Imperial History Research Articles

From One Paradigm to Another: The Jewish History of Race and Religion in International Law

Rabiat Akande's article, “An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law,” draws attention to the gap in frameworks of protection from religious discrimination, on the compelling rationale that much contemporary discrimination continues to work through racialization. And she provides a genealogy to show that this gap is not there by accident—it presupposes a specific set of histories that excluded the racialization of religion from protection, because such protection was devised to respond to some kinds of wrongs (especially those of concern to white Christians) rather than others. In this essay, I would like to draw out much more explicitly than she does Akande's momentous point that Jews—racialized by white Christian Europeans—once experienced and fought this very same protection gap. This story is of great historical interest in its own right, but it also redoubles the familiar lesson that colonialism never just ends. Instead, it endures in complex ways and facilitates ongoing cycles of suffering and unfreedom.

Nineteenth-Century Contextualization of “Race-Religion”

In her wide-ranging article, “An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law,” Rabiat Akande delves into the realms of history illustrating how the “race-religion” constellation became formative in current international law, specifically in Western discrimination toward minorities. As Akande writes, “the legacy of that past survives in the continuing interplay of the racial and religious othering of the non-Euro-Christian other.”1 This racialized-religious heritage, for instance, is evident in Western debates on the Hijab, Jewish circumcision (Brit Milah), and various other rituals practiced by religious minorities in the West. As a historian of the nineteenth century, in this essay I mainly focus on Akande's reconstruction of the historical aspect of the “race-religion” nexus. I begin by partially validating Akande's argument concerning the emergence of race-religion during the end of the nineteenth century, and by emphasizing Western racial discrimination against Islam and Judaism—the two “sister Semitic” religions. I then add what I see as important nuances that must be considered in the historical analysis of race-religion. Primarily, I illustrate how race-religion was “fluid” at times, allowing specific groups to “enter” Western civilization, while in other cases, race-religion was rigid, barring the inclusion of groups. Akande argues that the nineteenth century colonial expansion (in Africa, the Middle East, and India) dramatically contributed to the rise of the shared European categories of whiteness and Christianity. This emerging Western identity was antagonistic to the alleged “barbarism” of the non-whites and non-Christians. Nevertheless, further nineteenth-century inner-European contextualization is needed since the exclusion through race-religion also targeted, exactly at the time of this European imperial expansion, other “fellow Christian whites,” such as the Catholic Irish and Poles. It is not only “whiteness” per se that became prevalent, but a specific form of “whiteness” (e.g., Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Aryan) that was constantly reimagined and redefined.

Сибирь в работе Пьера Леруа-Больё «Обновление Азии: Сибирь, Китай, Япония»

Introduction. The article discusses the representation of Siberia in the work of the French author Pierre LeroyBeaulieu “The Renewal of Asia: Siberia, China, Japan” (1900). Materials and Methods. “The Renewal of Asia: Siberia, China, Japan” has not been translated into Russian and is being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. It presents a positive image of Russia. Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu's paper is a serious work based on statistics, scientific research and personal observations that he made during his trips in Siberia. The work uses the methodological principles of the interdisciplinary scientific direction of imagology, as well as research approaches of spatial imperial history, which involves not only the study of the practices of space development, but also its representation. Analysis. With the reference to specific examples the article examines how Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu constructed the space of the “new” Siberia. He associated the renewal of Siberia with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which he considered “the masterpiece of the century”. The author focused the reader’s attention on evidence of progress and urbanization, wrote about the potential of Siberia, but did not forget about the problems and obstacles to development. He destroyed the markers of mystery and danger of this territory and the image of Siberia with ”bad reputation” that existed in French discourse. The article examines how the author helped his readers to “imagine” the great spaces of Siberia. Comparing the space of Siberia with the space of North America, the author sought to make Siberia understandable to Europeans and mentally bring the space of Siberia closer. The image of Siberian cities in the work of Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu is studied. Attention is paid to the author's idea of the tolerance of Russians and their relationships with the native population. The article will also present facts from the biography of the author, who came from the well-known Leroy-Beaulieu family. Results. The analysis of the source showed that in place of the old image of Siberia with a «bad» reputation, which did not correspond to the new realities of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, the image of a “new” Siberia was constructed in French discourse.

