May 2012

On 14 December 1960, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed its famous “Declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples”.[i] This document, also known as UN Resolution 1514, declared that the domination of peoples by alien powers constituted a violation of human rights and thereby a breach of the UN Charter. It reaffirmed the right of self-determination for all peoples and called for the immediate and unconditional end to colonialism all over the world. Less than a year later, a special committee was established by the General Assembly to monitor and report the progress of decolonisation. One of the founding members of this Committee of 24, which was until 1962 called the Committee of 17, was Great Britain.

From the very beginning, the British position in the Committee was an extremely difficult one. The Committee of 24 soon became very well known for the violent attacks by the majority of its members against the Western colonial powers. Great Britain was the prime target of this anti-imperialist rhetoric. As the 1960s progressed, the criticism became so aggressive that the British Government at several points considered leaving the Committee of 24. This was only prevented, because Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the United Nations, convinced his government of the necessity to avoid the impression that Great Britain refused to cooperate with the United Nations. In the end, Great Britain remained a member of the Committee of 24 until 1971, when large parts of the British Empire had already been decolonized.[ii]

The impact which the Committee of 24 had on the dissolution of the British Empire should receive more attention by historians. The relevance of the Committee resulted, in part, from the great concern the British Government had for Great Britain’s international image during the 1960s. The determination to present Great Britain’s relationship with its colonies and other dependent territories in a favourable light was not only a question of honour and principle, but based on the firm conviction that too much international attention could have a significantly disruptive effect on the remaining parts of the British Empire and thereby endanger important British interests. The Committee of 24 was much more than just an international forum where Great Britain had to publicly defend its imperial record. The mere existence of the Committee influenced the policies of the British Government in at least some of its dependent territories. The impact of the Committee of 24 was therefore not limited to the many non-self-governing territories it actually discussed, but extended also to those countries the Committee might have put on its agenda.

The consequences of the British Government’s fear of interference by the Committee of 24 were seen with the case of the nine Protected States of the Persian Gulf. In December 1963, Sir Patrick Dean, Lord Caradon’s predecessor at the United Nations in New York, warned the Foreign Office that the Committee of 24 was very likely to turn its attention to Bahrain, Qatar and the seven Trucial States within the next year. Dean feared that the Arab member states of the United Nations, under the leadership of either Egypt or Iraq, would use the Committee of 24 to launch a concerted attack against the British position in the Persian Gulf. If that happened, the British Government would have very little chance of convincing the committee that there was no reason to classify Bahrain, Qatar and the Trucial States as non-self-governing territories. While the nine shaikhdoms were no colonies, their sovereignty was clearly limited. The British Government was not only responsible for their defence against foreign aggression and the conduct of their external relations, but it also reserved certain privileges in regard to their internal affairs. These British privileges included extra-territorial jurisdiction over all non-Muslims residing in Bahrain, Qatar and the Trucial States and a veto-right to the granting of oil concessions to foreign companies by the local rulers.

During the next few years, the British Government remained very alert to the possibility that the Committee of 24 might put the nine Protected States on its agenda. Sir Patrick Dean’s warnings let to an intense discussion on how Great Britain’s position in the Persian Gulf could be made less susceptible to international criticism. In 1965, the British Government decided to very slowly modernise its relationship with Bahrain, Qatar and the Trucial States, without, however, having any intention of giving up Great Britain’s presence in the Persian Gulf in the immediate future. In the meantime, it remained the policy of the British Government to draw as little international attention to the area as possible. The Foreign Office was very anxious to avoid the impression that Great Britain exercised more power in the Protected States than it had been granted by treaty. The most significant consequence of this principle was the British policy towards the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Shaikh Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan. At least from 1963 onwards, the possibility of replacing Shaikh Shakhbut, who was considered an unfit ruler for his shaikhdom, with his brother Shaikh Zayed was discussed in the Foreign Office. However, these plans were not acted upon until 1966, when the British Government was presented with a written request by the leading members of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family to depose Shaikh Shakhbut. Since the British Government had no constitutional right to replace a ruler, the initiative for the deposition had to come – or at least appear to have come – from the Al Nahyan family. In 1964, Sir William Luce, the Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, had suggested to go ahead without the prior consent of the family. The Foreign Office refused, because this move would have opened the door to the Committee of 24, with possible detrimental consequences for Great Britain’s entire position in the Persian Gulf.

In the end, Sir Patrick Dean’s concern about possible interference by the Committee of 24 in the Protected States proved to be unfounded. However, the impact that the concern about Great Britain’s international image had on British Persian Gulf policy shows the need to further investigate the role that the Committee of 24 played in the process of decolonisation.

Michael Talbot, Op-Ed Columnist

May 2012

May: the beginning of the British spring, or ‘the rainy season’ as it is better known; the month of  a whole range of patriotic events, from VE Day at its beginning to The Last Night of the Proms at its end, with the promise of extra pageantry with The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Nestling somewhere in the middle, resides a slightly different form of national entertainment. The 57th Annual Eurovision Song Contest, to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, will delight and/or induce vomiting across the land.

Eurovision has gone through a series of identity crises and changes. From a relatively serious singing contest at its inception in 1956, it was for several decades host to a number of relatively popular music stars, from Abba to Cliff Richard to Celine Dion. Then at some point in the 1990s, the contest became something of a farce, or a show of annual hilarity depending on one’s point of view, with novelty acts and bizarre performances mixing with regional block voting. Gradually over the past five years or so it is once again becoming something more like an earnest music competition.

In addition to the block voting – Greece and Cyprus always giving each other full marks, for instance – the otherwise harmless competition has often found itself in the middle of contemporary politics. It was widely believed, for instance, that General Franco rigged the 1968 competition held in London (although that may simply be the result of disbelief that the Spanish entry of that year, ‘La La La’ received any points at all). At the 1974 competition, again held in Britain, this time in Brighton, the singing of the Portuguese entry was one of the signals that ignited the Carnation Revolution and the overthrow of Salazar and the Estado Novo. The 2005 competition in Kiev was held in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution, its entry being the theme-song of that uprising, Razom nas bahato.

It has also been at the centre of conflict, with the struggle between Greeks and Turks over Cyprus resulting in disputes between Greece and Turkey in the 1975 and 1976 competitions. As entry to the competition is based on television broadcasters rather than geographic location, the competition has also found itself embroiled in the Middle East conflict. Israel is a regular participant, and has hosted the competition a number of times, but this has led to a boycott of the competition by potential entrants Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia.

But very rarely has there been a problem on the scale of what is happening this year. Certainly previous hosts have been somewhat problematic in terms of their human rights abuses, from the repression of Francoist Spain to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and Turkey’s oppression of the Kurds. Such things attracted some attention but relatively little compared to this year’s competition in Baku. Any human rights survey – such as the Freedom House survey which lists countries such as Ukraine and Turkey as ‘partially free’ – will generally place Azerbaijan in the ‘unfree’ category. Political dissent is not tolerated, the government is maintained by military rule and a brutal secret police, and for a journalist to speak out against the regime is to dice with death. The new Crystal Hall that will host the competition has been built by destroying dozens of flats and homes with only pittances given in compensation.

