Imperial Rivalry Research Articles

The Many Semantic Lives of Geopolitics: Evidence from the New York Times Archive 1900-2023

ABSTRACT Henry Kissinger’s death foregrounds a puzzle in the history of geopolitics. How did a word made infamous by Nazi Germany become so ubiquitous and popular in the English-speaking world? Was Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, responsible for its rehabilitation into respectability in English? Historians, geographers and political scientists have traced how Western geopolitical thought developed in the twentieth century through transatlantic imperial rivalry and knowledge field formations. But there is no quantitative discourse analysis of the many ways in which the word is used in the English language. Responding to this absence, this paper uses both quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis to study how the word was employed in the New York Times from 1900 to 2023. Analysis of this corpus, and select examples from it, reveals the limits of three common presumptions about geopolitics: that it entered English as a synonym for Nazi foreign policy philosophy, that its use carried a stigma, and that Henry Kissinger led a revival of the word from the 1970s. Rather, the corpus record reveals a term with many semantic lives, a stigma that did not endure, and a synonym for great power competition and resource rivalry whose popularity is due to many factors besides Kissinger’s influence. Cluster of meaning around rivals and resources, books and culture, and US power define the term’s use in American geopolitical culture.

Market integration, empire and industry in the colonial economic development of the Buenos Aires meat industry (1770s–1800s)

ABSTRACT Building on recent literature on the history of political economy and Spanish imperial history, the article reconstructs the ideas that supported the colonial development of the meat industry in the Río de la Plata. Archival and printed sources are employed to illustrate the different arguments revolving around colonial economic development and imperial rule, in the words and practices of merchants, explorers, administrators and ministers. This way, it is possible to disclose the multiple imperial visions circulating in the Spanish Atlantic. The analysis suggests that economic reformism was not only a European intellectual and political movement but was shared and appropriated by Spanish Americans. They employed arguments in political economy to foster their agenda, namely the economic improvement of their territory in the broader context of the Spanish commercial empire. If a shared consensus around imperial political economy between Spanish and Spanish American vassals provided arguments supporting this colonial industry, the diverging economic interests, imperial rivalries, and the different geographical spaces of enunciation determined a variable dialectic between projects for the expansion of salted meat production and their realisation.

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

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

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

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

Unpacking the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA): Internationalisation of capital, imperial rivalry and cooperation, and regional power agency

The existing accounts of the Iranian nuclear programme and the JCPOA suffer from ontological exteriority, in conjunction with the problematic conception of the state and unpersuasive assessments of future outcomes. Grounded on the philosophy of internal relations, which challenges the artificial detachment between political economy and military-security concerns, this article contends that grasping the Iranian nuclear programme and the JCPOA requires unpacking their internal links with neoliberal global capitalism. The article thus presents a three-part argument. First, it asserts that the Iranian nuclear programme and economic sanctions should be viewed as part of the great powers’ efforts, particularly those of the United States and the European Union, to shape neoliberalism in the Middle East and North Africa. Second, it delves into the post-2008 global economy’s imperial rivalry and cooperation, suggesting that the nuclear deal was a result of the US pivot to the East, China’s Belt and Road Initiative in West Asia, and the need for multinational companies to find new avenues for capital accumulation following the financial crisis. Finally, it connects the JCPOA to Iranian neoliberalisation, which gives rise to two competing capital fractions (the internationally oriented capital fraction and the military–bonyad complex) to emphasise the crucial role played by the former in reaching the nuclear deal.

Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations

It has long been recognized that the law of the Spanish empire was more supportive of manumission than was the case with other New World slave regimes. Adriana Chira's Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations gives us a nuanced look at the role of law in regulating the lives and possibilities of freedom for quasi-free and enslaved persons in one Spanish venue, Santiago de Cuba in the nineteenth century. Chira's choice of Santiago, on the eastern part of the island, provides us with a particularly appropriate jurisdiction in which to look at the processes and strategies that people used to gain freedom or at least a freer status. Located far enough away from the large sugar plantations that would transform the worlds of race and slavery in Cuba in the nineteenth century, Santiago was a venue whose economic conditions supported a large free population of color engaged in small-scale farming. These conditions facilitated the growth of quasi-free people who were able to lawfully purchase shares of their own lives and to hope for eventual purchase of total freedom.In the first chapter Chira traces slavery and freedom in Santiago from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. With conditions more suited to tobacco farming than sugar cultivation, the region became home to numerous small farms and a population of African descent that was able to purchase free or partially free status. The Spanish crown, wary of possible slave rebellion, had policies that were designed to limit the number of African captives brought to the island. The crown also had policies designed to encourage or at least facilitate manumission. All of this contributed to the growth of a free population of color, many of whom might have logically seen themselves as stakeholders in the Spanish imperial system, as witnessed by their participation in the militia, utilization of the courts, and manipulation of political patronage.Because Santiago escaped the sugar boom that transformed Cuba in the nineteenth century, the region also escaped some of the harshness that came with the expansion of the plantation economy and the increase in the African slave trade. The east remained somewhat underdeveloped, which led to somewhat greater autonomy for Santiago's population of African descent. The revolution in Saint-Domingue would heighten the concerns of Spanish authorities over possible rebelliousness, as would the arrival of French-speaking refugees from Hispaniola. This new fear would lead to increased governmental and legal support for manumission.Chira takes us through Cuba's nineteenth century, including the earliest rebellions that would ultimately culminate in Cuba's independence. But it is in her discussion of how the slave and partially free population used the law to gain partial or full freedom that Chira makes her strongest contribution. Chira's portrait of nineteenth-century Santiago society is nuanced and textured, reflecting a society where race and color as well as slavery and freedom came in complex and overlapping layers. Phenotype might set a presumption as to an individual's color or racial status, but it was a presumption that might be overcome by social, economic, political, and military accomplishments. There were individuals who were free and others who were enslaved, but there was also the possibility of purchasing a part of one's freedom, a topic previously explored in Michelle McKinley's Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (2016). This possibility in turn made the law a vehicle for settling not only disputes between those who claimed ownership of an individual and those who claimed their manumitted status but also legal quarrels over fractions of ownership of human beings.Patchwork Freedoms is at its best in taking us through the legal processes that determined what quantum of freedom an individual was entitled to claim. The enslaved and quasi-enslaved people of Santiago became skillful navigators of the legal system, with an ability to use formal and customary law in the quest for greater freedom. They were also adept at using patronage networks, especially connections with free and quasi-free people of color that enabled slaves and partially free individuals to earn the money for self-purchase.With Patchwork Freedoms, Adriana Chira has helped to expand our understanding of race and slavery in the Spanish empire. Her localized study guides the reader through the varied considerations—economic circumstances, imperial rivalries, shifting racial ideologies, and political and legal change—that determined the fate of many peoples of African descent in nineteenth-century Cuba. The book is a critical addition to the burgeoning field of Afro-Latin history.

Pilgrimage, Precarity, and Pandemics

Pilgrimage, Precarity, and Pandemics

Portuguese Mercenary Networks in Seventeenth-Century India: An Experiment in Global Microhistory and its Archive

Abstract Thousands of runaways left the Portuguese empire during the early modern period, but very little is known about the lived experience of this diverse group of individuals after they fled. This article questions the framework of analysis that reduces such a complex social phenomenon to the overarching category of “informal empire,” while testing the hypothesis that the issue of the archive lies at the core of the practice of global microhistory. A set of primary sources in Portuguese, Dutch, English, Marathi, and Persian is analyzed at close range to reconstruct the choices, motivations, and hesitations of a specific group of “Portuguese” – mostly dark-skinned mestiços of modest origin – who served as mercenaries in north-western Deccan. I argue that studying the networks of these mercenaries ultimately reveals localized forms of endurance and adaptation to rapid and disruptive changes brought about locally by imperial rivalry and long-distance commerce.

