The IOC of Pierre de Coubertin: circulation of elites, international relations and institutional production

Purpose of the paper is tracing the process of an international sport system construction, pivoted on an original institution, IOC, representing a key site, looking for traces on the process of a “first globalization”, up to Nation Societies, the birth of which was not indifferent to IOC considering itself a precursor of the same purposes and objectives.
The period chosen is that of Pierre de Coubertin’s leadership (1894-1925).
First of all it will be reconstructed the particular governance of IOC, through the members’ profile reconstruction, expression of a cultural and institutional trans-national social circuit, where public and private, national and international combine in a complex and articulate way. Therefore it will proceed to analyze the constitution processes (and identification) of 32 NOCs created until 1925, of which peculiarities and characteristics will be analyzed.
The methodological perspective will be based on history and social and institutional analysis, for the first time applied systematically to IOC, combining contributions from different disciplinary points of view.
Sources: archives of Olympic Museum, Lausanne; general and specialized press; books and review from the time, coming from political and sport fields.

Football, historiographie et théorie des relations internationales

Le football est un acteur majeur des relations sportives internationales. Vecteur de transferts culturels, de migrations de main d'oeuvre qualifiée et de touristes, objet de politiques étatiques et de projets de régulation continentale ou mondiale, il commence à être pris en compte par les historiens comme un lieu d'observation non-négligeable des relations internationales.
A partir de quelques exemples tels que la Fédération internationale de football association (FIFA), le football italien à l'époque du fascisme ou encore l'Europe du football, la communication visera à replacer cet objet particulier dans les transformations de l'histoire des relations internationales depuis Pierre Renouvin et Jean-Baptiste Renouvin et les apports des théories des relations internationales.

Les relations sportives internationales de Cuba comme enjeu dans le processus d’établissement et de stabilisation du système castriste (1959-66)

Si l’on ne se réfère qu’au système sportif officiel, on peut concevoir les relations sportives internationales de manière idéal-typique comme la somme des rapports qui s’établissent entre les fédérations sportives nationales dans le cadre et selon les règlements des fédérations sportives internationales d’affiliation et en lien plus ou moins étroit avec les politiques extérieures de leurs gouvernements. Après la prise de pouvoir de Fidel Castro au début de l’année 1959, la physionomie de ce triangle relationnel est objet de mutations que les opposants au nouveau régime ne tardent pas à contester. Dénonçant l’emprise croissante de l’Etat sur les « affaires sportives », ils interviennent auprès des grandes institutions internationales du sport pour revendiquer l’exclusion de Cuba et priver ainsi Castro d’une arme diplomatique à laquelle le « comandante en jefe » » accorde une importance particulière. Le Comité international olympique et la FIFA montrent alors des attitudes différentes tout en défendant le même argument de l’autonomie du sport. La bataille est définitivement gagnée par le pouvoir castriste lorsque Cuba parvient à imposer sa participation et à réaliser de brillantes performances aux Jeux de l’Amérique centrale et des Caraïbes en 1966 à San Juan (Puerto Rico), malgré toutes les tentatives de mise à l’écart menées par les Etats-Unis. Cette double victoire, politique et sportive, devient par la suite un élément majeur d’une nouvelle mémoire collective cubaine.
Notre communication retrace ce jeu de force entre le pouvoir politique et l’opposition (essentiellement les exilés cubains de Miami) en examinant plus particulièrement les réactions des deux plus grandes organisations sportives internationales, et tente de contribuer, à partir de l’étude d’un cas spécifique, à la compréhension des conditions et des mécanismes de mobilisation de la diplomatie sportive. Elle s’appuie sur des sources imprimées (consultées notamment à la Bibliothèque nationale José Martí à La Havane) et des documents d’archives en provenance de Lausanne (Archives du CIO) et de Zurich (Archives de la FIFA).

Soviet-German Sporting Contacts during the Cold War – Developing Relations aloof from international block constellations

Generally, the Cold War period offers a range of examples of the interplay of world sports and international politics, many of which are connected to the East West conflict. The differences between the two socially and politically opposed blocks could hardly be kept from the field of sporting competition.
The bipolar power structures already suggest clear concepts of friends and foes in both camps. These patterns were transferred from the constellations of foreign policy to sporting contests. Studying the Soviet sport contacts to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), on the one hand, and to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), on the other hand, allows the questions if and how the politically determined block constellations of the East-West-conflict were mirrored in these relations.
This paper aims at analysing the transfer of political claims and demands onto expectations connected to sport relations, as was the case between Soviet and West German sport officials. Selected examples from the Soviet-German sport contacts will show that sport relations offered a non-public level of communication and negotiations which was instrumentalised for the pursuit of interests that sometimes diverged from traditional foreign policy patterns of action.
The analysis considers documents from both Russian and German Archives (foreign office, sport confederations etc.)

‘Women and Sport a change in taste’: Identity and sports participation in interwar Britain.

The new modern woman was symbolic of youth and freedom; she embraced life and spent her time in the pursuit of fun and enjoyment. My research indicates that participation in sport was also a central part of modernity for many women during the interwar period in Britain.
The female body was in many ways one of the central focuses of the new modernity. The way it was dressed, its hair styled and even its shape were all intrinsic symbols of a woman’s conformity to modernity and its associated ideals. Sport could provide an opportunity to train and tone the body in an effort to conform to the new idealised ‘boyish’ shape, to improve posture and, it was believed, even to enhance beauty. Sport therefore offered an opportunity to acquire some of the ‘essential’ attributes of the young modern woman, a lithe figure, grace of carriage and clear complexion. However, sport also played an important role in lifestyle. This research indicates the importance of sport to the new concepts of modernity for women by tracing the rapid growth of distinct sports fashions and the use of sporting imagery in advertising.
My research draws on advertising in popular women’s magazines, newspaper cartoons, newspaper articles and medical discussions of sportswomen during these years in order to explore the ways in which this group were represented within the public arena. This paper intends to compare these media representations to the realities of their participation, drawing on oral history interviews and personal records, in order to discover the different ways in which multiple and often contradictory female identities existed in relation to sports participation in this period.

Pluralism and Dutch Colonial Policy in Indonesia

Dutch colonial rule in the Indonesian archipelago was strongly plural. For reasons of parsimony, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had preferred to leave its indigenous subjects as far as possible under the authority of indigenous rulers and under their traditional laws. In the colonial period (that is after the metropolitan state began to run the colony) this system was preserved. Legal pluralism and the rejection of a mission to Westernize the Indies gradually became a matter of deeply held principle that was challenged only briefly and with only limited success during the so-called Ethical Policy of the early 20th century. The pluralist system, along with the armed might of the colonial army, largely kept the peace during the colonial period, but Indonesia suddenly became intensely violent in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation. This paper will suggest that colonial pluralism was a recipe for stability, but that it was fragile, and left colonial society prone to intense violence at times of crisis.

Print and the Pornography of Violence: From the de Brys to Romeyn de Hooghe

Beginning with Theodor de Bry (b. 1528, Liege), and continued by him and his sons in exile, the de Brys put in circulation some of the most violent images ever depicted by European artists. Most, but not all of them, are said to concern the peoples of the New World. Arguably just as readily they may be imagined as expressing the terrified fantasies of people threatened with religious violence. The sensibility constituted a pornography of violence that can be traced in the Protestant imagination – from the de Brys, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, to the engravings of Romeyn de Hooghe that depict Mohammed but also the savagery of the French and Spanish. This imagery begins to soften when we turn to the engravings of Bernard Picart (d. 1733), and the relative peace that followed the end of the reign of Louis XIV.