However, this is unlikely to interfere in anyone’s fun time with Eurovision. Sure, Austria boycotted the 1969 competition, making a statement against Francoist Spain, Georgia boycotted the 2009 competition in Moscow following the war between those two nations the previous year, and Armenia will boycott this year’s competition due to their ongoing territorial disputes with Azerbaijan.  But for the majority of Europeans, the party and the celebrations will go on. This sad state of affairs, where people will ignore the suffering of others because it may interfere in their celebrations, got me thinking about another travesty that has recently appeared in the news.

Just a few days after I sent in my last piece to this website, a revelation came out in the British press that, although perhaps not entirely shocking was still sufficiently disturbing to have merited some attention. Reported on the BBC and in The Guardian, but nowhere else in any great depth, the story revealed that, after a challenge in the High Court, the British government had been forced to release to The National Archives a series of documents detailing colonial atrocities that had been withheld from the public.  This came with the further disclosure that large numbers of documents concerning said atrocities – primarily dealing with the British colonies in Africa, but elsewhere as well – had been illegally destroyed. These documents, which historians are now beginning to examine in depth, show in greater detail than was previously possible the extent of the brutality of the final decades of British rule in their African colonies. More than that, they actually confirm a pattern of brutality that had marked crown rule in India, in Southern Africa, Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere.

Yet, as with the wider British press, many historians of empire will no doubt be inclined to continue as if this disclosure had never been made. Especially in the month of The Proms, when we all gather to belt out Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory, it is unthinkable that people should be expected to ponder what empire really meant. The fact is that we will continue to think of our imperial past as something rather benign. The usual argument goes something like, ‘well, the British were simply well-meaning chaps bumbling around the globe trying to better the natives and organise their economies, and anyway, things were much better for those natives under British rule than things ever were for their fellows under French or, heaven forefend, Belgian rule.’ Certainly there are historians doing brave and necessary work on Kenya in particular, but still in sections of the British press (and indeed in British historiography) there is complete denial about the events of the 1950s, with this article from the Telegraph concerning the rights of Mau Mau to sue the British government dismissing any sense of imperial guilt as ‘self-hating Britain.’ Perhaps a bit of self-hate where it is due would do us no harm from time-to-time.

Just as Azerbaijan’s horrific abuses of human rights are unlikely to put a halt to the Eurovision festivities, so the increasing revelations from the archives of the horrors of imperial rule and the subsequent attempted cover-up will do little to dampen any of the patriotic events that will be celebrated in Britain from now until the end of the Olympics; neither will it do much to dent the perception that British imperial rule was overall a Good Thing.  But just as it cannot hurt to use Baku’s hosting of the Eurovision Song Contest as an opportunity to recognise the fact that violent and abusive dictatorships continue to exist on the fringes of Europe, it would only take a moment, as Brits gather in the Royal Albert Hall and Hyde Park to sing the hymns of empire, to contemplate that, not terribly long ago, this country too was in the business of terrorising many thousands of people who had the misfortune to resist its rule.

Mark Doyle, Op-Ed Columnist

May 2012

In March Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans to launch a feasibility study into the privatization of Britain’s road network. The nation’s congested roads, he said, are causing Britain to fall behind its competitors. The government lacks the money to make the necessary changes on its own, of course, but perhaps if it leased the roads to private investors, gave those investors a set of congestion targets, and rewarded them for meeting the targets with money from the Treasury, the genius of private enterprise will find a way to unclog the national arteries. Under this scheme investors would not be allowed to place tolls on existing roads, but they would be allowed to charge for the use of any new lanes or new roads that they build. Such a scheme, Cameron said, would allow Britain “to build for the future with as much confidence and ambition as the Victorians once did.”

Confident and ambitious the Victorians may have been, but is it wise to imitate their approach to infrastructure development? Those familiar with the history of road building in Victorian Ireland, with its notorious famine-era “roads to nowhere,” have good reason to doubt whether the Victorians are good role models in this respect, especially if the goal is to create just and equitable – rather than simply efficient – infrastructure. But as I have just learned from an impressive new book by Jo Guldi called Roads to Power, the Victorians’ infatuation with the free market nearly destroyed large stretches of Britain’s own road network as well. To see how this happened, and why it could happen again, we need to follow Guldi back to the eighteenth century and Britain’s first great age of road building.

The nation’s first roads were built and financed by turnpike trusts and local governments. Turnpike trusts paid for the roads by charging for their use, and local governments paid for them from the local rates. In the mid-eighteenth century, the central government began taking steps toward a centralized road system: first there were the military roads built to pacify Scotland, then came grander schemes (often promoted by Irish and Scottish MPs) to link the economies of outlying areas to the heart of England. The vast majority of roads remained in local hands throughout the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, but these massive state projects – immense bridges, 60-foot highways – generated new kinds of expertise (in the form of the civil engineer), technologies (e.g., macadam paving), and financing that eventually trickled down to the private and local roads. Central government coordination and the rule of experts helped to link the poor peripheries to the center, redistributed wealth, and undermined the power of the turnpike trusts, whose managers essentially became government bureaucrats. Turnpikes never disappeared, but they came under increasing pressure from poor people unable to pay their high rates, and from the 1820s to the 1840s anti-toll riots were common.

Beginning in the 1830s, however, the pendulum began to swing away from centralization and back toward local control. Libertarians objected to centralized roads on the grounds that they stifled local initiative, cost too much, and subjected the nation to the rule of unaccountable, out-of-touch elites. The result, as Guldi points out, was that from 1835 to 1900 (a period that coincides almost exactly with Cameron’s age of Victorian “confidence and ambition”) every single effort to centrally manage the nation’s roads was defeated. The result was a complete reversal of the positive trends established during the era of centralization.

For instance, opponents of centralization had claimed that free competition in roads would eventually lead to the demise of tolls, since shopkeepers and landlords would object to the way they hindered travel. This didn’t happen; instead, the burden of maintaining the roads simply shifted from the central government (which drew its revenue from rich and poor alike) to the poor alone. Municipalities that were too poor to pay for their own roads had to rely on tolls, and these tolls, like all tolls, hurt the poor more than the rich. In fact, the nation’s expanding rail network enabled wealthy travelers to bypass tolls and local roads altogether, while the poor who used local roads had to continue to pay for them, even as the quality of those roads declined. Faced with rising costs and unable to raise enough money for maintenance, many poor areas simply let their roads crumble. While economically vibrant areas like London could afford to abolish tolls and build and maintain good roads, rural and poor areas languished.

The swing back toward centralization began in the 1880s and 1890s, as areas of Scotland began to agitate against local control, and it culminated in 1936 with the Trunk Act, which nationalized Britain’s great highways. This centralization came at the cost of democratic decision-making, but it did have the virtue of equalizing people’s access to good roads. If the current privatization plans go through, Britain could see a repetition of this Victorian-era inequality. Even if no tolls are affixed to existing roads, new toll roads and toll lanes built by private firms would obviously hurt the poor more than the rich. While those who can afford the tolls speed to their homes or jobs on congestion-free arteries, those who cannot could remain stuck in the gridlock of free roads. Rural and impoverished areas are likely to be hit the hardest, as they will present private investors with little economic incentive to build or improve roads, and they will be unable to finance construction or improvement from their own pockets.

The Labour Party has objected to the road privatization scheme by comparing it to the privatization of the railroads by the Thatcher government, which was supposed to reduce costs and improve services but ended up doing neither. The analogy is probably a good one, but Labour (and other opposition groups) would do well to look more closely at what actually happened during Cameron’s vaunted Victorian age, when privatized roads contributed substantially to the creation of the “two nations” of rich and poor that so famously inhabited Britain during that time. Roads do have a way of bringing people together, but, as Guldi convincingly shows, they can also pull them apart.

