Imperial Past Research Articles

Between Empire and State: Haudenosaunee Sovereignty at the League of Nations

Abstract In 1923, Haudenosaunee leader Deskaheh Levi General traveled to Geneva and launched a campaign for Indigenous statehood at the League of Nations. Drawing on a not-so-distant imperial past, the campaign was a novel attempt to use international law to assert Indigenous sovereignty. The Haudenosaunee claim hinged on a seemingly impossible conceit: that an independent native polity might persist within the borders of a settled state. The League of Nations’ primary institutional frameworks for grappling with other such problematic sovereignties were minority treaties and the mandate regime. But the Haudenosaunee case, which hinged on the persistence rather than the novelty of sovereignty, fit within neither paradigm. Their campaign illuminates a larger crisis of legal legibility that characterized Indigenous-settler relations from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. By reading Indigenous history into international legal history, this paper shows how Haudenosaunee people leveraged older norms of imperial relationality in their engagements with international law. In doing so, it revises a persistent genealogical account of the history of Indigenous human rights in favor of a more capacious narrative of Indigenous internationalism.

Persepolis, 1960-1971: Material Culture, State Ideology, and Melancholic Contemplation on National Identity

The ruins of Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire (559–330 BCE), are celebrated as a cultural heritage site and national monument in Iran. In 1971, these ruins became the setting for the Celebration of the 2,500th Anniversary of the Founding of the Persian Empire, orchestrated by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Pahlavi regime aimed to fabricate a monarchical lineage that positioned the Pahlavi dynasty as the pinnacle of an uninterrupted historical continuum beginning with the Achaemenids and Cyrus the Great. The ceremonies featured a grandiose military parade with soldiers in historical costumes symbolically reenacting theprocessions of foreign emissaries depicted on Persepolis' walls, emphasizing the glory and grandeur of Iran's imperial past and its uninterrupted history. Conversely, a decade earlier, Iranian filmmaker and poet Fereydoun Rahnema's short documentary captured Persepolis in a starkly different light, presenting it as enigmatic ruins devoid of grandeur, prompting reflections on their lost original meaning. Utilizing Walter Benjamin's concepts of natural history, melancholia, and allegory, this article explores the allegorical implications of Rahnema's film. It argues that the documentary signifies the disintegration of the sublime image of Iran’s imperial origin, marking a shift where the imperial past becomes too eclipsed a signifier to serve as a cornerstone of national identity.

Christian Humanitarianism, Violence and the Debate over Empire

It may appear odd to write a review article focused on two books that are fundamentally different in intention and scope. The first is a self-conscious attempt by a moral theologian of conservative inclinations to contribute a Christian ethical perspective to the culture wars currently raging on both sides of the Atlantic on empire, race, and slavery. Its author, Nigel Biggar, is the Emeritus Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. The second book is a collection of papers by imperial and mission historians given at a workshop at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in July 2018. Its brief is more limited, namely to explore the professed commitment of nineteenth-century Christian missions to bringing a gospel of peace into contexts that were frequently sites of violence, not least between indigenous peoples and European settlers and other colonial actors. Its geographical remit is limited to Africa and the Pacific. Biggar's book has provoked a predictable storm of criticism, both within the historical academy and beyond it. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, for example, rapidly published a 15,000–word rebuttal of Biggar's arguments by Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, together with an almost equally lengthy reply by Biggar.1 In contrast, Geoffrey Troughton's edited volume, extremely valuable though it undoubtedly is, seems unlikely to attract notice beyond the limited constituencies of professional historians and scholars of mission studies. Although obviously differing in character, these two books, when set in juxtaposition, bring into focus some of the most pertinent issues raised for Christianity by the imperial past and the ambiguous role played within it by Christian missions.

