MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

International Women’s Movements and Transnational Feminism: International Women’s Organisations in the Interwar Years

Muthunlakshmi Reddi, founder-president of the Women’s Indian Association, stated at the 1933 International Council of Women that “from its infancy, the women’s movement was international in character”.[1] From the late 1800s, women from a variety of nations exchanged ideas and worked together on issues such as suffrage, marriage, and education. This includes through various international women’s organisations, beginning with the International Council of Women, founded in 1888.[2] Traditionally, women’s movements have been studied through national frameworks, practically ignoring these international and transnational aspects. Although these dimensions have received increasing attention through the ‘international turn’ in women’s history, international women’s organisations, especially for suffrage, have been “almost entirely overlooked”.[3]

The limited existing scholarship centres around three main organisations: the International Council of Women, International Woman Suffrage Alliance, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Despite proclaiming to represent “women of the world”, scholars such as Leila Rupp and Sumita Mukherjee have emphasised their overwhelming Eurocentrism, including in members, locations, and aims.[4] The interwar period, however, saw increased internationalism and diversity in international women’s organisations, both through membership and the foundation of non-Western organisations including the Inter-American Commission of Women (1928) and All-Asian Women’s Conference (1931). While such organisations have received some scholarship, Eurocentric organisations remain the dominant focus.[5]

This project seeks to address these various oversights and analyse international women’s organisations during the interwar years. Specifically, while examining the main organisations, criticise their Eurocentricity and explore more overlooked non-Western examples and their  efforts to decentre networks and organisations. Three leading research questions drive this project. Firstly, what were the aims of international women’s organisations and how effective were they? Secondly, what was their geographical locations, regarding both memberships and where they convened? Finally, what was their significance and contribution, including in affecting national campaigns? A primarily transnational approach will be used to analyse how issues, ideas, and networks transcended national borders, including with a transnational feminist approach to focus on more marginalised women. I will also use some comparative and micro-historical aspects to compare different organisations and follow certain individuals’ contributions. Various primary sources will be used to achieve this, including letters for personal insights; and organisations’ publications such as Jus Suffragii, and conference invites and reports for information on events, news, and aspirations.

At present, I argue that international women’s organisations significantly contributed to various movements including women’s rights and suffrage, both internationally and nationally. Countering the idea of a ‘global sisterhood’, however, the main organisations’ Eurocentrism overlooked non-Western perspectives and retained imperialistic attitudes. Although increased internationalism and representation in the interwar years challenged the Eurocentrism, non-Western women continued to face challenges and marginalisation. Nevertheless, the temporal frame of the interwar years is significant and valuable, including in demonstrating colonised women’s organisation, contributions, and reclaimed agency in the years prior to decolonisation. Additionally, women’s interwar international collaborations exemplify the ability to overcome international issues and tensions to work towards shared goals: an effort which remains crucial for various current issues, including environmentalism. These reasons, alongside the various scholarly oversights on international women’s organisations, drive and give merit to this project.

[1] Muthulakshmi Reddi, ‘Creative Citizenship (1933)’, in Maureen Mynagh and Nancy Forestell (eds), Documenting First Wave Feminisms, Volume 1: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents (Toronto, 2012), p. 203.

[2] Leila Rupp, ‘Challenging Imperialism in International Women’s Organizations, 1888-1945’, NWSA Journal, 8: 1 (1996), p. 9.      

[3] Ann Towns, ‘The Inter-American Commission of Women and Women’s Suffrage, 1920-1945’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 42: 4 (2010), pp. 779-780.

[4] Rupp, ‘Challenging Imperialism’, pp. 8-27. Sumita Mukherjee, ‘The All-Asian Women’s Conference 1931: Indian women and their leadership of a pan-Asian feminist organisation’, Women’s History Review, 26: 3 (2017), pp. 363-381.

[5] For examples on non-Western organisations, see: Towns, ‘Inter-American Commission of Women’, pp.779-807. Shobna Nijhawan, ‘International Feminism from an Asian Center: The All-Asian Women’s Conference (Lahore, 1931) as a Transnational Feminist Moment’, Journal of Women’s History, 29: 3 (2017), pp. 12-36.

Commercialized Peripheries: The role of legal and illegal northern European trade in the colonial Spanish Southern Cone (1802-18077)     

The Atlantic Ocean is more than a stretch of water between continents. Rather, it is an arena for trade, migration, conflict, and cooperation. Notions of the Atlantic world originate with Walter Lippmann’s 1917 The New Republic, where Lippmann referred to Pan-America and Europe as an “Atlantic community.”^[1] Prompted by his characterization, historians like Fernand Braudel, Robert Palmer, and Bernard Bailyn have developed scholarship on the topic.^[2]