Nabeul … Taroudant . El Jadida . . Tangier

Beckett’s knowledge of the history of imperialism has left abundant traces. Irish colonial history in particular provides a fertile ground for allusions and residual echoes in many of his texts, and this facet of his writing has received close attention. His alertness to the history of colonial conquest, exploitation and oppression is evident on the peripheries of his bilingual oeuvre too – notably, in his translations for Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology and Octavio Paz’s Anthology of Mexican Poetry, and in minute alterations to some of his manuscripts revealing a careful reflection on the historical and political weight of words. Charting Beckett’s exposure and responses to the history of decolonization in its French and francophone contexts, however, has proved more challenging, owing to the difficulties posed by the work’s multiple cultural and linguistic positionalities, which are often treated as matters of secondary importance. This essay attempts to destabilize and expand the coordinates commonly used when thinking about Beckett as a postcolonial writer, by considering his relation to the postcolony through the prism of his long stays in the Maghreb between 1969 and the early 1980s. Retracing Beckett’s steps in Tunisia and Morocco, I delineate postcolonial and neocolonial imaginaries around Beckett’s creative process that are more challenging and uncomfortable than the evidence previously scrutinized elsewhere, and I pay particular attention to the awkward sense of colonial presence underlying marginal texts such as his Tangier mirlitonnades. The extended periods Beckett spent in Tangier proved immensely generative for him; here, I examine his relation to Tangier in light of the city’s colonial history as an International Zone and a much-fetishized haven for expatriate Anglo-American writers, offering a portrait of Beckett that conveys his simultaneous involvement and non-involvement with his surroundings.

Spectres of ascendancy: Beckett, Yeats, and the politics of postcolonial amnesia

This essay reflects on the shifting status of “Ascendancy” as a colonial social formation and an historical and aesthetic category shaping the development of anticolonial and postcolonial thought in Irish writing and culture from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of commemoration and anti-imperial reckoning. In particular, the essay considers how Ascendancy is a surprisingly useful category for thinking about Samuel Beckett and his reflections on power and empire. The essay reevaluates Beckett’s relationship with W. B. Yeats and explores the significance of their markedly different but intertwining relationships to Ascendancy. Looking at the arc of Beckett criticism within Irish studies alongside new readings of Yeats’s elegies for the Ascendancy Big House and his plays The Countess Cathleen and Purgatory, the essay explores how we might reevaluate that intellectual and cultural history amidst the recent controversies attending Ireland’s “Decade of Centenaries” and the reimagining of Ireland’s place within a global imperial history. As part of that exploration, the essay considers Beckett’s and Yeats’s legacies alongside twenty-first-century Ireland’s public monuments, commemorations, and architectural heritage while also reflecting on commissioned inquiries into the legacies of empire by the President of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. In the midst of what President Michael D. Higgins has labeled a “feigned amnesia” around the legacies of empire in Ireland, the essay considers how Beckett’s work might be seen to have anticipated the terms of much of the current discourse.

Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History

Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History

“Yanqui-man Put Roots on Her”: Afro-Religiosity and (Dis)abilities in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints

“Yanqui-man Put Roots on Her”: Afro-Religiosity and (Dis)abilities in Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints

Istoria imperiilor: noi abordări în cercetările de istorie culturală din ultimele două decenii

The rise of cultural history has played a significant role in how we think about and narrate imperialism from the ancient world to the twentieth century. For decades the province of geopolitics, diplomacy and the “official mind”, imperial history is now just as likely to be told from the bottom up as from the top down. The aim of this article is to show how, by adopting the methods of cultural history, histories of empire have been transformed in the last two decades. Cultural histories of empire investigate often overlooked subjects and offer new angles of vision on familiar topics through a cultural lens.

Deconstructing the market: agrarian change and social differentiation in Jordan

ABSTRACT Because of the advanced state of capitalist dynamics’ penetration in agriculture, Jordan constitutes an enlightening and overlooked case study. Shaped by a history of war, dependency and imperialism, the monarchy has undergone a rapid process of agrarian change that has radically changed the social fabric of agriculture. Nowadays, a new process is occurring: the growing polarisation of two social classes of capitalist producers reveals the processes of accumulation and disempowerment driven by relations of credit and debt. The market, both in its abstract and physical realities, is the central mechanism that fuels the ongoing process of social differentiation.