Contested urban assemblages: ruination and restoration of postcolonial sites of memory

ABSTRACT Recent work on ruination has explored the capacity of ruins to embody multiple and contradictory meanings within a single site. This paper considers the capacity of ruined sites of memory to disrupt the relationship between past and present, celebration and shame, Self and Other. Ruins produce new expressions of time and space that transcend the intentions of either architect or spectator. Restoration, however, may attempt to overwrite this ambivalence with a single, dominant narrative. As a case study, this paper turns to the garden of tropical agronomy, a palimpsestic ruin in the Parisian suburbs that gives material form to both the imperial past and the process of forgetting the empire. It traces the history of the garden, and various unsuccessful attempts to restore it, before considering the successful renovation of the Tunisian Pavilion in 2020. Drawing from Actor-Network Theory, it analyses these interventions as acts of translation that alternately attempt to impose a singular meaning on the garden and enrich to its multi-layered form. Despite the intentions of human actants, throughout its recent history the garden’s uneasy multivocality has endured. Amidst conflicting and overlapping narratives, the garden haunts post-imperial Paris and undermines its attempts to consign empire to the past.

Doubly marginalized? Japanese gay men with interracial desires

Postwar Japan has built a new self-image as a peaceful, ethnically homogeneous island nation, obscuring the imperialist past. In this context, same-ethnic/racial partnering or so-called ethnic endogamy has been reinforced, whether gay or straight, as a normative sexual desire and practice. Japanese people who engage in intimate relationships with foreigners are potentially considered deviant and subject to social marginalization. Drawing on in-depth interview data, this research focuses on the experiences of Japanese gay men with such peripheral desires, examining how they negotiate their partner preferences when encountering social disapproval or stigma. Further, this research also discusses how their racialized desire intersects with their queer sexuality, simultaneously resisting and perpetuating same-ethnic/racial partnering normativity.

Imperial Past, Neoliberal Present, Dependent Future: A Political-Economic Approach to Urban Development of Bursa

Urban spaces, as the material representatives of past capital accumulation strategies, survive or get replaced on the basis of actors' strategies and partnerships. Periodization allows conceptualising these decisions and subsequent spatial change with respect to evolving local and national settings. The study focuses on expanding such approaches to Türkiye's experience beyond the two primate cities Istanbul and Ankara by the example of a secondary city, Bursa. The study uses maps, plans, official documents and newspapers corresponding to the periods and literature to form the connections between the actors' decisions and the spatial changes. The results highlight that while the previous periods' urban fabric and heritage is being replaced during the neoliberal era in parallel with the national experience, the problems faced as a secondary centre in close proximity to a primate city reduces local agency much more severely, leaving the urban space more vulnerable to exogenous influences.

The Archaeology of the Imperial Past: “Nostalgizing” in the German and Turkish Museums of the Interwar Period

Until 1918, representatives of the Konigliche Museen zu Berlin (Royal Museums of Berlin, now State Museums of Berlin) and Istanbul’s Muze-i Humayun (Imperial Museum, now the Istanbul Archeological Museum) excavated, extracted, and exhibited antiquities as part of their countries’ imperial projects. The material culture of past civilizations was used as a symbol of both empires’ imperial grandeur and territorial power. With the end of World War I, German and Ottoman archaeologists lost access to territories where they formerly acquired objects for their collections while previously transferred artifacts remained in the collections. After the empires collapsed and republics emerged in their place, German and Turkish museums were still managed by directors who had entered the institutions during imperial rule. A longing for the past and specific imaginings of the future emerged in both nations after the war. Nostalgic discourses shaped the development of the museums in the interwar period. This article focuses on the activities of museum directors from both countries. It provides a comparative analysis of nostalgizing museum practices in each country marked by examples of longing for a real or imagined past and expectations for the future found in correspondence, publications, and the process of musealization.

“Yugoslavia is worthless . . . you can get neither sugar nor kerosene.” Food Supply and Political Legitimacy in the Slovene Part of Yugoslavia, 1918–1924

Abstract The new states that were established in the autumn of 1918 presented themselves as something new and better. Not only were they supposed to be the embodiment of the “national yearnings” of the formerly “oppressed nations” of the Habsburg Empire, but they were also meant to be more democratic and it was promised that their administrations would work better and their economies would flourish. In short, they were to be a decisive break with the imperial past. However, the new nation-states often could not deliver on these lofty promises, and, as a result, their legitimacy began to erode rather rapidly. In this context, the inability to quickly improve the food supply played an important role. In the Slovene part of Yugoslavia, the inadequate supply of basic foodstuffs, rationing, and increasing prices made the already volatile situation worse, as parts of the population began to grumble, protest, and yearn for the Habsburgs, looking across their northern and western borders. Police and court files, district captains’ reports, and various other sources indicate that after the proclamation of independence the mood of the population quickly soured, and that the legitimacy of the new state was often questioned.

