Balance Of Power In Europe Research Articles

Laughing at the Mahdi: The British Comic Press and Empire, 1882–85

Laughing at the Mahdi:The British Comic Press and Empire, 1882–85 Michael de Nie (bio) This essay will explore comic commentary on events in Egypt and the Sudan between 1882 and 1885 in the leading London and Birmingham comic weeklies. In this period Northeast Africa experienced nearly simultaneous outbreaks of political and religious radicalism with far-reaching consequences for both the region and the British Empire. The Arabi Rebellion, which began in Egypt in 1881, was the West's first encounter with what would later be termed Arab nationalism as Arabi Pasha and his followers demanded "Egypt for the Egyptians" and an end to European oversight of the country's finances.1 The British invasion of 1882 and the ensuing occupation placed the Suez Canal firmly under British control, helping spark the scramble for Africa and the New Imperialism. Soon after they established a de facto protectorate in Egypt, the British faced a religious revolt in the Sudan, which had come under Egyptian rule in the early nineteenth century. Led by Muhammad Ahmad, who had declared himself the Mahdi (Guided One), the prophesied redeemer of Islam, the revolt was arguably the first occurrence of militarized Islamic fundamentalism in the modern era.2 Historians tend to study these two events separately, usually in the interest of making the research topic more manageable rather than from a failure to see the connections between them. But in the minds of most contemporaries in Britain and Ireland, these events were regarded as two chapters of a single story: the Egyptian Wars. Debate in the press and Parliament over Egyptian policy and the British interest in Northeast Africa certainly did not dissipate after the victory at Tel-el-Kebir in September 1882. Most viewed the Mahdist rising as a new and increasingly vexing wrinkle in the already difficult question of what to do with Egypt and how best to protect Britain's imperial interests against European competitors and internal turbulence. The Egyptian Wars were also, of course, interpreted [End Page 437] in the context of other contemporary imperial and domestic concerns, such as the Irish Question, franchise reform, and the state of India. Comic commentary on these and similar subjects shared the pages with discussion of Egypt and the Sudan, sometimes in the same cartoon or joke and especially when remarking on the government's difficulties.3 Among scholars, British intervention in Northeast Africa is commonly regarded as one of the key events of the New Imperialism, and some have detected an important change in British imperial ideology in this period.4 Scholars such as Jonathan Parry and Karuna Mantena argue that whereas Britons in the early nineteenth century often portrayed imperial expansion in moral terms as a duty undertaken to spread civilization and the gospel, by the closing decades of the century many or most Britons retreated from this ethical approach. Due to hardening racial attitudes and growing concerns over the balance of power in Europe, Britons increasingly referred to British prestige, security, and economic interests as justification for expanding the empire. But in my research on both the comic and mainstream press's reporting on British intervention in Egypt and the Sudan, I have found that while both prestige and British interests were commonly cited throughout this period, moral language had not entirely disappeared. Indeed, wide sections of the daily and comic press commonly debated the ethics of British intervention in Northeast Africa while also asserting the need for some form of British control or supervision over a region they deemed incapable of self-rule. Scholars of the British and other empires have of course examined the comic press, but their attention has been almost exclusively limited to how the weekly cuts, the full-page cartoons typically placed in the center of each issue, demonstrate European racism, sexism, and other prejudices. This essay explores press opinion on empire and imperial policy through a more thorough examination of the late-Victorian comic weeklies, making full use of the rich collection of jokes, puns, poems, songs, and smaller illustrations found in the pages of Punch, Funny Folks, the Owl, and others during the Egyptian Wars of 1882–85. A study of the comic press...

