European Rivals Research Articles

The Great Power Competition for North America: Western Expansion and the Conquest of Trans-Appalachia, 1680–1821

Great power competition elevates the American way of war over counterinsurgency practices, violating the need to balance these two modes of warfare. This article calls for a restoration of that balance, and does so by example. A look at the early period of settlement in North America, from East Coast lodgments to the Mississippi River, reveals a nation able to wage two wars at once. An American push to establish a permanent frontier that excluded European rivals coincided with a counterinsurgency war unleashed within newly claimed tracts of land. That effort proved effective, if immoral. Today, that balance must again take hold, with a reminder that cultural accommodation inherent in all wars means that a counterinsurgency war avoids the mandate of destruction called for in seeking victory by employing force of arms.

Lord Curzon's Tribal Policy: An Appraisal of its Aims of Securing Pacification and Contentment of Frontier Tribesmen

The British Empire, which encapsulated one-fourth of humanity, had few difficult frontiers, and the Northwest Frontier figured prominently among these. The Indian subcontinent was the most prized jewel of its coveted crown, and its preservation was considered vital given the influence and power of other European rivals, i.e., French and Russians in the region. Initially, the Inactive or Stationary Policy was pursued, and later in the 1870s, aggressive and penetrative Policy was adopted in the Tribal Belt. The aggressive Forward Policy alienated the tribespeople, which eventually resulted in the uprising of 1897. The British finally realized that only the Policy of contentment and pacification would ensure long-lasting peace and gain the loyalty of the tribe members. Lord Curzon, the expert on frontier affairs, was the main exponent of this Policy of conciliation to win the confidence of the inhabitants of the most sensitive Frontier of the empire.

Information Control in Afghanistan, 1901–1946

This article examines the history of information control in the first half of the twentieth century in Afghanistan. This was a period of great turmoil. The world fought two devastating wars and Afghanistan went through major political and social transformations that included several violent regime changes. Despite being a neutral state, the Afghan capital attracted European rivals who campaigned for the hearts and minds of Afghans. In addition to foreign intrigues, the Afghan rulers, too, used certain information practices as part of their surveillance regimes to suppress political dissent and public unrest. A contribution to media history in Afghanistan, this article looks into how the state tried to control the flow of information in this period through surveillance, censorship, and the spread of misinformation. This was an era when print and other media technologies gained significant popularity in Afghanistan but people continued to use mostly word-of-mouth to communicate information. Despite its best efforts, which often involved brute force, the article argues, the state was not always successful in preventing people from talking with each other.

The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in The English Quest for Japan, 1600–1625 by Timon Screech

