E. H. Carr,Norman Angell,and Reassessing the Realist–Utopian Debate

While the realist argument presented by E. H. Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis has received much attention from scholars, recent scholarship has suggested that traditional interpretations of the work and the debate in which it figured have not accurately reflected the inter-war discourse. In this article, the author provides detail to support these claims through an examination of Carr's landmark work in comparison with prominent ‘utopian’ counterparts, primarily Norman Angell but also others such as Leonard Woolf and Arnold Toynbee. The conclusion of this article calls for increased emphasis on the works of internationalist writers of the inter-war period. It also echoes other scholars in calling for renewed focus on early twentieth-century internationalist thought and a critical reappraisal of Carr's landmark work through the prism of his policy recommendations and the critique he received during the original ‘great debate’.     

NOSTALGIA AND (PRE-)MODERNITY

This article argues that, in the fourteenth century, there was a wave of nostalgia that was provoked by extreme structural change: this was a moment of demographic catastrophe (with famine and plague), endemic warfare, economic fluctuation, intensified urbanization, and intellectual and spiritual novelties. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines have assumed that nostalgia and modernity are intimately connected. Given these framings of nostalgia as a modern phenomenon, this article seeks to explore the implications of premodern nostalgia. It begins by setting out the arguments for the intertwining of nostalgia and modernity. Some have argued that modernity brings a sense of rupture and that this produces nostalgia. Others, relatedly, have argued that modernity seems to speed up our experience of time and that this produces a nostalgia for a slower-paced and more predictable past. I juxtapose these arguments with evidence of fourteenth-century outpourings of nostalgia across a range of contexts in England, Italy, and France. I analyze examples of nostalgia in political contexts (both radical and reactionary), nostalgia for apparently lost economic orders, nostalgia for a lost set of chivalric values, and nostalgia for disrupted social orders. I then suggest that these fourteenth-century manifestations of nostalgia were actually produced by precisely the features of the period that are usually deemed to be exclusive to modernity: it was rapid, rupturing structural change that provoked nostalgic regret. Nostalgia, then, would seem to indicate that there are features of the fourteenth century that might be deemed modern. However, rather than simply trying to therefore push back the moment of the birth of modernity, I argue that nostalgia is indicative of the problems of periodization. The presence of nostalgia across epochs—these echoes across the webs of time—suggest that lines of periodization, birthing moments, need to be treated with extreme caution. And it is appropriate that such a reminder should come from a phenomenon such as nostalgia, which is, after all, about resonances and echoes across time—resonances that are amplified, distorted, whispered even, but that all challenge and complicate any straightforward sense of either linear or cyclical time.     

MEDIEVALISMS AND MEDIEVAL TIMES: CONFRONTING CHRONOPOLITICS WITH MEDIEVAL TEXTURES OF TIME

This review essay examines Nadia R. Altschul's discussion of medievalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South America in Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America. She explores a chronopolitics whereby the notion that late medieval Iberia lagged developmentally behind the rest of Europe sustained the claim that parts of South America were still medieval, even while capitalist modernity was established elsewhere. Her exploration of the instrumentalization of this trope for neocolonial and neoliberal purposes provokes my own exploration here of medieval ideas about time. Medieval people actually had very sophisticated ideas about time, and this complexity troubles the idea of a simplistic and dully repetitive medieval temporality on which the linear hierarchies of time analyzed and critiqued by Altschul rely. More than this, though, I suggest that medieval ideas of time provide us with alternative chronotopes in the sense of thinking through the relationships between time and space in very different ways; in turn, this might permit a different kind of chronopolitics. First, I explore the ways in which medieval people experienced and articulated multiple interwoven layers of time, de-essentializing hierarchies of temporalities and puncturing the illusion that certain spaces should be associated with certain times. Second, I look at the ways in which time was not straightforwardly conceived of as linear in the Middle Ages and consider the ways in which this troubles ideas of periodization; a short discussion of nostalgia in different periods sustains this point. Third, I explore the ways in which ideas about time could be contested in the Middle Ages, challenging the idea that chronopolitics need just be a study of hegemonic attitudes.     

A beach of their own: The creation of the gender-segregated beach in Tel Aviv

This article examines the struggle for gender-segregated sea bathing in Tel Aviv from the first calls for gender segregation in the 1920s until 1966, when the city of Tel Aviv established a beach for men and women to swim separately. The most effective demands for gender segregation were framed in a civic and not religious discourse. Rather than claiming that gender-segregated swimming was against Jewish values, the ultra-Orthodox party Agudat Yisrael effectively argued that a lack of separate swimming violated their rights as taxpayers who had the right to bathe in the sea just as any other Israeli citizen.     

Spreading fear,communicating trust: writing letters and telegrams during the Panic of 1873

Abstract

This article analyses how journalists and businessmen used and perceived the Atlantic cable following the failure of New York banking house Jay Cooke & Co. in September 1873, an event which sparked stock markets panics in Vienna and Berlin. It is argued that while bankers successfully used telegraphic cables to communicate intelligence such as price information, letters proved superior as a medium for establishing personal trust, as the case of New York banker George Opdyke shows. Journalists, too, were critical of the telegraph’s performance, blaming the paucity of information available on the technology’s supposedly inherent deficiencies. This criticism, it is argued, was ultimately based on the ‘imagined reception’ of cables by their senders, as well as on the persistence of earlier imagined uses of telegraphy. These, I argue, continued to inform contemporary expectations of telegraphy’s performance.