European Empires Research Articles

On Province and Empire in My Ántonia and One of Ours: Cather’s 1922 The Waste Land

Willa Cather profoundly alters her attitude towards the American experiment, World War I, and the prospect of cultural pluralism in America between her 1918 My Ántonia and her 1922 One of Ours. In doing so, she addresses the issue of what kind of culture America should have: a monistic one such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson advocated or a pluralistic one. In My Ántonia, set during the period of Great Plains settlement but extending up into World War I, she presents an intact American cultural pluralism: non-English speaking European cultures continuing their positive practices absent the monarchic repression of Central European empires. Her ethnic settlements in the Great Plains practice pluralistic democracy without intervention from centralised authority, implicitly reflecting what could happen under an emerging European anti-monarchic ethos or in an America that allowed for many ways of life. In One of Ours, on the other hand, she savages the jingoism that possessed America during, and after World War I: a repression that makes the war disastrous for pluralistic democracy. The dream falters. Her wartime Nebraska becomes repressive for Germans, Czechs, and other divergent peoples. It practices conformity, a new materialism, and meaningless religion. Indeed, the death of her novel’s hero, Claude Wheeler, is not a sacrifice that enables democratic renewal but rather offers us a self-blinded hero who dies in glorious strife only as he sees it. He actually dies for a nation increasingly making itself unsafe for democracy in an army whose soldiers are massively disillusioned by the war. Thereafter, Cather writes little in a positive vein of Nebraska or the Great Plains and its various cultures but turns to earlier New World catalyst communities such as those of Quebec, the pueblos of the Southwest, and pioneer New Mexico.

Imperial Inequalities. The Politics of Economic Governance across European Empires. Ed. by Gurminder K. Bhambra and Julia McClure. [Postcolonial International Studies.] Manchester University Press, Manchester 2022. xx, 352 pp. Ill. £90.00.

Imperial Inequalities. The Politics of Economic Governance across European Empires. Ed. by Gurminder K. Bhambra and Julia McClure. [Postcolonial International Studies.] Manchester University Press, Manchester 2022. xx, 352 pp. Ill. £90.00.

‘From Theory to Practice’ Origins of the Ottoman Grand Vizierate and the Köprülü Restoration: A New Research Framework for the Office of the Grand Vizier

Abstract At the core of this article lies the argument that the Ottoman grand vizierate and the rise of the Köprülü family to power in the seventeenth century should be studied and analyzed mainly within two analytical and comparative frameworks. First, we should situate the office of the grand vizier in a diachronic view of the Islamic vizierate. Second, the Köprülü grand vizierate, in particular, should be viewed as one part of a synchronic ‘Eurasian age of the chief minister,” in a historical domain stretching from early modern Mughal and Safavid worlds to European empires and kingdoms. This article presents preliminary observations that may form a blueprint for future investigations into this global aspect of the grand vizierate and chief ministry. A broad perspective that merges these diachronic and synchronic approaches will allow us to detect theoretical and practical peculiarities of the Ottoman grand vizierate in comparison to its peers in Islamic history and across early modern Eurasia. Using that Eurasian macro perspective, I argue that the Köprülü grand viziers spearheaded the restoration of an independent vizierial authority that was idealized by generations of pre-Ottoman and Ottoman political writers and had numerous precedents in Islamic history.1

WP6.7 - Decolonising the roots of a UK undergraduate surgical curriculum

Abstract Aim To review our UK undergraduate medical school curriculum, by considering the legacies of the British and European empires and how they continue to affect how we perceive, structure and teach our surgical course. Method We developed a medical student led focus group to assess the existing taught surgical curriculum and monitor progression over time in both recognizing the impacts of colonialism and initiating a transformation of teaching towards equity, inclusivity and decolonisation. We encouraged open discussions about awkward traditional teaching and imagery. Facilitating the dialogue with both surgical faculty and medical students. Results These are some of root cause themes that students reviewing the surgical curriculum highlighted-Unconscious bias relating to perceived race, class and UK as well as global ethnicity.Using a range of ethnically diverse skin tones for clinical images.Discussing how Eurocentric medical teaching has affected or suppressed minorities.Using a range of ethnically diverse British names.Highlight gaps in research investigating cultural disparities.Highlight why disparities exist between different communities regarding the incidence and survival of cancer due to a range of social and economic factors. Conclusions A student led group, supported by senior clinicians enabled this discourse to take place and to be taken seriously enough for change to begin. Encouraging students to challenge dogmas and provide a framework of understanding to provide equitable patient care. Shining a light onto all corners of our surgical course. Accepting as well as explaining the issues of the past to guide future curriculum development.