The Shogun’s Silver Telescope centers Japan within the British East India Company’s history by picking apart layers of archival obscurity and imperial amnesia. Using unlikely gift objects—a silver telescope and cargoes of paintings presented by the English to bewildered shoguns—Screech weaves a riveting history of art with the methods of transnational history. The book argues that the quest for Japanese silver was highly important to the British East India Company in the era of peaceful Euro-commercial rivalry (4). To secure bullion, the English used art to present themselves as trusted trade partners compared to their European rivals, the Iberians, Jesuits, and Dutch.Japanese–British relations before the hostilities of World War II is insignificant to histories of international relations and empire. After the shoguns expelled Iberians and Jesuits when they banned foreigners in 1635, they permitted only the Dutch East India Company (the voc) to operate in Nagasaki. The ban remained in place until Commodore Mathew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy forced Japan to trade with the Americans in 1854. At this point, scholars acknowledge the anti-commercial isolation associated with the Edo ban to be a Euro-centered misnomer. But Britain remains marginal to scholars of the Edo period, nonetheless. After all, evidence of mutual interaction is meager. The dozen or so Company voyages to the “East Indies,” to which Japan was an added destination, ended when the English withdrew from Hirado in 1623. But when a lively historian of art grapples with the dull archives of English cargo, things can, literally, look different.Screech meticulously mines the records of Company voyages usually ignored by all but the connoisseurs of marine trivia for the production, selection, circulation, and reception of art objects. He then elaborates this dense life of art with an impressively close reading of the role of gifts in establishing commercial markets. The English were eager to mark their differences from the “Popish” Iberians and their Jesuit “proxy-agents,” as well as the republican Dutch. They deployed the silver telescope to drive a heliocentric wedge between Iberians and Jesuits and the Japanese elite. Classical nudes and landscapes were intended to distinguish the secularizing inclusivity of the English Church from the proseletyzing Jesuits (104). Furthermore, pictures and rituals concerning the English sovereign intended to reassure the shoguns that, unlike the Dutch, the English were royalists. Indeed, gifts were part of a broader strategy to persuade the shoguns that Jesuits posed an existential threat to their state and that the Dutch were too republican. The British alone traded in peace.The book’s arguments, however, are a little ambivalent. For example, Screech emphasizes that the English branded themselves as peaceable traders, in contrast to their depiction of Jesuits as conspirators, thereby fomenting the Jesuits’ banishment from Edo Japan. But the book also hints that the Company trade in arms may have been decisive in the crucial war between the Tokugawa and the Toyotomi clan (183–184). He finds that many Edo objects and Japan-related discussions are incorrectly identified as “Indian.” That is, the lost archive of Japan is hidden in plain sight. But the mis-filings also imply that early Company voyages to Japan were part of a long history of orientalism barely covered in the book. The research design foregrounds how mistranslated objects can illustrate mimetic relations. Japanese and English codes of art could cohabit and stimulate one another. But the book also suggests that English strategies in Japan were similar to those pursued in the Mughal court. Had Screech acknowledged the wealth of scholarship about art and European courtly encounters in Mughal India, would this stimulating comparison have created a different account of the imperialism of British commerce?The book betrays a mysterious elision. The English withdrawal from Hirado in 1623 coincided with an incident in Ambon, Indonesia, when the Dutch tried several Englishmen and hanged one for conspiracy. Subsequent British mythmaking about the “English massacre” in Ambon anchored British imperialism in narratives of peaceful commerce and accidental conquest. The Dutch “treachery” at Ambon was used to explain the breakdown of Anglo–Dutch relations and the shift in Company interest to India.1 Screech misses the drama of this key imperial moment when he writes that in 1623 “the Dutch saw no further benefit in the English and dissolved the Treaty of Defence” (238).Bilateral accounts of British–Japanese relations tend to emphasize peaceable relations to counter the history of World War II’s hostilities. Screech’s interdisciplinary method offers the potential to subvert that narrative and that of British imperialism as well. That the book does not realize this potential fully, however, should not stop it from being read and studied closely. The Shogun’s Silver Telescope opens up new avenues of research because it leaves readers wanting more.

Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication Among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

