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2. Petroleum and Progress in Iran: An Interview with Gregory Brew
- Author:
- Mirek Tobiáš Hošman and Gregory Brew
- Publication Date:
- 11-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- Between the 1940s and the 1960s, Iran developed into the world’s first petro-state. In the recently published Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War (2022, Cambridge University Press), author Gregory Brew argues that Pahlavi petro-state emerged from a confluence of global and local forces in the context of the Cold War, the global oil economy, and the nascent practice and discourse of international development assistance. The Toynbee Prize Foundation interviewed Gregory Brew on the main arguments and events of his book. Next to providing a brief chronology of the political and economic development of Iran in post-WW2 decades – including the episode of the failed attempt to nationalize Iranian oil industry in the early 1950s followed by the coup d’état in 1953 – Brew explained the concept of dual integration introduced in his book, which tries to account for both local and global integration of the Iranian oil industry. He also highlighted the role of the international development actors, including the World Bank, American developmentalists and development economists in shaping the Pahlavi regime and the Iranian development project.
- Topic:
- Development, Oil, History, and Industry
- Political Geography:
- Iran and Middle East
3. Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition: An interview with Shahla Hussain
- Author:
- Mahia Bashir and Shahla Hussain
- Publication Date:
- 09-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- “This dappled dawn injured by the night This is not the dawn we awaited. ” Thus, lamented the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz in his poem ‘Subh-e-Azaadi’ (The Dawn of Freedom) in August 1947 as the two nation-states of India and Pakistan were created unleashing catastrophic violence and bloodshed. The history of the subcontinent’s partition has been a fecund field of inquiry for decades. Often told as the cleaving of the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab, most studies of Partition and its aftermath have not devoted attention to the region of Kashmir. Treated as an exceptional case in official narratives and consequently in histories, Kashmir has been largely absent from accounts of Partition and its ramifications for the lives of millions of its inhabitants, many of whom faced displacement and violence as the erstwhile princely state was prized apart. Shahla Hussain’s Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2021) offers a corrective to this absence by braiding the history of Kashmir into the history of Partition and by introducing a bottom-up approach to this study. Interweaving official sources with meticulously unearthed vernacular sources, Hussain sets herself to the task of foregrounding people’s experiences of Partition and their aspirations of the future. What ensues is a rich interrogation of the multivalent meanings of freedom and self-determination in Kashmir, the limitations of the myopic model of territorial nationalism adopted by India and Pakistan and the Janus-faced nature of state-sponsored development in the region. Hussain deftly retraces international connections and solidarities between the Kashmiri liberation struggle and movements for decolonization in the mid-twentieth century and underlines the failure of institutions of international governance to accommodate movements for liberation. Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition therefore brings germane themes of historical inquiry such as anti-colonialism, nationalism, decolonization and development into dialogue. I had the delight of interviewing Professor Hussain about her book, the challenges that this project entailed, and her future research.
- Topic:
- History, Interview, and Partition
- Political Geography:
- Pakistan, South Asia, India, and Kashmir
4. Sources for South and Southeast Asian History
- Author:
- Kristie Patricia Flannery and Aditya Balasubramanian
- Publication Date:
- 09-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- KF: This online history project responds to the “fragility, absence, or inaccessibility of archival materials” for the study of South and Southeast Asian history, and the multifaceted historical connections between these regions. Could you tell us about how you have encountered these archival challenges in your research, and what were the solutions that you found? AB: My research so far has focused on India. File transfers from departments of the Government of India to the National Archives of India after independence in 1947 are erratic, and those from earlier periods can be poorly preserved or catalogued. My book project focused on the Swatantra Party, which did not have papers that became available until 2019, a year after I finished my PhD dissertation. Working around these challenges has meant mixing various different kinds of evidence and “reimagining the archive,” to take Sunil Amrith and Tim Harper’s turn of phrase from Sites of Asian Interaction. I, and many of my colleagues, take particular inspiration from the innovative work of Indonesia historian Rudolf Mrazek, whose Engineers of Happy Land involves working across multiple archives in the Netherlands and Indonesia and combining them with sources ranging from motorcyclist journals to poetry.
