The Gendered Identities of the ‘Lieutenant Nun’: Rethinking the Story of a Female Warrior in Early Modern Spain

This article analyses the story of Catalina de Erauso, a Spanish nun, who escaped from a convent at the beginning of the seventeenth century to begin a new life as a military warrior serving under the King of Spain in colonial Latin America. Her story reveals that notions of sex and gender at the time were surprisingly elastic and flexible, and often more associated with acts and behaviour than with physical bodies. By examining how the personage of the Lieutenant Nun has been treated in Spain and in Britain in the nineteenth century, this article also evaluates the extent to which certain pre‐modern ideas about sex and gender continued to survive two centuries later.     

Stuck in the past? British views on the Spanish army’s effectiveness and military culture, 1946–1983

After the Civil War the Spanish army functioned as a guardian of domestic order, but suffered from antiquated material and little financial means. These factors have been described as fundamental reasons for the army’s low potential wartime capability. This article draws on British and German sources to demonstrate how Spanish military culture prevented an augmented effectiveness and organisational change. Claiming that the army merely lacked funding and modern equipment, falls considerably short in grasping the complexities of military effectiveness and organisational cultures, and might prove fatal for current attempts to develop foreign armed forces in conflict or post-conflict zones.     

Conflicting nationalist traditions and immigration: the Basque case from 1950 to 1980

Immigration from the different regions in Spain to the Basque Country has traditionally opposed Basque and Spanish nationalism. This article provides an overview of the discourse of both nationalist traditions with respect to the intra‐regional migration movement of the second half of the twentieth century as well as of the resulting controversy. Whereas the Basque nationalist movement claims to have defended the need to integrate immigrants since the middle of the twentieth century, particularly through politics, Spanish nationalism claims that Basque nationalism has helped marginalise these same immigrants. A qualitative analysis is used to contrast this controversy by consulting the opinion of the Spanish immigrants who settled in the Basque Country and did not avail of the political integration proposed by Basque nationalism. The main conclusion is that these immigrants tend to avoid the heart of the matter of discord between both nationalist traditions, granting little importance to political and cultural elements though stressing their social integration in the Basque Country.     

Een‐Gonyama Gonyama!: Zulu Origins of the Boy Scout Movement and the Africanisation of Imperial Britain

British imperialists in the late 19th century denigrated non‐western cultures in rationalising the partition of Africa, but they also had to assimilate African values and traditions to make the imperial system work. The partisans of empire also romanticised non‐western cultures to convince the British public to support the imperial enterprise. In doing so, they introduced significant African and Asian elements into British popular culture, thereby refuting the assumption that the empire had little influence on the historical development of metropolitan Britain. Robert Baden‐Powell conceived of the Boy Scout movement as a cure for the social instability and potential military weakness of Edwardian Britain. Influenced profoundly by his service as a colonial military officer, Africa loomed large in Baden‐Powell's imagination. He was particularly taken with the Zulu. King Cetshwayo's crushing defeat of the British army at Isandhlawana in 1879 fixed their reputation as a ‘martial tribe’ in the imagination of the British public. Baden‐Powell romanticised the Zulus' discipline, and courage, and adapted many of their cultural institutions to scouting. Baden‐Powell's appropriation and reinterpretation of African culture illustrates the influence of subject peoples of the empire on metropolitan British politics and society. Scouting's romanticised trappings of African culture captured the imagination of tens of thousands of Edwardian boys and helped make Baden‐Powell's organisation the premier uniformed youth movement in Britain. Although confident that they were superior to their African subjects, British politicians, educators, and social reformers agreed with Baden‐Powell that ‘tribal’ Africans preserved many of the manly virtues that had been wiped by the industrial age.     

