The Intellectual Construction of the Fifth Empire: Legitimating the Braganza Restoration

Summary

Under the Iberian Union, the Portuguese discourse on empire had been both relatively muted and intertwined with Spanish debates. The Braganza Restoration presented a radical break from this tradition. A new network of preachers, theologians and jurists from the four corners of the Portuguese empire made the case for the recovery of independence. Instead of buttressing a common moral universe and the old pan-Iberian network of higher learning, the new network focused its energies on the establishment of the particularity of the Portuguese imperial and missionary enterprises. The contribution explores the importance of networks in establishing intellectual independence and the strategies employed by the partisans of the newly independent Portugal. It was no longer good enough for Portugal to be the other Iberian empire; her very raison d'être was now to become the only Iberian empire.     

Empire and ethnicity†

ABSTRACT. Historians and social scientists have typically assumed a conflictual or exploitative relationship between empire and ethnicity. On the one hand, empire might be seen (as perhaps Ernest Gellner saw it in Nations and Nationalism) as a superstructure of coercion to which a group of ethnic units were subject. On the other (according to an influential view), empire fabricated ethnicities (tribes or castes) to divide and rule. This article suggests that both of these views are too crude. In the British case at least (and in the modern history of empire, no generalisation that excludes the British case has much value), ‘imperial ethnicity’ was a much more subtle phenomenon. It existed ‘at home’ as one element in a more complex identity. It was a powerful force in British settler societies, where an indigenous identity could not be imagined. And, perhaps surprisingly, it was deeply attractive to some colonial elites in Asia and Africa – at least for a time.     

Colonial Emulation,Competition and Opportunism: A Twentieth-Century Spanish Perspective on the British and French ‘Empire Projects’

ABSTRACT

Through the views of Francisco Franco’s major adviser on African Affairs, this paper reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the long-standing interaction between competing ‘imperial projects’ in the twentieth century. Tomás García Figueras’s (1892–1981) speeches, writings and personal archive provide a long-term and well-informed Spanish perspective on the British and French colonial systems, offering us a model to make sense of three major aspects of inter-imperial relations: emulation, competition, and opportunism. Through this insight into the dynamics of imperial interaction, and the ever-evolving dialogues and exchanges between ‘empire projects’ from around the European peninsula, this article provides some key elements to answer the long-standing question of what motivates empires to expand, adapt, or contract. It illuminates the ways in which officials engaged in the day-to-day running of European empires looked at each other, in search for examples and counter-examples, emulation or, simply, opportunities. Crucially, it illustrates how ‘empire projects’ of varying clout interacted with each other, within the limits of realpolitik but well beyond linguistic obstacles, as the multilingual material assembled in the García Figueras archive clearly attests. It also charts, among national and socio-cultural circles hitherto neglected, the evolution in thinking about colonialism and decolonisation throughout the twentieth century.     

英国保守党政府的“有形帝国”政策（1874—1880）

1874—1880年英国保守党政府执政期间,为提高英国国际地位,提出了建立“有形帝国”的政策。这一政策的理论基础是迪尔克的种族帝国思想,现实动因则是随着欧洲民族国家的建立,大英帝国的霸权面临严峻的挑战。从实践方面看,重建“有形帝国”政策主要表现在保卫并扩大帝国的版图,其根本目的在于增强英国与欧洲大陆各国竞争的实力,力挽大英帝国霸权的颓势。     

Practising the British way of famine: technologies of relief, 1770–1985

In the past 200 years Britons have responded to famines in particular ways. This article explores these particularities by focusing not simply on the remarkably unchanging humanitarian representation of the victims of famine but on the changing technologies through which relief was collected and distributed. It shows how technologies of famine relief were created from the need to govern colonial populations rather than from the development of new sentimentality and ethics. The authors seek to demonstrate that, despite the changing nature of these technologies, the forms of expertise that sustained them, a set of routines and practices developed that allowed the performance of a British way with famine that slowly extended from the empire to the world. In the wake of two world wars these forms of expertise were extended to Europe and became internationalised through the work of voluntary organisations. After the formal end of Empire, these technologies were retooled and used to assist places in postcolonial Africa. They also helped create a new type of global citizen, informed of technologies of relief and invested in the Global South through the rise of a humanitarian culture.     

Regional Research on the Inca

The past two decades have witnessed an increase in the amount of regional research on the Inca state of Andean South America. This work has revolutionized our view of the Inca empire and has provided a comparative database for understanding the nature of imperial expansion in premodern empires. This paper places this work in historical context. It then describes the way in which a regional approach has complemented other research to give us a fuller picture of Inca imperial strategies. The Inca state used a variety of strategies to incorporate its provinces into a viable political entity. Regional archaeological approaches provide the best means of defining those strategies, giving us a more nuanced view of premodern states such as the Inca.     

Ancient Athens: democracy and empire1

This paper looks at the principal features of the Athenian democracy in the fifth century BC and of the Delian League, the fifth-century alliance which became an Athenian empire, and asks how it was that at the same time the Athenians built up an unprecedented degree of democracy in their internal affairs and an unprecedented degree of rule over other Greek states.     

6. WHAT'S IN A CONCEPT? THE KINETIC EMPIRE OF THE COMANCHES

This essay revisits the main themes and arguments put forward in The Comanche Empire: indigenous agency; spatial reorientation in the writing of colonial histories; the composition of the Comanche empire and its impact on the history of North America. It also responds to a number of specific issues raised by the roundtable participants: differences and similarities between indigenous and Euro‐colonial power regimes; balancing of culture‐specific frameworks with broad‐gauge political economic analysis; linkages between indigenous agency and indigenous sovereignty in colonial encounters; the question of periodization in writing Native American and colonial histories. Finally, the essay points to new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and comparing nonterritorial nomadic empires by introducing the concept of “kinetic empire,” which refers to a flexible imperial organization that revolves around a set of mobile activities and relies on selective nodal control of key resources.     

