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By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
politically charged transculturalism of Woodruff’s The Art of the Negro was of vital importance in offering an alternative history of global art from the Black perspective. Executed on the eve of the Civil Rights movement and within the context of a largely segregated art world, Woodruff’s cycle taught his predominantly African American audience not only a different global history of art but also a history of race relations, their power structures, and the earlier battles for the cultural survival of the colonised peoples
With the help of the Jesuits, the Qianlong emperor (often said to be Chinas Sun King in the long eighteenth century) built European palaces in the Garden of Perfect Brightness and commissioned a set of twenty images engraved on copper in Paris. The Second Anglo-Chinese Opium War in 1860 not only saw the destruction of the Garden, but also of the images, of which there are only a few left in the world. The John Rylands set contains a coloured image which raises even more questions about the construction of the palaces and the after-life of the images. How did it travel from Paris to Bejing, and from Belgium to the John Rylands Library? This article probes the fascinating history of this image. It highlights the importance of Europeans in the making of Chinese history and calls for studies of China in Europe.
enslavement are but two means through which Europeans made themselves the protagonists of global history. Europeans then rewrote their history, erasing the mass human suffering they had caused, promoting instead tales of white European innocence ( Wekker, 2016 ), superiority and exceptionalism. In its destruction of life, coloniality might be considered anti-humanitarian, and yet it is characteristic of the liberal humanitarianism whose end we now (prematurely) are invited to mourn. For over two decades, I have been struggling to make sense of
of the twenty-first century, typified by the Overseas Development Institute’s five-year ‘Global History of Modern Humanitarian Action’ project (2011–15), Médecins sans Frontières’ Speaking Out initiative ( Médecins sans Frontières, n.d. ), its recently released associative history ( Médecins sans Frontières, 2018 ) and the 2015 conference on the fundamental principles in ‘a critical historical perspective’, hosted by the International Committee of the Red Cross
of conflict and instability, weak health sectors and economies and an eroded social contract set the foundations for the crisis of 2014. The place of these countries in global history and contemporary dependencies was re-inscribed in the nature of the response. Under the PHEIC (Public Health Emergency of International Concern) declared by the World Health Assembly on 8 August 2014, it was conducted through a joint partnership between the international community and
Global Biographies provides a comprehensive and concrete analytical framework for the use of biography as a method in global history. Over several recent decades, biography has re-emerged as a legitimate and nuanced approach to history. Nevertheless, global history, long slanted towards structural processes and the macro-analytical perspective, has made limited use of biographies beyond the purpose of adding narrative spice to larger-scale analyses. By contrast, Global Biographies shows that biography as a method of historical writing is uniquely positioned to explore human experiences and agency in global processes. Biography offers a privileged means by which to explore the relationship between individuals being in the world and socio-historical changes on a global scale. Global Biographies unpacks the historiographical and methodological relationship between biographies and global history and in doing so presents three uniquely tailored approaches to global biography. These approaches direct attention to questions central to global history concerning time and periodization, exceptionality and the normal, and space and scale. Through a diverse and carefully curated collection of chapters, each approach is conscientiously probed and reflected upon. From Icelandic communists and Jewish medical students, via Zambian Third Worldism and Albanian nationalism, to the black/white Atlantic and Australian internationalists, this volume tests the potential and pitfalls of the approaches it launches. Global Biographies offers a thorough historiographical intervention, a new set of biographical approaches to global history and a broad and critically reflective set of case studies spanning the globe.
While most of the Germans who suffered expulsion during the First World War lived within British shores, the Royal Navy brought Germans from throughout the world to face incarceration in the their network of camp. This book offers a new interpretation of global migration from the early nineteenth until the early twentieth century. It examines the elite German migrants who progressed to India, especially missionaries, scholars and scientists, businessmen and travellers. The book investigates the reasons for the migration of Germans to India. An examination of the realities of German existence in India follows. It then examines the complex identities of the Germans in India in the century before the First World War. The role of the role of racism, orientalism and Christianity is discussed. The stereotypes that emerged from travelogues include: an admiration of Indian landscapes; contempt for Hinduism; criticism of the plight of women; and repulsion at cityscapes. The book moves to focus upon the transformation which took place as a result of this conflict, mirroring the plight of Germans in other parts of the world. The marginalisation which took place in 1920 closely mirrored the plight of the German communities throughout the British Empire. The unique aspect of the experience in India consisted of the birth of a national identity. Finally, the book places the experience of the Germans in India into four contexts: the global history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; German history; history of the British Empire in India; and Indian history.
In other words, for Tuchman biography served first and foremost as an approach to shedding light on larger developments. 3 Decades later, in the introduction to a 2019 issue of Past & Present , John-Paul A. Ghobrial bluntly presented the challenges that global history is facing: The fate of place-based research, the ability to explain change, its relationship to sources and theoretical frameworks, and its record on Eurocentrism: these four issues are just some of the problems facing global
Accounting is about ‘how much’ and is usually assumed to be about money. It is viewed as a financial technology related to the administration of finances, costing, and the calculation of efficiency. But this book suggests a broader understanding of accounting, linking related perspectives and lines of research that have so far remained surprisingly unconnected: as a set of calculative practices and paper technologies that turn countable objects into manageable units, figures, and numbers that enable subsequent practices of reckoning, calculating, valuing, controlling, justifying, communicating, or researching and that generate and appear in account- or casebooks, ledgers, lists, or tables.
And Accounting for Health involves both money and medicine and raises moral issues, given that making a living from medical treatment has ethical ramifications. Profiting from the ‘pain and suffering of other people’ was as problematic in 1500 as it is in today’s debates about the economisation of medicine and the admissibility of for-profit hospitals. In current debates about economisation of medicine, it is hardly noticed that some versions of these patterns and problems has been with health and medicine for centuries – not only in the modern sense of economic efficiency, but also in a traditional sense of good medical practice and medical accountability.
Spanning a period of five centuries (1500–2011) and various institutional settings of countries in the Western world, Accounting for Health investigates how calculative practices have affected everyday medical knowing, how these practices changed over time, and what effects these changes have had on medicine and medical knowledge.