The Officer Corps in Greece (1912–1936)

Abstract

The formation of the modern Greek army coincides with the efforts of the newly established Greek nation of the nineteenth century to import and emulate western institutions. The persistence of most governments in creating an officer corps inspired by the professional standards of western armies may be viewed as part of a general effort to modernize the Greek state. This attempt has invariably been thwarted by traditional practices which prevented modernizing forces from taking firm root in Greek reality. The degree to which professionalism was attained in the army depended both on the quality of military education and on the degree of professional security enjoyed by officers. Lack of security made some officers willing clients of ambitious cliques and agents of disruption of both military and political order.     

Undercover Acolytes: Honganji,the Japanese Army,and Intelligence‐Gathering Operations

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the Japanese Army sought intelligence on the countries neighbouring Japan, the military made use of the Buddhist priesthood as a cover for intelligence gathering. In addition, elements of the Buddhist priesthood, in particular the Kyoto‐based Honganji sect, were happy to cooperate with the military in its intelligence gathering operations, either by allowing military officers to disguise themselves as monks or by having Buddhist monks gather military intelligence for the Japanese Army. This article examines the relationship between the Japanese Army and the Honganji sect following the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the activities of military officers who disguised themselves as Buddhist monks and the intelligence gathering activities of Buddhist monks, hoping to shed more light on the part that Japanese Buddhism played in Japan's imperial adventures.     

Homogenisation,nationalism and war: should we still read Ernest Gellner?*

ABSTRACT. Is homogenising nationalism a consequence of industrialisation? This view has been most forcefully and systematically advanced by Ernest Gellner. The article contests this approach by focusing instead on militarism and militarisation. It therefore identifies the key role of the mass army as presaging the era of mass nationalism and cultural homogenisation. Drawing on a range of authors from history, sociology and political science, the relationship is found to be reciprocal and symbiotic. A preliminary exploration on the possibility of early modern (or pre‐modern) forms of cultural homogenisation is preceded by a critical assessment of Gellner's interchangeable use of the terms culture, language and ethnicity.     

Im Dienste der Wissenschaft: Der Centro de estudios históricos und die Begründung eines liberalen Nationalbewußtseins in Spanien (1910–1936)

In the Name of Science: the Centro de Estudios Históricos and the shaping of a liberal national conciousness in Spain (1910–1936). – The Centro de Estudios Históricos was founded in 1910 by the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios. The main goal was to create a modern scientific system, but the researchers of the Centro also attempted to reinterpret some aspects of the Spanish Culture. We also try to have a new insight into how Spanish History and Culture was apprehended by those intelectuals in order to create the cultural basis of a new Spanish nationalism. The philological school of Menéndez Pidal or the historical school of Sánchez‐Albornoz played an active role in trying to find out the cultural roots of the Spanish Culture. They strived for providing the Spanish nation a cultural background.     

Inevitability,masculinity, and the American military tradition: the committee on the conduct of the war investigates the American Civil War

This essay examines the work of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, a joint select committee of investigation formed by Congress during the American Civil War. During its tenure in the 37^th and 38^th sessions of Congress, the Committee investigated almost every aspect of Union military operations; however, its principal concern was the examination of Union military defeats. Members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War were influenced by the notion of inevitable Union victory. As self‐made men who had achieved a degree of success in the emerging market economy of nineteenth‐century America, Committee members exemplified the period's predominate concept of masculinity. Also skeptical of military science and distrustful of the United States military academy at West Point, the Committee showed a marked preference for volunteer soldiers and officers throughout the war. Believing that West Point generals who endorsed strategic maneuver were cowardly and disloyal, Committee members were frequently critical of regular army officers in their investigations. Confusing the rhetoric of ‘hard war’ with military competence, the Committee's disdain for military education caused it to endorse incompetent military leadership and advocate mediocre generals for high command.     