South Africa-sur-Nemunas1 : Transnational Hinterlands in Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom

The paper investigates the representation of Central Europe and its hinterlands in selected works by 20th-century South African writers. It pays special attention to Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom about Jacobson’s travel to Lithuania in search of the writer’s “middle-European” patrimony. Drawing on previously unpublished archival records, the study argues that Jacobson’s book merges Central European hinterlands (their histories, identities, landscapes) with South African ones in a radical act of re-mapping both areas. The paper also insists on recognising a distinctive mode of conflating Central Europe and South Africa. This hinternational poetics annuls the existing imperial cartography and builds transnational connections between different hinterlands and their pasts. Additionally, the article demonstrates how the need to “unlearn” imperial history allows for a geographic/spatial overlap between the “heart of the country” and the “core of Europe,” as well as creation of a network of transnational solidarity and implication across nations and ethnicities.

WESTERN EURASIA: THE SEARCH FOR A REGIONAL SECURITY PARADIGM

The paper analyzes the circumstances of the formation of a new security paradigm in Asian countries (former Soviet republics - Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan). The twilight of bipolarity, unfortunately, did not open a new qualitative page in the system of regional security. Global socio-economic transformations and political upheavals have added to political instability and uncertainty. Against this historical and political background, Russia's war against Ukraine became a bifurcation point for such a region as Western Eurasia. The relevance of the research topic is determined by the international political processes that are taking place today in the territory of the former Soviet Union. The security format of the former republics of the Union is traditionally considered mainly in the regional - post-Soviet geopolitical context. Therefore, when analyzing the foreign policy features of the region, one should take into account the fact that the Asian republics were part of the USSR for a long time. At the same time, the process of the collapse of the Soviet Union did not fundamentally change the specific status of Russia in the Eurasian “Heartland”. For a long time, Russia and the southern republics of the former Soviet Union were bound by ties of common imperial history, culture and values. However, the fact that Asia has been under the political roof of the Russian Empire for many years has determined the paradigm of Russia's paternalistic attitude towards the countries of the region and for many years defined the framework of the regional security paradigm. Regional political processes are an urgent problem in the system of researching processes and phenomena in the post-Soviet space, causing a clash of different points of view and practice. The focus of the research is the problem of the past and present in the countries of Asia (former Soviet republics) as international regional actors and the determination of possible prospects for the development of their foreign policy scenario. The purpose of the study is to clarify the role and place of Asian countries (former republics of the USSR) in the process of forming a new regional security paradigm from the moment of the beginning of the active phase of Russia's military aggression against Ukraine. The object of research is Western Eurasia as a modern regional phenomenon of geopolitics. The subject of the study is the foreign policy of modern Asian countries (former Soviet republics) in the conditions of the formation of a new paradigm of international relations and the growing competition of world actors in the region (USA, EU, China, Russia).

South African Literature and the “Strange Seductiveness” of the Fantastic

In postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two subgenres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a Western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (white) world-narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This article reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar postcolonial culture―South Africa―and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture exists and thrives. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging codes of recognition. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to emerging cultural forms.

How the Umayyads Lost the Islamic West: Contrasting Depictions of the Uprising of 122/740 by Arab Historians

Abstract In 122/740 an uprising in the Far Maghrib triggered a series of rebellions that eventually ended Arab rule over the Islamic West. The event is not of key importance for the historians of the Islamic Empire, and when it is discussed, the focus tends to lie on the uprising’s significance for Arab rule in al-Andalus rather than the Maghrib. This study compares the most detailed accounts of the Uprising of 122 by early imperial historians such as al-Ṭabarī and Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam with those of later historians writing in the heartland of the Islamic Empire, such as Ibn al-Athīr and al-Dhahabī, and of historians situated further west, in al-Andalus and the Maghrib. It finds that the presentation of the Uprising of 122 varies depending on the historical context of and the source tradition used by the author in question. It also finds that while the Umayyad and Khārijite actors tend to be presented with a degree of differentiation and from a variety of perspectives, the portrayal of the rebels is more uniform. The rebels, referred to as Berbers in all accounts, are depicted as a monolithic entity displaying a stereotypical set of characteristics that sets them apart from notions of order and propriety that the authors associate with the Islamic Empire. Although its consequences for Arab rule in the West are not explicitly acknowledged by the historians, this comparison of how they depict its actors reveals the Uprising’s impact on the historical consciousness, particularly in regard to the inhabitants of the seceded region.

