Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel by David Feldman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel ed. by David Feldman Kathy M. Newman Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel. Edited by David Feldman. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 352 pages. $39.68 (paper). In the 1880s, a British émigré to Ireland named Captain Charles Boycott became the target of a widespread community campaign to have him shunned. Captain Boycott was a British military drop-out who had migrated to Ireland and was working as a rent collector for Lord Erne in County Mayo. Captain Boycott ran afoul of an activist group called the Land League when he refused to lower rents and then evicted 11 of Lord Erne's tenants. The Land League subsequently urged Boycott's employees to go on strike and to shun him from the community. Shun him they did, so much so that Captain Boycott could not get his mail delivered or find anyone to sit next to him at church. It got so bad that Boycott had to appeal to the British government for laborers to save his crops. The story of Boycott's shunning spread to America, and Boycott's name would forever be yoked to the tactic that had been used against him. [End Page 430] David Feldman, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and the editor of this collection, reminds us of the shunning of Captain Boycott in his introductory essay. He uses the story to show that boycotts have long been "expressive" as well as "instrumental." Boycotting is a strategic tactic, but it is also a highly emotional one, often rooted in the withdrawal of various forms of patronage from the intended target with the larger goal of hurting that target's reputation and possibly even trying to destroy the target altogether. This collection shows that the history of the boycott is surprisingly long—extending as far back as the eighteenth century. In Michael L. Miller's essay, titled, "In Defense of the Nation: Protectionism and Boycotts in the Habsburg Lands, 1844–1914," we learn about the theories of the nineteenth century economist Friedrich List, a proponent of trade protectionism, whose influence was evident in a series of "buy national" campaigns in nineteenth century Europe, such as the "each to his own" campaign in Czechoslovakia and the "buy only from Germans" campaign in Germany. Many of these "buy national" campaigns had an antisemitic component as Jews were often excluded as members of the nation. In a series of detailed and fascinating essays we also learn about the anti-Jewish boycotts staged in early twentieth century Poland (Grzegorz Krzywiec, "The Enemy Within: The Anti-Jewish Boycott and Polish Right-Wing Politics in the Early Twentieth Century"), Zionist boycotts against Palestinians between World War I and World War II (Hizky Shoham, "Zionist 'Buy National' Campaigns in Interwar Palestine"), Nazi sponsored antisemitic boycotts in Germany (Christoph Kreutzmüller, "Picketing Jewish-Owned Businesses in Nazi Germany: A Boycott?"), and boycotts staged by the radical-left in postwar West Germany, including boycotts against the newly formed state of Israel (Alexander Sedlmaier, "Boycott Campaigns of the Radical Left in Cold-War West Germany"). When we think about boycotts we are most likely to think about those organized by the powerless to put pressure on the [End Page 431] powerful so they will be persuaded to change their actions and policies. As many civil rights scholars have shown, for example, civil rights boycotts were effective in isolating local business elites from purely racist elites, thus leading to positive changes in corporate and civic policies on discrimination. In this collection we see the story of a few such boycotts, including the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott of 1953, considered by many to be a failure because the settlement that ended the boycott did not result in the complete integration of the Baton Rouge buses. However, Derek Charles Catsam argues that the Baton Rouge boycott was an important precursor to the successful and ultimately iconic Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 in his essay, "The Onward March of a People Who Desire to Be Totally Free." In another example, Lori A. Flores argues...