war crime to shipping’s shadow world, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”RAI Book Launch – ‘Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World’ – Wed. 24 April
Book Launch
Wed. 24 April, 17:00
Rothermere American Institute, 1a South Parks Road, OX1 3UB
Open to the public
Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Marc-William Palen shows that free trade and globalisation in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea, Palen explores how, beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the peace and anti-imperialist movements of their age. By the early twentieth century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order. Of course, this vision was at odds with the era’s strong predilections for nationalism, protectionism, geopolitical conflict, and colonial expansion. Palen reveals how, for some of its most radical left-wing adherents, free trade represented a hard-nosed critique of imperialism, militarism, and war.
Continue reading “RAI Book Launch – ‘Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World’ – Wed. 24 April”ISRF Book Launch: ‘The End of Empires and a World Remade’ – 24 May
A book launch & conversation with Martin Thomas, author of ‘The End of Empires and a World Remade’. Hosted by Lars Cornelissen.
Was the twentieth-century collapse of European colonialism as definitive as it is often portrayed? How can we do justice to the historical complexity of decolonization while maintaining a broad global perspective?
In The End of Empires and World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization, Professor Martin Thomas [University of Exeter] brings together perspectives from global history, comparative politics, and international relations to re-evaluate decolonization in all of its historical messiness.
Continue reading “ISRF Book Launch: ‘The End of Empires and a World Remade’ – 24 May”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter/X @MWPalen
From food weaponization’s deadly comeback to the short-lived NATO-Russia honeymoon, 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/X @MWPalen
From how Shōgun exposes the brutal realities of colonization to how ‘Made in China’ became American gospel, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”Alessandro Portelli Lecture and Interview – ‘The Fosse Ardeatine: History and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome’
Iona Ramsay and Maria Teresa Marangoni
University of Exeter
The following lecture was given by Professor Alessandro Portelli during his recent trip to Exeter to take part in a PGR workshop on oral history. He was also interviewed by Professor Kate Fisher about his experiences of doing oral history.
Alessandro Portelli has taught American Literature at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He is the founder and president of the Circolo Gianni Bosio for the critical study of people’s cultures. He has served as advisor on historical memory to the Mayor of Rome (2005-2008). Among his books are The Order Has Been Carried Out. History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (2003); They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (2011); Hard Rain. Bob Dylan, Oral Cultures and the Meaning of History (2017); and most recently, Dal rosso al nero. La svolta a destra di una città operaria (From Red to Black. The right-wing turn of a working-class town, 2022).
Continue reading “Alessandro Portelli Lecture and Interview – ‘The Fosse Ardeatine: History and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome’”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
From the two faces of free trade to the history crisis as a national security problem, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”Linguistic Landscapes: Using Signs and Symbols to Translate Cities (March 5 Deadline)
Deadline: March 5
The Summer School Linguistic Landscapes: Using Signs and Symbols to Translate Cities aims at equipping participants with a comprehensive understanding of modern Linguistic Landscapes (LL) research. This course focuses on the growing interdisciplinary field of LL, which traditionally analyses “language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings”, as they usually occur in urban spaces. More recently, LL research has evolved beyond studying only verbal signs into the realm of semiotics, thus extending the analytical scope into the multimodal domain of images, sounds, drawings, movements, visuals, graffiti, tattoos, colours, smells as well as people. Students will be informed about multiple aspects of modern LL research including an overview of different types of signs, their formal features as well as their functions.
Suitable for: current final year Undergraduates (finalists, BA3), MA and MPhil/PhD Students in Linguistics, Sociology, Classical Studies, (Business) Communication Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Political Studies, Translation Studies or any other related discipline.
Read more about 2023 student experiences here.
For further information visit the VIU website or send an email to summerschools@univiu.org
Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World
Richard Toye and Marc-William Palen
University of Exeter
In this episode of the Talking Empire series, Professor Richard Toye sat down with Marc-William Palen to discuss his new book Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024). Pax Economica recovers the radical left-wing origins of free trade and globalization.
Through a wide-ranging discussion – from Gershwin musicals, to Norman Angell, to cheap food, and neoliberalism – Palen discusses with Toye the ways in which the book’s actors strike a stark contrast to today’s common association of free trade with right-wing free marketeers. Pax Economica‘s counterhistory of an idea traces how – beginning in the mid-19th century – liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians joined left-wing forces to undermine imperialism and war.
Through networks crisscrossing the British, American, Spanish, German, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Russian, French, and Japanese empires, these left-wing globalists condemned the economic nationalist turn to high tariffs and government subsidies among the industrializing empires after 1870. They argued that the extreme protectionism and trade wars of the rival Euro-American empires created the monopolies, trusts, geopolitical conflict, and colonial expansion that followed, culminating in two world wars.
Their envisaged left-wing free trade order – what they called their “pax economica” – instead promised peace, prosperity, democracy, and decolonization, to be maintained through supranational governance via the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organizaiton. The book’s findings offer timely lessons for our increasingly economic nationalist and war-torn world.
Click here for further details and to purchase a copy.
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
From rethinking the history of US humanitarian interventions to the rise and fall of the Galactic Empire, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”Professor Hakim Adi Lecture: Affirming the History of African and Caribbean People in Britain (March 7)
Join us at the University of Exeter on March 7th, 2024 at 6:00 PM for a powerful celebration of the rich history of African and Caribbean communities in Britain!
Newman Red Lecture Theatre, Stocker Road Exeter EX4 4QD
In 2023 Hakim Adi’s African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History was shortlisted for the prestigious Wolfson History Prize. In the same year, and despite developing and supervising probably the largest cohort of Black postgraduate history students in the country, his ground-breaking MRes in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora was terminated and he was dismissed from his post at the University of Chichester.
Continue reading “Professor Hakim Adi Lecture: Affirming the History of African and Caribbean People in Britain (March 7)”This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
From the return of Ethiopia’s first plane to an Asian American argument for solidarity, 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 and Global History
Marc-William Palen
University of Exeter
From Frantz Fanon as inspiration to the only woman to join the yakuza, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial and Global History”The statuesque, the imperfect female body and fun in the archives
Nandini Chatterjee
University of Exeter
Cross-posted from Cast in Stone
I finally found time in January this year 2024 to take myself to Reading, to explore the Tweed archive, the collection of private papers, sketchbooks and artefacts deposited by the daughters of the sculptor John Tweed in Reading Museum in 1968. I received a wonderful welcome from the art curator and her team, as she gave up an entire day in order to accompany me to the museum store and literally walk me through the materials. This of course, is the reality of research in smaller, regional archives and museums, there is rarely dedicated staff available to facilitate research and access depends on the generosity of very busy staff with many other things to do. However, when one does secure the time of such colleagues, the depth of knowledge that they can offer about the area is a resource in its own right.
In our Cast in Stone database, which is actively in development, John Tweed stands out as the most prolific sculptor of colonial statues; within England, he is known to have sculpted twelve prominent statues of individuals who were colonial officials or British statesmen closely concerned with imperial or colonial matters. He may indeed be associated with further statues in Scotland and Wales, but we are not aware of this so far. Indeed, in a splendid thesis turned book, Nicola Capon called him the ’empire sculptor.’
Continue reading “The statuesque, the imperfect female body and fun in the archives”
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