MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

In the spirit of week 8’s seminar on Global Intellectual History I have decided to address some of the things I have been thinking through in relation to the upcoming essay deadline. I will be writing on Global Legal History, which is a discipline in which Intellectual history is employed heavily.

I will open with the observation that a majority of the ‘global’ intellectual histories of International Law which I have read, see their global approach as a corrective to status quo politics or ‘ways of seeing’ history. Whilst it is not a necessary component of a global intellectual history, it seems to me (in my admittedly narrow reading) that many scholars in this area identify with more ‘critical’ epistemologies. This is an interesting observation for me, considering that in my other discipline of international relations, literature on International Law is dominated by scholars within the ‘classical liberal tradition,’ who forward positions which would be anathema to the Marxists and Post-colonialists whose work has dominated the last two weeks of my studies.

A second observation would be that these scholars, liberal, critical or otherwise almost always default to a traditional theoretical framework within which to study global intellectual currents. Variants of world-systems theory and realpolitik seem to be in vouge in my current area of research, having replaced the cosmopolitanism of soviet scholars and earlier anti-colonial perspectives. However, pretty much any serious debate between these academics (for anyone interested I would direct you to a written debate between Arnulf Becker Lorca, Jean-Louis Halpérin and Douglas Howland) admits that such overarching theories are insufficient to write any totally valid global intellectual history. Tensions between different localised intellectual ideas simply prove impossible to fit within the ambit of one model. This has led me to think that the task of writing a truly global intellectual history which does not deal in certain generalisations is probably a chimera. However, that is not to say that global intellectual history is useless (if it was, I wouldn’t be doing a project on it). Like other ‘global histories’ scholars can mess around with micro and macro perspectives to identify, explain and contextualise certain intellectual trends, which I have seen frequently termed as ‘glocalism’. However in employing a glocal approach it becomes necessary to identify new containers and categories which comprise the ‘local’, a task that simply takes us back to the problems of national history, just without the vitriol. My recent reading has really made me question the value of purportedly universal theoretical modelling within global scale research.

Of course, any good theorist admits their model will not account for all eventualities, and I think even the most ardent of post-colonialists or realists would not suggest their theories had universal explanatory value. As such, I almost feel like my frustration with theory is a bit of a straw man. However, in my own defence, academics continue to deploy all the theories I have mentioned into global contexts they are not really suited to explain. I feel like, especially from my very brief foray into Global Legal History, a turn away from theory would be beneficial. I have little doubt that these issues (nb. These are issues in my opinion and others may not see them as such) persist across global history. It just happens that Intellectual and legal history is the area which interests me most and as such, where I am best placed to see this.

As I am still researching my short essay on the links between environmental history, history of empire and transnational history, I would like to use this post to outline some of my thoughts.

Having chosen to work on environmental issues, I realize, is extremely convenient for a module on transnational history: what better transnational thread of analysis can there be than climate change? Although early environmental history scholarship has focused on national environmental issues and policies, most environmental historians actively call for the adoption of alternative scales and spaces of analysis.

Adopting environmental lenses is an especially powerful mean to reconfigure the ‘geographies of empire’.

Indeed, studying global phenomena enable historians to free themselves from the nation state – colony framework. Some analyses take on a truly global perspective, jumping from one colony to another in one page, as they trace abnormal temperatures and death tolls. Others, disregarding traditional political boundaries discuss simultaneously settler and extraction colonies such as New Zealand and Egypt. If some studies adopt comparative approaches, most of them focus on transnational networks and exchanges, making the empire seem like one single entity integrated through “webs of empire” and environmental concerns.

A parallel tendency encouraged by those environmental lenses has been to ‘zoom in’ and put forward the inherently local character of empire. However global environmental phenomena can be, their consequences and the experiences people make of them are always grounded. Adopting a bottom-up approach starting from several case studies to then build a wider perspective is therefore one very common method among historians. If the local is the basis for the global, it also enables to challenge it, as each local site develops its own specific way of relating and responding to the environment. The empire thus becomes “glocal”, all at once a single entity and a mosaic of unique configurations.