I intend to explore the Atlantic world through the trans-imperial interactions and flows of commerce with northern European merchants and port cities to and from the nineteenth-century Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. With the Anglo-Spanish War (1796-1808) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) endangering Spanish-Atlantic commerce, Spain authorized colonial trade with ‘neutral’ nations and vessels with the Viceroyalty.^[3] Many scholarly works concerning Platine neutral commerce center on relations between Spanish, Portuguese, and American merchants. This literature has highlighted the importance of these nations’ mercantile interactions and routes in the Atlantic and beyond.^[4] Yet few scholars have published on the role of northern European trade, specifically from Denmark, Prussia, Hamburg, and Holland, in this region and period. Some historians, such as Hernán Asdrúbal Silva, have accounted for the participation of Hamburg and Hamburger ships within Spanish Atlantic commercial networks, but more research is needed.^[5] Thus, the essential question for this paper is: To what extent did northern European merchants and port cities exploit their status as ‘neutral’ nations to benefit from commercial trade in the Spanish Atlantic? Further, how did other nations and merchants utilize these ‘neutral’ northern European vessels to conduct both legal and illegal trade during times of Anglo- and Franco-Spanish conflict?

To answer this question, I will utilize global microhistory to analyze interactions of northern European vessels within the Platine trade system and other ‘neutral’ vessels’ relations with northern European ports. Focused on the first decade of the nineteenth century, I will examine ships’ entries, departures, cargo, and routes from the Platine newspaper El Semanario de Agricultura, Industria y Comercio (1802-1807). For deeper analysis, I will aggregate this information into an SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) database to generate frequencies and patterns on cargo, ship ownership, and mercantile growth. Additionally, I will be cross-referencing these entries using the Slave Voyages Website.

Based on my current research, I argue that northern European merchants significantly increased their mercantile connections and revenue by taking advantage of their ‘neutral’ status with Río de la Plata’s port cities. As other national ships were either barred from ports or faced heavy duties, these ‘neutral’ nations served as middlemen for importing other nations’ goods to and from northern European ports or leasing their ‘neutral’ vessels for other nationals to transport their cargo. Thus, they profited by actively and passively participating in the Spanish American mercantile networks. Further, northern Europeans utilized their position and connections to engage in dishonest or illegal trade. French and Dutch ships were involved in privateering, notably with French Hipólito Mordeille capturing and selling British cargo utilizing French, Dutch, and Genoese ships. Hamburger, Prussian, and Danish ships also profited from deceitful trade as the dominance of rock or salt ballasts as cargo may indicate their transport of illegal goods, which they purposefully left undocumented in port records. In turn, northern Europeans’ participation in legal and illegal Platine trade demonstrates their ability to exploit their nations’ ‘neutrality’ and gain access to lucrative commercial networks.

^[1] Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario, 20: 1 (March 1996), p. 21.

^[2] William O’Reilly, ‘Genealogies of Atlantic history’, Atlantic Studies, 1:1, (August 2004), p. 70.

^[3] Jerry Cooney, ‘Neutral Vessels and Platine Slavers: Building a Viceregal Merchant Marine’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 18: 1 (May 1986), pp. 25-26.

^[4] See Alex Borucki, ‘The U.S. slave ship Ascension in the Río de la Plata: slave routes and circuits of silver in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic and beyond’, Colonial Latin American Review, 29: 4 (December 2020; Fabrício Prado, Edge of Empire: Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Río de la Plata (Berkeley, 2016).

^[5] Hernán Asdrúbal Silva, ‘HAMBURGO Y EL RÍO DE LA PLATA VINCULACIONES ECONÓMICAS A FINES DE LA EPOCA COLONIAL’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, 21:1 (December 1984), pp. 189-210.

  France, at the end of the 1960s, saw nuclear protest movements emerge because of rising ecological fears.^[1]Meanwhile, in 1967, ‘Nature and Youth’ formed in Norway as a radical environmentalist group.^[2] Clearly, there existed a European trend of environmental mobilisation in Europe from the 1960s, and, unsurprisingly, the Chernobyl disaster 1986 exacerbated these already strong environmentalist worries.^[3] It affected all of Europe and sparked movements in the East and West, making it a core reason for similar movements to develop. Importantly, there occurred trends between Eastern and Western media and governments, as many of them downplayed the effects and levels of radiation fallout. Therefore, this project will argue that media coverage of events; the accessibility of Western media in Eastern countries, such as Poland; and shared mentalities across borders, including parenthood were imperative for causing transnationally similar movements. The event created in both the East and West of Europe a disillusionment with governmental environmental policies, and exacerbated existing worries by certain social groups.  

Historiography

  Interestingly, there exists a focus on Soviet states in environmentalist literature.^[4] Most likely, the unethical environmentalist policies conducted by the USSR fuels this interest. Therefore, this project will use this area as a starting point because of its scholarly significance, and expand Westward. Notably, this will not be a comparative history, but rather an investigation of the durability of the Iron Curtain. It is, on a deeper level, asking how permeable it was to social-political movements.

Methods

  Indeed, this essay will use micro-historical and anthropological methods to demonstrate distinct connections between people in different countries. Influenced by anthropologist Harper who, in the 1990s, used individual case studies in Hungary to demonstrate a culture in Hungary after Chernobyl, it will use similar methods, but will widen the geographical scope to almost ignore national boundaries, creating a more broad, transnational picture of environmentalism.^[5]Furthermore, Hughes argues that historians evidently need to study environmental history using more global methods, and in a positive reaction to his argument, this project aims to view environmental impacts on a natural, continental scale rather than a man-made nationalistic scale.^[6] It could use scientific sources discussing radiation to understand if there is a trend in radiation levels and environmentalist movements, and use newspapers from the period to consider the role of media in this trend. To tackle language barriers, Alexievich’s voices from Chernobyl, translated anthropological sources, and visual sources will play vital roles in this project.

