History

The general argument is that the institution of the French Religious Protectorate, lasting roughly a century from the 1840s, and the missionary embrace of it had a major impact on the Catholic church in China and on Sino-foreign relations generally. The French state presented itself as the protector of all Catholics in China of whatever nationality, including Chinese. The claim was important to the French conception of its place among the powers that were then engaged in China. The foreign missionary bishops of the time believed that their work depended on secular protections. Yet the intervention of the French state was a source of aggravation for others: Chinese officials, ordinary Chinese, other countries with Catholic missionaries in China, and even the pope. Complications ensued. Amid increasing criticism within the Catholic camp in the early twentieth century, serious opposition to the status quo led to long-lasting divisions within the church. The book focuses especially on a reformist contingent of missionaries in the city of Tianjin. The struggle to free the Chinese Catholic church from its foreign identity and management and from indenture to France became intertwined with movement to change the methods of Catholic evangelism. An effort by the Vatican to make the Catholic church in China Chinese was launched from 1919 but was not sustained. When the Communists took power in 1949, the leadership of the church in China was still mostly foreign.

In his 1949 inaugural address, Harry Truman vowed to make the development of the underdeveloped world a central part of America’s national security agenda. This commitment became policy the following year with the creation of Point Four—the first U.S. aid program to the developing world. Point Four technicians taught classes on public health and irrigation, distributed chickens and vaccines, and helped build schools and water treatment facilities. They did all of it in the name of development, believing that economic progress would lead to social and political progress, which, in turn, would ensure that recipient nations would become prosperous democratic participants in the global community of nations. Point Four was a weapon in the fight against poverty, but it was also a weapon in the fight against the Soviet Union. Eisenhower reluctantly embraced it and Kennedy made it a central part of his international policy agenda, turning Truman’s program into the United States Agency for International Development. Point Four had proven itself to be a useful tool of diplomacy, and subsequent administrations claimed it for themselves. None seemed overly worried that it had not also proven itself to be a particularly useful tool of development. Using Ethiopia as a case study, Enlightened Aid: Development as Foreign Policy examines the struggle between foreign aid for diplomacy and foreign aid for development. Point Four’s creators believed that aid could be both at the same time. The history of U.S. aid to Ethiopia suggests otherwise.

Much recent work on the history of colonial medicine argues that medicine was the handmaiden of colonial power and of capitalism. Highlighting the tenuousness of colonial power, this book challenges this interpretation through careful investigation of the complicated relationship between medicine, politics, and capital in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. It includes chapters on midwifery training and female circumcision, on health and racial ideology, and on the quest to find the yellow fever virus in East Africa.

This book offers a historical analysis of violent conflict in north-east Africa through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book deals with a broad corridor of conflict incorporating the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands and their escarpment and lowland peripheries, stretching between the modern Eritrean Red Sea coast and the southern and eastern borderlands of present-day Ethiopia. Sudanese and Somali frontiers are also examined insofar as they can be related to ethnic, political and religious conflict, and the violent state- and empire-building processes which have defined the region since c.1800. The book argues that this modern warfare is not solely the product of modern political ‘failure’, but rather has its origins in a network of frontier zones which are both violent and creative. Such borderlands have given rise to markedly militarized political cultures, which are rooted in the violence of the nineteenth century and which in recent decades are manifest in authoritarian systems of government. The book thus traces the history of Amhara and Tigrayan imperialisms, to the nationalist and ethnic revolutions which represented the march of volatile borderlands on the hegemonic centre. This book suggests a new interpretation of Ethiopian and Eritrean history, arguing that the key to understanding the region's turbulent present lies in an appreciation of the role of the armed, and politically fertile, frontier in its deeper past.

Focusing the perspectives of gender scholarship on the study of empire, this is a volume of insights about the conduct of men as well as women. Bringing together disparate fields — politics, medicine, sexuality, childhood, religion, migration, and many more topics — this collection of essays demonstrates the richness of studying empire through the lens of gender. This is a more inclusive look at empire, which asks not only why the empire was dominated by men, but how that domination affected the conduct of imperial politics.

The Caucasus mountains rise at the intersection of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. A land of astonishing natural beauty and a dizzying array of ancient cultures, the Caucasus for most of the twentieth century lay inside the Soviet Union, before movements of national liberation created newly independent countries and sparked the devastating war in Chechnya. Combining riveting storytelling with insightful analysis, The Ghost of Freedom is the first general history of the modern Caucasus, stretching from the beginning of Russian imperial expansion to the triumph of nationalism after the Soviet Union's collapse. In evocative and accessible prose, Charles King reveals how tsars, highlanders, revolutionaries, and adventurers have contributed to the fascinating history of this borderland. Based on new research in multiple languages, the book shows how the struggle for freedom in the mountains, hills, and plains of the Caucasus has been a perennial theme over the last two hundred years—a struggle that has led to liberation as well as to new forms of captivity. The book sheds light on the origins of modern disputes, including the ongoing war in Chechnya, conflicts involving Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and debates over oil from the Caspian Sea and its impact on world markets. Ranging from the salons of Russian writers to the circus sideshows of America, from the offices of European diplomats to the villages of Muslim mountaineers, The Ghost of Freedom paints a rich portrait of one of the world's most turbulent and least understood regions.

Writing more than one hundred years ago, African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois speculated that the great dilemma of the twentieth century would be the problem of “the color line.” Nowhere was the dilemma of racial discrimination more entrenched—and more complex—than South Africa. This book looks at South Africa’s freedom struggle in the years surrounding African decolonization, and it uses the global apartheid debate to explore the way new nation-states changed the international community during the mid-twentieth century. At the highpoint of decolonization, South Africa’s problems shaped a transnational conversation about nationhood. Arguments about racial justice, which crested as Europe relinquished imperial control of Africa and the Caribbean, elided a deeper contest over the meaning of sovereignty, territoriality, and development. This contest was influenced—and had an impact on—the United States. Initially hopeful that liberal international institutions would amicably resolve the color line problem, Washington lost confidence as postcolonial diplomats took control of the U.N. agenda. The result was not only America’s abandonment of the universalisms that propelled decolonization, but also the unravelling of the liberal order that remade politics during the twentieth century. Based on research in African, American, and European archives, this book advances a bold new interpretation about African decolonization’s relationship to American power. The book promises to shed light on U.S. foreign relations with the Third World and recast our understanding of liberal internationalism’s fate after World War II.