Lord Cromer's ‘Ancient and Modern Imperialism’: A Proconsular View of Empire

1972 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. E. Chamberlain
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Near East ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Gertrude Bell ◽  
The Times ◽  
Classical Association ◽  
Regius Professor

In 1909, two years after his retirement as British Consul-General in Egypt, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer — knighted in 1883, he was created Baron Cromer in 1892, viscount in 1899 and earl in 1901 — was invited to be the President of the Classical Association. It was a duty which he took very seriously and he prepared his Presidential address on “Ancient and Modern Imperialism” with immense care. In the course of this preparation he consulted many of the most distinguished scholars of the times, among them Gilbert Murray, then Professor of Greek at Oxford, J. B. Bury, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, F. J. Haverfield, the Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, Sir William Ramsay, the Regius Professor of Humanity at Aberdeen University, Edwyn R. Bevan, a Hellenistic scholar much interested in Indian questions, Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist and expert on the Near East and Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, one of the most famous journalists of his day and an authority on Russia. After he delivered the address in January 1910 Cromer entered into further correspondence with the Conservative leader, A. J. Balfour; John Buchan who, although he is probably best remembered today as a writer of adventure stories, had been Alfred Milner's private secretary in South Africa, 1901-03 and was subsequently to be Governor General of Canada, James Bryce, the author of the classic The Holy Roman Empire, a former cabinet minister and at this time British Ambassador in Washington; and Sir William Ridgeway, the President of the Royal Anthropological Institution.

Revaluations, III: James Bryce, “The American Commonwealth”

1958 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
H. G. Nicholas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Half Century ◽  
First Order ◽  
The Government ◽  
Contemporary United States ◽  
Regius Professor

Had Bryce died on his fiftieth birthday, 10 May 1888, he would have been known as the author of The Holy Roman Empire, as a distinguished Regius Professor of Civil Law and as a respectable but undistinguished Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. The record would have been impressive enough but the content of achievement would have been orthodox – such as might be paralleled by many an academic liberal, British or European. Within a few months, however, Bryce broke into a new field and established a reputation of quite another order, with the appearance in December of The American Commortwealth, The book was more than a notable study of American institutions; it marked the recognition by a European mind of the first order of the importance and interest of the government, politics and manner of life of the contemporary United States. Tocqueville had paid such a tribute, a half-century earlier, but his example had not been followed up. Moreover, penetrating as his study was, as an analysis and a prophecy, one element was lacking in his tribute – observation.

James Bryce and the Future1

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Ranulf Brock
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Distinguished Career

James Bryce (Viscount Bryce), who was elected President of the British Academy in 1913 and delivered his last presidential address in July 1917, had a distinguished career in letters and public life. His essay, ‘Holy Roman Empire’, established his reputation as a historian, and he also qualified as a barrister. In his address to the British Academy, ‘The Next Thirty Years’ (1917), Bryce outlined a strategy for higher education. Article by William Brock FBA.

scholarly journals Germany and the Muslim World

ICR Journal ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-522
Author(s):  
Christoph Marcinkowski
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
The Times

The relations between the world of Islam and Germany (or what was then the Holy Roman Empire) date back far into the Middle Ages and were particularly intense during the times of the Crusades. However, Muslims came to Germany in larger numbers as part of the diplomatic, military and economic relations between Germany and the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. German diplomats and travellers, in turn, visited the Ottoman lands as well as Safavid Persia from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively. In Muslim public opinion, Germany appears to have been always seen as the ‘friend of the Muslims’, a kind of ‘exception’ compared with other Western colonial powers which controlled large chunks of the Muslim homeland. Germany - so it was thought - had no colonial ambitions in the Dar al-Islam. Germany’s last emperor, William II (r. 1888-1918), during his famous 1898 speech in Damascus, declared himself the ‘eternal friend’ of the (then) 300 million Muslims in the world. 

Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Schmoeckel
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
German Nation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society

‘The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ cannot easily be explained in the terms of modern states. Deriving its authority from ancient history, it still upheld the aspiration to represent Christian society in secular affairs. Modern notions can hardly describe the structure and the ambition of the empire. The official denomination refers to essential features, which are used here as the fundamental descriptions. Like the four ‘notae’ of the Church in the tradition of the Nicaean creed, these terms may give access to an understanding of the mission and principle errands of the empire. The ‘empire’, therefore, assumes superiority over all other territories. It is ‘holy’ because it protects the one and only Church and ‘Roman’ due to its origin and its aspirations. Furthermore, ‘German nation’ indicates the slow integration into the system of European states.

Lordship and Administration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Interconnected Networks ◽  
Territorial States

The Holy Roman Empire, and especially Upper Germany, was notoriously politically fragmented in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. A common way to interpret this fragmentation has been to view late medieval lordships, particularly those ruled by princes, as incipient ‘territories’, or even ‘territorial states’. However, this over-simplifies and reifies structures of lordship and administration in this period, which consisted of shifting agglomerations of assets, revenues, and jurisdictions that were dispersed among and governed by interconnected networks of political actors. Seigneurial properties and rights had become separable, commoditized, and highly mobile by the later middle ages, and these included not only fiefs (Lehen) but also loan-based pledges (Pfandschaften) and offices, all of which could be sold, transferred, or even ruled or exercised by multiple parties at once, whether these were princes, nobles, or urban elites. This fostered intensive interaction between formally autonomous political actors, generating frictions and disputes.

Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Scholz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Human Mobility ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Free Movement ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
German Nation ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract: Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire tells the history of free movement in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, one of the most fractured landscapes in human history. The boundaries that divided its hundreds of territories make the Old Reich a uniquely valuable site for studying the ordering of movement. The focus is on safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating free movement and its restriction in the Old Reich. The book shows that attempts to escort travellers, issue letters of passage, or to criminalize the use of ‘forbidden’ roads served to transform rights of passage into excludable and fiscally exploitable goods. Mobile populations—from emperors to peasants—defied attempts to govern their mobility with actions ranging from formal protest to bloodshed. Newly designed maps show that restrictions upon moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century, but unevenly distributed along roads and rivers. In addition, the book unearths intense intellectual debates around the rulers’ right to interfere with freedom of movement. The Empire’s political order guaranteed extensive transit rights, but apologies of free movement and claims of protection could also mask aggressive attempts of territorial expansion. Drawing on sources discovered in more than twenty archives and covering the period between the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, the book offers a new perspective on the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

The Bounds of Empire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Lee
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Italian Nationalism ◽  
To Come

Scholars have long believed that ‘medieval’ universalism was supplanted by ‘Italian’ nationalism over the course of the fourteenth century. As this chapter demonstrates, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Although the humanists were often more concerned with the fate of Italy, or of individual cities, than of mankind as a whole, they did not waver in their belief that the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed universal dominion. Only at the very end of the Visconti Wars, when the Empire was seen to threaten the peace and liberty of the peninsula did ‘Italianness’ at last begin to come to the fore. Yet this is not to say that their universalism was unvarying. Depending on whether they chose to view it more as the successor of the ancient imperium Romanum or as an instrument of providence, they could paint it in idealistically ‘Roman’ colours, or endow it with a more ‘hegemonic’ tinge.

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