In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama by Eric Tagliacozzo

In this stimulating volume, Taglliacozzo endeavors, as he puts it in the introduction, “to tie together the maritime history of Asia into a single interconnected web” (4). In six parts and fourteen chapters, he roams the Indian Ocean seeking connections that link, over the centuries, the Ocean’s varied shores. At its center, not surprisingly, is global trade. But he also includes the rise of empires—“colonial circuits” as he calls them—and the spread of religions from Buddhism to Islam and Christianity, as well as such unexpected topics as smuggling, the growth of lighthouses, and the presumed status of Zamboanga in the Philippines as “the end of the world.” In so doing, Tagliacozzo has set himself an enormous task. He succeeds in part by focusing much of his analysis on Southeast Asia, a region that he knows well, and by confining topics other than maritime trade to separate chapters.After an initial account of China’s medieval ties with Africa—most notably in the voyages of Zheng He from 1404 to 1433 during the Ming dynasty—Tagliacozzo turns, in Chapter 3, to Southeast Asia. Half of the volume’s remaining chapters focus on this region. The book’s subtitle is far too ambitious. Gujarat and Northern India, along with Burma, East Africa, Yemen, and Yokohama, receive some notice but not much. Tagliacozzo concentrates instead on the urban centers of Southeast Asia and on the island of Singapore, which looms over the other urban centers as a “central radial” (217, 277). Together, they are tied together by their ports, their cosmopolitan connections, and their diasporic trading communities. These international connections complemented the more inwardly focused “colonial circuits” of the British and Dutch on land. Although Tagliacozzo points out that the British made good in their control over India and much of Southeast Asia, he pays little attention to these “landscapes of trade and domination” other than to indicate that commerce could grow “on the wings of empire” (248–249).Several urban centers get chapters to themselves, most notably India’s southern coast, which Tagliacozzo calls “spice central.” The maritime–borne spice trade, he claims, was “the perfect vehicle in many ways to see how fluid market spaces were connected across large bodies of water” (306). He points out that in this trade, too, “commercial minorities”—most notably Jews, Chinese, and Indian Chettiar merchants—provided “the sinew of connection through their products and their migratory practices over hundreds of years,” even to the present day (288). To provide an intimate view into the workings of the trade, Tagliacozzo recounts, uncommonly for a historian, his own interviews with dock workers, Indian traders, and others. Zamboanga stands apart for him. Tagliacozzo appears to have included it so that he could discuss Muslim–Christian interaction in “a kind of religious outpost at the end of several overlapping maritime worlds” (183). He refers to Zamboanga fondly as “one of those places that lingers in the mind, and in one’s memory” (188).The volume concludes in Part VI with a fascinating discussion of “technologies of the sea.” Tagliacozzo writes not of ships and shipbuilding but of lighthouses and ocean mapping. In this context, imperial rivalries come into view at last, as the colonial powers, especially the British and the Dutch, squabbled for predominance over the maritime pathways, above all the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea islands, that “needed to be lit and mapped” (319). In these competitions, lighthouses “took on the symbolism of state power” (325). Tagliacozzo argues that the cosmopolitan spice trade that shaped the maritime world for so many centuries was eventually to be supplanted by goods produced within the nation-states of the region, and by shipping routes dominated by oil tankers and bulk carriers. He leaves open the question of whether China is now set to rule the waves.As “a peek through different kinds of windows,” Tagliacozzo’s view of the life of Asia’s maritime pathways throughout the last five centuries is unexcelled (380). Although much has been written about this subject over the years, this volume should find a prominent place within the scholarship of Asia and of oceanic worlds everywhere.