The Enlightenment in Russia and Points West

The Enlightenment in Russia and Points West Steven Seegel Andreas Kappeler, Ungleiche Brüder: Russen und Ukrainer vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Unequal Brothers: Russians and Ukrainians from the Middle Ages to the Present). 267 pp., illus., maps. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2017. ISBN-13 978-3406714108. €16.95. Curtis G. Murphy, From Citizens to Subjects: City, State, and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. 312 pp. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. ISBN-13 978-0822964629. $28.95. An early modern focus dominates the books by Andreas Kappeler and Curtis Murphy, who each prioritize shifts out of imperial contexts for Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. Western Europe's benchmark year of 1789 thus fades into the background. For Murphy, the lost towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth represented an unusually persistent old order of decentralized citizenship (obywatelstwo) in the private towns of "LitBel" and Ukrainian early modern Europe. For Kappeler, borderland spaces of modern Ukraine emerge from Habsburg-Romanov interfaces, a long devolution into homogeneous forms of frontier ethnic nationalism, up to the current conflict between Moscow and Kyiv. Both books are, in a sense, a defense of Europe, but not in a nostalgic way. Where Kappeler looks into submerged, multiethnic pluralisms and a post-1989 order guided by shared European values, Murphy is skeptical of bureaucratic statism, unitary or otherwise. He innovatively examines how discourses of governmentality and improved efficiency served to mask the centralizing prepossessions of an Enlightenment project—that is, applications of rationality and progress against republican liberties. [End Page 627] As a first monograph, From Citizens to Subjects is meticulously researched. Murphy comments on the unusual, decentralized, and persistent culture and society of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He covers the late reforms of the 1760s, through the three partitions, until the 1860s and 1870s when reformist imperial Russia abolished serfdom (1861), confiscated Polish estates (1863–64), and reorganized its cities (in 1870, with Ukraine and Belarusian regions as late as 1875). The book's abiding tension is republicanism versus centralism: how citizens living in private/public towns were caught in the long push toward bureaucracy and uniformity. Townspeople lost their particularistic practices. In the new imperial Russia, cities became villages. Although Murphy mostly bypasses the Prussian-annexed areas, which held many small, private towns under the Magdeburg Laws, his urban sociopolitical analysis of the habitus of newly annexed Austrian and Russian territories is rightly impressive. He samples some 22 private and royal towns (appendix 1) in the Kijów, Lublin, and Nowogródek palatinates (województwa), the Chełm area (both the town and the land), and the lands of incorporated Galicia and Volhynia. Murphy is, unapologetically, a social historian and disciple of the "[Andrzej] Kamiński school" (xv), the Georgetown early modern historian of Poland-Lithuania whose major historiographical contributions have zeroed in on (mis)perceptions of Warsaw and Moscow, the 18th-century European power balance, and tensions between republic and autocracy from the vantage of peripheries. Murphy writes against the current of "the self-congratulatory narrative created by the partitioning powers and the self-critical story told by generations of Poles" (24). Drawing from Kamiński, Pieter Judson, and political theorists from Quentin Skinner to Isaiah Berlin, Murphy's monograph urges us to disavow "enlightened centralism" and see things more like a small (around 5,000) or medium-sized (about 10,000) town of the 18th century.1 From Citizens to Subjects ventures outside the larger Warsaw, Kraków, Lublin, and Poznań. Murphy utilizes sources from [End Page 628] four main archives—the Archive of Ancient Acts in Warsaw (AGAD), the State Archive in Lublin, the Czartoryski Princes Library in Kraków, and the Central State Historical Archive in Kyiv. He offers a skillful critique of the buried tenets of statist centralism, which, it would seem, functions as a kind of cover-all not only for inefficient federalism but also for cameralist, physiocratic, Napoleonic, and positivist models of imperial governance. Against bureaucrato-federalist uniformity, the historian describes the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as "a uniquely devolved system" (128).2 Within its borders before 1795, Warsaw was the largest Polish "crown" city, with an aggregate population of 64,000 (in 1777). Neither it nor...

Polish-Ukrainian military units in the years 1991-2018

<i>The history and traditions of Polish-Ukrainian military contacts are as rich as the relations between the two nations. Intensive military cooperation dates back to the mid-16th century and is connected with the pursuit of the military capabilities of the Cossacks. The next chapter of Polish-Ukrainian military cooperation started just after the end of the First World War. The state authorities, analysing the political and military situation, noticed the importance of Ukraine for the future balance of power in Europe and its impact on Poland’s security in the east. The leader of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), ataman Symon Petlura, had a similar approach. The need for joint action in the face of growing threat led both parties to intensify negotiations and to sign a political and military agreement.</i><br><br> <i>The findings made on 14 January 1992 during the visit of the Minister of Defence of Ukraine, Colonel Konstantin Morozov, to Poland should be regarded as the beginning of contemporary military contacts with Ukraine. In formal terms, the legal basis for cooperation was the agreement on this matter, signed on 3 February 1993 in Kiev. In its framework, both parties agreed to develop, inter alia, training and training-operational cooperation. It was intended to be implemented through contacts between units stationed in the border regions, transferring the main effort to the lower levels of command.</i>

