History

The Greek Christians expelled from Anatolia between 1912 and 1924 often spoke about earlier times when they ‘lived well with the Turks’. They yearned for the days when they worked and drank coffee together, participated in each other’s festivals, and even revered the same saints and miracle-working shrines. Historians have never given serious regard to such oral traditions, given the refugees had been victims of horrific ‘ethnic’ violence that appeared to reflect deep pre-existing animosities. This book considers the rationality of such unlikely nostalgic traditions, which happen to be common among refugees from dismembered multi-ethnic societies. It claims that intercommunality, a mode of everyday living based on the accommodation of cultural difference, normally played a stabilizing function within societies like the Ottoman Empire. Along with a genuine longing for lost homelands, the refugees were nostalgic for moral environments in which religious communities claimed to have lived in accordance with their respective religious and ethical values. Although these traditions depicted worlds that were implausibly pristine, the intention was to counter the dominant but spurious national narrative, which reviled Turks as irredeemable barbarians and dismissed these refugee histories of coexistence as pure fantasy. Drawing largely from an oral archive containing 5,000 interviews, the book investigates the mentalities, cosmologies and value systems of these ordinary Anatolians, and shows how their popular perspectives pose serious challenges to the historiography. The book also examines the role of political violence in destroying this Ottoman society, and the way it effectively transformed these Anatolians into Greeks and Turks.

This book tells the story of Jewish survivors who pioneered Holocaust research in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Just liberated from Nazi terror, amidst political turmoil and privation, physically exhausted and traumatized women and men founded historical commissions and documentation centers throughout Europe to chronicle the Nazi Final Solution. By comparing the cases of France, Poland, and the Displaced Persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy, the book explores the motivations and methods which guided survivors in compiling archives of tens of thousands of Nazi documents, eyewitness accounts and questionnaires, ghetto and camp literature, wartime diaries, and artifacts, and in publishing dozens of historical works. Its comparative method illuminates the transnational dimension of Jewish Holocaust research and its place within the larger context of twentieth-century Jewish historiography. It argues that these documentation initiatives not only perpetuated certain Jewish cultural traditions of history writing and memory that predated the Holocaust but that collecting, recording, and researching the Jewish catastrophe had a vital function in survivors’ posttraumatic recovery. In their use of victim and perpetrator sources and social-science-oriented research methods and their focus on the history of the everyday life and death of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Jewish historical commissions and documentation centers anticipated methodological questions and debates over the use of victim testimony and the writing of history “from below” which entered academic Holocaust historiography only toward the end of the twentieth century. It also takes issue with the widespread misconception that all Holocaust testimony was belated, due to survivors’ decades-long silence, and that systematic Holocaust historiography began only with the 1960s.

This book is a collection of essays that unwraps the complex world of consumption under communism in postwar Eastern Europe. Its editors have carefully compiled, analyzed, and contextualized new work by both American and European scholars writing from variety of disciplinary perspectives. The result is a fresh look at everyday life under communism that explores the ways people shopped, ate, drank, smoked, cooked, acquired, exchanged and assessed goods. These phenomena, the editors argue, were central to the way that communism was lived and experienced in its widely varied contexts in the region. Consumption pervaded everyday life far more than most other political and social phenomena. From design, to production, to retail sales and black market exchange, the book follows communist goods from producer to consumer, tracing their circuitous routes. In the communist world this journey was rife with its own meanings, shaped by the special political and social circumstances of these societies. In examining consumption behind the Iron Curtain, this volume builds on a new field of study. It brings dimension and nuance to our understanding of the communist period and a new perspective to our current analyses of consumerism.

What role did the courts play in the demise of Germany's first democracy and Hitler's rise to power? This book challenges the orthodox interpretation of Weimar political justice. It argues that an exclusive focus on reactionary judges and a preoccupation with number-crunching verdicts has obscured precisely that aspect of trials most fascinating to contemporary observers: its drama. Drawing on untapped sources and material previously inaccessible in English, it shows how an innovative group of party lawyers transformed dry legal proceedings into spectacular ideological clashes. Supported by powerful party legal offices (hitherto almost entirely disregarded), they developed a sophisticated repertoire of techniques at the intersection of criminal law, politics, and public relations. Harnessing the emotional appeal of tens of thousands of trials, Communists and (emulating them) National Socialist institutionalized party legal aid in order to build their ideological communities. Defendants turned into martyrs, trials into performances of ideological self-sacrifice, and the courtroom into a ‘revolutionary stage’, as one prominent party lawyer put it. This political justice as ‘revolutionary stage’ powerfully impacted Weimar political culture. This book's argument about the theatricality of justice helps explain Weimar's demise but transcends interwar Germany. Trials were compelling not because they offered instruction about the revolutionary struggle, but because in a sense they were the revolutionary struggle, admittedly for the time being played out in the grit-your-teeth, clench-your-fist mode of the theatrical ‘as if’. The ideological struggle, their message ran, left no room for fairness, no possibility of a ‘neutral platform’: justice was unattainable until the Republic was destroyed.