- Topic:
- History, Research, Archive, and Interview
- Political Geography:
- South Asia
5. Plowshares into Swords: An Interview with David Ekbladh
- Author:
- David Ekbladh and Seokju Oh
- Publication Date:
- 09-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- As much as it was a moment of America’s reckoning of its own immense power or its sudden vulnerability, the early-1940s was also a moment of a successful transplantation. Technical experts of the League of Nations were shipped (literally in a Pan Am Yankee Clipper) across the Atlantic and were soon incorporated into America’s war effort and postwar planning. Their knowledge on food, public health, world economy, and many more was weaponized, first, to win the war against the Axis powers and later, to “win the peace” against the Soviet Union. How was this transfer of knowledge possible? According to David Ekbladh’s new book, Plowshares into Swords: Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations (University of Chicago Press, 2022), it is essential to understand the US’ special relationship with the League during the interwar years. Contrary to being skeptical outsiders, many Americans were dedicated insiders; they intermingled with fellow liberal internationalists to exchange ideas to address what they conceptualized as common global problems brought about by industrial modernity. In essence, the successful transplantation of internationalist knowledge at the onset of the Second World War was feasible because it had been nurtured over the preceding two decades within the liberal international society of which the US was an integral part. As Ekbladh points out in the introduction, “American internationalism was, well, international.” During the course of the conversation, Ekbladh expanded upon his views on internationalism and hegemony, the role of internationalists from “non-Great Powers” in the liberal international order, and the place of democracy and planning in the thoughts of the interwar liberal internationalists.
- Topic:
- History, Liberalism, Interview, League of Nations, International Order, and Internationalism
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus and United States of America
6. A revolution of runaways: An interview with Jesse Olsavsky
- Author:
- Jesse Olsavsky and Matilde Cazzola
- Publication Date:
- 08-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- The history of the fight against enslavement in the Americas is a rich and multi-faceted one. It should, therefore, come as no wonder that there are still several aspects of it to be disinterred, and which the growing and dynamic scholarship on slavery and emancipation is, year after year, progressively bringing to light. Nonetheless, the new story recounted in the latest book by Jesse Olsavsky (Assistant Professor of History, Duke Kunshan University), The Most Absolute Abolition: Runaways, Vigilance Committees, and the Rise of Revolutionary Abolitionism, 1835–1861 (Louisiana State University Press, 2022), is a wondrous one. This is the history of the Vigilance Committees based in US northeastern cities which organized and supervised the submerged network of secret “lines”, safe “stations”, and trusted “conductors” of the Underground Railroad, along which thousands of African Americans travelled northward, by land and by sea, in the decades preceding the Civil War. Established since the mid-1830s, the Vigilance Committees were urban organizations aimed at illegally assisting enslaved persons escaping slavery in the South, as well as protecting and agitating on behalf of those who had already escaped. These Committees, as the author puts it, represented “a movement within the movement” of abolitionism, but also a form of activism which radicalized anti-slavery militancy and revolutionized its objectives, shifting its focus from the conversion of whites to the abolitionist cause to the desires and needs of the enslaved themselves. Most interestingly, Olsavsky’s study shows how the Vigilance Committees became crucial sites of convergence between northern abolitionists and southern fugitives, and radical spaces of production of knowledge about slavery, communication of the strategies to escape it, and debate around the meanings of freedom.
- Topic:
- Civil War, History, Slavery, Interview, and Abolitionism
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America
7. From the Archivist’s Nook: An interview with Christy Lobo
- Author:
- Christy Lobo and Joseph Satish
- Publication Date:
- 06-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- Christy Lobo is the archivist at the Archives of the Jesuit Madurai Province in Shembaganur, Tamil Nadu. Technically skilled with an M.Sc. in Computer Science and a passion for the history of Jesuits in India, Mr. Lobo is keen on using the latest technologies in maintaining the Shembaganur archives and enhancing its online presence. In this brief interview, Jesuit studies scholar and Toynbee Prize Foundation Editor-at-Large Joseph Satish V talks to Christy Lobo about his work as an archivist and his enthusiasm for all things Jesuit.
