Harvard University Press Blog

Julian Jackson on Charles de Gaulle

Julian Jackson has written the definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept the Nazi domination of France.  De Gaulle draws on unpublished letters, memoirs, and papers in the newly opened de Gaulle archives that show how this volatile and inspiring leader put his broken nation back at the center of world affairs. We asked Professor Jackson about de Gaulle and his process in writing the book. 

It’s been more than 25 years since a major biography of de Gaulle has been written. Why has he been ignored for so long? Why is now a good time to take a new look at this titanic figure?

The last major biography of de Gaulle was published in French in 2002 but since then the de Gaulle archives have been opened. While the English speaking world has been far less interested in de Gaulle than in Churchill, it is certainly not true to say that he is ignored in France: books come about him literally every week, of varying quality. In France he is a figure revered on an even greater scale than Churchill in Britain.

It is a good time to re-visit de Gaulle for many reasons. One of these is that many of the questions he posed are still relevant today, and indeed possibly more relevant than ever: He governed at the height of the Cold War but was convinced that the Cold War would not last and that it was necessary to work to achieve a stable and balanced post-Cold War order, and we are still trying to achieve that; he was seen as anti-American but in reality he was looking forward to a time when the US would not necessarily see its interests bound up with those of western Europe and NATO, and felt that Europe must organize its own affairs and its defense. In the era of Donald Trump that seems more relevant than ever. For the British, who are in the process of leaving the EU, de Gaulle’s views about Britain and Europe seem prescient in the extreme, as do his comments on the consequences for the Middle East of Israel’s occupation of the territories it conquered in 1967.

That is not to say de Gaulle was always right but the questions he posed still matter today. For me the interests in reading about him lies in exceptional nature of his career. He led a truly fascinating life at every level.

De Gaulle was, with FDR and Churchill, one of the three great leaders of the second world war. Both FDR and Churchill found him deeply difficult to work with and their opinions of him – as aloof, egotistical, prickly to a fault – have largely defined his reputation in the English-speaking world. Is that fair? Or was Churchill’s de Gaulle a terrible caricature?

De Gaulle was indeed a prickly and aloof personality who found it hard to show his feelings. But this was exacerbated during the Second War by his sense of humiliation at the defeat of France and by his ambition to re-assert France’s role as a great power. One way of doing this was to be almost obsessively vigilant in defense of France’s interests even if this meant opposing his own allies. He often bit the hand that fed him because he wanted to show that France still had teeth. In this way, he turned his own personality into an instrument of policy.

In the case of Roosevelt, de Gaulle felt justifiably bitter that the Americans continued to gamble – mistakenly – that the collaborating Vichy regime would in the end rally to the Allies. De Gaulle said this would not happen; and he was proved right. He was not an easy personality but in the end Roosevelt’s attitude towards him was almost unhinged whereas for all their quarrels Churchill did appreciate de Gaulle’s stature. I am a great admirer of Roosevelt but his treatment of de Gaulle was not one of the more glorious or perspicacious aspects of his career.

You write that during his thirty years in politics, de Gaulle was brutally divisive. Why and how?

De Gaulle found himself at the heart of two bitter civil wars and for this reason it was inevitable that he would be seen as divisive: civil wars are by their nature divisive. His ambition was in fact to unite the French – it was his obsession – but this was simply not possible.

The first of those civil wars occurred between 1940 and 1944 over whether or not to collaborate with, or resist, the Germans. Some people afterwards reproached de Gaulle for creating a national myth that all the French had resisted except for a few traitors. He knew this was false but he invented the myth to bind the French together again. The second conflict was over the independence of Algeria: de Gaulle was never forgiven by the one million white Europeans in Algeria for conceding that Algeria would be independent. It is true that de Gaulle moved towards Algerian independence in a rather zig-zag manner which led many of these people to feel he had betrayed them. But however he had done this he would have faced their bitter hatred – leading to several assassination attempts against him. One of the guiding mantras of all his political action was the need to accept reality, however painful. But these were people living in a denial of reality. De Gaulle had tried to be a teacher but they were unwilling to listen to his lesson.

What did previous biographers get right, what did they get wrong, and what new revelations does your book introduce?

Previous biographers have tended to oversimplify de Gaulle whereas my biography shows his complexity and ambiguity.  There are some new documents revealed in my biography: for example, an amazing telephone conversation between him and his ministers negotiating with the Algerian independence fighters. The conversation, which I cite in its entirety, shows de Gaulle’s desperation to end the Algerian conflict at almost any price. But overall my book is not offering lots of new revelations – the basic facts of the story are confirmed by my research in the de Gaulle archives – but more about offering a more nuanced and complex interpretation. Good history is not about ‘scoops’ but about explaining and interpreting the past.

De Gaulle is perhaps most famous in France today for his decision to pull out of Algeria. Tell us about that decision. As the leader of the Free French, he had called on the French empire to support the resistance. Was that a difficult decision for him? Why did he do it? What do you think he would make of the Iraq war—or the war in Syria?

The decision to leave Algeria was a painful one for him because it represented a defeat for France even if he tried to dress it up as a decision that he had taken of his own free will. He did it because he believed that the Algerian war was poisoning French politics and that decolonization was a necessity. He could see that the war was also turning France into a pariah in the Third World and impeding his ambition to give France a role of moral leadership against the United States. That is why he decided that Algerian independence was necessary.

There was also a rather cynical side to this. The defenders of so-called French Algeria argued for what they called ‘integration’: that Algeria should be fully integrated into France and its Muslim population become fully French citizens. This was a bit hypocritical on the part of Europeans who had done all to deny rights to Algerian Muslims for decades. But de Gaulle’s objection was a pragmatic (one might even say racist) one. As he put it once to one of his Ministers: ‘Have you seen the Muslims with their turbans and their djellabas? You can see that they are not French. Try and integrate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a moment they separate again. The Arabs are Arabs; the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million and after tomorrow forty? If we carry out integration, if all the Berbers and Arabs of Algeria were regarded as French, how would one stop them coming to settle on the mainland where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombes-les-deux-Eglises but Colombey-the-two-Mosques.”

But de Gaulle came to his views about the Empire slowly. In 1940 he did indeed hope that the Empire would rally to him, and was disappointed when it did not. He did all he could to hold on to the Empire after 1945 and part of his resentment against the British was that he believed (wrongly) they were trying to oust the French from the Middle East. He had tried to hold on to French Indo-China after 1945 and was opposed when French forces pulled out. In other words, he was not really, as he later claimed, a prophet of decolonization, but he was ultimately a realist.

It is dangerous to try and make any historical figures speak from the grave and I cannot say what de Gaulle would think about the current Syrian situation. But one thing is certain: he would not have allowed France to be dragged into the Iraq War in the wake of the United States. He would have seized the opportunity to assert France’s independent policy. When the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin went to the United Nations in 2003 and refused any French participation in the Iraq War he sounded almost like de Gaulle speaking from the grave. De Gaulle could also have moments of really prophetic intuition which came from his deep immersion in history. This is what he said about Iraq in 1964: ‘The Sunnis with the Shias and the Kurds. These are countries destined to be divided because they contain altogether different peoples who do not have the same religion, the same past.’

(This is the first of a two-part interview) 

On Human Rights in an Unequal World

In the space of less than a decade, Samuel Moyn has defined—and largely created—the field of the history of human rights. With 2010’s radically revisionist The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, he revealed how our modern notion of human rights was birthed only in the 1970s, showing their rise to have been a precarious, contingent, and uneven development. Now, with Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Moyn places the history of the human rights project alongside the precisely concurrent ascendance of neoliberalism to consider how the age of human rights has been a golden age for the rich. In the exchange below we pose a few questions to Moyn about this new work that George Soros says “breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”

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Q: Your first book on human rights, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, was published in 2010. You begin Not Enough by noting that “no account of how the present emerged is definitive for long,” and point to the feeling that history is accelerating at a pace in our present age that makes that especially true. How would you characterize the ways in which the transformations of the years between these books have changed your perspective on the origins and achievements of the human rights movement?

Like so many others, I used to be primarily concerned about the viability of the liberal international order consecrated when the Cold War ended. I was curious how human rights became the moral lingua franca of international affairs at that moment, and my research for The Last Utopia took me into histories of ethics and politics as they led to an international order in which human rights matter and social movements pursue them. What was left out, however, was economics—even though I argued in The Last Utopia that, for most of modern times, socialism appealed to more people for far longer than international human rights principles. Already when I wrote up that first book in 2008-9, the global financial crisis was helping make its framing incomplete or even obsolete. Almost ten years later, in 2016-17, I wrote this sequel placing distributional justice and political economy much closer to the heart of the history of human rights than before. (I only hope the spike in populism that year has not made my new book incomplete or obsolete!)

Q: One way of describing Not Enough is that it’s a world history of how people have thought about the fair distribution of the good things in life—who should get what—and you track the shifting global focus from equality (a concern for the share of those good things enjoyed by the least fortunate with respect to the share going to the world’s most well off) to sufficiency (a concern for the share going to the least fortunate only with respect to some minimum level of provision). The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, among others, has argued that inequality shouldn’t concern us as long as sufficiency is satisfied, and Steven Pinker has of course just published another bestseller arguing that humankind has never been better off, in large part because of the steady improvements in absolute quality of life for many in the developing world. Make the case for equality.

Equality might matter as a moral principle in its own right, as many philosophers other than Frankfurt have contended. From the Jacobins in the French Revolution to John Rawls, some modicum of equality always has had a certain number of proponents, though they have debated what precisely requires equalization and how far to justify departures from perfect equality, as most did. But as a history book, instead of arguing directly on behalf of equality in response, I just try to show how many from the French Revolution through just a few decades ago have held out for a more ambitious equality in the face of less exacting obligations. Indeed, one of my goals in Not Enough is to locate the first thinker who contended that sufficient provision is all that morality requires of our institutions—I claim it was Thomas Paine.

I also track how early socialists slowly took on board distributional equality as a norm and, much later, postcolonial voices were the first to demand truly global equality. By the end, the goal is to show how unusual it is to have advocates of sufficiency alone as prominent as Frankfurt or Pinker, in the absence of egalitarian movements and politics, which were rife across modern history. It would have appalled many of our ancestors to see how many people today agree that it is morally acceptable how far the rich are allowed to tower over the rest as long as the poor are at least somewhat better off.

From Latin Fragments to Greek Medicine

New year, new Loebs! Below, Loeb Classical Library General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the latest additions to what critic Adam Kirsch calls “one of the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship.”

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This season brings another exciting set of volumes for the Loeb Classical Library. A two-volume edition of Quintus Ennius (fl. ca. 204–169), the “father of Latin literature,” by Sander M. Goldberg and Gesine Manuwald (LCL 294, 537) inaugurates Fragmentary Republican Latin (FRL), a monumental new series in twelve volumes (as currently projected) that is the first Loeb Classical Library project with its own series editor (Manuwald) and one that will surely be an even more indispensable resource for all readers of Roman literature than its predecessor, Eric H. Warmington’s Remains of Old Latin (ROL) in four volumes. On the Greek side, the Library adds three new works by Galen to its growing collection of the great physician’s fundamental texts: Hygiene, Thrasybulus, and On Exercise with a Small Ball (LCL 535, 536). Meanwhile, John Yardley’s new edition of the third and fourth decades of Livy’s History of Rome proceeds apace with volume X, containing books 35–37 (LCL 301).

Remains of Old Latin (1935–40) was an outstanding achievement, masterfully collecting and organizing a broad range of material, making much of it available in a modern language for the first time, and supplying annotation at once concise and rich. ROL was nevertheless atypical of its era for featuring fragmentary texts, however important their authors. After all, the concept of scattered quotations from or paraphrases of texts subsequently lost as “fragments,” and an interest in collecting and organizing them, date only from the early modern period, especially the 19th century. Until fairly recently, fragments resided in forbiddingly specialized editions and were rarely encountered outside of footnotes, much less in translation. But that is changing, as many recent Loeb Classical Library editions illustrate, not least the landmark Early Greek Philosophy published last fall in nine volumes (LCL 524–532). The decision to replace Warmington’s venerable ROL recognized the need for substantial revision and rearrangement of the existing material; the inclusion of additional authors and genres; and the incorporation of current methodological awareness of the complex nature of fragments, their transmitting contexts, and the limitations they present for analyzing and appreciating the works of which they were once a part.

Much as Early Greek Philosophy abandoned the traditional but misleading title “Presocratics,” the new title Fragmentary Republican Latin not only avoids the unappetizing connotations of “remains” and “old,” but also reflects a much larger scope and ambition: FRL includes not only all verbatim citations of the respective authors and literary genres but also paraphrases and indirect comments, as well as the testimonia on lives and individual works. Projected to be included along with Ennius are Pacuvius and Accius as well as the tragic incerta; Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Caecilius Statius as well as the comic and dramatic incerta; the togata, Atellana, and mime; Lucilius and other political invective and popular verse; most testimonia and fragments from Roman Republican orators; most testimonia and fragments from Roman Republican historians; a selection of lyric, elegiac, and hexameter poetry; and selected inscriptions, including the Twelve Tables. Fragmentary works by authors of whom complete pieces are also extant will not be part of this collection; thus fragments of Varro, Cato, and of course Cicero will be added to the editions of their surviving works. FRL volumes will appear successively over the next few years.

Transpatialization: A New Look at the Old Question of How the Modern World Was Formed

Greater Syria—the region known in Arabic as Bilad al-Sham—is roughly coterminous with the modern nation states of Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, historian Cyrus Schayegh offers a new history of the region from 1850 to 1950 that emphasizes the multiple layers of spatial identity embraced by the region’s inhabitants, presenting in the process a much-needed challenge to the predominant ways in which we talk about the formation of the modern world. Below, Schayegh decribes the experiences of the denizens of Bilad al-Sham, and outlines the notion of “transpatialization.”

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Each age comes with its own dominant historiographic lens. When nation states crystallized in the nineteenth century, many historians—especially European ones—made them history’s quasi-metaphysical objective and central subject. When a globalization wave built up from the 1970s, historians reacted, too. “All local, national, or regional histories must be global history, too,” the late Christopher Bayly famously stated in his landmark The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914.

Logically, the reverse is true as well. Global history must also be local, national, and regional. It is for this reason that quite a few global—and, related, transnational—histories materialize in specific locales. And it is for the same reason that some scholars define globalization not as uniformly tightening interdependence but as uneven interplays between border transgressions and reassertions; and that writing global history is not simply about topics but involves a global optic on past events and trends, as Sebastian Conrad has recently underlined in What Is Global History? Despite these historiographic insights, however, a “real challenge” persists, he has noted: To “shift between, and articulate, different scales of analysis… In many case historians have opted for novel geographies, but in the end have tended to then treat these spaces as given.”

A related challenge has to do with how we conceptualize the socio-spatial making of the modern world. That development cannot be reduced to nation-state formation or globalization or urbanization, to mention three usual suspects. Certainly, accelerated interdependence across space, states’ unprecedented ability to penetrate their territory, and record urban growth all have been instrumental in creating the modern world, distinguishing it from premodern times. But none has been clearly dominant. This is not the least because they are intertwined—because “all local, national, or regional histories must be global,” too, to quote Bayly again.

Enter transpatialization: what we may call modern cities, regions, states—nation-states and others—and global circuits reconstituting and transforming each other more thoroughly and at a faster rhythm than before. This, I argue in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, is the primary distinguishing feature of the modern world’s socio-spatial making. Transpatialization does not denote one single process, and it is not an empirical unit. (Neither are globalization, state formation, or urbanization, for that matter!) It refers to a set of processes; it is a heuristic umbrella that does not assign artificial primacy to any one presumably unitary process such as “nation-state formation” or “urbanization” or to any one seemingly distinct scale like “the global” or “the local.”

Social Breakdown in Revolutionary Russia

In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd, historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on the revolutionary year from March 1917 to March 1918 by examining a frightening rise in violent crime that threatened the daily life of ordinary citizens in the capital city. Through the lens of crime, police behavior, judiciary ineptitude, and public response, Hasegawa demonstrates how the breakdown of political and social institutions paralyzed the city and paved the way for the rise of a new kind of authoritarianism. Below, Hasegawa introduces his study of the violent, chaotic lived experience of the revolution, and considers some of its relevance for our world today.

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The catastrophic social breakdown of Petrograd, capital city of the Russian Empire, during the Russian Revolution of 1917 is an important aspect of the revolution that has been overlooked. There was euphoric excitement after the February Revolution, with people expecting immediate improvements to their lives. But life only got worse, and the city soon became paralyzed. Provision of electricity and water dwindled and soon stopped. Garbage piled up in the streets and courtyards, uncollected. The city stank so bad that newspapers commented that even an elephant would faint. Worst of all, basic food became scarcer. People had to stand for hours in long queues for a mere loaf of bread. Horses starved to death, and warnings were posted against their consumption. Dogs disappeared, ending up in people’s stomachs. Consequently, epidemics spread, filling the hospitals.

As horrible as this all was, the most frightening change in daily life was the sharp rise of crime, especially violent crime. The Tsar was gone, and the tsarist police were also annihilated. The newly created municipal police force was inexperienced and untrained, and infiltrated by former criminals. Pickpockets became muggers. Robbers became murderers. Faith in daily exchange suffered, as people believed that merchants were taking advantage of shortages and economic decline to soak a population already suffering from rationing and deprivation.

The old court system also became paralyzed, and the temporary new courts passed erratic verdicts without solid legal basis. Soon, even the temporary courts were abolished, leaving the citizens nowhere to go to lodge their daily complaints. The prison system broke down, leading to the mass escape of criminals back onto streets already riddled with crime.

Longing for the order and security that political authorities could not provide, people took the law into their own hands. Crowds turned to mob justice. When witnessing a crime, people attempted to catch the perpetrators, even petty thieves. They surrounded them there on the spot, beat them, sometimes even tearing them from limb to limb. They paraded them through the streets by tying them on carts, or threw them into the canals and rivers to enjoy watching them drown.

This brutal violence is, in my view, one of the most prominent, frightening, and often ignored aspects of the Russian Revolution. The revolution brought out the worst of human emotions—hatred, cruelty, brutality, and vengeance.

It is important to recognize that the Bolsheviks approved and often encouraged this breakdown of social order. Lenin in fact thought mob justice was the expression of justifiable popular anger against the bourgeois order.

But Lenin spoke too soon, because things went from bad to worse under the Bolsheviks. Both crime and mob justice grew in frequency and cruelty. Moreover, under the Bolsheviks a new element of mob violence was added: alcohol pogroms. Mobs attacked wine and vodka cellars in November and December. The most violent and notorious raid took place in the wine cellar of the Winter Palace, where many drowned to death. A Bolshevik high official helplessly observed that the Bolshevik power was drowning in a sea of wine and vodka.

Finding “Fake News” in History

In the opening days of the Battle of the Bulge, members of a Waffen SS division executed 84 American prisoners of war near the Belgian town of Malmedy. After a long and painstaking investigation, the U.S. Army tried and convicted 74 accused perpetrators, but a concerted effort to delegitimize and overturn the convictions immediately ushered in a decade of controversy over accusations that vengeance-seeking American interrogators had tricked and tortured the defendants and forced them to sign false confessions. By 1957 each of the convicted men had been released.

In The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy, historian Steven Remy shows how the torture accusations were invented and disseminated by a network of American and German trial critics, including the accused soldiers, their aggrieved American defense attorney, Army officials, prominent German clergymen, and a then-unknown American Senator making his demagogic debut, Joseph McCarthy. Conspiratorial anti-Semitism, a gullible American press, and ex-Nazis and their sympathizers all contributed to our enduring misunderstanding of one of World War II’s most infamous crimes.

Though the term only surfaced after Remy’s work on the book was complete, The Malmedy Massacre can be read as a “fake news” autopsy, a resonance now shaping the book’s reception. Below, we discuss responses to the book with Remy.

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Q: You delivered the manuscript for The Malmedy Massacre in late summer 2016, before we all became aware of the role that deliberately untruthful stories played in the American election, and the “fake news” label became a ubiquitous political barb. And yet those developments have now shaped responses to the book. Could you say anything about the experience of having a work of history be received into a political moment that differs in such significant ways from that in which it was crafted?

For a historian, it is both gratifying and unnerving to see one’s work resonate beyond its intended readership. The unnerving part is the risk that what you’ve written will be misused. Some readers may draw lessons from it that you had no intention of offering or make the kind of unhelpful, facile comparisons that the Harvard historian Moshik Temkin has written about recently in the New York Times. Fortunately, neither has happened here. Not so far, at least.

There’s no question I am in the position of being in the right place at the right time. But the unexpected resonance of parts of The Malmedy Massacre should remind historians—and the presses that publish their work—not to give in to the presentist temptation. While the British historian E.H. Carr was certainly right in claiming that historical research is always in significant part an ongoing dialog between the present and the past, we cannot allow present concerns to over-determine what we research and write about. We must also remain equally, if not more, concerned about what has changed and in recovering what has been lost.

A case in point is the question of interrogators and their methods. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a spate of German, British, and American television documentaries attempted to draw connections between the Malmedy massacre investigation and the abuses perpetrated against suspected terrorists in Iraq and other places. In doing so, the producers of these programs and the on-screen commentators repeated the falsehood that American interrogators tortured the suspects in the Malmedy case. I can understand that the temptation to make such connections must have been very strong. Yet, as I show in the book, the Malmedy case suspects were not tortured. So here was an instance in which well-trained American interrogators did not resort to abusive methods. While I had the recent scandals over torture very much in mind when I was writing the book, in the end the evidence in the Malmedy case pointed to a break with a pattern rather than continuity. Between the widespread use of torture in the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902 and the post-9/11 wars, World War II and the immediate postwar period seems rather exceptional in the longer history of American intelligence gathering.

Q: While you were certainly careful to resist that presentist impulse and let the story of the massacre and its aftermath unfold on its own terms, you also clearly highlight some ways in which The Malmedy Massacre can help us to understand aspects of contemporary political life. Do you worry at all that the resonance of the “fake news” phenomenon could obscure the particular contemporary relevance you had in mind?

The Idea of the Muslim World

President Trump’s weekend address in Saudi Arabia, a centerpiece of his first foreign trip since taking office, was billed as an address to the “Muslim world,” much in the same way as President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo. Though Trump’s focus on the threat of Iran undercut the notion of Muslim singularity, the speech was both presented and received in the context of an imagined global Muslim unity. In The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, Cemil Aydin asks how, despite “the obvious naïveté of categorizing one and a half billion people” as a single community, this idea’s become so entrenched. “How did we arrive at this point,” writes Aydin, “where a fantastical entity could be so present, so prevalent in political thinking? Why do so many Muslim and non-Muslim political leaders, intellectuals, and religious figures comfortably base many of their arguments and decisions on the idea of the Muslim world without reflecting on the accuracy of the generalization that this term signifies?” In the excerpt below, Aydin begins to trace the emergence of this imagined global unity during the peak of European hegemony in the late nineteenth century, when poor colonial conditions, European discourses of Muslim racial inferiority, and Muslims’ theories of their own apparent decline nurtured the first arguments for pan-Islamic solidarity.

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The idea of the Muslim world is inseparable from the claim that Muslims constitute a race. The distinction of the Muslim world and the Christian West began taking shape most forcefully in the 1880s, when the majority of Muslims and Christians resided in the same empires. The rendering of Muslims as racially distinct—a process that called on both “Semitic” ethnicity and religious difference—and inferior aimed to disable and deny their demands for rights within European empires. Muslim intellectuals could not reject the assumptions of irreducible difference but responded that they were equal to Christians, deserving of rights and fair treatment. The same conception of Muslim unity and difference justified appeals to Muslims as a global community during World War I and World War II. Racial assumptions also ensured that later subaltern and nationalist claims for rights would be framed in the idioms of Muslim solidarity and an enduring clash between Islam and the West, giving rise to the Islamism and Islamophobia of the 1980s and beyond.

It is thanks to this elaboration of both Muslim difference and Muslim unity that contemporary writing, scholarly and otherwise, tends to emphasize Muslim exceptionalism. The assumption is that Muslims, due to their piety and the nature of their faith, naturally resist the liberal international order of independent, pluralistic nation-states. Muslims’ attitudes toward politics are presumed different from those of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, whose societies need not be explained by reference to faith tradition or civilizational identity. However, this theory of Muslim exceptionalism is unsupported and unsubstantiated. The Ottoman Empire, Republican Turkey, British-ruled Indian Muslims, Afghanistan, the Saudi Kingdom, Pakistan, postcolonial Egypt, and Iran under the shah ardently supported the imperial and later nationalist world orders. The seeming importance of Islam in the contemporary politics of Muslim-majority societies derives not from theological requirements or a uniquely high level of Muslim piety but from the legacy of imperial racialization of Muslim-ness and from the particular intellectual and political strategies of Muslim resistance to this racialized identity.

The geography and technology of empire were essential to these processes of racialization and resistance in the second half of the nineteenth century. New transportation and communication technologies such as steamships and the telegraph fostered unprecedented levels of connection among Muslims, naturalizing the geopolitical concept of the Muslim world in Europe and its colonies. The networks enabled by these technologies were the medium of pan-Islamic thought born of confrontation with imperial racism.

Imperial racism, but not empire itself. Muslim leaders and thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not, for the most part, anti-imperialists. Instead they sought fair treatment from the four major European empires: British, Dutch, French, and Russian. These were cosmopolitan arrangements, home to wide-ranging ethnic and religious groups. But racialized legal categorizations shared across European empires, the empowerment strategies of colonized Muslim subjects, and tactics employed in imperial rivalries confirmed rather than challenged Muslim difference, ensuring that Muslims would be a separate class within the imperial whole. The British ruled almost half of the world’s Muslims and therefore played an especially important role in guiding the development of pan-Islamic thought. British fears of rebellion and policies of oppression engendered specifically Muslim responses. At the same time, Muslims understood that their vast numbers and the reality of their overwhelming loyalty to the empire all owed them real clout.

A Life of Miłosz

Andrzej Franaszek’s Miłosz is the first full biography of Polish poet, essayist, and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz. Miłosz was born in 1911, died in 2004, and was a witness to and participant in almost all of the crucial events of a century full of pain. Indeed, what comes across strongly in Franaszek’s account is how constantly Miłosz was confronted by upheavals within the political and social landscapes he inhabited, first in Lithuania, next in Poland and then in France and the United States, in each of which he experienced periods when he felt utterly alienated from his surroundings. The book puts Miłosz’s outsider status at the center of his life and work, and gives us a moving account of the writer’s difficult personal odyssey and the appalling history through which he lived.

In Aleksandra and Michael Parker’s English-language edition of Franaszek’s original Polish, the book is a feat of immersion, combining biographical narrative and critical insight with generous excerpting of Miłosz’s poetry and prose. Miłosz wrote prolifically but also thought without end about the role of the writer and the work of the intellectual, and his feelings on these things evolved over his long life. Franaszek interweaves it all, such that on nearly every page you’ll learn about an event in Miłosz’s life or in the world he watched so closely, then read a bit of a poem or letter he wrote about it at the time, followed by quotes from his reflections decades later.

Altogether, Franaszek gives us a remarkably intimate sense of Miłosz’s complicated life, wrapped in an emblematic portrait of the twentieth century. During the first eleven years of Miłosz’s life, his family was caught up in the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian-Polish War. In his late twenties and early thirties he witnessed the catastrophe of the Second World War, lived through the hell of Nazi occupation, and witnessed the beginning of a new chapter in European history. Finally, he settled down in the California of the 1960s, and for a long time was safe and stable, but still largely unknown to readers of English. This sense of his own obscurity weighed on him tremendously, as Franaszek describes:

It is easy to dwell on the latter, happier years of his life, when he was constantly honoured. From 1951 until he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980, he had a small readership, and could count on the fingers of one hand the number of articles written about him. For almost three decades after his defection from Poland in 1951, Miłosz was a writer who had resigned himself to the fact that he had failed and would be forgotten.

He hadn’t, of course, and he wouldn’t be.

The Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago has spent this entire month celebrating Czesław Miłosz and highlighting the work University Presses do to help keep poetry in play. Day by day they’ve shared lines from Miłosz’s 1978 poem “Notes,” and this week they published a wonderful consideration of Milos’z “The World: A Naïve Poem” from Michael Parker, who describes how the poem explores concerns that Miłosz would address throughout his literary career. His treatment of the poem offers a way into one of the great lives of the twentieth century, which Franaszek’s landmark biography now presents in such vivid detail.

A Statue for Red Ellen

British MP “Red” Ellen Wilkinson was one of the first female delegates in the United Nations. She played a central role in Britain’s postwar Labour government and introduced free milk and school dinners as education secretary. A passionate believer in social justice in post World War One Britain, Ellen Wilkinson is best remembered for leading the Jarrow Crusade. In October 1936, she was the only woman to march alongside two hundred unemployed shipwrights and steelworkers from Tyneside to London to protest against unemployment and poverty. Now, she is one of three pioneering women to be celebrated in statue form in the UK.

We spoke to Laura Beers, author of Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist, for her thoughts on this significant moment in women’s history:

The decision by Ellen’s first parliamentary constituency of Middlesbrough to erect a statue in her honour is a testament to the great impact on British politics she had. She was a champion of the dispossessed and downtrodden throughout Britain, as constituents in Middlesbrough long remembered her advocacy for Teesside in parliament. Her work to raise the school leaving age to 15 as the first Minister of Education in Attlee’s government was born of a belief that all of Britain’s children should be given the opportunity to realize their full potential, regardless of family or income. She was an important voice in opposition to appeasement in the 1930s and a champion of women’s rights. The work she did for her trade union, her constituents, for women and other politically marginalized groups at home and abroad is finally receiving the recognition it deserves in the city that she represented with passion and dedication from 1924 to 1931.

As Beers shows in Red Ellen, Wilkinson’s tireless work on behalf of her constituents was intimately interwoven with her international concern. From the book:

She brought a Marxist economic analysis into her understanding of both continental fascism and British imperialism; and, in turn, her appreciation of Britain’s role in international affairs affected her analysis of domestic politics. Her feminism was imbricated by class analysis that affected the way she perceived the status of women both at home and abroad. To Ellen, the campaign against mass unemployment in Britain was linked to the movements against fascism and colonialism and the campaign for women’s rights in that each was a crucial front in the war against injustice and human suffering.

From today’s vantage, Beers’s portrait of Wilkinson should reframe our understanding of the British left between the wars and bolster our sense of the possibilities for international social justice coalitions. “Red Ellen’s life story,” writes Beers, “is as much an inspiration for activism today as it is a history of an increasingly distant radical past.”

The Good Occupation

The end of World War II found more than seven million American servicemen and women overseas. Most longed to get home immediately, but many instead became occupation troops in Europe or Asia, staying put for weeks, months, or even years. These oft-disgruntled “after-armies” were tasked with bringing order and justice to societies ravaged by war, performing the work of guards, judges, educators, and welfare workers. How did these profoundly dissatisfied troops, these homesick pleasure seekers more concerned with “liquor, lust, and loot” than with policing the wrenching aftermath of catastrophe, come to be regarded as the sequel to America’s “good war”? In The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace, historian Susan Carruthers explores “the alchemy that transformed the base metal of lived experience after World War II into the golden stuff of national legend,” a story that helps also to explain how the U.S. acquired its postwar “empire of bases” across Europe and Asia. Below, Carruthers recounts how the rhetoric of America’s toppling of Saddam Hussein inspired her look back.

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For six months before the launch of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in March 2003, President George W. Bush, his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and other key advocates of a war to topple Saddam Hussein made repeated references to postwar Germany and Japan. Their intention was to reassure doubters about the wisdom of a war in Iraq with a reminder that, nearly sixty years earlier, American forces had managed to transform two of the most noxious and fanatical foes into peaceful, prosperous allies. If the Axis powers could be completely remodeled thanks to the United States’ military power and financial largesse, how much simpler to oust Saddam and make over Iraq as a democratic state? Summoning images of V-E Day euphoria, advocates of Iraq’s invasion went so far as to suggest that American troops entering Baghdad would be greeted with “sweets and flowers.”

As a professional historian, I paid close attention to this mobilization of the past. For one thing, the analogy didn’t seem to fit. An invaded country would surely not submit to the presence of foreign troops in the same way as exhaustively defeated enemies had done decades ago. Prominent scholars, most notably John Dower, author of a Pulitzer-winning book on the occupation of Japan, Embracing Defeat, made the same point. Iraq in 2003 did not, and would not, resemble either Germany or Japan in 1945. Subsequent events proved the point.