On the question of the imperial rivalry (based on materials of British exhibitions at the last third of the XIX – early XX centuries)

In the practice of British imperial propaganda, international and colonial exhibitions occupied a prominent place, which made it possible to demonstrate the prosperity and unity of the vast possessions of the metropolis. The 1886 Exhibition was the first event of its kind and left behind a huge amount of sources which made it possible not only to present exhibition sites, but to draw conclusions about the theory and practice of British imperial building. The last third of the 19th century is characterized by the intensification of colonial rivalry between the great powers, which was expressed not only in trade, economic and military, but also in ideological confrontation. In this regard, it is interesting to analyze what assessment was given in the context of the exhibitions to «other colonialists» and by what parameters British imperial practices were compared with the policies of the competing powers. The article concludes that colonial exhibitions were indeed based on opposition, but it was not an opposition between Britain and other modern empires, but an opposition between the past and present of the British possessions themselves. In the past there was savagery and barbarism by the «uncivilized» natives or oppression by «bad» colonizers such as the French and Dutch. In the present, everything testified to progress, prosperity and peace within the British family.International exhibitions have always been an effective way to establish cooperation and have not been a method of demonstrating conflicts. The experience of the 1908 exhibition clearly demonstrated the peaceful potential of such projects.

Nuclear Weapons and Extinction As Progress

Nuclear weapons have delivered more near-extinction encounters than any other anthropogenic threat, but for the three decades after the Cold War discussion of this threat was relatively sidelined. This paper points to some of the historical connections between 'war-ending' weapons, deterrence logic and its breakdown, and the binding between the sublimation of politics into commerce and an extinction logic held within it. It firstly gestures towards roots in the ideal of market mediation as civilisation rising in the eighteenth century; secondly it looks at some writing on the conception of nuclear weapons and the surprisingly long history of awareness of anthropogenic extinction risk this brings; thirdly it suggests that a post-Cold War revival of the binding of market realism to progress that had led to the 'weapon to end war', and the condition of deterrence, helps explain the fall in discussions of nuclear extinction; and fourthly it notes that current proliferation and destabilisation question this deep and largely unspoken conventional wisdom over nuclear 'non-violence'. It points to various moments in the imagination and realisation of viable nuclear weapons and their embedding in democratic regimes in Atlantic powers in particular, and to points of serious scientific consideration of extinction during the Cold War, and suggests that the long naturalisation of nuclear weapons has taught us to 'live extinction' in a way that speaks to other anthropogenic risks. Climate and nuclear crises indeed can be read as nodes on a trajectory of extraction and exchange defining a narrow conception of progress that has extinction as its telos. Ideas of 'total' deterrence become widespread during the imperial rivalries following this extractive-productive ethics, and take nuclear form as early as the first decades of the twentieth century. After 'stable' deterrence, though, as nuclear arsenals remained to back the Anglo-American 'victory' in the Cold War, these arsenals reached the apotheosis of their long depoliticising, dehumanising mission, standing as a silent horizon absorbing conflict and helping to explain a lack of political 'newness' often felt during late neoliberalism. With the more recent complex and largely obscured re-arming, nuclear weapons are being rediscovered as both an existential threat and an imperative to rethink the scope of political action.

Race, racialisation, and the East of the European Union: an introduction

ABSTRACT Racial capitalism requires that the subaltern periphery, providing cheap labour and new markets, be placed behind an imagined racial barrier, so that the full protection of the liberal state is not extended to it. This has applied also to the ‘Eastern enlargement’ of the EU. The East has had to compete with a much richer and more powerful West. When, inevitably, the East was unable to ‘catch up’, its ‘failure’ was attributed to its alleged historical and cultural incompatibility with the West. Such racist discourse has penetrated global and European politics, economics, and media. It also affects people who move from the East to the West. Unfortunately, many Eastern Europeans project their own racialisation onto others. This dynamic is articulated from the equivocal position of Eastern Europe, between the core West and the Global South. It aims to affirm the threatened whiteness of people in the region by distancing them from the Global South. But also, it functions within Eastern Europe, with each country to the East imagined as more ‘Eastern European’ until one reaches the prototypical Eastern European nation, Russia. For racism against Eastern Europeans reflects, in the final analysis, the long-standing imperial rivalry between the West and Russia.