Structure

  This paper will have two parts, split by chronology. The first section will consider environmentalism from its start in the 1960s to around 1986. It will investigate the factors that caused environmentalism to grow in multiple countries, and argue for similarity between Eastern and Western European countries. Secondly, and most importantly, it will study environmentalism post-Chernobyl, and use the same points as in the first section to demonstrate that the Chernobyl disaster played on and worsened existing fears. The point of this structure is to highlight the importance of the Chernobyl disaster in unionising environmentalist movements in Europe. 

Conclusion

  Overall, this project aims to show that environmental movements did transcend national borders. Movements did not depend on an Eastern or Western European identity, but more by personal and shared fears that superseded these borders. It will use the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 to underline that, although movements became more similar by the end of the twentieth century, they bore similarities from the start because of these universal fears.

^[1] Sezin Topçu, ‘Confronting Nuclear Risks: Counter-Expertise as Politics within the French Nuclear Energy Debate’, Nature & Culture 3(2) (2008), p.227.

^[2] Ørnulf Seippel, ‘From Mobilization to Institutionalization? The case of Norwegian Environmentalism’, Acta Sociologica 44(2) (2001), p.129.

^[3] Laurent Coumel and Marc Elie, ‘A Belated and Tragic Ecological Revolution: Nature, Disasters, and Green Activists in the Soviet Union and the Post-Soviet States, 1960s-2010s’, Soviet & Post-Soviet Review 40(2) (2013), p.158.

^[4] Anna Barcz, ‘Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe: Literature, History and Memory (London 2021).

^[5] Krista M. Harper, ‘Chernobyl Stories and Anthropological Shock in Hungary’, Anthropological Quarterly 74(3) (2001), p.115.

^[6] J. Donald Hughes, What is Environmental History? (Malden, MA 2016), p.84.

The Cold War has commonly been interpreted as the antithesis to globalisation. Following the Second World War, rather than being united in peace, the world was harshly divided into two distinct camps. The Iron Curtain separating East and West was seen as an impenetrable geographical, ideological and cultural barrier. However, this view of socialist states as isolated from the global trends that surrounded them has been revised in recent scholarship.[1] The processes of de-Stalinisation and decolonisation forced Soviet leaders in Eastern Europe to reassess their reluctance to engage with the outside world and instead foster a variety of economic, social and cultural relationships with the so-called ‘Third World.’ Rather than being solely a Western-Capitalist phenomenon, these encounters between the Eastern bloc and the ‘Third World’ impacted the political economies of these regions and shaped new forms of transregional mobility and exchange, presenting an alternative form of globalisation. [2]

A plethora of new literature exists on transregional Eastern European actors in African, Asian and Latin American countries – particularly in terms of economic, infrastructural and scientific development. However, I wish to discover how exactly the increased spread of knowledge about events in the ‘Third World’ to the Eastern bloc, alongside the increased exposure to individuals from these places made an impact on their host countries. Thus, I will argue that ideas of solidarity and anti-imperialism were transmitted from the ‘Third World’ to mirror and configure similar activism occurring in socialist Europe.

To do this I endeavor to use Czechoslovakia in the period of 1950-1989 as a focal point for transregional exchange. Alongside other socialist state countries, Czechoslovakia experienced a period of political activism and lively youth culture which was undoubtably impacted by increased contact with ideas and politics from the ‘Third World.’[3] In tandem with increased media circulation, the entrance of hundreds of ‘Third World’ students into Czechoslovakian universities and technical colleges played a role in dispersing ideas of liberation and reform that were subsumed into Czechoslovakia’s own political climate.[4]

Indeed, The Prague Spring in 1968 – violently crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion – was perceived akin to American intervention in Vietnam, likening Soviet interference in Czechoslovakia to Western and in turn imperial intrusion. As evident in the civic petition, Charter 77, which described the lack of press freedom in the Czechoslovakia as a “virtual apartheid”, the nation’s reformists were able to use language and concepts from the Third World to communicate internal disillusionment in the Socialist model prescribed by the Soviet Union.[5]

I hope to analyse transregional youth and cultural movements using archives from international student newspapers, archives of the University of the 17^th of November (a college for foreign students) and personal accounts and photography from youth festivals and protests to map how this rhetoric found its place in political activism. Additionally, I will examine film created by those in Prague’s FAMU school during this time, which has recently been exhibited as one of the main methods for foreign students from the ‘Third World’ to share their cultural experiences and encapsulate how independence aspirations crossed geographical boundaries.[6]

Through these means I wish to highlight the agency of these regions, examining how actors from the Third World were able to influence public opinion on liberation and solidarity and how Czechoslovakia formulated its own means to connect with these countries, separate from the prerogative of the Soviet Union. I believe marginalised voices both within Europe and in the Third World deserve specific study – highlighting how the periphery, both East and Southward, was able to shape transregional perceptions of politics, independence and human rights.