In most narratives of contact between Native Americans and European newcomers, communication begins with gestures, pantomime, and rudimentary sign language before increased familiarity enabled speech. Céline Carayon's Eloquence Embodied shows how this familiar sequence of events oversimplifies—and often ignores—the rich variety of nonverbal communication that occurred in the early modern Americas, including signs, ceremonies, gestures, and performances. Instead, this study of the first two centuries of French colonization in the Americas from 1500 to 1700 argues that, rather than evolving from “basic” nonverbal to more “sophisticated” verbal communication, “colonial America was the site of rich intersections between effective traditions of embodied expressiveness” (6–7). Furthermore, far from fumbling from one misunderstanding to the next, French colonizers and the Native Americans they met generally managed to understand each other quite well.Carayon's chronological framing means that French encounters with Indigenous people in Florida, Brazil, Guiana, and the Caribbean receive significant attention alongside the more frequently studied St. Lawrence Valley and Illinois Country. As a result, Carayon's account of Indigenous experiences with French colonizers includes Beothuc, Guale, Yao, and Tupi-Guarani speakers as well as Iroquoians and Algonquians, a choice that greatly strengthens the book.Each chapter in Eloquence explores a different theme while also proceeding in chronological order. The first surveys the use of sign language in the Native America, using a vast array of imperfect French sources to detail “complex” nonverbal communications systems across the hemisphere, including “what might have been a full-fledged sign language system in the circum-Caribbean region” (104). The next chapter examines traditions of nonverbal communication in early modern France against the backdrop of elites’ interest in “civility” to achieve refinement and unity of a linguistically and culturally diverse kingdom and is followed with an exploration of how Indigenous people chose to greet and communicate with French newcomers, mediated through the Europeans’ depictions of these encounters. Chapter four shifts attention from expressions of friendship to cross-cultural expressions (and interpretations) of trustworthiness and deception in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and five probes French and Indigenous attitudes towards language learning and multilingualism, with knowledge of unspoken cultural values and taboos as valuable as spoken tongues. Chapter six argues for the ongoing importance of nonverbal communication as an accompaniment to diplomatic oratory in the late seventeenth century. Carayon's conclusion briefly compares seventeenth-century English nonverbal exchanges with Native Americans before suggesting avenues where other scholars might fruitfully use “nonverbal features of Early American encounters to shed light” on various aspects of colonization (433). While making clear that she views the French as more adept than their European rivals—especially the English—in nonverbal communications with Indigenous people, she rejects the idea that such skill “produced a uniquely benevolent style of colonialism” (433).Carayon draws on a broad tranche of evidence, and her choice to include French colonization efforts in Florida, the Caribbean, and South America in her analysis gives added weight to the book's contributions. Overall, Carayon's argument—that French colonizers and Native Americans drew upon deep traditions of nonverbal communications to bridge their linguistic divide with less trouble than previously thought—is persuasive. Eloquence Embodied makes clear that scholars should jettison the idea that spoken language obviated the importance of ritual, sensory, and other embodied communication in later colonial counters. For all these reasons it will be a standard work in the field for some time.

Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams

Reviewed by: Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams Mark Sabine Hilary Owen and Claire Williams, eds, Transnational Portuguese Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). xxiv + 386 pages. Print and ebook. The responsibility shouldered by contributors to Liverpool University Press's Transnational Modern Languages series should not be underestimated. By gathering a multi-perspectival corpus of scholarship on cultural traffic that focuses on the permeability of borders, and acknowledges the multi-layered and intersectional nature of purportedly unitary ethnic identities, the series hastens the overdue embedding of the 'transnational turn' in a discipline founded—like it or not—in the epistemology of cultural nationalisms and colonialism. As Hilary Owen and Claire Williams assert in their cogent introduction to this volume, the challenge that transnational research methodologies present to the 'conflation of language, territory and identity' upon which the study of Modern Languages was originally predicated offers 'a transformative means of re-thinking' the pedagogic, social and political agency of the modern linguist (p. 5). It offers this, one might add, at a time when the value of a multilingual practice of scholarship, and of cultural analysis more generally, is increasingly scorned or contested. The current 'boom' in transnational enquiry responds to and informs both contestation of the hegemony of Eurocentric and often racist models of research and cultural value, and the demands of an increasingly multipolar world order. The studies Owen and Williams have gathered justify their contention that research subsumed under the rubric of Portuguese or Lusophone Studies offers especially 'powerful and engaging possibilities' for 'Modern Languages as transnational cultural enquiry' (p. 6). Portuguese Studies' status as a discipline has been determined by the language's global diffusion—centuries before the age of nationalism—and by its historical and geographical proximity to Spanish. Consequently, it has long presented as 'always already requiring a multiply-hyphenated "transcultural" and "transnational" methodology' (p. 7), even as its practitioners have, paradoxically, claimed a discrete 'national-looking' language base, so as to resist conflation with Spanish, or 'Hispanic', Studies. [End Page 99] Moreover, for some decades, historians examining Portugal's colonial expansion have foregrounded how that project's fragility—in the face first of established African and Asian empires, and later of ascendant European rivals—often engendered intricate repartitions of economic and political power that, in turn, brought forth new or hybridized cultural practices and identities. If Portuguese Studies' longstanding examination, and frequent celebration, of hybridities and transculturation qualifies it to offer leadership to sibling Modern Language disciplines, however, its practitioners also need to confront the legacy, in Portugal and elsewhere, of a 'dynamics of ignorance' about all things extra-national promoted by isolationist authoritarian regimes, as Ellen W. Sapega notes (p. 223) in a timely and meticulous study of Portuguese memorialization of the Second World War. They need also acknowledge—as Anna Klobucka's reading of Gilberto Freyre's quasi-anthropological travelogue Aventura e Rotina reminds us (pp. 50–56)—how imperialist, racist and (European) male-supremacist preconceptions and metanarratives often linger within the purview of linguistic and cultural scholarship, even when scholars identify Lusophone communities as inherently transculturated, and their task as inherently translational. Of the volume's four themed sections—'Spatiality', 'Language', 'Temporality' and 'Subjectivity'—the first two present transnational approaches to their titular concepts that are particularly effective for countering imperialist or exceptionalist narratives of a 'Portuguese-speaking world'. Zoltán Biedermann's 'Global Navigations and the Challenge of World-Making' opens up the ideological loading of 'unquestioned […] spatial notions' (p. 24)—'territory', 'nation', 'expansion'—that have long underpinned representations of Portugal's imperial enterprise as a 'linear process of diffusionist-cum-universalist power-building' (p. 40). Biedermann's call for an excavation and acknowledgment of early-modern Portuguese subjects' attraction to and interaction with 'powerful, prosperous and self-confident' extra-European cultural centres (ibid.), and the substantial input of these into the cultures and praxis of colonial and postcolonial world systems, is echoed in José Lingna Nafafé and Toby Green's fascinating critique of the concept of lusofonia, tracing the roots of an instrumentalization of language for imperialist ends back to the writings of Padre António Vieira, but revealing the extent...

