Harvard University Press Blog

African Victory in the Age of Empire

In the late nineteenth century, when it seemed that all of Africa was destined to come under European colonial rule, Ethiopia succeeded in thwarting European conquest and preserving its own independence. The pivotal event in its resistance to Italian colonial advance from Eritrea was the Battle of Adwa, in which an army of black Africans under the leadership of Emperor Menelik decisively defeated the Italians. The Battle of Adwa, which marked the first time in the modern era that a non-European power had defeated a European power without the aid of a European ally, is considered one of the most important events in modern African history. In The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire, historian Raymond Jonas makes the case for the broader global historical significance of the conflict. 

There are a number of complex reasons for Italian failure at Adwa. Italian leadership had assumed, wrongly but not without credibility, that it could play on factional conflict within Ethiopia. As a result the Italians were unprepared for the unity Menelik was able to inspire, and thus the Italians drastically underestimated the size of the Ethiopian army, and the firepower at its disposal. But Menelik’s forces didn’t merely outnumber the Italians; the Emperor also outmaneuvered them, in what Jonas describes as one of the great military campaigns of modern history.

Inevitably, Ethiopian victory was interpreted in racial terms, for not only had an African army defeated a European army, but a black army had defeated a white army. In the Jim Crow United States and elsewhere around the globe, Adwa gave the lie to the inevitability of European domination—both political and racial. We recently spoke with Jonas about the worldwide implications of what happened at Adwa in 1896. A bit of video from our conversation:

 

Presidential Politics and the Third Testament of the American Bible

In last night’s debate between the Republican candidates for president, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney brushed off the controversy surrounding a Texas pastor’s suggestion that as a Mormon he was a member of a cult. “I’ve heard worse,” he said of the pastor’s comments, before explaining why he found the remarks to be “a very dangerous and enormous departure from the principles of our Constitution”:

What I actually found that was most troubling in what the reverend said in the introduction was he said, in choosing our nominee, we should inspect his religion. And someone who’s a good moral person is not someone who we should select; instead, we should choose someone who subscribes to our religious belief.

That—that idea that we should choose people, based upon their religion, for public office is what I find to be most troubling, because the founders of this country went to great length to make sure, and even put it in the Constitution, that we would not choose people who represent us in government based upon their religion; that this would be a nation that recognized and respected other faiths, where there’s a plurality of faiths, where there was tolerance for other people and faiths. That’s bedrock principle.

(A full transcript of the debate can be found here.)

Despite Romney’s objection to its presence, religion is actually playing a very visible role in these campaigns. One take on that role came earlier this week in the form of a Los Angeles Times op-ed from Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, former military officer, and noted critic of American empire. In the piece, Bacevich highlights the reality that all mainstream presidential candidates, regardless of party affiliation, share a view of American exceptionalism that is rooted in a belief in God’s intentions for the country.

Bacevich quotes a recent speech in which Romney exclaimed that “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers,” and that the United States is a nation with “a unique destiny and role in the world.” To Bacevich, Romney’s comments were both striking and unexceptionable in their reflection of a position widely held by those seeking higher office. Where, Bacevich asks, are candidates learning of these higher plans for their country? From his piece:

The Hebrew Bible provides no evidence to support this proposition. Nor do the teachings of Jesus Christ and his disciples. Yet the American Bible incorporates a de facto Third Testament, which validates this assertion of American uniqueness. That testament, fashioned from a carefully tailored rendering of the 20th century, recounts the story of a new chosen people serving as God's instrument of salvation, leading humankind onward to the promised land. For anyone aspiring to high office, professing fealty to this Third Testament has become all but obligatory.

David Blight's American Oracle

Those of you who follow this blog with any regularity know that we’ve been looking forward to the publication of David W. Blight’s American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. The book is finally here, and folks in the Boston/Cambridge area have the added excitement of getting to see Blight at this afternoon’s Harvard Book Store Friday Forum (3:00pm, free and open to the public, no ticket required).

Blight’s award-winning Race and Reunion, published in 2000, traced American memory of the Civil War in the fifty years following the conflict. This new book continues that study of the war in American memory by moving forward to the moment of the Civil War Centennial, when the war was commemorated in the midst of the civil rights movement. By the early 1960s, Blight notes, some Americans had “learned and accepted the idea that the war had been, in one way or another, caused by slavery and that its principle result had been the emancipation of four million slaves and the preservation as well as recreation of a new union.” The centrality of slavery and emancipation to the conflict had by that point emerged as a consensus in scholarship on the Civil War.

Public memory lagged behind, though, as is usually the case. From Blight’s introduction:

For the majority, especially of white Americans—even as they watched TV images of civil rights marchers being clubbed by police and bitten by dogs in Birmingham, Alabama—to claim the centrality of slavery and emancipation in Civil War memory was still an awkward kind of impoliteness at best and heresy at worst. In 1963, the national temper and mythology still preferred a story of the mutual valor of the Blue and Gray to the troublesome, disruptive problem of black and white.

This book is about that disconnect, and about how the country went about publicly and privately commemorating a war whose meaning was still being debated.

And now, fifty years later, as we mark the Sesquicentennial, there is still much unsettled in the public memory of the American Civil War. American Oracle was written in an attempt to help us take stock. According to Blight we might best contemplate the memory of the war by exploring how American writers and readers were searching for the meaning of their history during the Centennial commemoration. “The best historical understandings often emerge,” he writes, “from a probing behind, into, and through how other thoughtful people have done the same before us.”

The focus of American Oracle is on four men who were among America’s most important writers on the significance and legacies of the Civil War during the 1950s and 1960s: Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin. In the short video below, Blight explains the significance of each chosen writer:

 

If you can’t be at the Harvard Book Store this afternoon to hear more, you can see a full calendar of Blight’s fall speaking events on his website.

Tragedy and the Civil War

Back in April, sparked by a podcast conversation about what Union and Confederate soldiers saw as their reasons for fighting, Atlantic editor and blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates noted the common ground often arrived at in discussion of the Civil War: that the war was a tragedy. In a post titled “The Civil War Isn’t Tragic,” Coates argued against that position:

I think that ground is generally accepted by almost everyone, and for good reasons. Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, a shocking figure which doesn't really capture the toll that this sort of violence took on the country at large. And yet when I think about the Civil War I don't feel sad at all. To be honest, I feel positively fucking giddy.

And I don’t think I’m abnormal because of this. Twenty-two thousand people died in the Revolutionary War, and we celebrate that with hot dogs and hamburgers every year. I’m sure that while Jews feel fairly horrible that the Holocaust happened, very few of them consider the fighting it took in order to liberate the death camps, "tragic." The Holocaust is tragic. Ending the Holocaust is not.

Coates has carried this argument through what’s become a months-long series of posts that engage with the notion of Civil War as tragedy. From this week:

If there is such a thing as an African-American people--and I believe there is--then it must be said that that for 250 years, that people lived in a state of war. The period between 1860 and 1865 are but the final years of that war, during which as Lincoln put it:

“...all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

It is a privilege to view the Civil War merely as four violent years, as opposed to the final liberating act in a two and half century-long saga of horrific violence, a privilege that black people have never enjoyed, and truthfully that no one in this country should indulge.

In response, the blogger Matt Yglesias argues that that “there’s a certain amount of tragedy lurking behind essentially every large war, even the most righteous one.” In his economic analysis, Yglesias notes that the money spent on the war could have instead been used to purchase the freedom of every slave, thus sparing the war’s loss of life. He continues:

Tragedy may not correctly capture the sense of a situation in which there are clear bad guys. But there’s something to be said for the fact that the human tendency to want to settle things by resort to arms is an ongoing tragedy, and even the “good” wars illustrate it in some important ways.

Coates countered by noting that compensated emancipation was in fact attempted and actually failed. But he also rejected the compromise inherent in the proposition:

I decline to lament that the federal government didn't go into the business of buying people, stripping them of their claim to America, after investing the profits of their labor, and colonizing them in parts unknown.

I decline all offers to mourn the second American Revolution. No one mourns the first.

The Bomb in American Memory

In this past Sunday’s Boston Globe Ideas section, a long piece by Gareth Cook considers the question of why Japan surrendered in World War II. The occasion for the article was the August 6th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, long-considered the pivotal event in the ceasing of hostilities. Cook’s article is built on an extended discussion of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and his book, Racing the Enemy, which we published in 2005.  As Cook details, Hasegawa’s revisionist work on the bombing’s part in the end of WWII forces us to reconsider much of what we’ve come to believe about that conflict and about the efficacy of nuclear weapons.  

The common conception and prevailing scholarly analysis have held that Japan surrendered in the face of the inconceivable devastation wrought by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hasegawa makes a convincing argument that Japan was in fact prepared to forge on even after the bombs, and that it surrendered only after the Soviets declared war on Japan several days after the bombing of Hiroshima. Hasegawa also argues that the level of destruction inflicted by the atomic bomb was not quite as singular as we’ve told ourselves. Indeed, as Cook explains in his article, the bomb’s technology was new but its effects were sadly familiar:

“In early March, several hundred B-29 Super Fortress bombers dropped incendiary bombs on downtown Tokyo. Some argue that more died in the resulting firestorm than at Hiroshima. People were boiled in the canals. The photos of charred Tokyo and charred Hiroshima are indistinguishable.”

The implications of Hasegawa’s work are wide-ranging. The perceived role of the atomic bomb in the halting of WWII has been a central factor in the international nuclear proliferation that has followed. What would it mean if the heart of the story that we tell ourselves about nuclear weapons is actually wrong? What would it mean for Japan to recognize that its leaders were actually prepared to fight on, despite the horrific employment of nuclear weapons against their people? And what would it mean for the United States to admit that its use of these terrible modern weapons was actually somehow peripheral to the war’s end, and thus perhaps even tactically unnecessary?

His treatment of all of these questions makes Hasegawa’s work not just a transnational history of military and political conflict, but also an important study of the role of memory in the formation of national character. In this sense, Hasegawa’s study of the aftermath of WWII and how it has functioned in our national consciousness belongs on a thematic shelf with work like David Blight’s ongoing investigation of the Civil War in American memory.

Obama’s Demi-Doctrine: Historical Resonances

The post below comes from Christopher McKnight Nichols, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age.

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President Obama is shaping a new vision of America’s foreign policy. It involves a limited, ethical, and coalition-oriented U.S. global presence. Such a position aims to combine recent multilateral actions in Libya with unilateralism in Pakistan, pending troop reductions in Afghanistan, and likely new commitments elsewhere. It is nuanced. It seeks to present U.S. global activism as a shared “burden” of membership in the international community. It defines threats on an individual basis. Though it upholds aspects of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy commitments and goals, it explicitly casts itself in opposition to Bush’s national security strategies, which were characterized by preemption and unilateral regime change, painting them as costly and unwisely aggressive.

This is Obama’s Demi-Doctrine. It is “demi” because it is less than a fully elaborated doctrine but closer to one than it might at first appear. It has refocused U.S. military and intelligence assets on the threat from Al Qaeda while also recognizing the need for building diplomatic bridges, seeking genuine multilateralism, and avoiding overreach by drawing down troops in Iraq and preparing to do so in Afghanistan. This “half” position does not bind America to any one-size-fits-all model for international relations. It posits no singular definition of the “nation’s interests.” In those respects it is fundamentally unlike such “full” doctrines as President Truman’s Doctrine opposing communism everywhere (1947) or President Monroe’s Doctrine prohibiting foreign powers meddling in the hemisphere (1823).

Still, the tenets of the Demi-Doctrine aren’t entirely new. In fact they have a long history. As a policy stance it began with the first modern American debates over foreign engagement and expansion more than a hundred years ago. At that time philosopher and anti-imperialist William James argued for taking all peoples and places on their own terms. He maintained that the nation should pursue “moral suasion” over “savage ambition” in foreign affairs, acting more as an exemplar than as a crusader. Obama’s new multilateral, case-by-case approach to U.S. involvement abroad builds on such views. It blends internationalist, isolationist, realist, and idealist arguments. And it has roots in pragmatism and anti-imperialist rhetoric. It encompasses Woodrow Wilson's idealism, draws on WWII Era beliefs about the international obligation to protect human rights, and builds on Cold War ideas of collective security (such as embodied in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

But just because Obama’s “new” American foreign policy has a history and has merits does not mean it does not have costs. Again and again over past decades, American interventions—particularly when linked to multilateral military coalitions and aimed at humanitarian ends—have had negative, sometimes catastrophic, and often unintended consequences. Relatively limited U.S. commitments of military and diplomatic force abroad have ranged from the unilateral actions in the Philippines in the late nineteenth century to various interventions during and after the Spanish-American War, through much more recent multilateral involvement in Bosnia and Somalia in the 1990s. Engagements such as these, which involved humanitarian rationales, have been deeply problematic. Few succeeded.

David W. Blight on The Civil War Sesquicentennial

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War, the commemoration of which provides an opportunity to look back on that great tragedy and retrace the conflict. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have convened online panels to do just that, and there are countless other rich resources available for examining the conduct of the war. The Sesquicentennial, though, is also an opportunity for considering the role that the Civil War has played in American culture through these one hundred and fifty years.

About ten years ago we published David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which was recently recognized as one of the dozen best books ever written about the war. The book is about how the Civil War functioned for America in the fifty years after its end, through the immediate efforts to put the country back together, through the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow system in the South. Blight shows how Americans in both the North and the South, led by the Federal Government, focused on healing the nation at the expense of pursuing justice for the countless Americans impacted by the war, chief among them the four million former slaves.

Later this year we’ll publish a new book from Professor Blight, on four writers who were both shaping and reflecting American memory of the Civil War during the Civil Rights era – James Baldwin, Bruce Catton, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. Working on this new project, which examines the role of the Civil War at its Centennial, led him inevitably to consider its impact today, at the Sesquicentennial, a time when the constitutional questions raised by the Civil War churn as tumultuously as ever.

We caught up with Professor Blight at the American Historical Association meeting in Boston earlier this month, where he was kind enough to join us for a conversation on the Civil War’s importance in America’s past and present. In three parts posted below, Professor Blight addresses the defining role of the Civil War in American culture, the conflicting aims of healing and justice in the years after the conflict, and the role of the historian in contemporary debate.

 

 

'09 a “very bloody” year, predict Taliban fighters

This as the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban agree to join forces in the face of the upcoming American troop increase, reports Carlotta Gall in today's New York Times.

As it happens, we're releasing a new paperback edition of Crews and Tarzi's The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, a collection of essays in which leading scholars explore the ins and outs of the Taliban in an attempt to show how the movement, far from representing pure anachronism, in fact constitutes a dynamic, complex, and adaptive force rooted in the history of Afghanistan and shaped by modern international politics. Essential reading for those who wish to understand the region beyond the necessarily here-and-now picture established by even the best current affairs reporting.

||| The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan

U.S. can't account for nuclear material at 15 locations

When a number of institutions with licenses to hold nuclear material reported discrepancies between the amount of material they were supposed to have and the amount they actually possessed, Energy Department officials chose to write off the missing material instead of investigating, says a new report released by the Department's Inspector General.

With that news in mind, we offer the following excerpt from Chapter 2 of Michael Levi's well-regarded 2007 book On Nuclear Terrorism, out in paperback this spring.

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Security at the Source

No material occurring in nature can be used to make a nuclear bomb, which requires either enriched uranium or plutonium. Uranium mined from the ground must be processed extensively—enriched—before it can be used in a bomb. Plutonium does not occur naturally aside from minuscule quantities and must be produced in a nuclear reactor. Both capabilities are widely agreed to be beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated terrorists. Thus state stockpiles of these nuclear materials and weapons are the gateways to nuclear terrorism. If nuclear weapons and materials can be locked up by capable, well-behaved states, and if those unable or unwilling to lock up materials or weapons can be denied them, nuclear terrorism can be made impossible.

This sort of strategy is so compelling that it should form the foundation of any sensible approach to preventing nuclear terrorism. Only nine countries have nuclear weapons. Policymakers are confident that in seven of them—the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, India, and Israel— no government imaginable would ever want to allow terrorists access to a bomb or to the materials needed to make one. A more contentious debate exists over what the other two states, Pakistan and North Korea, might do with their arsenals, but many believe that they would not part with them either. Many more countries retain civilian stocks of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium, the indispensable ingredients of nuclear bombs. Fourteen states without nuclear weapons are estimated to have at least twenty-five kilograms (about fifty pounds) of HEU each, the minimum amount required for a bomb according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Another twenty-six have at least one kilogram (about two pounds) of the material. Three countries without nuclear weapons also have sufficient plutonium with low enough radioactivity to be used in a bomb. Although these numbers may appear to indicate a widespread problem, they actually describe a limited challenge. In contrast with, for example, conventional explosives, nuclear weapons and materials are available only at a relatively small, known, group of facilities that in theory can either lock their materials down or end their operations if adequate security proves impossible. Meanwhile only one state, Iran, explicitly threatens to acquire highly enriched uranium or nuclear weapons in the near future, in theory a problem that can be managed using a mix of international diplomacy, inducements, economic pressure, or military action.

Reading on the high seas

Well those Somali pirates are at it again! Just when you thought they were out of ammunition and chutzpah, they are back at it on the high seas and wreaking havoc. 

Maybe the Somali pirates want to join the ranks of noteworthy seafarers of the past. Harvard University Press has two rollicking books forthcoming about life, death, and adventure on the open ocean. In The Death of Captain Cook, forthcoming this January 2009, Glyn Williams recasts the history of Captain Cook, this time exploring the multiple narratives of his death.  Since first reported to the world in 1780, the death of Captain Cook on a Hawaiian beach the previous year has been revered, celebrated, and shrouded in mystery. Simultaneously called a hero and an antihero, a ruthless invader, and a torchbearer of the Enlightenment, Cook’s reputation grew as much out of the moving story of his death as out of his adventures while he lived. Looking further ahead to March of 2009, Harvard is coming out with Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire by Jon Latimer. The term "buccaneer" is often used synonymously with "pirate," and has become associated with the trappings of pirate living - skull and crossbones, pieces of eight, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. But "pirate" literature concentrates almost exclusively on the so-called "Golden Age" of the eighteenth century that postdates the buccaneers, and which formed the principal inspiration for writers of fiction from Robert Louis Stevenson to the recent film series Pirates of the Caribbean. But the truth about the buccaneers is considerably removed from the stereotype and much more complex, and the aim of this book is to outline the truth.

So curl up with a hot toddy--in the safety of your own home--and get ready for these two swashbuckling books to hit bookshelves near you!