[1] See David C. Engerman, ‘The Second’s World Third World’ (2011), Łukasz Stanek, ‘Architecture in Global Socialism (2020), Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization (2016).

[2] James Mark and Artemy Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung (eds.), Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2020) pp. 3-5.

[3] Peter Apor and James Mark, ‘Socialism Goes Global: Decolonisation and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary 1956–1989’, Journal of Modern History, (2015),pp. 855-6.

[4] Kim Christiaens, ‘Europe at the crossroads of three worlds: alternative histories and connections of European solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–80s’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, (2017) 24:6, pp. 932-954.

[5]James Mark, and Paul Betts, Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation. (Oxford, 2022), pp. 220.

[6] Kathleen Reinhardt, ‘“Biafra of Spirit” in Prague: Film and Clashing Political Agendas in 1960s Czechoslovakia’, Contemporary And (17 January 2018) < https://contemporaryand.com/magazines/film-and-clashing-political-agendas-in-1960s-czechoslovakia/ >.

What does a postmodernist historiographical approach reveal about the driving determinants that inform post-Soviet Belarusian and Ukrainian textbooks’ origin of nationhood and conception of ‘nation’?

As one of the biggest stages for international conflict throughout the twentieth century, Eastern Europe has had little stability regarding definitive borders and nations in both its geographical and intellectual aspects. Therefore, many of the modern countries that constitute this region have evolved their conceptions of ‘nation’ and, subsequently, their origins of nationhood to help consolidate their national identity and strengthen their legitimacy. Such a phenomenon is particularly visible in Ukraine and Belarus; given their shared past as Soviet Socialist Republics within the Soviet Union, these two countries’ histories intersect and diverge from one another vis a vis Russian history. While greater historiographical discourses have identified a plethora of issues regarding the rigor of historicity in regards to national histories, the value of analyzing what, why, and how these national histories are constructed should not be dismissed. This project will use a postmodernist historiographical approach to examine post-Soviet Belarusian and Ukrainian scholarship on their respective origins of nationhood, uncovering the rudimentary driving forces that shape the structure and content of these histories; I intend to bring the dominant power structures that inform these phenomena to the forefront of historiographical research regarding the national history and the term ‘nation.’ My primary questions are as follows:

1. What are the driving determinants that inform Ukrainian and Belarusian origins of nationhood and how has this affected their respective conceptions of the term ‘nation’?  
2. Why do these modern nations draw on their ‘origin of nationhood’ in the first place?
3. Where do Ukraine and Belarus intersect ideologically with one another in this respect? Can this cross-analysis provide insight into how newer countries solidify their national identity?

I will first examine Ukrainian and Belarusian textbooks to delineate their origin of nationhood and conception of ‘nation’, bridging any gaps with their respective canonical historical scholarship. These primary texts will be directly sourced from Belarusian and Ukrainian institutions and authors, so I anticipate supplementing English translations where possible and producing my own translations when necessary. I will interact with some discourses of Russian historiography on these matters as a large portion of statehood for Ukraine and Belarus were in conjunction with Russian power. Preliminary research regarding both countries has emphasized the lineage of Kievan Rus’, a loose federation dating back to as early as the ninth century. Encompassing most of modern day Ukraine and Belarus, the origins of the term are typically attributed to Russian historiography in the nineteenth century. Rather than dissect the historical accuracy of these claims, I will focus on the sourcing and thematic structure of the textbooks and historiographical scholarship of Ukraine and Belarus. I will investigate how these works are referencing other nations and what models of nationalism they draw inspiration from. Interacting with secondary sources regarding ethnolinguistic nationalism, dynamics of language, and the conception of the ‘nation’ will help to situate Ukraine and Belarus within wider historiographical debates regarding Eastern Europe.

As I conduct my research, I will apply a postmodernist historiographical framework for analysis. Given the breadth of theories and intellectual stances that characterize a ‘postmodernist’ model, I narrow my definition of the term in correspondence to the main ideas of philosophers Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Due to the vast amount of work they have collectively produced, I will limit myself to one publication per philosopher which is as follows: Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979), Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), and Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966). As these works are internationally renowned, I am confident of the reliability of their translated counterparts. Therefore, I will be referencing the direct English translations of these works. 

Analyzing Ukraine and Belarus’s respective nationhood origins through this postmodernist framework intends to question some aspects of the unconscious hierarchy of historical knowledge at play within the construction of national histories and conceptions of ‘nation.’ National history and postmodernist historiography, in their own respects, are commonly characterized as problematic to history as a discipline. Through this project, I stray from the predominant historiographical discourses that regard postmodernist theory as impractical and anarchic to instead demonstrate the value postmodernist theory has as a conceptual framework for a fruitful analysis of national histories. 

