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Begin New Search Topic History Content Type Commentary and Analysis Publication Year within 25 Years Publication Year within 5 Years

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. The Individual and the International: An Interview with Dr. Michele L. Louro

Author:
Michele L. Louro and Sean Phillips
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
SEAN PHILLIPS: Could you tell us about your intellectual journey? What drew you to write about interwar internationalism and India’s stake in it, and in particular, Nehru’s view of it? Were there any particularly inspiring tutors or texts which lured you in? MICHELE LOURO: This project really began with an inspiring mentor and began with a text that I was intrigued by. I had received a bachelor's degree in psychology and had dreams of being a clinical psychologist, but I wasn't particularly happy researching in the field of psychology and hadn't quite figured out why. In 2003, I decided to change direction and began a Master's degree in history at Miami University (in Oxford, Ohio) which is not really a typical path to academia in the United States. Judith P. Zinsser who is a world historian took me on as a student and really helped my transition from psychology to the humanities. She suggested that I read Jawaharlal Nehru’s Glimpses of World History, which was published in 1934, written whilst he was in prison during the civil disobedience movement 1930-1934. I was really struck by the fact that much of the scholarship was really focused on his much later work, Discovery of India (1946) and what he wrote about the history of the Indian nation. Few historians had really tackled his chronicle, Glimpses of World History (1934), which is a work of one thousand pages in the form of letters to his daughter. I was also struck by why such an iconic nationalist figure and leader chose to write a work of world history as his first major book. That's really where my journey began—it was trying to answer this question: why the "world" rather than the nation was the subject of his first book and what the "world" meant to Nehru. I was also troubled by the assumption that his world history was simply a copy of H.G. Wells’s Outline of World History with an addition of further Indian context. My close reading suggested otherwise very early on. Instead, I came to learn that he was at the League Against Imperialism meetings in the years immediately preceding the years he wrote this text, so I began to think more critically about the international world that Nehru himself was engaged in and also what these experiences had done to shape his ideas about both India and the world he imagined. In thinking this through, I was really lucky to start my PhD at Temple University because I worked with a scholar, Howard Spodek, who was trained in world history and South Asian history. I also worked with Richard Immerman who trained me in international history, history, and Lynn Hollen Lees at Pennsylvania University who trained me in British imperial history. I was lucky to be able to think about this topic from a variety of different sub-fields therefore, pulling these all together to form a better understanding of Nehru and the world he was writing about.
Topic:
Imperialism, History, Interview, and Internationalism
Political Geography:
South Asia and India

15. Collaborators of the New Order—Fascists, Nationalists, Traitors, and Opportunists in occupied Western Europe: An Interview with David Alegre

Author:
David Alegre
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
Empires are not ruled only by force. Some degree of resignation or collaboration from local populations is needed. Despite its brief lifespan, the Third Reich was no stranger to this logic. In Western Europe, tens of thousands of European citizens took part in Nazi imperial policies of domination and spoilation, spurred on by fear of losing an unrepeatable opportunity and inspired by the dazzling triumphs of Hitler’s Germany. Such Nazi collaborators are the main subject of David Alegre’s most recent book, Colaboracionistas. Europa Occidental y el Nuevo Orden Nazi (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022).Born in Teruel, Spain in 1984, this researcher and lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona delves into collaborators’ experiences, their mental universes, their political strategies, and their stormy relations with the German Nazis, including the creation of volunteer units for war against the Soviet Union. Far from seeing themselves as mere pawns, the collaborators believed that close and loyal cooperation with the occupiers would be the fastest and most effective way to promote their personal interests and political projects. Marginalized by their convictions as traitors and persecuted by the Resistance, they would end up signing a blood pact with the occupiers, contributing to the plunder of their countries, and pushing their communities to the brink of civil war.
Topic:
Nationalism, History, Fascism, World War II, Interview, and Collaboration
Political Geography:
Europe and Western Europe

