scholarly journals Accounting for the Nation, Marginalizing the Empire: Taxable Capacity and Colonial Rule in the Early Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-472
Author(s):  
Eleanor Newbigin

Modern forms of national accounting are widely understood to have emerged within the context of rivalry between the western powers and attempts to manage the economic fallout of World War I. There has been little consideration of the way in which imperialism shaped debates and approaches to national accounting. Providing a close reading of Indian scholar K. T. Shah’s intervention in debates about how to measure the national economy of the 1920s, this article seeks to shed new light on innovative debates within Indian economics in this period. In so doing, it also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which debates about national economy were themselves a site of contestation, and reaffirmation, of colonial power structures in the interwar years.

1957 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Pierce Beaver

Nationalism in the Orient came into being as a reaction to Western and Japanese political, military, economic, and cultural imperialism. It still has this character in countries remaining under colonial rule. This nationalism is a phenomenon of the twentieth century, although arising somewhat earlier in certain countries. Anti-western movements before this time were manifestations of cultural resistance to European penetration rather than truly nationalistic expressions. The Boxer Uprising of 1900 in China is the last major example of such a cultural reaction. Thereafter love and pride of ancient culture became increasingly only one ingredient in patriotic loyalty and devotion. Intensified during World War I, this earlier type of nationalism reached its climax in Asia in the period of World War II, and came to fruition in the independence of eight nations in East and Southern Asia. Since then this earlier type of nationalism has been replaced by a religious statism, to which many Western nations had already succumbed and which had led Japan to disaster. The entire Orient is far too vast an area for treatment in a brief paper, and this survey is limited to a mere outline of the relation of nationalism to the Christian mission as illustrated by events in some countries of East Asia, where along with India the issues were most sharply raised.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.


Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.


Author(s):  
Eileen Ryan

Fierce opposition to the Italian invasion of Libya in October 1911 demonstrated the fallacies of Insabato’s predictions that a positive Italo-Sanusi relationship would lead to an easy victory. Nevertheless, Italian colonial officials continued to pursue an alliance with the Sanusiyya as a central objective. During World War I Italian and British officials toyed with the idea of exacerbating divisions within the Sanusi family, descendants of the man credited with founding the Sufi order. Rather than negotiating with the recognized head of the Sanusiyya, Ahmed al-Sharif, officials promoted the leadership of his younger cousin, Idris al-Sanusi. In the context of prolonged war, Idris’s negotiations with European officials met with widespread approval among Sanusi elites. For Italian colonial officials, the development of a power-sharing relationship with Idris meant minimizing the Catholic identity of Italian colonial rule, much to the dismay of missionaries and Catholic political interests in Rome.


Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.


Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


2012 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Koven

This essay examines an early twentieth-century Christian revolutionary habitus—a “technique of Christian living”—based on the conviction that everyday life was an essential site for reconciling the claims of individual and community, the material and the spiritual. The pacifist-feminist members of London’s first “people’s house,” Kingsley Hall, linked their vision of Jesus’s inclusive and unbounded love for humanity to their belief in the ethical imperative that all people take full moral responsibility for cleaning up their own dirt as part of their utopian program to bring social, economic, and political justice to the outcast in London, Britain, and its empire. In imagining what a reconstructed post-World War I Britain might become, Kingsley Hall’s cross-class band of workers used mundane practices to unmake and remake the late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic legacy they inherited.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1253-1271
Author(s):  
TALBOT C. IMLAY

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.


2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 689-695 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Meares

Objective: To draw attention to the absence of a concept of personal existence in standard psychiatric approaches to mental illness. Method: To sketch a shift in Western consciousness which occurred suddenly before World War I, involving a banishment of such notions as self and the awareness of inner life from the discourse of psychiatry, psychology and philosophy, leaving a fundamental vacancy at the heart of these disciplines. Results and Conclusion: The positivist–behaviourist hegemony of the twentieth century involved an implicit devaluation of that which is essentially human. The influence of this tradition brings with it the risk of an understanding and treatment of mental illness which leaves out issues at the core of humanity. I suggest we need to recover something of the manner of thinking of the great figures in psychological thought who were writing before the rise of behaviourism and who were contributing to the origins of dynamic psychiatry. A study of the phenomena of human consciousness was central to their work. Main figures mentioned include: Hughlings Jackson, the great neurologist who considered a career in philosophy; Pierre Janet, a philosopher turned psychiatrist; and William James, a physiologist who became a psychologist and philosopher.


Author(s):  
Geoffrey P. Nash

This chapter examines the development of Arab British fiction. It begins with an overview of the making of Arab British fiction, citing anti-colonialism, Orientalism, and hybridization as the main elements of Anglophone Arab writing up to the close of the twentieth century. It then considers British novels about Egypt in which paternalistic “genuine love” for, and “wise understanding” of, the politics of Egypt overlaid colonial attitudes. It also analyzes Arab British fiction in relation to the colonial experience Arabs received from British domination in Arab lands, which lasted from the end of World War I to the early 1950s. Finally, it discusses postcolonial crosscurrents in the works of Arab British women, along with the predicament of exile and Diasporic consciousness in male Arab British fiction.


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