Foreign policy and military policy of the Dutch Republic in an age of confessional fundamentalism (ca. 1590-1630)

The paper argues that the rise of an international system of power states around 1600 was one of the early modern “key problems in world history”. And it argues that the role of the Dutch republic within that process is of relevance for a deeper understanding of the diplomatic and military conflicts of the period as well as for an evaluation of the preconditions of peace and of the first political and legal order between the European power states. Dutch history is relevant in three distinct respects – firstly with regard to the specific policy of a republic among predominant royal actors; secondly with regard to the scope and limits of military power and violence enforced by a society allegedly liberal and tolerant; thirdly with regard to the specific contribution of Calvinism to foreign politics and international diplomacy as well as to its contribution to the fundamentalist interpretation of the state-conflicts of the epoch and the subsequent appeal to unlimited violence. – Complimentary to this relevance of the Dutch experience for global history, our topic is of a specific relevance for Dutch national history: It brings into focus again, that society and state of the early modern Dutch republic were by no means established by tolerance, conviviality and Calvinist piety only, but also by raison d’état policy and by a considerable amount of violence – exterior as well as interior. This interpretation was well established among political historians of former generations, but is somewhat marginalized by structural, social and cultural historians of the last and present generations.

The Power of Leonor Teles, Queen of Portugal (1372-1383)

Queen Leonor Teles was the wife of King Fernando of Portugal, who ruled between 1367/1383. When he died, in 22nd of October1383, she became Regent of the Kingdom, as the King had decided in his testament (1378) and in the marriage treaty of their daughter, Beatriz to King Juan I of Castela (1382/1383). Her Regency only wearied until January of 1384, when she renounced in favour to her son-in-law, Juan I of Castile. A few months after that date, King Juan I accused her of conspiring against him and obliged Queen Leonor Teles to leave the country and enter in the Tordesilhas monastery. She lived in Castile until the end of her days.
As Queen-consort, she had participated in her husband’s government in the domains of royal grace, international diplomacy and realm’s succession. The various donations that King Fernando has made with her, especially, to the higher nobility and the presence and the influence that Leonor Teles owned in the Beatriz’s marriage negotiations, as the treaties concerned can prove, show us a strong and different Medieval Queen. Besides that, Queen Leonor had an enormous quantity of lands offered by her husband, when they got married, in 1372. In those territories, the King gave her, for all of her life, supreme power, included death penalty, situation that was unique until that time: supreme justice was something which was considered as belonging to the strict King’s prerogatives and some Queen-consorts before Leonor Teles only got it in their lands, at least, for a very short time. We must also not forget that the donations that King Fernando made alone show us that Leonor Teles’s family was strongly beneficed. This fact agrees with the Fernão Lopes Chronicle’s idea, which defends that the Queen had built around her powerful customers, specially recruited in her family and friends. To understand her political role and the influence she had in her husband, we must not forget that for King Fernando she had the right of participate in political royal affairs, because he thought part of the Kingdom government belonged to her.
As Queen-consort, Leonor Teles favoured gently the clergy and the nobility, as we can see in the donations she made together with the King and in the administration of her own lands. On the contrary, as Regent, Leonor was much more sober with the gifts she gave. Her beneficiaries were essentially the lower nobility, the lower clergy and the merchant class. This change of recipients and the quality of mercies in her Regency is directly related with the insecurity that Leonor Teles felt and represented for the highest social classes, during the period of 1383-1385.
She died, in the exile, probably between 1390 and 1405/6. In 1626, her tomb was found, in the Monastery de La Merced, at Valladolid, when some reconstruction’s works were being made in the cluster, according to Antolínez de Burgos, a historical researcher of the seventeen-century.

An Ambitious Family: the House of Beja-Viseu and its Women

Queen Leonor (1458-1525) spent half of her life in a turmoil concerning her own family’s ambition to occupy the throne. Daughter of Fernando duke of Beja, second son of king D. Duarte, her father died qhen she was twelve, leaving an ambitious widow to raise eight children, Beatriz, duchess of Beja (†1506). Leonor, the eldest daughter, married her cousin João, soon to inherit the throne, and her younger sister Isabel the powerful duke of Braganza. The escalade of ambition continued until king João II murdered her brother duke of Viseu in 1484. In spite of this, her lineage continued to try to succeed in replacing the king, after her only son and heir to the throne Afonso died in a horse accident. The queen is said to have been the main responsible agent in João’s decision to leave the throne to her youngest brother Manuel (king 1495-1521).
This paper will try to analyse women’s agency through a joint analysis of the behaviour the various women in the family (Beatriz, and her daughters Leonor and Isabel) in order to further their family’s interests.

Un affaire politique. Le mariage du roi Manuel II et l'ambivalence des réseaux familiaux

Aussitôt qu’il arrive au pouvoir et malgré sa jeunesse, le roi D. Manuel II a eu besoin de prendre en charge « l’affaire » de son mariage. Devant une liste de princesses européennes appartenant à la parenté la plus proche, le premier choix s’est adressé vers une princesse anglaise et à forts liens familiaux avec la famille royale anglaise. Les intérêts politiques se superposaient à quelques d’autres raisons. Nonobstant l’engagement de Edouard VII dans « l’affaire », les plus intimes espoirs du roi et surtout des monarchistes portugais ont échoué à cause de la situation politique et de la très grave crise qu’on vivait au Portugal á cette époque-là.
Devant l’échec anglais, «l’affaire» est reprise étant été pressés tous les autres réseaux familiaux de la famille royale portugaise. Cependant, à partir de 1910, le départ en exil est rendu «l’affaire» chaque fois plus difficile. C’est seulement en 1913 que «l’affaire» a trouvé une solution acceptable, grâce au choix d’une princesse de la maison Hohenzollern, famille avec laquelle les rois portugais avaient une tradition de mariages et en conséquence des étroits liens familiaux existaient entre les deux familles, depuis le début du XIXe siécle.

Les "Linge" au coeur des stratégies politiques dans l'histoire des sociétés wolof du sénégal.

La communication vise à analyser et à mettre en relief l'action de quelques reines de l'espace politique wolof du sénégal d'avant la colonisation pour montrer qu'en fait, contrairement à une opinion répandue les femmes n'ont pas toujours occupé la périphérie en matière d'initiative et d'élaboration de stratégies au sein des formations sociales et politiques auxquelles elles appartenaient.

Maria Pia de Savoie (1847-1911), reine du Portugal

Maria Pia de Savoie, née en 1847, décédée en 1911, était fille de Victor-Emmanuel II d’Italie et d’Adélaïde de Habsbourg-Lorraine. En 1862, elle s’est mariée avec Louis Ier du Portugal, devenant reine à quinze ans. Les raisons d’Etat ont déterminé ce mariage (trop précoce déjà pour l’époque) et cette étrange alliance, si l’on considère les pratiques matrimoniales de la maison royale portugaise. Les secteurs sociaux portugais plus progressistes s’en sont, pourtant, réjouis, puisqu’elle était la fille du libérateur d’Italie, de l’opposant du Catholicisme radical de Rome.
Ayant ce contexte comme point de départ, cette intervention essaiera de poser certaines questions et d’en proposer des réponses: quel rôle a joué cette femme pendant le royaume de son mari (1861-1889), de son fils (1889-1908) et de son arrière-fils (1908-1910)? A-t-elle été une dame futile, presque une consommatrice compulsive, ignorant les graves questions politiques et sociales de son pays d’adoption, comme on la décrit souvent? A-t-elle influencé, de quelque sorte, les relations établies entre le Portugal et l’Italie? A-t-elle soutenu le choix de son frère Amadeo lorsqu’il a accepté la couronne espagnole, en 1870, alors que son mari et son beau-père l’avait refusée? Peut-on la décrire (au moins partiellement) comme responsable de l’impopularité de la famille royale portugaise, ce qui a abouti à l’assassinat de son fils, le roi Charles Ier en 1908, et à la chute de la monarchie portugaise, en 1910? Bref, Maria Pia a été une quasi-réplique de Marie-Antoinette?

Les Reines Rafohy et Rangita , fondatrices de la loi de succession au trône de la royauté merina (Madagascar) au XVIe siècle

Rafohy et Rangita furent la principale souche originelle des différentes dynasties qui se succédèrent au trône de l' Imerina ,région des Hautes-Terres de Madagascar au XVIe siècle .

Leur règne marque le point de départ d'un certain nombre de principes , de rites et de systèmes organisationnels qui , tout en subissant un certain nombre de transformations dues à l'évolution des conditions socio-économiques , politiques et culturelles tout au long de l'histoire de Madagascar , avaient servi de fondations à la royauté malgache et avaient été appliqués et respectés dans leur esprit et leurs grandes lignes par la plupart des souverains (MPANJAKA).Parmi ces principes et rites fondateurs ,le plus grand héritage qu'elles ont laissé est celui du DROIT DE SUCCESSION AU TRONE qui comporte pour l'essentiel six grands principes.