The Necessity of International Cooperation

The history of states goes back for thousands of years, thus also international relations have existed for a long time. Historically, however, a lot of the issues which arose between the states were rather of a bilateral nature, and therefore possible to be dealt with among the two states concerned, without the urgent need for third states to intervene. The first time when several states came together to form a union to take collective action against a problem, was the Congress of Vienna in early 19th century, when the major states of Europe wanted to limit the power of France after defeating it in the Napoleonic Wars. The main idea was to create and retain a balance of power in Europe, without having hegemony.

US grand strategy after the Cold War: Can realism explain it? Should realism guide it?

This article uses realism to explain past US grand strategy and prescribe what it should be today. Throughout its history, the United States has generally acted as realism depicts. The end of the Cold War reduced the structural constraints that states normally face in anarchy, and a bipartisan coalition of foreign policy elites attempted to use this favorable position to expand the US-led ‘liberal world order’. Their efforts mostly failed, however, and the United States should now return to a more realistic strategy – offshore balancing – that served it well in the past. Washington should rely on local allies to uphold the balance of power in Europe and the Middle East and focus on leading a balancing coalition in Asia. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump lacks the knowledge, competence, and character to pursue this sensible course, and his cavalier approach to foreign policy is likely to damage America’s international position significantly.

II. Legitimacy and Order: The US, Germany and Russia

The contemporary balance of power in Europe has increasingly been marked by a de-concentration of power and, potentially, its redistribution, which has been greatly facilitated by US retrenchment. ...

The Indian Economy and the British Empire in the Company Period: Some additional reflections around an essay by David Washbrook

AbstractTaking as its point of departure David Washbrook's essay ‘The Indian Economy and the British Empire’, this article takes a more detailed look at some episodes in the history of British India in the era of the Company Raj, with a view to placing them within a broader imperial framework, as advocated by Washbrook. The first part of the article examines, through an array of case studies, the actual contribution made by the Company to ‘global’ British expansion, concluding that it invested a lot of (Indian) blood and money in ventures from which it derived little benefit, as in the case of the expeditions to Manila (1762), Ceylon (1795), and Java (1811). It is shown that the Company's interests were ultimately sacrificed to the necessity of maintaining the European balance of power through consideration of the colonial interests of minor European powers such as Portugal or the Netherlands. While the Company saw its interests thus overlooked in the ‘global’ imperial arena, it could not find compensation in increased economic activity in India itself. Although the compulsions of ‘military-fiscalism’ largely explain such an outcome, we should not lose sight of the role of Indian agency in limiting the Company's options, as is shown by a rapid look at the history of both labour and capital markets, which the Company did not succeed in bending completely to its needs.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD. AN IMPACT OF HISTORY

The author touches the problem of the lessons of history upon the example of the impact of the Second World War on the contemporary world. One of these is that to stop an aggressor is possible only by collective efforts of freedom-loving powers. It was not done before the Second World War and Nazi Germany made use of it. One more lesson of history, which had hard consequences for mankind, - the policy of appeasement. It turned out to be connivance to aggressors and thus favored escalation of aggression. Its initiator – Great Britain – was striving to maintain the balance of power in Europe and make a peaceful settlement of contradictions with the revisionist states – Germany and Italy using “concessions for concessions” principle. In such a way the appeasers hoped to secure wider agreements with Hitler and Mussolini and establish long-expected peace in Europe. But these calculations turned to be based on sand. Actually, the concept of the appeasement was faulty, which supposed a reasonable dialogue with the leaders of Germany and Italy. But it was impossible to come to an agreement with the dictators on a reasonable basis, since they always staked strength higher than law. Hitler, as it is known, considered force (and, consequently, war) as quite a legitimate means of reaching aims planned. The Western powers, in their turn, more than once demonstrated passiveness in 1930s and by this making worse their strategic position and strengthening their potential enemies. As a result of all this – breaking the balance of power in Europe in favor of the Fascist states and demolition of peace. These lessons are highly important in the present conditions, when a threat of international terrorism became global. One more lesson of history – anti-Hitler coalition in the Second World War. It was formed in spite of deep contradictions among its participants – the USSR, Great Britain and the USA. But these contradictions were pushed aside, because Nazi Germany was the main threat for all. In conditions of global chaos, which is dominating in the contemporary world, the impact of history is highly relevant.

