Marc-William Palen
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From the imperial roots of hunger to whaling stations at the end of the earth, here are this week’s top reads in imperial and global history.
Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Rumana Begum and Andrew Thompson
Email Rumana Begum, rumana90@hotmail.com or Andrew Thompson, a.s.thompson@exeter.ac.uk
Cross-Posted from Care for the Future
Last week Michael Gove rekindled the debate on British values by demanding that they should be taught in Britain’s schools. Gove’s broadside against the dangers of Islamic extremism taking a hold of our education system was backed by the Prime Minister, who rallied to his Education Secretary’s side, claiming that the incorporation of British values into the school curriculum was likely to have the “overwhelming support” of the country. The Prime Minister went on to give his own view of what these values are, citing freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility, and a respect for British institutions.
Chris Dietrich
Assistant Professor, Fordham University
Follow on Twitter @C_R_W_Dietrich
“Allende was assassinated for nationalizing the . . . wealth of Chilean subsoil,” Pablo Neruda wrote on September 14, 1973. Neruda was lamenting the overthrow and death of his friend, Chilean President Salvador Allende, a week before he himself succumbed to cancer. “From the salt-peter deserts, the underwater coal mines, and the terrible heights where copper is extracted through inhuman work by the hands of my people, a liberating movement of great magnitude arose,” he continued. “This movement led a man named Salvador Allende to the presidency of Chile, to undertake reforms and measures of justice that could not be postponed, to rescue our national wealth from foreign clutches.” Unfortunately, Allende’s flirtation with economic nationalization ran up against the country’s multinational business interests, particularly those that had support from the U.S. government. His socialist reforms were also ill timed; the U.S. government’s ideological view towards the global economy tended towards the Manichean.
So what was the American role in Allende’s overthrow? Continue reading “Allende, the Third World, and Neoliberal Imperialism”
The History Department at the University of Exeter has recently received funding from the AHRC to support an international research network: ‘Imagining Markets: Conceptions of Empire/Commonwealth, Europe and China in Britain’s economic future since the 1870s’. The network led by David Thackeray, Richard Toye and Andrew Thompson aims to provide a bridge between historical and contemporary ways of thinking about Britain’s future global economic orientation, bringing together scholars working in the fields of Imperial, European and Asian studies, and scholars from cultural studies and economic studies, which have become increasingly separated branches of enquiry calling for reintegration.
Dr. Bryan S. Glass
History Department, Texas State University
Follow on Twitter @glass_bryan
With the Scottish independence referendum just around the corner, Dr. Glass, General Editor of The British Scholar Society and founder of the journal Britain and the World, discusses the complicated relationship between the British Empire and Scottish nationalism following decolonisation. He will be debating Michael Gove on these very issues later this month at the Chalke Valley History Festival. Dr. Glass’s book, The Scottish Nation at Empire’s End, was released today by Palgrave Macmillan.
The Scottish independence referendum is just a little over three months away. Pundits are constantly discussing or debating why Scotland should either remain within the United Kingdom or vote for an independence that would look far different from what the Scots last experienced in 1707. Continue reading “A Scottish Referendum on the Failed Empire?”
Marc-William Palen
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
From new digital archives to China’s last Tiananmen prisoner, here is this week’s roundup in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Following a meeting last month with representatives from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), Exeter Professor Richard Overy reports on the status of over 1 million secret files that the FCO has long kept hidden from the public. What is in the files? Will they be made available? If so, when? As Prof. Overy puts it, the situation remains ‘a rather gloomy one’. The Forum has previously reported on the secret archive’s implications for the history of decolonisation. Katie Engelhart (@katieengelhart), James Renton (@RentonJE, #secretarchive), Richard Overy, and Richard Drayton, among others, continue to keep us informed as events unfold.
The meeting was called by the FCO to inform interested academics and archivists about the current position of the so-called ‘Special Collections’ still held in the Foreign Office archives. The object was to gather views about what priority should be given to particular collections and to give a detailed breakdown of the current programme for releasing material to The National Archives. Around 60 people were in attendance with a panel of six experts, including representatives from TNA and the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council on archives.