-Le premier principe est celui de l'unité et de l'intégrité territoriale du royaume:"MANJAKA TOKANA".Ce principe fut difficile à appliquer car il fut à l'origine de nombreux assassinats
politiques .
-Le second principe est une conséquence directe du premier :celui de la succession arrangée par la désignation à deux degrés des successeurs ,"FANJAKANA ARINDRA".
-Le troisième est celui de l'identité du sang des successeurs pour la continuité et la légitimité d'une dynastie royale héréditaire:"MANDOVA FANJAKANA ,LOVA TSY MIFINDRA ".
-Le quatrième principe est la transmission utérine du pouvoir.
-Le cinquième :le droit d'ainesse assorti de restrictions.
-Le dernier principe :le renforcement du pouvoir masculin par le statut de la Femme.

Parmi ces principes ,la transmission utérine du pouvoir étroitement liée au principe de l'identité et de la pureté du sang constituent les deux piliers (ANDRY) centraux de la monarchie(FANJAKAN'ANDRIANA) parce qu'ils sont la base du nouvel ordre politique et social de la société établie progressivement pendant les trois siècles suivants (XVIIe-XVIIIe-XIX e siècles)

Revisiting Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal

The one and only Queen of Portugal of English origin was always portrayed by the historians as a competent mother, who was able to bread six high educated children, and also been able to teach them moral and religious values that they made use of all their lives. Her role as a Queen with political and diplomatic power, her capacity to administrate her own household and estate, were competences that few were curious to acknowledge. At the end of a deep research on the life and times of Philippa of Lancaster, I think that the time has come to show how some women had a very smooth way of exerting power and leave their specific mark in their society.

Globalising the French Revolution

With the end of debates over the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, the most promising new turn in studies is the global one. Recent research on Saint Domingue and slavery has renewed interest in events in the colonies and the importance of the triangular trade, but even more global factors need to be considered as well. These range from the effects of global competition on the monarchy's finances before 1789 to the consequences of fighting on an increasingly global stage for the Directorial and Bonapartist regimes. Most intriguing and difficult to ascertain is the influence of global factors (international political figures, foreign financiers, the "plot of the foreigners") on the internal mechanisms of the revolution within France.

Le Grand Océan à l'épreuve de la Grande Révolution: la Polynésie et la Révolution française

Du point de vue historique comme du point de vue historiographique, il s'agit à la fois d'un défi à relever et d'un paradoxe à soutenir: alors qu'à l'extrême fin du XVIIIe et au début du XIXe siècle, les relations entre l'Europe et cette partie de la zone Pacifique sont ténues et périlleuses, il est impossible de mettre celle-ci complètement à l'écart de l'onde de choc de la Révolution française: d'une part parce que -c'est connu- le fait polynésien, ou plus exactement tahitien, est une composante de l'idéologie contemporaine; d'autre part, parce que, curieusement,en créant une certaine situation de vide dans cette région du monde, les événements français ont contribué à la transformer radicalement et définitivement socialement, culturellement et économiquement.

La Révolution Française dans une histoire globale du 18e siècle

La discussion sur le cycle de révolutions atlantiques ou bien sur un contexte globale pour un « Age of Revolutions » invite à repenser pas seulement la période révolutionnaire courte (entre Etats Généraux et Brumaire) mais de la situer dans une perspective de transformation et de « crise mondiale » plus longue et moins franco-centrée. Les concepts d’histoire globale en débat depuis les années 1990 focalisent beaucoup plus sur la comparaison des grandes civilisations ou des empires que de proposer une place à la révolution de 1789 dans les narratives nouvelles, mais à l’autre côté l’historiographie révolutionnaire à développé les dernières années des approches promettant une relecture de la révolution. La contribution cherche à trouver des pistes pour réconcilier les deux débats.

La Révolution Française et la Méditerrannée. Perspectives transnationales

L’objet fondamental de notre travail porte sur la France révolutionnaire et la relation aux peuples étrangers. Cette question a fait l’objet de recherches éminentes dans le cadre de la Grande Nation et du monde atlantique. Dans cette perspective, l’aire arabo-musulmane a très peu bénéficié des derniers renouvellements méthodologiques que connaît aujourd’hui l’histoire de la Révolution française dans sa relation au peuples. Dans le cas des peuples situés à la périphérie de l’Europe, en l’occurrence le monde ottoman non-européen, la relation à la Révolution française n’a été envisagée que de manière différée ; au mieux, l’épisode de l’expédition d’Egypte est retenu comme une manifestation de rejet des principes universels proclamés par la Révolution. Paradoxalement, la Méditerranée et la Turquie étaient au centre de l’ordre européen et des préoccupations de la France au cours de cette période de la fin du XVIII e s. Dépassant alors le cadre restreint et hypothétique de l’impact et de la diffusion des idéaux, il y a lieu de saisir des répercussions immédiates de la Révolution française sur le monde musulman méditerranéen dont l’élucidation emprunte des voies diverses et convergentes. Dans le cadre de ce travail que nous proposons, il s’agit de prêter davantage attention à l’étude des matières concrètes et des pratiques au quotidien. Mis directement ou indirectement aux contacts d’une nouvelle organisation et d’une nouvelle législation révolutionnaires, le monde musulman méditerranéen a été amené à s’adapter à des degrés divers et de différentes manières, au nouveau système.
En même temps, de son côté et face à des situations de contingence, la France révolutionnaire a du développer entre autres la conception et la mise en place de pratiques diplomatiques qui tiennent compte des spécificités culturelles de l’Autre non européen, ce qui a permis, malgré le paradoxe des systèmes d’organisation, le maintien du lien inter-national et une continuité diplomatique tout au long de la période révolutionnaire et impériale dans cet espace de partage qu’est la Méditerranée… La période révolutionnaire devrait normalement marquer - et comme l’aurait préconiser Jacques Godechot - le moment de l’intégration du monde musulman dans un nouveau système mondialisé, aujourd’hui encore toujours en instance.
Cette tentative de décentrement des recherches autour de l’histoire de la Révolution française par l’élargissement de l’étude des relations de la France révolutionnaire aux peuples non-européens, nous offrirait la possibilité d’étudier ces relations dans le sens d’une interculturalité - insoupçonnée - entre deux aires culturelles marquées plus que jamais au cours de cette période particulière par des systèmes d’organisation opposés mais aussi par une communication ininterrompue. Dès lors et du côté de l’histoire du monde musulman méditerranéen comment définir, comprendre et situer les points de transition, de rupture, d’échec, de rejet par rapport à un ancrage possible dans une nouvelle phase historique - la modernité - et par rapport à des valeurs reconnues universelles… ?
En même temps, quel sens donné au projet méditerranéen de la République qui pourrait expliquer le retournement du monde musulman à l’égard de ces valeurs universelles ?
La mobilisation d’un corpus très dense de correspondances consulaires et diplomatiques - mais aussi de récits de voyages, relations d’ambassade… - dans le sens d’une relecture et à la lumière d’un renouvellement des questionnements et des méthodes d’approche, devrait permettre d’aborder cette question de la relation entre les peuples à ce tournant marquant de la Révolution française, sous un angle interprétatif nouveau qui pourrait mieux aider à dissiper les malentendus et les incompréhensions du moment entre les deux aires culturelles.

Miranda and the relation between the revolutionary Europe and Latin America

The transport business and early migration policies: The visible hand of shipping interests in American immigration laws 1882-1914

During the Progressive Era bills containing a literacy test passed one of the houses of Congress seventeen times without being enacted. In the meantime approximately 17 million migrants, an increasing part coming from eastern and southern Europe landed in the US. Scholars have denoted the shifting interests creating strange bedfellow-coalitions opposing the passage of these bills. Yet the role of multi-national shipping companies drawing the biggest part of their revenues out of the transport of migrants remains unexplored. This paper argues that the shipping lobby was the driving force behind these coalitions. Through lobbyists at Washington they obtained support of Congressmen from various parts of the country throughout the period and mobilized the associations representing the various ethnic groups to voice their protests. By keeping open the gates ‘in-betweens’ who never lost their ‘white on arrival’ voting privileges increased their political influence. At Ellis Island selections based on various degrees of whiteness criteria gained ground yet again shipping companies limited their impact. This analysis of shipping companies as middlemen between the individual migrant and the State aims to reassess the influence of business interests on migration flows in a period during which the cornerstones of our present-day immigrant control system were being laid.