The nation and the city: urban festivals and cultural mobilisation

This article attempts to map the relations between nation‐building processes in 19th‐century Europe and city cultures with their urban sociability. Three patterns are surveyed: [1] the modern‐national assimilation of medieval and early‐modern city cultures (sample case: Orléans and the French cult of Joan of Arc); [2] the modular replication across cities of urban festivals as cultural mobilizers (sample case: the spread of Floral Games festivals in Southern France and Northern Spain); [3] the reticulation of city‐based practices into a nationwide and nation‐building network (sample cases: the role of choral societies in German cultural nationalism; and its transnational knock‐on effect in the Baltic Provinces). By choosing the city as our social focus and placing it (or rather, its ideal‐type ‘Urbania’) alongside Gellner's ideal‐types of ‘Megalomania’ and ‘Ruritania’, we can avoid the finalism of studying regionalist and nationalist movements in the analytical framework of the post‐Versailles state system, and we gain a better understanding of the granulated, localized social basis of such movements and the translocally homogenizing role of culture.     

Colonial knowledge and the military in India, 1780–1860

Military officers and surgeons played a critical role in the collection, analysis and dissemination of knowledge in colonial India. Yet the little attention to date that has been directed at scholars with military backgrounds has treated their army service as incidental to, rather than formative of, their contributions to knowledge of India. While not all were actively engaged in intellectual pursuits, a surprisingly large number of orientalists came from the army. In some cases, this can be attributed to the military's need for specific information. But such strictly utilitarian motives were not always at work; boredom, curiosity and professional aspirations encouraged officers and surgeons to take up scientific, literary and artistic activities. Military service also offered opportunities for travel, as well as technical training, which furthered such pursuits. Consequently, much of the colonial knowledge that was generated in the first century of colonial rule was tinged with military values and it was sometimes framed in language redolent of the army. This would in turn help to popularise certain readings of Indian society, particularly those which stressed the medieval and fragmented nature of Indian society. The boundaries between fact and fiction became blurred as romanticism came to influence British aesthetic, historical and scientific encounters with India.     

Performing masculinity in the Moroccan theatre: virility,sexuality and Spanish military culture from the African War to the Civil War

This article explores constructions of Spanish masculinity in the first decades of the twentieth century, as Spain engaged in colonialist wars in Morocco; memoirs and literary texts by travellers, soldiers and military leaders such as Francisco Franco and José Millán Astray are read alongside theoretical works. I argue that, like European Orientalism, Spanish Orientalism projects onto Moroccan men an image of fanaticism, barbaric violence and ultra‐virile yet ‘polymorphously perverse’ sexuality. However, that particular image of masculinity is just as often re‐assimilated into a Spanish national identity that can never quite manage to assert its fundamental difference from North Africa.     

The limits of constructedness: memory and nationalism in the Arab Middle East

Abstract. This paper examines the influence of the historical trajectory on the creation of nationalism in the twentieth century Middle East. While it is not claimed here that everything was decided in preexisting history, the paper claims that history was important. If the story of Middle Eastern nationalism is the story of the tension between ethnic Pan‐Arabism and geographical state nationalism, the fact is both these phenomena are highly distinct in the sources used for this study, mainly seventeenth‐ and eighteenth century biographical dictionaries. The modern countries (Egypt, Syria) are in daily use, serving partially as terms of identity, non‐political though it might have been. A sense of Arabism existed as well, probably surviving from the early Islamic period. It had much to do with the survival of Arabic literary genres as the preoccupation of the intellectual elite. The Ottomans did their bit in this regard, by treating the Arabic‐speaking Middle East as substantially one unified unit, their provinces being superficial and unimportant barriers, mentally no less than physically. Thus, when the Ottoman Empire disappeared in the early twentieth century, the ambivalence between Arabism and state‐based nationalism already existed, and was by no means invented by colonialism. The later success of this or that version of nationalism could only be explained by reference to modern factors, but the repertory owed much to the cultural history of the region.     

‘Rocking the nation’: the popular culture of neo‐nationalism

The aim of this paper is to understand contemporary forms of nationalism in a socio‐political context in which neo‐nationalism has obtained a dominant role not just in politics but in public discourse and in the cultural field as well. It investigates the emergence of a particular music scene in the beginning of the 21^st century, shaped by rock bands and performers and supported by far‐right political actors, which has made the ‘national’ imagination emotionally and ideologically appealing to a considerable part of Hungarian society and first of all to young people.     