Global Monarchy: Royal Encounters in the Age of Empire

AbstractMonarchy is one of the oldest truly global social structures. On the eve of the imperial age, most of the world was governed by monarchs. But as the European empires expanded, this order was radically transformed. During the long nineteenth century, most non-European monarchies were conquered by imperial powers. Often, European imperial powers abolished them, imprisoning, killing, or exiling local rulers; in other cases, the imperial powers incorporated the conquered monarchies into new imperial orders of indirect rule. Yet, there were some monarchies that survived Europe’s imperial expansion. In fact, every country that retained its independence in the era of high imperialism was ruled by a monarch: Ethiopia, China, Japan, the Ottoman empire, Persia (Iran), and Siam (Thailand). To some extent, these monarchs lived in the same social worlds as their European counterparts, forming a global, status-based community. This article offers some observations on the relationship between the world’s monarchs in the age of empire by focusing on encounters between European monarchs and those of the few non-European countries that retained their independence.

Exploring the Legacy of Tibetan Mapmaking

At the 2019 International Conference on the History of Cartography (ICHC) in Amsterdam, the map historian Peter Barber stated in his ground-breaking keynote speech that ‘with a few exceptions, the emphasis in the traditional history of cartography [before 1980s] was on European mapping. In the age of European empires, it was assumed that, on grounds of technological skill as well as cultural superiority, European map making set the standard and that indigenous mapping in other parts of the world, with the partial exceptions of the medieval Arab world and China, was ipso facto inferior and hardly worth consideration.’ In recent decades the approach to the study of maps has changed and the field has been transformed. Researchers from different academic backgrounds have discovered the relevance of maps to their disciplines, and the primacy of the essentially European concepts of scale and accuracy as the sole criteria for assessing the quality of maps has been questioned. Finally, non-European indigenous mapping has been brought into the field. This paper makes a significant contribution to this development by presenting an important collection of Tibetan maps, namely those of the Harrer Collection held at the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, probably the largest corpus of Tibetan geographic regional maps outside of Tibet. For the first time, we show the entire set of maps and describe their cartographic characteristics. We also provide the Tibetan spelling, transliteration and translations for the numerous Tibetan inscriptions and explanations. We have endeavoured to study the maps using a comprehensive approach, and we discuss what we can learn from them in various respects: the human and geographic landscapes they show; their makers; the role they might have played within the historical context and the society in which they were produced; their circulation; and their role as historical sources.

Description of the city of Constantinople and its importance througConstantinople, Byzantine, civilization, New Rome, Christianity

Constantinople is the city that the Noble Messenger may God’s prayers and peace is upon him, announced his conquest by saying: “To conquer Constantinople, let us be the emir, its ruler, and the best army, that army. And the poets pay attention to it and write about it, as if this city was created to be a great empire that lasted for more than a thousand years. What helped it to survive is its huge building built by Emperor Constantine the Great in 324 AD to be the capital of the Eastern Byzantine Empire. This huge building is represented in its high fortified walls and its huge and remnant churches Now like the Hagia Sophia Church, and making it one of the most important cultural centers and a symbol of ancient civilization in addition to choosing this important geographical location, which gave it a very important economic and commercial importance, helped it to survive and continue and most of the attempts directed against it. Constantine's great goal was to build it, to continue the survival of the European Empire (New Rome), but this time in the East with a new look and a new religion, which is Christianity by adopting the official religion of the new empire.

Rebuilding life after slavery. Manumission, emancipation, and family networks in European empires, 1750–1900

Wherever and whenever systems of slavery existed, enslaved people struggled to attain freedom. Spanning various imperial contexts from 1750 to 1920, this special issue convenes a team of scholars to investigate the aftermath of emancipation. What did freedom from slavery entail in deeply unequal colonial societies? This issue explores diverse experiences, from maroon communities in the Caribbean wilderness to the forced resettlement of freed slaves in European colonies in Africa, and the legal emancipation of slaves in segregated colonial port cities in Asia. Enslaved people encountered ‘freedom’ with its attendant threats and opportunities in myriad ways. Building on the rich historiographical tradition of slavery studies, this special issue aims to broaden the scope of historical research from the slave trade and the lives of enslaved individuals to their post-emancipation existence. However, even recent literature often treats freedom after abolition and manumission as distinct phenomena, representing different legal paths to freedom—one associated with the early modern period and the other with the nineteenth century. This special issue re-evaluates this presupposition by foregrounding the post-emancipation life events of formerly enslaved individuals. It questions whether and how these different transitions from slave status to freedom can and should be structurally compared in slavery studies. By tapping into previously unexplored sources, re-examining older datasets with fresh perspectives, and employing record linkage to uncover forgotten slave histories, the authors seek to assess the living conditions of formerly enslaved people and their direct descendants after emancipation. In doing so, we aim to explore how past experiences of enslavement influenced future life choices and opportunities, thereby questioning the so-called afterlives of slavery.

