Peoples Of Empire Research Articles

The Global Refuge: The Huguenot Diaspora in a Global and Imperial Perspective

Abstract Huguenot refugees were everywhere in the early modern world. Exiles fleeing French persecution, they scattered around Europe and beyond following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, settling in North America, the Caribbean, South Africa, and even remote islands in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This book offers the first global history of the Huguenot diaspora, explaining how and why these refugees became such ubiquitous characters in the history of imperialism. The story starts with dreams of Eden, as beleaguered religious migrants sought suitable retreats to build perfect societies far from the political storms of Europe. In order to create these communities, however, the Huguenots needed patrons, and they thus ran headlong into the world of empires. The refugees promoted themselves as the chosen people of empire, religious heroes who also possessed key skills that would strengthen the British and Dutch states. As a result, French-Protestants settled around the world—they tried to make silk in South Carolina, they planted vines in South Africa; and they peopled vulnerable frontiers from New England to Suriname. Of course, this embrace of empire led to a gradual abandonment of the Huguenots’ earlier utopian ambitions. They realized that only by blending in, and by mastering foreign institutions, could they prosper in a quickly changing world. Nonetheless, they managed to maintain a key role in the early modern world well into the eighteenth century, before the coming of Revolution upended the ancien régime.

AWAKENING OF NON–TITULAR NATIONS AS A FACTOR OF THE BREAKUP OF EMPIRES (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE HABSBURG MONARCHY)

The purpose of the study is to show the influence of the national awakening of non-titular ethnic groups in the Habsburg monarchy on the development of disintegration processes in the state. The methodology of the research is based on the principles of historicism, systemicity, author's objectivity, as well as on the use of general scientific (analysis, synthesis, generalization) and special-historical (historical-genetic, historical-typological, historical-system) methods. The scientific novelty consists in a comprehensive study of the main factors influencing the process of national-state revival of non-titular peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is, in particular, the study of the impact on the processes of national consolidation of the territorial-political organization of the monarchy, locally-provincial or land-regional representative institutions, the place and social significance of the national elite of the non-titular peoples of the Habsburg monarchy in the formation of a national idea. The Conclusions . The authors are convinced that, being a random creation of history, the Habsburg monarchy for a long time combined the spiritual and cultural potential of the peoples of the empire with the political practice of the Austrian ruling dynasty. However, even taking into account the authority of the Danube monarchy as a factor in the multi-ethnic composition of the population, which had a beneficial effect on the development of the national culture of the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, Croats and other ethnic groups, which, at the same time, became the basis for the formation of national-state formations of non-titular peoples of the empire , was unable to stop the process of disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the final phase of the World War I .

Sunderland, Willard The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution (review)

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 766 capitalism, so it is not quite right for Thomas to claim that the ‘solitary success of a beleaguered Russian Revolution laying claim to his mantle was to Marx the least likely of scenarios’ (p. 166). In so short a book each author will focus on what for them is the essential Marx. Thomas captures Marx the theorist and Marx the revolutionist, although I think he has an overly harsh reading of a phrase from McLellan (cited p. 23) that Marx made slow progress of Capital because of the work he undertook for the First International that was ‘forced upon him’. One can accept tasks voluntarily and still note the impact of the commitment and this is how I read McLellan’s remark. I would not make it a major point of attack to be returned to (p. 164). Marx was clearly a revolutionary politician and a theoretician. Here I would have included my favourite sentence from Marx but absent from this book: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.’ Ulster University Coleraine Ian D. Thatcher Sunderland, Willard. The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2014. xv + 344 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Timeline. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00:£21.50. In his preface, Willard Sunderland gives an interesting account of the genesis of this book and how it came to assume its current form. He began it as a conventional biography of Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (1885–1921), better known as the ‘Bloody Baron’ of Civil War mythology. A darker version of T. E. Lawrence, Ungern’s brutal exploits in Mongolia have already spawned numerous biographies (the most accessible is probably James Palmer’s The Bloody White Baron, London, 2008), and extensive primary source publications (the most extensive from S. L. Kuz´min Baron Ungern v dokumentakh i memuarakh & Legendarnyi Baron: neizvestnye stranity grazhdanskoi voiny, Moscow, 2004). As Sunderland puts it ‘as I read more deeply, I began to see how widely he had lived and travelled, and the sources I was finding seemed to reveal at least as much about the Russian Empire as they did about him’ (p. xi) — so this book is much more than a biography. Instead Sunderland is attempting to use the techniques of microhistory — in this case the study of a single life — to tease out recurring themes in the history of late imperial Russia and its collapse between 1917 and 1921 (this is also the guiding principle behind Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present, Bloomington, IN, 2012, which he edited together with Stephen M. Norris). By and large he succeeds brilliantly in this, and along the way actually REVIEWS 767 gives a much better explanation of the development of Ungern’s character, personality and beliefs than previous biographers, who have tended to focus on the well-documented Civil War years and paid little attention to the imperial forces and milieus that moulded this ‘toxic cosmopolitan’ (to use a phrase from one of Sunderland’s earlier articles on the subject). From his birthplace in Graz to his execution in Novonikolaevsk, via Tiflis, his stepfather’s estate at Jerwakant in Estland, Reval, St Petersburg, Chita, Dauria, the Amur region, Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, the Eastern Front against Germany and Austria-Hungary and back to Mongolia again (Sunderland organizes the chapters chronologically and geographically), Ungern’s life certainly does bring to the fore the sheer ‘imperial-ness’ of the world he inhabited, one where the national idea was gathering in strength, but had not yet carried all before it. The book is rich in detail which illustrates this, but I will single out one vignette from a 1915 report from the Eastern Front just north of Warsaw, quoted in full by Sunderland: ‘Officer Ungern-Sternberg leapt to his feet before the wire and called out loudly in German, “You there, what’s gotten into you? Stop your shooting. It’s your own men!”’ (p. 136). The Germans fell for this ruse, allowing the German-speaking aristocrat Ungern (born, lest we forget, in the Austro-Hungarian...

Russia's people of empire: life stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the present

Russia's people of empire: life stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the present

Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present. Ed. Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. xviii, 365 pp. Notes. Chronology. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $35.00, paper.

Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present. Ed. Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. xviii, 365 pp. Notes. Chronology. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $35.00, paper. - Volume 72 Issue 3