Jodi Burkett, Op-Ed Columnist

April 2012

The conference season is upon us here in the UK (the three weeks of Easter break are packed with them). Conferences are like an oasis for the professional historian – a place where you can indulge in talking about your own work at great length and, more often than not, people are actually interested and will listen. They provide an excellent opportunity to hear what other people are up to, to stay abreast of new and recent research developments and that all-important demand to stop navel-gazing and tell people what you’ve been researching. I had the pleasure of attending two very different conferences in the first week of the Easter break this year and would like to spend my next two pieces reflecting on each in turn.

The first was a conference titled ‘Solidarities that know no boundaries: Transnational Advocacy in Historical Perspective’ held at Northumbria University in Newcastle and organised by Daniel Laqua and Charlotte Alston. This conference was held over two days and included 23 speakers from across Europe, and one from the United States. There were a few additional attendees, but the size of the conference meant that there was only one panel at a time so discussion and conversation could build throughout the two days.

The objective of the conference was to explore why activists take up causes that don’t directly affect them – what produces that sense of ‘solidarity’ across national boundaries? The conference papers presented explored this question from a number of angles using case studies from around the world and between the late 18^th century and the present day. My own contribution explored the NUS in the decade before 1968 arguing that the British student movement was deeply concerned about the plight of students around the world. However, I also argued that this was not necessarily an altruistic sense of solidarity, but was bound up with wider British feelings of guilt and responsibility regarding, and as a legacy of, the empire.

Throughout the wide ranging and fascinating discussion during the conference there were a number of issues which I would like to spend the rest of this article reflecting upon. The first was the meaning, and our assumptions about the meaning, of ‘solidarity’. Most of the time we have a very positive view of the idea of solidarity, but what emerged from a number of case studies was the idea that solidarity was not always based on a positive feeling or deep knowledge of an issue or people, but could equally be based on ignorance. There were a number of examples of this throughout the two days which showed that more often than not feelings of solidarity are about an imagined reality.  In effect, then, these examples of solidarity tell us much more about those who profess the solidarity than they do about those who are the objects of this feeling. This raises the issue of whether transnational action can be separated from nationality or nationalism – is exploring transnational solidarity another (useful) way of exploring national identities in a particular context?

In fact, the voices of those actors in need of ‘help’ were almost drowned out. In the main we discussed Europeans or North Americans and their solidarity with people in the ‘third world’. The reasons for this could be numerous. First, and perhaps most obviously, is our own position as academics within Europe/’the West’ (this Cold War language does seem to linger in these sorts of discussions). Our own subjectivity informs the type of history that we do. This is both on a psychological or emotional basis, and also for the more practical reason that these are the records, documents or evidence to which we most readily have access. But I also think this goes deeper into our understanding of the relationship between ‘the West’ and the ‘third world’ that dates back several centuries. We see ‘the West’ as in a position to ‘save’ those poor people on the other side of the world, from other members of ‘the West’, from each other and from themselves.

Kim Christiaens tried to bring this voice out arguing that ‘third world’ actors were themselves responsible for the creation of a number of solidarity organisations in Europe during the Cold War. However, there were questions raised about the chronology of some of these ‘third world’ actor’s tours and the extent to which they spurred the creation of solidarity groups. There were also some concerns raised that the appearance of these people was too simple an explanation for the springing up of solidarity movements – there had to be other factors which made these groups appear and cohere. One of these factors, I would argue, at least in the case of Britain, is the legacy of empire. Throughout the conference the importance of the national context in creating a sense of internationalism was raised again and again and for Britain a crucial part of the national context is, and was, the imperial legacy.

Perhaps a key distinction to make, and one which came up repeatedly throughout the conference, was the difference between solidarity as a desire to ‘help’ or support another group and that which feels an affinity or a sense of ‘sameness’ between themselves and another group. The first sense of solidarity, like that expressed by the NUS, is certainly part of a long-term trend emerging out of the same ideas which were expressed in the ‘white man’s burden’. Perhaps it is this second sense of solidarity – this feeling of affinity or similarity across very different circumstances – which is the more popular understanding of solidarity which can, and does, cut out ‘the West’ entirely.

Many more issues were raised than can be discussed here. It was certainly an excellent example of a conference about transnationalism that was transnational in character, scope and interest. It reminds us, those interested in Britain and the World, of both the difficulties and advantages of thinking transnationally and taking full account of our subjects of study who also often thought inter- or transnationally.

April 2012

Frankenstein. What a spine-tingling, delightfully scary word! It immediately brings to mind a host of images; a mad scientist, a horrifying reanimated corpse, a gigantic lumbering green man-monster.  With the exception of perhaps Dracula, no other literary monster has had such massive appeal and influence on books, film and television. Written when Mary Shelley was only eighteen, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus is often lauded as the first science fiction novel.  The significance of the work lies in its furthering of the acceptance of women as credible contributors to English literature, as well as its ongoing and pervasive cultural influence.

Mary Shelley’s terrifying vision is well known and has haunted imaginations for nearly 200 years, but perhaps lesser known are the details of her tragic and fascinating life. The daughter of political writer William Godwin, famous for his 1793 treatise “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice” and celebrated feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (of whom I wrote of in my last article) Mary Shelley was destined from birth to become a writer.  Mary referred to her mother’s most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in her journals, stating that ‘If I have never written to vindicate the Rights of Women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed. At every risk, I have befriended and supported victims to the social system.’[i]  She also expressed her early desire to write by stating ‘It is not singular that, as a daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing.’[ii]  Her husband, the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley[iii] referenced Mary’s illustrious parents when he dedicated his poem The Revolt of Islam to her:

                  ‘They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,
                  Of glorious parents, thou aspiring child.’[iv]

On the 30^th of August in Somerstown, London, Mary was born and named after her mother, who tragically died a few days later. William Godwin soon re-married, though Mary was unloved by her stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont, to whom ‘nothing was as irritating as seeing Mary deep in a book.’[v] As a child, Mary’s favourite pastimes were to daydream and write stories. She found nature very inspiring, and claimed that it was when she was in nature that her ‘true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination’ were most often created. [vi] A delicate child, Mary was occasionally sent to Scotland to ‘escape the close atmosphere of London and the reproofs of her stepmother’, where she rejoiced in her freedom and love of nature.[vii]  William Godwin described her as being ‘singularly bold, somewhat imperious and active of mind’ as well as having a great desire for knowledge.[viii]  Mary lived in a world of imagination, ‘weaving her weird fancies into stories’ reading poetry, and spending long summer days beside her mother’s grave in St. Pancras churchyard, book in hand.[ix]

Mary was being educated in Scotland when Percy Bysshe Shelley, critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language, first became acquainted with the Godwin family. Upon Mary’s return to England in April of 1814, Shelley fell madly in love with the ‘beautiful, restless, singularly gifted’ fifteen year old, and threatened to commit suicide if she didn’t return his affections.[x]   Described by Shelley as possessing a ‘beauty of a rare and refined type,’ Mary soon ‘pledged her heart and hand to Shelley for life.’[xi] Their relationship was ‘like a chemic union of a base, separately inert, but when combined became a potent force’ and on July 28^th, 1814, Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife Harriet, and ran away to France with Mary.[xii]  The young lovers were accompanied on their flight to the Continent by Mary’s sister-in-law, Jane Clairmont.[xiii]  William Godwin was so upset at Mary for her actions that he refused any communication with her for two-and-a-half years.