Merchant Seafarers and Their Homes in the Twentieth Century: a Study Drawing on British Sources

Often missing from discussions of merchant seafaring is any consideration that seafarers had relatives and family homes ashore to which they might be expected to relate between voyages. By the twentieth century, increasing bureauocracy demanded addresses as part of identity. Factors of earlier periods which could operate against home contact, such as internal transport and literacy, became less significant. Biographical and autobiographical writing and interview surveys with seafarers offer limited insights as such records are mostly concerned with sea life experience. From the 1840s crew agreements recorded places of birth of all seafarers regardless of port in which a ship was joined, and from 1851 (mates and masters), and 1862 (engineers) certificate of competency documentation demanded addresses. However in the mid 1890s revised agreement forms provided for current addresses of all seafarers, and the many that survive offer an opportunity to examine th correlation between places of birth and later home locations. This study will examine the factors operating for and against th maintenance of regular relationships between seafarers and their homes drawing on literary references, and with reference to particular ranks aboard foreign-going merchant ships, and the social influences in ships and in port districts. The contextual discussion will briefly touch upon seafarer interaction with maritime organizations ashore, which have been addressed by the autho in recent studies. For one rating only, able seamen in power-driven vessels, and through selected years between the 1890s and the 1970s, the study will analyse crew agreement entries in a search for additional insights.

Where was sailortown? Re-thinking urban histories and cultural geographies

One of the oldest and most influential genres of urban description relies on exaggerated discontinuities, reducing the city to a series of opposed or contrasted neighborhoods ranked according to the rigid dichotomy of “high” versus “low.” Such approaches to London typically relegate sailors to some peripheral region east of the Tower, as in Pierce Egan’s influential Life in London (1821). However, an examination of the Microcosm of London (1808) suggests a much more complicated spatial and cultural arrangement. Sailors, and sailortown, seem to have penetrated deep into the city center and the fashionable West End. I discuss the ways in which this is both manifested and concealed in the Microcosm (a collaboration between the French emgiré Auguste Pugin and the famous caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson) and place their panoramic views of London life in the larger context of new scholarship on the interface between maritime workers and urban history.

Shipping companies and their marketing strategies towards migrants, 1890-1918

From around 1890 to World War I, the transatlantic passenger business went through several structural changes. The early 1890s saw the advance of cross-border cartels that, in effect, divided the European migration market between the companies and created barriers of entry for new carriers, with Britain and Germany playing the leading role. This may partly explain why Norway, despite having among the largest merchant fleets in the world and being among the most important suppliers of migrants, did not get a permanent America line before the end of the period, in 1913.

The cartels did however not create a stable transatlantic passenger business. Distrust and breaches of agreements caused several “rate wars”, the most significant being the “Atlantic Rate War” of 1904-05. During World War I, all agreements dissolved, creating new business opportunities for other companies.

The focus of this paper will be on Scandinavia, and explore how the structural changes and external factors within the transatlantic passenger business were reflected in and effected marketing strategies towards emigrants in the above period. Scandinavia is a special case for several reasons. Until World War I, the Scandinavian migration market belonged to British companies. During World War I, the passenger business was severely disrupted and – apart from the Holland-American Line – only the three Scandinavian American lines could advertise that they departed from “neutral ports”.

Haven in a heartless sea: sailors' taverns in history and anthropology

This paper focuses on the boardinghouse-taverns once providing board, room and other services for merchant sailors ashore in the major seaports of the world. It opens with a summary of accounts of sailors' taverns found in popular histories, tourist guides, newspapers, fiction, theater pieces, autobiographies, missionary tracts and social historical writings. It concludes with an ethnographic framing drawing upon the author's experiences as a merchant seaman and his later participant observational research as a cultural anthropologist.

World Orders in Global History

The Place of Culture in Global History

The Japanese building of the Thai-Burma railway; the perspective from Thailand

During the Second World War Thailand’s relationship with the Japanese was governed by a military alliance signed on 21 December 1941. However as the war progressed and Japan stationed some 150,000 troops on Thai soil, the relationship acquired some of the qualities of an occupation, with Thailand being treated more as a conquered territory than as an ally. Illustrative of this difficult relationship was the building of the railway between Thailand and Burma from 1942-43. Some 60 000 Allied prisoners of war and over a quarter of a million Asian labourers were conscripted to work on the railway, of whom more than 12 000 prisoners and perhaps 90 000 Asians died. Some 2.3 per cent of the Asian workforce was Thai, and the construction of the railway was pursued in the face of official Thai opposition and some local resistance. In 1944-45 the Thai population in the Kanchanaburi province was exposed to Allied bombing of the completed bridge over the River Kwai. In Western memory the Thai-Burma railway has been dominated by the experience of Allied prisoners of war, mythologized in the 1957 David Lean film. This paper examines the nature of the much lesser known Thai experience of the building the railway and how this has been represented in later Thai memory.

"Mobilizing" Metal in Wartime France: Economic collaboration and everyday life

This conference paper explores a crucial aspect of twentieth century total warfare: the mobilization of economic resources through the voluntary participation of civilians. From 1939 to 1945, the successive French governments of the Third Republic, Vichy, and the Fourth Republic carried out a series of scrap metal salvage drives in the name of the French nation. They supported these drives with intense propaganda campaigns that included posters, newspaper articles and editorials, speeches, newsreels, radio spots, and humorous cartoons. As measured by kilograms of metal collected per person, some of the drives were successful, some were not. An analysis of the relationship between the propaganda for these scrap metal drives and their relative success will underscore the mechanisms used in wartime France-—before, during, and after the occupation—-to elicit the “voluntary” participation of French civilians in the war effort.

Le sud de la France sous l’occupation italienne de 1940 à 1943

L’occupation italienne dans le Sud de la France débute dès la signature de la convention d’armistice entre la France et l’Italie, le 25 juin 1940. Elle se termine le 20 septembre 1943, suite à la chute du gouvernement fasciste le 25 juillet 1943 et à la capitulation italienne face aux Alliés le 8 septembre 1943.

D’une part, durant cette période, aucun contact politique direct n’a réellement lieu entre les deux pays. Les relations franco-italiennes de 1940 à 1943 se déroulent donc essentiellement dans le cadre du régime d’armistice et la voie de la collaboration n’est en fait envisagée qu’à partir de l’été 1941 mais elle se fait surtout en réaction par rapport à la politique de l’allié allemand.
D’autre part, l’occupation italienne du sud français permet d’aborder les questions d’exercice de l’autorité et de la souveraineté sur les territoires concernés. Quoique l’armistice franco-italien ne contienne pas le terme « occupation », l’administration française se heurte continuellement aux autorités d’armistice, militaires et civiles, italiennes qui entendent exercer les droits de la puissance occupante et remettre en cause la souveraineté française. Cet aspect de la question permet d’ailleurs d’aborder la question des Juifs. L’historiographie met l’accent sur le fait que les Juifs ont, dans une certaine mesure, été protégés par les Italiens.
Enfin, l’occupation de certains territoires laisse supposer une annexion possible et même probable de ces territoires par l’Italie. Si Mussolini semble avoir renoncé à revendiquer la Savoie, les tentatives d’annexion sur Menton et surtout sur Nice, même si elles ne sont pas toujours l’œuvre des instances gouvernementales italiennes, sont bien perceptibles pendant cette période.

L’objectif de la communication est de voir comment une occupation, apparemment mineure mais aux enjeux multiples, a marqué le territoire français et les populations qui y demeuraient durant ces trois années, s’inscrivant dans un contexte international – la Seconde Guerre mondiale – et un contexte stratégique et idéologique – une occupation-annexion par les troupes d’un Etat fasciste – particuliers, soulevant de nombreux problèmes de souveraineté entre l’Italie et la France et entraînant différents types de résistance.