The Decline of the Eastern Empire and the Fall of Constantinople: An Omen for Europe?

There is a theory, already outlined by Toynbee, that empires that have succeeded one another in a dominant position are seeing their centre of gravity shift from east to west. This theory has most recently been evoked in connection with the replacement of the European empire by the American empire, which now seems to be giving way to an Asian empire. If we want to analyse historically the mechanisms that lead an empire to its downfall, the best example to choose is undoubtedly that of the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire in Western terminology. It is a world that has disappeared, but one that is close enough to us to allow us to understand it, and even to learn from its evolution, which only seems inevitable in retrospect. This story with its succession of internal and external causes of decline is summarized in the present study, leading to the disappearance of the Empire at the hands of the Ottoman dynasty. A parallel is drawn with the present situation of Europe.

Property and the End of Empire in International Zones, 1919–1947

Abstract At the end of the First World War, defeated European empires ceded a wealth of imperial patronage, including palaces, government buildings and offices, to newly forming states in central Europe. While we know a great deal about these property transfers, the fate of ceded property in mandates and other newly emerging sovereign spaces, such as international zones, is less well known. This article traces the ways in which central European properties were reallocated and sold in international zones, with special reference to the International Zone of Tangier. While the remains of central European imperialism in Tangier were integrated into the international administration, this process encouraged erstwhile imperial powers to vie ever harder to reclaim ‘their’ former property, including private property portfolios. Meanwhile, it encouraged existing imperial powers to support private property purchases in order to secure advantages in the administration. In other words, internationalization entailed widespread competition for property that is omitted from the usual accounts of these spaces. Drawing attention to this phenomenon is important as it reveals the new forms imperial rivalries took on within the international structures created after the war.

A Re-Orientalist Critique of Moni Mohsin’s The End of Innocence

The complicity of Western intellectuals in optimizing the oppression of the Orient even after the end of European empires is a much-debated issue within postcolonial literary circles. This argument is mostly centered around the critiques of European modernity doctrine which is held as a new face of the Imperialist project. West maintains its superiority over the East through different modes, among them diasporic fiction is identified as serving this project by Lisa Lau. In particular, Lau’s idea of re-orientalism reveals the involvement of migrant writers who highlight the inferiority of their indigenous cultures in their fiction. By considering the re-Orientalist perspective with its attention to the suspicion of meta-narratives and repetition of the stories already popular among Western readers, this paper points out the subtle ways in which formulaic representation of characters, emplotment of the story in specific socio-cultural Pakistani society and the narratorial references to historical and political happenings of the Pakistani society re-construct the orient as ‘other’. This paper concludes Moni Mohsin’s The End of Innocence as a cultural construct serving the European agenda of colonization, wherein the novelist has depicted the backward, sensual and illiterate Pakistani culture through the stereotyping of the indigenous population.

Water and History in Southern Africa

AbstractHow has water shaped the history of a region that is bordered by ocean, brimming with ephemeral rivers, and yet prone to drought? This article explores water histories in Southern Africa over the past two hundred years. Using oral traditions, epic poetry, archival sources, and secondary anthropological and archaeological literature, I examine how Africans and Europeans related to, claimed, and used different bodies of water. In the first section I discuss how water was central to isiNguni conceptions of social and political life. In the second section I discuss how European empires used water to enclose and dispossess African land and to build hydropolitical colonial orders over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I conclude by reflecting on afterlives of these water histories in the present.