The runaway threesome toured France and Switzerland for six weeks, with Shelley and Mary jointly detailing their travels in a journal which was later published under the title Journal of a Six Weeks’ Tour.[xiv]  A lack of funds forced them to return to England that September, and the following February Mary prematurely gave birth to a daughter who lived for only a few weeks.[xv]  Mary was consoled in her loss by the birth of their son William ten months later.

In May of 1816, Mary, Shelley, Jane and baby William journeyed to Geneva to rendezvous with Lord Byron, the leading figure of the Romantic Movement, where they moved into a small villa within walking distance from Byron’s summer home, Villa Diodati. Trapped indoors due to a ‘wet, ungenial summer and incessant rain’ Mary, Shelley, Byron, and the English writer John William Polidori amused themselves reading German ghost stories, ultimately deciding to write their own.[xvi]  Lord Byron said to Mary ‘You and I will publish ours together’, and Mary began to write her ‘wild and powerful romance’ which would ‘take hold of the public mind once and forever.’[xvii]

Mary wanted to write a story which would ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awake thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.’  Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was inspired by the late night conversations Mary overheard between Byron and Shelley on various philosophical doctrines, including Darwin’s theories, the nature of the principle of life and the possibility of re-animation.  Guided by her rich imagination, Mary envisioned ‘the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together…the hideous phantasm of a man.’ The image terrified and possessed Mary, and she began writing her tale of horror, which she later described as ‘a transcript of the grim terror of my waking dream.’[xviii]

The foursome returned to England in August of 1816, where the following months brought numerous tragedies into the lives of both Mary and Shelley.  Shortly after their return, Mary’s half-sister, Fanny Imlay, committed suicide by overdosing on laudanum, and on December 10^th, the body of Shelley’s estranged wife Harriet was found drowned in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London.  Despite the tragic suicides, the year ended on a somewhat positive note, when on December 30^th, Mary and Shelley were married in St. Mildred’s Church.  After the marriage, William Godwin ended his long silence and reconciled with his daughter.

Between 1817 and 1819 the Shelley’s lives were filled with both joy and great sorrow. The birth of their daughter Clara Everina in September of 1817 brought them much happiness, as did the publication in three volumes of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus on January 1^st, 1818.  In March of that year they travelled to Italy, accompanied by Jane and her one year old daughter Allegra, the illegitimate child of Lord Byron.  Tragedy struck when little Clara Everina died of dysentery that September in Venice, followed by William, who died from malaria in Rome nine months later.  The deaths of her children caused Mary to suffer a nervous breakdown, and she was frequently ill until her son Percy Florence was born five months later, on November 12^th.

After the birth of Percy, Mary found the strength to continue writing. In 1820 she began a novel titled Castruccio, Prince of Lucca and completed two mythological dramas, Proserpine and Midas. In July of 1821 the first translation of Frankenstein was published in France as Frankenstein; ou le Prométhée Moderne. In a letter written that year to Mary, her father claimed that ‘Frankenstein is universally known and is everywhere respected. It is the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age than any I ever heard of.’[xix]  Mary was undoubtedly glorying in the popularity of her novel when she traveled to San Terenzo in 1822 and moved into the Villa Magni with Shelley and Jane in April.  She was unaware that it was the last time she would be truly happy, and that unimaginable tragedy would soon change her life forever.

That June, Mary suffered a miscarriage which almost killed her, leaving her weak and in poor health the entire summer.  The following month, Shelley and his friend Edward Williams made plans to sail from San Terenzo to Leghorn in Shelley’s schooner, the Don Juan.  Mary was to have accompanied them, but her ill health prevented her. [xx]  Shelley had been having ‘ghostly presentiments’ and due to his ‘trembling under a shadow of coming misery’ Mary was ‘scarcely able to let her husband go from her side on the expedition.’[xxi]  On July 1^st, Shelley left the Villa Magni, never to return.

After Shelley and Williams failed to appear on July 8^th as expected, Mary waited in horrible uncertainty, and at one point, in hysterics, confronted Lord Byron demanding to know the whereabouts of her husband.  Afterwards, Byron stated that he ‘never saw anything in dramatic tragedy to equal the terror of Mrs. Shelley’s appearance that day.’[xxii]  Shelley’s corpse washed up on the shore near Via Reggio, 14 days after the schooner had gone missing. While sailing from Leghorn, the Don Juan had sunk in the Gulf of Spezia due to a sudden violent storm, and unable to swim, Shelley and Williams had both drowned. In accordance with Italian laws, Shelley’s corpse was cremated on the 16^th of August.[xxiii]

Widowed at twenty-four, with a child and no income, and disliked by her husband’s family, Shelley’s death left Mary ‘lonely and unsolaced.’  In a heartbreaking letter, she wrote ‘I have but one hope, for which I live – to render myself worthy to join him (Shelley)…God knows what will become of me.’[xxiv]  After Shelley’s death, she moved to Pisa, but finding that Italy had become a ‘corpse of the enchantress that she was’ Mary returned to England in 1823, where she continued to write. [xxv]  In her journal she wrote that ‘Literary labours, the improvement of my mind, and the enlargement of my ideas are the only occupations that elevate me from my lethargy.’[xxvi]

Although she was often despondent and claimed that nothing she wrote pleased her, Mary’s literary success continued, and in July of 1823, Presumption; or The Fate of Frankenstein, a play by Richard Brinsley Peake, opened at the English Opera House for a run of 37 performances.  Mary helped Thomas Moore to compose a biography of Lord Byron, and The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life was published in 1830.  In 1839, her four-volume edition of The Poetical Words of Percy Bysshe Shelley with her preface and notes was published, dedicated to her son Percy Florence, followed by her two-volume edition of Shelley’s Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments.

After Shelley’s death, Mary supported herself as a writer for nearly twenty years, and published numerous works: Valperga (1823); The Last Man (1824); Perkin Warbeck (1830); Lodore (1835); and Falkner (1837).  She also composed nearly all of the Italian and Spanish lives in Lardner’s Encyclopedia, as well as two travel volumes entitled ‘Rambles in Germany and Italy.’ [xxvii]  When Percy succeeded to the Shelley estates in 1844, Mary no longer wrote for money, but devoted herself to the composition of Memoirs of Shelley in honour of her beloved husband.[xxviii]  Due in part to the emotional strain of editing her late husband’s poems, as well as composing Memoirs, Mary was frequently plagued by illness for the remainder of her life. She died in London on Feb 1^st, 1851 at the age of fifty-four.  Her daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley, had the remains of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin (who died fifteen years earlier) moved from St. Pancras to the churchyard at St. Peters, Bournemouth, and on February 8^th, Mary was laid to rest between her parents.