The following points summarize the information that was given at the meeting: Continue reading “What the Foreign & Commonwealth Office is Hiding in its Secret Archive”
Quinn Slobodian
Assistant Professor, Wellesley College
Follow on Twitter @zeithistoriker
Professor Slobodian tells a remarkable story concerning the controversial Cold War German reception of one of the world’s most printed books: Mao’s Little Red Book.
In 1967, West Germans bought over one-hundred-thousand copies of Mao’s Book of Quotations, also known as the Little Red Book. Three editions were sold, each bearing a distinct ideological imprint. Alongside the familiar, plastic-bound edition of the Beijing Foreign Languages Press was a paperback published by the left-liberal Fischer Press. Translated and edited by West German students of Sinology, the Fischer edition provided a scholarly perspective on the Cultural Revolution that was broadly sympathetic, signaling its orientation with a cover photograph of a young girl and an elderly woman in a benign moment of intergenerational 
communication [left]. The third edition [right] of Mao’s book of quotations, published by the anti-communist Marienburg Press had the title, The Mao Zedong Breviary: Catechism of 700 Million. The editor, a minor functionary in the Economics Ministry, Kurt C. Steinhaus, warned of a coming race war led by the Chinese against the world’s white populations. The publishers declared that their goal in releasing the book was to “show Mao in all his severity.” “It is necessary,” they said, “to give Germans and Europeans the creeps.” Continue reading “Reading Mao’s Little Red Book in Divided Germany”
From Cold War cover-ups to ‘mansplaining’ IR theory, here are the week’s top picks in imperial and global history. Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
Martin Thomas
Director, Centre for War, State, and Society
University of Exeter
There has long been agreement among historians of Algeria’s violent decolonization that particular massacres and, more particularly, the retributions they provoked, decisively altered the nature of the conflict. Massacre, it is averred, changed the cultural codes, the military rules, and the permissible limits to mass violence within Algeria’s population and between French security forces and local insurgents.
Why this should be the case remains harder to explain. The demonstrative horror of mass killing intentionally shrinks the middle ground. It destroys the prospects for compromise, denying political and personal space to the otherwise non-committal. Meant to polarize, its violence signifies the ultimate rhetoric of shock. Little wonder that historians of Algeria’s war concur that massacres served as decisive conflict escalators, whether strategically, symbolically, or both. Continue reading “Rhetoric of Massacre and Reprisal in Algeria’s War of Independence”
Richard Toye
Follow on Twitter @RichardToye
On 3 March 1959, eleven Mau Mau detainees were beaten to death by their British guards amid an attempt to force the prisoners to undertake manual labour. What is now known as the Hola Camp Massacre has widely been seen as a seminal moment, one that undermined the legitimacy of the British Empire. In a celebrated Commons speech on the affair, Enoch Powell declared that it was not possible to have ‘African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home […] We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.’
Yet it is intriguing to ask why this particular episode of colonial violence became a cause célèbre when previous comparable episodes of imperial violence (such as the Batang Kali killings in Malaya in 1948) had not. Continue reading “Rhetoric and Imperial Decline: Arguing the Hola Camp Massacre of 1959”
Here are this week’s top picks in imperial and global reading: Continue reading “This Week’s Top Picks in Imperial & Global History”
The Imperial and Global History Network for early career scholars will be holding its first conference on 19th and 20th June 2014 at the University of Exeter. The conference will bring together early career scholars from across the world, discussing a range of topics including America’s Drone Empire, the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, and Treaty Port China. Registration for the conference is now open and information about how to register can be found here.
Where: Reed Hall, University of Exeter
When: 19 and 20 June 2014
Marc-William Palen
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen
Last week, I came across two provocative blog posts, at The Junto and the Imperial and Global History Network (IGHN), on teaching global history that got me thinking reflectively about my own recent experiences of approaching American and British imperial history from a global historical perspective. The big takeaways from both pieces seem to be: 1) teaching global history is a challenge not just for students but for teachers; and 2) that the net positive from teaching history from a global vantage point at the graduate level far outweighs said challenges. However, The Junto’s Jonathan Wilson concludes by quite explicitly questioning whether global historical approaches are in fact suitable for the first-year undergraduate classroom. Continue reading “Is Global History Suitable for Undergraduates?”
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