Reading Beside the Lines: Marginalia,W.E. Gladstone,and the International History of the Bulgarian Horrors

This article explores the marginalia found in the personal volumes of William Ewart Gladstone in the context of the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–8). Diverging from previous narratives, which have lionised Gladstone for his apparently prophetic support for the independence of Christian subjects within the Ottoman Empire, this article argues that Gladstone read and understood little about modern South-Eastern European history, Bulgaria, or the Bulgarians before the publication of his influential political pamphlet, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. Gladstone's powerful interjection, based upon widespread, imagined categories of cultural understanding, directly influenced British foreign policy at a critical juncture with profound international consequences. Britain abandoned its traditional support of the Ottoman Empire - allowing Russia to wage a punitive war against its former ally - and instead supported the independence of the ‘Christian races’ of the Balkans along the budding principle of national self-determination. Gladstone's marginalia provide a unique linkage between studies of cultural languages of understanding, individual decision-making, the mechanisms of political power, and the construction of foreign policy. In certain cases, therefore, marginalia may help reveal the nexus between local histories of cultural production and major events in international history.     

Canadian Diplomacy and the 1982 Falklands War

As a case study, Canadian diplomacy during the Falklands War is emblematic of the confused, and at times contradictory, components of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's utopic and idealistic foreign policy. Canada's diplomatic actions during the war were based on four principles. The first, and most significant, was the safeguarding of what were deemed to be Canada's economic interests: chiefly nuclear exports. The second was Trudeau's ‘Third Option’ policy and the belief of ‘the vital importance of the North-South dynamic to Canada’. Third was the desire to distance Canadian foreign policy, economics, and military commitments from those of both the United States and Great Britain. Trudeau had mixed feelings about the Commonwealth and disliked both President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Lastly, during the war Canadian politicians and diplomats took the position of an ambiguous neutrality to protect and promote what they perceived to be Canadian interests. Many of the political and economic decisions made by Canada during the Falklands War were met by harsh criticism nationally and internationally in both public and political spheres.     

德国与中日甲午战争

1894—1895年中日甲午战争的爆发,给正处于外交转型中的德国提出了挑战也带来了机遇,德国一改过去只关注经济利益而避免卷入政治纷争的传统立场,开始介入远东的权力角逐,这也成为德国远东政策的一个重要分水岭。战争初期,德国表面采取超脱的中立姿态,多次拒绝清政府与英、俄等国的调停提议,实质是鼓励或偏袒日本的战争行为。由于担心战争可能对远东利益格局乃至欧洲地缘政治产生不利于德国的变化,且出于帝国主义追求海外殖民地的贪婪和防范东方文明崛起的"欧洲中心主义",在战争后期、中日谈判及"三国干涉还辽"期间,德国大幅度调整政策,积极推动并参与"三国干涉还辽"。尽管很难明确判定哪项动机发挥了决定性作用,但这不影响我们得出"德国是三国干涉还辽的积极推动者与重要参与者"的结论。研究这一案例,有助于认识此时期德国在远东的外交以及在战争中所扮演的角色。     

War is its Own Justification: What Americans Think about War

Abstract

The authors deal with the morality of war in American culture. They argue that a war ethics that was characteristic of the Cold War has given way to a warrior ethics as it has developed in post-Vietnam America, in print media, popular sentiment, and film. According to this warrior ethics, the citizenry's support for soldiers, regardless of the justice of war, is understood to create social solidarity. Wars are easily justified because, at bottom, war is understood to be its own justification. It unites a country. This popular conception of war both props up more high-minded, political rationales for war and undermines traditional just war ethics. The article uses the war in Iraq as a case study. It analyzes the Bush administration's defense of the war alongside similar accounts of the just war theory given by Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel.

"As a moral problem, war is ultimately a problem of policy, and therefore a problem of social morality." John Courtney Murray     

Kuwait,Political Violence and the Syrian War

Kuwait’s support of civilians in war-torn Syria has been commended by the international community. In addition, the Gulf state has joined US-led coalitions against the ‘Islamic State’ and affirmed many international agreements designed to choke off international assistance to militias operating in Syria. In 2015, Kuwait paid a heavy price for its involvement, becoming a victim of IS-affiliated terrorism. Whilst this suggests that Kuwait’s position on radical Islamist movements involved in the Syrian conflict is clear cut, this article will argue that Kuwait’s government has had to balance this official position against domestic support for elements of the radical Islamist opposition in Syria. These cross-cutting tensions were underscored by the US designation of the state as the ‘epicentre’ of private fund raising for militias in Syria. To explore these contradictions, this article will analyse Kuwait’s engagement with the Syrian war, its new anti-terror legislation and the tensions between the official and unofficial views on support for foreign militias. This analysis will highlight the challenges the Kuwait government has faced in addressing unofficial Kuwaiti engagement with the radical Islamist opposition in Syria.     