A Country of White Lilies: Inter-Imperial Nation-Making and Development from the Russian Empire’s Periphery to Post-Ottoman Turkey

AbstractIn this article, we investigate the reasons behind the puzzling enthusiastic reception of a book about Finland’s national development by Turkish nationalist intellectuals in the early Republic of Turkey. Published in Turkish in 1928, the developmental model laid out in Petrov’s The Country of White Lilies resonated with the Turkish intelligentsia and has remained a popular book in Turkey throughout the twentieth century, and even today. First, we compare the fictionalized developmental model presented by Petrov in his book with Finnish development under the Russian Empire, before its independence in 1917. Second, we show that this reception was largely based on a comparison of Turkey and Finland’s geopolitical positions in global imperial politics, and a constructed racial affinity between the two nations in the minds of Turkish readers. Third, we argue that this national developmental model served three ideological purposes; distancing the Turkish Republic from the Ottoman Empire, showing the developmental capacity of nations outside the linear and paternalistic developmental model proposed by Western European empires, and last, presenting a model that glosses over Ottoman-Turkish state violence and ethnic cleansing, as well as democratic processes, as irrelevant to considerations of progress and development. Finally, we discuss the implications of our study for re-evaluating the sociological literature on nation formation, largely taking its “model cases” (Krause 2021) from the Western European experience, through a more encompassing inter-imperial approach (Doyle 2014).

Consenting to Early Modern Empires: Introduction

This text offers an introduction to the special theme section on Consenting to Early Modern Empires, guest-edited by the author. The contributors to this section seek to explain the prominent place given to consent in Spanish-American and Portuguese-Asian imperial records. This introduction points out that the politics of consent in early modern empires did not reside primarily in a struggle between freedom and unfreedom. Indigenous strategies of using consent to place checks on the Spanish and Portuguese had the effect of integrating them further into European empires.

Among Independence, Sovereignty and Autonomy: The Dutch Caribbean

This paper critiques the structure and functionality of the 21st century nation-state through analysis of emancipatory decisions in the former Dutch Caribbean colonies of Aruba, Curaçao, and Suriname.Suriname, the most culturally Dutch of the Caribbean territories, was the first of the former colonies to secede from the Netherlands. Although Suriname achieved independence in 1975, the economy remained heavily reliant on the policies of the United States. As such, the Surinamese government prioritized the interests of NATO and struggled to reconfigure its preexisting relationship with the suzerain. This dynamic strained Surinamese relation with Latin American nations more actively resisting US imperialism and isolated Suriname politically.Aruba became a constituent country in 1986; however, this shift was not contemporaneously reflected in Curaçao. Curaçao had headed the former Colony of Curaçao and Dependencies, and independence would have weakened its influence on the other islands whose governing structure would have remained unchanged. While Aruba had the opportunity to claim equal status with Curaçao, it instead pursued emancipation. Demographically Mestizo unlike neighboring islands, Aruba was eager to distinguish itself from Curaçao, where advocacy for decolonization arose with support from regional Black Power movements. Aruba and Curaçao had a long history of human exchange with Latin American continent from the pre-Columbian period. The inhabitants, especially those of African descent excluded from citizenship on the basis of race, moved to Spanish colonies where citizenship was granted upon conversion to Roman Catholicism. The people could use religion to obtain citizenship. They had no loyalty to the European empire nor a sense of belonging to any European kingdom. What they wanted was citizenship and human rights.Around the time Suriname declared independence, European governments began to promote neo-liberal policies that advanced smaller or limited government function. The former Dutch empire was itself abandoning its role as sovereign of a nation-state. Aruba, which had witnessed Suriname’s predicament post-independence and where sense of belonging within the nation-state was historically weak, finally elected to retain within the Dutch Kingdom. To become an independent nation would have entailed severing preexisting ties with Europe and rendered the territory more vulnerable, since globalization often facilitates interference from supranational institutions and military alliances such as the EU and NATO. The trajectory of Aruba prompts questions regarding the true definition and function of the 21st century nation-state.Today, even independent nations comply with international regulations and belong to multinational free trade spheres and military alliances. Due to Dutch disinterest, Aruba and Curaçao enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy. Thus, dependent territories such as Aruba that are capable of maintaining intercontinental and supranational affiliations do not immediately necessitate full independence

The role of the North Caucasian Diaspora (Muhajirs) in the Ottoman Empire in bilateral relations between Russia and Turkey in 1917-1921 in the context of revolutions, external and internal conflicts