L’image partagée: la photographie numérique par André Gunthert

Reviews 239 financial support of France and Spain. Both France and Spain had their own interests in mind as they agreed to this support. Following the Seven Years War and their significant losses in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, both countries sought to restore the balance of power in Europe by reducing the strength of Britain. By the end of the war, the two countries had given the equivalent of almost $30 billion in direct monetary aid and had helped to supply more than 90% of the arms used by the Americans. Furthermore, as Ferreiro emphasizes, their support had turned a distant regional conflict into a global war involving multiple European nations, as well as French and Spanish forces in places such as Honduras, Gibraltar, Pondicherry and the Kingdom of Mysore, which had weakened Britain’s military and political strength and, ultimately, led to its defeat:“The real story is that the American nation was born as the centerpiece of an international coalition” (336). As the subtitle of this work indicates, Ferreiro gives special attention throughout to the French and Spanish men who offered their services to the American war, citing by name innumerable merchants, ministers, soldiers and sailors, and providing fascinating details of their lives and their contributions to the war. Describing the trading firm of Arthur and Jean-Gabriel Montaudouin in Nantes who supplied covert arms shipments to Philadelphia, Ferreiro notes that the names of their ships, the Jean-Jacques and the Contrat Social, revealed their sympathy for the Enlightenment philosopher and for the ideals of the American cause (39). Speaking of the new governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Ferreiro adds that he“endeared himself to the French Creole population by marrying one of their own, Marie Félice de Saint-Maxent d’Estrehan, with whom he had three children” (133). In addition to providing colorful and intriguing anecdotes, these human-interest details add important recognition of individuals to the historical record. From its concise discussion of the events leading up to the war, to a detailed and illuminating account of the war itself and of the legacy of the French and Spanish involvement, Brothers at Arms is an exceedingly well-researched and highly readable revision of the history of the American War of Independence. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of American, French, and Spanish history, political science, and military science and technology. Northern Arizona University Erika E. Hess Gunthert, André. L’image partagée: la photographie numérique. Paris: Textuel, 2015. ISBN 978-2845975309. Pp. 176. Gunthert sets out to pioneer the field of digital images. Thus, it is in the novel role of historian of the present (7) that he retraces each step of the transformation from film camera to digitalization in a credible account. He signals both the social and technological milestones, such as the images from Abu Ghraib, and the decision to market cellphones equipped with digital cameras. Gunthert has accomplished a feat because the iconography reproduced in the book adequately covers the years roughly from 1990 to 2014. If the use of digital photography was groundbreaking during these years, Gunthert’s examples constitute a canon. He underscores furthermore that the break with tradition has taken place thanks to the digitalization of the image because until now photographs have come down to us in the form of prints. For Gunthert, this change is conclusive. A revolution creates the possibility to ease the production and circulation of images between people at a scale never seen before. In combating the rise of an army of citizen journalists, photojournalists claimed the esthetic superiority of images made by professionals. Gunthert argues that this claim misses the point because images made by amateurs offer the public a different way to look at the world. Quality and framing of the image may suffer, yet digital images can and do fulfill an important need. Images, such as those from Abu Ghraib prison, show us events we would have never seen otherwise. Digital photography can capture episodes, such as a catastrophe, that no photojournalist had the chance to witness. Gunthert also refutes the charge that digital images are unreliable because they are so...

A Península Itálica no século XIX

Around 1830, the counter-revolutionary movement began to wither but a new European fever would burst in 1848. On one hand, the revolutionary wave of 1848 covers a short period of time – 1848 and 1849. On the other hand, it falls within a broader perspective due to the upholding of liberal and national aspirations. This was both a liberal and national phenomenon that marked the revolutionary movement in Italy. In spite of the utopia underlying such a project, created in 1834, the latter was undoubtedly significant when seen from a cross European perspective based on a democratic view of the Nation-State. It should be noted that this patriotic elan was also a moment of convergence in Europe. This was the feeling that encouraged Mazzini in 1848, when he believed that favorable conditions had been met for the struggle against Austrian oppression. In fact, the unifications of Germany and Italy changed the European balance of power. Mazzinian and Garibaldian, revolutionary and moderate, Genoa played a leading role in important moments of the 19 th century Italian life: “Le due anime quella mazziniana e della sinistra rivoluzionaria in genere, e quella moderata, che avra dopo l’Unita un ruolo importante – sono entrambe protagonista nel quadro dele vicende risorgimentali”.