The Crimean War and its lessons for today

Orlando Figes's book The Crimean War: a history, based on English, Russian, French and Turkish sources, throws a new light on the Crimean War in a number of ways. It shows that the conflict was far from being a small war, but a landmark event. It was the only example of a war between Britain and Russia—and it led to enormous casualties. It also represented a stage in medical history, since most of the casualties were caused by disease. In Britain, it marked a new advance in the power of the press, which did much to fuel anti‐Russian sentiment. The war was also fuelled, on both sides, by religious and nationalist sentiment—but its most important cause related to the fate of the Ottoman Empire, then in decline, and fears that its collapse could result in a dangerous power vacuum. The war still has a significance for the present day because the collapse of communism has failed to resolve the antagonism between Russia and the West. Here, the book throws an important light on the development of British and western attitudes towards Russia, many of which were shaped in the nineteenth century. The book deserves attention, both here and in Russia.     

Stanner's War

The Pacific War and its aftermath were a turning point in William Edward Hanley Stanner's career. Until then, he had struggled to establish himself as a scholar and seemed destined to stay, like many other Australian scholars, within the orbit of British academia and its colonial empire. Almost immediately after war had been declared, Stanner returned to Australia, working in various capacities and, in May 1942, commanding the North Australia Observer Unit. In October 1943, he was transferred to the Australian Army's Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs (DORCA). Members of the Directorate saw themselves at the forefront of progressive reform in Australian colonial policy. Stanner opposed what he considered the grandiose plans for a post-war Papua New Guinea that were hatched by the DORCA ‘boys’, as they called themselves. By the end of the 1940s, however, control over policy was firmly in the hands of the civil bureaucracy and the new Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck. Any influence that may have accrued to either Stanner or to the idealism of the ‘boys’ in the Directorate was lost.     

Tyrtaeus and the Civilian Poet of the Crimean War

Recent scholarship has delved into the impact of newspaper press upon Crimean War poetry and highlighted the challenges of war representation facing non-combatant poets. The Crimean conflict (1854–56), this essay will show, was not only a ‘media war’ but also a ‘literary’ one, during which mid-Victorian commentators and poets consciously reworked an array of established traditions of war poetry, especially those of Tyrtaeus, the Greek martial poet of the seventh century, to negotiate the duties and artistic endeavours of the civilian poet. Tracing the construction of a ‘Tyrtaean’ tradition from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), it explores how a Romantic reworking of Tyrtaeus’ war songs served as a precedent for the civilian poets of the Crimean conflict, and how newspaper reports of the suffering of soldiers intensified a widespread scepticism of the civilian’s knowledge and bodily experience of war, which in turn instigated a reconfiguration of the ‘Tyrtaean’ poet. It argues that whilst the poetic efforts of Tom Taylor, Louisa Shore, and Alfred Tennyson to refashion the figure of the civilian manifest Crimean War poets’ anxiety about their non-combatant status and the use of poetry, they evacuated the ‘Tyrtaean mode’, a poetic mode intended to arouse people’s patriotic sentiment and exhort them to military action, forging a new image of war poet within their work marked by the civilian’s detachment from the spectacle of war and critical engagement with distant suffering.     

Ottoman Maps of the Empire’s Arab Provinces, 1850s to the First World War

In recent years the central Ottoman archive in Istanbul has been gradually releasing and computerizing thousands of maps stored in its collections. Our study introduces 137 maps already available to researchers that focus either directly or indirectly as part of broader presentations of imperial domains on the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces. These maps, which all date to between the middle of the nineteenth century and the First World War, differ widely in character, content and function. The maps are briefly described according to their content and set in their historical context.     

Gettysburg and the Great War

Fifty years after the conclusion of the Civil War, the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania faced the challenge of another war. From 1914 to 1917, the townspeople followed events in Europe closely, becoming vehement supporters of the American entry into the war by April 1917. In 1918, the Gettysburg Battlefield became inundated with American soldiers for the second time in its history, as doughboys trained for overseas service on the site of Pickett’s Charge. This paper considers the way the town of Gettysburg reacted to and mobilized for the First World War. It explores the notion of a ‘forgotten’ American war in a place that is perpetually haunted by war memories.     

