Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds

This review article explores the role nationalism has played in the world dominated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches. The focus is on the recent contributions of Paschalis Kitromilides who has written extensively on this topic. The article assesses the four books dealing with the relationship between religion, politics, Enlightenment and nationalism in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The analysis emphasises the complex and contradictory relationship between nationalisms and the Orthodox Churches pointing to the profound transformation that has taken the place in this relationship over the last 250 years.     

1884—1939年中药材埠际贸易的变迁研究

中药材作为近代中国贸易格局中的重要商品之一,在口岸-腹地的经济互动中位置显要,研究中药材埠际贸易网络对理解其流通的历史具有重要意义。由于受到调查数据相对零散和研究方法相对传统的限制,该网络的复原少有实质性推进。本文主要利用中国旧海关史料的中药材埠际贸易数据,辅以其他对外贸易数据,对近代的中药材埠际贸易流通网络进行数据分析研究,发现中药材埠际贸易格局的演变与通商口岸开埠的空间进程密切相关。从19世纪末到20世纪20年代,中药材埠际贸易网络呈现逐渐加密的态势,1927年后,因为战争,中药材埠际贸易网络摧毁严重;同时,中药材国际贸易的区域分布却较为广阔,从以中国为中心的东亚区域延伸到欧洲、美洲部分地区。     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

Indigenous Archaeologies of Crete, 1878–1913

This article makes a contribution to the emerging study of alternative, indigenous and subaltern archaeologies, using the Mediterranean island of Crete as a case study. My focus is on the crucial political developments that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the establishment of the Cretan State. These developments coincided with and facilitated the consolidation of archaeology as a scientific discipline and a state policy on the island. The Cretan population of the countryside ‘contested’ the new attitudes towards the material past by persevering with embedded practices that questioned the validity of scientific approaches. What kind of indigenous imagination underscored such practices? And how did the peasants interact with the new dogma regarding antiquities? Contrary to other groups involved, such as local and Western archaeologists, the rural Cretans remain among the ‘great unknowns’: accounts of relevant events by their own pen are scarce, highlighting the importance of oral historical sources. I therefore present these people through the voices of the others. Archival material such as administrative documents, correspondence, memoirs and newspaper articles, critically assessed, are used for this purpose. This research is also influenced by autobiographical archaeology, as glimpses of my personal work experience and family background overlap with the archival data discussed here.     

From Tongbo Village to Widow Village—The Legacy of the Chinese Civil War

Located on Dongshan Island,off the coast of Fujian province,is a typical rural village called Tongbo.On May 10,1950,147 men were abducted by the KMT army on its way to Taiwan.Since a majority of the men were already married,overnight,their wives became "widows," and most would remain so for the rest of their lives.Consequently,Tongbo village became more widely known as Widow Village.The first objective of this paper is to document the tragic experiences of men and women in Tongbo village,focusing on these forced separations in 1950,the possibility of reunion after 1987,and the struggle to cope with the difficulties in between.The second objective of this paper is to argue that while heartbreaking,the experiences of this village are not extraordinary in the context of the Chinese Civil War.What made the men and women in Tongbo extraordinary is not their collective suffering,but how these villagers suffered less,not more,than in many other places,because of the actions of three key figures.     

The Battle of Sha’iba, 1915: Ottomanism,British Imperialism and Shia Religious Activism during the Mesopotamian Campaign

This article analyses relations among the Ottoman Empire, British imperialism and Shia religious proto-nationalism in the period before and after the battle of Sha’iba of 1915, one of the pivotal engagements of the Mesopotamian campaign. It illustrates how the narrow victory of the British at the battle led them to draw a number of over-optimistic conclusions regarding their role in Iraq and their ability to co-opt the Arabs of the province against their ‘Turkish’ overlords. The victory at Sha’iba and in particular the ambivalent role played by a number of the Arab mujahidin volunteers led the British to conclude that there had never been any real enthusiasm for the jihad declared by the Ottomans against the British occupiers. However, this was based on the false perception that lack of commitment to Ottomanism could be equated with sympathy for British imperialism. In particular, the British failed to recognise that the Ottoman summons to jihad had strengthened the developing forms of Shia proto-nationalist consciousness led by various mujtahids influenced by the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.     

Spectres of Pan-Islam: Methodological Nationalism and British Imperial Policy after the First World War

In the aftermath of the First World War, British officials were forced to contend with a threat that seemed to undermine their empire from India to Egypt. The anti-colonial revolts that spread across the world in this moment were caused by many factors from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to far more local concerns. However, many British officials imagined these contemporaneous revolts to be caused by a pan-Islamic conspiracy. The threat of pan-Islam was inflated in the minds of these officials in large part because it fundamentally contradicted their conception of how politics should be ordered on a global scale. This article suggests that the spectre of pan-Islam helped to crystallise a methodological nationalism in imperial policies over Muslim populations. The amorphous spatiality of pan-Islam redoubled a growing commitment to bounded national spaces as a natural unit of political activity. To those officials obsessed with pan-Islam, it was so frightening precisely because it questioned the spatial paradigm through which they understood the world. Other officials saw pan-Islam as a minor nuisance, because they believe that such transnational politics could not possibly survive in a world inherently ordered into contiguous nations. The threat of pan-Islam helped to push both sets of officials into a methodological nationalism, but some saw nationalism as inevitable while others feared that Islam was a compelling threat to a European-dominated inter-national order.     

Zionism and Irish Nationalism: Ideology and Identity on the Borders of Europe

This paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes of race, gender and identity. It seeks to highlight the strong similarities of both nationalist projects: to show how Zionists and Irish nationalists were both heavily invested in state-building projects that would disprove European racist stereotypes about their respective nations and yet, paradoxically, were also part of the general history of European nationalism. Both Zionism and Irish nationalism sought to create idealised images of the past and claimed to be rebuilding a glorious ancient society in the future as a means of escaping a degraded present. Both movements saw language revival as a key means of carrying out this ‘return to history’. And both emphasised martyrdom as a way to build up prideful ideals of devotion to the nation and used sport, militaries and agriculture as forms of nationalist social engineering. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither national movement was truly unique.