Wandering Ideas: Circulations of Radical Social Thought in the long 19th century

ABSTRACT This article is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Wandering Ideas: Circulations of Radical Social Thought in the long 19th century’, which contributes to the ongoing debates on the revolutionary and socialist ideas on the move before the First World War. Collected papers touch upon, chiefly, such countries as Argentina, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, as well as the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Contributions in their previous forms were presented and discussed at the workshop held at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, on October 21–22, 2022. This introduction provides a concise overview of methods applied in research on circulations of sociopolitical ideas in the past and currently, as well as proposes a prospect for grounding them within the frames of imperial history.

Low Tide, Black Shoals: Toward Offshore Formations in Celan Studies

While Paul Celan’s lyrical commemoration of the Holocaust has been recognized for its multidirectionality, commentators have not acknowledged his engagement with other colonial and imperial histories contemporaneous with his writing. Celan’s advocacy for reading words “with the acute accent of the present” calls for a reading of his poetry that is attentive to its evocations of, and silence around, multiple histories of racial violence. Recognizing how the longue durée of transatlantic slavery is mediated through oceanic archives and the element of water, this article reads the fraught nearshore landscapes in Sprachgitter for their commemoration of the unresolved unfolding of Auschwitz and, if inadvertently, the unresolved unfolding of the Middle Passage. The reading focuses on “Niedrigwasser,” a poem ostensibly about a coastal landscape that is also about the formation and deformation of that landscape through ecological processes that used materials transported by genocidal violence. The multiple temporalities of the poem move between human time and geologic time in order to grasp the legacy of Auschwitz. In unsettling attempts to contain the spatial and temporal scale of genocide, this and other poems evidence their receptivity to and implicatedness in distant, but not entirely unrelated, histories of violence.

(Mis)Translations of the Critiques of Anti-Muslim Racism and the Repercussions for Transnational Feminist Solidarities

Abstract As critiques of anti-Muslim racism travel transnationally, they get translated in relation to complex histories of imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and nationalism. These (mis)translations produce unexpected uses and abuses of anti-Muslim racism as an academic and political concept, with significant consequences for transnational feminist solidarity. This article explores, as a case in point, the emergence of a “Black Turk” identity in millennial Turkey where pious Muslim identity, once marginalized under a secularist state, has reasserted itself by deploying an analogy of Black to pious Muslim. Obscuring the nuances of local power relations, the pious Muslim/secular fault line was oversimplified and mistranslated into the resonant American idiom of the Black/white binary. This analogy and the progressive critiques of anti-Black and especially anti-Muslim racisms were then instrumentalized by an increasingly authoritarian and gender-conservative Islamist Turkish government to legitimize its repressive agendas, even succeeding to garner unexpected sympathy from some feminist politicians and academics in the United States. Naive confidence that such dichotomous racial/religious categories and familiar political vocabularies can guide feminist analyses and politics risks employing a seemingly transnationalist and anti-imperialist but in truth U.S.-centric understanding of non-U.S. struggles for social justice and thwarting potential transnational feminist solidarities.

Benign and Radical Africanization in International Investment Law and Investor-State Dispute Settlement in Africa

Abstract The current Africanization approaches mask some nuances present in current reform efforts of international investment law (IIL) and investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) in Africa. I adopt the categorization of international law scholarship in Africa developed elsewhere into two trends: contributionist (weak) and critical (strong) scholarship. For reforms in African IIL and ISDS, I relabel this trends benign Africanization representing the contributionist (weak) strand and radical Africanization representing the critical (strong) strand. I argue that African states must focus on wider economic justice engendered in the radical Africanization approach. I propose three lines of action that will implement radical Africanization: first African States, in their reforms, must focus on both extra and intra-African investment; second, the reforms must engage deeply seated substantive issues in addition to the current procedural reforms; and finally, African States must have a real reckoning and engagement with the imperial history of IIL generally and ISDS specifically.

