scholarly journals Greece, Uruguay and the British Informal Empire: From National Narratives to Global History

HISTOREIN ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sakis Gekas ◽  
Camila Acosta
Keyword(s):  
Living Standards ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global History ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Significant Cost ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Approach ◽  
Of Greece

This article adopts a comparative global history approach to reflect on the histories of Greece and Uruguay through the prism of British informal imperial rule. It compares and contrasts the role and impact of the British informal empire on Greece and Uruguay’s economic integration into the globalising economy of the late nineteenth century. The aim of this article is twofold: to reflect on each country’s past to gain a better understanding of them, and to integrate the histories of Greece and Uruguay into the history of globalisation. To achieve this, we examine the place of each country in the globalising economy and the reasons why each country “performed” differently; Uruguay experienced some of the highest living standards in the region and the world while Greece was mired in wars and aggressive nationalist policies that lead to significant territorial (and therefore market) expansion at significant cost to state finances – a history that was marked by economic failures such as the default of 1893. Even that crisis, however, produced different outcomes depending on each country’s place in the globalising British informal empire. This article shows two different paths of integration into a globalising economy shaped by the British financial and commercial order – an order often imposed with consent and occasionally through coercion.

Guestworkers of the World, Unite!

No Man's Land ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cindy Hahamovitch
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Immigrant Workers ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global History ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
To Come

This chapter explores the first phase of the global history of guestworker programs, which began in the late nineteenth century and lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Before that time, there were no guestworker programs because there were no immigration restrictions. Immigration restrictions led to guestworker programs as states sought to guarantee employers access to the immigrant workers that restrictionists were trying to deny them. Temporary immigration schemes—guestworker programs—were state-brokered compromises designed to placate employers' demands for labor and nativists' demands for restriction. Guestworker programs offered clear-cut distinctions between citizens and noncitizens, natives and aliens, insiders and outsiders, whites and nonwhites. This first phase in the history of guestworker programs thus reveals the essential features of the guestworker programs to come.

COLOURING OUTSIDE THE LINES: METHODS FOR A GLOBAL HISTORY OF EASTERN EURASIA 600–1350

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 27-63
Author(s):  
Naomi Standen
Keyword(s):  
Nation State ◽  
Global History ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
The North ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Liao Dynasty ◽  
Neoliberal Economics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Techniques ◽  
Working Out

ABSTRACTWe are still working out how to do global history, especially for pre-modern periods. How do we achieve the necessary shift in scale without falling back on standard definitions of categories like states, ethnicity, religion, urbanisation, when these are increasingly challenged at the specialist level? This article sets out an approach that could help pre-modern historians ‘going global’ to challenge claims that ‘there is no alternative’ to modern frameworks such as neoliberal economics, and especially the nation-state. Useful alternative techniques include thinking in layers rather than blocks, not seeking narrative arcs, and not using words like ‘China’. These methods are illustrated with analysis of three Liao dynasty (907–1125) cities and three comparators from neighbouring states to the north, south and east of the Liao. The intention is to disrupt the re-emergence in the new venue of global history of essentially national narratives, using the opportunities presented by pre-modern worlds before nation-states to free us from teleological concepts. This article argues that there is indeed an alternative to the putative precursors of modern nation-states, and offers a framework for doing without them.

Global History of Sexual Science, 1880-1960

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Birth Control ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Orgasm ◽  
Male Homosexuality ◽  
Global History ◽  
The World ◽  
Sexual Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Starting in the late nineteenth century, scholars and activists all over the world suddenly began to insist that understandings of sex be based on science. As Japanese and Indian sexologists influenced their German, British, and American counterparts and vice versa, sexuality, modernity, and imaginings of exotified “Others” became intimately linked. The first anthology to provide a worldwide perspective on the birth and development of the field, this book contends that actors outside of Europe—in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—became important interlocutors in debates on prostitution, birth control, and transvestism. Ideas circulated through intellectual exchange, travel, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. This book tackles specific issues, including the female orgasm and the criminalization of male homosexuality, to demonstrate how concepts and ideas introduced by sexual scientists gained currency throughout the modern world.

scholarly journals “Very old Chinese bells, a large number of which were melted down”

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-54
Author(s):  
Madeleine Herren
Keyword(s):  
Scrap Metal ◽  
Local History ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Global History ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Place Of Origin ◽  
History Approach ◽  
The 19Th Century

In the second half of the 19th century, Buddhist bells from Japan began to arrive in Switzerland. The fact that these were objects listed in the so-called ethnographic collections is not surprising and the history of collecting has been a subject of postcolonial research. However, remarkably, the travel route of these bells, some of which weighed over a ton, could not be documented. Until now, the way how the bells were imported into Switzerland  as unknown, and the problem of their provenance unsolved. This article argues that a global history approach provides new insights in two respects: The consideration of materiality allows a new  nderstanding of the objects, while the activities of local collectors, seen from a micro-global point of view, reveal the local imprints of the global. Within this rationale, a history of individual bells in the possession of individual art lovers and museums translates into a history of scrap metal trade, allows to consider the disposal of disliked objects at their place of origin, and opens up a global framing of local history. Using global history as a concept, the historicity of the global gains visibility as we look at the intersection of materiality and the local involvement of global networks. Ultimately, as we follow the journey of the bells, reinterpreting scrap metal into art has formed a striking way in which local history assimilates the global.

