Documenting the Interactions of Britain and the World

Helene von Bismarck, Op-Ed Columnist

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. Read More »

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.” Read More »

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. Read More »

Allegra Geller, Op-Ed Columnist

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. Read More »

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. Read More »

Rebecka Black, Op-Ed Columnist

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. Read More »

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.)

Michael Talbot, Op-Ed Columnist

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. Read More »

Titanic-mania will reach a fever pitch this month. April 15 will be the hundred-year anniversary of the ship’s sinking, and cultural institutions of all sorts are finding ways to cash in on the public’s unsinkable enthusiasm for what The Onion once called the World’s Largest Metaphor. In Britain television viewers are being treated to a Titanic miniseries on ITV and a slightly more sober BBC documentary, while cinema audiences the world over are bracing for a 3D rerelease of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster film. Restaurants are offering Titanic-inspired menus, publishers are printing and reprinting Titanic-themed books, reenactors are planning reenactments, and Titanic artifacts are flooding the marketplace.   On both sides of the Atlantic museums that normally have nothing to do with the Titanic are hosting special Titanic exhibits, and the weirdly large number of museums that are specifically dedicated to the Titanic (even in places that have no connection at all to the ship, including one in my home state of Tennessee) are expecting record visitor numbers.

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.