Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples, William Banks's masterful translation of selected essays and published speeches, illuminates a remarkable facet of Georg Brandes's productivity in the first quarter of the twentieth century. We remember Brandes as the celebrated literary critic, biographer, and intellectual, whose famous address from the podium at the University of Copenhagen in 1871—“The only literature that is alive today is one that provokes debate”—heralded the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian letters. Considered the first modern comparatist, Brandes produced literary criticism that transgressed national boundaries; his six-volume Hovedstrømninger i det nittende Aarhundredes Litteratur (1872–1890; Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature) reconceptualized European literary and intellectual history and gave birth to the modern academic discipline of Comparative Literature. However, as Banks points out, literary memory has not been kind to Brandes's legacy since his death in 1927. Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples, consisting of selections and translations from the last two volumes of his Samlede Skrifter, is part of an effort to re-introduce Brandes to a wider public by profiling his publications as a political journalist and rights advocate. A majority of the selected pieces were originally published in the Danish daily Politiken between 1900 and 1925, during the last three decades of the prolific career of Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1842–1927).In the substantive introduction, William Banks provocatively frames Brandes's political journalism in the context of the modern human rights history, demonstrating that these publications may be read as “rights advocacy” and positioning Brandes as a forerunner to the human rights movement that emerged after the Second World War. Banks qualifies this claim, suggesting that “historical circumstances in his native Scandinavia permitted Brandes to approach something approximating what would later come to be called the doctrine of universal human rights; in his own curious manner, Brandes thus anticipated later developments in the major powers” (p. 7).This collection makes for an engrossing and sobering view into the cultural and political conflicts of the early twentieth century—conflicts that still, a century later, haunt the European continent. The thirty-five selected pieces offer palpable accounts from a period of bloody struggle and witness the battles fought between emerging nations, national minorities, and stateless and colonized peoples against oppressive imperial regimes. The material covers a range of diverse subjects, such as the Boxer Rebellion in China, Polish nationalism, the Ruthenian (Eastern Slavic) minority of Poland, the Armenian genocide, the Macedonian struggle, the Zionist movement, the Aryan race, the Jews of Finland, Georgian independence, the Boers of Dutch South Africa, and the Danish of Northern Schleswig. In other words, Brandes's political journalism calls to account the often brutal oppression perpetrated by ruthless imperial powers (namely, Great Britain, Czarist Russia, Imperial Germany, and the Ottoman Empire) against their national minorities and colonized peoples, while it also advocates for the “Rights and Duties of the Weaker” (which Brandes proposes in an essay from 1905). Banks provides elucidating introductions to each of the thirty-five essays as well as erudite footnotes that guide the reader to relevant cultural, historical, and political details.Although Brandes's essays and speeches address diverse conflicts of the early twentieth century, a cohesive Brandesian ideology resonates throughout this anthology. The selection demonstrates the consistently anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist stance in Brandes's late journalism and his unrelenting advocacy on behalf of the oppressed. As Banks reminds us, Brandes never employs the concept of “race,” but instead prefers language and culture as the primary determinants of the identity of “a people” (et folk). Thus, Brandes often focuses on the monolingual language policies of the German Reich (Prussification in Northern Schleswig and Western Poland) or of Czarist Russia (Russification in Finland, and in partitioned eastern Poland and Ukraine). Brandes as political journalist is an articulate witness to the humanitarian crimes of the major global powers that, in the final decades of their imperial death throes, sought to stomp out cultural and political sovereignty among minorities and colonized peoples whose survival challenged imperialist ambitions.A few examples might illustrate the fiery tone, passion, irony, wit, and genuine humanity of Brandes's advocacy—and the reason that this collection should not be missed! In “Armenia” (1900), then under the rule of Russia, Persia, and Turkey, Brandes decries the genocide of the Christian Armenians under the Ottoman Turks: “Armenia . . . [is] an enslaved, abused, and martyred land of mass murder. . . . In the last seven years nearly 300,000 Armenians have been slaughtered under a regime of torture to which the Inquisition was previously thought to have had the exclusive right” (pp. 55–6). In his speech to the Armenian Student Union in Europe in 1903, Brandes describes the brutal atrocities committed by Turkish and Kurdish soldiers against Armenian villagers, pleading: “We must stop this!” (p. 111). Brandes's