Britain’s Imperial Past and Contemporary Borders in Adichie’s Americanah and Zadie Smith’s ‘Fences’

Recent literary works draw attention to the multifaceted legacy of Britain’s imperial past, not only but including its impact on current UK border practices. The works of postcolonial and Black British authors illustrate especially strongly that the spatial epistemologies of empire are still prevalent in twenty-first century border debates. This article engages with Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Zadie Smith’s essay “Fences” (2016) as literary works that negotiate UK border practices both before and after Brexit. They draw attention to the intersections of empire, race, gender, and class in the recent resurgence of British bordering practices and emphasize the necessity to make visible both contemporary and historical borders in the UK in order to come to terms with the underlying colonial epistemologies of many border practices.

British Performance on the International Stage: Theatre, Cultural Diplomacy, and the British Council's Early Years

In May of 1940, the British Council sent the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company on a tour of the Netherlands. This tour, which ended with the German invasion on May 10th, became one of the first events to bring international attention to the British Council and its activities in the realm of cultural propaganda. While most recent studies of the Council focus on the organization's operations in the postwar period and the Cold War, this article examines the Council's history during its formative years from 1934–1947. It traces the evolution of the Council during these years and the domestic and foreign political tensions that complicated their initial activities. Finally, in focusing on theatre and dance operations of the Council, this article shows how the success and continued operation of the British Council was owed not only to their forward-looking approach to cultural propaganda in the twentieth century, but also to their ability to co-opt and revitalise the institutions of traveling performance that had existed throughout Britain's imperial past.

Literature and the legacy of Empire: Approaching Turkey’s post-imperial condition through Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

How does literature engage with the legacies of Empire? This article examines how imperial decline and nation building are reflected in textual production after the First World War. With Turkey as a case study, it focuses on the post-imperial narrative as a form of narration dealing with the experience of imperial loss, political contingency and possibilities of national belonging. I argue that Turkey’s post-imperial condition is shaped by coming to terms with the loss of the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and a nationalising present embedded in the experience of Western-dominated modernity, on the other. Against this backdrop, I examine essays from the compilations Yaşadığım Gibi (1970, ‘As I lived’) and Beş Şehir (1946, ‘Five Cities’) by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, a key intellectual of the early republican era. The analysis of these post-imperial narratives reveals how Tanpınar tries to root Turkey’s national modernity in selected elements of the imperial past. For Tanpınar, continuity with (Turkified) imperial heritage is a prerequisite for a strong nation-state.

ОСВОЕНИЕ КИТАЙСКИХ ТЕРРИТОРИЙ РОССИЕЙ И ГЕРМАНИЕЙ В КОНЦЕ XIX в.: СХОДСТВА И РАЗЛИЧИЯ

The paper focuses on comparison of the Sino-German treaty respecting the lease of Kiao-Chau (1898) and the Sino-Russian convention for lease of Port Arthur and Talienwan (1898), on an analysis of Russian and German plans in relation to Chinese territories, on considering the dynamics of solutions in this direction, preliminary agreements with the Qing Empire. The topicality stems from the need to detail the imperial past of the powers, to clarify how each empire approached the process of mastering the territory of the other state. The chosen angle allowed to draw attention not only to the similarities between the foreign policies of Russia and Germany in relation to the Qing Empire, but also to identify significant differences. The study was based on the methods of source analysis, comparative analysis. Russia and Germany concluded lease agreements with the Qing Empire, which differed significantly in a number of terms. According to Sino-Russian convention, supreme rights to the territory remained with the Qing state; the lease term was 25 years; the clause about railway construction widened the scope of the concession already granted. In the Sino-German treaty the transfer of supreme rights to the kaiser state, the lease term of 99 years, and an agreement to build railway lines that extended well beyond the leased territory were all recorded. Both powers had occupied the Qing domains before the agreements were concluded, but they went about legislating in different ways.