Taylor, Stephen. Sons of the Waves; The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail.

Taylor, Stephen. <i>Sons of the Waves; The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail</i>.

Fashioning an Imperial Metropolis at the 1896 Berliner Gewerbeausstellung

AbstractThe 1896 Berliner Gewerbeausstellung was a transformative moment for city and nation alike. The exhibition announced Berlin's pre-eminence as a scientific and industrial city and bolstered an emergent German national identity. Including displays of Egypt and Germany's formal colonies also revealed Germany's competence as a colonial power. By illustrating its skill in both aggressive conquest and subtle intervention, city and nation thought themselves capable of competing with European rivals at home and abroad. However, the two visions of colonialism, cloaked in the guise of mass entertainment, have rarely been brought into conversation with one another. This article seeks to discuss this colonial–Oriental dichotomy by focusing on tensions between education and entertainment in display techniques, particularities of racial difference in ethnographic display, the use of advertising, and the insertion of new technologies. Contributing to a deeper understanding of race, empire, and modernity in the German context, the Gewerbeausstellung offers a jumping off point for further comparison to other local, regional, and international exhibitions and an avenue to explore how notions of modernity factored into formal and informal imperial arrangements. Ultimately, it sheds light on how an exhibition helped to fashion a global, imperial city at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783–1840

The Federalist Frontier: Settler Politics in the Old Northwest, 1783–1840

Веймарская республика и Франция: проблемы взаимоотношений двух непримиримых соперников в постверсальский период

The article considers the process of difficult, confrontational interaction between two long-standing Euro-pean rivals, France and Germany. Using specific historical examples and events, the author explores not only the style of political and diplomatic behaviour of the two countries, but also the deep-rooted collective perceptions of the French and Germans in relation to each other. The specific historical analysis carried out within the framework of this article allows concluding that a stable stereotype of the ‘enemy’ was formed and rooted in the people’s minds on both ends of aggravated Franco-German relations. The study of the phenomenon of Franco-German relations in the post-Versailles period makes it possible to assess the political and diplomatic, emotional and psychological, socio-economic and international consequences of the confrontation between the two countries, the basis of which was a the collective confrontation saturated with mutual dislike and hostility.