At this point in my reading and thinking, I asked myself ‘so what?’. What is the use of shifting from a state-colony to a glocal frame of analysis? I still need to do a bit more reading about this, but the main idea is that it “decentres” the empire, or “provincializes” Europe, and changes our understanding of imperial power structures. Indeed, we soon realize that the traditional model of diffusion of ideas, resources and agency from Europe to the colonies is extremely simplifying, especially when working on environmental conservation ideas and practices. In fact, most of these ideas and practices developed in, and circulated between, the colonies, outside of the channels of exchanges with Europe.  This challenges, in the field of the history of sciences for example, the idea of all-powerful European “centres of calculation”: the peripheries become the centre. Moreover, the glocal enables to reveal the agency of colonized populations who often actively participated or resisted to environmental conservation practices and thus, once again, to relativise the homogeneity of European imperial power.

I feel that I have already reflected on a lot on these themes but, as I keep coming across them in my readings, I felt the need to reformulate them once again, hopefully with some added value to my previous reflections.

While researching for my short essay on the development of transnational history and its impact on the historiography of women’s history, I came across another dimension that I could incorporate into my project: that of gender history and theory. While I was always intending to engage with and contribute to women’s history through my project, gender theory and history could bring a new dimension and further nuance.

Women’s history ultimately looks at bringing women into the historical narrative and giving light to their experiences, contributions, and voices which had previously been excluded. Gender theory emerged after women’s history. As noted by Bonnie Smith in the Introduction to Women’s History in Global Perspective, it focuses on the categories of masculine and feminine and their associated characteristics with male and female. It analyses how these characteristics shaped and even produced people’s lives, and challenges them and their agency and dominance. Opposite to sex which focuses on the biological determinants, gender sees masculinity and femininity as mutually constituted, socially constructed concepts. These understandings produce hierarchies where the masculine generally dominates the feminine, and these produce values, meanings and understandings.

Gender theory directly links to my project: the women involved in international women’s organisations, including during the interwar years, were actively challenging their gender roles. This was both through their organisation, activism and presence in the public sphere, as well as overall through many of the issues and goals they were campaigning for. By incorporating gender theory into my project, it could increase the understanding into the background against which women were campaigning and working collectively against, and the extent and significance of their collective work and achievements due to how deeply traditional gender roles were embedded into society.

Additionally, some of this week’s key readings illuminated yet another dimension of analysis that I could potentially incorporate into my project: that of transversal and transcultural history. In our very own Milinda’s article, Transversal Histories and Transcultural Afterlives: Indianised Renditions of Jean Bodin in Global Intellectual History, he notes that the globalised movement of a concept also involves it weakening, negation, agitation, and reformation as well as just being transferred and translated. As part of this, transversal history looks at how different moments become connected, and resultantly how “new ethnic-political decisions” are made because of these connections. In the realm of intellectual history, it especially means regarding discursive moments (page 166).

In relation to my project, I think this could, for example, provide a further insight and analysis of a concept such as women’s suffrage. I could look at this in different places at different times, and see how it was understood in different international women’s organisations. Through analysing the impact of different cultures and understandings on something such as suffrage, it could provide information on variations of how it was perceived and thought of, wider implications and associations, and resulting decisions. Therefore, through incorporating these as well as gender theory, they could provide further beneficial insights, backgrounds, and dimensions.

The unconference was an interesting exercise for me in evaluating how I work and think versus how my peers work and think. While I have looked up “polish women migration” “polish women transition period” so many times at this point, it was interesting to see what my other group members found using their fresh perspective and searching on Google. Avery did this and found a webpage called ‘War, Cold War, and New World Order: political boundaries and Polish migration to Britain’ by Kathy Burrell at De Montfort University. This page includes testimonies about both men and women’s experiences migrating, and how before the fall, migrating from Poland meant you were preparing to never return to Poland. As some of the oral history in this webpage touches upon Polish identity and its relation to migration, I hope to examine it further for my final paper. Another aspect that I enjoyed about the unconference was hearing from both professors during our Tribe A exercise. I think as students of history, we are so used to hearing “what are you going to do with that degree after uni?” and sometimes feel discouraged by how unfeasible other students or adults make a successful career after doing history seem. Hearing the optimism both Dr Struck and Dr Banjeree have about their career choices and research made me feel a bit more relaxed about my degree choice and that it is worth studying a subject that I love, rather than one that is focused only on making money after graduation. 

