A Metropolitan History of the Dutch Empire

This book analyses popular imperial culture in the Netherlands around the turn of the twentieth century. Despite the prominent role that the Dutch empire played in many (sometimes unexpected) aspects of civil society, and its significance in mobilising citizens to participate in causes both directly and indirectly related to the overseas colonies, most people seem to have remained indifferent towards imperial affairs. How, then, barring a few jingoist outbursts during the Aceh and Boer Wars, could the empire be simultaneously present and absent in metropolitan life? Drawing upon the works of scholars from fields as diverse as postcolonial studies and Habsburg imperialism, A Metropolitan History of the Dutch Empire argues that indifference was not an anomaly in the face of an all-permeating imperial culture, but rather the logical consequence of an imperial ideology that treated ‘the metropole’ and ‘the colony’ as entirely separate entities. The various groups and individuals who advocated for imperial or anti-imperial causes – such as missionaries, former colonials, Indonesian students, and boy scouts – had little unmediated contact with one another, and maintained their own distinctive modes of expression. They were all, however, part of what this book terms a ‘fragmented empire’, connected by a Dutch imperial ideology that was common to all of them, and whose central tenet – namely, that the colonies had no bearing on the mother country – they never questioned. What we should not do, the author concludes, is assume that the metropolitan invisibility of colonial culture rendered it powerless.

A Scientist in Love

Chapter 4 investigates Marie Stopes’s interracial, cross-gender relationships with Fujii Kenjirō and Sakurai Jōji through her three published Japanese-related works—A Journal from Japan (1910), Love-Letters of a Japanese (1911), and Plays of Old Japan: The ‘Nō’ (1913)—along with her unpublished transcripts and correspondence. It unveils an unconventional, stormy romance, a warm friendship, and literary collaboration. It considers the gender and racial complexities Stopes textually negotiated for the sake of her love and friendship against the rigid imperial ideology and the Victorian notion of femininity, which produced a distinct representation of humanized Japan as Britain’s masculine ally with feminine sensibility. It also discusses particular challenges Western women in a cross-racial relationship faced in Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan. The close examination of this underexplored phase of Stopes’s career reveals the incipience of her sexology and complicates the posthumous, more controversial aspect of her as eugenicist.

The great forum (c. AD 110–25)

This chapter summarizes evidence for the form, date, and use of the massive monumental forum complex that replaced London’s Flavian forum in the late first and early second century. Work probably started on this vast public building under Trajan, following soon after the new waterside quays were built, and after the successful conclusion of the first Dacian war. The complex was not completed, however, until the Hadrianic period, perhaps in preparation for Hadrian’s visit to Britain in AD 122. The forum’s role as the public focus of imperial ideology, and as a place for managing supplies and business affairs, is discussed.

Defending the House of Austria. Antineutralidad (attributed to Diego Saavedra Fajardo) and Habsburg political thought

A recently discovered political and legal treatise, Antineutralidad (1640), has been attracting attention in scholarship. This paper extensively scrutinizes the dating and authorship of the text. Sources found in several European archives have made it possible to establish with certainty the authorship of Diego Saavedra Fajardo and the precise period in which Antineutralidad was written (between January and March 1640). This determination is backed by a comparative analysis of early modern texts. Lastly, explorations based on themes and inner logic reveal highly sophisticated and superior planning, argumentation, structural cohesion and innovation, qualities which ennabled the author to create an overarching framework to defend the House of Austria, including key German and European political and legal themes, integrated and fused with both Spanish Habsburg and Christian universalist thinking. Keywords: Saavedra Fajardo, early modern political thought, Habsburg studies, imperial ideology, Spanish political philosophy.

Features of sociological analysis of religion of Russia during the imperial period of its history

The article deals with the features of sociological analysis of religion in Russia during the imperial period of its history. The national sociological tradition of study of religion as a socio-cultural phenomenon and a social institution, which was developed during this period, had its own unique and peculiar appearance and was just begun to revive again in post-Soviet Russia, is sharply different from the tradition that took place in the West. In this context, the appeal to the works of classics of Russian religious, socio-political thought, unfortunately undeservedly forgotten, is a very promising area of modern sociological research. When studying this issue, the author emphasizes the peculiarities of the historical development of Russian society and the state and the events that had a significant impact on the formation and development of scientific understanding of religion in Russia: reforms of Peter I, the elimination of patriarchy, the independence of the Russian Orthodox Church, its transformation into part of the bureaucratic state system created by Peter I, the beginning of a large-scale process of secularization of Russian society, the emergence of Westernism (the direction of the Russian social thought and political ideology focused on values of the Western European culture, which is negative to the idea of originality, an originality, uniqueness of ways of development of the Russian culture, combined with the aspiration of representatives of this trend to impose to the Russian nation of a form of the western culture, social practice and political system, rejecting the system of values and traditional foundations of activity of the Russian society), the imperial nature of the Russian statehood and official imperial ideology. The author analyzes the content of the Uvarov’s triad formula, which underlies the official imperial ideology, as well as the discussions that took place between representatives of Slavophilism and Westernism about understanding the historical path and fate of Russia, the historical role of Orthodoxy, the Russian Orthodox Church in the fate of the Russian people, Russian society and the state, as well as the whole world. In his opinion, this problem has remained relevant to the present, including in the framework of a sociological analysis of religion in post-Soviet Russia.

Oceans and Empire

This chapter explores how Woolf’s frequent writing about the ocean highlights both her opposition to and her enmeshment in the British Empire. Woolf scholarship has emphasized Woolf’s portrayal of oceans and empire as naturally antithetical, demonstrating the various ways in which Woolf’s oceans oppose patriarchal imperialism. The chapter argues that, in portraying this antithesis, Woolf’s writing subverts a central tenet of British imperial ideology during her lifetime: the belief that oceans and empire were naturally connected and that, because of the critical importance of maritime trade and sea power to British imperialism, the sea was in fact an agent of empire, foundational to British imperial identity. The chapter shows how Woolf’s subversion of this naturalized connection between oceans and empire both augmented her anti-imperial critique and, by amplifying her blind spots regarding race and the representation of non-European peoples, significantly constrained it.