프랑스-영국의 관계, 숙적에서 동맹으로 (1815~1914)

This article explains the transformation of the relationship between Britain and France from hereditary enemies to alliance partners in three stages. At first, the Franco-British couple has evolved tremendously in the long period between 1815 and 1914 from structural hostility to firm allies. The domestic political change and European international balance of power, as well as the world political evolution are analyzed for this one hundred year peace. The structural comparison is followed by more detailed and historical analysis. The period 1815-1870 forms a cycle. In 1815, France was militarily and politically defeated and has since then made a progressive comeback on international stage with the help and assistance of Britain until the Crimean War. But France was defeated again by Prussia in 1870. The second period of 1870-1914 resembles the preceding one in that France needed to recover her international status. Nevertheless the relations with Britain has been more turbulent because of the imperialistic rivalry such as planned by the German Chancellor Bismarck in order to deviate France from revenge against Germany. The long term transformation of the bilateral relationship between France and Britain has been influenced by the political regime of these two countries, their imperialistic rivalry on global scene, and the balance of power in European politics, especially in regard to the triangle France-Britain-Germany. France and Britain have been embroiled in imperial rivalry, but have finally elaborated a common front of liberal democracies against the emerging German power.

Ethno-Racial Paranoia and Affective Cold Warism: Remapping Rival US-PRC Imperial Formations

Focusing on an array of comparable racial and ethnic projects, this essay identifies and unpacks how an affective infrastructure of rival imperial formations that we call "ethno-racial paranoia" spawns enduring fears and antagonisms to perpetuate Cold War mentalities. Through an ethnoracial linkage, the US and PRC not only have been coconstituting and coevolving through each other but also have emerged as interdependent adversaries. Our analysis challenges verticalized historiographies that valorize diametrically opposed nation-states engaged in Cold War struggles by highlighting the centrality of ethno-race in creating divisive discourses and paradigms. Second, we demonstrate how ethno-race, despite the "end" of the old Cold War, continues to undergird the re-creation and maintenance of imperial boundaries, setting the stage for a new Cold War. Finally, we shift attention to the minor-to-minor relations formulated among activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan who are stuck between the new Cold War imperial rivalry. Our aim is to show how these groups—who share affects that cannot be absorbed into the structured historiographies, hermeneutical patterns, and economic materialities informed by Cold Warism—illuminate an alternative path that cuts across the seemingly impenetrable binaries bolstering the ethno-racial paranoia at the heart of intensifying interimperial antagonism between the US and PRC.

Imperial Rivalries

Henry Rawlinson’s translation of the Behistun Inscription is part of a larger story of empire and imperial rivalries. The fascinating life of the double-agent Jan Witkiewicz adds an intriguing footnote.

Confronting global infrastructural capitalism: the triple logic of the 'vanguard' and its inevitable spatial and class contradictions in China's high-speed rail program

ABSTRACT We take infrastructure as a ‘keyword’ in foregrounding the production and the reproduction of contemporary capitalism as well as its complexities and contradictions. To tease out the capitalist dynamics of the contemporary moment as infrastructural capitalism, this paper moves beyond a dichotomous constellation of the logic of capital and the territorial logic of power, to argue how a triple logic- capital, power, and culture informs the cultural politics, attempting to simultaneously resolve the economic crisis and glorify China’s fast-speed capitalism. As the vanguard of Chinese infrastructural politics, the high-speed rail spearheads the Chinese spatial economic system towards one that is not an alternative to capitalism but, at best, a variegated form of moving capitalism, which we call infrastructural capitalism. Illuminating the political role of the infrastructural projects in creating invisible social contradictions, this article highlights a wide array of affected working-class masses who take individual and collective actions that result in the reversion of ‘the vanguard’, dissolving the condensation of the materiality of infrastructural capitalism into the global assemblage of unpredictable but inescapable contradictions driving China into global imperial rivalries and class conflicts. (178 words)