The Origin of the Cold War and Hungary from 1947-1948

The auther investigates the Origin of the Cold War from 1947-1949 by the viepoint of the Hugary.
The origin of the Cold War was mainly analyzed from 5-6points.
However the 20th anniversary of the End of the Cold War in 1989 changed the situation. The new dokuments was published by turnes, translated in English, and Wilson Center(Cold War Center and Library) contributed much for spread the newest document and now many scholars easily access to these documents. The author shows the analysis of the new documents and article in Hungary.

Labor Mobilization under Occupation Regimes: The Imaginary of Compulsory Labor Service in Late Colonial Korea

The forced labor mobilization under the Japanese occupation of Korea began with the implementation of the National Mobilization Law in 1938 and took place in several stages that gradually increased in the level of coercion. It is at this point that Nazi Germany provided an important inspiration for Japanese who hailed the Nazi system of regimented apprentice-training and labor-service programs. The notion that the state should actively intervene in the labor market by mobilizing and training laborers for national service was not entirely new to colonial Korea, but the system would be deployed on a wide scale as the war intensified. The colonial state established labor centers where colonial officials pressured young Korean men to enlist for work service. Companies were also allowed to recruit Korean workers directly by sending their hiring agents to various parts of Korea. At first the labor mobilization relied on mostly “voluntary” methods of recruitment. As a precursor to the full military draft of Korean soldiers, the colonial authorities established hundreds of work training camps, often on elementary school campuses. Eventually, when the military draft became expanded to include Koreans in June 1944, the labor mobilization became a part of the military conscription system. This presentation will examine the conscription of labor in late colonial Korea and examine the various methods of mobilizing media and propaganda to achieve the “self-mobilization” of Koreans for compulsory labor service under their rule.

Living between coercive collaboration and resistance: The Overseas Chinese community in Malaya and Singapore under the rising sun

Conference of the International Committee for the History of the Second World War, Amsterdam (August 2010): The experience of occupation, 1931-1949. Comparative Perspectives on the Asian and European Theatres of War.

Abstract by Takuma Melber:
Living between coercive collaboration and resistance: The Overseas Chinese community in Malaya and Singapore under the rising sun

At the time when the British and Australian defenders of Malaya and Singapore surrendered in Singapore on February 15th 1942, the Japanese occupiers promptly began to take control of the Malayan peninsula and the Southeast Asian metropolis Singapore. To pacify the new occupied zone the Japanese forces took drastic action immediately against the Overseas Chinese community, which had already in the pre-occupation period declared solidarity with the mother country and their anti-Japanese sentiment: So first of all the Japanese military took a radical measure, the so-called Sook Ching. Under the slogan “purge through purification” the Japanese massacred - first in Singapore, then all over the Malayan peninsula - many Overseas Chinese. According to Chinese estimations up to 50 000 Overseas Chinese were killed solely in Singapore. Even if an exact number of casualties will never be known the Sook Ching was clearly a violation of human rights.
Furthermore the Japanese occupying forces took more steps - especially in the first weeks of the occupation period, but also in the following time - to contain the surviving members of the Overseas Chinese community.
Despite the Japanese measures of pacification and control the Overseas Chinese succeeded in originating the Malayan People´s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), the most significant military resistance movement and from the first to the last day of occupation worst enemy of the Japanese in Malaya.
Therefore the Overseas Chinese were be faced on the one hand with an installed system of control mechanisms and coercive collaboration, on the other hand with the military MPAJA-resistance.
The lecture presents some of the Japanese measures against the Overseas Chinese community and tries with the aid of selected examples to give an idea of the everyday life of the Overseas Chinese community in Malaya and Singapore under the rising sun.

Internal Peripheries and Paths of Social Policy in 20th Century Europe

The Developmental Imagination in India

There is a history to conceptions of 'development' that is larger than the set of Cold War-related concerns to which they are usually reduced. In particular, these concerns relate to aspirations of modelling and moulding societies in accordance with images of a desirable future, which tend to be far larger aspirations than 'economic development'. This paper traces these larger concerns in relation to India, at the end of empire, and into the first decades of the 'developmental state' in India. It builds on work done by the author in two earlier works on development and the 'Nehruvian state' in India, and connects development to ideas of socialism, science, national discipline and indigenism that informed them. In so doing, it begins to ask whether a legitimating vocabulary that is shared among an international community of users is in fact legitimating because it hides important divergences by using the same terms to mean very different things.

European national museums: Identity politics, the uses of the past and the European citizen

National museums are authoritative spaces for display and negotiation of community and citizenship. Through collecting and creating repositories of scientific, historic and aesthetic objects choices are made that protect and narrate ideas of virtues, unicity and place in the wider world. Explicitly and implicitly territorial identities are negotiated and related both to ideas in the tradition of universalistic enlightenment and through its selection and narration presenting formative ideas of who belongs to what political and cultural entity, why and with what consequences. This is done by negotiating different claims on what citizenship means, the relationship with competing political projects on sub-national and supra-national levels, and by calling on universalistic values and virtues as basis of claimed unicity and value of community, belonging and pride. Comparative results from large research project will be presented.

History Writing and National Identity Formation

This paper will look at the interrelationship between historical writing and national identity formation in Europe.

Hegemonic memory through parliamentary decision: the case of the Belgian Lumumba-commission.

In a context where almost everybody (at least rhetorically) supports the political values of truth and transparency, where many claim to speak in name of voiceless victims of the present and the past, and where the articulation of counter-hegemonic memories has become a central stake in major political conflicts, it no longer seems possible to create consensus over national histories by simply leaving out reference to the more sensitive parts of the past. Still, the construction of canonical national histories and the creation of consensus around the past today remains of great importance to the project of nation-building. One interesting attempt to deal with this problem is to be situated in the creation of parliamentary commissions of inquiry where consensus on contested pasts is literally created through formal democratic procedures. In my paper I will focus on one such a parliamentary commission – the Belgian commission that had to investigate the Belgian responsibility in the murder in 1961 of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba – and analyze how it attempted to produce a hegemonic memory. The Lumumba-commission was established in the spring of 2000 in direct reaction to the publication of the book “the murder of Lumumba” by the sociologist Ludo De Witte and had to help the Belgian population once and for all to turn this ‘black page’ in its history. It is hard to assess whether or not the commission succeeded in its intent, but its existence raises some fundamental questions, such as: what happens to history when it is subjected to democratic procedures and voted upon? And: what kind of memories and histories fit to become hegemonic or consensual? In order to put the case of the Lumumba-commission into a broader perspective I will compare it to some larger scale commissions of inquiry such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa and the TRC in Sierra Leone.

Fashioning Legacy in South Africa: Power, Pasts, and the Promotion of Social Cohesion

South Africa has received praise from around the world for the way in which it has dealt with its oppressive past. Its post-apartheid governments have insisted on the making of a future through intense engagement with memory of the colonial and apartheid eras. Memory work has ranged from the endeavour of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to the flowering of new museums and archives, from the investigations underpinning the land restitution process to the writing of new histories for schoolchildren, from the research supporting special pensions and the location of missing persons to the use of freedom of information instruments by civil society.
The paper explores the proposition that it is time to ask searching questions of this post-apartheid memory work. How effective has it been? Is the assumption of exemplary status for South Africa in dealing with its oppressive past justified? Has the springboard constituted by the TRC been utilised adequately by structures of the state and of civil society? There are signs that the work of reconciliation in South Africa has only just started. Old social fissures remain resilient. New ones are appearing. Social cohesion is proving elusive. Could it be that South Africa’s post-apartheid memory work has been too superficial? And that the really difficult memory work remains to be done?
The seal of the South African Constitutional Court is the representation of a tree with people clustered under it, rather than the more commonly used symbols of a set of scales or the figure of blind justice. The matter of what truly, actually, happened in precolonial indigenous courts of long ago is a matter for truth-seeking historians. Some will find evidence of such courts as fields for the manipulative operation of royal or chiefly power, others may find proof of instances of genuine community participation (just as historians could find historical evidence of both well-weighed evidence and of power tipping the scales).
However, the role of this idea of justice can be evaluated differently, according to criteria of authenticity. Public participative justice, inspired by memory, rather than an historical or legal truth, may be accepted as an appropriate vision of justice –as authentic- not because it conforms to the received wisdom about tradition (the grounds on which some support the recognition of traditional law and custom), but because its drives and origins are understandable and worthy of approval. Its authenticity however, can only be established through dialogue about its nature. In this case the nature of the logo is its assertion of an ideal of participative justice. Authenticity then is a contemporary ideal.
The crisis around truth, and the emerging possibilities of authenticity, proposes a modification of how we approach and understand memory. What is the meaning of memory for the establishment of authenticity? What is the meaning of historical truth for the establishment of authenticity? These questions, and their implications, are the core of the proposed paper.