Project Title – Rapanui and the Obliteration of Isolated Civilizations: Causes, Effects, and Methods of Comprehension 

Word Count: 656 

Rapanui, a tiny grass-covered rock that is more commonly referred to as Easter Island, is the most isolated island in the Pacific Ocean and as of 2022 C.E. houses a population of over 9000 people. Looking backwards to the start of the 19^th century and that number was around 4000, but by the middle of said century it was exactly 110.¹ Just 110 individuals were all that made up the Indigenous Rapanui population, those people that share the name of the island. Unseen by this raw number is that most of the cultural knowledge departed with this population drop as slave traders carried heritage sharers to slave plantation in Peru. This is societal collapse and destruction. The how, why, and aftereffects of this deep destruction will be the focus of this project. As in my writing I will seek to examine how Rapanui’s interaction with the wider world resulted in the near obliteration of the Indigenous island’s culture, not solely in materialistic terms, but in systematic fashions.  

In doing this, a dual challenge will come in my research in the form of the lack of first-hand accounts of the actual Rapanui themselves, with most “primary” sources coming in the form of either explorers or missionaries recordings, and the nature of many of my secondary sources being of technical disciplines other than history. I believe the purpose of my writing being to explore how a civilization can be destroyed will solve the first issue, as the gaps themselves can help speak to areas left empty. The second issue, while requiring extensive work and reading to obtain an adequate understanding, will serve to better my project as it will aid in obtaining a multi-faceted, and directional, view of the island’s societal collapse. 

Accompanying this, contradicting narratives confuse the collapse of Rapanui society. The damage to the island and its inhabitants’ post-contact, namely in the form of the slave raids of the 19^th century and the sheep farms in the 20^th, stands as obviously harmful, but an addendum often accompanies their stating. For the traditional narrative, described as “On Easter Island, the people cut down every tree, perhaps to make fields for agriculture or to erect giant statues to honor their clans. This foolish decision led to a catastrophic collapse, with only a few thousand remaining to witness the first European boats landing on their remote shores in 1722,” has been challenged in more recent years in favor of evidence that points to a stable, if troubled, society that was by no means suffering population decline or societal collapse.² Thus, part of my research will pertain to how much the Western influences truly drove the collapse of the societal structures on the island versus how much pre-contact events were merely accompanied by post-contact ones. 

In contemplating these ideas, it becomes important to ask what worth studying Rapanui has to the larger discipline of history. Besides the more standard historical notions of examining and effectively studying part of the world that lies criminally underdiscussed, which Rapanui and the larger Pacific Islands sphere lies in, there also stands bigger notions connecting Rapanui with ideas of transnationalism. For while more specifically Rapanui in my project stands as a case study of an individual isolated civilization interacting with a wider world, the process of globalization, in both the past and present, has increasingly eroded the walls between the separated and connected. Through this then, this project in its most comprehensive form will add to the tapestry of how said isolated peoples survive, or do not, in transnational world, and how we as historians should study it. 

Bibliography: 

Binghamton University. “Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong.” ScienceDaily, 13 July 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210713090153.htm>.  

DiNapoli, R.J., Crema, E.R., Lipo, C.P. et al. “Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).” Nat Commun 12, 3939 (2021). 

Haun, Beverly. Inventing Easter Island (Toronto, 1952), p. 29. 

Here’s the file so footnotes are also available to be seen 🙂

As I have been narrowing my focus as we approach our project proposals, I have found the recent conflicts in Eastern Europe to be particularly pertinent to my research. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked a lot of questions among major news outlets and my peers alike regarding the motive and precedence of Russia’s unprovoked attack. President Putin (and I say ‘Putin’ rather than ‘Russia’ intentionally) justifies his ‘military action’ in Ukraine under the pretense of protecting Moscow supporters within Ukraine from the ‘bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime.’ These pretenses are awfully reminiscent of the former Soviet Union’s invasion, or what was referred to as a ‘peacekeeping mission’ at the time, of Poland for the sake of the Belorusian and Ukrainian minorities. In the search for a more informed understanding of these current conflicts, I find the origins and dissemination of ethnolinguistic nationalism and the constructions of national identity at the forefront. 

Navigating the temporal and geographic framework of my research and contextualising this information through appropriate methodology has been my biggest obstacle thus far. Examining the national histories of origin hood in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, I have found myself slipping into the comfort of comparative history and its respective approaches. Identifying the links between these nations rather than comparing differences between their respective conceptions of ethnolinguistic nationalism and nationhood has proven to be quite difficult given the varying degrees of development of scholarship in each nation. 

I have also found it troubling how the historical scholarship interchangeably uses the terms ‘state’ and ‘nation.’ While it is nearly impossible to avoid anachronistic hoops inherent to studying newer countries, I find it necessary for a clear distinction between the two terms. 

With that being said, I hope to narrow my focus more as I have realized the enormous amount of scholarship necessary to grasp these concepts. I am leaning towards focusing on the dissemination of ethnolinguistic nationalism, but need to tighten my geographical and temporal scope.

Hi, everyone! Since we were cut short for time, I’m transferring all of my thoughts to my blog post for the week – but am happy to share in our unconference on Saturday if needed. In my previous post, I started thinking about the more aesthetic, medical side to fasting and detox spas, but have since been drawn towards fasting as political action.