The Foreign Intercourse Bill of 1798 and the Debate over Early American Foreign Relations

Between January and March of 1798 the House of Representatives debated the foreign intercourse bill, which would fund the diplomatic corps for the next two years. This was a generally a routine function, but it soon became a wide-ranging debate over the basis nature of American diplomacy, and of the American republic itself. The debate revealed something important about the politics of the 1790s. Given that republics were inherently fragile, even seemingly small matters might destroy the American republic. Both Republicans and Federalists proceeded from this assumption. The debate fell into three broad categories. First was the question of who should be appointed. The Republicans accused President Adams of using additional diplomatic appointments as a vehicle to create a patronage machine that would corrupt Congress. The Federalists that countered that amount of patronage available was insignificant, and that that the president was justified in excluding Republicans from office. Second was the question of who should control the appointments. This led back to the control of American foreign policy. The Republicans argued for congressional control through the appropriation and war powers. The Federalists contended for presidential control through the treaty and appointment powers. Third was the question of whether diplomats should be appointed at all. The Republicans believed that trade would allow the United States to secure its diplomatic goals without recourse to the normal institutions of diplomacy. The Republicans considered the United States as existing outside the European balance of power. The Federalists saw no choice but to play by the generally established rules, and thus must appoint diplomats.

A New Power in the Late Fourteenth‐Century Low Countries: Philip the Bold's Planned Franco‐Burgundian Invasion of England and Scottish Alliance, 1385–1386

AbstractThis article considers the power of Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy and count of Flanders, Artois and Burgundy Palatine, and his attempts to use violence against England to strengthen his rule in the Low Countries, and help to secure his nephew's rule in France. In 1385, and again in 1386, he came close to launching a large‐scale invasion of England with the support of Scotland and of Brittany that had the potential to remove English influence from Flanders and even force Richard II to give up claims to the French throne. The invasions have been considered from a French and English perspective, and in adding a Burgundian view the present article pulls together English, French, Flemish and Scots source to offer a full analysis of the motivations for the invasion, showing the significance of the Hundred Year War for the rulers of Flanders. Philip's planned invasion capitalized on weaknesses in England, on growing hawkish parties in Scotland, on unity in France and on his own power in the Low Countries. Although the invasions never left Sluis, the attempt to retake the initiative, and to change the balance of power in Europe, merits further consideration for the ambition of Philip and for the centrality of the Low Countries for fourteenth‐century Europe.

The Last Two Centuries of Global Governance

In recent essays, Thomas Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson argue that analysis of systems of global governance going back to the beginnings of the earliest state systems could provide fundamental insight into the problems that trouble the scholarly field of international relations today. (1) While no social scientist or historian is yet able to give a credible account of global governance over those many millennia, it is possible to begin to recount the history of global governance far back beyond the events with which scholars of international relations begin, 1945, the end of World War II and the founding of the postwar UN system--as Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch do in their essay in this issue of Global Governance--to provide valuable insights for contemporary global governance. An even more reasonable date for the beginning of the contemporary system of global governance would be 1815. The associated events were the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna and the beginning of a system of governance of Europe and its empires that eventually led to the global system that we now have. The conservative governments that held the congress created many of the institutions that still characterize global governance and gave new life to older institutions and practices whose sources and consequences were central to the nineteenth-century interimperial organizations out of which the United Nations grew. Many of the goals of the interimperial system--the economic goals as well as the goal of universalizing and perfecting the state system--also are still with us. Moreover, the constitutional dynamics of the nineteenth-century system--the forces that led to change within international governance--remain the same. Attention to those dynamics can, as Weiss and Wilkinson would suggest, help us understand the prospects for ameliorating current global problems, including problems that could not have been anticipated two centuries ago. New Institutions The Congress of Vienna imposed a peace on France and Napoleon's allies by doing much more than reestablishing something like the eighteenth century European balance of power. The victors sought to create a system that would assure continent-wide and interimperial rule by conservative social forces far into the future. The congress itself was the first of a series of nineteenth-century multilateral conferences of the great powers called to deal with European and interimperial conflicts. The Hague international peace conferences of 1899 and 1907 (and a third, planned for 1915, aborted after the outbreak of war) also built on the earlier conferences by attempting to institutionalize general processes for resolving conflicts among all national governments. The goal remained the same with the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that established the League of Nations and the 1945 San Francisco conference that agreed on the UN Charter. The congress or conference system not only made multilateral treaty making a common practice, it quickly led to the simultaneous or sometimes separate meetings of periodic congresses or conferences of representatives of ministries involved with transportation, communication, commerce, health, currency, finance, and almost every other aspect of government. This was the beginning of the legislative branch of today's global governance, the system of global multilateral conferences. At the same time, and often in the same cities where nineteenth-century public officials met, private associations of transnationally oriented communities of professionals and social activists also met to agree on voluntary international standards affecting almost every aspect of economic and social life throughout Europe and its empires. Moreover, long before the congresses of the great powers became truly global, the private international governance system welcomed professionals and activists from every part of the world. By the mid-nineteenth century, many of the periodic conferences, both public and private, had created permanent administrations (secretariats) to carry out tasks between the meetings of national representatives. …