From Holokaust to Inglourious Basterds: Holocaust Memory between Transnational Entertainment and National Resurgence in Germany and the US

It is easy to find fault with mainstream films and documentaries about Nazism and the Holocaust which have been part of a successful transatlantic memory exchange during the last two decades. German commercial and non-commercial media products have cast a mournful, aestheticizing gaze over the trappings of Nazi power thus rendering the evil empire curiously ambivalent and attractive. The aestheticization of the Third Reich features an amiable collage of eyewitnesses whose emotional testimony attests to the burden of the past without bothering to raise questions about the historical causes of genocide or sort out victims and perpetrators. TV executives distribute this generous media package at home and abroad with a considerable sense of national pride about Germany’s exemplary, self-reflexive historical culture.
In the commercially driven US media landscape, Holocaust subject matter has been seamlessly integrated into a flood of trauma kitsch ranging from afternoon talk shows to highbrow feature films. The formulaic, ritualized celebrations of survivorship turn Jewish Holocaust eyewitnesses into yet another type of media heroes who thrive on adversity. The romantic emplotments and accompanying psycho-babble systematically derail any serious reflections about the causes of all that human misery which offers so many people an opportunity to hone their survival skills. In the US, the Holocaust has thus become the measuring stick of an ideologically structured historical consciousness that, through instant historicization, transforms troublesome criminal culpability in times of war into morally acceptable collateral damage.
Apparently, the Holocaust forms part of different, yet compatible memory comfort zones on both sides of the Atlantic. Hence the successful and lucrative exchange of media products for Cineplex and History Channel distribution. But then comes along a transnational media event like Inglourious Basterds replete with likeable Nazis, Jewish juvenile orgies of revenge, and other role reversals. Especially on a visual level, the film calls into question the cozy memory products we know so well. Can mainstream Holocaust representation undergo a radical moral face-lift comparable to the memory revolution that marked the invention of the paradigm in the 1970s?

Across the street and through the continents: towns and communication in local and global perspective

Communication is a fundamental function in the history of towns and indeed in the process of urbanization itself. Internal movements of messages, goods and people, as well as contacts with the hinterland and the wider world, are crucial prerequisites of towns and urban life, in any period and every society that has had its urban elements. The different lines and modes of communication – by road, water, rail and air – have and have had significant consequences for the site selection, layout, built form, and internal traffic in each town. Transport has been and is a crucial variable in the urban economy, and has also had a strong influence on the social formation of towns. This is why the International Commission for the History of Towns (CIHV) had decided to address the theme of towns and communication in the framework of a three-year cycle of annual conferences. Instead of dividing the theme by periods, or geographical regions, it was decided to take up one aspect of the topic at each conference: Internal communication in towns in Zagreb in September 2006, Communications between towns, and between towns and their hinterlands in London in July 2007, and Towns and long-distance and inter-continental communication in Lecce in September 2008. Our present paper provides an overview of the most relevant research agendas and new insights that the papers at these conferences brought to the centre of our attention.

Metropolitan communications and the experience of urban form: London, Paris, and the city railway

Numerous visions, ideas, and discourses on transport and reform had been articulated by the time the Metropolitan Railway opened its first section in 1863 in London. Since their early inception, plans for the Metropolitan and other lines in London and Paris were not only determined by the benefits that railways represented when compared with other means of transport, but also by how a multiplicity of voices reacted to and, in fact, resisted the implementation of railway lines within the city limits. Two distinct and, at times, opposing constructs were central to this process: on the one hand, the city and, on the other, the railway. The term ‘city railway’ reflects, in this sense, a position that incorporates the tensions and conflicts which emerged from the question of whether and how to take trains underneath the streets of the English and French capitals. ‘City’ and ‘railway’ were constructs with numerous and varied nuances, the conjunction of which was condition to the speculative thinking and the later implementation of the projects meant to respond, among others, the issue of severe street congestion. It is the relationship between these two constructs what I think became most constitutive of the way in which the system was conceived and evolved during the nineteenth century.

Medieval Urban Literacy

An important topic in recent research on medieval literacy is the growth of the so-called literate mentalities. In the Middle Ages, in towns one seems to have had more chance of being confronted with writing than elsewhere. The readiness on the part of town dwellers to engage in the use of written documents can be considered as an important sign of changes in thinking and the perception of the world. This urban use of written modes of communication needs to be studied in the context of all modes of communication available to town dwellers. Research on medieval urban literacy so far has concentrated on particular towns or urbanized areas. The present project aims at forming an international network to study the phenomena of literacy and the development of towns from a pan-European perspective, in which both western, Byzantine and Islamic urban societies are taken into account. This comparative approach will lead to an appreciation both of the role of the use of writing in medieval urbanization and, conversely, to a new understanding of the role of towns in the development of European literacy as such.

Town streets in the Romanian Principalities. The long road from wood to stone (17th – 19th centuries)

The same as other towns of Medieval Europe, inner town communications in the Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia stood for a significant element in the development of urban centers in Romanian-inhabited areas as well. Roads did not only allow for the carrying of news and military operations; they also represented trade routes, whereby merchants could carry their merchandise and their money. In most of the towns of Moldova and Wallachia, communication routes were under the joint supervision of town administration and royal representatives. The public road network in towns was irregular, and had developed over time, as towns had followed a gradual, unchecked pattern of expansion. A peculiar feature in many of the indicated towns were the so-called “planked streets” that had been built over the roads; these were made of boards of wood secured in such a way as to create a type of even floor, that was designed to ease passage of vehicles. This had been noticed by a large number of foreign travelers, missionaries, businessmen or diplomats that had made their way through the area. In the 19th century, the first streets paved with stone were built in the Romanian Principalities. In the second part of our paper, we will focus on the difficulties (technical, local mentality) faced by the constructors of these streets.

Performative Literary Culture and Public Knowledge

This paper will discuss the often ignored fact that the rise of the printing press was directly linked in time and space with the rise of performative literary culture and visual culture in the core urbanized areas of Western Europe. It has of course often been pointed out that the creation, circulation and public adaptation of knowledge became linked to the public sphere of civic networks and institutions. However, the role of the networks and institutions of performed literature (theatre plays, but also poems, songs, and other scripted performances) in the exchange of knowledge and learning in wider audiences has received limited interest from historians. This is due to the fact that this culture and its festive and burlesque features was often perceived as folky in nature. Work by historians, art historians and literary historians is seriously challenging these boundaries between 'popular' and 'learned' culture. This paper addresses the changes in our view of the circulation of knowledge that are caused by these recent developments.

L'académie équestre de besançon au XVII et XVIIIème siècle: transmetteur européen de la culture équestre.

Amsterdam, 2010 : la ville, centre du savoir et de la communication.


L’académie équestre de Besançon au XVIIème et XVIIIème siècle : transmetteur européen de la culture équestre.

Au XVIIème et XVIIIème siècle, l’académie équestre de Besançon, est un des hauts-lieux privilégiés en Europe de la transmission de la culture équestre. Cette institution s’inscrit dans le « kavaliertour » de la jeune noblesse allemande. C’est une des raisons qui a poussé la ville à favoriser un tel établissement. Elle recherche les protections impériales et royales pour maintenir son rang. L’académie équestre est vitale pour le rayonnement de la ville à l’étranger et notamment dans les cours européennes.