Land allocation and social transformation in inter-war Athens: a study in peripheral urbanization

Urban History ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 54-73
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Land Allocation ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
European Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
Mode Of Production

The inter-war years represented a turning point in Greek urban history as a capitalist mode of production rose to dominance. Yet despite its European location, Greece should be seen as forming part of a capitalist periphery: for a long period of its history, from the late nineteenth century to the mid-1960s, structural features of its economy and social development differed in important respects from those of most other European countries, and in regard to urban development, the history of Athens – the capital city of Greece – provided a pattern that was the reverse of the European experience. The basis of this article, in fact, is the claim that developments affecting inter-war Athens had features in common with a Latin American pattern of ‘peripheral’ urbanization. Amongst the features that will be illustrated in this review of Greek urbanization – based on a study of the history of Athens – will be economic ‘dualism’, the polarization of social classes, and at greater length, the nature of ‘popular’ land allocation.

Continental and Maritime Empires in an Age of Global Commerce

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 779-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Frank
Keyword(s):  
Port City ◽  
Global History ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Economic Relationships ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Global Commerce ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Informal Empire ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This article calls for the incorporation of Central Europe into the European and even the global history of the late imperial period through the investigation of the Habsburg Monarchy’s participation in global commerce. From 1719 until the empire’s dissolution in 1918, the Habsburg Monarchy strove to build up an informal empire based on maritime trade and the information it both engendered and required. The linchpin in this geography of imperial commerce—the point of connection between the continental empire and the rest of the world—was the port city of Trieste, on the empire’s Adriatic coastline. Thanks to Trieste and the ambition of its mercantile elite, the Habsburg Monarchy became not only a continental power, but also a maritime power. A cluster of politically and commercially engaged Habsburg subjects—consuls, merchants, engineers, bureaucrats—shared a vision of securing for the Habsburg Monarchy a global position that matched its dynasty’s prestige. Austria-Hungary’s ultimate inability to establish coercive economic relationships with non-European polities did not represent a rejection of the economic advantages or cultural privileges of imperialism, but a failed struggle to take advantage of them. From this perspective, the Habsburg Monarchy was a land caught not “between past and future,” as Robert Musil described it, but between terrestrial and maritime understandings of empire. Austria-Hungary could avow its lack of interest in formal colonial activity, but it could not escape the complications of a globalizing and colonizing age.

Writing the on-board: Meiji Japan in transit and transition

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Dusinberre
Keyword(s):  
National Identities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Global History ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
In Transit

AbstractThis article uses the history of Japanese emigrants to Hawai‘i as a lens through which to examine Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a single journey from Yokohama to Honolulu in 1885, it reconstructs the transit of two migrant labourers as they entered an ‘in-between’ state – between regimes of labour, between freedom and coercion, and between local and national identities. These migrant experiences challenge the teleological discourse of Japanese ‘progress’ that was so popular among political elites across the world in the 1880s, and that was embodied by the very materiality of the ship in which the labourers travelled. But the ‘in-between’ also speaks to the historiographical need to fill the silences that exist between archives across the Pacific Ocean, and thus to the wider challenges of writing global history.

The Wealth and Poverty of African States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Jerven
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Long Run ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Over Time ◽  
New Framework

A wealth of new data have been unearthed in recent years on African economic growth, wages, living standards, and taxes. In The Wealth and Poverty of African States, Morten Jerven shows how these findings transform our understanding of African economic development. He focuses on the central themes and questions that these state records can answer, tracing how African states evolved over time and the historical footprint they have left behind. By connecting the history of the colonial and postcolonial periods, he reveals an aggregate pattern of long-run growth from the late nineteenth century into the 1970s, giving way to widespread failure and decline in the 1980s, and then followed by two decades of expansion since the late 1990s. The result is a new framework for understanding the causes of poverty and wealth and the trajectories of economic growth and state development in Africa across the twentieth century.

Introduction: Writing the History of Terrorism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola Dietze
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global History ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes the most important trends in the writing of the history of terrorism since the beginning of terrorism research in the late nineteenth century up to today. It presents the origins of terrorism studies in Western social sciences and international relations, and it contextualizes the standard narrative of the history of terrorism put forward by the political scientists David C. Rapoport and Walter Laqueur. The chapter traces major developments in the history of terrorism in professional historiography in the Soviet Union or Russia as well as Europe and the United States during and after the Cold War, and especially since the attacks on September 11, 2001, and it outlines the results and effects of that historiography. On the basis of the evaluation of the scholarship available to date, the article maps out the rationale and the contours of the new global history of terrorism pursued in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism.

A History of Greece

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Grote
Keyword(s):  
History Of ◽  
Of Greece
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