Registration Open for ‘Embassies in Crisis’ – British Academy, 9 June 2016

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Embassies in Crisis

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. It is this aspect of Embassy experience that this conference explores.

The Embassies in Crisis conference will revisit flashpoints in the recent lives of Embassies overseas. Much of the focus will be on Britain’s Embassies, but several papers will also consider other instances of Embassies in crisis, whether British or otherwise. Serving and former British Ambassadors will be presenting as ‘witnesses’ alongside invited academics who have been invited to discuss dramatic instances of international confrontation or mass demonstration that placed particular nations, their capitals, and the Embassies they housed in the global spotlight.

Key themes include:  Continue reading “Registration Open for ‘Embassies in Crisis’ – British Academy, 9 June 2016” →

What FDR and Reagan Had in Common – A Talk by H. W. Brands

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What FDR and Reagan Had in Common

And What Might be Disappearing from American Foreign Policy

a Talk by

Professor H. W. Brands

Brands, Bill 2009

When: 24 May, 2.00-3.30

Where: Laver LT6, University of Exeter

RSVP online at Eventbrite

Abstract: Franklin Roosevelt epitomized liberalism in America in the 20th century, and Ronald Reagan conservatism. Yet while they disagreed on nearly everything in domestic affairs, they agreed on the need for the United States to play the leading role in world affairs. This consensus among liberals and conservatives is at risk from the mediocre performance of the U.S. economy since 2008 and from a questioning at both ends of the political spectrum of the value to the United States of trying to solve the world’s problems. Continue reading “What FDR and Reagan Had in Common – A Talk by H. W. Brands” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter
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Abjad al-ḥarb ʻThe alphabet of warʼ (British Library, COI Archive, ‘Arabic A.B.C.’ PP/1/28L). © British Library, 2016

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

From how history can save the global economy to African utopias of the 1960s, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Daily History Q&A: The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade

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Clinton Sandvick
Daily History

Cross-posted from Daily History

Marc-William Palen’s new book The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896 is relevant not only to historians of imperialism, capitalism, and economics, but to the 2016 American presidential primary election. Once again, free trade has become a central campaign issue during a presidential election. While Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have discussed the consequences of free trade, they have provided very little historical context to help voters understand the rationale behind free trade. Palen’s book explores a world when extreme American economic nationalism came into conflict with Britain’s advocacy of global free trade. Palen’s book focuses “upon the ideological debates surrounding free trade and protectionism” within the United States and Great Britain.[1]

Palen is a historian at the University of Exeter. He has written extensively on globalization and free trade for the New York Times, the Australian, The Conversation, Globalist Magazine, History News Network and many others. Palen has recently published two outstanding articles (‘Free trade is once again tearing apart the Republican Party‘ and ‘Trump’s anti-trade tirades recall GOP’s protectionist past‘) explaining how Donald Trump’s economic policies echo previous GOP stances on free trade. He is also the current editor for Imperial & Global Forum. You can follow Palen on Twitter at @MWPalen.

Here is the interview with Marc-William Palen.

If someone asked you to quickly summarize your book, what would be your 2-minute elevator version?

Briefly, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade provides a new interpretation of Anglo-American imperialism and economic integration from the mid to late 19th century. The issue of free trade dominated the era’s political scene like no other. But whereas Britain turned to free trade as a national policy and ideology by mid-century, the United States turned to economic nationalism. The book thus argues that Anglo-American economic globalization was driven by this political and ideological conflict between free trade and economic nationalism from the 1840s onward.

Continue reading “Daily History Q&A: The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment
Abdel Kader Haidara with ancient family-owned manuscripts, Timbuktu, Mali, 2007. PHOTO: AMI VITALE/PANOS
Abdel Kader Haidara with ancient family-owned manuscripts, Timbuktu, Mali, 2007. PHOTO: AMI VITALE/PANOS

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

From the librarian who saved Timbuktu’s heritage to walking tours of Barcelona’s slave trade past, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

J. A. Hobson and Imperialism – A New Talking Empire Podcast

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

john_atkinson_hobson (1)In 1902, journalist John A. Hobson published Imperialism: A Study. The book was among the first to connect the  rise of finance capital with the growth of imperial expansion after 1870. Hobson’s theory would fast number among the most influential critiques of imperialism. Although Hobson himself was not a Marxist (he was a classical liberal), his theory would play a key role in shaping subsequent Marxist theories of imperialism, most notably that of V. I. Lenin.