I’ve been ideating about famine versus fasting versus hunger strikes. I am also interested in how countries that have experienced famine respond differently to hunger strikes due to a sense of responsibility held by the government to nourish their people. My brainstorming, which is outlined below, eventually led me to the idea of female hunger. I am seeking to understand the international and imperial networks inspiring women’s hunger strikes staged in different time periods and national contexts.

I’m interested in hunger strikes in postcolonial states and their imperial legacies. I’ve found literature on imperial Britain – connections of fasting in England, Ireland, India; connections between Russian methods on British suffragettes, and more recent civil rights movements in India and the United States. I do hope to expand beyond the British empire, but that is where I have found the most literature so far.

I’m hoping to understand intentions. What’s interesting about hunger strikes in recent history is more widespread media, and therefore more access to first-hand accounts and interviews with these activists. Hearing their intentions behind the political action, what might have inspired them, and even the language they use and finding connections between that vocabulary and previous movements – will help me trace cross-cultural interactions.

In all the literature I’ve encountered so far, women’s fasting and looking at famine through a gendered lens is always a chapter or footnote. There are really interesting references that are casually explained and moved on from that I’d love to dig deeper into. For example, Kevin Grant mentions fasting as a ‘feminine’ form of bodily protest, versus a male capability to resist authority with force. He went on to discuss how a modern liberal government and publicity of a modern, uncensored media led to successful hunger strikes in the British empire, but not so much in imperial Russia. This made me think about government systems and how their ethos affects forms of political action and the success of hunger strikes. I want to look more at the gender theory behind this political action, and the subconscious associations it might hold in our minds.

Though my focus will eventually narrow, I do not want to solely research the role of fasting in suffragette movements. There are recent events, such as Swati Maliwal’s hunger strikes as demands for justice in response to India’s rape crisis, and racial justice activists in the United States protesting the death of Breonna Taylor. I think it is important to look at the nuances of female hunger in recent decades. Moving forward in time will also allow me to question how changing attitudes towards women’s agency and bodies affect their political motives, methods, and success.

In contemporary India, hunger protest is a female-dominated affair. I’m curious about how their participation has evolved from the nationalist hunger strikes. In a review of Grant’s book, Dr. Aidan Forth asks ‘How might the feminist tactics of early suffragettes have inspired the activist Swati Maliwal’s 2019 hunger strike against Indian rape laws?’ These are the types of questions I want to ask, finding connections between cultures and over time.

To conclude, my research is in its early stages, but I’ve finally stumbled upon a subject I feel excited about and believe there will be a wealth of sources, versus my original topic where research was spare. The texts I am looking at so far are:

Sumita Mukherjee: Indian Suffragettes, Female Identities and Transnational Networks

Kevin Grant: Last Weapons, Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890-1948

Nayan Shah: Refusal to Eat, A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes

I am also reading articles on medico-historical overviews of fasting, and really trying to understand the macro context as I dive into the more specific, women’s experience and action involved with hunger strikes. Hopefully, I will be able to find good primary sources in government reports, political manifestos, published periodicals, and even oral interviews with these women.

Please let me know if you have any reading suggestions or topics to investigate! I am working this week on narrowing my scope and forming more concrete questions before turning in my proposal and meeting on Saturday.

What began as a simple, straightforward final project idea has now transformed into a new, complex, and nuanced research proposal. Based on my research from previous summers, I believed I had a firm grasp of the concepts and directions of my proposal. Before the break, I began working with a dataset I created on SPSS containing the port records from early nineteenth-century Río de la Plata (mainly Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Maldonado). Using the program’s statistical functions, I was able to isolate, analyze, and compare the origin, declared destination, nationality, cargo (including goods and people), etc of ships entering and departing these ports. While interesting, it was difficult to find unique or uninvestigated patterns that related to my previous research interests of enslaved cargo and labor trafficking. Feeling tinges of research desperation, I dug deeper into my secondary sources. Yet this yielded even more troubles, as a large and impressive collection of articles and books on transnational and global connections between Spanish, Portuguese, and American slavers and the slave trade in Río de la Plata already exists. (As a result, I have not stopped talking about Alex Borucki’s “The U.S. slave ship Ascension in the Río de la Plata: slave routes and circuits of silver in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic and beyond”). While these contributions are impressive and incredible for transnational/trans-imperial Latin American history, I was finding it difficult to find my niche.

Slightly frustrated, I set course for Spain (on a plane, not a ship) for this February break, hoping some sunshine would help clear my clouded mind. Surprisingly, it worked! Tucked away in a Malaga coffee shop, amidst a horde of German tourists, it hit me: What about the role of central and northern European countries in the Atlantic world? Immediately my mind went to Jutta Wimmler and Klaus Weber’s Globalized peripheries: Central Europe and the Atlantic world, 1680-1860, a fascinating collection of articles I too quickly shelved believing it was of little relevance. After consulting my SPSS dataset, I (re)discovered a series of Danish, Prussian, Hamburgian, French, and Dutch ships entering, exiting, and trading in Río de la Plata. While my data analysis on these ships is very preliminary, I plan on investigating (on a micro-level) the extent to which Central and Northern European ships, sailors, and commerce participated in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, I hope to highlight the ties between this European “periphery” and the trade of goods and people in the trans-imperial port of Río de la Plata.   