From an Inconsequential Legacy to National Heritage: Revisiting the Conservation Approaches Towards the Ottoman Buildings in British Colonial Cyprus

Cyprus came under British control in 1878. At this time the Western-based orientalist mind-set, which saw ‘Ottoman’ as a synonym for stagnation was at its zenith, and this view was strategically disseminated as the European empires expanded. This also coincided with the evolution of the ethnic-nationalism that facilitated the formation of national heritage constructs. By analysing the case of Cyprus, a place which is entangled with British colonial governance as well as revolutionary Turkey, this paper aims to widen the discussion on the conservation trajectory of the Ottoman built heritage in post-Ottoman environments. Approaches to the restoration, interpretation, and management of Cyprus’s Ottoman buildings between 1878 and 1960 are dissected, assessed and categorized through British-era archival collections. The history of conservation practices is contextualised in changing political and professional perspectives, which reveal the role of Eurocentric paradigms of orientalism and nationalism in managing the perception and treatment processes of Ottoman-built heritage.     

美国内战时期南部邦联政府的财政政策

美国内战期间,南部邦联财政政策的主要目标是筹措资金。为达到此目的,南部邦联政府采取了征税和发行国库券与债券等措施。由于通过征税获得的财政收入微乎其微,南部邦联政府的财政资金便主要依靠发行国库券和债券。此举固然使得南部邦联政府短期获得一部分可支配资金,但由于南部邦联没有坚实雄厚的财政基础,又得不到外来有力的资金援助和支持,因此南部邦联财政政策并未实现既定目标,反而引发了通货膨胀和物价飞涨,加剧了南部邦联的民心涣散,最终加速了南部邦联的失败。     

Shrine diplomacy: Turkey’s quest for a post-Kemalist identity

ABSTRACT

Shrines are many things to different people: war memorials, places of pilgrimage and even venues for shared festivities. The Sultan Murad shrine complex in Kosovo was raised to commemorate the strategic Ottoman victory at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Over the past decade, however, it has assumed significance for Turkey as at no other time in the Republic’s history. Not only is it a key part of state visit itineraries, it also hosts dignitaries of various kinds, tourists and even schoolchildren from Turkey. Taking inspiration from historical and anthropological studies on shrines and memory, this paper dissects the significance of the Sultan Murad I shrine complex in Kosovo to contemporary Turkish foreign policy imaginaries. The shrine allows us to explore the wider motifs and symbols used in presenting the state’s attachment to physical spaces outside of its borders.     

Howard's War on Terror: A Conceivable,Communicable and Coercive Foreign Policy Discourse

This article explores the relationship between language and political possibility. It is argued that John Howard's language from 11 September 2001 to mid 2003 helped to enable the ‘War on Terror’ in an Australian context in three principal ways. Firstly, through contingent and contestable constructions of Australia, the world and their relationship, Howard's language made interventionism conceivable. Secondly, emphasising shared values, mateship and mutual sacrifice in war, Howard embedded his foreign policy discourse in the cultural terrain of ‘mainstream Australia’, specifically framing a foreign policy discourse that was communicable to ‘battlers’ and disillusioned ‘Hansonites’. Thirdly, positioning alternatives as ‘un-Australian’, Howard's language was particularly coercive, silencing potential oppositional voices.     

A shameful debate? A critical reassessment of the ‘Torossian debate’

ABSTRACT

For years now, a debate has been going on concerning the memoirs of Sarkis Torossian, published in 1947, and republished in a commented Turkish version in 2012. This latter publication sparked a debate among a number of Turkish historians, divided over the reliability or not of Torossian’s account of his participation in the Ottoman war effort as an officer, and his subsequent desertion following the realization that most of his family had fallen victim to deportation and mass murder. Some challenged Torossian’s narrative and evidence, based on inconsistencies and errors, coming to the conclusion that his story was largely fictionalized and his documents forged. Others, on the contrary, took Torossian’s defence, trying to reject or to justify these inconsistencies, and suggesting that this criticism was likely to stem from a nationalist, or even denialist stand regarding the genocide of the Armenians. The debate has to a large extent remained contained within Turkey, and its rare international repercussions, including an article by Taner Akçam in the Journal of Genocide Research, have more or less systematically sided with the ‘pro-Torossian’ side. The present article aims to set the record straight by showing that the criticism levelled against Torossian’s memoirs is extremely serious and solid, and that the debate has been corrupted by a gradual slipping of what should have remained a scholarly discussion into an uncontrolled conflict based on ad hominem attacks and political allegations. It is my contention that the authenticity or not of Torossian’s narrative and documents is of very secondary importance, compared to the much more problematic issue of the way in which ideological, political and moral concerns have ended up hijacking the debate. The ultimate relevance of the so-called Torossian debate may well be its capacity to reveal some crucial weaknesses of genocide research in a late Ottoman context.     