Au moment de la conquête française, dans l’acte de capitulation de la ville, Louis XIV accorde à la ville le privilège de conserver son académie, véritable fleuron, jalousé par les autres villes de la Comté. Le changement de souverain n’affecte pas l’établissement. Celui-ci, par le renom de ses écuyers poursuit la diffusion de la culture équestre au service de la jeunesse noble de la ville, de la province ainsi qu’à celui des jeunesses nobles de toute l’Europe.

L’académie, intégrée au réseau des prestigieuses académies européennes, doit son rayonnement à l’activité de ses écuyers qui ont à cœur de faire connaître leur établissement. Les responsables de la ville savent aussi que l’aspect mercantile n’est pas à dédaigner dans les affaires de ses citoyens.

Heritage education and history teaching: a present challenge

The word “heritage” has a connotation of presentism, commercialism and propaganda for group identities, whereas “disciplinary history” would be focused on analysis, contextualization and a sense of historical truth. The Dutch research-project Heritage Education, Plurality of Narratives and Shared Historical Knowledge investigates whether in the practice of teaching a more nuanced or dynamic approach is possible, one that builds on the strength of both sides of this supposed dichotomy. How would dynamic approaches look like in the context of multicultural classrooms? In this paper we report about the preliminary findings of this project from a teacher perspective. In research literature teachers are seen ‘curriculum makers’ par excellence, so it makes sense to investigate which concepts they use and how they evaluate current heritage practices on the themes we focus on in the project: Christianization, Black Slave Trade and World War II.

Between Facts and Opinions: An Exploration of Adolescents’ Ideas about the Nature of Historical Knowledge

In studying the past, students cannot but start from themselves and their present. This study, building upon educational psychological literature on epistemic beliefs and historical thinking and using qualitative methodologies, explores conceptions of historical knowledge that influence student understanding of the past. Twelve high-school students participated in two structured interviews during which they were asked to explain their degree of agreement or disagreement with a set of 22 statements exemplifying different epistemic positions theoretically deduced from the literature. They also read two sets of six texts regarding two specific historical issues and completed two parallel constructed response tasks while thinking aloud. Although students demonstrated interest in discussing epistemic issues, analysis of the findings identified several ideas that may hinder student historical understanding, such as equating the historian’s role to that of a chronicler and blurring the distinction between opinions and arguments based on evidence.

“History Isn’t History…” The Ways in Which Historians, History Programs and History Teachers Struggle with Interrelations Between Past and Present

This paper compares the relationship between past and present from three different perspectives on history: those of the historian, history programs and high school history teachers. The comparison emerges from an analysis of the epistemology of history, the goals and methods presented in official history programs in the province of Quebec and eighteen interviews with high school history teachers responsible for transmitting the latter. While the subjectivity of “present” or “current” time represents an obstacle and a challenge to the objectivity of historians, it offers history programs a base from which to study interrelations between the present and the past: the roots of present phenomena are usually examined in light of the past in order to understand the complexity of contemporary society. For history teachers, understanding present time is the goal of their teaching, however, they present this interrelation in a way which has more to do with a pedagogical strategy. Indeed, according to teachers, present time serves to give significance to knowledge about the past in a dialectic manner. In a way, the past becomes the mirror of present time. Obviously, there are differences between them, but it is rather the similarities that teachers use to help students understand interrelations between past and present.

Detach or Attach? The tension between past and present in contemporary history education in Belgium.

Contemporary society holds many expectations towards history education: it has to raise pupils to become tolerant, critical thinking citizens who can deal with the diversity of the multicultural society in a democratic way. These expectations are translated by the Belgian government into guidelines for the education of history. But this demand for social usefulness of history education and the explicit 'presentcenteredness' could easily obstruct the realization of other important goals of the teaching of history, mainly the ability to think historically. To achieve historical thinking, pupils need to be able to detach themselves from the present. They need to learn to understand the 'otherness' and 'strangeness' of the past. This demand for detachment can conflict with the social demand of attachment. History teachers do not always seem to be aware of this tension. This paper will focus on different forms of present- and pastcenteredness, and on their relationship with epistemological beliefs and teaching strategies of (future) history teachers. Firstly, I will elaborate on the research tools that have been developed to explore these relationships - namely a questionnaire and a set of performance tasks. Secondly, I will discuss the results of the research. And finally, I will elaborate on the usefulness and merits of this research for the teaching of history and more specifically for history teachers in secondary schools.

About the past, at present, for the future? Teacher students’ interpretations about the various functions of history as a school subject

The paper draws on essays written by 23 prospective history teachers, in which they reflected on the functions of history as a school subject and elaborated their personal philosophies for teaching history. They also described, how their own relation to history had developed, during school and university studies. The essays were analysed qualitatively, seeking different categories of beliefs about the role of history. Findings: history could be understood as direct information about the past, it could be given the role as related to citizenship education, or democratic education, but very often the student teachers underlined the training of historical thinking. They did not see these functions to exclude each other. The latter alternative included various approaches: historical empathy, critical analysis, and seeing the continuum and discontinuity between past and present. The interpretations were also classified according to Klafki’s theory into classical, objectivistic, formal and categorical forms.

A Forgotten Key Concept? Time in Teaching and Learning History

Time is the only concept that distinguishes history from (other) social and cultural sciences. Yet, there are not many studies in teaching and learning history that take time as their point of departure or pivotal concept. Historical thinking and reasoning is rarely defined as thinking in terms or historical time, but rather as a version of social research. This paper explores historical reasoning from the point of view of thinking in terms of historical time. Psychological and anthropological studies indicate that thinking in terms of historical time might be highly artificial and unnatural, which implies that it could present a considerable learning problem for students - a learning problem which is usually ignored. Options for empirical research are explored, around six central categories of thinking in historical time: the calendar, periodization, anachronism, contingency, generations and traces/documents.

Coolies and Capital

Ubiquitous and central to capitalism in most parts of the world and indeed constitutive of it, the ‘coolie’ represents perhaps the characteristic relationship between labour and capital outside a relatively small part of the West. As a labouring subject stabilized by coercive mechanisms that were produced and configured during the very decades of ‘slave emancipation’ and the emergence of a free-standing working class, the ‘coolie’ also interrupts liberal (and Marxian) narratives of progress from slavery to free labour. This paper explores how the availability of the ‘coolie’ as a generalizable labour form and relationship between capital and labour enables us to explore the contextual and contingent nature of the meanings and institutions of freedom in the market for wage labour, and by extension, freedom more generally.

The Indeterminacy of ‘Free Labour’ and the Return to Materialist Categories

My paper argues that the dichotomy between free and unfree labour is either a tautology (under most legal systems there are individuals who are either free or unfree) or a remarkably naïve reposing of faith in freedom of contract which is assumed to be a reality when it is in fact a transparent fiction, even more of one today than it was in the nineteenth century, as every good lawyer knows. For Marx, contracts between employers and workers were simply a ‘legal fiction’, and notions like ‘free labour’, ‘equality’, etc. symbolic of the abstractions of classical individualism. More illuminating than the contrast between free and unfree labour and its obvious potential for mystification would be a history of wage-labour itself, the ‘differences of form’ that Marx would doubtless have developed in his ‘special study of wage-labour’ (Capital, vol. 1, p. 683), but reconstructed historically, with a wealth of material that scarcely existed for him. Both the extent of wage-labour before capitalism and the brutality with which wage-labourers were treated under capitalism have been strangely underestimated by Marxists. These are issues that only historians can sort out properly but they will obviously have a major bearing on the future shape of historical materialism. As Karen Orren writes, ‘the institution of wage labor long preceded the emergence of capitalism in the seventeenth century’. The final part of the paper revisits Laclau’s critique of Frank and shows where the fallacy of that critique lies. The contrast between servile relations of production in the periphery and free labour in Europe was consistently overstated by Laclau and expanded into a contrariety between distinct economic régimes, thus missing the complexity of capital’s international relations of production. When Marx wrote that with the expansion of a world-market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, ‘the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc.’, he was half-suggesting that forms of exploitation that were typically precapitalist could be integrated into capitalism (the production and accumulation of surplus-value). The master & servant régimes of the nineteenth century are an obvious case of this, even if the more general point is one that lacks any explicit theorisation in Marxist theory (in contrast, say, to the way radical historians have now started constructing the trajectories of capitalism, as in William Dusinberre's micro-history of the South Carolina rice-plantations, Them Dark Days).