As I have researched and read for my project, I feel like I have already greatly shifted and morphed my ideas. I am primarily interested in the international and transnational flows and connections surrounding women’s movements and suffrage. While this topic is broad, I feel I have finally (slightly) narrowed and identified the focus of my project.

Towards the beginning of my research, I read Irma Sulkunen’s article An International Comparison of Women’s Suffrage: The Cases of Finland and New Zealand in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century. This article takes a comparative approach, and I found it particularly interesting in its focus and analysis of two peripheral countries who were “trailblazers of women’s suffrage”. The scholarship on women’s suffrage in particular is generally dominated by the British and American cases, so I found this article insightful and an important contribution in providing an often overlooked narrative and area of women’s suffrage.

While this interest in more peripheral cases stayed in my mind, my research then led me to international organisations, most prominently what Leila Rupp identifies as the three main international women’s organisations: International Council of Women, the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (which then became the International Alliance of Women), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. These organisations and their various meetings, exchanges and conferences were hotspots of transnational ideas, flows, and cooperation. I find them very interesting and with many important insights, especially due to their work and international nature through the first several decades of the twentieth century when there were many strong senses of nationalism.

However, as I read more, I came to realise the Eurocentricity of these organisations, including in their membership composition, ideas, meeting locations, and languages. This led me back to my interest in more peripheral examples, and I started to look at transnational examples and influences from the non-Western world. Particularly after the First World War, there was increased involvement of non-Western women in both the three main organisations stated above, and the formation of new organisations. Articles by scholars including Sumita Mukherjee particularly highlighted the efforts by non-Western women to claim their own agency in international women’s movements, including in European colonies such as India and other Asian countries.

Over the last few days, I have been facing many decisions on how to actually carry out my project. Do I look at the impact of one international organisation on a country or geographical region? Do I take international organisations (or perhaps only one or two) as my focal point and see who attended, their aims, achievements and effectiveness? Or do I take a comparative approach to analyse different transnational movements?

My current thinking (although my ideas seem to be continually morphing and changing) is to look at international organisations in the first wave of the women’s movement, focusing from around the 1910s to the interwar years. Taking a primarily transnational approach (but with perhaps some comparative aspects), I would look at their aims, composition, and impact. As part of this, I can bring in the Eurocentric critique and the efforts to counter continued colonial and imperialist attitudes in these transnational networks and international organisations, including women of the Global South looking for their own representation, participation, and impact.

My current main concern is the continued large breadth. I am nevertheless looking forward to presenting my current research, questions, and ideas on Tuesday in more detail, and listening and taking on any feedback. What has become obvious to me so far is how ideas towards a project continuously evolve as more research is done. I look forward to seeing what mine will further reveal and where it will take me.

My reading has taken some odd turns in recent weeks, stretching from disease to sovereignty and finally to a (now technically obsolete) document. This document banned the use of explosive projectiles under 400g for being both inhumane and providing no reasonable military advantage.

The importance of this document within the history of international law has been heavily studied by scholars of International Relations. However, this has been done almost exclusively from a state centric perspective, largely ignoring the actions of the delegates from each state and the transnational intellectual currents which informed the development of this treaty. Consequently, my current aim is to write a project which interweaves discussions on the text of the document with the perspectives of individual delegates, those of their governments and the transnational transfer of ideas. I will try to determine how and why the St. Petersburg Declaration was able to come together at the time, place and in the manner that it did.

My first steps along this path have been shaky, but I have definitely enjoyed them. My initial challenge has been finding out which representatives attended St. Petersburg. Whilst I have had little luck locating them in traditional scholarship, I have so far identified the British representative and am seeking out the Prussian representative. These are two of the most important figures for the project I am currently planning to write. The British representative, because he was the key force behind some of the most interesting drafting decisions in the text. The Prussian representative, because I know that key members of the Prussian military establishment opposed this treaty and want to engage with the intellectual debates that were playing out between various transnational actors such as Swiss Professor Bluntschli and Prussian general Moltke.

At present, I have found a digitalised version of the ‘Nouveau recueil général de traités, conventions et autres transactions remarquables,’ which contains a section on the agreement. I hope this will be a strong source for me, allowing me to identify some more key players. I have been using google translate and my meagre French to get the measure of the text. Whilst fully aware this will not give me a perfect rendition of the text’s original meaning, I feel that I can very clearly understand what is being recorded, especially because of how formulaic some of the language is. Overall, the most interesting individual actors to me other than the Prussians and British delegates are the Russian diplomats behind the meeting, and I am hoping this text will shed some insight on them. Beyond the individuals, I will be looking at the transnational development of thoughts on race, humanitarianism, utility, national tradition and violence embodied by this 1866 document.

However, this research can be time consuming and I am hoping to have enough done by mid-way through this week to forward a coherent and well thought through thesis for the upcoming project proposal.