At the unconference I was brainstorming a topic for my short essay, and after looking over the course document and its encouragement of focusing on historiography, I think I want to focus more on the historiography of migration, gender and Poland. This will illuminate hubs of migration that have already been focused on (Chicago, Germany, UK, etc.) and in this will also showcase where the gaps lie that my research and final paper can fill. Another idea that I wrote about during our speed writing sessions on Saturday is to focus on what is going on in Poland in the postwar period that affects women such as contraceptives, child care, and employment changes. Still, I think context about these phenomena will arise in papers about gender in Poland that can then be coupled with migration. Another idea is to look deeply into social reproduction theory, however, I do not want to push too many things together in just 2,000 words. These are my journal-like thoughts after Saturday and as I head into writing the short essay.

Saturday’s unconference was really helpful for me. I was quite intimidated by the idea of sitting and writing with someone looking over my shoulder, but it was actually really nice to be able to talk out my idea and narrow down my questions into something that makes sense, which I was struggling with and do not think I did clear enough in my project proposal. I am still trying to make my questions as clear as possible, but I now know I want to focus on the transnationality of tourism, and how tourism is used to help legitimize authoritarian governments. To do this I will use two case studies, looking specifically at the Soviet Union and Spain and looking at how these two governments created their own tourism bureaus because they saw the necessity of tourism in the promotion of their country and their ideals. I found some Soviet tourism advertisements from the interwar period specifically targeting the United States and encouraging Americans to visit for a vacation and also see the implications of socialism within the community. The soviet propaganda was earnest in selling their ideologies to American citizens, to try and disprove what capitalist governments were perpetuating. In Spain, resorts were being developed to take advantage of their coastlines, selling their beaches and the warmth of a Spanish summer to Northern countries. The government also worked with TWA and Hilton Hotels to create a travel industry within Spain that would appeal to Western citizens, encouraging Americans to visit because of the familiarity. How did these countries use tourism as a way to be legitimized by western, capitalist countries, and did it work? The interaction foreign tourist and becoming a part of the global world was a vital part for countries in the latter half of the twentieth century. 

Another aspect that I find important when analyzing the government interest is the response from foreigners. Were tourists convinced when visiting the country? What were their takeaways from visiting a country with this kind of dictatorship put in place? And did these visitors feel that their experiences were authentic? When traveling to another country, even in modern times, there is an idealized view of travel, of someone who is able to go off the beaten track and delve deep into the true culture of a place. There is a desire to venture away from the tourist traps, find the hole-in-the wall restaurants and explore not just the famous sites. But can one person really see the true aspect of a culture after a week or two in one place? I believe that it is really hard to leave out one’s own opinions, stereotypes, and prejudice when traveling, and part of the culture of a community is living within the mundane and the day-to-day lives of a community. However, not a lot of people go into this much depth when thinking about traveling. So for those who were able to glimpse into the Soviet Union or Franco’s Spain, did they question the reality in which they were seeing? I want to look into tourists’ awareness of the cultures they were traveling to, and if they changed their mind about the preconceived notions they knew about these countries. To summarize, the reactions of tourists once they visited the Soviet Union or Spain. Did the government efforts to increase tourism work and were they able to convince foreigners of their countries legitimacy? Going further, looking into the foreigners’ understanding of the country they were visiting, and if they believed that what they saw was a truly authentic experience. 

With more research I will be able to narrow down my ideas and continue to make it even clearer. Tourism is all about the interaction between nations, and for the Soviet Union and Franco’s Spain, there was an understanding around the importance of these types of interactions. I want to find out more about how they capitalized on these interactions and what was the response. I also need to make sure I do not try to cover too much, and with more research I will be able to decide the limits of my essay.

I found the exercise of pair writing very challenging, and there might be several reasons for that. Firstly, as I am still in the process of very early research for my essay, I felt that my ideas were not  formed enough to have anything to write. I still managed to get a few hundred words down: even though I don’t like them, the exercise has taught me that there is always something to write, and the sooner the better. Secondly, I think I was a bit too concerned about what my co-writer would think and understand, which prevented me from being as productive as I could have been. An additional challenge for me was language, as my first drafts are usually written in a kind of ‘frenglish’ which I did not want to impose on my co-writer. 

Despite these challenges, I found the process of discussing my work with George very interesting as he would ask quite simple questions to which I had not thought of, and which helped me to be more precise with my definitions and intentions.

I would now like to offer some feedback to George.

First of all, I feel like your project is on the right path: your question is well defined, and you already have a quite clear idea of your methods and sources. I find your idea of using an anthropological approach especially relevant in the context of this transnational history class. Indeed, it will enable you to ‘play with the scales’, focus on the individual or small community level and connect them to broader patterns, while freeing yourself from the national level. The national could still be included, but only as an element of context informing your analysis.