"SECULAR RELIGION" AND THE DIPLOMATIC CONCEPT OF POWER BALANCE

Abstract: In the XIX century the theory of the power balance grounded on the equality of all sovereign states was becoming obsolete. The representative of three “secular religions” (nationalists, socialists and liberals) questioned the rationality of the existing model ousting the traditional theory of power balance in international relation. In the second half of XIX and beginning of XX century official foreign policies of European cabinets were still based on the power balance theory, though the essence of the balance was changed as the balance policy was more often expressed in rivalry and mutual concessions of powers. The article argues that before the First World War the principles of power politics led to the increased dependency from military potential thus the military might became the most important measure of national greatness, what eventually destroyed the classic European power balance system.

Europejskie przywództwo. Niemcy w Unii Europejskiej

This paper is an attempt to analyse European leadership and the role played by a reunited Germany in the European Union. The author proposes five fundamental theses: 1) the reunification of Germany ruined the balance of power in Europe; 2) the Eastern enlargement of NATO and the EU has moved the zone of political and military influence of the USA to the line of the Bug river; 3) the Germans have confirmed their position as a European power; 4) the foreign policy of Angela Merkel is a continuation of Gerhard Schroder’s policy, meaning a transfer of the focus from European policy to prioritising German national interests; 5) the German issue has remained open.

Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy from 1453 to the Present, by Brendan Simms

Summarising more than 550 years of European history in 690 pages is no mean feat, but ultimately Brendan Simms’s book fails to convince. The author approaches Europe’s history through the lens of international relations. After a short prologue on medieval Europe, the author sets off the history proper with the advent of modern times. The first 200 years of the span are dealt with in forty pages; half of the book is devoted to the twentieth century. Simms aims to reveal a range of constants in international relations: European powers are often driven by a fear of encirclement, while aiming to uphold a balance of power in Europe. We are reminded that foreign policy enjoyed a primacy within politics for most of the past half-millennium and that the western European states uncoupled themselves from this only in the 1960s. The primacy of foreign policy for a state’s survival or flourishing had a profound impact on most other political domains. Different constitutional systems developed and evolved to cope with international competition: Britain’s parliamentary tradition is one example, Prussia’s autocracy another. Each system strove in its own way for flexibility and efficiency, especially with regard to financial politics, itself developed largely for the funding of war. The struggle for supremacy in Europe has always been a zero-sum game, and the author shows how many local and far-away phenomena of the past half-millennium (e.g. slavery in the Americas) can be explained through that lens. Along the way, one stumbles upon some surprising details. The reviewers learned that in eighteenth-century Russia ‘Westernisation’ and ‘Europe’ stood for more efficiently organised despotism (p. 119), that London bankers financed Napoleon (p. 159), and that the Weimar Republic was more centralised and thus potentially more powerful than both the Second Reich and today’s Federal Republic (pp. 323, 402). The book’s strongest moment comes towards the end, with its analysis of ongoing geopolitical challenges, notably Russia’s new imperial ambitions and the challenges faced by the European Union.