Unfree Labor and Emancipation: Comparative Reflections

In this paper I will draw on my book, _Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom_, and on my current research for a book on emancipation in Russia and the U. S. South, to offer some comparative reflections on unfree labor and its aftermath.

Russian serfdom in a global perspective, 17th-19th century

Since the 18th century at least, comparatives analysis about labor institutions and labor conditions in Russia have been made as if the boundary between free and unfree labour was a-historically and universally defined. Free labour in the “West” is thus opposed to serf labour in Russia and “Eastern Europe”. We are going to call this assertion into question and show that serfdom was never officially institutionalized in Russia and that the rules usually evoked to justify this argument actually aimed not to “bound” the peasantry but to identify noble estate owners.
However, it was not only a matter of legal definitions; we will also study the way tsarist administration, nobles and peasant themselves made use of legal courts in order to contest ownership titles and, on this ground, peasants’ and workers’ obligations and legal status. These outcomes are quite similar to those had been recently achieved “second serfdom” in Prussia, Lithuania an Poland .
In turn, this means that these labor contracts and institutions are not at the opposite range of so called “free labour” contracts and institutions that, quite the contrary, had much more contraints on woerkers than usually stated.

Atlantization and Deatlantization in times of the "Second Slavery" (19th century)

The paper describes the access (or the loss of access) to the Atlantic slave trade (and contraband trade) and the consequences for different slave societies of the Americas.

The Domestication of Early Canada: Encounters with Indians and Americans

This inquiry uses the text of Lady Simcoe's diaries of 1791-1796 as a model of cultural and personal discovery through travel to unknown lands. She came to Upper Canada from Britain in this period as the wife of the appointed Governor of the new English territory. Simcoe's diaries raise questions of the potential for the traveller to engage the natural environment and the otherness of strange peoples in a non-exploitative manner. They also take us on a journey exploring the social perceptions of the colonizer, international relations, and the culture of the colonized. The effectiveness of her mode will be queried in the paper.
Simcoe’s diaries are models of an attempt to achieve “authentic” relation to the otherness of place, nature and culture. She reports finding that her greatest fear as she explored the forests of this new land was that in these woods she might encounter Americans, not Indians. In fact she reports her admiration of the “superior air” and “impressive action” of the Indians, and she sought to learn as much as she could from them about the hunting of game and the use of plants as medicine.
Throughout the initial hardships of creating an English settlement in a harsh land, Simcoe had to balance her position as the wife of a head of state and had to maintain propriety appropriate to her position while finding the essence of this new land. She reveals to us a surprising model of motherhood, leaving most of her children behind in England as she undertook this task, losing one after a year in Canada, and taking another on arduous journeys through the new territory in spite of the child’s illness, hunger, and the chilling temperatures.
The diaries provide one version of a successful encounter with the novel and strange, and an image of encountering other without seeking its conquest.

Le Brésil vu par les français dans la littérature de voyage

Notre travail a pour but de présenter des réflexions sur la littérature de voyage de quelques Français, qui, venus au Brésil pendant la deuxième moitié du XVIIIème et la première du XIXème siècle, présentent, dans leurs écrits, différentes façons de regarder le peuple, la nature, les moeurs du pays visité, laissant, dans leurs journaux, des témoignages assez importants qui nous permettent d’ étudier le rapport France/Brésil dès la Renaissance, aussi bien que les mouvements d’indépendance dans ce pays, qui un jour a été appelé “France Antarctique”. La Condamine, Saint-Hilaire , Ferdinand Denis et Francis de Castelnau sont quelques-uns de ces voyageurs responsables d’ éléments importants dans le croisement de regards entre les deux pays.

The Crusades of John of Luxembourg

At the end of XIII century the crusades to the Holy Land and Jerusalem were finished and the christian state is fallen down. The last pagan region of Europe was at the moment the northern - eastern part of continent. This was the main direction of crusades in XIV century. In 3 of them to Prussia and Lithuania took part king of Bohemia John of Luxembiurg. These crusades had a lot of aspects: religious, political, military, cultural, but also signified the crossing of boundaries between different civilisation areas. Besides these expeditions played very important role as a part of chivalric ethics of the Middle Ages.

Vidago, Pedras Salgadas and Chaves - more than just spa tourism destinations between 1892 and 1974

This paper analyzes the changing culture of travel in a very local Portuguese context, focusing the spas of Vidago, Pedras Salgadas and Chaves. The period under consideration starts in 1892 as that year was crucial for spa development in Portugal because the “law of mineral waters” (lei das águas) was decreed then; 1974 is the closing year, for introducing the actual political regime, the democratic republic. As a matter of fact, local tourism history will be linked with such diverse national sociopolitical contexts as monarchy (until 1910), republic (1910-1926) and dictatorship (Estado Novo; 1926-1974). Differences/similarities will be highlighted and, if possible, explained and/or related with national tourist plans/changes in society/political priorities/etc..

The main objective is thus to find out whether we can discover why people went to the Alto Tâmega cluster of spas (in the interior north of Portugal): for spa motives or other kind of motives? This implicates that we have to sum up the tourist attractions available over time. Another question to be answered is whether local authorities adapted hotels/resources/promotion campaigns in order to respond to changing tourist demands. Or in other words: why did only Vidago have a Grand Hotel, why where local river beaches/casinos created, who paid for tourism publicity, could foreign tourists be attracted?

The documents available to inform us about this part of history - municipal deeds, local and national newspapers (and magazines), legislation, statistics, novels, business archives, photos, posters - are very heterogeneous and not all of them cover the whole period under analysis.

Images of place and space: nineteenth-century travel and the development of cultural economies

Using comparative examples, this paper proposes to examine some factors contributing to travel as a force for change in the second-half of the long nineteenth century. In particular it will focus on examples of the relationship between travel practices (such as visiting cafes) and the media and cultural industries. The volume, range and content of the materials and artefacts relating travel produced by these industries demonstrates the effects of the increasing mobility of people, goods and information on perceptions and representations of place and space, facilitating and encouraging the making of the kind of comparisons that stimulated competition and emulation in a number of different fields and across continents and cultural boundaries. Particularly important in this respect was the trend towards an urban tourism which was encouraged by, amongst other things, the spread of an exhibition culture which included not only the great international trade fairs ( in the which the promotion of tourism was actively promoted) but also as well as more specialised kinds of events focused on art, horticulture and health. The increasing interconnectedness of cities and the structure of the media and cultural industries meant that the growth of tourism in one place could impact on the cultural economies of places elsewhere.

From the “Tibetan paradox” to the “Tibetan médiance”: Epistemological changes in the perception of Tibet through the experience of French explorers

The French culture of exploration to Tibet (1846-1912) has been largely neglected by critics who have generally subsumed French travel accounts under the imperial geopolitical background of British explorations of Tibet known as the Great Game. Nevertheless, French explorers show a specific evolution of knowledge and representations concerning Tibet.
First explorers tend to conceive Tibet in a paradoxical way: land and inhabitants being perceived as wild and savage, they cannot acknowledge Tibetan culture in itself. This is what I propose to call the “Tibetan paradox” on the basis of a varied body of French texts and accounts on Tibet from the second half of nineteenth century. Such an approach of Tibetan landscape and people will be dismissed by one of the most original travellers to Tibet, Jacques Bacot (1877-1965). After his explorations of unknown parts of Tibet from 1906 to 1910, Bacot was to play a leading role in the evolution of French tibetology. In his travel accounts, Bacot appears to pay an acute attention to Tibetans’ own representations of their environment. This signs the emergence of a renewed conception of Tibet, which can be suitably described in the terms of French geographer Augustin Berque as a Tibetan “médiance”. This will prove the first step in the development of a new set of interrogations in XXth-century human sciences in France and a cornerstone in the literary history of French representations of Tibet.