indictment is not limited to Turkish barbarism; he also calls out Allied indifference, specifically the complicity of the German Reich in the Armenian genocide; here, Brandes alludes to the old Icelandic Njáls Saga, where the blood-soaked cloak of the murdered man is thrown by his wife over a complicit relative, obligating revenge.In a handful of essays on the Zionist movement, Brandes consistently restrains any advocacy on behalf of European Jews (likely because his critics never tired of an opportunity to discount the Dane as a “foreigner” of Jewish descent), yet in the Hay letter of 1903, Brandes draws attention to the hellish fate of Romanian Jews: “No wonder that the harassed East European Jews cling to the idea of Zionism” (p. 102). Nonetheless, Brandes is ambivalent regarding Zionism. As Banks emphasizes, the Zionist insistence that European Jewry constituted a “race” with a right to homeland clashed with Brandes's conviction that the identity of a people was determined by shared language and culture, not by biological inheritance. In “The Aryan Race” (1905), Brandes dismisses the pseudoscience of Aryanist racial theory, and in another essay of the same year entitled “Zionism,” which deals with Zionist literature that insisted that European Jewry constituted a “tribally pure” people, Brandes reiterates his earlier opinion that “the purity of the race is in any case a phantom” (p. 173).In several essays, Brandes advocates for his beloved Poles and Polish nationalism (the Third Partition of Poland in 1795 had divided the lands between Austria, Prussia, and Russia), but also addresses the unjust mistreatment of the Ruthenian minority population in Galicia, the border region between modern Poland and Ukraine. In his 1904 essay on “The Ruthenians,” Brandes advocates on behalf of Europe's “sixth largest population” (p. 133), writing that “one is in the habit of calling them Little Russians, an appellation they themselves reject. . . . They are a people with an independent language who inhabit a plain that is more than double the size of Austria's. Their mother country is Ukraine. Their old capital is Kiev” (pp. 133–4). The relevance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is impossible to ignore.In a couple of asides from his focus on oppressed minorities, Brandes addresses the working-class struggle in Andalusian Spain and the government's sham criminal conspiracy, La Mano Negra (The Black Hand), concocted to oppress the growing Socialist Workers Movement. And, in “Transvaal” (also published in 1903), he advocates on behalf of the Boers (white Afrikaners) of South Africa who, defeated by the British in the South African War (Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902), lived in abject poverty, stating ironically that their “conditions are characteristic of a people who have been at war with the Englishmen who are of course among the world's most highly regarded peoples” (p. 132). Brandes omits any discussion of consequences of British victory on the majority Black population.Most fascinating for Nordic scholars are Brandes's pieces on “Finland” and “The Jews of Finland” (published 1904 and 1908) and his advocacy on behalf of the Danes of Northern Schleswig. Between the years 1899 and 1905, Brandes published a series of essays about Sønderjylland in anticipation of the reunification of 1920. In his speech “To the Students of Germany”(1904), Brandes urges German students to pressure their government to ease the repression of Danish subjects and harsh Germanization efforts, writing that “an undeniable war is conducted against the Danish language; everywhere it is driven out of the church and the school. Expulsions, harassment, imprisonment, and continuous spying makes the lives of the North Schleswig farmers difficult and yet cannot break their resistance” (p. 145). Brandes frames the oppression of the Danish-speaking majority of the German-ruled Duchy in relation to the Finns under Czarist Russia. With the February Manifesto of 1899, imperial Russia extended its Russification polices into the Grand Duchy of Finland (which had previously been spared), drafting Finns into the Russian army under a new conscription law of 1901. Brandes appeals to fellow intellectuals and university students in 1904: “Scandinavians as well as non-Scandinavians ought never to tire of speaking in favor of Finland. It ought to be made known in Russia that we follow attentively the ever-increasing oppression perpetrated on Finnish soil, and that we feel in solidarity with those against whom ever-more violent violations of rights are committed” (p. 139). In “The Jews of Finland” (1908), a rebuttal to the mandated 3-day limit on “foreign Jews” visiting the Grand Duchy, which had created controversy upon Brandes's invitation to Finland, Brandes ridicules his critics and countrymen, declaring them more “Jewish” than himself: “Denmark and Finland are saturated with Judaism” (p. 180). He continues: “Half of Denmark's culture comes from Palestine; half of its literature is inspired from there. Even the names, the authentic Danish names, Petersen, Hansen, Jensen, etcetera, are Jewish names, biblical names” (p. 180). Indeed, there is much to enrich and enlighten us in William Banks's carefully curated compilation, translation, and editorial project. Human Rights and Oppressed Peoples is an auspicious publication and a valuable companion to anyone interested in the culture and politics of the early twentieth century.