Untangling (Missionary) Entanglements: Recent Work on Christianisation and Cross-Cultural Contact and the Case for an Entangled Approach

AbstractThis article discusses recent work on cross-cultural interactions between missionaries and Central Africans, including Images on a Mission by Cécile Fromont, Religious Entanglements by David Maxwell, and “What Is Religion in Africa?” by Birgit Meyer. These works adopt an entangled approach, examining how Christianisation engendered interconnections between Central Africans and missionaries and between Central Africa and Europe. In this way, the works paint a nuanced image of the cross-cultural interactions that occurred in the framework of the Christianisation of Central Africa, showing us how an entangled approach can help examine such interactions afresh. By contextualising the manifold ways in which Westerners and non-Westerners, the West and the non-West were entangled, we can better understand the (power) dynamics and outcomes of cross-cultural interactions. By reading sources in an entangled manner, we can get a completer view of the wide array of interactions between Westerners and non-Westerners. By acknowledging how historical entanglements shaped the analytical concepts we use, we can decolonise our scholarly practice. This article shows how the study of a fundamentally cross-cultural phenomenon—Christianity in the non-Western world—can inspire global and imperial historians to study cross-cultural interactions in a truly cross-cultural manner.

Time Enclosures and the Scales of Optimisation

This paper looks at the cluster of phenomena that aggregates into what has been called a crisis of time, where experiences of time have become at once stretched to perpetuity and compressed to negligibility. The former results from the perceived endurance of digital media that feign everlasting memory and recall, whilst the latter is due to the speeds at which information is processed, making wait times feel intolerable. In either case, digital technologies have seemingly rendered time into something unrecognisable on a human scale.
 Whilst there are several competing theories on elements that contribute to this, such literature has largely been confined to the discourse on speed, acceleration, and standardisation. What has been so far overlooked is the logic of optimisation, a mode of operation that is endemic to digitality. Optimisation, which captures aspects of digitality that exceed the scope of efficiency, is particularly insidious within the digital milieu due to the abstraction necessitated by digital processes. I analyse optimisation as it surfaces in capitalist history in the form of land privatisation and imperialism, tracing it through to the digital milieu, producing what I term “time enclosures”. This term parallels the land enclosures that were the historical preconditions of capitalism in order to articulate a specific element of privatisation and commercial value in the crisis of time. Finally, I relate optimisation to the entwined values and histories of imperialism that are premised on linearity and progress to explore the thread that corrupts our sense of time through digital technology’s effects on retention and protention.

Yugo Wars: A Case Study on the Peacekeeping Efforts in Bosna-Hercegovina

This article is an examination of the history of ex-Yugoslavia, more specifically the region of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and its immediate neighbors. A brief history of imperialism, religious influence, and the impact of the World Wars within BiH will lead to a discussion on nationalist-separatism and Balkan independence movements. The article focuses on the drive behind, and the outcome of, the 1992 war within BiH that stemmed from BiH’s desire to be independent from Yugoslavia. The primary perspectives within the article are that of the Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. Outside actors such as Serbia, Russia, the United States, Pakistan, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), Muslim terrorist organizations, the United Nations (UN), and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will also be discussed to capture the various stakes and goals of the war. This will transition into a detailed breakdown of various UN and NATO missions, as well as their impact on the citizens and factions within BiH. The missions analyzed within this article will be the Dayton Peace Accords, the United Nations Mission in BiH (UNMIBH), the Stabilization Force (SFOR), the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), Implementation Force (IFOR), and the European Union Force (EUFOR). Transparency in BiH between parties to the conflict, the success or failure of peace enforcement, and the provision of effective rehabilitation assistance by the international community will be put into question. The article’s conclusion will analyze the value of peacekeeping within BiH as well as address the lasting social/emotional impact on the BiH community.