The author examines the influence of the North Caucasian diaspora (Muhajirs) on the relations of the Ottoman Empire, and later Turkey with Russia in the context of the creation of the Union of Highlanders of the North Caucasus and Dagestan in the region of the same name during the conflicts – the Civil War in Russia and the War of Independence of Turkey. The end of the First World War was marked by the fall of the largest European empires, including the Russian and Ottoman empires. These cataclysms have led to an increase in conflict in the region. In addition, these processes contributed to the growth of national consciousness of the peoples who were part of these states. At the same time, the social upsurge took place not only in the country of origin, but also in the diaspora, which, using its social position in the receiving country, tried to influence foreign policy in order to realize its historical "myth". In turn, the diaspora simultaneously acted as an informal "instrument" in relations between Russia and Turkey. The research used general scientific methods such as analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, the unity of historical and logical. A wide source and historiographical base was used. The study revealed that representatives of the diaspora had a double identity: on the one hand, they retained the "myth" of their historical homeland, on the other, they considered themselves loyal subjects of the Ottoman state. Based on their dual self-identification, their activities and the policy of the Turkish state in the Caucasus resulted, forming a kind of symbiosis, so the foreign policy interests of the state were intertwined with the desire of the muhajirs to return to their homeland. At the same time, the country of origin, although actively cooperating with the diaspora, also pursued its own interests. However, as the revolutions in Russia and Turkey faded and the state apparatus of the two countries strengthened, the diaspora factor began to decrease – national interests prevailed over the interests of individual ethnic groups.

“It is ticklish meddling with the navy”: The British navy and Caribbean contraband trade, c. 1713–1750

In the early eighteenth century, slow communications between the metropole and the margins of empire combined with fuzzy relationships among the various institutions of the composite imperial state to enable British naval officers to act with relative impunity. Facing little oversight and scant consequences for misbehavior, many captains took advantage of the entanglement of European empires in the Caribbean to pursue personal profit. They both protected local merchants engaged in illicit inter-imperial trade and themselves transported enslaved Africans across imperial lines. This article explores the extent of those activities and the intra- and inter-imperial conflicts they generated, emphasizing how naval officers’ behavior mirrored that of other public and quasi-public officials at the periphery. It also evaluates the conditions that allowed naval trading to persist despite its violation of longstanding laws and regulations, arguing that there was no powerful political stakeholder who clearly suffered by the naval officers’ actions.

Among All the Nations

I spent much of the first decade of the 2000s writing a book about the Catholic Church in nineteenth and twentieth-century Vietnam. I came to the topic as a scholar of Vietnam, and very much not as a scholar of modern Catholicism. In the project's early stages I searched high and low for a general history to fill in the (many) gaps in my knowledge of the subject. The best I could find was Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett's 2003 Priests, Prelates & People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. This book, although excellent and still worth reading, is squarely grounded in scholarship written from an older national and regional approach to the Church's modern history. It essentially ignores the fact that in the modern era more than ever before, Catholicism's historical epicenter in Europe was irreducibly tied to the rest of the world not only through the Ultramontane Church but also through the circulation of ideas and the printed word, migration, and (above all) European imperialism, and that the Church's institutional and cultural evolution since the eighteenth century is incomprehensible outside of such frameworks (Atkin and Tallett devote an astounding 5 of their 333 pages of text to the European empires in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which made up two-thirds of the global Catholic population at the time they finished their book).

Imperial inequalities: the politics of economic governance across European empires

Imperial inequalities: the politics of economic governance across European empires

Emulating Empires: Caribbean Free Ports, Economic Dualism, and European Imperial Rivalry, c. 1670s–1760s

ABSTRACTWhen the Dutch West Indies Company (WIC) established the free port of Willemstad, Curaçao after 1674, they launched a model for economic competition that other European empires would emulate. Within a century, the Danish, Spanish, British, and French all established their own Caribbean free ports. Emulation, however, was not replication. This article argues that while the expansion of free ports into different Caribbean empires generated similar forms of economic dualism (prohibitive commercial systems in certain locales with more-open ones in others), they all served varying purposes. The Dutch and Danish maintained or expanded their free-port systems and utilised strategic neutrality to remain active players within an increasingly competitive economic arena. Britain wanted to extend its commercial empire by making foreign realms dependent on its trade. France sought to pacify recalcitrant planters desperate for reliable provisioning. Finally, Spain enacted free ports in Santo Domingo to supply and encourage settlement in a region threatened by French encroachments. Thus, although these empires all established free ports in strategic locales and jealously emulated each other, they did so with unique political-economic aims in mind. Meanwhile, merchants, enslaved Africans, sailors, settlers, and European intellectuals employed Caribbean free ports to accomplish their own ends as well.