Secondly, about your fear of being too Eurocentric, I do not think that this is too much of an issue. Even though there is a tendency in the historiography to study other geographical regions, Europe is still a relevant topic of inquiry with a lot to be explored. However, as we said during our discussion, it might be a good idea to study peripherical European regions, such as Turkey or Russia, which could unveil some unknown connections or patterns that usually go unnoticed in studies about Western European countries.

Lastly, it would be interesting for you to reflect on the ‘added value’ of your project. By added value I mean, what does demonstrating that patterns of fears existed across different European countries tell us? What do you make of it? How can you use this conclusion to enlight our understanding of a particular period, geographical area, historical issue? You might have already thought about it but, if not, I feel that it would add a lot of strength to your project.

Here is an article I just found about the study of climate change from a people’s perspective: Pallavi V. Das, ‘People’s History of Climate Change’, History Compass, 16:11 (2018), pp.1-8. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12497

Even though climate change is not exactly your topic, I thought it might still be useful to understand how Das goes about researching and writing about people’s perceptions and fears.

Today, conflict and ‘law’ are inseparable. The ‘Hauge Laws’ regulate conflict, proscribing weapons which cause unnecessary suffering, as well as the targeting of civilians. These proscriptions can be traced to the 1868 preamble to the St Petersburg Declaration prohibiting explosive projectiles (Declaration), where they were first enumerated in an international treaty.[1] However, the Declaration is limited, particularly in its refusal to apply its protections to colonial wars.[2]

The Declaration succeeded in limiting arms, where similar attempts in 1816, 1832 and 1859-70 failed.[3] This is because its text satisfied two major conflicting political and intellectual philosophies of the time, military realism, and humanitarianism. These philosophies were shaped by diverse conceptions of modernity, legalism, racialised colonialism and nationalism, which spread in tandem with the growth of mass media and communicative technology.

This project will ask how the Declaration came to be formulated at the time, and in the manner that it was. Current scholarship mainly analyses the Declaration as a ‘staring point’ for developments in humanitarianism and international law.[4] In contrast, my research will study the intellectual and political debates which characterised its drafting, placing these in a transnational context. I shall research individual members of the drafting commission, who go almost undiscussed in current literature on the Declaration. This original ‘transnational’ focus on the political and intellectual origins of the Declaration, and the novel incorporation of individual drafters into the narrative of its creation, will provide a fresh perspective into how international humanitarian norms first emerged.

My driving questions are: Considering Russia possessed the most advanced explosive projectiles, why did it call a convention to prohibit them? Why did the attendant states agree to this, and why were certain states invited or excluded? Why did the Prussian representative try to broaden the Declaration’s prohibitions, despite pressure from a powerful Prussian lobby opposing legalistic restrictions on war? Why did Britain’s representative attempt to narrow the Declaration and prevent its application to colonies? And, to account for the criticisms that scholarship on humanitarianism has been unduly Eurocentric, how did Latin American and Asian influences shape the development of the humanitarian ideas within the declaration?[5]

I hypothesise that these questions can be answered by considering the growth (facilitated by technology and media innovations) of two antagonistic transnational phenomena. 1) The development of a web of actors in law, media and ‘global’ society (including Asia and Latin America) who, after the Crimean war, gained the political capital to effectively advocate for humanitarian and legal parameters to be placed on conflicts. This created the environment which allowed the Declaration to be proposed and for some delegates to push to codify new humanitarian ideals. 2) The parallel development of anti-legalist, ‘nationalist military realism’ and racialised colonialism, which inspired delegates to limit the Declaration through textual alterations and the exclusion of states from negotiations. The Declaration succeeded by incorporating elements of both positions, contrary to other disarmament proposals in 1816, 1832 and 1859-70.[6]

My position challenges paradigms which suggest that international legal norms were constructed solely by unitary states to maximise their relative military and economic power, without considering morality or ideology.[7] However, to account for this position, I will consider whether Russia designed the Declaration purely to prevent an economically damaging arms race and whether the Prussian calls to widen the treaty reflected an attempt to undermine it by broadening it unrealistically.[8] I expect the answers to these contentions to be no.