Borderlands History in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Borderlands History in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly Omar Valerio-Jiménez (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution First page of the July 1912 issue of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, which subtly notes the publication's name change. University of North Texas Libraries, the Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu. [End Page 408] For over a century, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly (including the time between 1897 and 1912 when it was known as the Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association) has been a venue for borderlands scholarship on Texas and the surrounding regions. While the number of articles on borderlands topics have waxed and waned over the years, the journal has consistently promoted scholarship on the Spanish and Mexican periods of the region's history. The Quarterly has featured articles by some of the most renowned borderlands scholars, such as Herbert Bolton, who helped establish the field, but it has also been an avenue for emerging scholars whose research has appeared as journal articles before their books were published. The journal has also published articles by various non-academics whose interests in the state's early history led to contributions to the borderlands field.1 Among the first articles in what [End Page 409] would become known as borderlands history that appeared in the Quarterly were studies focused on Indigenous nations, imperial rivalries, and Spanish exploration.2 The first articles on Indigenous nations were mainly descriptive. They focused on identifying which Native groups lived in what is now Texas, their social organization, the languages spoken by each nation, and their displacement by Anglo Americans. Reflecting the attitudes of Anglo Americans in the late 1890s, these articles demonstrate a Eurocentric bias and advance pernicious stereotypes of Indigenous nations. While discussing the presence of Caddo, Alabama-Coushatta, Lipan Apaches, Comanches, Tonkawas, Karankawas, and others in the region that became Texas, Martin McHenry Kenney lauded the advances in comparative philology that allowed scholars to trace human migrations by analyzing language. Using "tribes" to refer to the Indigenous nations, Kenney discussed the "advance toward civilization" of "savage people."3 He also described alliances among various Indigenous nations and briefly explained their internal social structure of matriarchal and patriarchal groups. Kenney's perspective on "progress" and "civilization" led him to conclude, "There is no instance of a tribe, as such, adopting the political or social organization of civilization."4 But perhaps his most troubling statement is about the Karankawa Indians of the Texas Gulf Coast, when he writes, "The first and worst of these was the Carankawa, inhabiting along the coast from Galveston westward–a tribe of cannibals, noted for their gigantic stature and hideous aspect. … their language was an almost inarticulate guttural, impossible of imitation, and the lowest form of human speech."5 Some articles on Indigenous nations contain important insights despite their Eurocentric interpretations. The essay by Kenney mentioned above notes the advanced skills required to create arrowheads with "uniform construction." The author gestures to the elaborate trade networks among Indigenous nations that led Native groups in western and northwestern Texas to acquire flint rock to make arrowheads. Noting that this flint rock originated in Arkansas and Alabama, the author notes that expansive trade among non-sedentary Indigenous people brought this rock [End Page 410] material to Texas.6 The different types of materials exchanged in such trade networks are not discussed, nor is the possibility that these materials were exchanged among various Indigenous nations from their source to their ultimate destination. This article also speculates about the purpose of earthen mounds in East Texas and references Spanish colonists' accounts of them. Notwithstanding the author's acknowledgement that these mounds took considerable skill and time to complete, the author disparages Indigenous nations by arguing that it was unlikely they were descendants of the mound builders because these nations had a "habitual indisposition to labor."7 The author concludes that "prehistoric races" of Indigenous peoples became "extinct" because they had failed to develop agriculture. Other articles focused on the forced removal of the Cherokee Indians from the American Southeast to Texas and eventually to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. These essays described the Cherokees' acculturation...