The tragic romance of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley will remain fascinating as long as their works are read. A self-educated and gifted writer, Mary’s legacy lies in having been one of those literary women ‘whose true province was to influence and stimulate others.’[xxix]  Frankenstein, her most memorable achievement, is ‘a fearful and fantastic dream of genius’ which has endured for nearly two centuries, and has had a significant influence on 20^th century culture.[xxx]  Upon her death, The Leader published Lines on the Death of Mrs. Shelley, among which the following verse eloquently illustrates the influence of her greatest work:

                  A peeress, girt about with magic powers,-
                  That could at will evoke from her wild thought
                  Spirits unearthly, monster-shaped, to strike
                  Terror within us, and strange wonderment, –
                  Renewing, realizing, once again,
                  With daring fancy, on her thrilling page,
                  The famous story of Prometheus old.[xxxi]

Leslie Rogne Schumacher, Op-Ed Columnist

April 2012

No graduate proseminar on modern British history is complete without a discussion of Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2005).  Porter’s book has become famous–one might say notorious–for promoting a revision of the view that British society was a patently “imperial” society, at least until the last two decades of the nineteenth century.  And even then, other political, economic, and cultural issues and categories prevailed in the British mind as they had throughout Britain’s long history of interaction with the world, whether this was carried out in a functionally imperial manner or otherwise.  This thesis, as we know, caused quite a stir in the academic community, gathering a host of criticisms, plaudits, and dozens of in-depth reviews in leading journals.  Some of those who arranged themselves on Porter’s side made a scholar who cut his teeth on studying the legacy of British anti-imperialism uncomfortable, as they mistook his words for the kind of writing espoused by modern apologists for empire.  Similarly, Porter was surely disappointed that imperial historians of the postmodern stripe didn’t get more out of the book, as he obviously sought to interrogate the language with which we describe the past and give it shape according to modern theoretical conceptions and dialogue.

Given the furor that arose immediately following the book’s release, only seven years out the debate seems like old news in the field of British history.  And indeed, this is not really the place to delve into a detailed exposition of the why or why not, the whether or in what way, or any other specific elements of the book.  Rather, I’m interested here in making a few comments about how my post-Porter experience has shaped the kind of research I do and the kind of scholarship I find compelling.  I’ve always been concerned more with the questions in history more than I have the answers, and in this The Absent-Minded Imperialists never fails to get me questioning, even arguing, with myself over the appropriate view to take on whatever topic of Britain and the World is set before me at the moment.  For this peculiar capability to always affect, to always incite, I have in the last five years come to feel that Porter’s particular rendition of the problem of talking about Britain as an “imperial society” should stand as a standard starting point for graduate education on the topic.

In some ways strangely, this opinion comes from the enigma that Porter’s book is so provocative and ambitious, yet contains a level of imprecision and is open to misinterpretation.  This tension lends itself not only to starting an initial dialogue with students (most of whom, including my 2007 self, come into the field buying the notion that British imperialism was as important to Britons as Porter says it wasn’t), but also makes it so remarkably useful for thinking about the problem as time goes on.  Indeed, one of the most valuable assignments I ever had was writing a review essay on Porter’s book as a first-year Ph.D. student.  Having done this, my opinion is that every aspiring scholar of the British Empire should be compelled to take on this task.  Moreover, students should be encouraged to continue thinking through the topic as they move through their graduate education, coming back to Porter’s argument again and again.  Recently lighting upon my old review essay in pursuit of some other paper, I went down the rabbit hole again, spending hours thinking through the problem using my historical self in relation to the dissertation that will be the subject of my rapidly-approaching defense, cross-checking it with the dog-eared copy of the book always within arm’s reach of my desk.

One might wonder if it’s appropriate for a single book to have such an effect on someone, and indeed my prose may overestimate the centrality of Porter to my worldview.  Rather, what is specifically fascinating to me is that while so many people saw the book as positing a new vision or place in the field of imperial history, in fact it doesn’t appear that it is possible to adhere to Porter as one might to a Ferguson or a Spivak, a Colley or a Cannadine, or even a Hobson or a Seeley.  Instead, what sucks me in is the tension present in The Absent-Minded Imperialists between bold statements based on ingenious source-use (as when he counts up the column-inches in Hansard on Parliamentary debates involving empire) and bold statements upheld by frustratingly vague dismissals of the opportunity for his critics to offer alternative viewpoints (as in places where Porter backs up a point by saying it is “impossible” to identify some motivating factor or know what was in Britons’ minds).  Indeed, charting the impression one gets from the book would, at least in my case, go back and forth between a feeling of being inundated by a fire hose of irrefutable data and a suspicion that Porter can’t possibly believe all that he’s saying.

Is the book just a rhetorical exercise, then?  This might not be far off, but it’s the kind of rhetoric he’s referencing and responding to that makes all the difference.  Certainly, it would be wrong to think that Porter believes empire is nowhere to be found in British history and we should all just pack it in and move on to other, more important things.  Instead, the caution he presents, and we must remember, is that the words we use to describe the past matter, and without even knowing it we may say outrageous, irresponsible things merely by packaging our interpretation in vague, pretty, popular, or evasive language.  Porter’s concern, in this sense, is with the language and terminology we use to characterize Britain as mindfully aware of its imperial nature.  A friend of mine once noted that it was significant that Porter has a peculiar obsession with Catherine Hall’s characterization of British society as “imbricated” in empire.  It seems to have, at least in part, inspired Porter to write a book on why it wasn’t.  For him, the use of such strong words so loosely moves the discourse on imperialism and imperial history away from the facts.

How can we disagree on the basis of this principle?  It proceeds from the essence of our discipline, which occupies a nexus between empiricism, literary criticism, and pure narrative.  But one of the major criticisms of Porter’s thesis comes from altering the metric by which we gauge imperial self-awareness: he says we must focus on language in which imperialism was about domination by the British over other places or other peoples, denying that materials like tea, sugar, and curry can rightfully be seen as conveying to Britons the imperial nature by which these materials were procured.  To this one might merely disagree, using his own logic that we can’t assume to know all the hooks and cues that organized the British mind.  Moreover, it might not actually fit with the “facts” if one is willing to assign and prioritize all the implicit meanings that come out of explicit data–a technique that is a standard part of the historian’s repertoire.

But I have to admit that five years after cracking the cover I still find in the book new opportunities to think and rethink how I approach my own work and the work of others I find interesting.  This is especially the case for thinking about the general topic of Britain and the World.  The questions that Porter poses can simultaneously help challenge, organize, and bolster one’s arguments about Britons’ interactions with the wider world, even if one disagrees with the central premise of the book.  For example, as an historian of diplomacy and foreign policy I adhere largely to the school that sees domestic pressures as being the preeminent forces in defining external policy.  I expect Britons in the metropole to care about their immediate surroundings much more than they would about places oceans away.  Does this mean, though, that they appear in their words and deeds “absent-minded” about their participation in the promulgation and management of empire?  No less than Americans might in a hundred years appear to historians to have been absent-minded about national security every time economic problems arose.  In other words, there is a balance that can be struck: one can care deeply about something and not talk about it all the time.  This shines light on the innate inadequacy of the historical record to give full shape to the worlds represented in historical inquiry; our subjects still require us to say things for them.

What Porter’s admonition does, then, is make historians better at making their points by pressuring us to be more careful about the interpretative language we use to tie together fact and theory.  His book is also useful, ironically, because he at once delivers so much of his argument as a set of clear-cut proofs while leaving the door open by, at times, mincing words himself.  There is no better project for students of imperial history than to unpack, critique, and respond to his challenges, especially because The Absent-Minded Imperialists seems to have a remarkable ability to be read in a hundred different and surprising ways at different stages of our lifelong pursuit toward a better understanding of the British past.  I’m on at least my tenth re-visitation.  I can’t wait for number eleven.

