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1. The Venezuela-Guyana Dispute over the Essequibo

Author:
Rafael Ramírez
Publication Date:
02-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Istituto Affari Internazionali
Abstract:
The Essequibo[1] is a territory located in the North-East of South America, between Venezuela and Guyana, with a maritime projection towards the Atlantic. It has been part of Venezuela since 1777[2] under the rule of the Spanish Empire and then as the Republic of Venezuela since 1810. The United Kingdom illegally occupied it in 1814,[3] while Venezuela was going through a long and bloody war of independence. The UK tried to formalise the dispossession of the territory with the Paris Arbitral Award of 3 October 1899,[4] in a flawed process in which Venezuela was represented by the United States. The British Empire exercised its power to obtain a ruling in its favour. After the death of the lawyer Severo Mallet-Prevost in 1949, who represented Venezuela in this process, these irregularities became public knowledge.[5] In 1962, Venezuela denounced the nullity of the process before the United Nations and insisted on its historical claim.[6] On 17 February 1966, Venezuela and the UK signed the Geneva Agreement,[7] whereby the parties recognised the nullity of the Paris Arbitral Award and agreed to search for a negotiated solution. During this process, Guyana (independent since May 1966) would administer the Essequibo but without carrying out any activity that would modify the legal situation of the territory as established in Article V of the agreement, which states that “No acts or activities taking place while this Agreement is in force shall constitute a basis for asserting, supporting or denying a claim to territorial sovereignty in the territories of Venezuela or British Guiana or create any rights of sovereignty in those territories”. After four years, no progress was made in the negotiation, so on 18 June 1970, the two parties signed the Port of Spain Protocol,[8] to suspend the meetings for twelve years and to possibly use as an alternative one of the means of peaceful settlement provided for in the UN Charter.
Topic:
Oil, Territorial Disputes, History, and Borders
Political Geography:
South America, Venezuela, North America, Guyana, and United States of America

2. WHY DO MASS EXPULSIONS STILL HAPPEN?

Author:
Meghan Garrity
Publication Date:
01-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Political Violence @ A Glance
Abstract:
January 30, 2023 marks 100 years since the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece. This population exchange was not the first such agreement, but it was the first compulsory exchange. Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion and Muslim Greek nationals did not have the option to remain. Further, Greek and Muslim refugees who had fled the Ottoman Empire and Greece, respectively, were not allowed to return to their homes. Only small populations in Istanbul and Western Thrace were exempted from the treaty.
Topic:
Human Rights, History, Refugees, International Criminal Court (ICC), Rome Statute, Rohingya, Geneva Convention, and Lausanne Convention
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, Turkey, Greece, Germany, Nigeria, Myanmar, and Niger

3. The Shah’s Son and the Future of Iranian Opposition

Author:
Lior Sternfeld
Publication Date:
05-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Abstract:
For the Iranian opposition movement to be viable, it has to offer a clear vision for Iran that can unite most Iranians. Those opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran must keep in mind the people in Iran, including those who have not yet shown any support for the opposition, and let them know what their future would look like if the opposition prevails. Any movement that would try to rely on sentiments favoring the Iranian monarchy is doomed to fail. The Iranian people will not get behind replacing one autocratic leader for another. This is one of the reasons for despair among many Iranians of the middle generation. The Iranian opposition’s vision for the country should include the role of those who are now employed or involved in the state apparatus.
Topic:
History, Domestic Politics, and Opposition
Political Geography:
Iran and Middle East

4. Global History and International Relations: a discussion with Ayşe Zarakol, Glenda Sluga, and Heidi Tworek

Author:
Ayşe Zarakol, Heidi Tworek, and Glenda Sluga
Publication Date:
11-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
IR scholars and Historians are increasingly in dialogue these days, trying to give meaning and substance to how we think about the international order, not least what it is. This conversation between Ayşe Zarakol (AZ), Heidi Tworek (HT), and Glenda Sluga (GS) engages Zarakol’s British Academy ‘Frontiers of Knowledge’ funded grant which aims to bring IR scholars and Historians together to think about disorder:Pathways from Disorder to Order: Where History Meets Theory.
Topic:
International Relations, History, Interview, and International Order
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

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. 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

19. 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

20. War Is a Choice, Not a Trap: The Right Lessons from Thucydides

Author:
Michael C. Desch
Publication Date:
07-2022
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Defense Priorities
Abstract:
A careful reading of the Greek Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War suggests that a U.S.-China war is hardly inevitable. Such a war is a choice, not a trap, and selecting the appropriate U.S. grand strategy is the way to avoid it. China faces important geographical and technological obstacles to expanding its hegemonic position in the region. Thucydides’ fundamental lessons for the contemporary United States in its rivalry with China is that democratic Athens erred when it sought primacy by expanding its empire during the Peloponnesian War; today we do not need to preserve a position of primacy in East Asia but can instead rest content with maintaining a balance of power. Despite China’s rise, the United States and its regional allies are in a strong position to maintain a regional balance of power that keeps a peace and serve U.S. interests in Asia.
Topic:
Conflict Prevention, Defense Policy, War, History, Alliance, and Geography
Political Geography:
China, Asia, North America, and United States of America