‘Mahomedan Fenians’: Anti-Imperialism, the Islamic World and Irish Republican Thought, c.1848–1885

Abstract If Irish republicanism (or Fenianism) after 1848 was sometimes articulated through the critique of British imperialism in Afro-Asia, by the 1870s the Fenian command and journalists writing for the Irish-American republican press were taking a marked interest in Muslim societies under British rule. This interest developed steadily from the Indian Rebellion of 1857–8 to the Great Eastern Crisis of 1875–8, analysis of the latter illuminating the additional potential possessed by those frontiers where imperial rivalries could be manipulated to exhaust and abrade British power and prestige. Afghanistan—a buffer between British India and Russian Central Asia—held great promise, and the eruption of the Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80) presented an opportunity for the Irish cause: support for Afghans might precipitate the disintegration of British coercive power, providing in turn the opportunity for Ireland’s emancipation. Focusing on the writings of the Fenian command and reportage in the US-based Irish World, this article shows the attentiveness of Irish patriots to the spectral power of the world of Islam, which haunted the European powers, and their subversion of the Orientalist categories constructed to demonise Muslims, particularly those from the frontier most resistant to European imperialism. Fantastical and opportunistic, this short-lived burst of interest was the culmination of a longer-term process, one revealing the embeddedness of Fenianism within a world-historical moment marked by numerous imaginative projects constitutive of Islam as a world religion and a (latent) world power, and, thus, the imperial, trans-imperial and global geographies of Fenian thought.

Knowing the ‘hereditary enemy’: Austrian-Habsburg intelligence on the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century

ABSTRACT Throughout the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire presented the most formidable challenge to the House of Habsburg’s predominance in Europe. This imperial rivalry and the military conflict which it generated made it vital that the Holy Roman Emperor and his advisors were kept informed about their powerful adversary to receive advance warning of impending attacks. For this reason, intelligence formed an important aspect of the day-to-day activities of the Aulic War Council, created in 1556 to coordinate the military defence of the Habsburg–Ottoman border, as well as the Austrian-Habsburgs’ resident ambassadors in Istanbul. Sources surviving in the Viennese archives provide valuable insights into the collection and dissemination of relevant information, as well as the organisation built by the Habsburg diplomatic presence in the Ottoman capital. In particular, this article examines ambassadorial expenditure accounts which provide insights into the financial aspects of Austrian-Habsburg intelligence in the period 1580–1583 and demonstrates that the business of intelligence was pursued by the Habsburgs in a more professional and orderly manner than historians usually acknowledge. Indeed, it was woven into the very fabric of the Aulic War Council as well as the Austrian-Habsburg diplomatic presence in Istanbul.

The Disappearance of the Turk: The Cultural Politics ofThoroughbred Horses in the Ottoman and British Empires

Between 1650 and 1750, the English Thoroughbred horse was created from Ottoman imports grafted upon native racing stock in an asymmetrical Anglo-Ottoman exchange, with appropriation leading to naturalisation and radical assimilation. The Ottoman Empire was a rich source of equine genetic material of the superior bloodhorse type. The Ottomans were equine multiculturalists. For Evliya Çelebi, the küheylân (Arab thoroughbred) was as Ottoman a breed as any other. Evliya never speaks of “Turk” or “Turkoman” horses as Western visitors did; instead he particularizes the breeds of the steppe, employing the Tatar term aġırmaq (thoroughbred), and identifying the Nogay and Karaçubuk as ‘thoroughbred’ breeds. Yet it was this “Turkoman” lineage of early imports such as the ‘Byerley Turk’ that was most originally formative for the English Thoroughbred, evidenced by studbook records, contemporary observers, phenotypical resemblances, and recent genome research. From the evidence of Evliya Çelebi, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Sir John Malcolm, Lady Anne Blunt, and others, this essay argues for the formative influence of the Ottoman “Turkoman” genotype that, as a consequence of imperial rivalries, British prejudices, and equine bloodstock politics, has been erased from history. The impact made by Ottoman imported horses constitutes an instance of collective, rather than individual, equine agency.