April 2012

April 2012 marks the anniversary of two important events in British history. Both important moments unfortunately were the product of neglect and extreme arrogance and both moments are still arguably misrepresented today: the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the liberation of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Both historic tragedies deserve remembrance but each has lost elements of its truth and has been victimized by what is considered, by many, art’s most accurate mediums – photography and film.

On April 15th the world remembered the ironic sinking of the “unsinkable” British luxury liner the RMS   Titanic which set sail from England bound for New York in 1912. Unfortunately, as we all have come to know, the Titanic did not arrive in New York as scheduled due to fatal complications caused by colliding with an ice berg near Nova Scotia. To honor the centennial of the Titanic disaster James Cameron’s 1997 Hollywood blockbuster was re-released to theaters so that audiences could once again lose themselves in a romantic, yet, tragic love story, with the sinking ship as its backdrop. There are rumors that the 2012 release, which appeared in 3-D to highlight scenes of actual underwater wreckage, may even be nominated for Academy Awards. Fortunately, this American film cash cow (Titanic holds the No. 2 spot in international box office charts with $1.8 billion globally), as a re-release, is not eligible for any more Oscars, but will no doubt continue to keep James Cameron’s titanic bank account well afloat.

James Cameron’s 1997 film and its 2012 re-release are not the only reincarnations of the tragic sinking. They do, though, indicate the ongoing global fascination with the ship’s story.  Since discovery of the ship’s wreckage in 1985, and even before, numerous books and films have told, retold, and even reinvented the Titanic’s tragedy. Audiences of Cameron’s Titanic, though, are undoubtedly aware that what they see in theaters (3-D or not) is not film footage from the actual voyage and sinking of the RMS Titanic and is not a documentary of its passengers. Because of the story’s emphasis on fictional characters Jack and Rose and their unexpected and forbidden (how formulaic) relationship, the audience is aware that the focus is not the ship, it’s the people on the ship. Though Cameron, in my opinion gets this right in terms of general focus, his fictional love story detracts from the audience being able to comprehend the real tragedy of the Titanic – it isn’t just the loss of two celebrities fictionally in love; it is the actual loss of over 1,500 passengers that should be the emphasis.

Also on April 15^th a smaller portion of the world remembered the British liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Belsen was a camp where over 60,000 prisoners suffered and died near the end of World War II as a result of inhuman Nazi mistreatment. Fortunately there are no Hollywood films inappropriately recreating the tragedy of Belsen. There are, however, photographs and films taken by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) which have become so commonplace in the media in the past 67 years and over the internet in recent decades that they are often thought to be the definitive representations of the Holocaust. Like the tragedy of the Titanic, the truth about victims of Belsen perhaps has become overshadowed in popular culture through film and photography.

Accordingly, the emphasis of Belsen remembrance should not focus solely on those heroes of the British liberating forces and medical team sent to Belsen in April 1945. The liberation forces and medical team do indeed deserve acknowledgment for their relief efforts and the terminal emotional scarring they endured after witnessing the atrocities at Belsen. The focus should neither be on the documented images of bulldozers pushing corpses into mass graves; it should be on the survivors and those who could not survive. With the over-circulated AFPU images, the victims and the true tragedy of Belsen are lost in the anesthetizing of the viewers to the mass inhumanity of the Nazis. The over-circulation is also misleading because images of Belsen, the most widely circulated and known from any concentration camp, are often accepted to be representative of all Nazi camps and that is inaccurate. Belsen was not a death camp in terms of mass exterminations upon inmates’ arrival as in Auschwitz. Rather, Belsen was initially a camp for political prisoners (primarily Jewish) that the Germans felt could later be used for negotiations – Belsen inmates were kept alive. Inmates received adequate treatment in the beginning (“adequate” is certainly relative here) of the war, but only near the end of the war, when Allied forces were advancing and defeat was eminent, did camp officials stop feeding inmates which led to mass starvation and disease causing the death of over 60,000 victims. The irresponsible mass circulation of images via the internet has caused the images to lose credibility as historic documents which no longer educate the viewer about the truth at Belsen.

Arguments against the credibility of photographs and film as historic, infallible documents are ongoing. Scholars and critics from Walter Benjamin to Susan Sontag have all weighed in to decidedly agree that there is no such thing as truth or objectivity in photography (and film) even in documentary works; the camera does lie. The shot or frame is always chosen; it is always staged but insists that it is objective and truthful. If we cannot trust the authenticity of James Cameron’s underwater documentary footage (because we know we cannot trust the rest of the film as truth) and we cannot even trust the British AFPU’s footage, what are we as scholars and mourners to trust as authentic visual evidence? What is left is painting. It is, like film and photography, completely subjective and the composition is entirely dependent upon the artist’s wishes or viewpoints. However, painting does not lie about its subjectivity; it embraces it and engages the viewer with it. The truthful relationship between a painting and the viewer is what allows the viewer to emotionally engage with the subject matter, like death or loss, because the painting does not present historic flesh and blood beings. There is a safe-space created by painted representations of death or tragedy; we know in the painting it is not real, but we know it references a truth. Photography and film allows a machine (camera) to interfere with the artist from engaging physically with the subject. In photography, there is no safe space for the viewer to approach a subject like death. Rather, the viewer is faced with the image of death in its actuality creating an emotional crisis or disgust for some which turns many viewers away from such scenes and in turn leads to misunderstandings of important history. Painting allows the viewer to view, explore, and engage with difficult subjects, perhaps leading to a fuller understanding of what is portrayed.

I do not wish to discredit film and photography completely; these mediums are invaluable for many subjects and styles and even documentary works. My goal here is to reintroduce painting as a valuable alternative lens with which to view these two important historic moments because I fear they have been emotionally lost due to widely circulated film and photographic images concerning each. I wish then to leave the reader with painted images of the Titanic and Belsen tragedies in hopes of remembering these historic events in an alternate emotionally engaging and truthful way.

Max Beckmann, German, 1884-1950; The Sinking of the Titanic (1912-1913) oil on canvas; St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, Missouri); Bequest of Morton D. May 840:1983; Artists Rights Society, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Doris Zinkeisen, British, 1889-1991; Belsen: April, 1945 (April 1945) oil on canvas; Imperial War Museum (London, England) Art.IWM ART LD 5467

Helene von Bismarck, Op-Ed Columnist

April 2012

Like many academic fields of research, the study of history is – not exclusively, but substantially – driven by trends. There is of course no obligation for any historian to follow them. It remains up to us what we study and how we study it, but there is no point denying that some analytical approaches are much more influential and talked about than others and that there is some regularity discernible in the rise and fall of these fashions. Indicators of recent trends in historiography are the titles of new books and journals, the topics discussed at historical conferences, the creation of networks and the job market in academia. During the last decade, one important discipline on the rise has been global history. Its success and influence is perhaps best epitomized in the recent launch of a promising new book series on Global and International History by Cambridge University Press, edited by Harvard Professor Erez Manela and Georgetown Professors John McNeill and Aviel Roshwald. The trend towards analyzing history within a global framework has not been limited to the English-speaking world. The interest in global or, as some call it, world history, has also increased in Europe and some parts of Asia, namely China and Japan. There is no doubt about it: global history is en vogue.