- Topic:
- Religion, History, Research, Interview, and Archives
- Political Geography:
- South Asia and Nepal
8. European Communities in South America and the Global Total Wars of the 20th Century: An Interview with Dr. María Inés Tato
- Author:
- María Inés Tato and Salvador Lima
- Publication Date:
- 05-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- Total wars do not just affect the belligerent societies. The two global conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century had repercussions in neutral countries and colonial territories that could not escape of their economic and political impact. This was certainly most evident for the European diasporas in the South American region. How did overseas Europeans participate in the war effort? What were the tensions surrounding the mobilization? What were the effects on the relationship with the adoption countries? These are some of the questions that the authors of Transatlantic Battles. European Immigrant Communities in South America and the World Wars (Brill, 2022) address. The book was edited by María Inés Tato, researcher at the National Council of Science and Technic Research (CONICET), in Argentina, and director of the Group of Historical War Studies of the Institute of Latin American and Argentine History “Dr. Emilio Ravignani”, University of Buenos Aires. Under her coordination, this collective project gathered several historians from different backgrounds, including Juan Pablo Artinian, Norman Fraser Brown, Juan Luis Carrellán Ruiz, Hernán Díaz, Marcelo Huernos, Milagros Martínez-Flener, Germán Friedmann and Stefan Rinke. The main goal of the project was to explore how European communities in South America expressed the transnational nature of their national identities through enlistment in armies and the mobilisation of economic and cultural assets. As Tato says in the book’s introduction, these immigrants, and their families “had two homelands: they were attached to their countries of origin and, at the same time, exhibited strong connections with the societies they resided in, developing a complex identity that recognized their dual allegiance.” Transatlantic Battles should not be understood as an isolated piece of work, but as a contribution to a growing academic movement that, for the last twenty years, has attended to the global dimension of the twentieth-century total wars. Tato herself has published and directed several books on the subject, working closely with colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic.
- Topic:
- War, History, Diaspora, and Interview
- Political Geography:
- Europe and South America
9. War, Plague and Inflation: Is this time different?: An Interview with Dr. Natacha Postel-Vinay
- Author:
- Natacha Postel-Vinay and Tehreem Husain
- Publication Date:
- 05-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- World economies are facing a troika of challenges in the form of war (in Ukraine), disease (COVID19) and return of inflation, all of which have led to dampened growth globally. This invites us to ask how new these challenges, individually and as a combination, are, and what lessons we can draw from history? To answer these questions, we take a long-run view from more than 100 years of history to discuss the implications of war, disease, and inflation on our economies. This interview features Dr. Natacha Postel-Vinay, an economic and financial historian and Assistant Professor at the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Postel-Vinay is an expert on the economic history of the Great Depression. Her research focuses on public finance, private finance, and welfare. More specifically, her research looks at the connections between bank risk-taking, banking crises, banking crisis resolution, public debt, and moral hazard, all from a historical perspective. I seek her opinion on the current economic environment and discuss how history can inform the present. The talk is structured in two parts. The first part focuses on understanding the similarities and differences between the experiences of inflation, war, and pandemic today compared to the interwar period. This section covers rising indebtedness and the impact of war, pandemic, and inflation on bank lending and credit supply. The second part focuses on highlighting some solutions to the present crisis and highlighting the risks to recovery.
- Topic:
- War, History, Inflation, Interview, and Disease
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
10. Recovering the History of Interwar International Environmental Law: An Interview with Omer Aloni
- Author:
- Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín and Omer Aloni
- Publication Date:
- 04-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- For a long time, international legal scholars and practitioners tended to see the League of Nations solely as a historical failure. In leading textbooks and inside the classroom, it was not uncommon to read and hear depictions of the interwar international institutions as a mere prelude to the post-1945 international order. The League, in comparison to the United Nations, was dismissed as a moment of not yet. In the last decade or so, however, more nuanced waves of scholarship across disciplines have unearthed the inner lives of international ordering, exploring the immense efforts and disappointments that surrounded the work of the League and other interwar institutions. In his recent monograph, Omer Aloni joins this renaissance of historical scholarship, adding a distinctively socio-legal perspective grounded in rich archival research to a conversation in which lawyers have been relative latecomers. In this sense, The League of Nations and the Protection of the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2021) provides an exploration the ways in which the relations between “nature, environment, and humankind” were legally regulated at the international plane in the interwar period—and beyond. Aloni’s monograph offers a textured account not only of the origins of modern international environmental law, but also of the deep roots of our contemporary ecological crises. In it, we find that many of the issues that contemporary commentators decry as novel have, in fact, long histories. For instance, Aloni details that the quest for environmental protection and conservation has long been tangled with difficult questions related to scientific expertise, civil society participation, colonial and imperial hegemony, industrial lobbies and economic interests, and the relationship between public and private interests. By exploring several cases studies (which, as Aloni notes, “cover almost every part of the Earth—from the depth of the oceans to wooden landscapes”), the monograph provides us with a thick account of the interaction between the League, legal vocabularies, and environmental agendas. In our conversation, we explore what Dr. Aloni’s book can reveal about the challenges that international organizations face in their quest to enact environmental regulation as the planetary situation becomes increasingly dire.
- Topic:
- Environment, International Law, History, Interview, and League of Nations
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus