Category: Events

We kicked off the new year with a return to ideas of political ‘space’. This came by way of the sometimes unusual fantasies of late 19th century French left-wing authors. Fortunately, we had Alex Paulin-Booth (Université Libre de Bruxelles) on hand to decode the meanings and implications of this utopian and dystopian thinking. Anita Klinger sends this report or you can listen again by following the Audiomack link below or subscribing to our podcast channel (on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts).

Alex’s research is concerned with ideas of time; in particular, she examines experiences and understandings of time and their effect on political activism. In her paper, she focused on the radical French left around 1900 and spoke about how their ideas about time shaped their politics. Notions of time, she argued, became particularly bound up with the questions of the day. As the possibility of a revolution became less certain after the Paris Commune, it provided the left with new, alternative discursive and political spaces to think about possible futures.

Her two main strands of investigation for the paper were, on the one hand, futurist novels and, on the other, the discourse around evolutionary theory, both of which were experiencing a boom around 1900. Through these sources, Alex argued, historians were able to examine how the/a future might have been conceived of by political activists, allowing us to enter into their mind-sets, while also providing us with a history of “how people got things wrong”.

Following an illuminating summary of the limited historiography surrounding the study of time, Alex began by laying out a major concern on the French left around 1900. She spoke of the criticism of Marxism as taking away agency from the proletariat by insisting on “waiting around” for the revolution to come, rather than focusing on concrete, reformist steps which could be taken towards the betterment of society. As concrete discussion of the future was side-lined in political activism, Alex argued that it was displaced into the realm of literature. By way of example, she talked about four turn-of-the-century French novels in some more detail. They were Maurice Spronck’s L’an 330 de la République (1894); Eugène Fournière’s Chez nos petits fils (1900); Daniel Halévy’s Histoire des quatre ans (1903); and Anatole France’s Sur la pierre blanche (1905). Though all four quite different, Alex identified a few themes which these utopian and/or dystopian stories had in common.

One prominent theme was technological development and the anxiety which the new pace of change induced in contemporaries. Though this anxiety had been mounting since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Alex argued that especially evolutionary theory and science had placed all of humanity on a new and vast plane of time, heightening this anxiety even further. Another theme which some of the authors were particularly ambiguous about was the future of work, and the prospect of worklessness. While technological advances would likely reduce working hours, there were serious concerns about not losing control of time altogether and needing to balance the new spare time with some structure to prevent, as Halévy envisioned it, a society plagued by drug use and alcoholism, now that work was not central to the structure of society any more.

A third theme was that of the unity of European nations under some form of federalist structure. This unity, in Maurice Spronck’s imagining, had made redundant the need for any European armies and thus exposed the continent to great threats, particularly from ‘the East’ and North Africa. The utopia, therefore, revealed itself as more of a dystopia after all, at least to Spronck, who, notably, was the only one of the four authors who was on the political right, rather than on the left.

Curiously, Alex noted, these novels all imagined a future, but once the future was arrived at – often through the heavy-handed literary device of having the protagonist transported there in his sleep – the imagined future proved static. The authors rarely explained how the future societies they had imagined had actually been brought about, presenting a future that was ‘cut off’ from the present with no plan of how to get there.

Towards the end of her paper, Alex went on to speak more about the ‘cult’, or ‘religion’ of science which became increasingly popular around 1900. Science promised progress, based on actual evidence, and evolutionary theory in particular was one such way of progressing. It allowed people to conceive of mankind as a living organism which followed the newly-popularised (and immediately bastardised) theory of evolution. In this way, a scenario in which people would fall out of step with the accelerated pace of change could hopefully be avoided entirely.

However, as Alex emphasised, while these (ab)uses of science may have served as a useful ‘shorthand’, they were more often than not lacking a deep understanding of the actual science behind them. Alex concluded that, overall, the French left around 1900 tried to use science, and especially ideas of time, to safeguard their revolutionary goals while also defending itself against the accusation of uselessly dreaming rather than engaging in meaningful reformist change in the present.

In his comment, Emile Chabal (Edinburgh) reminded the audience that thinking about time was central to the way we understand politics, and therefore a very appealing subject. By including one author from the political right, Emile posited, Alex had made us think especially about what was interesting or perhaps unique about the left at this point in time. In his view, the left was in a state of failure, and therefore in particular need of utopias, where – even though the process was left unclear – the endpoint at least was not.

Emile also raised the point of work and labour. How far had the four novels Alex presented posed the question of the future of work and how should the left position itself as technology may be making work, and workers, ever less central to societies and identities? He furthermore suggested that a political compass might be imagined which did not span from left to right, but from the past (traditionally the focus of more conservative politics), via the present (with which liberalism was most concerned) to the future (which was the remit of the revolutionary left, and right). Lastly, Emile wondered what it might mean for our conceptualisations of time and politics that the current generation in the Western world did not necessarily envision a better future for themselves, while vast populations for example in Asia were still full of utopian dreams and aspirations.

The seminar ended with a lively question and answer session, which touched on a diverse range of topics, including the significance of the French empire; the role of the revolutionary right; notions of constant crises on the left; the place of gender in the utopias imagined by the four authors; and the effects of the Russian Revolution and the First World War on ideas of time.

Anita Klingler is a PhD student in History. Her research interests lie broadly in twentieth century European history, political and colonial violence, and coming to terms with a violent past. Her thesis compares attitudes towards political violence in interwar Britain and Germany. She is a CSMCH steering committee member.

As Edinburgh served up some of its least hospitable November weather, the Centre warmly welcomed Michael Goebel (Graduate Institute, Geneva), to discuss his most recent project on urban ethnic segregation in the global south in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Rosalind Parr was there to bring us this report, or you can listen again to the talk by following the Audiomack link below or on the CSMCH podcast channel.

For several years, Michael has been at the forefront of global history.  His influential Anti-Imperial Metropolis (2015) examined migrant communities in interwar Paris, shining a spotlight on the formative experiences of Ho Chi Minh and Deng Xiaoping, amonst others.  Speaking to the Centre’s current theme of ‘space,’ his current work reflects a deepening interest in the emerging sub-field of global urban history and seeks to bring historians and social scientists into dialogue on the question of ethnic segregation in global cities.

Michael’s paper presented preliminary research on an ambitious new project, whch takes as its starting point the assumption, found in the work of Saskia Sasson and others, that globalization exacerbates urban socio-spatial polarization.  By examining ethnic segregation in multiple port cities in the global south, he argues, historians can unpack this widely held assumption and offer stimulating new insights to the debate.

Given Michael’s background in global history, it is not surprising that his research offers a consciously ‘decentred’ perspective.  At issue is the dominance of the North American urban spatial model, based as it is on exceptional conditions of racial segregation, which has unduly influenced the global picture.

As Michael noted, in light of recent studies of urban cosmopolitanism in the global south, the assumed link between globalisation and ethnic segregation looks much less stable. One very important objective of Michael’s work is to bring observations found in rich, area-specific studies such as Su Lin Lewis’s Cities in Motion, into dialogue with a truly global, cross-disciplinary literature on the topic.

Drawing on an impressive variety of sources, Michael offered as case studies Havana, Manila, and Buenos Aires.  Even after what he presented as preliminary findings, it was clear that levels of segregation manifested unevenly in different geographical contexts. Cosmopolitan Manila, for example, became increasing heterogeneous even as micro-segregation existed at the level of church seating arrangements. In Havana, the prevalence of racially structured domestic slavery hampered ethnic segregation due to the co-habitation of master and slave.

Yet Michael’s argument goes beyond the observation of local complexity and regional variation; his analysis is alert to the importance of timing and changes over time. The relatively early arrival of Italian migrants in Buenos Aires produced ethnic segregation based on their ability (in contrast to later-arriving Spanish migrants) to take advantage of lower land values in semi-urban areas.  These findings point to striking historical contingency, as well as complexity and variation, in the development of urban ethnic segregation in a globalizing world.

In his comment, Edinburgh’s pre-eminent urban historian, Richard Rodger, drew attention to the important question of generational shifts in ethnic identities, amongst other responses. His remarks, along with comments and questions from the floor, suggest that Michael’s objective of instigating scholarly conversations around the big questions of globalization and urbanization will no doubt be achieved.  We look forward to hearing more as the project develops.

Rosalind Parr is a temporary Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of St Andrews. She is a CSMCH steering committee member. 

In our fourth seminar of the semester, the CSMCH teamed up with the new Edinburgh Centre for Global History to invite Vanessa Ogle (Berkeley) to talk about her work on offshore tax havens. She used the Centre’s theme of ‘space’ to deliver a masterclass in how global history can be done effectively and innovatively. You can read Anita Klingler’s succinct seminar report, or listen to the recording via the Audiomack link below or via the CSMCH podcast channel (on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts).

The topic of Vanessa’s talk was the emergence of so-called tax havens over the course of the twentieth century and her central argument was that decolonization, besides being a political, social, and cultural process, should also be viewed as a financial event.

In view of the constantly expanding nature of global capitalism, Vanessa’s work is underpinned by impressively extensive archival research, literally all over the globe, from Europe, to Australia, to the Bahamas and back. She began her talk by  pointing out that the ‘offshore world’ consisted of four distinct elements: tax havens, with very low tax rates, special rates for foreign businesses, and strong bank secrecy laws; secondly, offshore finance; thirdly, ‘flags of convenience’ registries; and lastly, free trade zones. Her paper would focus on the first of those four elements, tax havens.

Their emergence, as Vanessa pointed out, was largely a product of the First World War and the postwar world. Many countries, the UK among them, raised or introduced new taxes during the war, thus prompting the development of tax havens in the Channel Islands and other locations in Europe. The second wave of tax haven development followed after the Second World War, particularly in the North Atlantic world, the Caribbean, and South-East Asia. In a third wave, further tax havens sprang up in the Pacific world in the 1980s and 1990s. From the 1980s onwards, Vanessa remarked, recalling Hannah Arendt’s arguments on colonial violence, financial instruments developed in the (formerly) colonial world began to make their way back to the metropole.

What Vanessa’s research led her to discover was a correlation between the moment when former colonies gained independence and a noticeable effort to move capital out of those places and into known tax havens. Her first example of this was the Swiss National Bank which, in the second half of the 1950s, began to notice an increasing number of foreign banks requesting permission to open in Switzerland.

Among them, were two Moroccan banks operating out of Tangier. Following the effective partition of Morocco in 1912, Tangier was brought under international governance and developed into a tax haven. When it was reunited with newly independent Morocco in 1956, however, Tangier stopped being attractive as a tax haven and capital was systematically moved elsewhere, for example Switzerland.

One of Vanessa’s slides, as simple as it was striking, listed some fourteen cases in which her archival research has allowed her to retrace similar capital flows from formerly colonised countries to international tax havens, at the very moment of upheaval in those areas and/or national independence for those countries.

During the first wave of decolonisation following the Second World War, in particular, places which had a significant European settler community witnessed the exodus not only of the European settlers themselves, fearing violence and repercussions under the new independent regimes, but also of their money. Examples which Vanessa discussed included that of capital being shifted from Kenya, in view of the Mau Mau Uprising, and Rhodesia to Caribbean tax havens such as the Bahamas; as well as white South Africans who decided to move to the UK, especially following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, but chose to move their liquidated assets to Gibraltar instead.

There was an awareness that these processes were going on even at the time, which earned the capital thus shifted the moniker ‘funk money’. Banks in emergent tax havens in fact made active efforts to attract capital, for example in Malta, which, while still under British control, offered pensioners who settled there very low taxes. Other groups which were targeted specifically by banks were minorities, such as the East African Indian population or Christians living in North Africa, who feared future political developments.

In another striking display of numbers, Vanessa pointed to the vastly different tax rates between (former) colonies and the metropole; a discrepancy which, in her analysis, led to the creation of a taxation culture which tried to avoid repatriating wealth, for example to the UK, and move it into tax havens instead.

Vanessa ended her talk by explaining that the channels created by bankers between the developing world and international tax havens continue to be used today by corrupt local elites to move their assets out of their countries, causing these economies significant losses in tax revenue and exacerbating their economic difficulties. In the end, the question of who had had the power to buy up the assets which were being sold at the end of Empire, has in fact set up power structures in the decolonised world which endure today, lending strong credence to Vanessa’s argument that decolonisation was a financial event.

Vanessa’s talk was followed by a brief comment by Martin Chick (Edinburgh). He reminded the audience that individuals who had fixed assets in colonial settings, such as land or houses, and chose to liquidate them when moving elsewhere, had virtually no incentive to move their money to places like the UK or France, as both countries were, up to the late 1960s, active in nationalising industries. There were therefore good reasons not to want one’s assets in the developed world, and, depending on one’s approach to risk, investments outside the developed world were much more attractive. The stability of the Bretton Woods system thus encouraged the development of overseas tax havens where its rules did not apply. Following the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, however, tax havens did not begin to disappear, but continued to flourish instead. Martin ended by observing that the ‘funk money’ flowing freely around the world in the last few decades has had the effect of driving up asset prices globally.

In the question and answer session, audience members invited the speaker to share her reflections on the political-ethical dimensions of her research project. How can or should historians position themselves while also avoiding writing a ‘how-to’ manual on tax evasion? Further, related, questions addressed the changing culture of ‘scandalisation’ around tax evasion; and possible solutions to this ongoing phenomenon. While our speaker was too wise to make predictions about the future, some of Vanessa’s suggestions focused on the necessity for a certain political moment, which, in her analysis, the growing discourse on inequality since the financial crisis of 2008 has potentially provided, and in which changes to legislation might be possible. Nevertheless, the cycle of plugging existing loopholes while bankers and lawyers try to find new ones will likely continue as a constant game of cat-and-mouse.

Anita Klingler is a PhD student in History. Her research interests lie broadly in twentieth century European history, political and colonial violence, and coming to terms with a violent past. Her thesis compares attitudes towards political violence in interwar Britain and Germany. She is a CSMCH steering committee member.

The CSMCH took a decidedly theoretical turn this week as the legal scholar Davina Cooper (King’s College London) shared with us the conceptual foundations of her new ESRC project on reforming legal gender identity. She challenged us to think differently about what gender is, what it could become, and what sorts of spaces it could inhabit. Our dedicated scribe, Calum Aikman, was there to take notes and send this report, or you can listen again to the talk by following the Audiomack link or tuning in to our podcast channel on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

In an age when gender is an increasingly important feature on the political landscape, how can we seek to resolve the contentious issues that arise? How can gender identity hope to move beyond today’s climate and become something new? And what chance is there for agreement and unity when feminist campaigners are frequently at odds with one another? These are just some of the questions which animated Davina’s paper on ‘reimagining the conceptual space of gender’.

Davina began by briefly illustrating the recent history of gender politics, arguing that the main themes are by no means new; many feminist essentialist arguments, in particular, have been aired at regular junctures in the recent past. These have, however, been considered secondary to the broader challenge of how to define women and womanhood without resorting to overtly male, middle-class modes of thought.

But the increased prominence of debates pertaining to the rights of transsexual men and women, amongst other things, has shifted emphasis towards ideas that specifically evaluate gender. Many governments throughout the world have been involved in passing legislation that seeks to further ‘trans’ rights – Davina mentioned Malta, Denmark and the Republic of Ireland as three countries that have taken the lead in formulating a light-touch approach to gender transitioning.

Yet progress remains uneven, and even those states with a more interventionist ethos have found it difficult to avoid issues – such as sex-divided spaces and provision of ‘puberty blockers’ – that generate a great amount of controversy. (In some instances, it is established feminist groups that have raised objections – such as over proposals to make gender reconstruction easier, for example.)

Davina sketched out two contesting concepts that influence the way many of us think about such matters. ‘Gender as Domination’ (GDom) was described as a paradigm in which exploitation is considered a part of everyday relations between men and women; its proponents thus focus primarily on combating those factors that make it possible, with a defence of rights and freedoms as one of the main goals.

In contrast, ‘Gender as Diversity’ (GDiv) sets out to tackle the hardships experienced by gender-fluid people, and adopts a more outrightly radical attitude that emphasises trajectories of self-realisation. Davina explained that there is no single right or wrong answer to the narrative of gender experience, and that both GDiv and GDom are valuable as interpretive models.

Of course, both these approaches also have flaws: GDiv is unduly concerned with subjective needs, while GDom – although relational in its understanding of how men and women shape each other – can potentially become over-focused on ‘dystopian’ visions of male predatory behaviour and female victimhood.

Can these two conceptions of gender coexist in a way that allows for positive dialogue, rather than antagonism? What Davina suggests is a move away from such binary divisions, by introducing alternative ideas that illuminate other social inequalities and, in doing so, provide a ‘hopeful conceptual line’ that can go beyond the stale assumptions of the ‘gender wars’.

Her own idea is to offer a utopian perspective by thinking in terms of ‘prefiguration’ – a concept which aims to challenge the restrictions inherent in a given situation by proposing that one should act as if the desired alternative is already in place. This creates space for play and imagination, to work within a plural framework that assumes ideals and reality to be part of one continuum. Although Davina stressed that for any such theory to be effective an awareness of objective evidence is still necessary, her hope is that such an approach will allow people to concentrate on identifying what gender might become, rather than be trapped in competing, often authoritarian definitions of what it already is (or, indeed, what it is not).

Davina further argued that prefiguration can provide a new dimension to gender politics, by allowing it to engage with various socio-economic issues that highlight other aspects of the gender experience – family life, for instance, or care-work. She noted that legislators already have the potential to act in a prefigurative fashion, by changing meanings and notions of gender while introducing political reforms.

Even so, she argued that individuals ultimately have a greater degree of agency than the state does, because they are not bound by the limitations of what is ‘real’ and ‘right’, and can thereby give their imagination free rein. She did acknowledge that the utopian nature of prefiguration has its drawbacks, not least because harmful relations between men and women cannot simply be wished out of existence. But at least it brings forth new concepts to work with: these ‘fruitful pathways’, as she described them, have the potential to go beyond current struggles by substituting competition and criticism with something more constructive.

Commenting on the paper, Mathias Thaler (Edinburgh) began by conceding that he did not fundamentally disagree with any of the main points raised in the paper, noting that Davina’s portrayal of prefigurative politics as a collective reflection on what gender could mean allows for a genuinely new perspective on an otherwise frequently terse debate. Nonetheless, he expressed some reserve about what he described as the ‘ambivalent’ nature of prefiguration as an idea, observing that its ‘playfulness’ can only oscillate between the seemingly contradictory principles of utopian idealism on the one hand and realpolitik on the other. This, he suggested, has the potential to cause conflict, especially if the underlying principles are not properly understood by the wider public. The frequent accusations of failure that have dogged the Occupy movement, for example, illustrate what happens when a performative and experimental movement is unable to articulate its agenda on its own terms.

Related to this, while Davina suggested that activists were empowered through the act of prefiguration, Mathias wondered just how many actual examples of this there actually are, and commented more generally on his feeling that there wasn’t much ‘empirical substance’ to the paper. He was also sceptical about how effective the legal system could be in enabling prefiguration, given the capacity of the law to erode its playful, subversive qualities, and ruminated on the involvement of academics themselves – should they seek only to bear objective witness, or is it their responsibility to mediate actively in the issues they are studying?

Calum Aikman is a PhD student in History. His research mostly focuses on twentieth-century British and Scottish politics, trade union history and the fortunes of the Labour Party in the post-war era. His thesis is on the political thought of the Labour Party’s ‘revisionist’ right wing in the 1970s. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.

For this week’s seminar, we explored an entirely different aspect of our theme of space: the built environment. We broke with tradition and invited one of our own – our new lecturer in environmental history, Emily Brownell – who took us on a fascinating journey through the urban sprawl of 1970s Dar-es-Salaam and the concrete fantasies of postcolonial socialism. Mathew Nicolson was our note-taker on the day and you can read his report below. You can also listen again to the whole lecture on Audiomack or by tuning in to our podcast channel (accessible via iTunes or your favourite podcast app).

By framing the city of Dar es Salaam as the explicit subject of her research instead of simply the backdrop for its people and elites, Emily’s research on post-colonial building materials provides an innovative approach to the history of post-independence Tanzania.

She began her paper by outlining the political, social and economic background of 1970s Tanzania. Noting that the short timespan of this period makes her study unusual within environmental history, a field more commonly examined over centuries rather than decades, Emily explained her approach by emphasising the rapid changes Dar es Salaam experienced during these years. On one hand, the state ideology of ‘Ujamaa’ as advocated by Tanzania’s first President, Julius Nyerere, led to the government concentrating its development funding in rural parts of the country in order to address inequalities inherited from the colonial area. On the other, the combined impact of famine, the 1973 Oil Shock, a collapse of commodity prices and the 1978-9 war with Uganda sparked a trend of rapid urbanisation, creating intense pressure on Dar es Salaam’s infrastructure at a time when funding for urban development was already scarce.

These conflicting pressures form the core of Emily’s study.  She asked how urban residents shaped their environment in the face of anti-urban state policies and, more broadly, how Tanzanians subsequently adjusted their material and ideological expectations for the future. To answer these questions, she traced the history of the city’s building materials back to the colonial period. The presence of a growing African population in cities caused initial anxiety among British colonial administrators, for whom urban areas were generally European spaces.  Unplanned migrant neighbourhoods were prohibited from becoming permanent, limiting their structures to ‘traditional,’ non-permanent materials such as mud and wattle. This contrasted with the permanent concrete and brick structures inhabited by Europeans, resulting in the de facto segregation of Dar es Salaam along material and racial lines.

After the Second World War, colonial administrators increasingly framed colonialism as a modernising project.  Emily suggested building materials played a key role in such attitudes, evidenced by the belief that Tanzanians would become ‘civilised’ by inhabiting permanent structures designed for a European-style nuclear family.

The arrival of Tanzanian independence in 1961, by contrast, created the first opportunity for Tanzanian elites to shape urban and material policy.  How did these differ from colonial-era regulations? Emily argued that, while Nyerere sought to reverse the material segregation of urban areas through a programme of slum clearances, replacing impermanent structures with concrete housing, his approach nevertheless maintained the colonial distinction between permanent and impermanent housing within government policy.  The state therefore continued to perpetuate the colonial narrative regarding the ‘civilising’ properties of permanent materials.

In particular, cement assumed a vital position in the post-independence national consciousness. Major construction projects created an intense need for cement, including a new airport, a hydro-electric plant, railways, harbor extensions and the relocation of the country’s capital to Dodoma. Prevailing architectural styles favoured cement as the ‘new national aesthetic.’ To meet this need, the Wazo Hill Cement Plant was established. Cement produced in the plant was marketed with the Dar es Salaam name, leading to what Emily referred to as the ‘territorialisation of cement.’

However, Tanzania’s deteriorating economic situation throughout the 1970s created growing problems for Wazo Hill, which faced outages and production stoppages. The state responded by reversing its policy as Nyerere condemned his country’s ‘unhealthy addiction to “European soil”.’  Economics, then, also influenced the state’s ideological attitude to building materials.

New techniques were subsequently sought to compensate for these shortages.  Emily explained this development by charting the emergence of brick manufacturing as an alternative to cement.  Community brick building was promoted with utopian imagery, portrayed as – literally – ‘building socialism,’ while the bricks were increasingly viewed as the solution to Third World slums.  Yet, brick manufacturing also brought a major environmental cost: 25,000 bricks produced requiring the felling of 70 trees.

Emily concluded by remarking on the value this period offers African scholars.  Specifically, it represented a time of continuing optimism before the emergence of a ‘desperate reckoning with terror and failure’ which forced a reimagining of the future.

Commenting on Emily’s research, Isabel Pike (University of Wisconsin-Madison) emphasised the role of building materials in recording life changes among urban residents, whereby individual and community progress has often been described alongside changes to such materials. Isabel then raised the possibility of comparing Tanzania with neighbouring countries, questioned broader global attitudes to cement and inquired into the role materials play in Tanzania today.  After listening to Emily’s paper and engaging with the discussions that followed, those of us in the audience left with a keen sense of the possibilities offered by urban and environmental history to reshape our understanding of the past, both in a post-colonial setting and more widely.

Mathew Nicolson is a PhD student in Scottish History.  His research interests focus on the politics and culture of postwar Scotland with particular emphases on its ‘peripheral’ island groups and imperial connections.  His thesis explores the politics of culture, identity and constitutional change in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles from 1969 to 1999. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.