This development presents us historians with tremendous opportunities, but also with rather daunting challenges. One of the main advantages of the global history approach is that it can have a significantly liberating effect. The analysis of the past from a global perspective helps us to transcend boundaries, and not just geographical ones. It allows us to study history without being limited by previously established frameworks of analysis, like nation-states, areas, continents or even civilizations. The aim of global history is not to deny the relevance of these frameworks for many historical developments, but to add a new and un-biased perspective. The increased interest in non-European and non-Western history can lead to the discovery of new dynamics and free us from the distorted view of the world that results from an analysis focused on the constructed dualism of centre and periphery. Global history can also help to build bridges between different historical specializations that have often been at odds with each other. Pioneers of the field like Anthony G. Hopkins and Jürgen Osterhammel have shown the merit that lies in an integrated approach, combining the study of economic and political history with the examination of cultural, social, intellectual and environmental developments. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that global history can be an opportunity for historians to get out of our self-inflicted incarceration in narrow specializations and look at the world with new eyes.

To ensure the long-term success of global history as an academic discipline, its students and scholars need to address a number of methodological challenges. One central problem every global historian has to face is the balancing act of studying very broad issues whilst maintaining the highest possible standards of academic research. The discussion of big questions, fascinating as they may be, can entail a danger of generalization or even inaccuracy. A possible way to meet this danger is the use of a rigorously-defined set of terms. The broader a subject is, the more important it is to make the meaning of one’s terms and concepts absolutely clear. There remains a lot to be done for global historians in this respect. The boundaries between global, world, international, universal and transnational history are not always clear-cut. Another challenge for global historians is the careful selection and combination of primary and secondary sources. In many cases, primary material can only take a minor role in the analysis. Even if the historian had access to all the archives that are relevant to his topic and unlimited financial resources at his disposal – two very unlikely assumptions – the sheer volume of the source material would probably overwhelm him. This need not be a problem. The aim of global history is not the accumulation of encyclopaedic knowledge, and it is not the job of the global historian to know and explain everything that happened everywhere during a certain period of time. However, the fact remains that global historians are compelled to rely to a very significant degree on the expertise of their colleagues within narrower fields of research. This is another reason why global history can only be one out of many successful analytical approaches to the study of the past and not replace all the others.

One important issue of global history is to discuss the origins and the development of globalisation. Until very recently, this was a topic that was monopolized by economists and political scientists. Probably due to the increased relevance that globalisation seems to have on all our lives, historians have become increasingly interested in it during the last few years. Their research has shown that globalisation – understood as the growing formation of connections between people, ideas and markets – is not a recent phenomenon, but can be traced back at least to the beginning of the 16^th century. However, this does not mean that globalization has been a linear or teleological macro-process that started at some point in the past and brought us into the present globalized world on a one-way street. The distinction between global history and the history of globalisation is a very important one. The latter is only one aspect of the former. Historians of globalisation should remind themselves of the influence that our perception of the present can have on the way we approach the study of the past. It is perfectly legitimate to look at the historical origins of our present situation, but we must resist the temptation of reading it into the past. We should not forget that the present is nothing but a fleeting moment. When we start thinking and talking about it, is has already gone.

Further reading:

• Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert and Ulrike Freitag (eds.), Globalgeschichte. Theorien, Ansätze, Themen, Frankfurt a.M. 2007.
• Anthony G. Hopkins (ed.), Global History. Interactions between the Universal and the Local, Basingstoke/ New York 2006.
• Anthony G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalisation in World History, London 2002.
• Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalisation: A Short History, Princeton 2005.
• Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Munich 2009. (An English translation will be forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2012.)

April 2012

As if transported back in time to 1997, Titanic fever once again afflicts large numbers of Britons. The film has been released, memorabilia has been dusted and repackaged for resale, and a rather macabre and seemingly cursed commemorative cruise is due to recreate the doomed vessel’s route.

Quite frankly I find the whole obsession with Titanic rather tedious and occasionally disturbing, but in an attempt to get into the spirit of things I thought I would have a look through the scanned copies of the passenger lists that were made available online to commemorate the centenary of the ship’s sinking, and I realised I had never really thought of the third-class passengers as an international bunch.

I suppose my surprise at turning up thirty-something different nationalities is in part due to my rather hazy memories of the James Cameron three-and-a-quarter hour-long blockbuster. One of the scenes of which I have a particular recollection is that of a party in the third-class quarters, when Kate Winslet’s character gets involved with the dancing and drinking. The scene is led along by a number of Irish jigs, and the quaffing of great quantities of stout certainly gave the whole thing a Hibernian twist. But I also remember a whole babble of accents, and even (although this may just be my memory playing tricks on me) a chap doing some sort of hora in a kalpak and kaftan.

It is not entirely unreasonable that there should be an Irish flavour to the third-class party, since (by my very quick counting) just over one in seven of the 713-ish third-class passengers came from Ireland.  Yet they were joined by a variety of others from across Europe and beyond, from Argentina to China.  In terms of groups represented, some 259 third-class passengers were from Britain and the British Empire (mainly English and Irish). They were joined by 129 Scandinavians (Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes), 85 Ottoman subjects, 59 Russian subjects (almost entirely Finns), 44 Americans, 43 assorted Europeans, 40 Austro-Hungarians, 37 from the Balkan states, and 17 others. They all perished in quite shocking numbers, with 530, almost a full three-quarters lost. There was no uniformity in the rate of death within the various population groups, so 61% of the Ottoman passengers died, whereas 88% of Austro-Hungarians and every one of the 37 Balkan subjects died. These differences led me to dig a bit deeper.

This map shows the hometowns of those passengers, with the Austro-Hungarians in pink, Bulgarians in red, and Ottomans in blue. With the exception of two Austrians, the Habsburg subjects all came from modern Slovenia, Bosnia, and especially Croatia. They were 32 men to 7 women, so aside from a few families were for the most part likely to have been individual economic migrants. For the most part they boarded the Titanic at Southampton, destined primarily for Harrisburg, Chicago, and New York. They came from small villages away from major populations centres, and for the men travelling alone the aim would have been to earn enough money to allow them to return home eventually.

The 33 Bulgarians presented an interesting case. Although the region was to erupt into warfare later in 1912, these migrants – all men – were seeking economic opportunity. Interestingly, they all came from small villages surrounding the small central town Troyan. I was initially puzzled as to why there in particular, but some initial research explained that there had been an American missionary-run college established in the nearby provincial capital of Lovech, where there were also travel agents operating to attract migrants to work in certain industries in America. The involvement of agents is evident from the clumping of destinations. All but three of the Bulgarians boarded at Southampton, and 23 of them were destined for Chicago where they must have had arranged employment. None of those gentlemen made it off the ship.

Finally, to the Ottoman subjects. Comprising 85 passengers, or 12% of those in third-class, they were from two locations in very different parts of that empire. The smaller group were six Armenians from Keghi in eastern Anatolia, mostly married men, seeking employment in Brantford, Ontario, most likely as temporary migrants who intended to return with their earnings back home; unfortunately, they all perished.

The vast majority of the Ottoman passengers, however, were from small villages in Lebanon. They joined the Titanic when she called at Cherbourg, probably travelling across the Mediterranean by steamer to Marseille and thence northwards. It would appear from some family names and from their villages that these were overwhelmingly Christians, most likely Maronites. There were numerous travel agents operating to attract Ottoman subjects to work and settle in both North and South America, and there was a precedent of Lebanese migration during periods of political and economic turmoil in the middle of the nineteenth century. Just how these people were able to afford the journey from Lebanon to France, plus their ticket for the Titanic, is unclear, although the most likely explanation that I can think of is that they already had family members living and working in America or Canada who remitted money to help pay for the journey.

There were many families: the Baaklinis from Duhur al-Shuwayir going to Brooklyn; the Toumas from Tebnine off to Dowagiac, Michigan; and Mrs Moubarek and her two sons travelling to Houtzdale, Pennsylvania. The majority, however, aimed to settle in three major locations. The first was New York, which attracted mainly individual men. The second and third are intriguing in that they appear to have been some sort of village-wide migration, with 14 individuals (10 men, 4 women) from Kfar Meshki aiming to settle in Ottawa, and another 14 (also 10 men, 4 women) from Hardeen intending to live in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The Ottoman subjects probably had a slightly lower mortality rate as noted above because of a higher number of women and children; the Baaklinis, Toumas, and Moubareks all survived; however, only 5 of the Hardeen party and one of the Kfar Meshki group escaped.

I have only picked on the Habsburgs, Bulgarians, and Ottomans because they are of particular interest to me, but it has made me wonder what other stories and social histories form part of the otherwise rather hollow Titanic narrative. Away from the scramble for Titanic memorabilia, deep-sea dives to admire the rusted shell of the ship, and the romantic imaginings of string quartets playing until the bitter end, there are perhaps far more interesting tales to be told. Moreover, it would be nice if those tales focussed not on the luxury of the first- and second-classes, nor purely on the British, Irish, or American passengers, but on the hundreds of others who formed the majority of the third-class travellers. However, unfortunately, as long as the popular and therefore lucrative image of the Titanic as a final grand and tragic symbol of a golden age of luxury and confidence continues to thrive, the stories of those international migrants will provide at best a minor subplot, rather than forming the main attraction.

Perhaps no city has a better claim on the Titanic than Belfast, where the ship was built. The city just celebrated the opening of a new Titanic museum on the former grounds of the Harland & Wolff shipyards – a sleek, postmodern building meant to reproduce the scale, and something of the grandeur, of the ship itself (although the locals joke that it looks more like the iceberg than the ship) – and it is also planning a Titanic festival that will include performances of Titanic-related plays and music. All this is an inspired piece of civic rebranding: Belfast still has a bit of an image problem leftover from the Troubles, and the Titanic story promises to focus visitors’ attention away from the still-festering sores of sectarianism and political violence and toward the city’s past glory as one of the world’s great shipbuilding centers. Here, the purveyors of this Titaniciana seem to say, is a piece of Belfast’s history that we can embrace without shame; here, in this scrubbed and polished former shipyard, we can find a sort of neutral ground where all of the city’s inhabitants can celebrate Belfast’s industrial might and ingenuity.

Would that it were so simple. As somebody with great admiration for Belfast I hope this rebranding works and that the city can channel some of this Titanic energy into even greater things, but as a historian I have some reservations about the whole enterprise. I should say that I have not yet visited the Titanic museum (it just opened on March 31), and I don’t yet know how the museum or the festival will deal with the history of the Belfast shipyards, so what follows should be taken only as a historian’s cautionary finger-wag, not as a rain cloud hurled at Belfast’s parade. The crux of my concern is this: Belfast’s shipyards were among the most bitterly sectarian places in the United Kingdom, and any commemoration that fails to recognize this fact risks facile romanticization at the expense of historical truth.

From their beginnings in the late 1850s, Belfast’s shipyards reproduced in microcosm the sectarian divisions of the larger city. The skilled workers (the carpenters, riveters, fitters, welders, etc.) were overwhelmingly Protestant – in the beginning, many of them were in fact Scottish and English migrants – while the unskilled workers (e.g., the ship painters) tended to be Catholic. The two groups developed a heated rivalry during the frequent riots of the Victorian era, and it was not uncommon for Protestant workers to expel Catholics from the shipyards during moments of communal or political excitement. It was also not uncommon for the Protestant shipyard workers to clash with the Catholic navvies who built the city’s docks and railways. During the riots of 1864, Protestant ship carpenters and “rivet boys” attacked a group of Catholic navvies who had wrecked a Protestant school in town, chasing them into the harbor and shooting and killing one man. The riots of 1886, which lasted four months and cost over thirty lives, began with an argument between a Catholic navvy and a Protestant navvy who were cutting pipes for the new Alexandra Dock. A fight broke out after the former, emboldened by the Irish Home Rule Bill then being debated in Parliament, told the latter, “It won’t be long until none of your sort will be allowed to earn a loaf of bread in this country.” The next day a phalanx of Protestant shipyard workers, now becoming known as the Islandmen (for the Queen’s Island on which they worked), attacked the Catholic navvies; once more the Catholics were driven into the harbor, and once more one Catholic died.

This rivalry survived well into the twentieth century. In July 1912, during another period of Home Rule excitement and just three months after the Titanic’s doomed voyage, Protestant workers assaulted dozens of Catholic workers at the Harland & Wolff shipyards and elsewhere, forcing 2500 Catholics to flee their work. A few years later, after the First World War, returning Protestant servicemen expelled Catholics who had moved into skilled jobs in their absence. There were renewed expulsions during the partition riots of 1920-22 and again in 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression. Protestants were not always the aggressors in these confrontations (nor were they the sole aggressors in Belfast’s riots generally), but they tended to outnumber the Catholics and, by virtue of their skilled positions, to enjoy more influence with the shipyards’ owners. The power of the shipyards was therefore largely in the Protestants’ hands, and they used it both to intimidate their employers into keeping Catholics out of skilled positions and to intimidate the Catholics themselves into docility.

This shipyard sectarianism had hugely important consequences for Belfast. Among other things, it helped to ensure that Belfast never developed a powerful and united labor movement in the manner of other northern industrial cities. It also helped to entrench social and economic divisions between the city’s two communities, making continued tension and violence all the more likely. Given all this, there is an inescapable irony in the idea that Belfast might be able to shed its reputation for sectarianism by focusing visitors’ and residents’ attention on its days of shipbuilding glory (there is, of course, a further irony in the idea of distracting people from one tragedy by reminding them of another). The shipyards were a crucible of Belfast’s sectarian rivalries, and their story cannot be detached from the stories of the people who worked there or from the web of social relationships in which they existed. Claiming the shipyards as a nonsectarian neutral ground might be good for Belfast’s image, but it is also deeply problematic.

I accept that it’s probably too soon to do the story of the Belfast shipyards real justice. The wounds are still too raw, the public appetite for soothing, unifying civic narratives too strong. But is the purpose of public history simply to tell soothing stories, or is it also to tell hard truths? Do museums and commemorative events have a duty not only to educate and entertain, but also to raise difficult questions about the past? Is civic pride incompatible with civic introspection? During this month of Titanic festivities I don’t expect Belfast’s civic boosters and tour operators to deviate too much from the generally upbeat script – at most they will oscillate between the twin poles of romantic nostalgia (for a lost golden age) and pious reverence (for the lives tragically lost) – but it will be interesting to see whether, and to what extent, the script might change in the months and years to come.