Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
What Does it Mean to Act with Humanity?
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
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
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”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From reviving the East India Company to questioning whether the American Revolution was a good idea, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
China’s New Silk Road: Central Asia and the Imperial Legacy of the Great Game
Tom Harper
University of Surrey
In the vein of its rich history in Central Asia, China’s quest for economic development has seen it return to the region that was once spanned by the Silk Route. While Central Asia has served as the cross roads between Eastern and Western civilisation for centuries, it also once provided the chessboard upon which the Great Powers of the past had battled each other for land and influence. In sum it is one of the most strategic regions of the world, whether it be the Great Game of the nineteenth century or the superpower conflict of the 1980s.
In line with the power politics of the past, the region has seen a new Great Game where today’s strongest nations compete for the region’s natural resources.[1] With the close of the twentieth century, Central Asia re-entered the spotlight as a result of the War on Terror and, more recently, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路). In light of these developments, the imperial struggles of the past two centuries take on a new importance, as they continue to influence the perceptions of China’s return to the region. These perceptions, real or imagined, have fuelled the struggles of the Great Powers in the region and China’s involvement is simply the latest chapter in a centuries long struggle. Continue reading “China’s New Silk Road: Central Asia and the Imperial Legacy of the Great Game”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From inside Britain’s secret underground Cold War city to why we need international history, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Arguing about Empire: The Dreyfus Affair and the Fashoda Crisis, 1898
We are delighted to announce a new online collaboration with our colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Not Even Past and the Imperial & Global Forum will be cross-posting articles, sharing podcasts, and sponsoring discussions of historical publications and events. We are launching our joint initiative this month with a blog, cross-posted from Not Even Past, based on a new book by Exeter’s own Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing About Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France.
Martin Thomas and Richard Toye
“At the present moment it is impossible to open a newspaper without finding an account of war, disturbance, the fear of war, diplomatic changes achieved or in prospect, in every quarter of the world,” noted an advertisement in The Times on May 20, 1898. “Under these circumstances it is absolutely essential for anyone who desires to follow the course of events to possess a thoroughly good atlas.” One of the selling points of the atlas in question – that published by The Times itself – was that it would allow its owner to follow “most minute details of the campaign on the Atbara, Fashoda, Uganda, the Italian-Abyssinian conflict &c.” The name Atbara would already have been quite familiar to readers, as the British had recently had a battle triumph there as part of the ongoing reconquest of the Sudan. Continue reading “Arguing about Empire: The Dreyfus Affair and the Fashoda Crisis, 1898”
Amanda Nettelbeck (Adelaide) on creating Aboriginal subjects of the Crown in colonial Australia – this Wed., May 3
Protection, conciliation and coercion: creating Aboriginal subjects of the Crown in colonial Australia
Centre for Imperial and Global History Seminar Series
When: Wed. May 3, 4:30pm
Where: Amory 115, University of Exeter
Amanda Nettelbeck
University of Adelaide
Recent scholarship has seen a spike of interest in the politics of colonial humanitarianism and its various expressions around the British Empire from the late 18th century onwards. In particular, the project of Aboriginal ‘protection’ that had its formal heyday between the mid-1830s and the mid-1850s has received renewed focus as one of the most important means through which nineteenth-century strategies of humane governance were put into operation. Once conventionally regarded as a relatively short-lived Colonial Office agenda to extend justice and rights to indigenous people, the mid nineteenth-century project of protection has more recently been reconsidered in terms of its role to help secure the Crown’s practical jurisdiction in unruly colonies, and its motivations to create indigenous people’s colonial subjectivity. Continue reading “Amanda Nettelbeck (Adelaide) on creating Aboriginal subjects of the Crown in colonial Australia – this Wed., May 3”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From rethinking Cold War Burma to Brexit and the World Wars, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
CFP: Understanding Insurgencies (1920-2000)
AMNESTY TO COUNTER INSURGENCY:
GLOBAL COMPARISONS FROM THE COLONIAL CONTEXT, 1920-2000
Workshop
Global History & Culture Centre, University of Warwick
14-15 June 2018
This workshop is part of a Leverhulme Trust Research Network on Understanding Insurgencies: Resonances from the Colonial Past. Led by the University of Exeter’s Centre for War, State and Society, other collaborators in this international network are the University of Warwick, University of Oxford, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Paris, University of Glasgow, Universite de Québec à Montréal, and KITLV Institute Leiden. The network is funded by the Leverhulme Trust to stage a series of workshops and conferences over a three-year period, (commencing June 2016), and leading to publications.
The theme of this sixth workshop in the Understanding Insurgencies series is ‘Amnesty to Counter Insurgency’. The intention is to examine the manner in which amnesties have been used to bring about temporary cease-fires during counter-insurgency campaigns, to induce surrenders or the ending of hostilities that will bring conflict to an end, or as a means of engaging political discourse in order to generate a negotiated peace. We invite presentations that give detailed consideration to individual case studies during the twentieth century, but would also welcome papers which take a comparative approach and those that look at the principles and pit-falls that lie behind amnesty settlements, including papers that consider the political consequences of amnesties – where these may be contested as well as where they are accepted. Continue reading “CFP: Understanding Insurgencies (1920-2000)”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From when America bombs countries to save them to why the French presidential candidates are arguing about their colonial history, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
We’re Hiring! Lecturer in Digital History
Job title Lecturer in Digital History (Education & Research)
Job reference P57178
Date posted 11/04/2017
Application closing date 15/05/2017
Location Exeter
Salary The starting salary will be from £33,943 per annum within the Grade F band (£33,943 – £38,183).
Package Generous holiday allowances, flexible working, pension scheme and relocation package (if applicable).
Job category/type Academic
Job description
College of Humanities – Department of History
The University of Exeter is a Russell Group university that combines world-class research with very high levels of student satisfaction. Exeter has over 21,000 students from more than 130 different countries and is in the top 1% of universities in the world with 98% of its research rated as being of international quality. Our research focuses on some of the most fundamental issues facing humankind today.
The post of Lecturer in Digital History will contribute to extending the research profile of History at Exeter, particularly in areas related or complementary to Digital History and the Digital Humanities more generally. This permanent, full time post is available from 1st September 2017. Continue reading “We’re Hiring! Lecturer in Digital History”
This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History
Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From neocolonialism in Africa to when humanitarianism became imperialism, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Teaching and Learning War
Catriona Pennell
University of Exeter
The AHRC has recently funded the Teaching and Learning War research network, which brings together EU and international researchers and educationalists, from a range of academic disciplines and professional backgrounds (including schools, museums, archives and heritage organisations), to explore young people’s engagement with and receptivity to the cultural memory messages of the two world wars from an international comparative perspective. At the centenary of WW1 in the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand young people find themselves front and centre of both state-sponsored and community-level commemorations. As the two world wars fade from living memory, young people across the Commonwealth have been singled out as those who will be carrying the memory of the war forward. Early indications suggest similar emphasis will be placed on young people in the 80th and 90thanniversaries of WW2. Continue reading “Teaching and Learning War”
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