Early military industry in Denmark-Norway, 1500–1814

From the 16th to the 18th centuries, the Danish-Norwegian state sponsored the development of military industry essentially capable of covering all needs of the army and navy. Most establishments continued into the 20th century. This industry was concentrated in Denmark, despite the generally more favourable industrial environment in Norway. The military industry was, however, tightly integrated with the military itself and thus located within reach of the main base in Copenhagen. Despite the importance of private management and, increasingly, private ownership, the industry existed as a spinoff, dependent on the expertise of officers as well as the custom of the army and navy.     

The Subject of the King and a Mercantile Ideology in Early Modern Spain

This article proposes an interpretation of Lope de Vega's El Brasil Restituido (1625) that points to the political, military, and economic crises of Spain in Europe as the underlying themes of the representation of the retaking of the Brazilian colony of Bahía from the Dutch. The Spanish monarchy faced a major challenge to its European supremacy during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Not only was its military power being frontally contested at different sites of Europe, but its political and economic influence was rapidly deteriorating as well. One of the goals of the Count-Duke of Olivares, the powerful prime minister of Phillip IV, was to regain European leadership by mobilizing the mercantile segments of Spain. The play illustrates the confluence of two ideological systems during the transformation of Spanish feudal society. On the one hand, the dominant ideology of blood purity legitimizes the seigniorial structure of lineage; on the other hand, the representation of a new merchant as a good servant of the king discloses the important role that a mercantile enterprise and ethos had acquired in the formation of a subject to the monarchy.     

Patriotism,nationalism and modernity: the patriotic societies in the Danish conglomerate state, 1769–1814

ABSTRACT. This article investigates sixty‐three patriotic societies established in the Danish conglomerate state during the Age of Enlightenment, since they can throw light on the pre‐national collective identities. It explains how the patriotic societies had both an external function in regard to society and an internal function among their members. It analyses how the members comprehended patriotism and how they propagated ideas of solidarity and good citizenship to a wider audience. The patriotism of the eighteenth century is also compared with the nationalism of the nineteenth century, and the way they reflect two different understandings of core concepts such as state, language and folk culture is explained. However, both ideologies correlate to modernity, since they reflect the same dialectic tension in the relationship between the individual, the social community and the modern state.     

‘Faith in nation comes in different guises’1: modernist versions of religious nationalism2

ABSTRACT. Many scholars of nationalism seem to assume that religious nationalism is inherently and necessarily hostile to the secular nation‐state and to modern developments in general. The present paper challenges this conviction by drawing on recent debates among sociologists of religion, and it points to the existence of modernist versions of religious nationalism that acknowledge the legitimacy of the secular nation‐state and are generally sympathetic to modern developments. It examines one of the most prominent manifestations of this variety of nationalism, namely Protestant modernist nationalism. After a brief consideration of cases from nineteenth century Europe, the remainder of the paper focuses on the modernist religious nationalisms arising in post‐Cold War Eastern Europe, with a special focus on Slovenia.     

Anti‐nationalist nationalism: the paradox of Dutch national identity

Academic research on contemporary Dutch nationalism has mainly focused on its overt, xenophobic and chauvinist manifestations, which have become normalised since the early 2000s. As a result, less radical, more nuanced versions of Dutch nationalism have been overlooked. This article attempts to fill this gap by drawing attention to a peculiar self‐image among Dutch progressive intellectuals we call anti‐nationalist nationalism. Whereas this self‐image has had a long history as banal nationalism, it has come to be employed more explicitly for political positioning in an intensified nationalist climate. By dissecting it into its three constitutive dimensions – constructivism, lightness and essentialism – we show how this image of Dutchness is evoked precisely through the simultaneous rejection of ‘bad’ and enactment of ‘good’ nationalism. More generally, this article provides a nuanced understanding of contemporary Dutch nationalism. It also challenges prevalent assumptions in nationalism studies by showing that post‐modern anti‐nationalism does not exclude but rather constitutes essentialist nationalism.