After many hesitations and detours about my research topic, I have finally settled on a study of the diffusion of climate anxieties and the establishment of environmentalist practices in the French colonial empire at the end of the 18th century. The question now arises as to how to conduct the project.

We are taught in my geography classes that space is constructed. Socially, politically, but above all mentally. This is why I was pleased to see Pierre-Yves Saunier cite, in his chapter ‘On Methodology’, John Agnew’s concept of the Territorial Trap, referring to a way of imagining the national space as bounded, with a clear distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’. While I am used to see this concept applied in the analysis of present-day politics, I had never thought about applying it to historians: at this point I am not teaching anyone anything, but historians, too, are too often trapped in logics of separations between territories and scales.

Luckily for me, environmental history lends itself quite easily to cross-border analyses. I have noticed, however, that the field of imperial environmental history, in which I have done most of my research for now, suffers from its own kinds of territorial traps. Firstly, it tends to study separately different imperial regions: the Atlantic world, the Indian world, Australasia, … Secondly, although acknowledgment is made about their connections, the colonies and continental Europe (in the case of France, the “metropole”) are treated as two distinct poles. Escaping the territorial trap would therefore mean for me integrating imperial regions together and/or colonies with the metropole through the prism of climate anxiety.

              Here are some thoughts on how I could practically proceed.

A first step could consist in answering the question ‘WHERE were climate anxieties and environmentalism?’. Inspired by Saunier’s comment on maps being gates into an argument rather than simple “supportive tools” (p.126), it would be interesting to map the dispersion of some influential books on climate theory and environmentalism across the empire. Botanical gardens could also serve as good proxies for environmentalism as they often were places of scientific experimentation on environmental conservation. This mapping would reveal both the spatial dispersion of environmentalist ideas and practices but also its evolution in time and would hopefully provide some hints about the modalities of circulation.

Reading Saunier’s chapter also made me aware of the powerful potential of translocality as a way to “stretch our spatial imagination” (p.118). Indeed, it enables both to open a dialogue between the local embeddedness of an idea and its circulation and to move beyond the traditional hierarchies of spatial scales. In the case of my project, I am thinking of focusing on two or three locals (Paris and colonial islands) and to analyse their connections and specificities in terms of environmentalism. I will also try to connect the global climatic consequences of El Nino events directly to local impacts, bypassing the national level.

Lastly, taking a biographical route, that is, reconstituting the lifeworld of key individuals, seems promising. Just like some places, we could qualify some individuals as ‘hubs’: through the multiple functions they occupy in multiple spheres, they provide key entrance points into various networks and unveil connections that would have been invisible had the analysis been conducted at another scale. For my project, I have in mind individuals such as Pierre Poivre, naturalist, Jesuit missionary and King’s steward on the Isle de France, or Phillibert Commerson, a naturalist who embarked on Bougainville’s circumnavigation and who subsequently played a major role in the environmental conservation programmes on the Isle de France. Poivre and Commerson are fairly well-known examples, but I am sure I can find many more.

These are my thoughts at the moment, the work continues.

I am fairly confident I want to focus on global intellectual histories’ implications within the consolidation of ethnolinguistic nationalism in Slavic states and their effect on their respective nationhood origin histories. I am particularly looking at Soviet satellite states such as Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland from the late 19th century onwards. I have selected these three as I have interacted with their national histories the most in my previous modules. These states have very distinct cultural characteristics from one another making it easier to more clearly delineate major thematic tropes in their respective scholarship. These states’ differences present the opportunity for insightful comparison and analysis in relation to one another.

While I am (cautiously) confident in my ability to analyse and dissect Russian sources, I am a bit daunted by interacting with sources originally written in Belarusian, Ukrainian, or Polish. I am fortunate that Russia, and subsequently Russian scholarship, has had a heavy influence on much scholarship within these nations – in particular, Belarus. In one of my previous modules, I had done a good bit of research on the Belarusian national identity and origins of statehood. I am tempted to primarily focus on how influences external to Belarus have formed their conception of ethnolinguistic nationalism and their history of nationhood origins to examine the consequent effects on intellectual history (inside and outside Belarus). Although, in efforts to be more ‘transnational’, I am approaching my research with an open mind and trying to apply this template to Ukraine and Poland.

As we approach our Project Proposals, I am most concerned on how to manage the scope of my topic. I feel as though I am stuck in the infamous ‘Chicken or the Egg’ situation. Hopefully my transnational approach will decipher how each one of these concepts inform one another. I am sure that I will begin with how intellectual history specifically informed the key tenets of ethnolinguistic nationalism. Which forms of intellectual history, you ask? I am still not sure…

One of our teachers here at St Andrews, Dr. Tomasz Kamusella, has extensively researched the implications of ethnolinguistic nationalism in historical scholarship. As a Polish native, I believe he provides an invaluable perspective in analysing the historical implications language plays within the states I am examining. I am quite familiar with some of his publications, notably The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (2008), and intend to draw on his insights while engaging with my own research. I hope to situate the ideological roots of intellectual history within each of these states in effort to, perhaps, better comprehend the context behind the conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe today.