Between Defeat and Victory: Finnish memory culture of the Second World War

The article focuses on five essential phenomena in the Finnish memory culture relating to the three Finnish wars fought in 1939–1945, namely, (1) the memory of the fallen; (2) the influential work by author Väinö Linna; (3) the contested memory politics and veteran cultures in the 1960s and 1970s; (4) Germany and the Holocaust in the Finnish memory culture; and (5) the ‘neo-patriotic’ turn in the commemoration of the wars from the end of the 1980s onwards. The Finnish memory culture of 1939–1945 presents an interesting case of how the de facto lost wars against the Soviet Union have been shaped into cornerstones of national history and identity that continue to play a significant role even today. Using the growing research literature on the various aspects of the Finnish war memories and memory politics, the article aims, first, at outlining a synthesis of the memory culture's central features and, second, at challenging the common contemporary conception, according to which the Finnish war veterans would have been forgotten, neglected and even disgraced during the post-war decades, to be ‘rehabilitated’ only from the end of the 1980s onwards.     

Neutrality and submarine warfare: Germany and Spain during the First World War

The Spanish government maintained official neutrality during the Great War because deviating from neutrality would supposedly endanger the nation’s already limited political and social stability and even threaten the survival of the monarchic regime. In August 1914 there were no direct Spanish interests in the conflict and no benefit to be obtained from any intervention by Spain, which was very weak in military terms and in the international arena. Nevertheless, Spain’s geographic location and its commercial dependence on the Entente made it especially vulnerable to the pressures of France and Great Britain, both of which attempted to take advantage of the services that Spain could offer in the economic war; Spain’s importance increased with the prolongation of the fight. Germany, in contrast, could not hope for more from Spain than its strict neutrality because of its highly important political and economic ties with the Entente and its defencelessness before England and France, from which Germany could not protect it. Because Germany could not wait for Spain’s participation next to her, the primary target of German diplomacy had to be to resist the influence of the Entente and maintain Spanish neutrality while preventing Spain from inclining towards favouring the Allies. To achieve this objective, Berlin fed, with vague promises, the idea that a Spanish collaboration would be rewarded with the annexation of some territories. On this basis, we can begin to study German–Spanish relations during the Great War, which came to be determined by incidents that were caused by the submarine war. The dependence on the Entente also helps to explain the last evolution of the relations between Germany and Spain, which could follow no other policy than that imposed by the final development of the war: taking up a position near the winners and distancing from, and nearly rupturing ties with, Germany. Using both Spanish and German documentation allows us to reach different conclusions that aim to contribute substantially to understanding the relationship between Spain and Germany during the Great War.     

Russia,Turkey, and the Problem of the Black Sea Straits in 1898–1908

The article deals with the main geopolitical problem in Russian—Ottoman relations at the turn of the twentieth century. Using ample archive sources the author shows the course of Russia’s struggle for influence in the straits. He concludes that the Ottoman policy was more flexible and the Turks proved able to assert their interests in the region. At the same time the straits question did not become the cause of any serious escalation between the two powers.     

Daylight as a Design Strategy in the Ottoman Mosques of Tunisia and Algeria

This study investigates daylighting design in Tunisian and Algerian mosques from the Ottoman era. It aims to constitute a daylight-based architectural design knowledge which might serve the built heritage preservation as well as supports contemporary environmentally friendly mosques’ and building design. An intensive literature review and a field work research have been undertaken in Tunisia and Algeria in order to survey daylighting devices in the Ottoman mosques era. Nine Tunisian and 14 Algerian mosques, from the Ottoman era, constitute the study corpus. First, an inventory of architectural components and their associated daylighting strategies was carried out. This collected data is then examined by means of a building conformation lecture based on typological, topological, and morphological analysis. This research reveals the existence of an interrelated set of daylighting devices and structural models governing rules in the Ottoman mosque model, site conditions, and previous local architectural styles.