In this Talking Empire podcast, Centre Director Richard Toye discusses Hobson’s Imperialism with Dr. Marc-William Palen.

 

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by Marc-William Palen1 Comment
Never Again! East German National Front election poster 1958.
Never Again! East German National Front election poster 1958.

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

From Krushchev’s 1956 charm offensive to democracy in East Germany, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

History Repeating Itself? Free trade is once again tearing apart the Republican Party

Published on by Marc-William Palen1 Comment
An 1883 Puck cartoon depicting the Republican Party standing before the Tariff Question Sphinx. The Independent Party Solution approaches in the distance, representing Oedipus, who, in Greek mythology, solves the riddles of the Sphinx.
An 1883 Puck cartoon depicting the Republican Party standing before the Tariff Question Sphinx. The Independent Party Solution approaches in the distance, representing Oedipus, who, in Greek mythology, solves the riddles of the Sphinx.

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” →

The Victorian Origins of Will and Kate’s Visit to India

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The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at India Gate, a memorial to Indian service in the First World War, its foundation stone laid by the Duke of Connaught in 1921 Credit: @PARoyal
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at India Gate, a memorial to Indian service in the First World War, its foundation stone laid by the Duke of Connaught in 1921. Credit: @PARoyal

Charles V. Reed
Elizabeth City State University
Editor, H-Empire

As the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visit south Asia this week, doing the sorts of things that royals are expected to do whilst abroad in the former empire – attend fancy social events, commemorate, inaugurate, and patronize, play cricket, and so on – the celebrity-obsessed global media has enthusiastically followed their every move. An even cursory glance at the tweets tagged #RoyalVisitIndia reveals the performative and visual character of the royal tour – so essential to its purpose since the first visits of the nineteenth century. William and Kate’s touring ancestors would find much familiar in their itineraries, the ceremony, the responses. It’s a quite odd thing, when we think about it, considering nearly seventy years of Indian independence from British rule. Of course, the present Queen’s dedication to the Commonwealth and maintaining the monarchy’s role in the former empire — as chronicled in Philip Murphy’s Monarchy and the End of Empire — explains much of it. But the Victorian history of the royal tour is of equal significance. Continue reading “The Victorian Origins of Will and Kate’s Visit to India” →

Apply by April 17 for an International PhD Student Award @ExeterCIGH

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The deadline (April 17) is fast approaching to apply for an international PhD student award, through which you can become a crucial part of the Centre for Imperial and Global History.

We offer internationally-recognised supervision with geographical coverage from staff across African, Asian (including Chinese), Middle Eastern, North American, Latin American, European, Imperial, and Global history from early-modern to contemporary eras. We have strong inter-disciplinary links with colleagues across the humanities and social sciences at Exeter, particularly with the Centre for War, State and Society and the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. The Centre has particular research interests in:

  • Globalisation’s past and present
  • Comparative empires and transnationalism
  • Humanitarianism, development and human rights
  • Law and colonialism
  • Political economy and the imperial state
  • Europe, decolonisation and the legacies of empire
  • The impact of armed conflict on society
  • Colonial warfare and counterinsurgency

Continue reading “Apply by April 17 for an International PhD Student Award @ExeterCIGH” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

Published on by Marc-William Palen1 Comment

Senegal festival 1966

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

From 21st-century death merchants to the Cold War’s ‘black world’, here are this weeks 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

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

street sign 1

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” →

India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia

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india's war

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” →

This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History

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An encounter between the Mexican army and student protesters in the summer of 1968 in Mexico City's Zócalo (Wikimedia Commons)
An encounter between the Mexican army and student protesters in the summer of 1968 in Mexico City’s Zócalo (Wikimedia Commons)

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” →

Are Trade Wars a Historical Myth?

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Embargo Canada US

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?” →