Contesting monuments, challenging narratives: Divergent approaches to dealing with the colonial past and its legacies in Lisbon, Portugal

Portugal was the longest modern European imperial power, yet the dominant historical narrative is characterised by a celebration of the ‘Discoveries’ and a denial of colonial violence. This is visible in Lisbon's public space, dotted with monuments and statues glorifying the imperial past, while occluding less convenient histories. Especially since 2017, more attention has been given to Portugal's colonial past in public debates. Various initiatives have stimulated discussions about this past, while highlighting socio-cultural issues connected to these histories that continue to affect Portuguese society today. These have contested certain monuments and the narratives they embody, as well as created alternative narratives regarding the public space and cultural memory. This article compares a selection of recent interventions that contest monuments and dominant narratives about Portugal's colonial past. We look at the ways in which certain spaces and monuments become zones of contestation, and how such contestation not only contributes to changing dominant narratives, but also to resignify such spaces and structures. Our goal is to shed light on the variety of agents working towards a change of narrative regarding Lisbon's public space and memory, while reflecting on the socio-political meanings surrounding the presence and absence of monuments related to the colonial past.

Restitution of cultural property: the rise and fall of a cosmopolitan ideal

ABSTRACT This paper provides a historical analysis of the peak and demise of the international view on cultural heritage. In the 1980s, cultural internationalism emerged as a conservative reaction against the adoption of the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which organises the restitution and return of stolen cultural properties. Internationalist and cosmopolitan scholars who have claimed that cultural heritage ‘belongs to humanity’, generally condemned restitution, and pushed back against the ratification of the Convention. The international view on cultural property became traditionally dominant in milieus such as universal museums, antiquity markets and some academic disciplines. However, over the past half-decade, the growing importance of research on provenance has challenged cultural internationalism in two areas. Firstly, research on provenance focused on art and archaeological crime has shown that artefacts allegedly excavated in the past are often the proceeds of recent looting, especially in conflict zones. Secondly, recent studies on historical provenance have revealed that many objects were collected using colonial violence. As a result, developments in criminology, postcolonial history, and indigenous peoples’ rights have generally led to the retreat of cosmopolitan narratives on cultural property. Ultimately, this paper highlights that cosmopolitanism in cultural heritage has historically hinged on the imperialist past.

Relics of an Unwanted Past: Slavery, Polygamy and the Harem at the End of the Ottoman Empire

AbstractThis article traces the ways in which the newly inaugurated Turkish Republic dealt with such institutional and legal ‘relics’ as the imperial harem, slavery and polygamy, that it inherited from its immediate, largely undesirable imperial past, condemned retrospectively as ‘backward’, but nevertheless continued to exist for years to come. Focusing on the immediate aftermath of the abolition of the Caliphate and the exile of the Ottoman dynasty, it examines a set of legal, governmental and discursive weapons that the new regime deployed – from expropriation and disposal of dynastic property to exoticisation and sexualisation of court practices – to severe the imperial harem and its erstwhile powerful actors from the political, social and cultural contexts they had long been closely linked with. It argues that while such measures affected a relatively small number of individuals, particularly women, they had significant implications for the republican government's reconceptualisation of citizenship and state belonging for the wider public.

Sectarianism as racism: the collective punishment of Alevi communities in Turkey

Drawing on the case of state-sanctioned violence and discrimination against Alevis, a historically stigmatised and persecuted ethnosectarian community in Turkey, this article shows that sectarian identities can also be raced. The case of Alevis in Turkey not only indicates how sectarianism can function as a form of racism but also offers an example of the connection between the production of race and the politics of death. Approaching racism as a punitive mechanism and form of collective punishment that punishes racialised communities at different levels and that constantly reminds them of the possibility of what Gilmore terms ‘premature death’, the article offers a new and nuanced understanding of the multiple modalities of racism in Turkey. Rather than viewing racism in Turkey as merely an imitative form of European racism, this article shows that racism in Turkey is also informed by the country’s own imperial past. Turkey provides fertile ground for examining both western and non-western forms of racism and the intersections between the two.