16. The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War: An Interview with Nicholas Mulder

Author:
Nicholas Mulder and Mahia Bashir
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
The 2008 global financial crisis and the dislocations it caused sparked a renewed interest in economic and international histories of capitalism, globalization, and internationalism and produced a new corpus of writings that we broadly know as new economic and new international histories. Nicholas Mulder’s new book The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War is the latest addition to this corpus. It details the history of sanctions, their wartime origins in the economic blockade of the First World War, and their evolution from a deterrent to an actively used tool of modern state warfare. In doing so, it raises and answers important theoretical questions about the limits and contradictions of the interwar liberal international order, state sovereignty, and the legitimacy of a totalising instrument that profoundly and rather devastatingly impacts civilian societies. Through the story of sanctions, the book also offers a fresh perspective on the tragic escalatory spiral of the 1930s—the rise of fascist states but also the Second World War. Straddling regions from Albania, Greece, and Switzerland to Manchuria and Latin America, The Economic Weapon has all the trappings of a gripping international economic history: it blends detail and analysis harmoniously. I had the delightful pleasure of speaking with the author, Nicholas Mulder on a balmy spring day about the book. We talked, inter alia, about Professor Mulder’s scholarly journey, the origins and evolution of sanctions, the ethical dilemmas they posed, and the role of historical memory in the history of sanctions. Professor Mulder was also very generous in giving us a glimpse into his exciting new project on confiscation.
Topic:
War, History, Sanctions, and Interview
Political Geography:
Global Focus

17. Decoding South Asia on the 75th Anniversary of Independence and Partition: An Interview with Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose

Author:
Ayesha Jalal, Sugata Bose, and Tathagata Dutta
Publication Date:
02-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
Earlier this year in August the three post-colonial states of South Asia—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the British Raj as well as the partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947. Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman first published in 1985 remains one of the foundational texts on partition. The work was instrumental in revising previous historiographical trends that advocated that the 1947 partition was the logical end of religious communalism that had plagued the subcontinent. The work refocused much needed attention to the partition resulting from the failure to devise a suitable power sharing mechanism at a federal level. The decolonization of the subcontinent in 1947 also heralded the end of the age of empires. The British Indian Army not only guarded Britain’s empire in much of Asia and Africa, but also provided critical defense to other European empires in the Indian Ocean arena. The loss of India deprived Britain of this critical instrument of coercion and governance. Sugata Bose in his A Hundred Horizons (2006) explored the structures of power in the Indian Ocean world in an age of global empire as well as the anticolonial solidarities that circulated in this interregional arena. Ayesha Jalal is the Mary Richardson Professor of South Asia and the Muslim World at Tufts University and Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. The 75th anniversary provides a wonderful opportunity to not only revisit these two seminal works together, but also to have a larger conversation regarding the craft of history writing and the emerging trends of the discipline. On behalf of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, I thank them both for giving their valuable time for this interview.
Topic:
History, Decolonization, Interview, and Partition
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Asia, and India

18. Putin’s Use and Abuse of History: Back to the 19th Century?

Author:
Leo Goretti
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:
“Ukraine is not just a neighbouring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.” This is how Putin introduced the “decisions being made” in his 55-minute address to the nation on 21 February 2022, which paved the way for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Several commentators noted how Putin’s speech was replete with historical references: as historian Benjamin Nathans pointed out, Vladimir Putin seems to be “quite obsessed with history. So part of our attention […] should be looking at how Putin is using history”. Indeed, almost one-quarter of Putin’s speech was devoted to a rather erratic and convoluted discussion of pre-1991 Russian and Soviet history, departing from the assumption that this was necessary “to explain the motives behind Russia’s actions and what we aim to achieve”.
Topic:
Nationalism, History, and Conflict
Political Geography:
Russia, Ukraine, Caucasus, and Balkans

19. The Institutionalization of Anti-Haitianism in Dominican History and Education

Author:
Ayendy Bonifacio
Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)
Abstract:
Recent acts of anti-Haitian violence and discrimination are not isolated events, but part of a long history of anti-Blackness in the Dominican Republic.
Topic:
History, Discrimination, Violence, and Racism
Political Geography:
Latin America, Caribbean, Haiti, and Dominican Republic

20. How to Destroy an Investigation from the Inside: Ayotzinapa and the Legacies of Impunity

Author:
John Gibler
Publication Date:
11-2022
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)
Abstract:
Is the Mexican government's dubious new evidence part of another “historical truth?”
Topic:
Corruption, Government, History, Impunity, Memory, and Extrajudicial Killings
Political Geography:
Latin America, North America, and Mexico