Venice Carnival from the Middle Ages to the Twenty- First Century

As with other carnivals around the world, the history of the Venetian Carnival sheds light on the complex dialectic between festivity and politics and more particularly on the growing need for political authorities to control the urban environment. This article provides a longue durée approach to carnival in Venice and unpacks the meaning of its successive metamorphoses. During the Middle Ages, Venetians used carnival as a defense strategy for their city, intended to ensure the cohesion of its various neighborhoods around a common destiny. In the fifteenth century, the legacy of public festivals for both rich and poor gave way to a more official celebration, which allowed Venice to outdo its European rivals. The civilized and policed expressions that were elaborated from the Renaissance until the eighteenth century gradually set Venetian Carnival apart from the exuberance and invertibility displayed by rustic carnivals in other parts of Europe. However watered-down and commodified present-day Venetian Carnival may seem, it continues to raise eminently political issues, most of which have to do with the appropriation of public space by private interests and the recreation of traditions for mass consumption.

GEOPOLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE INDIAN OCEAN AND MARITIME SECURITY CHALLENGES FOR PAKISTAN

Geopolitics and geographical identity of a state holds great significance in today’s arena of International Politics. The geographical sphere is a source of global puissance in regional policy making. From the last few decades, the world has witnessed major variations in regional power dynamics from Atlantic to Pacific and from Europe to Asia. Oceans and seas are an imperative driver of dynamic change and clutches prosperity enigmas from eras. The Indian Ocean, in contemporary world, is a major maritime transit lounge. Global economy relies on this giant oceanic connector as it is an emerging economic gravity center in world’s trade and economic affairs. Hegemonic influence on the littoral states of Indian Ocean is the dire need of Asian economic giants as well as the US and European rivals. Pakistan’s geographic location and its embryonic Gwadar port holds great strategic significance in regional economy, prosperity, security and stability. Notwithstanding, there are certain maritime challenges for Pakistan. The aim of this paper is to identify maritime challenges to Pakistan in terms of CPEC and to highlight possible remedial measures in changing regional geopolitical power dynamics. It can be concluded with a thorough study that Pakistan requires adequate measures to cope up with existing and futuristic challenges in the maritime domain.

The Maubara fort, a relic of eighteenth-century local autonomy and Dutch–Portuguese rivalry on Timor

The European rivals for colonial domination on the island of Timor in the eighteenth century relied on alliances with the many Timorese principalities for influence outside their own small settlements; the Dutch at Kupang and the Portuguese at Lifau. The central Timorese principality of Maubara sought an alliance with the Dutch in 1755, resulting in the building there of a Dutch fort a few years later. The Dutch had hoped that this alliance would facilitate extension of their authority in the eastern districts. However, the Portuguese moved their capital to Dili in 1769 and Maubara was soon surrounded by Portuguese allies. The Dutch continued to supply Maubara with sporadic support, but finally surrendered it to the Portuguese in 1861. This article examines the Dutch claim to Maubara, the circumstances surrounding the erection of the fort, and the reasons for its later abandonment to the Portuguese.

"Networks of Diplomacy and Trade in the Contested Florida Borderlands"

"Networks of Diplomacy and Trade in the Contested Florida Borderlands" Diana ReigelspergeriD When Cuban engineer Antonio de Arredondo debarked from his ship and set foot on the docks in St. Augustine in August of 1736, he might have been surprised by the three British ships he likely noticed in port.1 Unlicensed trade with British ships was illegal in the Spanish colonies, although smuggling and contraband trade were common. The city of St. Augustine, the capital of Spanish Florida, was isolated from regular Spanish commercial traffic and had long relied on illicit trade to fill the gap when supplies ran short. Nevertheless, the openness of these operations might have caught Arredondo's attention. If the large number of foreign ships did not surprise him, then the stores openly selling British goods and British citizens wandering the city certainly would have. Spanish authorities in Florida were in the midst of tense negotiations with the British over the settlement of Georgia, the colony recently established to the north. Arredondo had been sent by the governor of Cuba to order the governor of Georgia, James Oglethorpe, to withdraw from Georgia completely. He was also there to survey the Florida fortifications in case the conflict devolved into war, and he might have found it alarming that British visitors could easily explore the city and do the same. Or perhaps he was not surprised at all. Arredondo had also been given a secret directive to investigate the administration of Florida's governor, Francisco del Moral y Sánchez, for openly violating trade laws, mismanaging religious affairs, and imprisoning anyone who opposed him.2 Governor Moral y Sánchez had assumed leadership in Florida in 1734, in the midst of a decade shaped by border conflicts. Spanish maps had once claimed most of the eastern seaboard as "La Florida", but these claims had been dramatically reduced by encroaching English settlement over the years. This circumscription of Spanish territory culminated in 1713 with the end of the War of Spanish Succession. British invasions had reduced effective Spanish control to the capital at St. Augustine and its immediate surroundings. In the subsequent years, royal authorities labored to repopulate the colony and fortify it against European rivals and their indigenous allies, though with limited success.3 In 1733, the establishment of Georgia added a new facet to the Anglo-Spanish conflict over territory in the Southeast. British settlers and soldiers were closer than ever before. [End Page 511] British agents expanded their trade networks with the native chiefdoms of the region, undermining the Spanish sphere of influence.4 Yet even as the contest for territorial control developed, St. Augustine also became enmeshed in the rapidly growing trans-imperial economy that connected so many parts of the Atlantic world. Both legal and illicit trade expanded.5 Despite trade regulations, this commerce became central to the economic success (and sometimes survival) of colonies with limited resources like Florida and Georgia. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Florida routinely relied on British trade goods. Such trade was also beneficial to larger colonies like South Carolina that enjoyed having local export markets.6 Had Arredondo seen four, five, or even six ships in the harbor, it might have been a typical day. The presence of many foreign ships in colonial Florida has long been recognized by historians.7 In the surviving records of maritime traffic, the names of ships and ship captains change frequently, giving the impression of a diversity of traders in the customs and naval logs. Records of ship owners, however, reveal that the bulk of the city's commerce was influenced by a small handful of merchants. Each of these merchants operated multiple ships that travelled all over the eastern seaboard and the Caribbean, making regular stops in St. Augustine. The unusual administration of Governor Moral y Sánchez enabled them to gain a foothold within the Spanish community itself by setting up resident agents and permanent stores. As a result, some of them became enmeshed in the political and commercial landscape of the colony. In the case of the Florida-Georgia border negotiations, commercial networks facilitated diplomatic relations. As the Spanish and British moved closer to war...

Bridging the gap in competitiveness of Russian companies with intangible bricks

PurposeThe paper aims to explore factors of the low competitiveness of Russian companies assuming that the gap in the endowment of intangible resources is responsible for the gap in competitiveness.Design/methodology/approachThe framework of resources-based view is used to examine causality between the resources used and competitiveness measured by economic value added (EVA). Controlling for the most relevant factors, the authors place an emphasis on those intangible resources that are considered in the literature as being the most critical for Russian companies when contending for global competitiveness: productivity, strategic long-term orientation of companies, quality of human capital, innovative behavior of companies, foreign investments and corporate networks. The data set of more than 1,000 Russian companies benchmarked to the data set of more than 1,600 European companies during a period of 10 years: 2004-2013 is analyzed to test the hypothesis put forward.FindingsCausal effect of the gap in intangible endowment and competitiveness of Russian companies compared with European rivals is revealed. According to our analysis, gaps in productivity, strategy implementation, qualifications of the board of directors and company location play critical roles in the global competitiveness of Russian companies. Meanwhile, underinvestment in structural resources, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other intangible assets, are considered positive factors that reduce gaps in EVA.Originality/valueThe paper introduces original approach for studying the gap in performance caused by the gap in used resources.

Appalachia as a Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528–1682

Appalachia as a Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528–16821 Kimberly C. Borchard Introduction During the twentieth century, Appalachia became stereotyped as a rural back-water rife with the poverty and ignorance emblematic of English-speaking "Deep America" at its worst. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines Appalachia as "a term for areas in the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern US that exhibit long-term poverty and distinctive folkways."2 But far from foreshadowing impoverished twentieth-century caricatures of the region, the first European accounts of the area offered promises of boundless wealth alongside dramatic tales of violent encounters with indigenous warriors and the ever-present threat of attack by European rivals. With local Native American informants feeding their dreams of gold and silver mines dwarfing those of Mexico and Peru, explorers of Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German origin raced to stake their claims to the imagined riches of the Appalachian borderlands. Charles Hudson describes Spanish interest in North America as borne of the conquest of the Nahua and Inca empires in 1519 and 1535, respectively. Since "Spaniards had found riches only after reaching the interior" of the territories controlled by these great New World civilizations, hope blossomed that similar wealth would be found inland to the north.3 The Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca reported that Native Americans told him "samples of gold" he discovered in western Florida in 1528 came from a distant realm called Apalache.4 The term was transposed to the mountains as Apalchen by the Spanish cartographer Diego Gutiérrez in 1562, and the mountains denominated Montes Apalatci by the French artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues following his travel to Florida in 1564–1565.5 The Apalachee of northwest Florida thus "unwittingly gave their name to one of the largest natural features in the eastern United States, the Appalachian Mountains."6 Gabriel Archer did not make the first English-language mention of the "mountaynes Apalatsi" until his 1607 account of Christopher Newport's exploration of the James River.7 [End Page 91] Notwithstanding the international array of individuals and languages involved in the exploration and (mis)naming of Appalachia, American historiography has portrayed postcontact Appalachian history as an essentially English affair, with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and French forays into Apalache/Apalatci as anomalies in the path toward inevitable Anglo-American settlement. Conversely, studies of colonial Latin America touch on Apalache as a northern realm stumbled upon and abandoned in the course of catastrophically failed expeditions leaving Cuba in search of wealth comparable to that of Mexico and Peru. Perhaps it is due to Spain's failure to establish any imperial stronghold or center of administrative power in the area (as opposed to the missions that survived in Florida until the eighteenth century) that there has been no sustained effort to study Spain's interest in Apalache as analogous to its sixteenth-century search for gold in South America. Nevertheless, Apalache would maintain the evocative power of El Dorado in the English colonial imagination well into the eighteenth century. And a wide variety of early documents indicate a pervasive belief that the eastern mountains of North America hid within them a native empire of fertile lands and rivers flowing with gold, populated by fearless warriors and formidable women.8 Rumors such as these were so typical of early Spanish accounts of the mythic Amazonian El Dorado that they were clichés by the 1560s, when Apalache appeared on maps of North America; and English interest in the Appalachian Mountains was fueled from the beginning by rumors of Spanish mines secluded in an opulent inland dominion, which, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became suspiciously reminiscent of that described by Spanish explorers in the far reaches of Amazonia. Though belief in the existence of Spanish mines inspired the first English-funded exploration of Appalachia in the seventeenth century, significant gold deposits were not discovered in the Appalachians until the 1820s, and the first Georgia gold mines did not begin operation until summer 1829.9 A brief period of nineteenth-century gold mining was soon overshadowed by the large-scale mining of coal that began in earnest in the...

Thailand's Kra Isthmus and Elusive Canal Plans since the 1850s

AbstractThis article uses primarily British colonial documents and Singapore sources to examine the history of proposals for the construction of a shipping canal through Thailand's Kra Isthmus from the 1850s. It provides historical background for continuing interest in constructing a Kra canal with the most recent speculative discussions involving Chinese interests. Since the 1850s the idea of a canal was revived on numerous occasions with several detailed surveys conducted over this time to assess the feasibility of a shipping canal via the Kra Isthmus. This research examines how speculation and actual proposals were handled by the British colonial authorities and how this related to the British policy of using Siam/Thailand as a buffer state separating their colonies and those of their European rival France. In colonial Singapore canal proposals created great angst and to some extent this has continued to be the case to the present day. The article suggests that while British colonial policy was always against, or at least not in favour of, the construction of a canal, other factors are equally important for explaining why canal proposals never proceeded beyond planning and surveys.

New Fighter Aircraft Acquisitions in Brazil and India: Why Not Buy American?

How do states decide where to source arms? Drawing on theories of international relations, we consider the recent fighter aircraft competitions in Brazil and India, and analyze why the U.S.‐made aircraft lost to their European rivals. Official statements offered by the Brazilian and Indian governments have cited inferior aircraft performance, technology‐sharing issues, and prices. These explanations may be valid, but their main purpose is to direct attention away from the fact that military procurement is, above all, a matter of international politics and policy. Using analytical eclecticism as our guide, we selectively combine constructivist, liberal, and realist theoretical elements to provide a more comprehensive explanation of why Lockheed Martin and Boeing failed to sell fighters to Brazil and India.Related Articles Catalinac, Amy L. 2007. “.” Politics &amp; Policy 35 (): 58–100. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2007.00049.x/abstract Quinn, Adam. 2007. “.” Politics &amp; Policy 35 (): 522–547. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2007.00071.x/abstract Rosen, Amanda M. 2015. “.” Politics &amp; Policy 43 (): 30–58. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12105/abstract Related Media So, Vishnu. 2012. “.” NDTV. December 8. Duration: 16 min, 42 sec. http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/bigger-higher-faster/the-story-of-the-rafale/257581 . 2015. “.” Notícias Militares. January 10. Duration: 3 min, 38 sec (in Brazilian Portuguese). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P12stwG1jA

The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600–1784: A Grand Strategic Interpretation, by G.J. Bryant

The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600-1784: Grand Strategic Interpretation, by G.J. Bryant. Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2013. xx, 350 pp. $99.00 US (cloth). How did the British East India Company (EIC) transfonn itself from a commercial trading corporation to an imperial state, ruling (or at least dominating) the several hundred million inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent? When did this transition occur? From Nathaniel Halhed to James Mill, from T.B. Macaulay to Percival Spear, from S.N. Mukherjee to Ranajit Guha, these questions have been at the centre of Indian and imperial history. In this book, G.J. Bryant weighs in with an interpretation of his own. Bryant is a military historian who has been writing about eighteenth century Anglo-Indian wars and armies for the past forty years. Although this book is broader in scope, it approaches the creation of the Raj as a process that was essentially military in nature. Bryant's subtitle A Grand Strategic Interpretation is thus advanced in a narrowly technical sense: At what point did EIC strategy (both military and geo-political) shift from the goal of protecting the assets of a quasi-private trading company to that of promoting the interests of a quasi-sovereign government determined to exercise suzerainty over the entire subcontinent? Although the title promises a broad sweep over the course of two centuries, the book focuses on the four decades between 1744 and 1784. Bryant maintains that until the outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1744, the attention of the EIC's military and civilian leaders was entirely on protecting its trading assets. It was only in the course of defending against assaults by the French that these leaders learned to appreciate the value of alliances with indigenous states and rulers within India itself. Having begun to play the game of Indian politics, however, the EIC could never look back. In India, the peace of 1748 did not lead to a cessation of hostilities, since the British and the French continued their struggles through the proxy wars with native allies, which continued right up to 1754, when the European rivals went to war again. When this new Seven Years War began, the conflict was centered primarily in the Carnatic, where both sides perceived that their primary interests lay. What fundamentally changed the entire situation was Clive's unexpected victory at Plassey, which brought all of Bengal under British control. After enthroning and dethroning two successive puppet Nawabs, the EIC finally engineered a direct grant of the diwan to themselves, in 1765. Now, with the revenues of Bengal directly at the EIC's disposal, the British had become a territorial power within the subcontinent, endowed with interests (and newfound resources) that fundamentally changed its grand strategic approach. …

Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and the U.S. Racial-Imperialist Politics of the Hemispheric “Yellow Peril”

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This article examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime.