Report of the Fifth Global Humanitarianism Research Academy (GHRA 2019)

Published on by CIGH Exeter

Cross-posted from Humanitarianism & Human Rights

Academic Conveners: Fabian Klose (University of Cologne), Johannes Paulmann (IEG Mainz), Andrew Thompson (University of Exeter) in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (Geneva)

Date: 07.07.2019-19.07.2019, Mainz / Geneva

The fifth edition of the Global Humanitarianism Research Academy (GHRA) took place at the Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz and the Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva from July 7 to 19, 2019. It approached cutting-edge research regarding 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. With the Chair in International History and Historical Peace and Conflict Studies at the Department of History of the University of Cologne, a new partner joined the GHRA 2019. As in the last four years the organizers FABIAN KLOSE (University of Cologne), JOHANNES PAULMANN (Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz), and ANDREW THOMPSON (University of Exeter) received again a large number of excellent applications from more than twenty different countries around the world. Eventually the conveners selected eleven fellows (nine PhD candidates, two Postdocs) from Brazil, Cyprus, Egypt, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The multitude of disciplinary approaches from International Law, Political Science, and Medicine proved to be very rewarding just as the participation of guest lecturer CLAUS KREß (University of Cologne), visiting fellow JULIA IRWIN (University of South Florida, Tampa) as well as STACEY HYND (University of Exeter) and MARC-WILLIAM PALEN (University of Exeter) as long-standing members of the academic team. Continue reading “Report of the Fifth Global Humanitarianism Research Academy (GHRA 2019)” →

New Books on Black British History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

Ryan Hanley
University of Exeter

October marks Black History Month in the UK, providing the perfect excuse to delve into some of the best new history writing in this dynamic and rapidly-expanding field. Since my first monograph, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), was published last October, the field of black British history seems to have been completely transformed. The past twelve months have seen several (I counted six) new permanent academic posts in the UK and a new MA programme, all dedicated more or less specifically to black British history. And January 2020 sees the launch of a new seminar series in London supported by the Institute for Historical Research, showcasing some of the best new work in the field from within and beyond the university – hope to see some of you there!

Some of this will have to do with the publication in October 2018 of the Royal Historical Society’s Race, Ethnicity and Equality Report, which highlighted the chronic underrepresentation and overwork of ‘Black and Minority Ethnic’ academic staff in British history departments. But the sudden heightened visibility of black British history in UK academia is not purely down to newfound resolutions to build stronger, better history departments, nor solely to the ongoing work to ‘decolonise’ history curricula, though both are important factors. The simple fact is that we have had an incredible year of high-quality scholarly research publications, accounting for some of the most innovative, dynamic, and vital work on British history as a whole.

Don’t call it a ‘turn’ – but there is more and more great work out there that, taken together, is changing the way we think about Britain’s past and its relationship to global and imperial history. Some of you, especially if you don’t work on topics obviously related to black British history, might be curious about how this impacts on your research interests. So, to celebrate and spread the word about this new wave of black British history scholarship, here are my top picks from the past twelve months. Continue reading “New Books on Black British History” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
Yasuke, the first foreign-born samurai, as depicted in a Japanese children’s book by Kurusu Yoshio.

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

From the lost chapter of the world’s first novel to the lost world of Ottoman cosmopolitanism, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Historicizing ‘America First’ and US Isolationism

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Christopher McKnight Nichols
Oregon State University

Isolationism is much in the news in recent days. President Trump’s acquiescence to Turkish demands regarding a modern buffer area, including a new offensive, followed rapidly by an announcement that all, or nearly all, US troops will be withdrawn from Syria has drawn sharp rebukes, including from prominent Republican members of Congress. Disastrous consequences for Kurdish people, and former US allies, on the ground in Syria has added fuel to this fire. Most notably Senator Lindsey Graham suggested that Trump “must” rethink the US position, and argued that isolationism has not “worked” in particular historical moments, such as before the Second World War. Others have responded that these latest policy changes do not, in fact, amount to isolationist or even retrenchment politics, given the scale and scope of US military commitments worldwide. While yet others have cited history, noting, sadly, that major powers have a tendency to sell out allies when it is convenient or the going gets tough, which itself does not necessarily amount to any particular type of strategy or policy position.

Continue reading “Historicizing ‘America First’ and US Isolationism” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter
The Lenin Museum, fd. in 1987. YURI LITVINENKO

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

From an intimate view of the British Empire to when the Nazis were welcome in the Canary Islands, 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 Book Reviewers – Rethinking History

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William Gallois
University of Exeter

Rethinking History is seeking to attract new book reviewers and would welcome suggestions of works to review from PhD candidates and early career researchers working in global and colonial history. We also have a specific need to find reviewers for the following recently-published works: Continue reading “Call for Book Reviewers – Rethinking History” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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security guard posted during a Sept. 20 trip organized by the Saudi government to an Aramco oil-processing facility, which had been damaged nearly a week earlier in a drone and missile attack. (Amr Nabil/AP)

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

From refuting the idea that precolonial Africa lacked written traditions to how war forced the United States to rethink the politics of oil, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Autumn Term @ExeterCIGH seminar schedule

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The Autumn Term is now upon us, and so please find the Centre for Imperial and Global History seminar schedule below for your calendars.

Please direct any inquiries about attending to the seminar convenor, Dr Lyubi Spaskovska.

Continue reading “Autumn Term @ExeterCIGH seminar schedule” →

The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter Judson (2016)

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Jonathan Parker
University of Texas at Austin

Cross-posted from Not Even Past

This excellent work by historian Pieter Judson shows how the Hapsburg empire was a modernizing force that sustained a complex but often mutually beneficial relationship with the various nationalist movements within its borders.  To support this argument, Judson synthesizes an impressive number of existing works on narrower topics into a cohesive narrative history of the empire from the late eighteenth century until its demise at the end of World War I. Judson claims that the empire was hardly doomed prior to 1914, arguing against long-standing nationalist histories of the empire’s inevitable collapse. While The Habsburg Empire is not without its flaws, it will surely remain required reading for anyone interested not only in the empire itself, but more broadly in the history of state-building, modernization, and nationalism in the nineteenth century. Continue reading “The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter Judson (2016)” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter

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

From connecting Trump in Greenland with Germany’s Second and Third Reich to the radical right’s obsession with southern Africa, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

That Time Canada Tried to Purchase Greenland

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
Sir Robert Laird Borden

John C. Mitcham
Duquesne University

President Donald Trump’s recent musings about buying Greenland from Denmark stirred deep emotions abroad.  The idea of acquiring sovereign territory through a real estate purchase seems like a quintessentially American act. As a Canadian writer in the Toronto Star put it, “Whether you love him or hate him, I think we can agree on this: Donald Trump even believing he can buy Greenland is clinically insane.”

Except that Canada also once tried to purchase the Greenland.

At the height of the First World War, the leaders of the vast British Empire assembled in London to lay the foundation for a postwar world dominated by white, English-speaking peoples.  This Imperial War Conference of 1917 included representatives from the overseas Dominions of Canada, Newfoundland, South Africa, and New Zealand. It was the kind of Commonwealth gentleman’s club that would make the most romantic Brexiteers swoon with post-imperial nostalgia. Continue reading “That Time Canada Tried to Purchase Greenland” →

Why Boris Johnson is drawing parliamentary parallels with Lord Palmerston

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Lord Palmerston (left) and Boris Johnson (right)

Alan Lester
University of Sussex

When Laurence Fox played Lord Palmerston in ITV’s Victoria, he admitted that the character “may have had a bit of the Boris about him”. [1] Johnson and Palmerston of course shared undiplomatic careers as flippant Foreign Secretaries and a wit and charm that made them popular with the public, if not always with their peers in parliament. The parallels do not end there, however.