The financial humbling of a great power in any age demands explanation. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) Louis XIV's France had to fight way beyond its borders and the costs of war rose to unprecedented heights. With royal income falling as economic activity slowed down, the widening gap between revenue and expenditure led the government into a series of desperate expedients. Ever-larger quantities of credit, often obtained through fairly novel and poorly-understood financial instruments, were combined with ill-advised monetary manipulations. Moreover, through poor ministerial management the system of earmarking revenues for spending descended into chaos. All this forced up the cost of loans, foreign exchange, and military logistics as government contractors and bankers built the mounting risks into the price of their contracts and sought to profit from the situation. There was already a problem with controlling royal contractors, who ran the entire financial machinery, but this only grew worse, not least because the government further indemnified and bailed out men deemed too essential to fail. In some cases entrepreneurs even managed to penetrate the corridors of the ministries, either as heads of royal agencies or even as junior ministers. This added up to nothing less than an early military-industrial complex. As state debt climbed to astronomical levels and financial instruments collapsed in value France's chances of remaining the superpower of the age shrank. The military decline of a great power often goes hand-in-hand with its financial decline, but rarely so dramatically as in early eighteenth-century France.

This book is a discussion of how modern Poland was created by the application and manipulation of myths about its past, and the symbols that represented them. Its focus is on the era 1914–2008, and the central actor is the charismatic Józef Piłsudski. Piłsudski came to represent a disposition regarding the meaning of Polish history which eventually penetrated virtually the whole of modern Polish society. The work is constructed by the analysis of memoirs, documents, coins, stamps, films, maps, monuments, and many other features, making it a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional volume It is written with verve and passion; its chapters explain the meaning of Polish history from a new perspective.

What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. This book highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, this study situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. It argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors—Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others—this book emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.

This book is about interwar physical culture as a set of popular practices and as a field of ideas. It takes as its central subject the imagined failure of French manhood that was mapped out in this realm by physical culturist ‘experts’, often physicians. Their diagnosis of intertwined crises in masculine virility and national vitality was surprisingly widely shared across popular and political culture. Theirs was a hygienist and sometimes overtly eugenicist conception of physical exercise and national strength that suggests the persistence of fin-de-siècle preoccupations with biological degeneration and regeneration well beyond the First World War. The book traces these patterns of thinking about the male body across a seemingly disparate set of voices, all of whom argued that the physical training of men offered a salve to France's real and imagined woes. In interrogating a range of sources, from get-fit manuals and the popular press, to the mobilizing campaigns of popular politics on left and right and official debates about physical education, the book illustrates how the realm of male physical culture could be presented as an instrument of social hygiene as well as an instrument of political struggle. In highlighting the purchase of these concerns in the interwar years, the book ultimately sheds light on the roots of Vichy's project for masculine regeneration after the military defeat of 1940.

This book provides a new history of parliamentary conservatism and the extreme right in France during the successive crises of the years from 1870 to 1945. The book charts royalist opposition to the newly established Republic, the emergence of the nationalist extreme right in the 1890s, and the parallel development of republican conservatism. It moves on to the hitherto unstudied story of conservatism during the Great War, and then to the Right’s victory in the 1919 elections. The book charts the crisis of parliamentary conservatism in the interwar years, and explores the Right’s response to the rise of Fascism and Communism. It concludes by placing the Vichy regime, which governed France under the German Occupation, in the context of the history of conservative politics. This history is related to the struggle of those who saw themselves as ‘elites’ to preserve their leadership in the ‘age of the masses’. The book shows that conservatives of all stripes shared a common culture (notably including organicism and crowd theory), but that different factions used these ideas in different ways, for different purposes. Whereas previous studies have been primarily concerned to ‘categorize’ conservatives groups, for example as ‘fascist’, ‘liberal’, or ‘modern’, this study examines the way in which competing groups used such terms in complex struggles amongst themselves and with the left. The study is based on considerable archival research, as well as on knowledge of the vast body of recently published research in English and French.

Shanghai Sanctuary assesses the plight of the European Jewish refugees who fled to Japanese-occupied China during the Second World War. It is the first major study to examine the Nationalist government’s policy towards the Jewish refugee issue and the most thorough and subtle analysis of Japanese diplomacy concerning this matter. The story of the wartime “Shanghai Jews” is not merely a side-bar to the history of modern China or modern Japan. It is a story that illuminates how the “Jewish issue” complicated the relationships among China, Japan, Germany, and the United States before and during World War Two. Both the Chinese Nationalist government and the Japanese occupation authorities thought very carefully about the Shanghai Jews and how they could be used to win international financial and political support in their war against one another. Thus, the Holocaust had complicated repercussions that extended far beyond Europe. The diaspora of Jews to East Asia in the era of the Second World War is a rich and complex story that deserves our attention as well. Firmly grounded in archival sources from the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, Britain, and Israel, Shanghai Sanctuary is comparative and transnational in scope and makes an important contribution to the international history of the period. (213 words)