These hypotheses shall be tested using archival research and literature reviews. I shall scrutinise the letters and journals of delegates from Prussia, Russia and Britain. Then, I shall place them within a transnational context using recordings of the Declaration’s negotiations in combination with diplomatic letters, parliamentary proceedings, newspaper debates, the Red Cross archives, and the meeting records of ‘peace societies’ and other humanitarian groups. In studying developments in technology, modernity, legalism, colonialism and humanitarianism, I shall review and discuss secondary literature.

[1] Georg von Martens, New General Collection of Treaties, Conventions and other Remarkable Transactions (Göttingen, 1873), pp.450-473.

[2] Ibid., p.472.

[3] Scott Keefer, The Law of Nations and Britain’s Quest for Naval Security International Law and Arms Control: 1898 – 1914 (E-Book, 2016), pp. 16-17.

[4]  See James Crossland, War, Law and Humanity The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–1914 (London, 2018).

[5] Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘Review of JAMES CROSSLAND. War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–1914. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.’ American Historical Review, (2020), p.621.

[6] Keefer, Quest, p.16-17.

[7] See description of Morgenthau/Realism in Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2001), pp.439-440.

[8] See Keefer, Quest, p.40.

Tourism is not only a major force within a country’s economy, but also vital within the Western cultural lifestyle. ^[1] Within Europe, tourism provided some reconstruction of normality after the tragedies of the Second World War.^[2]The twentieth century brought about new understandings of movement through borders and a new desire to venture away from one’s homeland, even within the ever-changing political landscape. Tourism is fundamentally a transnational idea, as it relies on the travel of people from one region to another, in search for the unknown and a divergence of the mundane.^[3]

I am interested in how the phenomenon of tourism continued to grow, even within the authoritarian regimes of postwar Europe. These governments saw the developing importance and reliance on tourism as a source of economic flow, as well as using it for the promotion of their country’s government to the rest of the world, convincing visiting citizens of their authority and legitimacy. This also came at a time when, after the war, world-wide tourism was becoming more accessible and the importance growing within Western culture. 

However, research today continues to be limited in how tourism is addressed, with historians focusing on one specific case study. This constraint forgets the inevitable transnationality of tourism as a subject, which becomes even more important when focusing on the different regimes around the world. Looking specifically at Spain during Franco’s regime and the Soviet Union will be beneficial in comparing not only nations under vastly different regimes, but also varying political ideologies. The need for tourism from an economic standpoint is just one factor in the reasons for creating and expanding tourist offices. What were the justifications in opening their borders to tourists, and how were they able to create the image of Francoism and Socialism, respectively, into a vision that would be accepted by the visitors? In other words, why was it a government initiative to pursue tourism, and what was done to create an image of the country that the regimes would allow the international public to see and experience? The importance of these questions also comes from the analysis of the response from the visiting public, was the government initiative successful in swaying public opinion?

By using a comparative transnational lens, I will work to uncover the reasons for a push toward international validation, and to see the universal importance of tourism, even within illiberal regimes. The importance of comparing the different political structures created to handle tourism is to create a picture of the global importance of leisure travel. In Spain, the Ministry of Information and Tourism was created in 1951 to “officially [recognize]” the growing need of “social and commercial activity.”^[4] The Soviet equivalent was called Inturist, created to sell socialism to the visiting public and hoping these ideas would transfer through tours of the Soviet sphere.^[5] The opening of their countries to foreigners helps explain the importance of the globalized world, and how it  became impossible to ignore the necessity of foreign support, especially when it came to validating the legitimacy of one’s government.

^[1] Hartmut Berghoff and Barbara Korte, “Britain and the Making of Modern Tourism: An Interdisciplinary Approach”, in Hartmut Berghoff, Barbara Korte, Ralph Schneider and Christopher Harvie (eds) The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600-2000, (Hampshire, 2002), p. 1.

^[2] Sasha D. Pack, “Tourism and Political Change in Franco’s Spain”, in Nigel Townson (ed.), Spain Transformed: The Late Franco Dictatorship, 1959-75, (London, 2010), p. 51.

^[3] Eric G.E. Zuelow, “The Necessity of Touring Beyond a Nation: An Introduction”, in Eric G.E. Zuelow (ed.) Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History (London, 2011), p. 12.

^[4] Pack, “Tourism and Political Change in Franco’s Spain”, p. 53.

^[5] Shawn Salmon, “Marketing Socialism: Inturist in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s”, in Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (eds), Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist Under Capitalism and Socialism, (Ithaca, 2006), p. 187.

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.