Sergeev, Evgeny. The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-British Relations in Central and East Asia (review)

SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 772 Sergeev, Evgeny. The Great Game 1856–1907: Russo-British Relations in Central andEastAsia.WoodrowWilsonCenterPressandJohnsHopkinsUniversity Press, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD, 2013. xix + 530 pp. Selected chronology. Notes. Appendix. Selected archival sources and bibliography. Index. $65.00; $35.00. The imperial rivalry in Asia between Russia and Britain played a central role in shaping the international relations of the Great Powers in the half century before the First World War. Sergeev’s book describes the course of the ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia in detail, concentrating on the period between the end of the Crimean War in 1856 and the signing of the Anglo-Russian agreement in 1907. Strangely, the book nowhere mentions that it is effectively a translation of Sergeev’s 2012 work published in Russia (E. Iu. Sergeev, Bol´shaia igra, 1856– 1907: mify i realii rossiisko-britanskikh otnoshenii v Tsentral´noi i Vostochnoi Azii, Moscow 2012). Sergeev begins by putting Russo-British relations into a broader context through discussions of the their development during the first half of the nineteenth century and of the wider phenomenon of imperialism. He suggests that it was the Crimean War which marked the beginning of a period of intense rivalry between Britain and Russia, as both states began to concentrate on expanding their power and influence in Central Asia. St Petersburg, feeling its European ambitions frustrated, began to expand vigorously into Central Asia while the British acted to protect their Indian possessions in the wake of the 1857 revolt (for which Sergeev uses the term ‘Sepoy mutiny’). The book proceeds to trace the course of Anglo-Russian rivalry over the following half century in depth, identifying Afghanistan as the fulcrum for competition between the two states. Sergeev shows how British pressure on Russia in the Balkans and the Near East at the end of the 1870s prompted more assertive elements in the Russian military to propose marching troops into Afghanistan as a step towards threatening British India. Russian intervention in Afghanistan in the summer of 1878 proved, however, to be unsuccessful, as by the end of the year the British had entered Kabul and for almost the next twenty years the two powers faced a stalemate in Central Asia. Changes in the European balance of power at the beginning of the twentieth century, with Germany emerging as a potential threat to British interests, persuaded the London government to try to break the deadlock in its relations with Russia. The resulting Anglo-Russian convention of 1907 essentially neutralized the rivalry between the two states in Asia, opening the way for the wartime alliance of 1914. Sergeev’s book is based on a wide range of sources from both the Russian and British sides and the discussion of this intense imperial rivalry from both standpoints represents the major strength of the work. He shows how threat REVIEWS 773 and counter-threat reinforced each other, and how the process built upon deepseated perceptions of Asia in both Britain and Russia. The Great Game was a central part of nineteenth-century European imperialism, and both Russia and Britain felt themselves justified in bringing what they perceived to be political, economic and cultural benefits to Asian peoples. Sergeev’s book itself continues to perpetuate some of these stereotypes: he asserts that in the mid nineteenth century ‘Central and East Asia were characterized by more or less medieval political, social and political features’ (p. 329), stuck for centuries in ‘social apathy, economic backwardness and political anarchy’ (p. 330). He sees both Britain and Russia as pursuing ‘civilizing missions’ (p. 346) in their desire to cement their power in Asia. The intellectual challenge posed by Edward Said to European interpretations of the wider world is acknowledged in Sergeev’s book, but his view of the rivalry between Britain and Russia is firmly within the tradition that Said ably dissected. This book takes very much a traditional view of relations between European powers and Asia: it places Britain and Russia as the central figures in a struggle for influence, with Asian states and peoples as merely subjects in the interplay between the two European powers. Sergeev rejects the idea that Anglo-Russian rivalry...

Maritime Trade as the Pivot of Foreign Policy in Hume’s History of Great Britain

This paper examines David Hume’s vision of how maritime trade opened up new strategic prospects and challenges for England in the Stuart age. It shows that his emphasis in the History of England was not simply European, as most Hume scholars have believed, but, more importantly, trans-Atlantic. He maintained that England’s maritime trade in America and the West Indies from the seventeenth century onward tied her fortunes to the opaque and uncertain destiny of imperial politics. This had important implications for the dynamic relationship between Britain and its American colonies as well as for the resulting contest of European powers around the world. This paper shows that maritime trade served as the focal point for Hume in explaining England’s role in the European balance of power. Although some attention has been drawn to this aspect, no systematic study has investigated his Stuart history as an important text for understanding his views on foreign policy. This paper fills the gap by explaining the connections between his views on political economy and foreign policy It shows how he explained the crucial importance of trading interests in the English strategic thinking as well as why the European balance of power was significant for England’s maritime security and national interests.