In 1857, when he was Prime Minister, Palmerston suspended parliament in order to force his will by appealing directly to the electorate. Sensing that he was more in touch with the electorate than their elected representatives in the House of Commons, he called a general election and mobilised British patriotism to gain a new parliamentary majority.  In Palmerston’s case, patriotic fervour was brought to bear against the Chinese rather than the EU. In both his journalistic and political careers, Johnson has dedicated himself to narrating the EU as Britain’s bogeyman just as effectively as Palmerston was able to generate Sinophobia. Both men realised that there’s nothing like spinning an enemy to advance a political career. Continue reading “Why Boris Johnson is drawing parliamentary parallels with Lord Palmerston” →

The struggle over 1989: The rise and contestation of eastern European populism

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

Bogdan Iacob, James Mark, Tobias Rupprecht

First published in Eurozine

Eastern Europe is clearly part of a global populist wave, and is now part of the western right-wing populist imaginary as the bedrock for ‘pure’ European values. Only by looking at ‘1989’ from a new angle can we see how populist governments’ rejection of a ‘decadent’ and ‘imperialist’ West merely continues a communist stance, despite their strident anti-communist rhetoric.

The spread of populist governments in eastern Europe over the last decade, and their nationalist challenging of core tenets of western liberalism, has given currency to talk about a ‘new east-west divide’. A notion has taken hold that draws on a longer history of western views of eastern backwardness: a specifically eastern illiberal ‘infection’ is allegedly threatening the stability of the entire European project. In this vein, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called upon ‘the EU and the people of Europe to resist the backsliding we are seeing in the east’.1 Yet the parallel ascent of populist parties in much of the West, and a wave of anti-populist mass protests in the east, suggest the divide is not defined by geography alone.

As we argue in 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe, the current wave of east European populism, while rooted in local nationalist traditions, is best understood by also considering its global ideological bedfellows. Nativists in eastern Europe, and those who embrace similar forms of ethnonationalist cultural traditionalism elsewhere, have mutually reinforced each other. Radical right-wing figures in western Europe have developed strong bonds with eastern European populists in a common push to ‘re-found’ Europe on an explicitly anti-liberal basis. Beyond Europe, leaders with an authoritarian bent, from the right-wing of the Republican Party in the United States, to Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Xi Jinping in China, have contributed to eastern European populists’ re-positioning against the West. Through these relationships, leading figures of such nationalist parties as PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary, as well as their intellectual supporters, re-imagined their place in a broader world beyond the liberal rule of law and what they consider the neo-colonial interference of the EU in their countries’ domestic affairs. Together, they clamour for the defence of their societies’ ‘Europeanness’, allegedly threatened by Western multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and ‘political correctness’. Continue reading “The struggle over 1989: The rise and contestation of eastern European populism” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter

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

From reconciling capitalism with democracy to wedding socialism with populism, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Major new ERC study tracing the history of psychiatry will show roots of today’s global mental health

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University of Exeter Research News

A major new study of the history of psychiatry will show how efforts to create a “global standard” for mental health has left a lasting legacy on the treatment offered today.

After World War II psychiatrists in different countries worked together to create institutions which are still used universally. Psychiatrists, anthropologists and others are still continuing some of the same debates, interrogating the role of local social and cultural factors in the definition and classifications of disorders, diagnoses or treatments. Historian Dr Ana Antic, Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, has won a prestigious European Research Council Starting Grant Award of 1,499,952 Euro to investigate the history of transcultural psychiatry and its links to decolonisation.

The five-year University of Exeter project, ‘Decolonising madness? Transcultural psychiatry, international order and the birth of a “global psyche” in the aftermath of WWII’, is the first to trace the emergence and development of the concept of a “global psyche”, and to examine how psychiatrists from different cultures worked together from the 1950s until the early 21st century. This project will involve an interdisciplinary team, who will show to what extent this process resulted in the “decolonisation” of mental health services, and how it impacted on patients in non-Western nations. Continue reading “Major new ERC study tracing the history of psychiatry will show roots of today’s global mental health” →