Imperial & Global Forum

Lori Lee Oates
PhD Candidate, History Department, University of Exeter

My research was born when I posed a single question: Why are people so interested in the texts of New Age religion at a time when church attendance and the power of traditional religion are declining in many parts of the world?

It was obvious to me that the way the world engages with religion had changed in recent decades as books like The Power of Now, Eat Pray Love, and Return to Love topped the New York Times bestseller list. I soon discovered that scholars have argued for some time that New Age religion is rooted in nineteenth-century occultism, the meeting of Eastern and Western religions, and the rise of secular society. Religious Studies scholars have used these factors to explain why Western society is now racing to meditation and yoga classes, or reifying New Age texts as contemporary religious symbols. Through my research, I discovered that scholars had already effectively established that New Age religion is rooted in the Hellenistic religious philosophies of the ancient world, combined with a synthesis of Eastern religion in the nineteenth century.

My project, however, seeks to set the emergence of commercialized religion within the context of nineteenth-century globalization, imperialism in India, growth in the printing activity, growth in liberalism, and the development of the market economy. Largely, I am doing this by examining the globalization and movement of literature between 1833 and 1900, in a way that has not been done previously. Continue reading “Postgraduate Profile – Lori Lee Oates” →

Editor’s Note: It is hard to believe that the Imperial & Global Forum went live just a year ago. In the weeks leading up to the new year, please help us celebrate by checking out the year’s 10 most popular posts.

10. Diminishing Returns of the Global Turn

David A. Bell
Lapidus Professor of History, Princeton University
Contributing Editor, The New Republic

I am grateful to Marc-William  Palen for his smart, sharp comments on my New Republic essay, and also for his generous offer to let me respond to them on this blog.

Palen calls my essay ‘provocative’ and ‘eloquent’, but also ‘unfair’. I certainly prefer this judgment to ‘balanced, but dull and inarticulate’, but the adjective ‘unfair’ still rankles a little. In particular, Palen charges me with confusing page counts and criticism; with mixing up Atlantic history and global history; and with ‘expect[ing] the impossible’ from the volume that I was reviewing.

Of these charges, it is the third that really gets to the substantive differences between us.

My use of page — and reference — counts in the review was simply a convenient shorthand, of the sort that is necessary in short essays, to give readers a quick sense of what a book under review does, and does not emphasize. Of course, historians can often ‘transmit an impressive amount of information and analysis’ in a small number of pages, as Palen says, but the overall allocation of space still has more than a little to tell us. The fact that A World Connecting allocated just three sentences (out of 1,168 pages) to the First and Second Socialist Internationales suggests pretty strongly, however crude the measurement, that the authors did not consider the Internationales an important subject. [continue reading]

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

From the demise of the world’s largest monopoly to the smells of empire, here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History” →

Andrew Thompson
Director, Centre for Imperial & Global History

[This article first appeared as ‘How to talk about immigration, by the 1960s politician who made it his life’s work’, Conversation, 18 November 2014]

As the Rochester and Strood by-election approaches, raising the chances of another UKIP politician entering parliament, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has warned against getting caught in an “arms race of rhetoric” about immigration. On the other hand though, Cooper has attacked liberals who don’t want to talk about immigration at all.

This recent escalation in the rhetoric on immigration is best understood not simply on its own terms but when put into a proper historical perspective. Ever since the 1960s, talk of immigration in Britain has played into negative politics – a politics of what is opposed and what we are against. The latest example of this tendency is that of the defence minister Michael Fallon, when he suggested that British towns were being “swamped” by migrants from Eastern Europe.

Whenever the debate about immigration intensifies the media invariably recalls the inflammatory speeches of Enoch Powell. We might however be much better off re-reading some of the speeches made by a lesser known politician of the 1960s. Maurice Foley isn’t a household name like Powell but he made talking about immigration the centre of his career. Continue reading “Lessons From the 1960s for UK Immigration Debate” →

Dr. Stacey Hynd
Director of Postgraduate Research, History Department

If you are seeking PhD funding in the fields of World, Global, Imperial or Transnational History, please consider the following funding opportunities at the University of Exeter.

• AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership: http://www.sww-ahdtp.ac.uk/

The Doctoral Training Partnership is hosting an Information Day at the National Museum of Wales on 24 November (registration closes on 10 Nov). If you cannot attend this information day, please feel free to contact the Director of Postgraduate Research, Dr Stacey Hynd (s.hynd@exeter.ac.uk), and she will answer any questions you have about our research community.

History at the University of Exeter has two research centres in the broad field of world history: the Centre for Imperial and Global History, and the Centre for War, State and Society. Both offer internationally-recognised supervision with geographical coverage from 30 staff across African, Asian (including Chinese), Middle Eastern, North American, Latin American, Imperial, and European history from early-modern to contemporary eras. The Centres have 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
• Maritime history

Continue reading “PhD Funding Available: Last Day to Register for AHRC Doctoral Training Information Day” →