Bautista Serra, un agente genovés en la Corte de Felipe III: Lo particular y lo público en la negociación política

The prominent role played by certain Genoese private individuals and families in the European power balance during the Ancient Regime is essential for understanding the decision making processes and the strategies followed by the Spanish monarchy for the management of critical situations. A telling example is that of Bautista Serra, agent of the Genoese Republic in Madrid between 1614 and 1618. Serra’s instructions aimed at the preservation of Genoa’s status and the perpetuation of the privileges enjoyed by the Genoese in the lands under the Spanish monarch. This, however, did not exclude alternative paths of negotiation not only in order to guarantee the success of his mission, but also to obtain personal gains for him and other Genoese subjects. These were alternative resources in order to get a consensus that complemented the official ones, and that depended on the ability of certain families to enter into international elite networks and to interact with the circles of royal patronage.

The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (review)

Reviewed by: The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano Benjamín N. Narváez The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples. Edited by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 624 pp. $95.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper). Writing a comprehensive and accessible account of more than five hundred years of Caribbean history is no easy task. Completing such a project by weaving together thirty-nine essays by forty different experts in Caribbean studies (including historians, anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists) is even more difficult to do well. Stephen Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano, the editors of The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, should be commended for doing so successfully. In covering the history of the Caribbean from pre-Columbian times to the present, the editors and their contributors present a number of important concepts with two main arguments standing out. First, the Caribbean was and is an important site of destruction and creation in both a material and a cultural sense. Materially speaking, colonialism led to the virtual elimination of the Caribbean’s indigenous peoples and the subsequent development of plantation slavery with imported African labor. Slavery was a destructive force that ripped people away from their homes and cultures and worked many to death, but it also allowed Europeans to produce unprecedented amounts of wealth through sugar and other commodities. Out of the dislocation and destruction caused by colonialism and plantation society emerged new cultural formations. As this book makes evident, a process of creolization (i.e., massive cultural transformation through the creation of new and blended cultural traditions from the remnants of older destroyed ones) has been a definitive characteristic of the Caribbean. Indigenous and African traditions (especially the latter) merged with European ways to create vibrant creole Caribbean cultures (in terms of language, religion, social relationships, farming techniques, food, and more). During the long nineteenth century, Asians migrated to this region, as did a new wave of Europeans (particularly Spaniards to Cuba), both [End Page 437] of whom further contributed to the creation of hybrid cultures in the Caribbean. The cultures of different societies have constantly come into contact with each other and changed through these interactions, but the Caribbean was particularly a hotbed of cultural blending and new cultural formation. The second main argument is that the Caribbean has played a crucial role in world history and processes of globalization. The book makes this clear in a number of ways. The Caribbean was central to the making of the “Atlantic World.” The region linked Africa to both Europe and the New World more directly through the slave trade. The Haitian Revolution had reverberations throughout the Americas and in Europe, inspiring some and terrifying others. Caribbean colonial slave societies and plantation agriculture (especially sugar which originated in the Old World) allowed European nations to gain massive amounts of wealth and have the capital and markets needed for industrialization and modernization. In fact, the Caribbean sugar plantation, despite (and in part due to) slavery, served as the world’s first modern industry. Abolitionism linked transnational actors. The islands of the Caribbean became important sites of competition among European powers in their battles over the balance of power in Europe. The region loomed large in the U.S. imagination and U.S. intervention contributed to the rise of the United States as a global power. During the twentieth century, the Caribbean may have seemed to have lost much of its global importance, but in reality it continued to play an important role in world developments, particularly through the impact of Garveyism, the Cuban Revolution, and the large-scale migration of many residents of the region to the United States, Canada, and Europe. In making these arguments about creolization and the connection between the Caribbean and global history, the book is right to suggest that the history of this region is one filled with “triumphs and tragedies” (p. 4). Examples abound. Europeans succeeded in dominating the Caribbean, but this “triumph” led to the decimation of the indigenous population, the development of the horrors of plantation...