(Ne)baigtas Antrasis pasaulinis karas Ukrainoje

The text examines one of the most difficult periods in the history of people of Ukraine – the events of the World War II. The purpose of this survey is to show the existential nature of the largest armed conflict in the history of mankind for Ukrainians, which was determined by the real threat of de­population, as well as the deprivation of their natural right to self-determination. Not only great and influential, but also smaller actors of international arena had their own inter­ests in Ukrainian territories, raw materials, and industrial and human resources. Howev­er, Moscow considered Ukraine to be the sphere of its undivided domination and used all means to solve the “Ukrainian question” according to its own scenarios. The first Sovieti­sation unequivocally confirmed the Kremlin’s intentions to implement the Bolshevik pro­ject in the Ukrainian regions annexed in 1939–1940. Under the collision of two totalitarian systems – Soviet and Nazi – Ukrainian political independence-oriented forces managed to organise themselves for resistance and protection of the indigenous interests of the people of Ukraine. The organisation of Ukrainian nationalists, as well as representatives of other political groups created their own armed formations – such as “Poliska Sich”, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, self-defence units – which launched a struggle against the German and Soviet occupational forces and administration. This asymmetric confronta­tion had great political and moral-psychological significance, affirming the vitality of the “Ukrainian idea” and the continuity of the struggle for the restoration of Ukrainian state­hood. The Stalinist regime needed more than 10 years to suppress the national liberation movement in Ukraine. Yet Ukrainians did not come to terms with communist tyranny and resisted it until the fall of the Soviet Union. In the current confrontation with the Russian aggression, Ukraine is finally breaking with its imperial past and establishing it as an in­dependent, democratic state.

The (Un)Finished Ukrainian World War II

The text examines one of the most difficult periods in the history of people of Ukraine – the events of the World War II. The purpose of this survey is to show the existential nature of the largest armed conflict in the history of mankind for Ukrainians, which was determined by the real threat of de­population, as well as the deprivation of their natural right to self-determination. Not only great and influential, but also smaller actors of international arena had their own inter­ests in Ukrainian territories, raw materials, and industrial and human resources. Howev­er, Moscow considered Ukraine to be the sphere of its undivided domination and used all means to solve the “Ukrainian question” according to its own scenarios. The first Sovieti­sation unequivocally confirmed the Kremlin’s intentions to implement the Bolshevik pro­ject in the Ukrainian regions annexed in 1939–1940. Under the collision of two totalitarian systems – Soviet and Nazi – Ukrainian political independence-oriented forces managed to organise themselves for resistance and protection of the indigenous interests of the people of Ukraine. The organisation of Ukrainian nationalists, as well as representatives of other political groups created their own armed formations – such as “Poliska Sich”, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, self-defence units – which launched a struggle against the German and Soviet occupational forces and administration. This asymmetric confronta­tion had great political and moral-psychological significance, affirming the vitality of the “Ukrainian idea” and the continuity of the struggle for the restoration of Ukrainian state­hood. The Stalinist regime needed more than 10 years to suppress the national liberation movement in Ukraine. Yet Ukrainians did not come to terms with communist tyranny and resisted it until the fall of the Soviet Union. In the current confrontation with the Russian aggression, Ukraine is finally breaking with its imperial past and establishing it as an in­dependent, democratic state.

‘Let us teach our children’: Online racism and everyday far-right ideologies on TikTok

This paper identifies perceptions of injustice, grievance, and alienation as online drivers of radicalisation by concentrating on contemporary visual radicalisation patterns. It focuses on far-right agents of radicalisation in the UK with a particular analysis of visual and ephemeral drivers of radicalisation on social media platforms. We analysed widespread TikTok hashtags which embody mainstream right-wing ideologies. Using these hashtags, we selected four popular videos (> 30k views) for visual thematic analysis of their compositional content and comment-sphere to explore everyday representations and discourses of far-right ideologies. Our findings highlight mundane online expressions on TikTok that collectively reinforce notions of a shared idealised identity built on nostalgic reinterpretations of an imperial past, which contribute to the mainstreaming of far-right ideas and ideologies.

Russia and Turkey: A Roller Coaster Relationship between Securitization and Cooperation

Understanding perceptions of Russian and Turkish foreign policy from their imperial past up to the present day constitutes a continuing puzzle for historians and policy practitioners alike. Now, because of their ambitious ideological posturing and power projections, the need to examine some of the most-discussed features of Moscow’s and Ankara’s respective approaches to foreign policy has arisen anew. What is novel and significant is to address how the emergence of the individual efforts of Russia and Turkey to secure a greater global role for themselves reflects a new modus vivendi whereby they continue cooperating, despite serious conflictual areas between them.