Hubris and melancholy in multinational states

ABSTRACT. The article sets out to explore the rather different roles that hubris and melancholy can play in the relations between majority and minority nationalities within multinational states. In the case of majority‐type nationalities, there is a sense of being a Staatsvolk, a feeling reinforced by linguistic, cultural, geographical, and political characteristics associated with the larger nation‐state. There may also be a sense of pride caught up with the larger identity between the nation‐state and the empire with which it is associated. For their part, minority‐type nationalities have been more prone to express their national sentiment in melancholic terms. Hence a tendency to dwell on lost battles of the past, on suppressed rebellions, on recurrent threats of assimilation and linguistic extinction. There may be elements both of hubris and of melancholy to national sentiment in multinational states, and the dialectic between the two colours their overall political development.     

Those Who Dared: A Reappraisal of Britain's Special Air Service, 1950–80

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United Kingdom embarked upon a policy of rapid demobilisation, reducing its armed forces from a wartime high of 5 million in 1945 to just 375,000 by 1963. Yet in these same years it faced conflict in Palestine, Malaya, Korea, Kenya, Cyprus, Oman, Aden, and Egypt, to name just a few trouble spots where British soldiers were sent. To account for the shortfall between the availability of soldiers and the need, the armed forces turned in part to Special Force units, particularly the army's Special Air Service (SAS). As British formal control receded throughout the world, so the SAS became ever more active. In so doing, it played an integral - if often misunderstood - role in contemporary British history. This paper examines the rebirth of the Special Air Service in post-war Britain and re-evaluates its role from 1950–80.     

Leaders in Thinking,Laggards in Attention? Bureaucratic Engagement in International Arenas

Frameworks that examine policy subsystems, networks, and coalitions view bureaucracies as part of the mix of policy actors that advocate policy positions in both domestic and international arenas. However, few examine bureaucracies as independent actors and how they exercise influence distinct from other pressure groups. The ways in which domestic bureaucracies engage in the international environment is woefully under examined, with only a few studies examining how domestic bureaucrats affect decision making in the international arena. However, it is not unreasonable to posit that bureaucratic engagement in the international arena may have political implications in the domestic sphere. Building on examinations of bureaucratic autonomy, this research queries the ways in which domestic bureaucracies can interact in the international arena to "change agendas and preferences" of domestic political actors. While it finds that attention to developing an international reputation can enhance political leverage at home, it may do so at a cost to domestic programs if insufficient attention is given to domestic aspects of the organization's mission. Nevertheless, as attention lurches from one arena to another, policy change is facilitated by the politically powerful resources of an international reputation in expertise, active engagement in the international policy community, and broadly based support for programmatic change.     

Colonial rule,colonial repression and war crimes in the Italian colonies

A strange silence has long reigned in the public memory as well as in Italian historical studies regarding possible crimes committed by Italy in its colonial territories. The aim of this article is to reflect on the reasons for this silence through an examination of the major historiographical questions and a review of the few studies available on the subject. The historiographical use of the judicial category of ‘crimes’ or ‘war crimes’ should not be taken for granted, above all in examining the history of the colonial experience. The most important authors have ignored the risk that the sensationalistic use of the category ‘crime’ – in itself an extraordinary and exceptional event – can make one forget the weight of the ordinary running of a colonial power. With these precautions, the article offers a list of the principal episodes historians now unanimously define as crimes. These episodes eliminate any possibility of taking refuge in the self-absolving and vague appeals to stereotypes of Italians as ‘good people’. The article concludes by defining precisely the triple order of silences that together produced the general silence that the author considers an obstacle and a post-colonial stain on the memory of colonial Italy.     

论亚当·斯密的帝国思想

亚当·斯密的帝国理论的核心是其殖民地自由贸易理论.他认为,殖民地是母国的负担,对母国没有益处,主张放弃对殖民地的贸易垄断;改革英国对殖民地的统治政策,让殖民地按其人口比例选派代表参加帝国议会.     

State,Parliament and Empire in the Mid 18th Century: Hudson's Bay and the Parliamentary Enquiry of 1749

In 1749, the house of commons appointed a committee of enquiry into the lands and trade of Hudson's Bay. This was the climax to nearly 20 years' work by the Ulsterman, Arthur Dobbs, which focused first on renewed search for a northwest passage and later widened to attempt to expand trade and settlement by challenging the monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company. Dobbs's Irish patriotism, linked by support for union with Britain with his remarkably expansive vision of British empire, became concentrated on this campaign with a zeal and tenacity which overrode contrary evidence based on experience. Propaganda pamphlets, mobilisation of compatriots, merchant and political contacts, briefs for MPs, marshalling of evidence and witnesses for parliamentary committees, 30 petitions from a variety of places, organised by Liverpool and Bristol merchants who took the lead in the final campaign: all were used to attempt to influence parliament. This was an impressive mid-century effort to promote British commerce and manufactures, actively supported by the parliamentary opposition which was reviving under Leicester House leadership. Yet, while this campaign could shape the report of the committee of enquiry, the House itself was not so easily moved, especially when public expenditure was likely to be involved. A motion arising from the report was decisively defeated. The impressive campaign came to nought. While it indeed reveals powerful visions of commercial and imperial expansion in the mid 18th century, the outcome suggests that realism and scepticism prevailed at the heart of the state.